Super Emma (7 page)

“Huh?” a couple of kids say. They don’t know what Jared is talking about.

I don’t know either, but I start to get an idea when he lurches forward—and grabs hold of me. “Ow, let me go,” I yelp, and we wrestle back and forth for what seems like about a week.

Jared is working his way toward the stinky garbage cans, and he’s taking me with him.

He’s going to stuff me into a garbage can!

I try to kick his shins, but his arms are wrapped around me so tight that I can’t get my feet back far enough to do any good.

My mind fills with jumbled thoughts of what is probably in that trash can.

There will be old tuna fish sandwich scraps.

And mushy bananas.

And yucky, nose-blowing Kleenexes.

Maybe there will even be little plastic bags full of dog poop! I don’t know why there would be dog poop in a school trash can, but anything is possible.

I kick at Jared again and hit his leg this time.
“Oof,”
Jared says, and then he crunches me even tighter.

“Dump her,” creepy Stanley shouts. “Dump her in the can!”

“I hate you, you big fat meanie,” Annie Pat wails.

Poor Annie Pat
, I can almost hear myself think. Jared is twisting me over the slimy edge of the fullest garbage can. The smell of the trash fills my head like a tuna-fish-mushy-banana-dog-poop nightmare.

“Let her go,” a voice cries out, and another body hurls itself in between Jared and me, knocking the trash can over. Knocking all three of us over!

It’s—it’s EllRay Jakes!

I don’t know who is the most surprised.

Is it Jared?

Is it me?

Or is it EllRay Jakes?

Jared howls. “You dumb—” and then he starts pounding EllRay’s narrow shoulder with his fist.
So
I pounce on Jared’s back like a flea on a bulldog and start whacking
him
.

“Stop … it … you …
big … stupid … bully,” I say, panting.
Thud, thud, thud
. It feels as though I am hitting a mattress.

“I’ll bet you’re the little bird who tattled to Ms. Sanchez,” Jared shouts at EllRay.

“So what if I was?” EllRay shrieks, and he twists around and pops Jared right in the mouth with his fist. I am busy pulling Jared’s twirly brown hair, but I have time to be surprised by this news.

EllRay Jakes was the one who tried to keep Jared from teaching me a lesson, even though I was the one who embarrassed EllRay!

“Yow,” Jared roars the second after EllRay’s fist hits his mouth.

“Two against one, no fair,” Stanley squeals, but I don’t see him jumping into the fight to even things up.

That’s Stanley, though.

Suddenly, someone grabs me by the scruff of my neck just as if I were a kitten, and I am lifted
off Jared’s back. I am being held up in the air by only my sweater and the seat of my pants! I see EllRay go flying up in the air, too, and Jared scrambles to his feet.

“Those two kids were beating Jared up—for no reason,” Stanley Washington tells the teacher who is holding me. “It was awful!” he adds, fake-shuddering.

“Shut up, Stanley,” Jared cries. His upper lip is already getting puffy. He is starting to look like Daffy Duck, I am happy to see. I sway back and forth in the air like a battering ram, parallel to the ground.

The person holding me—the playground monitor—finally plops me onto my feet. My legs are trembling so much that I can barely stand up. “She pulled out some of Jared’s hair,” a girl says, sounding amazed.

Sure enough, a few wisps of brown hair are stuck to my hand when I manage to open it. Jared moans and touches the back of his head.
“I’m practically bald!” he says. I wipe my hand on my pants.

“Those two little kids
whomped
him,” some kid announces.

“Nuh-uh,” Jared shouts, defending his reputation.

EllRay is still dangling in the air like a great big Christmas ornament. “There’s not going to be any whomping on
my
playground,” the man holding him says, and EllRay sways a little.

I gasp and take a wobbly step back.

It’s the principal! The
principal
is holding EllRay Jakes up high in the air.

EllRay and I are in big, big trouble. We are sitting next to each other in the principal’s office. This is probably the only time in school history that third-graders have ever been sent to the principal.

Oh, great, we’ll be famous—for
this
!

The principal is in the outer office calling our parents. His office door is open, and we can kind of hear what is going on. But EllRay and I just sit here, kicking our feet against the legs of our chairs. EllRay won’t even look at me.

I want to say,
“Thank you for trying to save me.”

I want to say,
“I’m really sorry if I embarrassed you the other day
.”

Instead, I say, “How is your action figure?”

EllRay gives me an empty look.

“You know,” I say helpfully, reminding him. “Your toy. The one with the bat wings, that Jared took.” But now I am starting to wish that I had kept my big mouth shut.

“Oh. It’s fine,” EllRay says. He tries to smile, but then he goes back to kicking the chair.

Jared is in the nurse’s office, even though he kept telling everyone that he was okay. But the nurse just walked by holding a bowl of ice from the cafeteria. I guess it’s for Jared’s swollen mouth. Our school nurse looks just like a regular lady. She doesn’t wear a uniform, or anything like that, but she does peek into the principal’s office as she passes.

I guess she wants to see the rough, tough kids who were mean enough to hit poor Jared Matthews.

Hah
.

“All right,” the principal says, bustling into his office. “I’ve talked with both your parents.” He towers above us, looking down, hands on his hips. I sneak a peek at his face. He has a very large nose and a black beard. It is so fluffy that
I’m surprised words can get past his hidden lips. “Emma?” he says, turning to me.

“Yes?” I croak.

“Your mother told me some of what’s been happening. Jared’s threat and so on. You should have spoken to Ms. Sanchez about it, Miss.”

Miss
. I’m really in trouble now. Or maybe he just can’t remember my last name.

“Okay,” I say meekly. But I know that I would probably still be sitting here, in trouble, even if I
did
tell on Jared. Because Jared wanted a fight.

“And you, young fella,” the principal says, turning to EllRay, “you and your pop did the right thing by calling the school office this morning.”

EllRay ducks his head and blushes, waiting for what is going to come next.

And here it comes. “But there’s absolutely no excuse for fighting,” the principal states.

“I didn’t mean to fight,” EllRay says. “But see, Jared was going to—”

“There’s no excuse,
period
,” the principal interrupts—which is very rude, I think. But it is his office, so I keep my mouth shut.

“Yes sir,” EllRay mumbles.

“Now, your parents and I have talked it over, and I decided that I’m going to let you kids return to class today. All three of you,” the principal says, jerking his head toward the nurse’s office, next door, where Jared is. “But I don’t want any more trouble, do you hear me?”

EllRay and I nod. How could we not hear him? His voice is booming all over the place. Even Jared can probably hear him!

“Because if there
is
any more trouble, especially any more hitting,” he says, bending over to stare us in the eyes, “I’m going to be very, very upset, understand? And you don’t want that to happen. Believe me.”

“I believe you,”
EllRay and I both say at the exact same time.

“All right, you two can go now,” the principal
says. Jared will rejoin your class in half an hour or so, when the swelling goes down.”

And so EllRay and I trudge back to class down the long, shiny, empty hallway.

EllRay turns to me. “I wasn’t being brave when I tried to defend you,” he says to me. “I just couldn’t figure out what else to do.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” I tell him.

Phew
. We are finally eating lunch after a long morning of listening to Ms. Sanchez be mad at us about what happened at recess. We had to raise our hands one at a time and tell her ways to solve problems when you are angry, ways that don’t have hitting in them.

I don’t think that any of the things we came up with would work with a kid like Jared Matthews, but I guess making that list helped Ms. Sanchez calm down a little.

Some of the answers kids had were pretty good. For instance, Fiona said you could draw an ugly picture of the kid you are mad at and then crumple it up. That sounded like fun.

But some of the ideas were dumb. For example, Heather suggested that you should say,
“I am just so angry at you!”
to the person you’re mad at. And what good would that do? If you said that to someone like Jared, he would be absolutely thrilled!

But Ms. Sanchez wrote it down on the board anyway.

“Are you okay?” Cynthia asks me as I am peeking into my lunch sack.

“I’m fine,” I tell her. Annie Pat and I are eating with the other third-grade girls again, so everything is back to normal.