The Boy Who Failed Show and Tell

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  Whoopee. I’m sure William Feranek will have a very successful future as a penman when he grows up. But what Mrs. Fisher doesn’t understand is that I am not messy on purpose. First of all, my hands are always shaky from my asthma medicines. On top of that, I am just … well … messy. When I was in second grade, Miss Williamsen used to send me home with hours and hours of extra handwriting worksheets to do. One night, I traced the letter e over and over again, capital and lowercase, until the edge of my pointer finger swelled up in a huge blister.

  It was gross. And painful. Plus, my e’s still refused to stay straight and on the lines.

  The point is, I try really hard to be neat. Just like I try really hard to be quiet and sit still. I don’t understand why Mrs. Fisher doesn’t just see that I am never going to be William Feranek and give me things I can do. I bet I know more about dinosaurs, snakes, and ironclad battleships than he does. If knowing about stuff like that—stuff that is actually cool and interesting—counted, I would be the star. Then Mrs. Fisher would have to ask William, “Why can’t you be an expert on reptiles and nineteenth-century explosives like Jordan Sonnenblick?”

  Or if she would test us on Marvel Comics, she would see that I know everything there is to know about those. I wish that could be a subject. Our tests could say things like What lesson does Peter Parker learn in The Amazing Spider-Man #1? I would answer, This is a trick question! Peter Parker’s first appearance is in Amazing Fantasy #15, not The Amazing Spider-Man #1. He didn’t get his own comic book until 1963—almost a year later. And the lesson is that with great power comes great responsibility.

  I guarantee I know more about Marvel Comics than William Feranek does.

  But instead of getting to show people what I know, I am stuck staring out the window of room 4-210 all day, counting squirrels in the tree outside and wishing this woman would just leave me alone. Then she yells at me for not paying attention. Well, if some mean old lady yelled at you all day, would you want to pay attention to her?

  But I still try to make her see that I am good for something. On Friday morning, when I am the first one finished with the story we are supposed to be reading in our big, fat reading textbook, I raise my hand and ask to speak to her. I walk up to her desk and tell her all about Hector, and how I would like to bring him in for Show and Tell.

  Mrs. Fisher looks horrified. “You want to bring a snake into my classroom?”

  I think I’ve been pretty clear about this, but I nod.

  “Why? Why would you want to do such a thing?”

  I’ve already told her. He’s my pet. And he’s cool! What other reason does she need?

  I try again.

  “Well, I want to bring him in because snakes are misunderstood. Everybody thinks they’re slimy. Or gross. Or dangerous. Lots of snakes get killed every year by people who don’t know how helpful they really are. I just want to show the class they should be kind to any snakes they meet.”

  Mrs. Fisher’s eyes get all squinty. “Is it safe for this … REP-tile … to be in our classroom?”

  “Sure, I’ll protect him. I can teach everyone how to hold him so he doesn’t get hurt or scared.”

  “I’m sure the snake will be fine. I want to know whether the CHILL-dren will be safe.”

  “Yes,” I say. “I promise.”

  * * *

  After lunch, Mrs. Fisher tells me I can bring Hector in. I can’t believe it. Maybe Mrs. Fisher isn’t so bad after all. Maybe when she sees what a responsible pet owner I am, she will decide I am a good boy. Maybe—

  “But, JORR-dan,” she says, “if that snake causes any commotion, I will hold you PER-sonally responsible.”

  Maybe this is my dumbest move yet.

  * * *

  The next week, I bring Hector into school in his old jar from camp. I have covered the bottom of it with fresh new grass, plus some pebbles from his cage at home and one bigger rock for climbing. I have also made sure he is nice and full of fish, because I have already noticed he is calmer and sleepier after a big meal. I’ve even placed a stick in the jar at an angle, so he can climb higher if he gets bored during the day.

  As I reach over the radiators to place the jar on the windowsill behind me, I am pretty sure I’ve thought of everything.

  Everything except Britt Stone.

  “What is that?” she says in a voice that is even snottier than usual.

  “That’s Hector, my pet snake. I brought him in for Show and Tell. He’s a garter snake, and—”

  “A garden snake?” she interrupts.

  I have to correct her. “No, a garter snake.”

  “Are you sure that’s how you say it? Because I’m pretty sure you’re wrong.”

  “And I’m pretty sure you’re wrong.” I can’t believe this girl.

  “Oh, yeah? If you’re so smart, prove it.”

  “Fine!” I say. We each have a big, bright red hardcover dictionary in our desks, so I start to look up garter snake.

  Mrs. Fisher is up front, starting the day with an announcement. “From now on, students who finish their assigned seatwork early should spend the extra time working with this SRA kit.”

  I have no idea what an SRA kit is, but I am right about garter snakes. The definition from the dictionary says, any of numerous nonvenomous longitudinally striped viviparous North American and Central American snakes. I flip back a page to make sure there is nothing called a garden snake. When I see that there isn’t, I turn my back on Mrs. Fisher and whisper to Britt, “See, look! It’s a garter snake, and there’s no such thing as a garden snake.”

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Fisher is going into a whole long explanation of this kit thing. I catch some of what she says. There are dozens of page-sized cards in the box, and each one has a story on the front, with five questions about the story on the back. Each card has a colored tab on top, and the colored tabs tell you how hard the story is supposed to be to read. The cards at the front of the box are the easiest—pale blue. The ones all the way in the back are the hardest—dark purple. Our job is to start with the first story in the box, and—

  Britt hisses at me, “I don’t even know what all this means!”

  “Well, I do,” I snap back. This is because I took a class about snakes every Saturday last year at the Staten Island Zoo called Introductory Herpetology with Mr. Robert T. Zappalorti, the boss of the reptile house there. He happens to be a world-famous snake expert, and the Staten Island Zoo’s collection of snakes is famous, too. We have the largest collection of rattlesnakes in captivity anywhere!

  “It’s easy,” I tell Britt. “Hector is nonvenomous, which means he doesn’t have poisonous fangs. Longitudinally striped means he has lines that go along his body from his head to his tail. And viviparous means baby garter snakes are born alive like people, not in eggs like chickens.” I figure this has to shut her up. She clearly doesn’t know anything about snakes, and I have a Certificate of Completion from the Office of Mr. Robert T. Zappalorti. It’s on my wall at home.

  “You’re a freak,” she says. “And I don’t care what your stupid snake is called. He’s ugly!”

  I glance at Hector to make sure he isn’t getting upset by all this fighting, but he is busy climbing his new stick, so I guess he is fine. But I am so mad, I wish Hector were venomous. Then he could bite Britt, and when she died, maybe Jennifer Deerfield would come sit next to me.

  “Hector,” I say as calmly as I can, “is an excellent example of everything a garter snake should be. Besides, Miss Animal Critic, I don’t see you bringing in your pet for Show and Tell. You probably have some yappy little dog that your mother carries around in her gold purse.”

  “Shows how much you know! My pet is a horse.”

  She’s the snottiest girl in the world. Of course her pet is a horse.

  I give up on the argument and turn back around to face the teacher.

  “And that,” Mrs. Fisher says, closing up the lid of the box, “is how you use the SRA kit!”

  I seem to have missed
some details.

  Curse you, Britt Stone.

  * * *

  I feel even more hyper than usual all morning. I can’t wait to introduce Hecky to the class. He seems to be pretty calm about it, although he has spent an unusual amount of time rubbing his body against the side of his rock for the past couple of hours. When it is finally Show and Tell time, all the members of the class sit in a circle in the middle of the floor. I carefully carry Hecky’s jar over and sit holding it in my lap. A few other kids go before me, but the whole time, people keep looking over at Hector, whose presence is clearly the most interesting Show and Tell event since Kenneth’s Leap of Fire.

  Mrs. Fisher makes me wait until the very end of Show and Tell for my turn. As soon as she calls on me, I tell everybody the story of how I caught Hector at camp. Then I stare right at Britt and say, “By the way, a lot of people think garter snakes are called garden snakes. Of course, those people are wrong.”

  Now it is time for The Event We Have All Been Waiting For:

  I am going to take Hecky out of the jar and pass him around!

  Before I unscrew the lid, I have to tell the class the rules of safe snake handling. “Always stroke a snake from the front of its body to the back,” I inform them. “If you try to go the other way, you push its scales in the wrong direction and catch their edges, and that isn’t good for the snake. If you are doing it right, the snake’s skin will feel smooth and the snake will like it. But if you go the wrong way, it will feel rough and the snake will get irritated. Also, you should never squeeze a snake or try to grab it anywhere, especially not near its head. If you startle a snake, it can bite you. The most important rule is to be gentle. Garter snakes are small, and you can hurt them if you aren’t careful when you handle them.” I look around at every student to make sure they have listened to all of this. They are all staring at either me or Hector, so I figure they have.

  When I turn the lid of the jar, it makes a skritchy noise and then pops off into my palm. A few kids gasp as I reach down to lift Hector from the stick, and somebody goes “Ewww!” as Hector comes free from the jar and wraps himself around my wrist.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “He’s really very friendly. Who wants to hold him?”

  Nobody says yes. Not even Robert Falcone, who used to hold him all the time at camp.

  I start to feel panicked. “Okay, who wants to pet him?”

  Nobody speaks, or raises their hand, or anything.

  I don’t know what to do, so I stand up and start walking around the circle of kids from the outside, like I am playing a very strange game of Duck, Duck, Goose. When I get to Robert, I reach down with the arm that has Hector wrapped around it and beg with my eyes. If Robert, The Coolest Kid In The Class, pets Hector, I am positive other people will, too.

  Robert slowly lifts his arm up and very carefully strokes Hecky with one finger.

  Whew! I think.

  As I start to move around the circle again, some of the kids pull away from me, but maybe half of the kids touch him. Mrs. Fisher says, “No, thank you, JORR-dan,” when I hold Hecky out to her, but she isn’t rude about it or anything.

  Then, when I am almost back where I started, I get to Britt Stone.

  I almost don’t want her to touch Hector, because she is mean enough to hurt him on purpose. But she reaches out and runs two fingers along the whole length of his back. This is great! Now I am sure she will change her mind about snakes! Anybody who actually meets Hector realizes what a great pet he—

  “Oh, eww!” Britt says, smiling. “It’s slimy!”

  Hector is not slimy. No snake is slimy. Their skin is cool and dry. She is just being mean.

  I don’t say anything, because half the class has just touched him. Obviously, they know the truth.

  Britt goes on. “And hey, what’s wrong with his skin? It looks like he’s falling apart!”

  I hold Hecky up to my face, and she is kind of right. In a few places, his skin has started to separate from his body. Now I understand why he has been rubbing up against his rock! I turn to the rest of the class and say, “Check this out! Hector is shedding his skin. Snakes do this every few months, because their scales can’t grow or heal like our skin can. When it’s time for a snake to shed its old skin, the whole thing comes off at once. A lot of times, the entire skin stays in one piece, so it looks like a see-through snake.”

  I expect everybody to think this is as awesome as I do. But Britt ruins everything. She says, extra loudly, “No, his skin is flaking off. You are the only kid in the world whose snake has dandruff.”

  A few kids laugh. They are laughing at Hecky. Because of Britt!

  “Shut up, you … you idiot!” I explode.

  “JORR-dan!” Mrs. Fisher says sharply. “We do not call our friends idiots!”

  She’s right. I don’t call my friends idiots. I call idiots idiots.

  Mrs. Fisher keeps at it. “Now, put your animal away. Show and Tell is over!”

  “But!” I protest. “I haven’t even shown you how he moves! I was going to put him on the floor so he can sidewind across it. You have to see! Snakes have several ways of moving, but on a slippery surface like this floor, they propel themselves by—”

  “Enough!” she growls. “Go back to your seats, everyone. Although if you have touched the snake, please stop by the sink on the way back to your desk to wash your hands.”

  Hector isn’t dirty. But it’s over. My moment of glory has been destroyed. Britt did it all on purpose. And she didn’t even get yelled at for being mean to Hector. I turn away from the group as I slip my hand down into Hector’s jar so they won’t see the tears in my eyes.

  I hope Britt Stone’s dumb old horse throws her. I hope it throws her several miles away, so she lands in New Jersey and never finds her way back to P.S. 35.

  When we are all back in our seats, and Hector is back on the windowsill, Mrs. Fisher says, “Well, that was exciting. Now, please take out your spelling books and copy each of this week’s words five times into your notebooks. And pay careful attention to your penmanship.”

  Penmanship! I bring real live science in, and she cuts me off so we can work on our penmanship. I get up to sharpen a pencil, and on my way back to my desk, I hear Mrs. Fisher say, “Ooh, very good, Mr. Feranek. What a lovely even slant your cursive letters have!”

  The third word on this week’s list is inequitable. That means unfair. I don’t know why I even have to copy this word. I can already spell it. I already know what it means. And Britt and Mrs. Fisher have just spent the morning acting it out.

  When I was four, I taught myself to swim.

  The hard way.

  We were at the Jewish Community Center swim club, and I was standing on the steps at the shallow end of the pool, wearing inflatable swimmy tubes on my arms. I remember that I felt pretty cold, probably because I was incredibly skinny when I was little. My mom was on a metal reclining chair in her usual spot at the bottom of the grassy hill, tanning herself. She had been reading a book, but I was pretty sure she had fallen asleep because her sunglasses were off.

  My mom never takes her sunglasses off outdoors unless she is going to sleep.

  Meanwhile, Lissa was with the big kids at the deep end of the pool playing Sharks and Minnows. I thought Sharks and Minnows was the coolest game in the world. Leon, the pool manager, would choose one kid to be the shark, who would stand at the edge of the deepest part of the pool. The other kids would be the minnows, and they would line up directly across from the shark. When Leon blew his whistle, the shark and the minnows would dive into the water and swim toward each other. It was the shark’s job to touch as many minnows as possible before the minnows could cross the water and touch the wall.

  Everybody who got tagged by the shark then became a shark, too. The shark’s goal was to touch everybody so there would be no more minnows. Every other kid’s job was to try to be the last untouched minnow. If you outlasted everybody else, then you would get to be the shark at the beginning
of the next round.

  I wanted more than anything to play Sharks and Minnows, but you had to be able to swim to do that. There was a swim test and everything! When you passed the test, then your name got written down on Leon’s clipboard and you could play. I only knew how to kick my way across the shallow end by holding on to a kickboard or, when I was feeling really strong, to doggy-paddle ten feet or so before turning and grabbing on to the wall like a drowning man. In fact, my mom had ordered me not to leave the shallow-end stairs unless I was using both my kickboard and my swimmies.

  If I was going to play Sharks and Minnows, something had to be done.

  So on this day, as soon as my mom was asleep, I put what seemed like a foolproof plan into action. First, I popped out the little inflation tube on each of my swimmies with my teeth. Second, I used my right hand to pull the rubber stopper out of my left swimmy, and my left hand to pull the rubber stopper out of my right swimmy. Third—and this part was a bit scary—I pushed myself off from the second-to-bottom step and started doggy-paddling as the swimmies deflated rapidly.

  It was a simple plan. Either I would learn to swim or I would drown.

  The first few feet of my epic swim-or-die mission went fine, but the more air the swimmies lost, the lower my body sank in the water. As the chlorine-tasting water rose over my chin and splashed into my open mouth, I started to panic. My feet couldn’t reach the bottom, and the wall to my left seemed very far away.

  Without a kickboard, I didn’t know how to turn.

  I kicked harder and harder. My head bobbed under the water completely for an instant, and then I remembered something the swim teachers were constantly saying during lessons on Sunday mornings: Cup your hands and pull the water toward you! I cupped my hands and reached forward for a big stroke. As I pulled them into my chest, my head popped back up above the surface.