Leon and the Spitting Image (3 page)

* * *

Leon lifted an arm and expertly extended one finger toward the oncoming traffic. Despite the downpour, he managed to nab a taxi almost at once. (Drivers generally picked him over businessmen urgently waving briefcases.) He gave the cabby the address of his school, then squinched and clucked, hoping for an Alaska, or a Botswana, or—best of all—a Suriname. Suriname was the one country he still needed to complete South America.

Leon opened his eyes and looked at the name on the driver’s photo ID: Ladislo Szekacs.

He recorded the name in his travel book and said, “Excuse me, Mr…. uh … ”

“It is pronounced ‘say catch,’” said the driver. “Like in your American baseball.”

“Thanks,” Leon said. “Could you tell me where you come from, Mr. Say Catch?”

“Why should you know?” the driver asked suspiciously.

“It’s for my collection,” Leon said.

“What collection?” the driver demanded.

Leon had his routine down pat. “Some kids collect baseball cards. I collect taxi drivers.”

The cabby hesitated.

“Please,” Leon said. He held up the travel book. “It’s important.”

“Hungary,” the driver mumbled.

“Yes!” Leon exclaimed.

“Why are you so happy? This is good?”

“This is
great,”
said Leon. “You’re my first Hungary.”

“And you, little boy,” said the now smiling driver, “you are my first taxi-driver collector.”

Leon closed the travel book and gazed out the window. A mail truck, idling at a traffic light, made him think of envelopes, which in turn made him think of the confidential report he had uncovered the night before. The memory prompted a sudden uncontrolled shiver. The assessments from Sloat, Toothacre, and Joost seemed so unfair. And it didn’t help that the identity of his fourth-grade teacher was a total mystery.

Leon tried to forget about school, but he couldn’t. When he struggled to break through the red string on the pastry box, a phrase from the home report popped back into his head.
Nimble fingers make for nimble minds
. What lamebrain thought that one up?

The only good thing about the first day of school was that Leon would see his two best friends, P.W. and Lily-Matisse. They had both been away all summer.

P.W. was called P.W. because his real name—Phya Winit Dhabanandana—tended to scare people off. P.W. was a short kid with a long name, whose parents came from Thailand. He loved math and building things. He hated spelling and keeping quiet. He had a
reputation for being a bit of a smart aleck.

As for Lily-Matisse, she was lean and lanky (like Leon) and had buck teeth. (“Dentists must
love
that girl,” Leon’s mom had once conjectured.) She was an awesome jump roper, a gifted gymnast, and the daughter of the school art teacher, Ms. Jasprow, which meant she knew lots of stuff other kids didn’t.

“Little boy, you hear me?” said the taxi driver. “We are arrived.”

Leon paid the fare, and dashed out into the rain. He hadn’t even made it up the limestone steps when he took his first tumble of the school year. He fell hard, face forward. Dough balls rolled down the steps and into the gutter. Embarrassed and bruised, Leon tried to pick himself up. He couldn’t.

A very large army boot was pressing down on one of his untied shoelaces. Intentionally.

“Hey there,
Zit
-sel,” a voice bellowed. “Welcome back.” The owner of the boot completed his greeting with a brutal punch to the arm.

Leon winced, but said nothing. He knew his attacker would soon lose interest and seek out other targets.

The assault came from a beefy eleven-year-old named Henry Lumpkin. Henry Lumpkin had been torturing Leon nearly as long as teachers had.

Lumpkin’s methods differed from theirs, however. To inflict pain, he relied on dead-arms and dodgeballs,
not confidential reports. He was a thoroughly nasty life-form who picked up nicknames the way crooks acquire aliases.

Some kids called him Lumpkin the Pumpkin because of his bright orange hair and his pumpkiny shape. Others referred to him as Hank the Tank, in recognition of the armored body hidden under the olive drab army jacket he always wore to school. And still others identified him as the Lethal Launcher because of the force and accuracy of his dodgeball throws.

But to Leon he was just Lumpkin, a blockhead and a bully whose sudden and unpredictable attentions always spelled trouble.

Leon stayed put on the ground for almost a minute, even though it was raining. When the coast was clear, he darted into school. Lily-Matisse and P.W. were waiting near the water fountain.

“Hey,” said P.W.

“Hey,” said Leon.

“Hey,” said Lily-Matisse.

“Hey,” said Leon.

“You okay?” Lily-Matisse asked.

“Why shouldn’t he be okay?” P.W. said.

“Well, for starters, he’s limping,” Lily-Matisse observed. “Plus he’s rubbing his arm.”

Leon glanced at the human tank rolling down the hall.

“Did Lumpkin do that?” Lily-Matisse asked.

“Yup.”

“We’d better take cover,” P.W. advised.

The three friends hung up their rain gear and entered the classroom.

“Holy cow!” said P.W.

“Geez!” Leon exclaimed.

“My mom told me our homeroom was going to be different,” said Lily-Matisse.

“This is
so
weird!” P.W. said enthusiastically. He pointed to the back of the room, at a massive metal cabinet mounted on heavy rubber wheels. “Look at the lock on that thing! What do you think is inside?”

“And what about those!” Leon said, gawking at a series of wall posters featuring severed hands.

“Sure beats those poems Mr. Joost had on his walls last year!” said P.W.

“Don’t count on it,” said Lily-Matisse. “My mom told me—”

“Here it comes,” P.W. interrupted. “Previews of upcoming attractions. Let’s hear what your mom says.”

“Well, my mom told me—”

DRRRRINNNNNG!

The school bell put a stop to Lily-Matisse’s update.

A thin shadow darkened the frosted glass of the classroom door.

Leon squinched and clucked.
Please
make this teacher better than the last ones, he told himself.

The knob turned and the door opened.

When Leon unsquinched, he found himself in the presence of a tall, thin woman wearing a long black cape. Not a Batman cape. More the kind of cape Florence Nightingale would have fastened around her neck before heading off to nurse the wounded.

Leon stared at the clasp on the cape. For
a moment, he thought the clasp was formed from two yellow marbles linked by a chain. But the more he looked at the “marbles,” the more they seemed to look at him.

All of a sudden he understood why.

They’re not marbles, he said to himself…. They’re
eyeballs!

Leon lifted his gaze from the glass eyes to his teacher’s eyes—two dull black beads set deep into a narrow face framed by a helmet of unnaturally black hair. The severe hairdo exaggerated the thinness of the head and drew attention away from a mouth so pinched it looked as though it had been stitched in place by a doll maker who had pulled too hard on the thread.

The teacher hung up her long black cape and revealed a long black dress underneath. Not
everything
she wore was black. Between the bottom of her dress and the top of her precisely knotted lace-up boots (which were also black), there was a small stretch of leg covered by panty hose the color of cooked liver.

Leon wasn’t the only one shocked by the new fourth-grade teacher. The rest of the class was equally amazed. They all watched in nervous silence as she marched over to her desk and began emptying her satchel. Leon made a mental list:

It didn’t take a hotel detective to figure out that the key must go to the giant padlock on the cabinet. Leon observed his teacher insert a piece of chalk into the sleeve of the chalk holder and adjust it like a lipstick. She then wrote her name on the blackboard with terrifying neatness:

Miss Hagmeyer

P. W. leaned over to Leon and whispered, “
Hag
is right.”

“Suspend the verbal games at once!” Miss Hagmeyer snapped.

P.W., lowering his voice to a murmur, said, “How’d she hear us?”

“Must have radar,” Leon whispered back.

“I do,” Miss Hagmeyer said. “So I advise all of you to keep quiet and concentrate on the matters at hand.” She went back to writing on the blackboard.

“There,” she said moments later, turning to face the room. “I would like all of you to read out loud what I have written.”

The students dutifully repeated the phrase. “A place for everything and everything in its place.”

“Louder,” Miss Hagmeyer commanded.

The class said the phrase once again.

“Better,” she allowed. “Those nine words will guide us throughout the year. There will be a proper place for books, a proper place for supplies, and a proper place for worksheets. There will be a proper place for study, a proper place for play, and a proper place for each of you to sit.”

With that, Miss Hagmeyer put down the chalk and called everyone up to the front of the room. She then reached for her clipboard and pointer and began reading off the names of students—last name first, first name last. The roll call started with “Brede, Antoinette” and finished, inevitably, with “Zeisel, Leon.” After stating each name, Miss Hagmeyer aimed her metal pointer at a chair.

Leon ended up at the very rear of the room, sandwiched between a desk assigned to Warchowski, Thomas, and the padlocked cabinet. Though the seat assignment separated Leon from his friends, it did have one advantage. It was beyond the range of Lumpkin’s spitballs, noogies, and dead-arms.

Brede, Antoinette, wasn’t so lucky. Because of the configuration of the chairs, she got stuck directly in front of the class bully.

The moment Lumpkin thought Miss Hagmeyer
wasn’t looking, he reached forward to give Antoinette a poke with a brand-new highly sharpened No. 3 pencil (No. 3s being the ones with the extra-hard lead). But before he could complete his attack, Miss Hagmeyer whipped around.

“Stop that at once!” she barked. “Did you fail to register my earlier warning? I hear everything, Mr. Lumpkin—
everything.”

“But I didn’t touch her,” he protested.

“You were about to. I
heard
you leaning over, and don’t bother denying it.” Miss Hagmeyer lifted her unnaturally black hair to reveal a truly shocking pair of ears. “These little beauties never fail me.”

Leon found himself gawking. Even from the back of the room he could see that the so-called little beauties were neither little nor beautiful. Quite the opposite. They were huge and gnarled, like the giant mushrooms one sometimes finds growing on rotten tree stumps.