The Best School Year Ever (3 page)

T
he janitor, Mr. Sprague, said that was that—no more trash masher. He told the principal that we could have a trash masher or we could have the Herdmans, but we couldn’t have both under one roof.

“I can’t stand around and guard the thing all day,” he said. “There’s six of them and only one of me, and every time I leave the basement to go sweep a floor, they shove something else into it.”

They’d already mashed up the fourth-grade ant farm and the plastic dinosaur exhibit, and then Leroy went ahead and mashed up the Good School Citizen Award too, once he found out he couldn’t eat it or spend it or sell it to anybody.

Alice reported this to her mother, and Mrs. Wendleken was so disgusted about the whole thing that she resigned from the PTA, which my father said was good news for the PTA.

Of course, Mrs. Wendleken didn’t come right out and say, “I quit because I’m mad at everybody.” She just said it wasn’t fair for her to run the PTA Talent Show because Alice was in it. She said Mother could do that because Mother
didn’t
have any talented children in it.

“Does that mean we aren’t talented, or just that we aren’t in it?” Charlie asked me, and I said, “Both.”

Actually
nobody
had any talented children in it, and they really had to scratch around to get kids to do anything, so it was no night of a thousand stars, which was what all the posters said—“Night of a Thousand Stars! An Evening of Family Entertainment! PTA Talent Show!”

When my father saw the list of acts, he said he hoped there would be more talent in the refreshments than there was going to be in the show.

“There aren’t any refreshments,” Mother told him. “This is just an evening of family entertainment.”

He shook his head. “Not unless you have refreshments, it won’t be.”

I guess Mother took another look at the list, because that night she called around for people to make cookies and brownies and cup-cakes and punch, and the next day the posters said, “Night of a Thousand Stars! An Evening of Family Entertainment! PTA Talent Show!”—with “Delicious Refreshments!” crowded in at the bottom.

This was a big mistake, because “refreshments” is one long word that all the Herdmans understand, and right away you knew that they’d figure some way to get at them.

“They can’t,” Alice said. “They’d have to be in the show, and they can’t do anything talented.”

“They can steal,” Charlie said.

Alice looked at him the way my mother looks at the bottom of the hamster cage. “That’s not a talent,” she said.

Maybe not, but the Herdmans did it better than anybody else. Still, it was hard to see how they would do it for an audience or what they would call it on the program or what they would steal, because there wasn’t much left that they hadn’t already stolen.

Last year they were all absent on October 4 and we had Arbor Day because for the last three years the Herdmans stole the tree, and the principal said at least this year we’d finally get it planted, even if it died over the winter.

“Maybe they’ve got some talent we don’t know about,” I said. And sure enough, three days later Gladys Herdman took a pair of kindergarten safety scissors and cut Eugene Preston’s hair in the shape of a dog. It could have been a cat, though, or a horse or a pig. Something with four legs and a tail, anyway, or else something with five legs and no tail.

You had to look right down at the top of his head to see it, but this was what you mostly saw of Eugene anyway because he was the shortest kid in the second grade or the first grade or even kindergarten. So naturally he got picked on a lot, and if you had to choose which kid in the Woodrow Wilson School would get his hair cut in the shape of a dog for no reason, you would choose Eugene.

Of course he was already a nervous wreck from being the shortest kid around, and you knew it wasn’t going to calm him down to have people holler, “Here, Fido!” or “Here, Spot!” at him. And if his hair was anything like the rest of him, he would probably be this way for years. So things didn’t look good for Eugene.

“A dog?” my father said when he heard about it. “I can’t believe it looks like a dog. Who says it looks like a dog?”

“The art teacher,” Charlie said. “I heard her tell the principal. She said if it just wasn’t on Eugene’s head she would display it as an example of living sculpture.”

“Why don’t you tell that to Eugene?” Mother said. “It might make him feel better to know that he’s a living sculpture.”

I didn’t think so. For one thing, nobody knew what a living sculpture was. I helped Eugene look it up in the encyclopedia, but we looked under
living
instead of
sculpture
and never got past
living sacrifice
, which was all about torture, and
that
sure didn’t make Eugene feel better.

“Come on, Eugene,” I said. “Don’t be crazy. No one’s going to make you be a sacrifice.”

“Hah!” he said. “How about Gladys Herdman?”

He was really worried, and between being worried and short and having his hair all chopped up, Eugene began to twitch and wiggle and bite his fingernails and bang himself on the head.

“I can’t help it,” he said. “It makes me feel better.”

Actually, there wasn’t a kid in the Woodrow Wilson School who didn’t wiggle or twitch or tie knots in his hair or
something.
Boomer Malone once ate a whole pencil without even knowing it till he got to the eraser and broke off a tooth. Some kids banged their heads, too, when they didn’t have anything else to do, and of course the Herdmans banged
other
kids on the head, but nobody did it as hard as Eugene.

This was fascinating to Gladys Herdman. She quit hitting him and hollering at him and just followed him around everywhere— waiting for him to knock himself out, we all thought.

“Why do you do that all the time?” she asked him, but Eugene was scared to tell her the truth. He figured if he said, “It makes me feel better,” she would pound him black and blue and claim it was a good deed.

My mother thought Eugene ought to enter the talent show. “It would take his mind off his troubles,” she said, “and there must be
something
he could do.”

I couldn’t imagine what, except maybe stand up on the stage and be short, and I never heard of a show where part of the entertainment was somebody being short. So I was pretty surprised, along with everybody else, to learn that Eugene had a hidden talent that he would perform at the talent show.

“And then on TV, probably,” Gladys Herdman said. Gladys was the one who discovered this talent but she wouldn’t tell anybody what it was and she wouldn’t let Eugene tell anybody either, not even his mother—so Mrs. Preston didn’t know whether to get him a costume or a guitar or elevator shoes or what.

My mother didn’t know what to put on the stage for him to use. “Maybe he needs a microphone,” she said. “Maybe he needs some special music. I’d really like to know, because I want Eugene to be a success.” It would be wonderful, she told us, if Eugene could win first prize in the talent show.

What she really meant was, it would be wonderful if
anybody
besides Alice Wendleken would win first prize for a change, but I knew that wouldn’t happen unless Alice broke both her arms and couldn’t play the piano.

I guess Charlie thought it was worth a try, though, because he asked Eugene what he needed for his talent act.

“He needs walnuts,” Charlie reported, “but he says he’ll bring his own. He doesn’t want to. He’s scared to be in the talent show, but he’s more scared of Gladys.”

“What’s he going to do with walnuts?” Mother asked.

“I don’t know. Unless . . . maybe he’s going to juggle them.” Charlie brightened up. “That would be good! Even if he drops some, that would be good!”

It seemed to me that if Eugene could juggle
anything
we would all know about it, but maybe not. My friend Betty Lou Sampson is double-jointed and can fold herself into a pretzel, but she won’t do it in front of people, because of being shy. It could be the same way with Eugene, I thought.

I also thought he might back out, but on the night of the talent show there he was, so for once we had something different to look forward to.

There isn’t usually anything different or surprising about the talent show. One year a girl named Bernice Potts signed up to do an animal act and the animal turned out to be a goldfish, which was different. But then the act turned out to be Bernice talking to the fish and the fish talking back and Bernice telling the audience what the fish said. Charlie loved this, but he was in the first grade then and believed anything anybody told him.

Mrs. Wendleken said this act didn’t belong in the talent show because it didn’t have anything to do with human talent. “Even if the fish
could
talk,” she said, “that would just mean the fish was talented, not Bernice.”

Mrs. Wendleken didn’t think Eugene should be juggling walnuts either, according to Alice. “If he can do it,” Alice sniffed, “which he probably can’t.”

Eugene didn’t even try. He came out on the stage carrying a big bowl of walnuts while Mother was introducing him. “Our next talented performer,” she said, “is from the second grade. It’s Eugene Preston, and Eugene is going to—”

Mother never got a chance to finish, because Eugene began smashing walnuts on his forehead one after another, just as fast as he could, and walnut shells flew everywhere.

People sitting in the back of the auditorium couldn’t figure out what he was doing, and people sitting in the front of the auditorium knew what he was doing but couldn’t believe he was doing it. The principal, who was sitting in the back row, thought kids were throwing things at Eugene, so he started up the aisle and ran smack into Mrs. Preston, who was yelling for someone to stop Eugene before he killed himself with walnuts.

Nobody heard her. There was too much noise. Kids were jumping up and down and clapping and hollering, “Go, Eugene! Go, Eugene!” and then, “Go, Hammerhead! Go, Hammerhead!” Boomer Malone began counting walnuts: “. . . twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four . . .” And pretty soon everybody was chanting, “. . . thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight . . .” Boomer said Mrs. Preston fainted when Eugene got to forty-five walnuts, but she didn’t really faint. She just collapsed onto a seat, moaning something about “scrambled brains.”

Eugene used all his walnuts and then he set his bowl down on the stage and walked off. He looked taller to me, but that’s probably because I was looking up at him for a change.

Eugene didn’t win first prize, but neither did Alice. Her piano solo was called “Flying Fingers,” and it would have been pretty flashy except that there were so many walnut shells stuck in the piano keys that she kept having to stop and start over. Eugene was the popular favorite, but I guess the judges didn’t want to reward a scramble-your-brains act, in case that
did
eventually happen to him, so they gave the first prize to the kindergarten rhythm band, which was probably the best thing to do. It made all the kindergarten mothers happy and it didn’t make anyone else very mad.

Of course, kids were all over Eugene, telling him that he should have won, that he was the best, and wanting to feel his head.

“Did you always crack nuts that way?” someone asked, and Eugene said no, that it was Gladys Herdman’s idea.

“Why?” Charlie said. “What was in it for Gladys?”

If you didn’t know any better you might think that Gladys felt guilty because of Eugene’s dog haircut, but no one at the Woodrow Wilson School would think that. So when we went to get the delicious refreshments, no one was very surprised to find they were all gone.

Mrs. McCluskey was in charge of the food, and when Mother asked her what happened she said, “I’d just put the last plate of cupcakes on the table when Gladys Herdman ran in here yelling that Eugene Preston had gone crazy in the auditorium and was trying to kill himself. Now normally I wouldn’t pay any attention to
anything
a Herdman told me, but I could hear a lot of noise and stamping around and people yelling, ‘Eugene! Eugene!’ so naturally I went to see.” She shrugged. “I still don’t know what happened to Eugene, but I know what happened to the refreshments.”

Everybody knew what happened to the refreshments but as usual you couldn’t prove anything because the evidence was gone and Gladys was gone.

Mrs. Wendleken didn’t agree. She said the evidence was Eugene. “It’s obvious that Gladys Herdman got that poor little boy to knock himself silly and cause a big commotion, and then she went to the cafeteria and walked off with every last cookie!”

Maybe so, but Eugene
didn’t
knock himself silly and you couldn’t feel very sorry for him because he was a big celebrity with his name in the newspaper—“
UNUSUAL PERFORMANCE BY PLUCKY EUGENE PRESTON EARNS STANDING OVATION AT WOODROW WILSON TALENT SHOW
.” The article also mentioned the kindergarten rhythm band, but not by name (“Too many of them,” the reporter said) and not by musical number (“Could have been almost anything”).

Besides, Eugene wasn’t even Eugene anymore except to his mother and the teachers. And sometimes even the teachers forgot and called him Hammerhead, just like everyone else.

E
very now and then I would remember about the assignment for the year—Compliments for Classmates—and turn to that page in my notebook. So far I had thought up compliments for six people, including Alice. For Alice, I put down “Important.”

“I’m not sure I’d call that a compliment,” my mother said.

“Alice would,” I told her. Actually, Alice would probably consider it just a natural fact, like “The earth is round,” “The sky is blue,” “Alice Wendleken is important.”

Alice began being important right away in the first grade because she was the only first-grade kid who had ever been inside the teachers’ room. So whenever something had to be delivered there, Alice got to deliver it.

“I have a note to go to the teachers’ room,” our teacher would say, “way up on the third floor, so Alice, I’ll ask you to be my messenger since you know exactly where it is.”

Then Alice would stand up and straighten her dress and pat her hair and carry the note in both hands out in front of her as if it was news from God. Most of all, she would never tell what was in the room.

Whenever the teachers didn’t have anything else to do, they went and hid in the teachers’ room, but nobody else ever got in there. You couldn’t
see
in, either, because the door was wood and frosted glass almost to the top.

Boomer Malone once got Charlie to climb on his shoulders and look in, but all Charlie could see was a sign that said “Thank God It’s Friday,” and another sign that said “Thank God It’s June.”

This got spread around school, and kids went home and told about the swear words in the teachers’ room, so after that they put up a curtain and nobody could see anything.

“There isn’t anything to see,” my mother said.

“Just some chairs and tables and a sofa and a big coffeepot and a little refrigerator.”

“No TV?” Charlie said.

“No TV.”

“What do they do in there?”

Mother sighed. “I suppose they relax,” she said, “and talk to each other, and have lunch.”

“That’s not what Imogene Herdman says,” Charlie muttered.

“Well,” Mother said, “if you believe what Imogene Herdman says, you”ll believe anything.”

“They go in there to smoke cigarettes and drink Cokes” was what Imogene had said. “And if somebody has a cake, they put it in a Sears, Roebuck sack and pretend it’s something they bought, and then they go in there and eat it where nobody can see them. And they don’t let anybody in who doesn’t know the password.”

Charlie brightened right up. “What’s the password?”

“They pick a new one every day,” Imogene said, “and then they put it in the morning announcements, like in what’s for lunch. Once it was
macaroni and cheese.
”

I figured Imogene was making this up as she went along, so you had to be impressed with her imagination. I even got out my notebook and started to write that down: Imogene Herdman—“Has imagination.” But then I realized it wasn’t imagination, it was just a big lie. I also realized that finding a compliment for Imogene Herdman was probably the hardest thing I’d have to do all year and I’d better start thinking about it.

Of course, Charlie kept waiting for “macaroni and cheese” to show up in the morning announcements. He was going to walk past the teachers’ room and say “macaroni and cheese” and see what happened. But the next time it was on the lunch menu, Charlie was stuck in the nurse’s room with a nosebleed and didn’t get to try it.

Imogene told him it didn’t make any difference because the password that day was
softball.

“Did you try it?” Charlie asked. “Did you get in?”

“I don’t want in.” Imogene gave him this dark, squinty-eyed look. “If a kid gets in that room, they never let him out. Remember Pauline Ellison?”

Charlie shook his head.

“Neither does anyone else. She got in the teachers’ room. Remember Kenneth Weaver? Did you see Kenneth Weaver lately?”

“No, because he’s got the mumps.”

“That’s what you think. Kenneth doesn’t have the mumps. Kenneth got caught in the teachers’ room.”

I guess this was too much, even for Charlie. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

Imogene grinned her girl-Godzilla grin. “Neither did Kenneth,” she said. “I told him he better not go near the teachers’ room but”—she shrugged—“he did it anyway.”

For once nobody believed Imogene. Nobody
told
her so, but Alice Wendleken said that from now on Imogene couldn’t shove people around anymore because she was a proven liar, and no matter what she said everybody would laugh at her and maybe knock her down. Nobody believed
that
either, but it sounded great.

“Just wait till Kenneth comes back!” everybody said. But Kenneth didn’t come back.

Charlie hunted me up at recess with this news. “He’s never coming back,” he said. “The teacher gathered up his books and moved Bernadette Slocum into his seat and said, ‘Well, we’ll certainly miss Kenneth, won’t we?’ It’s just like Imogene said!”

“Oh, come on, Charlie,” I said. “You know they haven’t got him shut up in the teachers’ room.”

Still . . . you had to wonder. First Imogene said Kenneth was gone, and then he
was
gone. What if Imogene was right?

I wasn’t the only one who thought about this, and I wasn’t the only one who found reasons to stay away from the teachers’ room, and even to stay away from the whole third floor. Kids suddenly couldn’t climb stairs for one reason or another or kids got dizzy if they went above the second floor. Alice had what she called a twisted toe and limped around holding on to chairs and tables, all on one floor, naturally.

But Louella McCluskey told the real truth, for everyone. “I don’t
think
Imogene Herdman is right,” she said, “and I don’t
think
kids disappear into the teachers’ room, but maybe she is and maybe they do, and I’m not going to take any chances.”

Then two teachers and a district supervisor and Mrs. Wendleken all got locked in the teachers’ room by accident. They were in there for an hour and a half, banging on the door and yelling and even throwing things out the window. They took down the curtain and climbed up on chairs and waved their arms around at the top of the door, but nobody saw them and nobody heard them because nobody ever went near the teachers’ room.

They were all pretty mad, especially the district supervisor, and Mrs. Wendleken was hysterical by the time somebody let them out. By that time, too they were all worn out and hoarse from yelling and dizzy from waving their arms around in the air.

Who finally let them out was Imogene.

She said that she stood around trying to decide what to do, and that made Mrs. Wendleken hysterical all over again. “What to do!” she said.

“Open the door and let us out is what to do!”

“But it’s the teachers’ room,” Imogene said, looking shocked, as if she had this rule burned into her brain. “We’re not allowed in the teachers’ room.”

“You’re allowed to let people
out
of the teachers’ room!” Mrs. Wendleken hollered.

Then the district supervisor got mad at Mrs. Wendleken. “This child has saved the day,” she said. “We ought to thank her. And let me tell you, there are plenty of schools in this district where the students spend every waking minute trying to break into the teachers’ room, or sneak into the teachers’ room. You wouldn’t believe the wild tales I’ve heard. Now here’s a student who seems to understand that teachers need a little privacy. I hope you have more boys and girls like . . . is it Imogene?”

“We have five more exactly like her,” one of the teachers said.

The district supervisor said that was wonderful and nobody argued with her—too tired, I guess, from jumping up and down yelling for help.

This whole thing got in the newspaper. “
SCHOOL PERSONNEL LOCKED IN THIRD FLOOR ROOM
,” it said. “
RELEASED BY ALERT STUDENT
.” It didn’t name the alert student but it named everybody else who was there.

“Except Kenneth Weaver,” Charlie said. “It doesn’t say anything about Kenneth Weaver.”

“That proves it, Charlie,” I said. “He never was in there.”

“Why in the world would Kenneth Weaver be in the teachers’ room?” Mother said. “That whole family moved to Toledo.”

“Did they take Kenneth?” Charlie asked.

“Certainly they took Kenneth! Who would move away and leave their children?”

“Mr. Herdman,” I said, but Mother said that was different.

Alice Wendleken cut out the newspaper article and gave it to Imogene. “I thought you’d want to keep it,” she said, “since it’s about you. Of course nobody knows it’s about you because they didn’t print your name. I wonder why they didn’t print your name.”

“They didn’t print Kenneth’s name either,” Imogene said. “So what?”

“So Kenneth wasn’t there!” Alice said.

Imogene stuck her nose right up against Alice’s nose, which naturally made Alice nervous and also cross-eyed. “Why do you think I opened the door to that room?” she said. “You think I opened the door to let all those teachers out? Who cares if they never get out? I let Kenneth out.”

“My mother was in there,” Alice said, “and she didn’t see Kenneth.”

“Did you ask her?”

“No, because I know Kenneth Weaver is in Toledo.”

“He is now,” Imogene said.

This was typical Herdman—too shifty to figure out, and Alice didn’t even try.

Aside from congratulating Imogene, the district supervisor said that the worst part of being shut up in there for an hour and a half was the furniture. “Lumpy old sofa,” she said, “broken-down chairs, terrible lighting. It doesn’t surprise me that the door was broken. Everything in that room is broken.”

So the teachers got a new sofa and chairs, and the furniture store donated a new rug, and they painted the walls and fixed the door and bought new curtains and a big green plant.

They left the door open too for a couple of days so everybody could see the new stuff, which just went to prove, Alice said, “that there’s nobody hidden there and never was.”

Imogene shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

Charlie was feeling brave too. “Where would they be?” he said. “There’s no place for them.”

“Sure there is.” Imogene pointed. “How about that? The plant that ate Chicago.”

“The plant?” Mother said that evening. “Well, I would have chosen some normal kind of plant like a fern, but I guess they wanted something scientific for the teachers’ room. That plant is a Venus’s flytrap. It eats flies . . . swallows them right up.”

Charlie looked at me, his eyes wide, and I knew what he was thinking—that maybe you could say the password by accident, disappear into the teachers’ room, and never be seen again because of death by plant.

“It eats
flies,
Charlie,” I said. “Nothing but flies.”

“Well, after all, it’s just a plant,” Mother said. “It doesn’t know flies from hamburger. I guess it eats anything it can get hold of.”

Once Charlie spread that word around, you would normally have had kids lining up to feed stuff to the plant—pizza, potato chips, M&M cookies—and they would probably have had to keep the door locked and put up a big sign that said “Private, Keep Out, Teachers Only.” But none of this happened because nobody would go near the teachers’ room, not even to watch a plant eat lunch.

When the district supervisor came back to see the new furniture, she mentioned this and said that the teachers could thank “that thoughtful girl. What was her name? Imogene” for all this peace and privacy.

I guess she was right, in a way, but I didn’t see any teachers rushing to thank Imogene. And never mind how much I needed to find a compliment for her, I certainly couldn’t write down “Imogene Herdman is thoughtful,” no matter what the district supervisor said.