The Boys Start the War (4 page)

“Ask!” Jake whispered to Josh.

“You ask!” said Josh. “You always try to make me do it.”

“Wally, you do it,” said Jake.

“Why me? What the heck am I supposed to say?”

The girls had reached the middle of the narrow bridge now and, still walking side by side, held on to the cable handrails as the bridge bounced slightly beneath their weight.

“If one of us doesn’t ask, Peter will,” Josh warned. “He’ll say something dumb, like ‘Have you buried anyone lately?’”

“I will not!” snapped Peter.

Wally didn’t know what he’d say, but he knew that someone had to say something, so he stepped out in front of his brothers and started toward the bridge.

But suddenly there was nothing at all to say, because, as he stared, the two older Malloy girls stepped off the end of the bridge and the third Malloy sister popped out from behind them. She came
right down the path to the very spot where Wally was standing. She had either never been dead at all or she was the first ghost in the history of Buckman, and here she was now, in front of his very eyes.

“T
his,” said Caroline to her sisters as the Hatford boys headed up the sidewalk, “was our greatest performance yet.”

“What do you mean
yet?”
asked Beth, pulling a paperback from her bookbag to finish before school.
The Fog People,
it said on the cover. “I’m not going to spend all my time dropping you in the river and hiding you on the bridge.”

“But they believed! They really, truly believed that I was dead and buried at sea! The look on their faces when I came out from behind you. If we could carry that off, we could do anything. We’d make a wonderful team!”

The four Hatford brothers were growing smaller and smaller in the distance. They hadn’t said hello or ‘Welcome to Buckman’ or anything at all. They’d just gaped, their mouths wide open.

Eddie whirled her baseball cap around on one finger. “You know they’ll try to get even.”

“We
are
even! They dumped dead fish and squirrels on our side of the river. And we spooked them into thinking I was dead,” said Caroline. She almost wished they weren’t even, because she had so many wonderful scenes yet to play. There must be a hundred and fifty ways she and Beth and Eddie could fool the boys. Boys made such a wonderful audience. They’d believe anything.

Buckman Elementary was an old building of dark redbrick that didn’t look anything like the new school they had left behind in Ohio.

“Quaint,” said Beth, when she saw it.

“Dismal,” Eddie proclaimed.

Caroline hadn’t decided what to think about it until she passed the auditorium with its high stage and velvet curtain.

She stopped in her tracks and stared. Back in Ohio the only auditorium was the cafeteria. There the stage was a foot off the floor, with no curtain at all. But here there were fixed rows of seats for the audience, the kind you saw in movie theaters, and the curtain was maroon on one side, gold on the other. She knew positively when she saw it that somehow, sometime, on that very stage, she, and Beth and Eddie would perform, and that she, Caroline Lenore Malloy, would have the leading role.

What she did
not
expect was that she would find
herself in the same classroom with one of the boys across the river. She didn’t even know his name, but she recognized him from his sneakers that morning.

“Welcome to fourth grade,” said a large woman at the front of the room-—a woman as round and rosy as an apple, whose name was—incredible as it looked there on the blackboard—Miss Applebaum.

If Caroline weren’t so precocious, she would have been entering the third grade, because she was only eight. But she had learned to read at four, subtract by five, and when she was six, she was in first grade only a month before she was transferred to second. If she was surprised to find herself in the same room with one of the boys across the river, however, the boy himself seemed even more astonished. His eyes grew as large as turnips when Caroline came through the door and his face turned petunia-pink.

“If you can remember just one thing, class, we’ll get along famously,” Miss Applebaum was saying. “When I talk, you listen. Now, the first thing we’re going to do is seat you alphabetically.”

I sure hope his last name isn’t Mahony or something,
Caroline thought, watching the boy.

Miss Applebaum was calling out names of students and pointing to seats, one after another, in the first row. She called out, “Wally Hatford,” and pointed to the first seat in the second row, and the boy took it.

Wally Hatford, huh?
Caroline said to herself.

Well, the Hatfords would soon find out they were no match for the Malloys. Miss Applebaum was filling up the rest of the second row, and when she called out, “Caroline Malloy,” Caroline realised that the apple-shaped teacher was pointing to a desk directly behind Wally.

Caroline quietly took her seat, and hardly dared move. She was sure that the moment the teacher’s back was turned, the boy would turn around and say something so awful, so embarrassing about Caroline and her sisters tricking him and his brothers that she would be forced to think of something awful and embarrassing to do to him next.

Wally did not turn around, however. He said nothing at all, and Caroline could not stand it. He kept his head pointing straight forward, hands on his desk, where he was holding a ruler between his thumbs, and as Miss Applebaum droned on and on, Caroline leaned forward and blew, ever so gently, at the fine hairs on the back of his neck.

This time she saw goose bumps break out on Wally’s skin. Caroline smiled to herself. She leaned forward even farther until her mouth was just inches away from Wally’s left ear, and then she said, “Wal-ly.”

The boy did not move, but his ear—
both
ears—turned bright red.

“Wal-ly,” Caroline whispered again, just behind him. “There is a gigantic black spider with eight
hairy legs dropping down from the ceiling about five inches above your head.”

“Where?” Wally said, throwing back his head, and crashed right into Caroline’s nose.

“Ow!” she yelped, covering her face.

“Caroline Malloy and Wally Hatford!” said Miss Applebaum. “I don’t believe either of you is paying the slightest attention. What’s wrong?”

“There was a big spider coming down from the ceiling over my head,” said Wally. “She told me.”

He seemed to be trying hard not to smile, but Caroline could hardly think because her nose ached so.

Miss Applebaum came down the aisle and stood beside her. “Let’s see this gigantic spider,” she said dryly. “A spider like that we should study in science. Where is it?”

“Gone, I guess,” Caroline said, still holding her nose. It was bleeding a little. She hoped it wasn’t broken. Actresses with broken noses never got the good parts.

“Since Caroline and Wally have cost us some class time, I think it would be fair for them to stay after school and make it up,” said Miss Applebaum. “If you see any more big hairy spiders, Caroline, you may collect them in a paste jar. And if you hear any other girls telling you about spiders descending over your head, Wally, I suggest you pay no attention whatever. Do you want to see the nurse, Caroline?”

“No.” Caroline answered, snuffling, and spent the rest of class with a tissue wadded beneath her nose.

She didn’t see her, sisters all morning. When the fourth grade was doing arithmetic, the fifth and sixth grades were having recess. When the fourth grade was having recess, the fifth and sixth grades were having lunch.

It was halfway through the afternoon when Caroline happened to pass Eddie’s class in the hall on the way to the library. She grabbed her sister’s arm and said, “Eddie, is my nose broken?”

“What?”

“Is it crooked?”

“No. What happened?”

“Wally Hatford.”

“What?”
cried Eddie, but by this time her classmates were well down the hall, and she had to run to catch up.

What bothered Caroline most about her predicament was that she wouldn’t be able to walk home with Beth and Eddie, and would have to wait to tell them about Wally Hatford banging her nose.

At three o’clock everyone left except Caroline and Wally.

“What is so wrong about not listening when I’m talking,” Miss Applebaum told them, “is that you disturb other students as well.”

Caroline stared down at her desktop. She wondered how old it was. There were all kinds of things
scratched in the wood—initials and numbers and little cartoon faces.

“And because listening is the most important thing in my class, and talking out of turn is so distracting,” Miss Applebaum continued, “I want to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Come up here, both of you.”

Caroline got woodenly to her feet. Miss Applebaum wasn’t going to paddle them, was she? She didn’t think she could stand the humiliation. Wasn’t that against the law? Or could teachers do things like that in West Virginia?

She followed Wally up front where Miss Applebaum was placing two chairs, face to face, about three feet apart.

“I want you to sit here,” she told them, “and I want you to talk to each other for ten minutes. Perhaps at the end of that time you will have said everything there is to say, and there will be no more disturbances in class.”

No!
Caroline thought. She would rather be paddled! One minute would be bad enough, five minutes would be cruel and unusual punishment, and ten was torture!

She lowered herself sideways into one of the chairs. What was she supposed to say to a boy who, up until that morning, had thought she was dead?

Miss Applebaum stood with arms folded. “Well? I’m waiting.”

Caroline crossed her ankles. “You started it,” she said to Wally.

“What did I do?” he mumbled, sitting sideways himself.

“Dumping all that dead stuff on our side of the river.”

“So
you
pretended to die.”

“Is this a normal conversation?” asked Miss Applebaum as she picked up a box of supplies and headed for the closet at the back of the room.

“No,” said Caroline, but she was talking to Wally, not her teacher. “This is not a normal conversation because you and your brothers aren’t normal human beings. Normal people don’t go dumping dead fish and birds around the neighborhood.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” said Wally. “Well, actually it
was
my idea—dead fish, I mean—but it was Jake and Josh who—”

“So
none
of you are normal.”

“We’re not normal?” said Wally, his voice rising. “What do you call people who go burying each other in the river?”

“It was a great performance, and you know it.”

“It was dumb.”

“You believed I was dead.”

“I believe you’re crazy.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“Whatever you two are arguing about, you’d better get it out of your systems now, because when you come to school tomorrow, I expect you to pay
attention,” Miss Applebaum called, sticking her head out of the supply closet.

“You and your dumb brothers,” Caroline muttered because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“You and your stupid sisters,” said Wally.

“We’re smarter than the four of you put together,” Caroline told him.

“We’ll see,” said Wally.

“If you’d just left us alone instead of dumping that dead stuff, things would be okay,” said Caroline.

“If you’d go back where you came from, there wouldn’t be any more trouble,” Wally replied.

“Oh, yeah? If you went back to where
you
came from, you’d be in a cave!”

“That does it,” said Wally, hotly. “The war is on.”

“Okay,” called Miss Applebaum, coming back to the front of the room for another box. “If you two have settled things, you may leave now.” She looked from Caroline to Wally. “Unless, of course, you are not agreed.”

“We agree,” said Caroline emphatically.
The war is definitely on.

She could hardly wait to get home and tell her sisters.

What she discovered when she got outside was that she wasn’t the only member of her family who had been kept after school. Eddie had stumbled
over Jake’s foot in the cafeteria and, sure that he’d tripped her on purpose, brought her tray down on his head. Beth, of course, had waited for Eddie, so there they were again, the three of them coming home late on the very first day.

Mother was dusting shelves in the hallway. “Whatever happened to your nose?” she asked, looking at Caroline.

“She bumped into something that needs a little fixing,” said Beth.

“Needs a lot of straightening out,” put in Eddie.

“Well, how was school?” Mother asked.

“Urk,” said Eddie.

“Ugh,” said Beth.

“It has possibilities,” said Caroline.