Help! Somebody Get Me Out of Fourth Grade

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Text copyright © 2004 by Fair Dinkum and Lin Oliver Productions, Inc. Illustrations copyright © 2004 by Grosset & Dunlap. All rights reserved.

Published by Grosset & Dunlap, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group,
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. GROSSET & DUNLAP
is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. S.A.

 

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-09855-4

 

 

“STUDENTS, THERE WILL BE excitement in the classroom today,” my teacher Ms. Adolf said. “Can you feel it?”

I tried. Oh, boy, did I try. I even lifted my palms off the desk and stuck them straight out in the air to see if they would pick up the excitement vibration.

Nothing. I felt nothing.

I looked around to see if I could see anything unusual in the classroom. It looked like the same old fourth-grade room at PS 87 where I had spent the last eight months of my life. Same old pale green walls. Same old desks lined up in totally straight rows just like Ms. Adolf likes them. Same old bulletin boards displaying the compositions of the best students in the class. Oh, in case you're wondering, mine wasn't up there. Never has been and never will be. But, hey, a guy can dream, can't he?

So what could Ms. Adolf be talking about? Excitement? In school? As far as I'm concerned, school and excitement just don't go together.

I flapped my arms around again, just to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

“Frankie,” I whispered to my best friend Frankie Townsend, who sits across the aisle from me. “Are you feeling the excitement?”

“Zip, the only thing I'm feeling is the breeze coming out of your armpits,” he answered. “What's with all the flapping?”

“Excuse me, Henry,” Ms. Adolf suddenly cut in. I looked up. She was staring at me over the top of her gray-rimmed glasses. “You seem to be in the midst of a conversation. I hope I'm not disturbing you.”

“Oh, we're almost finished, Ms. Adolf,” I said. “We were just trying to feel the excitement that you said was in the room.”

Everyone laughed. Correction. Everyone laughed but Ms. Adolf. She gave me that stare. You know, the “one more wisecrack and you're on your way to Principal Love's office” stare. She's good at that. In fact, I think she invented it.

“Mr. Zipzer,” Ms. Adolf said, “I hope you're not trying to be funny, because if there's one thing that annoys me, it's funny children having fun.”

Ms. Adolf walked over to my desk and stood so close that I could see a piece of lint on her gray skirt, the one she wears every single day to school. For a second, I was tempted to reach out and pick it off, the way my mom is always picking bits of lint and donut crumbs and other stuff off of my clothes. There's something about a little clump of lint that screams, “Somebody remove me, please!” My hand was just starting to reach out for Ms. Adolf's skirt when my brain woke up and shouted at me:

Fortunately, I pulled my hand back just in time. Another trip to Principal Love's office avoided!

I wasn't trying to get in trouble in class, but I'm going to tell you the truth because I feel I can trust you. It does feel really good to make thirty-one kids laugh, all at the same time. And when you're doing that, you're usually doing something that's going to get you in trouble.

Actually, on that particular Tuesday, it was only thirty kids that I made laugh. There was one, Nick the Tick McKelty, who definitely did not laugh. That was no surprise, though. Nick McKelty only laughs at his own jokes, which by the way, are not funny and are really, really mean.

Like the other day, we were playing handball on the playground, and for no reason at all McKelty turned to Ryan Shimozato and said, “Hey, punk, you're so short you should play handball on the curb.” Then he laughed and belted out so much bad breath that everybody on the court gagged and ran for cover.

“Henry, I recommend you close your mouth and open your ears,” Ms. Adolf snarled as she walked back to the front of the room, “because what I'm about to say has particular significance to you.”

“I'm all ears, Ms. Adolf,” I said. And I was. I even stopped breathing for a minute so that there was nothing but wide-open space between her mouth and my eardrum.

“There will be no school this coming Friday,” she announced without even cracking a smile. “It will be a day off for all of you.”

“That definitely rocks, Ms. Adolf,” I shouted.

Whoops, I did it again. I was the only kid in class who had opened his big mouth. Everyone else had the good sense to just enjoy her announcement quietly. Not me. It's like the minute something comes into my brain, it just slides right out my mouth. I really have to have a mouth cork made. I wonder if they make them kid-mouth sized.

My other best friend, Ashley Wong, raised her hand.

“Are we starting summer vacation early?” she asked. Frankie and I gave her a high five for the question.

“Absolutely not, young lady,” Ms. Adolf said. “Summer vacation is too long as it is. You fourth-graders have too much fun. There's no need for excess fun.”

I don't even know how to comment on that, because I know you and I are thinking the same thing. Now I ask you: Is there any such thing as a summer vacation that is too long? Let's answer that together:

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

“Who knows why there will be no school on Friday?” Ms. Adolf asked.

Heather Payne, who always knows the answers to everything, raised her hand and waved it in front of Ms. Adolf's face like she was trying to swat a fly off her nose.

“It's fourth-grade Parent-Teacher Conference Day,” Heather said in her Little Miss Perfect voice.

“That's correct, Heather,” Ms. Adolf said. “Good job of remembering.”

“It's easy to remember, because we have it marked on our master calendar at home,” Heather said. “It's written on a square right between my dental X-ray appointment and my French horn lesson.”

Ms. Adolf smiled. “It makes me feel very warm inside when I see such excellent organizational skills,” she said.

My family's master calendar would definitely not make old Ms. Adolf feel all warm inside. That's because it lives in a drawer in the kitchen, buried underneath boxes of aluminum foil and waxed paper and plastic baggies. It used to be up on the kitchen wall at the beginning of the school year. My dad put it up with a yellow thumbtack. But whenever my mom would write on it, the thumbtack would fall out, and the calendar would flop onto the kitchen floor. Then our dog, Cheerio, would attack it and try to tear the pages off with his teeth, which is why our calendar now lives in a drawer.

“The purpose of these conferences is for me to go over your end-of-the-year evaluations with your parents,” Ms. Adolf was saying. “I'm sending home sign-up slips for your parents. Have them pick a time slot. Please bring back the slips tomorrow.”

Ms. Adolf picked up a stack of pink sign-up sheets from her desk and walked around the classroom, handing one to each student. “I'll be discussing your overall work with your parents,” she explained as she walked, “which will determine whether you continue your educational journey into the fifth grade.”

After she passed by my desk, Nick McKelty leaned over to me as far as he could without bumping his Neanderthal head into the back of mine.

“In case you're wondering, Zipperhead, your evaluation is going to suck . . . as always.”

I wanted to turn around and tell him to take his disgusting mouth and put it on a jet and send it to Outer Mongolia, but I had already blurted out once today, and I didn't want to be sent to Principal Love's office, so I fought the urge.

I felt McKelty's hot breath in my ear. It's a good thing it wasn't any closer to me, because his breath would have melted the eraser off the top of my pencil.

“Forget it, Hankie boy,” he whispered. “You won't be seeing the fifth grade. Everyone knows you're being left back, sucker.”

That did it. I spun around in my chair and stared into his snaggly teeth, which were pointing at me from every direction.

“You don't know what you're talking about, McKelty,” I said. “What everyone really knows is that you're a liar.”

Those are strong words, I know, but they're the truth. McKelty exaggerates everything. Just take the truth and multiply it by one hundred, and you have what Frankie, Ashley, and I call the McKelty Factor. Like he told us that he went to the opening Yankees game, and they asked him to throw out the first pitch, but he said no because he thought they should ask the mayor of New York instead of him. Nick McKelty, president of the fourth-grade Bad Personality Club, didn't want to hurt the mayor's feelings. Right.

“Hey, Zipperbutt, I happen to know something you don't know,” McKelty whispered.

I tried to ignore what he said. I tried, but I didn't succeed. McKelty's words started to buzz around in my head like a swarm of bees.