Fourth-Grade Disasters (2 page)

“Sure,” he said guardedly.

Brody held out a twin dog-shaped pencil sharpener, which he had been hiding behind his back. “I got one for you, too! Because we’re best friends, and co-owners of Dog. Now we’ll have matching dog pencil sharpeners!”

Mason returned Brody’s grin. It was weird to have a best friend who was so excited about a pencil sharpener, but Mason had nothing against weirdness. Some people even thought that he himself was a tiny bit unusual.

“And wait till you see my eraser!” Brody went on. “You aren’t going to believe my eraser!”

This time Mason felt more comfortable venturing a guess. “It’s shaped like a dog.”

“It is! And guess what, Mason.”

“You got one for me, too.”

Triumphantly, Brody pulled two matching dog-shaped erasers out of his sack.

“Ta-dah!”

“Wow. Thanks, Brody,” Mason said. What else could he say with Brody’s face shining like that?

“So it will be like having Dog there with us at school. Fourth grade is going to be great!”

Mason wanted to say that having a dog-shaped pencil sharpener and a dog-shaped eraser was nothing at all like being with a real, live Dog. And he strongly suspected that fourth grade was not going to be great. The best he could hope for was bearable. Being in the Plainfield Platters was not even going to be bearable.

Before Brody could show him any more school supplies, or start talking about how wonderful it was going to be to join the Platters, Mason jumped up and said, “Let’s take Dog for a walk.”

Brody cast one longing glance back at his sack, but then he jumped up, too. Dog had already dashed into the kitchen and returned with his leash in his mouth.

“This is the last walk we’ll ever take with Dog before we’re officially fourth graders,” Brody said solemnly. “I mean, we were sort of fourth graders once third grade ended, but we were also sort of nothing—in
between, not anything. So this is our last walk as not yet really, truly fourth graders.”

Mason knew Brody meant his comment to highlight the grandeur of the moment, but to his ears, it had a doomed sound.

Tomorrow Mason would be a really, truly fourth grader, armed only with a dog-shaped pencil sharpener and a dog-shaped eraser.

He took the leash from Dog with a heavy heart.

Then Dog spied something in Mason’s heap of school supplies and pounced on it. Mason couldn’t see what it was, but he knew it wasn’t something Dog should be eating.

“Dog, drop that!” Mason commanded.

Dog kept on chewing, and then he swallowed it, whatever it was.

Mason looked back at the school supplies to see what was missing.

There was no longer any dog-shaped eraser in the pile.

So tomorrow Mason would be a really, truly fourth grader, armed only with a dog-shaped pencil sharpener.

A really, truly fourth grader who would really, truly be expected to sing and dance in front of everybody.

Mason’s fourth-grade teacher was a man. Other teachers at Plainfield Elementary had normal names, like Mrs. Prindle and Mrs. Oliphant. Not that those were completely normal names, but at least they were teacher-sounding names. This teacher called himself Coach Joe.

“Good morning, team!” he shouted once everyone had found a desk.

Mason was impressed that Coach Joe was letting kids choose where to sit. Mason chose to sit next to Brody, of course, which meant sitting in the front
row, because Brody loved the front row. Tall, skinny Nora Alpers, who had become a friend last summer when they had all been in summer art camp together, sat on Mason’s other side. Mason was relieved that Dunk Davis chose a seat in the farthest corner of the back row.

“All right, team! Come on up for a huddle!”

A huddle must be a class meeting. The students gathered on the football-shaped rug in front of Coach Joe’s stool.

Coach Joe clearly loved sports. Mason hated sports. So this was a first clue that, despite his getting to sit next to Brody and far away from Dunk, fourth grade was not going to be a good year. Mason sighed, a deep, wrenching sigh that took every molecule of air right out of his lungs. No one seemed to notice, except for Nora, who noticed everything.

Sitting two kids away from Mason in the huddle, Dunk did a few boxing motions in the air, as if to demonstrate his readiness to enter the ring. Dunk’s big mean dog, Wolf, had attacked Dog last summer and almost killed him. Or at least might have killed him.

It was unfortunate that Dunk had happened to
walk by Mason’s house before school that morning as Mason’s mother had him posed outside by the front door, smiling grimly, holding his bulging bag of school supplies, for the first-day-of-school photo that she took every year. Dunk now interrupted his boxing to pretend to snap a picture of Mason and then doubled over laughing.

“Okay, team!” Coach Joe said. “Listen up!”

Coach Joe’s hair was cut short in a bristling crew cut. He didn’t wear a whistle on a string around his neck, but if he had, it wouldn’t have looked out of place.

“Today is the kickoff for fourth grade,” Coach Joe said. “If we’re going to have a winning season this year, we have to have a winning attitude.”

Mason couldn’t believe it. First his mother, now his teacher.

Sitting next to Mason in the huddle, Brody gave a huge grin. If anybody had a winning attitude, Brody did. In second grade, Brody had even liked Mrs. Prindle.

“No team,” Coach Joe continued, “has ever won the Super Bowl, or the World Series, or the NBA Championship without a winning attitude.”

So that made three things Mason wasn’t going to win.

The public address system clicked on. It was time for the Pledge of Allegiance, morning announcements, and the singing of the school song.

The students all stood up, crowded together on the football-shaped rug, and turned to face the large flag hanging by the front whiteboard. Mason saw Dunk shove the kid standing next to him; the other kid shoved him back.

Mason joined with the rest of the class in saying the pledge. He half listened to the announcements. The school lunch today was chicken nuggets. Mason was glad he had brought a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from home. Then again, he always brought the same lunch from home: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a small apple, and four Fig Newtons.

Then Mason heard the principal say, “The Plainfield Platters will begin practice next week before school on Tuesday and Friday mornings, starting this coming Tuesday.”

It was Thursday now—for some reason, a new school year always started on a Thursday—so Tuesday was five days away.

“The Platters are open to all fourth and fifth graders who love to sing.”

That left out Mason.

When the announcements came to an end, the tape-recorded piano music for the school song, “Puff the Plainfield Dragon,” started to play. Brody bellowed the song at the top of his lungs. Nora, Mason observed, was barely singing at all. Dunk punctuated the song with jabs to the shoulder of the boy he had been shoving before; the boy jabbed back. Coach Joe, busy singing himself, didn’t seem to notice, but then, without missing a word of the song, he moved over toward Dunk, and suddenly Dunk was standing somewhere else.

During the song, Mason opened his mouth partway so it wouldn’t be too obvious that no sound was coming out of his body. Mason wasn’t about to sing in front of other people, even if no one else was looking at him because they were all too busy singing themselves.

“Puff is loved by everyone, because he is so cool!” the other students sang. “Every day we shout hooray that Puff lives at our school!”

Ha! The only dragon that lived at Plainfield
Elementary was a faded, oversized stuffed animal that sat in the display case by the front office. Somebody’s mother had bought him for the school a million years ago to be the school mascot, and the music teacher had written new words to “Puff the Magic Dragon” in honor of this new Puff. But nobody loved Puff or thought he was cool, as far as Mason could tell. Well, Brody probably did.

“Go, team!” Coach Joe called out once the song had ended.

“Go, team!” everybody shouted back.

Everybody except for Mason.

That afternoon, Coach Joe called the class into a second huddle. In Mason’s opinion, two huddles in one day was excessive.

“This year,” Coach Joe said, “we are going to be doing a lot of writing in our class. We are going to be making a full-court press on writing.”

Mason didn’t know what a full-court press was, but it had to have something to do with sports. It sounded as if it would require a lot of work and effort.

Most of the girls looked excited, except for Nora. That didn’t necessarily mean that Nora didn’t like
writing; it just took a lot to make Nora look excited.

Most of the boys looked pained, except for Brody. Mason knew that he himself must look pained, too. He could feel the misery of a full-court press on writing radiating out from the core of his being. The misery had probably reached his face by now.

A full-court press on writing was another clue that this was not going to be a good year.

“Stories!” Coach Joe said. “Autobiographies! Poetry!”

At the word “poetry,” Dunk gave a groan loud enough that Coach Joe could hear it.

“Winning attitude, team!” Coach Joe reminded them. “Let’s try that again. Poetry!” He pumped his fist into the air.

A few kids feebly pumped their fists into the air in response.

“Let’s try that
again
. Poetry!”

This time the whole class went along, except for Mason. Nora’s fist didn’t go up very high. But it went up higher than Mason’s. Mason didn’t want to make Coach Joe mad, but he wasn’t the type of person who pumped his fist into the air, any more than he was the
kind of person who sang in front of other people. He just wasn’t.

Coach Joe continued his pep talk.

“Today we’re going to start on our first writing assignment for the school year. Are you ready, team?”

“Ready!” the class chanted back. Mason moved his lips, but he didn’t actually say the word out loud.

“All right! A story starts with a character. A character can be a girl, or boy, or a grown-up person, but it doesn’t have to be a person at all. Who else could be a character?”

Brody’s hand shot up. Some kids didn’t like Brody because he was always so eager and enthusiastic, but Mason knew that Brody couldn’t help being that way. If Brody tried to keep the answer inside, he’d explode.

“Brody?”

“An animal!”

“Great! A character can be an animal. What kind of animal?”

“A kangaroo!”

“Great! Other animals?”

Various kids suggested a dog, a cat, a saber-toothed tiger, a mongoose, and a butterfly.

“Great!” Coach Joe said to each one.

Mason didn’t think having a dog or a cat as a character counted as a great idea. Those were ordinary ideas.

“Let’s open this up some more,” Coach Joe said. “Your character doesn’t have to be an animal, either. What else could it be? Let’s get some ideas from way out in left field.”

“A flower,” one girl suggested.

“Great!”

“A toaster,” a boy called out.

“Great!”

Now the ideas came thick and fast: a baseball, a skateboard, a cell phone, a million-dollar bill.

Nora raised her hand. “There’s no such thing as a million-dollar bill,” she pointed out.

“This is a
story
,” Coach Joe said. “In a story, we can have a million-dollar bill if we want.”

Nora looked as if she wanted to disagree, but she let it drop.

“A toilet!” Dunk shouted.

Everyone laughed. Even Mason laughed. Coach Joe laughed, too.

“All right!” he said then. “I want you to pick an
inanimate object—that means something that isn’t alive, not a plant, not an animal, not a person—and write a story about it. At least three pages long for your first draft.”

Mason didn’t like how Coach Joe said “first draft.” That made it sound as if there would be a second draft, too.

Back at his desk, Mason gripped his pencil and stared down at a blank piece of paper. Maybe he could write about a pencil that didn’t want to write a story. He could write about a blank piece of paper that didn’t want to have a story written on it.