Peach shook her head. “You can’t go around shooting people and bombing them,” she said.
“It’s just a story.”
“It’s more like a dumb video game. Alice is special, Toby.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. She’s not all syrupy like in the Disney movie. That’s all you know. She’s tough. She.doesn’t take anything from anybody. You’d like her if you knew her. I seriously don’t think you want to trash her, okay?”
Toby knew a threat when he heard one. He gave in. And Peach handed him back the notebook
“Read Alice in Wonderland sometime,” she said. Tobias didn’t promise anything.
THE ASSIGNMENT topic was “What I did on my summer vacation.” Amelia had petted a stingray in the Monterey Aquarium. Graham had caught a foul ball at a Blue Jays game. He had the ball to prove it.
Then it was time for Tobias to read about his summer vacation adventure. He read “Tweedledum and Tweedledead: An Eyewitness Report.” In only two pages, Sergeant Steele arid the Desperate Throng wiped out Wonderland without a hitch. It was brutal. They turned the caterpillar into caterpillar dust, stuffed the Mad Hatter into his own hat and left the rabbit who had started the whole thing twitching in a ditch. Steele kept the rabbit’s gold watch. Tweedledum and Tweedledee tried to round up some help from beyond the looking-glass, but they got wasted by one of the commandos, Mad Clyde and his flame-thrower. Alice was spared. She was carried home in a basket by the Desperate Throng and put in a special zoo with Winnie-the-Pooh, Wilbur the pig and the Cat in the Hat.
Nervously, Tobias looked at Ms. Julia Peach to see if she approved of his revised ending. She gave him the thumbs up.
Ms. Knieppe, however, did not. She invited Tobias to the front, took the story from him and reread it to herself.
She said she was appalled.
She asked if anyone knew what appalled meant. The class nodded its head. They could tell what she meant from the look on her face. But Ms. Knieppe didn’t stop there. With Tobias still standing at the front, she got the class to try to spell it.
Amelia got it right. Amelia got to look it up in the dictionary: appall v.t. to fill with dismay or horror; terrify; shock.
Which was exactly what the class had seen on Ms. Knieppe’s face.
Ms. Knieppe scribbled a note and invited Tobias to take his story to Mrs. Armitage, the principal, to see what she thought of it. Tobias snuck a peek at Peach as he left the room. She was rolling her eyes to beat the band.
Tobias sat outside the principal’s office in a little dead-end hallway off the main office. In the main office the fall sun streamed through the window. One of the secretaries, Mrs. Devlin, was chatting to a man in a uniform who had delivered some packages. She was having a coffee and telling him about the trouble she was having with her K-Car. It turned out that the man in the uniform had had the same kind of trouble.
The school nurse smiled at Tobias as she got some stuff from her mailbox. And Ms. Rowanook of the orange hair was typing something with a Sony Walkman on, bobbing her head to the music.
It gave Tobias a nice cheery feeling to see everybody having a good time. It gave him hope.
Mrs. Armitage, meanwhile, was on the phone. Tobias could just make her out through the pebbled glass of her door. He could hear bits and pieces of what she was saying. Mrs. Devlin had taken in “Tweedledum and Tweedledead” with the note from Ms. Knieppe, and right away Mrs. Armitage had got on the phone.
At first Tobias thought she was phoning his parents or the cops or something, but the phone call didn’t seem to have anything to do with him. So he waited in the dead-end hall, just out of the sunshine, until finally Mrs. Armitage hung up.
His waiting changed then. His ears filled up with the silence of her reading his story. He was Sergeant Steele holding his breath, hiding in a bush as a troop of playing-card soldiers marched by, a fistful of leaves away. Then he heard the scrape of the principal’s chair and watched her ghostly, pebbly figure come towards him and invite him in, invite him to sit down.
Tobias sat. Mrs. Armitage sat down, too, and thumbed through the story.
“Wilbur,” she said. “From Charlotte’s Web?”
Tobias nodded hesitantly. Sweet talk. She was going to engage him in conversation before she brought out the thumb screws.
“So how did Sergeant Steele end up with Wilbur and Winnie-the-Pooh and the others?” she asked. “Has he been raiding all the imaginary places?”
Tobias looked for the trap. “The zoo doesn’t actually belong to Sergeant Steele,” he said.
“Who does it belong to?”
Tobias scratched his head. “I don’t know.”
Mrs. Armitage frowned. “The writer must be sovereign over the worlds he creates,” she said.
Tobias would have liked the chance to write that down. It sounded like a handy thing to know. But Mrs. Armitage was not finished.
She looked over her glasses at Tobias. “I think part of the problem here, Toby, is that Ms. Knieppe was hoping her students would recount events that had really happened to them this summer.”
Tobias nodded. “I know,” he said. “She heard me telling someone about wrestling with a tiger on my way to the cottage. She said it sounded really interesting and she hoped I would write about it.” He didn’t go on.
“And?” said Mrs. Armitage.
“And I tried,” said Tobias. “But it wouldn’t come.”
“Tell me about it,” said Mrs. Armitage, leaning back in her chair. She seemed to want to hear about wrestling the tiger. But Tobias shrugged and was silent.
“Did it really happen?”
“Yes,” said Tobias.
“Then why don’t you want to share it with me, with your classmates?”
Through Mrs. Armitage’s window, Tobias could see the man in the uniform getting into his truck. The truck was silver and said Mercury Messenger Service on its side. There was a picture of a guy with wings on his heels running like a halfback with a package in his hands. The man in the uniform was whistling.
“Tobias?”
“I already told them!” said Tobias. “We were going to the cottage and we stopped to get gas and they had a tiger cub in a cage. The man at the gas station said I could go in the cage with him if I wanted, so I went in. It was cute. We wrestled a bit and my mom took a picture. I can show you the picture if you don’t believe me.”
“I do believe you,” said Mrs. Armitage sincerely. “It sounds like a great story. Don’t you think that’s why Ms. Knieppe wanted you to write it down? Don’t you feel that’s why she was disappointed?”
Tobias watched the Mercury Messenger Service truck pull out of the school driveway onto Alta Vista Drive. He wondered where the next stop was and what all those packages contained.
Mrs. Armitage turned to see what Tobias was looking at, but the truck was already gone.
“She already knew the story,” said Toby. “Everybody in class knew the story. It just wasn’t worth writing it out.”
“I see,” said Mrs. Armitage, nodding. “So instead you decided to fire-bomb Wonderland.”
“It was sort of a joke,” said Tobias. “The class liked it.”
“I’m sure they did,” said Mrs. Armitage in a disapproving voice. The end of her sentence was like the bony end of a chicken drumstick. Mrs. Armitage bit down on the word and Tobias figured the sweet talk was over and the lecture was coming. But he was wrong again.
“It is funny,” she said. “Tweedledum and Tweedledead, I mean. I’m not ‘appalled’ by it, Tobias, in case you’re wondering. I think it is very imaginative.”
“Thank you,” said Tobias.
“Ms. Knieppe, however, is correct in thinking that the content of this story is inappropriate for the assignment, and I agree with her on that. But my guess is that you knew it was inappropriate and that’s
why you wrote it. Am I correct?”
Tobias shrugged.
“This was written purely for its shock value,” said Mrs. Armitage.
“No,” said Tobias. “It was fun.”
Mrs. Armitage didn’t look at the clock or anything, but she suddenly looked like someone who had a lot of other things to do and not a lot of time.
“I mean,” said Tobias, “I wrote it for a laugh. That was part of it...”
“Yes?”
“And I guess I was a little mad, that was part of it…”
“Mad?”
“About having to write the tiger story.”
“I see. And…”
“And ...” Tobias stopped short as if at a chasm. Chased by the playing-card soldiers through a minefield, he was now at the brink of Dead Man’s Leap. The enemy was right behind him and down below he could see the mangled bodies of kids who had tried to raid Wonderland before and failed. Where had it all gone wrong?
“And it just came to me,” he said.
“It just came to you,” said Mrs. Armitage.
It didn’t seem much of an answer.
PEACH WAS waiting for him after school. “Let me guess,” she said. “You have to clean the gym floor with a toothbrush, right?”
“I wish!” said Tobias, falling in beside her. She waited for him to tell her. It wasn’t that she actually stopped talking — Peach never stopped talking — but she didn’t press him. She talked about a stamp her great-aunt had sent her from Guyana for the stamp collection her great-aunt seemed to think she had. And then she went on about how at her riding class the past Wednesday, Amelia, the girl who touched manta rays and spelled so well, had fallen off her pony.
“No way,” said Tobias, grinning.
“Okay,” said Peach. “She didn’t fall, but she rode appallingly.”
Then they talked about a bunch of appalling things until they were suddenly standing at Peach’s driveway.
“So?” she said.
Tobias kicked at some fallen leaves. “I’ve got to write die tiger essay,” he said.
“Is that all?” said Peach. “You got off easy.”
Tobias looked at her. “I won’t do it,” he said. 1 can’t.
TOBIAS’S MOTHER was in the backyard putting her garden to bed. He gave her the news, all of it.
“Why won’t you do it?” she said. “Is it a matter of principle or something?”
Tobias tried to think why he couldn’t write the essay. “There’s no surprise to it,” he said.
“Well, this is a fine kettle of fish,” said his mother.
She made him carry the lawn chairs to the garage and then help with dinner. She made him roll out the perogi dough while she read his story and the notes on it from Ms. Knieppe and Mrs. Armitage. His mother laughed at something, but Tobias wasn’t sure if it was the story or the notes she was laughing at.
“Couldn’t you talk to them?” he asked.
His mother patted him on the shoulder and shook her head. She started frying onions.
“I’m not doing it,” said Tobias. His mother said nothing. Tobias rolled and rolled. His wrists
ached. There is nothing tougher than perogi dough.
PEACH PHONED right after dinner. “You gonna do it?”
“Nope,” said Tobias. “They can throw me to the tigers, as far as I’m concerned.”
“But it’s easy,” said Peach. “You could write it with your eyes tied behind your back.”
“I just can’t make myself do it,” said Tobias.
Peach was silent on the other end, but Tobias waited. Sometimes she was just hitching up her sock or reading the newspaper—her mother said she had very poor telephone manners—but Tobias was used to it. Sometimes she was thinking. That was what it was this time.
“Can you come over?” she said.
“WHAT ABOUT your assignment?” said his mom. Tobias lied. He promised he would get right to it when he got back Since he didn’t say that he refused to do it, which is what he had said all through dinner, she let him go.
PEACH WAS at her kitchen table writing on a pad of foolscap. An untouched piece of chocolate cake sat beside her. A dollop of ice cream melted by its side. Peach’s mother cut a piece of cake for Tobias. Tobias sat down and watched. Peach kept writing.
“Your manners, young lady,” said her mother, but she didn’t go on about it and left the two of them alone in the silence of melting ice cream.
Finally Peach stopped writing. She sat up straight and held out the pad of paper in front of her to look it over.
“Exceptional,” she whispered.
“What’s going on?” said Tobias.
Peach said, “Are you absolutely sure you won’t write the tiger story?”
Tobias gritted his teeth. He looked as if he was going to scream.
“Good,” said Peach. “Because I’ve written it for you.”
She handed him the foolscap pad.
The Summer of the Tiger
by Tobias Green
Every summer we go up to our cottage. I really look forward to swimming and waterskiing. Also my two cousins Terry and Dave live up there all year round and we do lots of things together like going to the antique boat show and fishing. But little did I know that this summer the best part of the trip was going to be the getting there!
“What?” said Tobias. “This is gross.”
“No,” said Peach. “It’s appalling. And it gets worse.”
So, while she helped herself to her much deserved piece of cake, Tobias read on.
We always stop at the Kritchmar Esso on our way north. There’s an old pop bottle cooler there and Mom and Dad let us choose whatever soft drink we want. They also have a big cage out back of the old service station where there is sometimes an orphaned deer or bear cub. Once there was even an eagle which sat on this, dead tree in the cage yelling at everybody. The Kritchmars just keep the animals for a week or two, then they let them go. Imagine our surprise when we arrived this time to find a real tiger cub!
“Imagine our surprise.” Tobias wrinkled his nose. “It sounds just like Amelia’s story about petting the manta rays.”
“I’m glad you noticed,” said Peach.
Tobias read on. He stopped and looked at Peach again. “How do you know all this stuff, anyway?”
Peach rolled her eyes. “I’ve heard the story about a hundred times,” she said.
Tobias read in silence, shaking his head in disbelief. “She’ll never believe I did this,” he said when he had finished. “It’s got A+ written all over it.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” said Peach, finishing her cake and taking a forkful of Tobias’s. “Ms. Knieppe thinks you are very creative. That’s why she gets so disappointed with you. This will just prove to her that she was right all along. Teachers like that. Of course, you’ll have to write it out again in your own ugly scrawl. And don’t tell me you can’t do it because it would be wrong or unethical or something. This isn’t some sit-com. This is life or death.”
Tobias pushed his own piece of cake towards Peach. “Thanks,” he said. She took another forkful and pushed it back.
“It’s going to cost more than a piece of cake,” she said.
Tobias looked worried. Peach got up, left the room and ran upstairs. She came down a minute later with her hands behind her back.
“What?” said Tobias.
“You can have the A+ essay,” she said, “but in return I want you to read this.” Then, from behind her back, she brought out a copy of Alice in Wonderland.
Tobias grimaced.
“Read it,” she said. She was about to hand him the book but instead she grabbed a tea towel and made him wipe his hands. The book was a beautiful edition with a clear plastic cover and gold lettering.
“What do you mean?”
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Peach grabbed the book from him and opened it at random. “The-players-all-played-at-once-without-waiting-for-turns,” she read. “They’re called ‘words,’ Toby. Read them.”
“But why?” said Tobias. “I know the story.”
Peach sighed. “Well, then I guess you won’t be needing this,” she said. She picked up the foolscap essay and, rolling it up, she took it firmly in two fists and slowly started to tear.
“Hold it!” said Tobias. “Give me a chance to think!”
Peach waited. Tobias looked miserable. She looked away. Then she sighed again, unrolled the essay, smoothed it out and handed it to him. “Sorry,” she said. “Jeez, I sounded just like Ms. Knieppe.”
Tobias took the essay. Then he reached out and took the book, too.
“It’s okay,” said Peach. “I’m not going to make you read it.”
“I’ll read it,” he said. “Really.”
Peach’s eyes lit up. “Tonight?” she asked.
“Tonight!”
“It’s only 140 pages of big type and you don’t have to read the last three or four pages where she wakes up, because that’s garbage.”
“Okay, okay!” said Tobias. “It’s a deal.”
Peach smiled triumphantly.
Tobias shook his head. “You’re the worst best friend a guy ever had,” he said.
HE COPIED out her essay without changing a word. He wrote it in his best handwriting. Then, while his folks watched “Unsolved Mysteries,” Tobias settled into the task of reading Alice in Wonderland. He knew Peach would quiz him on it and even though he remembered the movie, she would catch him out some way or other if he tried to fake it. He read late. And he stayed up still later.
THE NEXT MORNING he showed Peach what he had done. “The Summer of the Tiger” was nicely bound with a cover made from torn strips of orange construction paper glued onto black. Very tigerish. There was a plastic dust jacket with gold lettering. It was pretty impressive. He also presented Peach with a little something he had written in his notebook.
“Tweedledum and Tweedledead: The Return.” Peach looked dubious. She read it in silence.
The first paragraph showed no signs of improvement. Sergeant Steele and his Desperate Throng throttled the weasely counterspy, found the old map and dug out the rabbit hole just as they had done in the earlier version. They parachuted down the hole and gave themselves hypodermic needles full of Smallness just like before. But having blasted down the door — bazookas blazing—and entered the lovely garden, everything changed.
Some of the Kinder Planets Page 6
