Operation Yes (4 page)

Now the whole class was staring in fascination at the couch, even if they'd never seen the movie.

Miss Loupe got up from the Ugly, Ugly Couch and moved behind it. She shoved the couch into the middle of the Taped Space so that it faced the class and stood behind it, her arms stretched out along its curved back.

“What happens when we place an object in the Taped Space?” she said. “Do we see it differently than if it were in the teachers' lounge or in a living room? What happens when someone talks to it? When I insulted it with my own weak language and then the bold words of Shakespeare? How did you feel
when I hit the couch? Did you feel differently when I treated it kindly?”

Of course,
thought Bo.
How could you not?
His hand twitched as if it wanted to rise into the air.

Wait. Maybe no one else had felt sorry for the couch. He wanted Miss Loupe to keep doing her crazy games, instead of real school, but he didn't want everyone to look at him like he was moldy shredded cheese either. He sat on his hand and glanced over at the window. It was sealed shut under rippled coats of yellowed paint. He wished Miss Loupe could push it open a tiny crack.

Miss Loupe was moving on. “Let's try it with another object. Rick, may I borrow your ID card?”

Rick handed over the tan laminated card.

“What can we do with
this
?” said Miss Loupe. She waved the ID card. “And
this
?” She patted the couch.

No one knew.

“You're right. We need one more thing. Would someone come sit on the couch, please?” She looked at the class expectantly.

This time, Bo couldn't help it. His hand rose into the air.

“Yes, Bo, come on up.”

Bo made his way to the front of the class. As he crossed the edge of the Taped Space, he deliberately tripped over the flat, beige strip of tape and sent himself rocketing into the cushions of the Ugly, Ugly Couch. The class laughed, and he wondered for a second if Miss Loupe had any rules about how to treat her couch. She had whacked it, but … He turned around and sat up.

Miss Loupe didn't say a thing. She began to take his picture, only she used the ID card instead of a real camera. Her fingers gripped the rectangular edges of the card as she lifted it to her face and squeezed one eye shut. She peeked around the card with the other eye, regarding him intently. Then she advanced on the couch, rotating her imaginary camera from side to side, searching for the best angle.

The whole class was looking at Bo as if he should be doing something in response. Trey had overlapped his hands so they formed a line in front of his neck and was slowly raising the Quagmire over his chin and mouth and nose, his lips
glubglubb
ing silently.

He wasn't going to sink, thought Bo. It couldn't be that hard. He slicked down his hair and pasted a fake grin on his face. He beamed from the lobe of one freckled ear to the other. He twinkled his eyes, one at a time. He shook his head as if dazed from the repeated flash and waved to his legions of screaming fans.

“Trey! Good to see you, man! Zac! Check it out! I'm a rock star! Yo, Melissa! Want to interview me?”

But inside, he was wondering: What did Miss Loupe want him to do? Was this right?

He began to bounce on the couch. It felt like a trampoline. Could he launch himself over the side?

Now Miss Loupe was acting as if there was something wrong with her camera, shaking it and repeatedly looking through the imaginary viewfinder at him, and then taking her eye away and surveying him and the Ugly, Ugly Couch. It was as if she was
trying to tell him something. Should he get up? Leave the couch and take the camera from her?

Then, suddenly, Miss Loupe had stopped taking pictures of him. Her imaginary camera transformed back into an ID card, which she handed to Bo. “Here you are, sir. It looks
exactly like you.
”

Bo did the only thing he could think of. He took one look at Rick's picture, did a double take, and passed out. He flopped his head over the arm of the Ugly, Ugly Couch and let his tongue loll uselessly from his mouth. His toes twitched in a last shudder of consciousness.

The whole class, except Rick, broke out laughing, and Bo stretched his tongue out a millimeter more, completing his lifeless pose.

“Well,” Miss Loupe said, looking down at his limp body, “that's one way to end a scene.” She turned to address the class. “As a general rule, you should try not to pass out or die. It gives your partner nothing, absolutely nothing, to work with.”

Bo recovered his extended tongue, which was making him leak drool onto the couch cushions. He opened his eyes and tried to look as alive as possible.

“The best thing to do,” Miss Loupe went on, “is to say, ‘Yes,
and
…'”

She handed Rick back his card, which he stuffed into his pocket without looking at it. She motioned for Bo to return to his seat.

Yes? Hadn't he said yes? thought Bo. He trudged to the back row, sat down, and stuck both hands under his legs.

“That means you add new information to the scene. I should have explained it better before we began. Think of it like cooking: What new flavor can you throw into the pot that will go with the rest of the ingredients but make it somehow different, somehow better?

“Let me give you an example,” Miss Loupe said. She walked over to her desk and turned a picture frame around.

“This is my brother Marc,” she said. The man in the picture had close-cropped hair and a wicked grin. He looked like Miss Loupe, minus the earrings. “He's two years older than I am, and he's in Afghanistan with a Special Forces team right now.”

“He's cute,” said Allison.

“Warriors aren't cute,” said Trey.

“We can't talk much,” said Miss Loupe, “but we e-mail each other as often as we can. I promised to tell him about my adventures here with you, and he promised to tell me about his adventures there. Except that there are things he's not allowed to write in an e-mail — things that might endanger a mission. So sometimes we play games in our e-mails instead. He gives me a line of a story, and then I give him one, and we try to keep it going for as long as we can.”

She lifted a piece of paper from her desk and held it up. “Yesterday he sent me a new one and dared me to try it with all of you.” She read the e-mail out loud:

“So, Room 208, I hear you have my baby sister as your teacher. Did she tell you about the time I taught her how to tie her shoes wrong? She came home from kindergarten and punched me.”

The class laughed.

“But unlike me, she's good at teaching things. You'll see. Have you learned the ‘Yes, and …' game yet? If you have, here's a line for you.”

Miss Loupe picked up the picture of Marc and acted as if he were saying the words: “The students of Room 208 were walking in the mountains of Afghanistan when they met a huge, three-eyed, double-jawed, dirty-furred, snarling monster….”

She pointed the picture frame at Kylie. “What should I tell him happens next?”

“We run away!” said Kylie.

“Well, yes,” said Miss Loupe. “Wouldn't we all? But for the sake of this game, let's see what happens if the rule is: You
can't
run away. Then what?” She pointed at Kylie again, prompting her: “Yes, and …”

“Yes, and … we looked around for a cave to hide in!”

“Good!” said Miss Loupe. “Yes, but we couldn't find one and it was getting dark….” She pointed to Zac.

“Yes, and my pants fell down….” The boys laughed, but the girls looked disgusted. Miss Loupe pointed at Aimee.

“Yes, and your underwear glowed in the dark….”

Miss Loupe grinned. She pointed at Martina.

“Yes, and the monster said you looked like a humongous marshmallow….”

“Yes, and he built a roaring fire….” added Miss Loupe.

“Yes, and I wanted to run away, but I couldn't,” said Melissa, “so I went to the river and jumped in to make myself all wet —”

Allison interrupted. “I don't get it. Why are we talking about monsters? And Bo was acting stupid up there. Like, I had no idea where you were.”

Bo's mouth opened. “We were ON STAGE!” he yelled.

The whole class turned around to look at him, but Miss Loupe flashed him a huge smile.

“Yes!” she said. “When we're on stage, we can be anywhere. We can see what happens next when we don't run from monsters. And if we say yes, we can take
ugly
or
stupid
and turn it into a new picture altogether.”

She put the frame back on her desk. “I can't wait to tell Marc he'd better send us another first line, because all of you
aced
that one!”

The bell rang, and the second day of school was over. Miss Loupe reminded them about their math homework for the next day. The class shoved pencils and books into their backpacks and lined up at the door.

What happens next?

What happens next?

What happens next?

Bo left Room 208, but he felt the possibilities bouncing around his brain, like golf balls launched off chunks of concrete.

“I'm not going to North Carolina.” Gari trailed her mom down the hallway, talking steadily to her mom's back, as if it weren't moving away from her. “I have it all worked out. I can stay here, and you won't have to worry because I'll be —”

Her mom stopped at the end of the hallway and looked up at a cord dangling from the ceiling.

“— staying with Tandi,” finished Gari.

Gari's mom yanked at the cord. A set of attic stairs unfolded, creaking and popping. The springs that held them together swayed like they were going to break.

“Tandi isn't family. I want you to be with family while I'm gone.”

“Maybe I could stay with Tandi until … you know … until the Army or somebody could find … could find … I mean, I do have other family … if we knew where —”

“No,” her mom said. She shook the stairs to make sure they were locked in place. Little puffs of dust clouded the air. “If your dad was going to show up, he would have done it by now. It's always been you and me. Always.”

Gari watched the dust drift down and pushed her glasses tightly against her nose. “But I could …”

Her mom put a foot on the stairs. “No. The Army's only giving me three weeks to get ready, and we have enough to do without arguing over this.”

Gari discovered that she was biting her lower lip so hard that she had torn the skin. She wasn't arguing. She was proposing a different plan. What was wrong with that?

But her mom ended the discussion, reaching out and hooking one of her fingers around one of Gari's.

“All the time,” she said, and the familiar words, like the beginning of a song, called up the response from Gari.

“Love you all the time too, Mom,” she answered. She did. Just not so much at this exact moment. She slid her finger out of her mom's grasp.

Her mom climbed up, and her head and shoulders disappeared into the attic.

“Here's my old trumpet,” her mom called, her voice muffled. “You can take that with you, if you want. Maybe you can try …” She went on talking, even though her head went farther up inside the attic and Gari couldn't hear her words anymore.

Gari stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking at her mom's feet.

There had to be a better plan. There had to.

Over the next several days, Miss Loupe had the class transfer her mysterious quotes about frames, art, and saying yes to strips of shiny white poster board, which they mounted with blue putty to the pitted and scarred cinder block walls of their classroom.

“Say yes?” said Melissa, as she struggled to get the poster board to hang straight. “What happened to ‘Just say no'?”

“You should have hit the couch when she said you could,” said Bo. “Why did you say no?”

“I couldn't help it,” Melissa said. “I never can tell what she's thinking. Sometimes she teaches like a normal teacher, and then … WHAM!”

“It's her shoes, dummy,” said Allison. “My mom says a person's shoes are important, and if you paid attention to clothes, you would know that.” She bumped her name-brand tennis shoe against Melissa's plain white one.

It was true. Miss Loupe did teach them sixth-grade math and science and social studies and English. But every afternoon, for at least a few minutes, she kicked off her regular footwear and slipped on her black stealth shoes. What happened after that was anybody's guess.

One afternoon she began with:

“Give me the name of an object.”

“A boat!” yelled Zac.

“A place?” said Miss Loupe.

“On the couch!” said Melissa.

“
That's
kind of boring,” said Bo.

“An event?” continued Miss Loupe.

“PT!” yelled Martina.

“What's PT?” whispered Kylie to Shaunelle. She knew some military stuff, like PCS (Permanent Change of Station), because her mom was fluent in the language of selling houses to everyone who moved in and out. But some things still puzzled her.

“Physical training,” Shaunelle whispered back. “Like P.E., except for grown-ups. You have to —”

She gasped, because Miss Loupe had jumped up on the Ugly, Ugly Couch. She was perched on its flat, squat back, one leg hanging over each side. And then she started rowing. And
singing.

“When my great-granny was ninety-one,” she belted out, pulling with all her might against imaginary oars, “she did PT just for fun!”

Martina giggled. She knew this jody call. Her mom sang it while she shined her boots. Then her dad would tease her mom and say, “Hey, aren't YOU going to be ninety-one when you finally retire?”

“When my great-granny was ninety-two,” Miss Loupe bellowed, “she did PT better than you!”

She looked sideways at her class, continuing to row, and pretended to wipe sweat from her brow. “Come on, I'm fading out here all alone!”

The class laughed. But they didn't sing or row. They watched.

“When my great-granny was ninety-three,” Miss Loupe sang, more weakly now. She paused, her oars trailing as if she were faltering in the water. She listed to one side of the couch. She looked like she might pass out or die.

But that would end it!
thought Bo. Didn't she just tell him the other day not to do that?

“She did PT better than me!” he called out.

Miss Loupe gave a whoop of delight and righted herself on the couch.

“You! Let's go!” she said to Bo. “On the boat!”

Bo hustled to the front of the room. He kicked off his shoes and scrambled up the cushions onto the top of the couch. He'd done lots of rowing on the lake near his grandparents' house in Tennessee. He mimed spitting into each hand, then grabbed for the oars, pulling in tandem with Miss Loupe.

“Who's next?” said Miss Loupe. “We need more crew!”

Bo yelled, “When my great-granny was ninety-four …”

He pointed his imaginary oar at Trey.

“She ran two miles and ran ten more!” said Trey.

Trey ran to climb aboard next to Bo.

“When my great-granny was ninety-five …” Trey chanted.

“She did PT to stay alive!” Zac yelled, racing for the couch.

“When my great-granny was ninety-six …”

“She did PT backward just for kicks,” called Kylie, before another boy could yell out. She tucked herself in between Miss Loupe and Bo.

Soon the whole boat crew was chanting in unison, as rhymes flew back and forth between the boat and the shore:

“When my great-granny was ninety-seven …”

“She up and died, she went to heaven!”

“When my great-granny was ninety-eight …”

“She met St. Peter at the Pearly Gate!”

Miss Loupe hopped off the couch and went off on a riff:

“St. Peter, St. Peter, sorry I'm late!”

She lifted up her hands in apology. Then she took a giant step to the left, turned and faced where she had been standing, and stroked an imaginary beard.

“St. Peter said, with a toothy grin …”

Miss Loupe paused for effect and then snapped out:

“Drop down, Granny, and give me ten!”

With a giant step to the right, she was back to being the great-granny. She did ten quick push-ups without even breathing hard.

Then she stood up and applauded her crew on the Ugly, Ugly Couch.

“You see? We got into a rhythm of passing the lead back and forth, and it got easier and easier as we went along!”

“You're good at push-ups!” said Melissa. “You could be in the military!”

“Well,” said Miss Loupe, “I was once a cadet at the Air Force Academy.”

“You were in the Air Force?” said Bo. He tried to imagine her in uniform, with no earrings or belly ring, standing motionless in formation.

“No,” she said. Her eyes went to Marc's picture for a brief moment. “I left after my freshman year.”

The bell for the end of the day rang, and all the rowers scrambled off the couch to get their backpacks.

“Spelling test tomorrow!” Miss Loupe called after them. “Study your words! Try making a jody call with them!”

 

The next afternoon, after the spelling test, she donned her soft black shoes and pulled an old hooded sweatshirt from her desk drawer.

“The sweatshirt is one
object
,” she said. “A WHAT. Can someone give me a WHERE?”

“Someone left it,” said Allison. “At the wrong house.”

“Yes, and …” said Miss Loupe. “Can someone give me SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS?”

“When they came back to get it, a cat was sleeping on it,” said Bo.

“Yes, and when I wrestled the cat,” said Trey, “one of the ties tore off….”

“Yes, and the cat swallowed it….” said Aimee.

“Yes, and we had to take her to the vet….” said Shaunelle.

“Yes, and we had a wreck on the way and the cat escaped….” said Rick.

“Good,” said Miss Loupe. “Now let's try to put our
object
, our
place
, and our
event
into action.”

She called Rick and Shaunelle up into the Taped Space. Rick was the cat, curled on top of the sweatshirt. Shaunelle approached him and tried to tug the sweatshirt away. Rick wouldn't budge. She tugged harder. Rick didn't give an inch. Shaunelle yanked with all her might, and there was a loud
r — iiii — p
! A pencilsized gap appeared in the seam of the sweatshirt.

“OH!” said Shaunelle. “I didn't mean for that to happen!”

“I think I can fix that,” said Miss Loupe. “But what do you think went wrong here?”

“Rick wouldn't move!” said Shaunelle.

“Cats don't move unless they want to,” said Rick. “Mine doesn't.”

“Ah,” said Miss Loupe. “You're both right. So how do you move forward when both of you are right?”

“Take turns?” offered Shaunelle, thinking of the arguments she'd refereed between her younger sisters.

“Exactly,” said Miss Loupe. “One person leads, the other follows. It's like a good stage fight.”

“Fight?” said Bo and Trey together.

Miss Loupe regarded them with a half-smile. “I don't think I should've mentioned that. I should've said, one person leads, the other person follows … like good ballroom dancing.”

The two boys fell back in their seats. Miss Loupe picked up the sweatshirt from the arm of the couch.

“Isn't that an Academy sweatshirt?” asked Allison.

“Yes, it is,” said Miss Loupe.

“Why didn't you stay at the Academy, ma'am?” said Melissa. “Because you wanted to be a teacher?”

“That's a story that takes more time than we have,” said Miss Loupe, eyeing the clock at the back of the room. She exchanged her slip-ons for laced-up tennis shoes. “I have bus duty today.”

“So do I!” said Kylie. She got out her Safety Patrol sash.

Melissa still had her notebook open.

“Can't we do more writing?” she said. “I'm not too good at … at …” She gestured toward the Taped Space.

“We'll do a fiction and poetry unit later in the year,” Miss Loupe told her. “In the meantime, thinking about WHAT, WHERE, and WHAT HAPPENS can help you write scenes. And WHO,” she added. “Characters are very important.”

Melissa nodded and closed her notebook.

Bo shook his head. Why did Melissa want to write things when they could be DOING them?

 

Later that night, at 9:58, Bo lay awake, listening to the sound of his dad's flight suits tumbling in the dryer. He leaned out of his bed and shoved the window open a crack, so he could hear the music that marked the official end of the military day.

In the morning, at six
A.M.
, the song was Reveille —
Dut-dutdutta-dah! Dut-dut-dutta-dah!
— which meant “Wake up!” At noon, “The Air Force Song” rang out across the base:

At four thirty, the speakers played the national anthem for the Retreat Ceremony. Then at ten o'clock, like tonight, the music of
Taps floated over the night air. Taps was much slower than Reveille.

Dun-dun-daaaah. Dun-dun-daaaah.

Solemn and steady, the song drew out its notes as if trying to linger far beyond the end of this particular day.

Sometimes when Bo heard it, he counted back in his head, walking through each house he'd lived in that he could remember. In each house, he'd had a different key, but the same tag attached to it. It was a strip of bright red cloth with the words
REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT
on it in white letters — bright red so Bo wouldn't lose it. His dad had shown him the much larger, real tags on the covers for fragile jet parts.

He wondered how many houses from now he would be thinking back to this room, to this house, to this town, and know that everyone here had mostly forgotten who Bo Whaley was. It was eerie, like thinking about himself in a long hall of mirrors, each one smaller than the last.

Bo pushed his window shut again. Now that the flight suit zippers had stopped clunking against the dryer, he could hear his parents' voices. They were discussing Gari, legal paperwork, and how to turn his dad's office into a bedroom.

Boring. Boring. Boring.

He fell asleep imagining that he and Trey were dueling, like fighter jets in a dogfight, on the backs of very ugly, but surprisingly maneuverable, couches.

 

The next day, he came early to class. Room 208 was empty except for Miss Loupe, who was sitting at her computer, checking
her e-mail. Bo caught a glimpse of a photo of rugged mountains and a military vehicle with dust flying up around it. How should he ask her so she would say yes?

Miss Loupe turned to greet him.

“Hey there,” she said. “Here for your ballroom dance lesson? Rumba or tango today? Your choice.”

She laughed at his horrified face.

“Come on, Bo. Even Marc knows how to dance a little bit. It's good for impressing the girls.”

“Is that him?” said Bo, leaning in to the computer.

“Yes. Although I hardly recognize him under that bushy beard.” Miss Loupe moved to the side so Bo could see the screen. “His team grows beards so they can blend in with the local culture when they need to.” She regarded him curiously. “Do you think you'll join the military one day?”

“My dad thinks I will,” said Bo. He stared at Marc in his uniform and his reflective sunglasses. Then he took a breath and jumped into the reason he'd come early.

“Yesterday, you said we could do stage fighting….” He shifted his backpack to the floor.

Miss Loupe rubbed at her hair with one hand, making it stand up even spikier. “I knew you wouldn't let me get away with dropping that,” she said.

Bo waited.

“Stage fighting is an advanced technique. Lots of leading and following. We might learn it if I get the gr —” She stopped.

“Get the what?”

“Sorry,” said Miss Loupe. “Top secret for now.” She pivoted
on her chair and closed out her e-mail program. Then she looked back at him. “Can I trust you?” she said.

Bo felt his throat dry up.
Yes
, he wanted to say.
Yes, you can trust me!
But he wasn't quite sure what would be required.

Miss Loupe stood up. “If I can, then I could show you how to fall.”

“Fall?” said Bo. “I know how to do that!”

“Not this way, you don't.”

She came out from behind her desk into the Taped Space.

“Falling is important to fight safety,” she said. “The last thing you want is to thud to the floor uncontrollably. Let me show you.”

She readied herself, and then stumbled backward as if she'd been punched. Her legs buckled under her, and she collapsed sideways to the floor in one graceful motion, with hardly a sound.

She stood up again. “It all comes from your core,” she said, making a fist just in front of her lower stomach. “If you're strong here, then all your limbs move together and in control.” She grinned. “I hate to say it again, but it really helps if you take dance like I did.”