Operation Yes (10 page)

On Tuesday, Miss Loupe didn't mention the Ugly Couch Players sign-up again. Instead, she introduced a math game. She held up a small blue rubber ball.

“Have you ever played pinball?”

Half the class raised their hands.

“Good,” said Miss Loupe. “Then you know that the object is to keep the ball moving and think on your feet. Bo, Gari, would you come up and be my two pinball flippers?”

Inside the Taped Space, Bo and Gari stood as far away as possible from each other.

“Now,” said Miss Loupe. “How many people in the class?”

“Twenty-eight,” said Melissa.

Miss Loupe wrote
28
on Gari's side of the chalkboard and
28
on Bo's.

“How many girls?”

“Fourt — oh, wait … fifteen!” said Melissa again.

Miss Loupe wrote
15
above Gari's number 28 and drew a horizontal line between them, making the fraction
.

“How many boys?”

“Thirteen,” said Zac.

Miss Loupe made the fraction
on Bo's side.

“So, if a pinball were to bounce off Gari or Bo and into the rest of the class, what is the chance that it would hit a boy?”

Kylie raised her hand. “Can we use a calculator?”

Miss Loupe nodded.

“Thirteen minus one is twelve, which divided by twenty-eight is point four two nine. Almost forty-three percent,” Kylie sang out.

“Good!” Miss Loupe tossed the ball to Bo. “Let's try another one. But now, the game is to try to keep the ball going by finding someone who has something in common with you. Bo, name something you like.”

“Pogo sticks,” said Bo.

“How many of you own a pogo stick?” said Miss Loupe.

No one raised a hand.

Miss Loupe wrote
on the board. Four percent. She took the ball from Bo and handed it to Gari.

Gari wanted to sit down. She picked something she knew everyone here hated.

“Vegetarians.”

Aimee poked Allison. “That's you! You eat carrots and Oreos! No meat! That's you! Raise your —”

Allison reluctantly raised her hand.

Miss Loupe wrote. .07. Seven percent.

She instructed Gari to toss the ball to Allison.

“Now, Allison, your turn. Bonus points if your answer can make the ball bounce back to your flipper here.” She patted Gari on the shoulder.

“Green,” said Allison, noting Gari's shirt.

Lots of kids raised their hands, including Gari. Miss Loupe gave three bonus points to the girls' team. The ball bounced to Gari and then from one green lover to the next. Rick yelled out the answer:
. Sixty-four percent.

Miss Loupe awarded five points to the boys' side for that.

The ball ricocheted around the room to shouts of “Hey! I didn't know
you
liked tree frogs … the Miami Dolphins … hot sauce … pink hair … NASCAR … high dives …” Eventually, the girls won, but only by eleven points, which was, as Rick pointed out, only two percent more than the boys' score.

Worse than that, Bo had fun. When the math lesson was over, he couldn't help it. He glanced over at the Ugly Couch Players cast list. What were the chances that he would ever get a teacher like this again? Zero.

He should ask his dad. Ask him what the chances were of that assignment going through. Of Bo getting to stay. Of his dad having to go. Maybe everything would equal out.

Bo did his probability homework at the kitchen counter that night. His dad had to go to an Airmen's Leadership School banquet and give a speech. Bo's mom went with him. They were on base, a stone's throw away, so they let Bo and Gari stay home together.

“Want to check our answers?” he asked Gari. “I think I got them all right.”

“Nope.”

Gari went into her room and added to her plan:

On Wednesday, Mrs. Heard announced that the library and the construction of the Reading Castle would be a special focus of the School Commission visit.

“Everything must be PERFECT!” Mrs. Heard said.

She sent Bo and Trey to the library to move the Ugly, Ugly Couch once again. The two of them pushed and shoved it down the hall to the cafeteria, where Mrs. Purdy reluctantly agreed to house it in one blocked-off corner, along with cans of paint and extra lumber.

“Come back for it as soon as they leave on Friday,” she said, arranging a blanket over the whole mess.

As they walked back, Trey said, “You aren't going to join the Players?”

“We're moving,” said Bo.

“I know,” said Trey. “Me too. Sometime. But I'm doing it. You're ten times better than me.”

“Why bother?” said Bo.

“It's better than last year.”

“What is?”

“School.”

“Who
are
you?” Bo grabbed Trey by the shoulders and butted his head into Trey's forehead.

“Ow.” Trey backed off, laughing.

“Just checking,” said Bo. “They left your skull, but they did a good job removing your brain.”

If he did stay for another year and moved off base, would Trey still be his friend? There were two middle schools, one close in and one farther out. What if they ended up at different ones?

On Thursday, Miss Loupe reminded them that she was mailing the care box to Marc the next day. If they had anything to add to it, they should bring it in tomorrow. And then she began the next math lesson: the formula for the circumference of a circle.

Gari already knew how to find circumference. She'd learned it last year. Besides, she was trying to STOP her mind from racing around in circles. She stuck the sketch she was working on inside her math book.

She had a plan now, Plan B, and it didn't require her to say one word. But it would be dramatic, and powerful, and it would change the way people thought. She had supporters. She knew what they would do. And she knew on which day she would have a high probability of being heard.

She quietly slid her plastic bag nearly half-full of stars from her backpack. Underneath her desk, she folded star after star, adding them to the bag, trying to keep her mind cool, calm, and focused. Until the School Commission visit tomorrow.

Friday morning was easier than Gari thought it would be. It turned out that vomiting on your first day at school made everyone believe you when you said you needed to be excused
now.
And no one checked to see
which
bathroom she'd run to.

The bathroom on the kindergarten hall was marked with a handmade sign:
OUT OF ORDER
. Gari pushed against the darkened wood of the door and slipped inside. The smell of sewage was so thick that she had to pull her T-shirt over her nose. She opened her backpack, which was full of supplies. She'd bought five bags of army men from the BX. Later, she'd gone back for red paint. Black crayons. Super Glue. She took one last look at the sketch she'd made, and then she began to work, quickly and smoothly, on her campaign to bring her mom home.

When she finished, she looked over the scene she had created. Piles of little green figures, some of them on their sides, lay all over the floor. The sinks were filled with stagnant puddles of red paint. She'd taken a black crayon and written one word on each of the three mirrors:

 

BRING THEM HOME!

 

In the stalls, she'd filled each toilet with more red paint, and flushed one with paper towels in it to make it overflow. It wasn't exactly like the picture of the antiwar rally, but it was close. And she hoped it might cause a lot of trouble. She picked up the black crayon again and wrote GARI WHALEY in the corner of the right-hand mirror, just to be sure.

She slipped out of the bathroom and walked back to the library, where her stack of books was still waiting for her on Miss Candy's desk.

“Feeling better?” said Miss Candy, offering her a butterscotch drop.

“Hey,” said Shaunelle, who was gathering up her books too. “Can you still show me how to make those stars?”

“Later,” said Gari. “We should get to class.”

 

Knock, knock.

Mrs. Heard opened the door and put her head inside Room 208. All of Miss Loupe's class was dili gently completing the math problem she'd written on the board. Heads were bowed over papers, and the only sound was the
scritch, scritch
of pencils.

“Miss Loupe, the Commission has arrived. Since your classroom had the most extensive report on its physical condition …” She smiled at Miss Loupe. “I thought we'd start here.”

Mrs. Heard stepped to the side, and three people walked into
Room 208: a woman so skinny she would have been able to slide under the door if it hadn't opened, another woman in a white pantsuit, and one man, with no hair on his head but sideburns that stretched deep into his cheeks. Each of them had a clipboard, and the pantsuited woman had a palm-sized gadget that she tapped at with a plastic pen the instant she moved into the classroom.

She examined the chalkboard on which Miss Loupe had written the math problems for the day. There was a crack running through it.
Tap, tap, tap.

She bent down to view a spot where the baseboard had slightly detached from the floor.
Tap, tap.

She looked up at the bent cage that covered the clock.
Tap, tappity-tap.

The other two members of the Commission didn't move around at all. They flipped pages on their clipboards back and forth and occasionally whispered to each other. The skinny woman pointed to one of Miss Loupe's signs. The man nodded.

Mrs. Heard stood at the door, watching and waiting.

“Thank you,” said the woman with the gadget. “We've seen what we need.”

Mrs. Heard moved to open the door for them to leave.

“But,” said the man, holding his clipboard against his chest, “I still believe it's the quality of the teaching that matters, not the condition of the classrooms. We can spend all the money we want on repairing infinitesimal cracks, but if the teachers aren't doing their jobs …”

Mrs. Heard's smile faded. “I don't believe that's a problem in my school,” she said, fixing the man with a cool gaze. She swept her hand over the students of Room 208, who were the model of an industrious classroom.

“Oh, yes, they are
busy
,” said the man, his sideburns bristling away from his face. “But what are they
learning
?” He indicated the quote on the wall:

 

ART IS ARRANGING OBJECTS TO CREATE BEAUTY

 

“The last time I checked, that was NOT part of the sixth-grade curriculum.”

Mrs. Heard straightened the cuffs of her blouse, pulling them firmly out of the ends of her suit sleeves. They had embroidered flowers on them. “You don't believe in beauty, Mr. Johnson?”

“Not at the expense of facts,” he said, walking over to Gari's desk. “This young lady has only been pretending to work that math problem. In reality, she has been making
these.
” He reached under her desk and pulled out a plastic bag filled with paper stars.

Gari felt hot and cold at the same time. This wasn't the trouble she'd planned for.

Miss Loupe moved beside Gari and put her hand firmly on Gari's desk. She drew herself up as tall as possible.

“Mr. Johnson,” she said, “with all due respect, Gari is my newest pupil. She joined the class last week. I'd like to give her time to adapt.”

Mr. Johnson clipped Gari's bag of stars to the metal hinge at the top of his board. “Then perhaps you have another student who can explain how these quotes tie into the curriculum established by the state and approved by the school board?”

Miss Loupe turned to Melissa. “Would you show Mr. Johnson your notes, please?”

Melissa handed over her notebook. Mr. Johnson paged through the tabs marked Social Studies, Math, and Language Arts. Filed under each tab were lines of careful, color-coded, orderly notes, on everything from ecosystems to area and circumference to a list of their required reading. Melissa tried not to look smug, but she felt a pleased glow building in her cheeks.

Then Mr. Johnson came to the tab marked Taped Space, and he paused. He began to read intently. His eyes stopped midway down one page and he motioned his fellow Commission members to come closer.

“What's this?” he said, thumping his finger against the page. The three of them huddled over a certain paragraph.

“May I see?” said Mrs. Heard. “I'm afraid I can't address something if I don't know what you're talking about.”

He shoved the notebook in front of Mrs. Heard. “Would you care to explain why one of your teachers is ‘jumping on couches' and ‘rolling on the floor' and encouraging this student to … to …” He spit out the words. “…‘just do the first thing that pops into her head'?”

Melissa let out a hiccup of fear.

“Those aren't Mrs. Heard's ideas,” said Miss Loupe. She stood straight, her arms at her sides and her shoulders pushed back. She could have been standing at attention at any military ceremony. “They're mine.”

“But Mrs. Heard hired you, did she not? She knows what's going on in your classroom, is that not so? Are you saying that Mrs. Heard has
approved
these ideas as acceptable teaching practice? Or are you saying that the principal doesn't have control of this school?”

The man with the sideburns looked at Miss Loupe as if she were a little mouse. Mrs. Heard was looking at her too. Miss Loupe looked from Melissa's notebook to Mr. Johnson to her former teacher, struggling to find the right words. There was a moment of horrible quiet.

Bo did the only thing he could think of. He bolted for the jammed window. He banged and pushed and threw his body against the stubborn frame. Everyone in Room 208, including all three members of the School Commission and Mrs. Heard, turned to look at him as though he had yanked them on a cord.

“What if this room caught on fire?” Bo said, jumping and twisting as if there were flames licking at his feet. He tried to smell the smoke, feel the heat. His voice rose. “What if the door were blocked and we couldn't get out? What if this window were the only way to save us and you hadn't fixed it …?”

He wasn't nearly as good as Miss Loupe was at getting an audience to imagine a scene. The woman with the gadget was staring down at the floor. The other woman looked as if she
would rather be at a dentist's appointment. Mr. Johnson's sideburns twitched.

The alarm! The alarm! The alarm needs to go off! Right now!

It didn't.

But Shaunelle raised her hand and said, “Yes, and what if we tried to break open that window and got cut on the glass?”

Rick said, “Yes, and I broke my arm as I fell out the other side?”

Trey said, “Yes, and what if Allison here …” He indicated Allison to the Commission members. “…
croaked
from breathing all that smoke while she was waiting to leap out the window, and her mom and dad sued?”

Allison's eyes widened at the thought of her own tragic death. She said, “Yes, and … they would. Totally.”

“Yes, and it's not only here,” said Aimee. “There are loose tiles in the hallway, and all over the school. Someone is going to trip and bust their head open.”

One by one, the members of Room 208 listed every crack they had discovered.

“Yes, and in the girls' room …”

“Yes, and on the playground….”

“Yes, and you wouldn't believe how bad …”

Even Gari entered the skirmish, to Bo's surprise. Eyeing her bag of stars, still pinched in Mr. Johnson's grasp, she contributed:

“Yeah, and there's a bathroom in the kindergarten hall that would completely flunk the health code. My mother is a nurse, so I should know.”

Tappity tap. Tappity-tappity-tappity tap.
At least one person on the Committee was listening. The other two seemed overwhelmed by the torrent of information pouring over them.

Before they could recover, Mrs. Heard reached for Melissa's notebook.

“I'll take care of this, don't you worry,” she told Mr. Johnson. “We have important things to focus on, as you have heard. Now, the library?” Her large arms shepherded the Commission members out of Room 208. As she shooed them through the door, she turned and deftly handed the notebook to Miss Loupe. They looked at each other for a moment. Then Mrs. Heard was gone.

Miss Loupe slowly walked backward from the door, as if she expected it to reopen at any moment. She shuffled into the middle of the Taped Space and looked down at the browning edges of her tape, then up at her class.

A huge smile broke over her face.

“Brilliant!” she said. “The best piece of improvisational theater I've seen in a long time!” She ran her fingers through her hair, sending her spikes even higher. “Wait until I tell Marc about this!”

She stopped smiling when she saw that Melissa had her head down on her desk. Miss Loupe put her hand on Melissa's shoulder. “You didn't do anything wrong,” she said.

Melissa raised her head and pushed her bangs out of her eyes.

Miss Loupe continued, “I'll tell Mrs. Heard that I can explain how everything in this notebook relates to our curriculum and more.” She handed Melissa back her notebook. Melissa put both of her hands on top of it and folded them.

Bo was still standing by the window.

“Does that really not open?” Miss Loupe said, a frown forming.

Bo banged his fist against the frame, which loosened the crooked seal of dried paint. He pushed the sash up and a gust of air blew into the classroom. He peered into the sill. Just as he thought: bugs, piles of them, legs and antennae and crunchy wings. He hoped none of the School Commission would run into his dad.

“Are you sure you don't want to join the Ugly Couch Players?” Miss Loupe said to Bo.

Bo swooshed across the room as if he were on skis. He picked up the marker. He signed his name with quick, dark strokes:
BO.
Not Bogart, not yet. Just Bo. But just Bo was pretty good.

“And Gari!” said Miss Loupe. “You're a natural! You've had hardly any training and yet you jumped in there! Bravo!”

Gari gave a quick smile, her first all week. Before she could say a thing, Bo had inked in her name, under his.

No!
she thought.
You're the show-off, not me! To stand up in front of all those people!

She shook her head at Bo, motioning for him to strike through her name, but he ignored her.

Well, it didn't matter, because as soon as the School Commission got to that bathroom …

 

It didn't take long. Twenty minutes later …

Knock, knock, knock.

Mrs. Heard was back to see Room 208, but this time, her face was dark, as serious as a heart attack, as Gari's mom would say. She motioned Miss Loupe to the door. She said something to her in a low voice and handed her a slip of paper.

The class started whispering.

Melissa steadied herself.

Gari steadied herself.

Miss Loupe clutched the oval that hung around her neck. The cord holding it broke, but she didn't notice. She looked at her class and then at the piece of paper.

“Go,” Mrs. Heard said in a tight voice. “I've told the School Commission to come back another time. I'll take over your class.”

What?
thought Gari.
Don't they know it was me? MY idea?

They can't get her in trouble over the Taped Space!
thought Bo.

Melissa was so scared she couldn't think.

Mrs. Heard took Miss Loupe by the shoulders and gave her a tiny but firm shake. “Carol! GO!”

Miss Loupe ran out the door, down the hallway, out the side door, through the grass, and into the teachers' parking lot.
As she ran, the cord and oval fell through her peacock-green shirt and onto the ground.

“Sixth graders,” Mrs. Heard announced. “I'll be your teacher for the remainder of the day.” She moved into the room and stood behind Miss Loupe's desk.