The Candy Smash (9 page)

"You have to clean up the mess you made, too," said Evan. "You left trash on the floor."

Jessie closed the door behind her with a defiant slam, then walked across the hall. She was just about to cross the threshold to Evan's room when she froze in midstep. "Wait a minute," she said. "Is this a trick?" It was just the kind of trick she would have thought of to earn an easy dollar.

"No, for Pete's sake!" Evan said. "You have permission to go into my room to clean up the mess!"

There were two scraps of paper on the floor, and Jessie was kicking herself for not having noticed them before. Evan watched her pick up the papers and throw them in his trash can. He still had that look on his face. The one that Jessie couldn't quite figure out. Was it anger? Frustration? Impatience? Suspicion? Maybe Evan was having mixed-up feelings, in which case Jessie knew she couldn't figure them out. One feeling was hard enough to decipher; a whole bunch of them left her completely confused.

When she walked past him on her way back to her room, Evan grabbed her elbow and gave it a shake. "Jess," he said. "Don't do it again. Okay? 'Cause some things are just..." He waved in the general direction of his room, as if that one gesture gathered up everything that was his—all the bits and pieces of himself—in one grand sweep of his arm. "Some things are just private. You know?"

Jessie nodded her head. But she didn't have a clue what he was talking about.

metaphor
(n) a figure of speech that says that one thing is another different thing as a way to compare the two and note their similarities; for example: "my mother is a battleship" or "school was a rollercoaster"

 

Mrs. Overton was sitting at her desk when the class filed in on Friday morning. Evan thought she looked really tired.

"How's Langston?" asked Christopher, dropping his completed love poem in the In basket on Mrs. Overton's desk.

"Better. He was very sick yesterday. We spent the whole day at the animal hospital. He has pneumonia, which is serious for a cat as old as Langston. But the vet gave him some medicine and said he's going to be fine."

A bunch of kids were gathered around Mrs. Overton's desk to hear the latest on Langston's health and to hand in their love poems. Evan noticed another group, mostly girls, huddled around Jessie's desk. They wanted to know if Jessie had finished tallying the results of the survey, but Jessie wasn't giving anything away. Not yet.

Slowly, Evan pulled a piece of paper out of his backpack. He wished the kids standing around the teacher's desk would go back to their seats. He watched as Adam casually dropped his poem into the basket, as if it were just another math assignment. Evan knew that Adam had written his poem about playing basketball and Paul had written about his family's sailboat. Malik had written a poem about a bug, which he had recited to everyone on the playground that morning:

 

I dug a bug from under the rug.
The bug said hi and looked me in the eye.
I hugged my bug.
Bad idea!
Bye-bye bug.

 

Evan didn't think it really counted as a love poem, but it was pretty funny. He ambled over to Mrs. Overton's desk, his poem held low against his thigh. He watched and waited for the right moment, then slipped his poem, face-down, into the basket just before Nina and Ben put their poems on top of his.

All morning, he'd gone back and forth: Should he hand in the poem about his grandmother or the one about the tepee in the woods on his grandma's farm? His mom said both were good, but it was the one about Grandma that made his heart beat fast and his mouth go dry. At the last minute, he'd decided to play it safe and hand in the one about the tepee.

Several of the kids were telling Mrs. Overton about the second mysterious appearance of the candy hearts when Salley interrupted. "Tell us the truth, Mrs. O. Are you the one who left the candy hearts?"

"I am not," said Mrs. Overton solemnly.

"Yeah, but that's what you'd say if you
did
leave the hearts," said Ryan, and several kids agreed.

"That may be true, but I didn't leave them. And I'm glad there weren't any waiting on your desks this morning."

Evan was glad, too. He did not want to get another box of hearts with the kind of message you could find at Wal-Mart. He decided that if any more mysterious candy hearts appeared, he would throw his box in the trash without even looking at it.

"Morning Meeting, everyone," said Mrs. Overton, corralling them all to the rug. "Today, I have two poems in honor of my poor sick cat, who is now on the mend."

"Two poems!" shouted Jessie. "Give me a break!"

"I bet you're going to read us another poem by Langston Hughes," said David.

"No, but I think you'll see why I chose this poem, instead," said Mrs. Overton. "It's called 'Fog.'" She turned the easel paper with a giant flourish of her arm, as if she were unveiling a statue in the center of town. Salley read the poem out loud, and Evan followed the words silently.

 

F
OG
by Carl Sandburg

 

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

 

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

 

"It's a metaphor!" shouted Nina, pointing to the photo of Langston that said
METAPHORS BE WITH YOU
. Mrs. Overton had taught them how poets sometimes use one thing to mean something else.

"Yes!" said Mrs. Overton. "What's the metaphor?" Almost half the class raised their hands.

"The fog is a cat," answered Taffy.

"That's just what fog is like," said Maddy. "It's like a cat, the way it creeps around." And Evan agreed. He had never thought about it before, but now he would always think of a cat when he saw fog creeping across his backyard.

Jessie shook her head. "Fog is not like a cat. Not at all. Fog is vapor. It's drops of water in the air. A cat is an animal. It's a solid, and it's alive. The two are nothing alike."

What Jessie said was true, and yet—Evan could
see
it. He could see the fog with its long tail curling around the corner of a house, arching its back as it rubbed up against a building and purred. He could imagine fog purring. How did the poet do that?

"What about the second poem?" asked Megan.

Everyone looked expectantly at Mrs. Overton, and Evan thought he saw her face turn just the slightest bit pink.

"Well, the second poem is written by me, actually. I wrote it yesterday at the animal hospital."

"You wrote a poem?" asked Adam. "But you're a teacher!"

"Teachers can write poems," said Mrs. Overton. "Anyone can. I'm not saying mine is as good as Mr. Sandburg's, but it's mine, and I like it."

Evan couldn't believe that Mrs. Overton had written a poem. He leaned forward and watched as she turned the easel paper and began reading.

 

C
OUNTING
R
IBS

 

your head
too weak to lift I
lay my own alongside
yours and run my hand
across the silky familiar side of you
fingers feeling bone beneath
one        two        three
                                      breathe
four        five        six
                                      please
seven      eight      nine
                                      breathe

 

counting to keep my
eyes from crying
my heart from breaking
out
of its own ribbed cage

 

breathe          please          breathe

 

On the last word, Mrs. Overton's voice cracked, and Evan—who had been staring intently at the words on the page—turned quickly to look at his teacher's face. Her eyes were swimming with tears, and her lip trembled just the slightest bit. Horrified, Evan looked around the room. Everyone was staring at Mrs. Overton. No one knew what to do. Teachers were not supposed to cry.

Megan was the first to respond. She jumped up from her spot on the rug and circled her arms around one of Mrs. Overton's arms. Then Maddy, Rachel, and Tessa clustered around her, too, laying their hands on her shoulders and arms, as if they were a protective fence that had sprung up out of nowhere. Most of the boys, including Evan, looked at their feet or the floor. The silence was a bulldozer, plowing them under.

Until Jessie spoke up.

"Why are you crying, Mrs. Overton?" she asked in a loud voice.

Mrs. Overton looked right at Jessie, but her voice was high-pitched and broken. "Because he was so sick, and I was afraid I was going to have to let him go. I've had him practically my whole life." Megan patted Mrs. Overton on the shoulder, and Evan could see that she was starting to cry, too.

"But that was yesterday," said Jessie. "You were sad
yesterday.
You said he's fine now. Aren't you happy now?"

"Yes, Jessie. He's going to be fine. But I guess the poem just carried me back to that feeling. That terrible, hopeless feeling when I thought I might lose him. That's what poems do. Take a feeling and make it real, right in the moment."

No one said anything as they thought about what Mrs. Overton had just said. Then Evan spoke up in a clear voice. "It's a love poem," he said.

Mrs. Overton nodded her head. "Yes, it very much is." Her eyes filled up again, and she looked like she was really going to start crying now, right there in front of the whole class. It was just awful.

"And it's a good one," said Evan, pointing at the easel, "because of all those long
e
sounds. They sound like breathing, those long e's. Like when you're sick and wheezing." He made a breathing-in-and-out sound that sounded like the vowel
e.

"And it's got alliteration," said Salley. "See? 'Fingers' and 'feeling' and 'bone' and 'beneath.' That makes it good, too."

So then the class went through the poem and found all the examples of alliteration and assonance and rhyme, and the girls all sat down again, and Mrs. Overton's face went back to what a teacher's face is supposed to look like when she's teaching her fourth-graders about poetry.

After talking about the poem, Evan was quick to get back to his seat, but it was Carly Brownell who reached inside her desk first and found something unexpected.

"Hey!" she shouted, raising her hand above her head and rattling the small box she held. "More candy hearts!"

breaking news
(n) a news story that is unfolding at the moment that reporters are reporting it

 

There was a mad scramble as all the kids in 4-O ran to their desks to look for boxes of candy hearts. Jessie's desk was very neat, so it took her no time to find hers. But other kids had to pull out crumpled papers and notebooks and pencil cases before they uncovered the familiar pink and red box with the little cellophane window. Everyone started rattling the boxes, and soon the room sounded like a maraca band in full swing.

"Mine says
CAPTAIN JACK
," shouted Jack Bagdasarian, and he growled like a pirate to show that he deserved the name.

"Look at mine!" said Michael Mahoney. "
FLY HIGH
!" Michael's dad was a commercial pilot, and Michael took lots of trips on airplanes.

Jessie carefully removed one of the hearts from her box and read the message.
GOOD IDEAS
. Where had she heard that before? She tried to think, but Mrs. Overton shouted out in a near panic, "Do not eat any of this candy!" and Jessie's attention switched to her teacher. Mrs. Overton looked like the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote when he realizes he's about to drop one thousand feet into a canyon. Jessie pulled out her reporter's notebook. This was breaking news, and she didn't want to miss anything.

"Where is this candy coming from?" asked Mrs. Overton.

"Can I please go to the bathroom?" asked Evan in a loud voice.

"Not right this second, Evan," said Mrs. Overton, rubbing a hand across her forehead.

"I need to go now!" Evan nearly shouted. Jessie stared at her brother. Was he about to pee in his pants? But his face didn't have
that
kind of look on it. Instead, he looked like he was ready to rip someone's head off. What could Evan be mad about?

"Yes, go. But come straight back. We've got to figure out..." Mrs. Overton didn't even seem to know how to finish her sentence.

Jessie watched as Evan grabbed the big wooden bathroom pass from the hook by the door, then stormed out of the room. There was something red in his hand. She made a note of this in her notebook.

 

 

A lot of the kids were circulating around the classroom, comparing candy-heart messages. Mrs. Overton stood with her hands on her hips for a moment, then made a beeline for the classroom phone. Meanwhile, Jessie meandered over to Evan's desk and took a quick peek inside. As expected, it was an atrocious mess, but there was no box of candy hearts.