The Wednesday Wars (3 page)

The brook flows down the pretty mountain.

Here's the sentence she gave to Danny Hupfer:

He kicked the round ball into the goal.

Here's the sentence she gave to Mai Thi:

The girl walked home.

This was so short because it used about a third of Mai Thi's English vocabulary, since she'd only gotten here from Vietnam during the summer.

Here's the sentence she gave to Doug Swieteck:

I read a book.

There was a different reason why his sentence was so short—never mind that it was a flat-out lie on Doug Swieteck's part.

Here's the sentence she gave me:

For it so falls out, that what we have we prize not to the worth whiles we enjoy it; but being lacked and lost, why, then we rack the value, then we find the virtue that possession would not show us while it was ours.

No native speaker of the English language could diagram this sentence. The guy who wrote it couldn't diagram this sentence. I stood at the blackboard as hopeless as a seventh-grade kid could be.

"Mr. Hoodhood?" said Mrs. Baker.

I started to sweat. If Robert Louis Stevenson had written a sentence like that in
Treasure Island,
no one would have ever read the book, I thought.

"If you had been listening to my instructions, you should have been able to do this," said Mrs. Baker, which is sort of like saying that if you've ever flicked on a light switch, you should be able to build an atomic reactor.

"Start with 'what we have,'" she said, and smiled at me through her pinched face, and I saw in her eyes what would have been in Long John Silver's eyes if he had ever gotten hold of Captain Flint's treasure.

But the game wasn't over yet.

The P.A. crackled and screeched like a parrot.

It called my name.

It said I was to come to the principal's office.

Escape!

I put the chalk down and turned to Mrs. Baker with a song of victory on my lips.

But I saw that there was a song of victory on her lips already.

"Immediately," said the P.A.

I suddenly knew: It was the police. Mrs. Baker had reported me. It had to be the police. They had come to drag me to the station for taking out Doug Swieteck's brother. And I knew that my father would never bribe the judge. He'd just look at me and say, "What did you do?" as I headed off to Death Row.

"Immediately," Mrs. Baker said.

It was a long walk down to the principal's office. It is always a long walk down to the principal's office. And in those first days of school, your sneakers squeak on the waxed floors like you're torturing them, and everyone looks up as you walk by their classroom, and they all know you're going to see Mr. Guareschi in the principal's office, and they're all glad it's you and not them.

Which it was.

I had to wait outside his door. That was to make me nervous.

Mr. Guareschi's long ambition had been to become dictator of a small country. Danny Hupfer said that he had been waiting for the CIA to get rid of Fidel Castro and then send him down to Cuba, which Mr. Guareschi would then rename Guareschiland. Meryl Lee said that he was probably holding out for something in Eastern Europe. Maybe he was. But while he waited for his promotion, he kept the job of principal at Camillo Junior High and tested out his dictator-of-a-small-country techniques on us.

He stayed sitting behind his desk in a chair a lot higher than mine when I was finally called in.

"Holling Hood," he said. His voice was high-pitched and a little bit shrill, like he had spent a lot of time standing on balconies screaming speeches through bad P.A. systems at the multitudes down below who feared him.

"Hoodhood," I said.

"It says 'Holling Hood' on this form I'm holding."

"It says 'Holling Hoodhood' on my birth certificate."

Mr. Guareschi smiled his principal smile. "Let's not get off on the wrong foot here, Holling. Forms are how we organize this school, and forms are never wrong, are they?"

That's one of those dictator-of-a-small-country techniques at work, in case you missed it.

"Holling Hood," I said.

"Thank you," said Mr. Guareschi.

He looked down at his form again.

"But Holling," said Mr. Guareschi, "we do have a problem here. This form says that you passed sixth-grade mathematics—though with a decidedly below-average grade."

"Yes," I said. Of course I passed sixth-grade mathematics. Even Doug Swieteck had passed sixth-grade mathematics, and he had grades that were really decidedly below average.

Mr. Guareschi picked up a piece of paper from his desk.

"But I have received a memo from Mrs. Baker wondering whether you would profit by retaking that course."

"Retake sixth-grade math?"

"Perhaps she is not convinced that your skills are sufficiently developed to begin seventh-grade mathematics."

"But—"

"Do not interrupt, Holling Hood. Mrs. Baker suggests that on Wednesday afternoons, starting at one forty-five, you might sit in on Mrs. Harknett's class for their math lesson."

Somewhere, somewhere, there's got to be a place where a seventh-grade kid can go and leave the Mrs. Bakers and Mr. Guareschis and Camillo Junior Highs so far behind him that he can't even remember them. Maybe on board the
Hispaniola,
flying before the wind, mooring by a tropical island with green palms crowding the mountains and bright tropical flowers—real ones—poking out between them.

Or maybe California, which, if I ever get there, you can bet that I would find the virtue that possession would show us.

But Mr. Guareschi returned to his form and read it over again. He shook his head. "According to this record," he said, still reading, "you did pass sixth-grade mathematics."

I nodded. I held my breath. Maybe I could dare to believe that even a dictator of a small country might have a moment of unintended kindness.

"Mrs. Baker does have a legitimate concern, it would seem, but a passing grade is a passing grade."

I didn't say anything. I didn't want to jinx it.

"You'd better stay where you are for now," he said.

I nodded again.

"But"—Mr. Guareschi leaned toward me—"I'll double-check your permanent record, Holling Hood. Be prepared for a change, should one be necessary."

In case you missed it again, that's another one of the dictator-of-a-small-country techniques: Keep you always off balance.

Mr. Guareschi scribbled over Mrs. Baker's memo. He folded it, then took out an envelope from his desk. Looking at me the whole time, he placed the memo in the envelope, licked the flap, and sealed it. He wrote
Mrs. Baker
on the outside. Then he handed it to me.

"Return this to her," he said. "The envelope had better be sealed when she receives it. I will make a point of inquiring about it."

So I took the envelope—sealed—and carried it back to Mrs. Baker—sealed. She unsealed it as I sat back down in my seat. She read what Mr. Guareschi had written and slowly placed the letter in the top drawer of her desk. Then she looked up at me.

"Regrettable."

She said all four syllables very slowly.

She could probably diagram each one if she wanted to.

I watched her carefully for the rest of the day, but nothing ever gave away her murderous intentions. She kept her face as still as Mount Rushmore, even when Doug Swieteck's new pen broke and spread bright blue ink all over his desk, or when the Rand McNally Map of the World fell off its hangers as she pulled it down, or when Mr. Guareschi reported during Afternoon Announcements that Lieutenant Tybalt Baker would soon be deployed to Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division and we should all wish him, together with Mrs. Baker, well. Her face never changed once.

That's how it is with people who are plotting something awful.

The Wednesdays of September passed in a cloudy haze of chalk dust.

At 1:45, the bus arrived from Temple Beth-El to spring half of my class.

At 1:55, the bus arrived from Saint Adelbert's to spring the other half—even Mai Thi, who had to go to Catechism since it was the Catholic Relief Agency that had brought her over from Vietnam, and I guess they figured that she owed them, even though she wasn't Catholic.

Then Mrs. Baker and I sat. Alone. Facing each other. The classroom clock clicked off the minutes. She was probably considering what she could legally do to remind me how regrettable it was that my family was Presbyterian.

"There's no point teaching you something new," she said. "You'd just hear it a second time tomorrow." So that first Wednesday I washed all the chalkboards. Then I straightened the
Thorndike
dictionaries. Then I washed all the chalkboards again since they were streaky. Then I went outside and pounded the erasers against the brick wall of Camillo Junior High until the white chalk dust spread up and around me, settling in my hair and in my eyes and up my nose and down my throat, so that I figured I was probably going to end up with some sort of lung disease that would kill me before the end of the school year. All because I happened to be Presbyterian.

The second Wednesday of September, and the third, and the fourth, and Wednesdays on into October were pretty much the same. I got good at the chalkboards, so Mrs. Baker added putting up her bulletin boards with microscopic pins and leveling tools, and sweeping down the cobwebs from the asbestos tiles on the ceiling, and wiping the grime of sweaty hands off the lower half of the windows, then pushing them all up so that, as Mrs. Baker said, fresh air could circulate into the classroom.

Which it really needed, since once air reached the Coat Room, it landed on all the stuff from all the lunches that had been chucked into the corners because they were too vile to eat even when they were fresh. Lunches like liverwurst sandwiches.

So after I got good at the windows, Mrs. Baker got me cleaning out the Coat Room.

But what I didn't clean out was the stash that Doug Swieteck was hiding to prepare for Number 166. So far, there was a box of tapioca pudding, a bag of marshmallows that had been smashed into a sticky pulp, a half-dozen ragged feathers, a bottle of red ink, and a plastic bag with something awful in it. Probably something dead. He had it all in a small box from the A&P, stuffed on the shelf above the coats.

I didn't touch any of it.

And do you think I complained about this? Do you think I complained about picking up old lunches that had fungus growing on them and sweeping asbestos tiles and straightening
Thorndike
dictionaries? No, I didn't. Not once. Not even when I looked out the clean lower windows as the afternoon light of autumn changed to mellow and full yellows, and the air turned so sweet and cool that you wanted to drink it, and as people began to burn leaves on the sides of the streets and the lovely smoke came into the back of your nose and told you it was autumn, and what were you doing smelling chalk dust and old liverwurst sandwiches instead?

And why didn't I complain?

Because after the first week in October, the Baker Sporting Emporium narrowed its architect choices down to two—Hoodhood and Associates, and Kowalski and Associates—and so every single night after supper but before Walter Cronkite began reporting, my father said to me, "So Holling, everything all right with Mrs. Baker?" and I answered, "Just swell."

"Keep it that way," he'd say.

So I didn't complain.

Still, you would have thought that since all this was happening because I was a Presbyterian, God would have seen to it that the Yankees would have played in the World Series to pay me back for my persecution. But were they? Of course not. The world isn't fair that way. The Boston Red Sox were playing instead. And let me tell you, everyone knows that the Boston Red Sox are never going to win another World Series. Never. Not even if they have three Carl Yastrzemskis. Which they don't.

Doug Swieteck's brother was still not back in school, and Doug Swieteck told us why: The ten days of observation had been pure delight for him, but when no one had found any behavior beyond his usual weirdness, he realized that he would be coming back to school again pretty soon. So the evening before he was to return, when he came to his classroom with Mrs. Swieteck to meet with his teacher, Doug Swieteck's brother walked up to the chalkboard and pounded the erasers against his head. Since Mr. Ludema didn't have someone like me around to pound them against the brick walls every Wednesday afternoon, Doug Swieteck's brother's hair turned white after about four poundings. Then he took two long pieces of chalk, stuck them into his mouth like fangs, and went howling and roaring and slobbering out into the hallway.

The school was mostly deserted, so it really was just dumb luck that Mrs. Sidman, who had decided to leave her new post in the Main Administrative Office, had come into school that particular evening to clean out the last of her personal effects.

I think her screams echoed up and down the halls of Camillo Junior High until dawn.

That bought Doug Swieteck's brother another four weeks of medical observation. And it was pretty clear from Mrs. Baker's glares the next morning that, somehow, she thought this was all my fault. Which it wasn't. I didn't have a thing to do with it. But when someone hates your guts, truth, justice, and the American way don't mean all that much.

On Wednesday, when we all stood up to go to Mr. Petrelli's geography class, Mrs. Baker stopped glaring. In fact, as we walked out with
Geography for You and Me
in our hands, she started to smile at me. Then I got worried. She looked like those evil geniuses who suddenly figure out a plan to conquer the world and can already imagine earth's population quivering in their grasp.

It was all I could do not to sprint out of Mrs. Baker's classroom—even though we weren't supposed to run in the halls—to the safe world of junior high geography.

Mr. Petrelli believed that no class was worth anything without a Study Question Data Sheet. He dittoed these off like a major publisher. His hands were always blue from the ink, mostly because he hauled the dittos out from the machine while they were still wet from the alcohol—the smell of which gave the room a tang.