The Best School Year Ever (6 page)

“Oh, we weren’t absent,” Imogene said.

Miss Kemp frowned. “But you had chicken pox?” she asked.

“You mean, did I have chicken pox?” Imogene said.

This was like talking long distance to my grandmother without her hearing aid, and— just like my grandmother—Miss Kemp didn’t try to pin it down.

“If you have chicken pox, you can’t come back without a note from the doctor,” she said, and Imogene said, “Oh. Okay,” and got up and left.

So no one ever knew for sure whether they did actually have chicken pox, or how many of them had chicken pox, or exactly when they had chicken pox, and no one ever knew for sure whether they came to school and breathed on everybody and ruined our big award assembly, or whether they were all sick and stayed home on the fire-drill day so we won the award in the first place.

T
he last day of school is pretty loose and they probably wouldn’t even bother to have one except that that’s when you clean out your desk. If you didn’t have to clean out your desk, Mr. Crabtree could just get on the PA system any old day in June and say, “All right, this is it, last day of school. Go on home. Have a great summer. See you in September.”

But then everyone would go off and leave their smelly old socks and moldy mittens and melted Halloween candy and leftover sandwiches. Once a kindergarten gerbil got loose and climbed in Boomer Malone’s desk and died there.

Nobody knew what to do with the gerbil because, like all the kindergarten animals, it had a name and a personality and we knew all about it from the notice on the bulletin board—“Our friendly gerbil is missing. His name is Bob. If you see Bob, please return him to the kindergarten room.”

So this wasn’t just any old dead gerbil— this was friendly Bob. It didn’t seem right to drop him in the trash, so Boomer took him back to the kindergarten room. We all thought the kindergarten would stop whatever it was doing, hunt up a cigar box, write a poem for Bob, and have a funeral, but according to Boomer they couldn’t care less.

“Not even the teacher,” he reported. “She took one look and said, ‘Oh, that’s not Bob,’ and dropped him in her trash basket.”

If there was a moral to this, I guess it was: Don’t show up with dead animals on the last day of school.

You couldn’t show up with live ones either anymore. We used to have a pet parade every year on the last day of school, till the year Claude Herdman entered their cat.

The Herdmans’ cat was missing one eye and part of an ear and most of its tail and all of whatever good nature it ever had, so you wouldn’t expect it to win any prizes in a pet parade. If it was your cat, you would probably try to clean it up a little, but you probably wouldn’t whitewash it and then spray it with super-super-hold hairspray, which is what the Herdmans did.

According to Claude, they thought it would win the Most Unusual Pet prize, but it was too mad from being whitewashed and hairsprayed to do anything but attack. So the pet parade turned into a stampede of dogs and cats and turtles and hamsters and guinea pigs. Some kids held on to their animals but most didn’t, so there were cats up in the trees and on top of telephone poles, and dogs running off down the street, barking . . . and the Herdmans’ cat in the middle of it all, tearing around the playground, hissing and spitting and shedding flakes of whitewash. It took all day to get the cats down and the dogs back, and there were two hamsters that never did turn up.

So that was the end of the pet parade, and it left a big empty spot in the day’s activities, which the teachers had to fill up somehow. We had spelling bees and math marathons, or we stood up and said what we were going to do that summer, or what we would do if we were king of the world.

One year everybody brought their collections. There were baseball cards and Cracker Jack prizes and bubble-gum wrappers . . . and belly-button lint.

The belly-button lint came from Imogene Herdman, but she said she wouldn’t recommend it as a hobby. “I don’t even collect it anymore,” she said. “This is left over from when I
used
to collect it.” I guess that was the last straw—old belly-button lint—because we never did that again.

This year there was no big surprise about what we would do on the last day. It was up on the blackboard—Compliments for Classmates—and we had each drawn a name from a hat and had to think of more compliments for that one person.

“We’ve been thinking about this all year,” Miss Kemp said. She probably knew that some kids had but most kids hadn’t—but now everybody would think about it in a hurry. “And on the last day of school,” she went on, “we’re going to find out what we’ve learned about ourselves and each other.”

I had finally thought of a word for Albert. Once you get past thinking
fat
you can see that Albert’s special quality is optimism, because Albert actually believes he will be thin someday, and says so. Another word could be
determination
, or even
courage.
There were lots of good words for Albert, so I really hoped I would draw his name.

I didn’t. The name I drew was Imogene Herdman, and I had used up the one and only compliment I finally thought of for Imogene—
patriotic.

“Patriotic?” my mother said. “What makes you think Imogene is especially patriotic?”

“When we do the Pledge of Allegiance,” I said, “she always stands up.”

“Everybody stands up,” Charlie said. “If everybody sat down and
only
Imogene stood up, that would be patriotic.”

“That would be brave,” I said.

“Well, she would do that,” Charlie said. “I mean, she would do whatever everybody else didn’t do.”

Would that make Imogene brave? I didn’t really think so, but I had to have some more compliments, so I wrote it down—
patriotic
,
brave.

Two days later I still had just
patriotic
and
brave
while other people had big long lists. I saw the bottom of Joanne Turner’s list, sticking out of her notebook: “Cheerful, good sport, graceful, fair to everybody.” I wondered who
that
was.

Maxine Cooper asked me how to spell
cooperative
and
enthusiastic
, so obviously she had a terrific list. Boomer must have drawn a boy’s name, because all his compliments came right out of the Boy Scout Rules—
thrifty, clean, loyal.

I kept my eye on Imogene as much as possible so if she did something good I wouldn’t miss it, but it was so hard to tell, with her, what was good.

I
thought it was good that she got Boyd Liggett’s head out of the bike rack, but Mrs. Liggett didn’t think so.

Mrs. Liggett said it was all the Herdmans’ fault in the first place. “Ollie Herdman told Boyd to do it,” she said, “and then that Gladys got him so scared and nervous that he couldn’t get out, and then along came Imogene . . .”

I could understand how Boyd got his head
into
the bike rack—he’s only in the first grade, plus he has a skinny head—but at first I didn’t know why he couldn’t get it
out.

Then I saw why. It was his ears. Boyd’s ears stuck right straight out from his head like handles, so his head and his ears were on one side of the bike rack and the rest of him was on the other side, and kids were hollering at him and telling him what to do. “Turn your head upside down!” somebody said, and somebody else told him to squint his eyes and squeeze his face together.

Boyd’s sister Jolene tried to fold his ears and push them through but that didn’t work, even one at a time. Then she wanted half of us to get in front of him and push and the other half to get in back and pull. “He got his head through there,” she said. “There must be some way to get it back out.”

I didn’t think pushing and pulling was the way but Boyd looked ready to try anything.

Then Gladys Herdman really cheered him up. “Going to have to cut off your ears, Boyd,” she said. “But maybe just one ear. Do you have a favorite one? That you like to hear out of ?”

You could tell that he believed her. If you’re in the first grade with your head stuck through the bike rack, this is the very thing you think will happen.

Several teachers heard Boyd yelling, “Don’t cut my ears off!” and they went to tell Mr. Crabtree. Mr. Crabtree called the fire department, and while he was doing that the kindergarten teacher stuck her head out the window and called to Boyd, “Don’t you worry, they’re coming to cut you loose.”

But she didn’t say who, or how, and Gladys told him they would probably leave a little bit of ear in case he ever had to wear glasses, so Boyd was a total wreck when Imogene came along.

She wanted to know how he got in there— in case she ever wanted to shove somebody else in the bike rack, probably—but Boyd was too hysterical to tell her, and nobody else knew for sure, so I guess she decided to get him loose first and find out later.

Imogene Scotch-taped his ears down and buttered his whole head with soft margarine from the lunchroom, and then she just pushed on his head—first one side and then the other—and it slid through.

Of course Boyd was a mess, with butter all over his eyes and ears and up his nose, so Jolene had to take him home. She made him walk way away from her and she told him, “As soon as you see Mother, you yell, ‘I’m all right. I’m all right.’” She looked at him again. “You better tell her who you are, too.”

Even so, Mrs. Liggett took one look and screamed and would have fainted, Jolene said, except she heard Boyd telling her that he was all right.

“What do you think of that?” Mother asked my father that night. “She buttered his head!”

“I think it was resourceful,” my father said. “Messy, but resourceful.”

“That’s like a compliment, isn’t it?” I asked my father. “It’s good to be resourceful?”

“Certainly,” he said. So I wrote that down, along with
patriotic
and
brave.

I thought we would just hand in our compliment papers on the last day of school, but Alice thought Miss Kemp would read three or four out loud—“Some of the best ones,” Alice said, meaning, of course, her own—and Boomer thought she would read the different compliments and we would have to guess the person. So when Miss Kemp said, “Now we’re going to share these papers,” it was no big surprise.

But then she said, “I think we’ll start with Boomer. LaVerne Morgan drew your name, Boomer. I want you to sit down in front of LaVerne and listen to what she says about you.”

LaVerne squealed and Boomer turned two or three different shades of red and all over the room kids began to check their papers in case they would have to read out loud some big lie or, worse, some really personal compliment.

LaVerne said that Boomer was smart and good at sports—but not stuck up about it— and friendly, and two or three other normal things. “And I liked when you took the gerbil back to the kindergarten that time,” she said, “in case they wanted to bury it. That was nice.”

It
was
nice, I thought, and not everybody would have done it, either. To begin with, not everybody would have
picked up
the gerbil by what was left of its tail, let alone carry it all the way down the hall and down the stairs to the kindergarten room.

“Good, Boomer,” I said when he came back to his seat—glad to get there, I guess, because he was all sweaty with embarrassment from being told nice things about himself face to face and in front of everybody.

Next came Eloise Albright and then Louella and then Junior Jacobs and then Miss Kemp said, “Let’s hear about you, Beth. Joanne Turner drew your name.”

I remembered Joanne Turner’s paper— “Cheerful, good sport, graceful, fair to everybody.” I had wondered who that was.

It was me.

“I know we weren’t supposed to say things about how you look,” Joanne said, “but I put down graceful anyway because I always notice how you stand up very straight and walk like some kind of dancer. I don’t know if you can keep it up, but if you can I think people will always admire the way you stand and walk.”

It was really hard, walking back to my seat now that I was famous for it—but I knew if I did it now, with everybody watching, I
could
probably keep it up for the rest of my life and, if Joanne was right, be admired forever. This made me feel strange and loose and light, like when you press your hands hard against the sides of a door, and when you walk away your hands float up in the air all by themselves.

I was still feeling that way three people later when Miss Kemp said it was Imogene’s turn.

“To do what?” Imogene said.

“To hear what Beth has to say about you. She drew your name.”

Imogene gave me this dark, suspicious look. “No, I don’t want to.”

“You’re going to hear
good
things, you know, Imogene,” Miss Kemp said, but you could tell Miss Kemp wasn’t too sure about that, and Imogene probably never
heard
any good things about herself, so she wasn’t too sure, either.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I mean, if Imogene doesn’t want to, I don’t care.”

This didn’t work. I guess Miss Kemp was curious like everybody else. “Imogene Herdman!” Louella had just whispered. “That’s whose name you drew? How could you think of compliments for Imogene Herdman?”

“Well, you had to think of
one
,” I said. “We had to think of one compliment for everybody.”

Louella rolled her eyes. “I said she was healthy. I didn’t know anything else to say.”

Louella wasn’t the only one who wanted to hear my Imogene words. The whole room got very quiet and I was glad, now, that at the last minute I had looked up
resourceful
in the dictionary.

“I put down that you’re patriotic,” I told Imogene, “and brave and resourceful . . . and cunning and shrewd and creative, and enterprising and sharp and inventive . . .”

“Wait!” she yelled. “Wait a minute! Start over!”

“Oh, honestly!” Alice put in. “You just copied that out of the dictionary! They’re all the same thing!”

“And,” I went on, ignoring Alice, “I think it was good that you got Boyd’s head out of the bike rack.”

“Oh, honestly!” Alice said again, but Miss Kemp shut her up.

Of course she didn’t say, “Shut up, Alice”—she just said that no one could really comment on what anybody else said because it was very personal and individual. “That’s how Beth sees Imogene,” she said.

Actually, it wasn’t. Alice was right about the words. I did copy them out of the dictionary so I wouldn’t be the only person with three dumb compliments, and I didn’t exactly connect them with Imogene, except
sharp
because of her knees and elbows which she used like weapons to leave you black and blue.

But now, suddenly, they all turned out to fit. Imogene
was
cunning and shrewd. She
was
inventive. Nobody else thought of buttering Boyd’s head or washing their cat at the Laundromat. She was creative, if you count drawing pictures on Howard . . . and enterprising, if you count charging money to look at him. She was also powerful enough to keep everybody away from the teachers’ room forever, and human enough to give Howard her blanket.