Happy Kid! (22 page)

That night I had a dream about Mr. Borden chasing me up and down the halls of the school. He was waving a screwdriver the size of a broomstick.

As soon as I got to advisory that morning, Melissa started giving orders.

“We really need to plan what we're going to do at our meeting with Mr. Alldredge. Look for me before social studies, and we'll walk together to class.”

“The plan is made, Melissa. You said you'd do all the talking,” I reminded her.

“I will, I will. I just want you to hear what I'm going to say.”

“I don't care what you say so long as you watch your step.”

“I think I know how to be careful and sensitive,” Melissa retorted, as if I'd accused her of something. “I'll see you before third period.”

I thought there was a very real possibility that we were doomed.

“There is something going on between you and Melissa Esposito, isn't there?” Jake asked during art class. We were standing in line by the cupboard where we kept the projects we were working on, so everyone around us could hear.

“Oh, please,” I replied.

“I saw you in the hall with her this morning,” he said.

“Do you watch everything I do?” I asked, trying not to look up to see who was listening.

“Always. Last week you picked something up off the floor in the cafeteria and ate it.”

I didn't think it was worth making the effort to deny that. I did wish I could ask Luke if he'd heard anyone talking about Melissa and me being a couple, though. But after he picked up his project, he took his stool and placed it as far away from me at our table as he could. Not only was he not speaking to me, he wasn't even looking at me.

Once Jake and I were back at our table, I said, “Melissa and I are hanging around together because . . . we're working on something,” so Luke would hear me.

He did. He knew what I was talking about right away. He really should be an A-kid. After he'd pulled his stool closer to me, I whispered, “We're going to see Mr. Alldredge this afternoon—about that essay.”

“Oh, Kyle, man . . . do you think Mr. Borden will be fired?” Luke whispered back.

“No one said anything about being fired!”

“Kyle!” Mr. Ruby called. “That was way too loud! Do you want to go down to the principal's office?”

“No!” Luke and I shouted together.

“Why would he get fired?” I asked Luke in a lower voice.

“He did screw up and give you guys the wrong essay question for practice.”

“But we know it was an accident. We're not
blaming
him for doing something wrong. Why are you bringing this up now? You said I should try to fix what happened,” I reminded him.

“Well, sure, but it's going to be so hard to do that.”

And he didn't think of that before?

Jake leaned across the table toward us. “What's going on?” he asked.

“Kyle is going to tell Mr. Alldredge about that essay his teacher showed him before the SSASies,” Luke explained.

“
I'm
not telling him. Melissa is. I'm just going with her. I'm just going to be there in the room. Not saying anything,” I insisted.

“So what did Melissa have to do to get you to go?” Jake asked.

“She had to be right, Jake.”

“Kyle, wow, you're just like one of Master Lee's warriors,” Luke said.

“One of the
zombies
?”

“Well, yeah, they were dead,” Luke admitted, “but they were still cool.”

“Tell Melissa that if ol' Gus gives her any trouble when you guys are visiting him, she can just mention my name,” Jake told me.

“Thanks, Jake. I think she'll be really pleased to hear that.”

 

 

She wasn't.

“How can you be friends with him?” she demanded on our way to social studies.

“I'm not. He just always seems to be where I am. By the way, you probably should know that a little over a week ago, Jake and I were in the same movie theater with Mr. Alldredge. Jake farted and blamed it on him.”

“Why are you telling me that disgusting story?”

“Because I was sitting next to Jake when it happened, and Mr. Alldredge turned around and saw me there. I don't know that it will matter today, but—”

Melissa stopped dead in the hall. “So Mr. Alldredge really
does
think you're part of Jake's posse?”

“I told you so.”

Melissa looked as if someone had punched her in the stomach. “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no,” she kept saying while her eyes kind of bulged out of her head.

“You still want me to go with you?” I asked.

“I'll let you know,” she gasped, and she hurried off.

When I walked into social studies, Brad asked, “What's up?”

That could have meant anything. I decided it meant, “Are you going to the principal's office with Melissa this afternoon?” because that was all I could think about. So I just said, “Yes.”

“Yes?” Brad repeated.

“I'm going to the principal's office with Melissa this afternoon.”

I had been sure he would be shocked or mad or disappointed. But he just nodded and said, “I know how it is. Once or twice last week I almost broke and told her
I'd
go.”

“You still can,” I offered eagerly. “Melissa's not that happy with me right now.”

“That's okay.” Brad grinned. “I've been to the principal's office before.”

“Me, too. You may have heard about it? A cop was there?”

“Oh, yeah. That sounds familiar,” he admitted.

“And why did you have to go?” I asked.

“I was one of the Citizens of the Month in February, and we all went to Mr. Alldredge's office to have lunch with him,” Brad said, sounding just a little bit embarrassed.

I thought it would be something like that.

“We're still on for this afternoon,” Melissa told me after English. “I'll meet you at your locker right after school.”

She looked a little jumpy and pale. The sight of her just filled me with confidence.

It's funny the way time both drags and goes by too fast when you're waiting to do something you really don't want to do. It seemed to take forever for the school day to end, but then, way too soon, there I was standing next to my locker with Melissa.

“Remember, I'm going to do all the talking,” she said as we started to walk toward the office.

“That's always been the plan,” I reminded her.

“I'm going to do all the talking.”

“Yes, Melissa.”

“I've been thinking about this for days. I've planned what I'm going to say, so I'll do all the talking.”

“Okay,” I said, noticing that we seemed to have slowed down.

“Teachers always like me. Don't teachers always like me?” Melissa asked me.

“I guess. I've only known you a year and a half,” I told her.

“Teachers always like me, so I should do all the talking.”

“Melissa, you're freaking out,” I said.

“I am not. Why should I freak out?”

“Your voice is shaking, Mel. Why are you putting yourself through this? Mr. Borden is the one who should be telling Mr. Alldredge about what happened. It hardly has anything to do with us.”

“What if everybody said that?” Melissa asked me. “What if everybody said, ‘I'm not going to do this thing that somebody needs to do because it's too difficult, or I'm scared, or it hardly has anything to do with me'?”

“According to those articles you keep bringing to current events, that's pretty much what everyone
does
say.”

“Should we be that way just because everyone else is?” Melissa asked.

I could have said, “That would be fine with me,” but I didn't want to sound as if I wasn't as good a person as Melissa was. So instead I said, “Let's get this over with. Someone is coming to get me in fifteen or twenty minutes, and she doesn't like to wait.”

We had to sit out with the secretaries for a couple of minutes because Mr. Alldredge was on the phone. When he was done he came to the door and said, “Come in, Melissa! Glad to see you! Oh. Kyle. Did one of your teachers send you down here? The detention room is right down the hall—”

“He's with me, Mr. Alldredge,” Melissa said.

I had never had detention. Not once. But just as soon as Mr. Alldredge saw me, that's what he thought I was there for.

Talk about thinking negatively.

“Hello, Mr. Alldredge,” I said. “Nice tie.”

“Well, come on in. Take a seat. How can I help . . . the two of you?” Mr. Alldredge asked as he slipped behind his desk.

Melissa looked a lot perkier than she had when we were out in the hall. “We want to talk to you about something that happened when we were taking the State Student Assessment Surveys.”

Mr. Alldredge stopped smiling just like that and leaned forward in his chair. “What is it? What happened?”

The way the expression on his face changed so rapidly would have been neat if it hadn't been so scary.

Melissa's right knee started leaping up and down under her blue jeans. She leaned her hand against it and said, “Well, you see, during the English Survey we were given two essay questions to choose from. One of them we had seen before. Mr. Borden had given it to us as an assignment. He was told he could use some old SSASies that were stored in the English Department so we could prepare for the test.”

“You practiced the essay?” Mr. Alldredge broke in. “Is that what you're saying?”

His voice was tense, bordering on upset, and once you get to upset, the next stop is angry. I'd heard that tone of voice coming from a teacher a few times over the years, but Melissa hadn't. She began to sink down in her chair.

But she said yes without hesitating.

“Mr. Borden, you said? Excuse me for just a moment.”

Melissa relaxed a little when Mr. Alldredge left the room, but I didn't because I guessed what was coming. A minute or two later we heard Mr. Alldredge's voice on the intercom.

“Mr. Borden, would you report to my office, please. Mr. Borden, report to my office.”

Melissa gave this little shriek and kind of hopped once or twice on her chair. “Now what do we do?” she asked me.

“You said you had a plan,” I reminded her.

“I never planned on Mr. Borden being here. I don't want to have to talk to him. What if he thinks I'm accusing him of cheating? You saw how he was when I asked him about the essay question in class.”

“He did get kind of touchy,” I recalled. “People get that way when they think they're being blamed for things. I can tell you that from personal experience.”

“I'm not blaming him for anything!” Melissa insisted. “All I want is for someone to fix this test problem and make everything all right.”

All I wanted was to get out of there.

“I don't know what to say now,” she said. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.”

Something like this had happened to me, though. In fact, I was beginning to feel as if the old time and space continuum was totally twisted and I was being spun back to June. Mr. Alldredge's voice drifting out over the intercom, one of my teachers being called to the office, my backpack on the floor by my feet . . . all I needed was my father and a guy in a uniform to complete the scene.

As Melissa got more and more upset, I got calmer and calmer. Because, I realized, my life stunk so bad that this wasn't the worst mess I'd been in. The act of doing something different—getting hauled into the principal's office last year for carrying a concealed screwdriver—had made me a different person. I was used to things not going the way I expected them to now. All my plans had flaws. There was no point in going nuts and getting down on the whole world whenever things didn't go the way I wanted them to. I'd be nuts all the time. And then how could I keep my mind open for those surprising new opportunities to make the best of the many, many bad situations I was always in?

We could hear Mr. Alldredge speaking in the reception area. From the sound of his voice, he was walking back toward his office, and he wasn't alone. Melissa was teetering on the edge of her seat, as if at any second she would jump up and run for the window.

“You've got to control yourself,” I whispered to her. “Don't—”

“Of course I'll control myself,” she snapped at me, her voice shaking.

When Mr. Alldredge arrived, he had Mr. Borden with him. Mr. Borden sighed when he saw Melissa and shut the door behind him. He looked at me and his head drew back as if he'd had a little electric shock. I'm sure I was the last person he expected to see sitting in Mr. Alldredge's office next to Melissa Esposito.

Yeah, well, me too.

Mr. Alldredge sat down behind his desk, gave a big sigh that made the bottom of his mustache flutter a little bit, and said, “I know this is going to be awkward for all of us, but Melissa has told me some disturbing news. The charge she is making is so serious that I felt it was only fair to bring you in, Mr. Borden, so that you could hear and respond to it yourself.”

Melissa had slid back in her seat and folded her hands in her lap. She was sitting up nice and straight. She looked pretty good. But when she opened her mouth to speak, the word “Charge?” came out with a squeak.

“You're accusing Mr. Borden of cheating,” Mr. Alldredge explained.

Well, that was pretty much what
Happy Kid!
had predicted. For what good that was going to do me.