Operation Yes (3 page)

It was the next day, the second day of school. The Taped Space (the Theatrical Space, the Temporary Stage) was still there. Waiting.

Bo didn't say a word to the rest of the class about Gari coming.
What's she like?
they would ask. And he would have to say,
Who knows?
People changed from year to year. From month to month. Even from day to day. For example, Miss Loupe. Today, there was no sign of her Day One weirdness. She was acting like she'd never crawled on a floor before and she was doing boring teacher things, like evaluating their math skills.

In the middle of the evaluation, the principal, Mrs. Heard, came into Room 208. She was encased in an olive-green suit, which Trey instantly began to draw, adding tank treads and a firing turret.

“I hate to interrupt your lesson, Carol — ah, Miss Loupe,” she said, her body filling the entire frame of the doorway, “but this can't wait.”

She handed Miss Loupe a thick packet of papers.

“Colonel Whaley …” Her eyes flicked to the back of the room, which made Bo feel like a spotlight was trained on him. He
tried to look straight ahead and not at Mrs. Heard. “… ah … the base commander … has finally convinced the School Commission to visit Young Oaks next month. If you'll fill out this assessment of your room and the surrounding hallway, I can document the poor conditions here. I want the School Commission to see every last thing that is fixable, down to the smallest crack in the front sidewalk. Some of these things have needed repair since
you
were a student!”

Her gaze snapped back to Bo, as if he were a flashing sign.

“No classroom management issues?” she said.

“None yet,” said Miss Loupe.

“Well, should you have any questions, I'm available.” Her chuckle sounded like she was trying to start a stalled car.

After she left, Miss Loupe put the report on her desk. When they had finished the math pre-test, she carefully went over the remaining pages of the Student Handbook with them.

“Did you see they added pogo sticks because of me?” Bo whispered to Trey, pointing to the line about “Prohibited Modes of Transportation on School Grounds (Before or After Hours).”

Each student signed the bottom of page 26, stating that they did, indeed, understand that threats against the school were not a joking matter and that no weapons, even toys, could be on school property.

“What about jets?” Trey whispered to Bo, as he drew four F-15Es in formation at the top of page 12. They were releasing bombs onto the words below.

Next, Miss Loupe passed out the required reading list, plus the library's newsletter,
The Candy-Gram.

“Look!” Zac said. “Miss Candy used my book review from this summer!
Al Capone Does My Shirts.
Page one!”

“Is that her real name?” Shaunelle said, peering at a blurry photo in the upper corner of the newsletter. It looked like the librarian was holding a bowl with gold marbles in it … but maybe that was candy?

At lunch, Miss Loupe chaperoned the class to the cafeteria, where she drank a diet soda and ate a prewrapped salad topped with six pale ribbons of ham and one hard-boiled egg cut into wedges, just like all the other teachers.

“Do you think she's going to act weird again this afternoon?” Melissa said at the girls' lunch table. “I don't know how we're supposed to learn anything if she keeps making us
guess
the answers!” She poked her plastic fork into her spaghetti noodles and twirled it around and around.

Allison unpacked her lunch of baby carrots and Oreo cookies. She handed one cookie to Aimee and one to Martina, keeping three for herself. She unscrewed a cookie top and delicately licked the white creamy filling.

“I don't know, but if you want to guess something, guess what you and Shaunelle are eating. That meat is, like, from yesterday's tacos.”

Shaunelle quickly shook the noodles off her fork and picked up her slice of bread. Aimee and Martina nibbled their cookies next to Allison. Melissa popped a plump forkful of spaghetti meat into her mouth and chewed loudly.

At the boys' table, Trey was drawing a picture of Miss Loupe's bird tattoo on his napkin.

“No,” said Rick. “The head was smaller, and the beak was longer … like a hummingbird. It definitely had its wings open.” Sanjay nodded silently in agreement.

Bo took the pen from Trey and added tiny lines beside the outstretched wings to make them look as if they were beating quickly.

“I don't know anything more,” said Rick. “I'm going to have to see it again.”

After lunch, Miss Loupe handed out their social studies textbooks, which, as Zac pointed out, were fatter than the local phone book and a lot more boring.

“You guys have fun
reading
about Germany,” said Dillon. “I'll be living there! We get to go to Heidelberg Castle!” He didn't even bother signing his name inside the textbook cover.

Trey checked the inside of his worn textbook cover to see who had had it last year. No one he knew. No good doodles either. He set about fixing that.

Bo was still thinking about Zac's comment. “I wish these books had coupons in them. Like the ones in the phone book. You know, ‘Free Hot Wings from Poppette's Pizza!' We could have ‘Ten Percent Less Homework on Fridays!'”

“We don't have a phone book yet,” Shaunelle said. “The rooms at the TLF are supposed to have one. Ours didn't.”

Allison snorted, which made Aimee and Martina giggle. Shaunelle decided not to say that she read the phone book cover to cover whenever they moved to a new place. There wasn't
much else to do at the Temporary Lodging Facility while her family waited for a base house.

“I wish we were still in the TLF,” Melissa said, as she neatly wrote her full name on the inside cover. “We got to eat out every night. Now we only get to go to Hog Heaven when it's somebody's birthday.”

Hog Heaven!
Bo thought. He loved their famous basket of crispy hush puppies topped with spicy pork barbecue. It was the first place he and his family had eaten when the Air Force had moved them to Reform last year, and it made him think that this town, no matter how boring and small, at least had the food thing down right.

If he were in the Taped Space, how would he make someone guess that he was at Hog Heaven? That he was eating barbecue and not pizza? He could snort around like a pig, like he'd done for that killer
Charlotte's Web
book report he'd given in the fourth grade. No one here had seen that. That was one good thing about moving so much: You could reuse old work and no one ever knew.

What about those waitresses that worked there? The ones who could balance ten glasses of sweet tea on a tray and who brought you banana pudding when you were just
thinking
about spooning creamy, cookie-filled globs of it into your mouth? He didn't think he could pretend to be one of them, unless the game allowed you to talk. Then he could say, “What can I getcha, honey?” And “You wanna go whole hog on that?” which meant your barbecue sandwich came topped with a dab of tart, creamy
coleslaw, and surrounded by hush puppies and three fistfuls of french fries.

How had Miss Loupe done it? How had she made them
believe
? And why wasn't she doing it today?

From their social studies texts, they read three firsthand accounts of the immigrant experience and discussed what it was like to adapt to new customs and rules. Then they moved on to science and reviewed lab safety. Forty-five minutes before school ended, Bo could stand it no longer. He tore off the back of his handbook and inked a thick rectangle to represent the Taped Space. In it, he wrote the words

 

Hey Trey.
Where am I?

 

He slid the note onto Trey's desk. Trey's pen skipped around the piece of paper, answering Bo's question with a drawing. When he passed the note back, there were Bo and Trey in combat gear, fending off a hissing cesspool.

Bo grinned. The Quagmire of Ignorance — it was back! Last year, their teacher, Mr. Nix, had spent the first week lecturing them about his favorite geometric figures. (
The octagon! Have you ever seen such perfection! Look at all those parallel sides!
) When Bo had yawned, Mr. Nix had pounced, quizzing Bo about the shape of the state flower of North Carolina.

“I just moved here,” Bo had protested. “How would I know?”

Then he had asked Trey, who hadn't known either.

“Fine,” Mr. Nix had warned, waving his freckled hands at the two of them. “Go ahead and sink into the Quagmire of Ignorance. The rest of us wish to set sail on the Sea of Knowledge.”

Bo had oozed out of his seat and onto the floor with a series of loud
glub-glub
s. Mr. Nix then sailed him directly to the principal — his first visit. After that, it hadn't seemed to matter to Trey that his dad worked for Bo's dad. They were both in the Quagmire together.

This year, Mr. Nix was teaching first grade. Bo wondered if Allison's little brother, Tony, was in Mr. Nix's class, and if he was sinking or swimming. He added a kid's face to Trey's drawing, right in the sticky middle of the Quagmire. Two terrified eyes were barely visible above the creeping muck. A first-grade-sized hand waved desperately in the air. Bo wrote in a speech bubble:
Help! An octagon has my leg!

Miss Loupe was suddenly standing next to his desk. Bo saw her shoes first. They were made of soft black leather, with an elastic strap over the foot. They looked like slippers and they hadn't made a sound as she approached. What had happened to her tennis shoes, the ones that were so new they squeaked, the ones he was positive had been on her feet minutes ago?

Miss Loupe eyed the Quagmire of Ignorance and the torn Handbook. Would she send him to the principal like Mr. Nix had?

Her finger tapped the words
WHERE AM I?
on his note.

“Would you and Trey help me, please?”

She turned and glided out the classroom door.

Bo bounced out of his desk, and he and Trey scrambled down the hall after Miss Loupe, who was walking quickly. They turned the corner seconds after she did.

There, blocking the way, was the ugliest couch Bo had ever seen. It was lumpy and green, and covered with fat gold-fringed pillows. It squatted on four brass legs and had bare spots on the arms and seat cushions, as if a fungus had eaten away the thick fuzz. It smelled faintly of stale tortilla chips.

“Quit staring,” said the Ugly, Ugly Couch.

Or so Bo thought, until he saw Miss Loupe's head poking over the far end.

“Can you two handle this?”

Bo and Trey each grabbed an end of the ugly thing. It didn't feel as bad as it looked. The arms were soft, and they creaked slightly as the couch swayed between them down the hall. Miss Loupe preceded the couch, directing their every move as they tilted the beast through the doorway and into the room, which was loud with the voices of the rest of the class.

“Here,” she instructed, pointing to a spot inside the Taped Space. “Line it up with the edge.”

Bo and Trey thumped the couch down as the class spurted questions.

“Can I sit on it, Miss Loupe?”

“Is that yours?”

“What are we doing? Do we need a pencil for this?”

Miss Loupe motioned Bo and Trey back to their seats, then walked deliberately around the outside of the Taped Space to a
spot in front of the chalkboard, where she toed her stealthy black slippers to the edge. The class quieted.

In the silence, she pushed her hands out in front of her, as if she were parting a heavy velvet curtain, and stepped, with careful grace, into the Taped Space.

She confronted the couch.

“I can smell your stench from here,” she said to it. “Didn't you take a bath today?”

The class giggled nervously.

Suddenly, Miss Loupe grabbed a dingy pillow and whacked it against the arm of the Ugly, Ugly Couch.

“You reeky, onion-eyed nut-hook!” she shouted.

Bits of green fuzz burst into the air and floated before settling back onto the cushions. The class laughed, but even more awkwardly. What were they supposed to be thinking? Doing? Was Miss Loupe losing her mind before their eyes?

Bo, strangely, felt a twinge of pity for the couch. It wasn't its fault that it looked like a moldy block of partially shredded cheese.

Miss Loupe approached Melissa and offered her the pillow.

“Want to try it?” she asked.

“Is this for a grade?” Melissa said.

Miss Loupe withdrew the pillow. She turned to the couch, where she stretched herself out, as if to take a nap, with the pillow under her head and her feet crossed. She was so small that she only took up two of the three couch cushions.

“Ahhhhh,” she said, sighing. “This is a most comfortable, cozy,
and considerate couch.” She patted the back of it affectionately. “Too bad that everyone thinks you're ugly.”

Okay,
Bo thought,
now I must be sinking into the Quagmire, because I have no idea what she's doing.

“Too bad,” Miss Loupe went on, “that everyone thinks
I'm
crazy. Too bad no one wants to join us. Too bad no one wants to sit upon the same couch that starred in
I Know When You're Alone.
”

“I saw that movie!” Allison said. “There's this girl, who keeps hearing this voice when she plays this music on this piano, but when she turns around, there's no one there, just this green … couch. Yeah,
this
couch, and then she finds this blood under the cushions and —
ewww
! Is there blood on that couch?”

“Special effects,” said Miss Loupe. She sat up. “I got the couch from a friend of mine who worked at MiraGrand when I was in college in Los Angeles. I needed a couch for my apartment, and they were going to toss it, so I took it.”