by Steve Cotler
Lots of kids, me included, laughed.
“Please read that again, Edward,” Mrs. Wikowitz said firmly but without raising her voice.
Eddie did … this time the right way. When he finished, I expected Mrs. Wikowitz to call on the next student, but she just stared at Eddie, then picked up a pencil, took a small blue pad of paper out of her desk drawer, and wrote. It took her almost a half minute to finish the note. The whole time, no one made a sound.
Finally she tore the note off the pad and held it at arm’s length.
“Ronald Mack, please stand.”
I stood instantly, completely surprised—what had I done?—and knocked my SuperBinder to the floor. It flipped over, and lots of kids saw Doofus, Dweeb, and Dork-Boy. Some of them giggled. I was kind of embarrassed, and so, even though Goon wasn’t there, I had to award her another four points. The score was 694–673. Darn.
“Ronald,” Mrs. Wikowitz said, “would you please take this note and accompany Edward to the principal’s office? You are to see that he arrives there without delay. No bathroom stops. No dawdling. No conversation. Please give this note to the secretary, and after Edward has discussed his behavior with Mr. Stotts, you both shall return to this room in the same fashion. Do you understand?”
I put my SuperBinder back on my desk (with the covers facedown!), said, “Yes, ma’am,” and walked to her desk.
She handed me the blue slip. “Edward, please go with Ronald.”
Eddie stood, strode to the door, and pushed it open. I scooted through just before it closed.
In the hallway, Eddie looked back at room 113 and muttered something I am not allowed to write. Then he started walking fast. I followed him, realizing I had no idea where the principal’s office was.
“Where’re you going?” I asked.
“Mr. Stotts’s office, like the teacher said.” He didn’t even look at me. He just kept striding along. I had to sort of trot to keep up.
The best word to describe Eddie Chapple is jagged. He is tall and skinny, and when he moves it looks like he has lots of elbows and knees. He has a pointy nose and a pointy chin and pointy eyebrows. His hair is cut and gelled with spikes. He would stand out in any crowd of kids. But this morning in class Eddie Chapple had made himself stand out even more.
At the end of the hall, I saw an OFFICE sign with an arrow pointing down another corridor. Eddie stopped underneath the sign, snatched the note out of my hand, and crumpled it into a really tight ball.
“Watch this.” He turned, raised his hands, then launched a long basketball-style jump shot across the hallway at a not-so-big opening of a recycling bin. The paper ball dropped right through! Even Georgie couldn’t have done that.
“Great shot,” I said.
“Basketball’s my best sport,” Eddie replied with an almost-smile. “And no matter what Mrs. Wicked Witch thinks, I have just proved I am a good citizen by recycling her note. What’s yours?”
At first I didn’t know what he was asking, then I said, “Baseball.”
We walked down the hall to the school office, which was like the office at any other school. You can probably guess what it looked like.
The office secretary was on the phone. She gave Eddie a huge smile and a hold-on-a-minute wave. Her super-thick glasses made her eyes look gigantic. The nameplate on her desk said MRS. COLLINS.
“Hello again, Eddie,” she said after she hung up. Then she huge-smiled me. “Which of you has the blue slip?”
Eddie was already taking a seat and didn’t look like he was going to answer, so I said, “Um, I do. I mean, I did. I, uh … I’ll go get it.”
The halls were deserted, so I half ran to the recycling bin, wondering if I was going to get in trouble for running. I was peering into the opening of the bin when a very short, very round man walked by.
“Lose something?” he asked, slowing but not stopping.
“I just found it,” I replied, holding up the little wad of blue paper.
“Blue slip? Too bad for you,” Mr. Amato said.
(How did I know the very short, very round teacher’s name? Actually, at that moment, I didn’t. I’m just sticking it in here because you’ll meet him soon!)
He called out, “See you in third period … and no running,” as I speed-walked back to the office. I unwadded the blue slip and handed it to the secretary. Then I sat down next to Eddie. And we waited.
And waited.
And waited.
It was boring, so I read the papers thumbtacked to the bulletin board on the opposite wall of the office. Most of it was stuff like bus schedules and lunch menus. But one paper caught my eye.
I’d heard a lot about student government because Goon is the eighth-grade vice president. They’d had their election at the end of last year when they were seventh graders. She brags about being VP a lot. She thinks she’s an RLS big shot.
Then it hit me!
(If this book were a comic strip, right now … at this exact moment … you’d see …)
Cheesie Mack for Sixth-Grade President!
If I won the election, Goon would go bonkers! And that would probably generate a major victory for me in the Point Battle.
But could I win the election?
If I ran and lost, Goon would tease me forever (maybe longer!) about how she was really popular and I was a proven loser.
I was thinking hard about it when a door behind Mrs. Collins opened and a tall man with a buzz cut stepped out. The door had a nameplate on it that said MR. STEWART STOTTS, PRINCIPAL.
“Ed … ward Chap … ple,” Mr. Stotts said as he took the wrinkled blue slip from the secretary. His tone wasn’t stern, but the way he stretched out Eddie’s name made it sound ominous. (Remember ominous from my first book? It means something bad is going to happen.)
“This has not been a good first day for you, Edward. Two blue slips in less than”—Mr. Stotts looked at the wall clock—“thirty minutes. Please take a seat in my office.”
Eddie disappeared into the principal’s office. Mr. Stotts looked at me. “Did you escort Edward?”
I nodded.
“Wait, please. He’ll be with me for only one sentence.” Mr. Stotts started toward his office, then looked at me again. “June Mack’s your sister, right?”
I nodded again.
“She’s quite an asset here at Stevenson,” said Mr. Stotts. “Good student. Good citizen. Eighth-grade vice president.”
Goon always seems to fool grown-ups. It’s like she has some kind of magic power that makes her eviliciousness invisible to them.
Mr. Stotts patted me on the shoulder in a very uncle-ish way. “You must be very proud to be June Mack’s little brother,” he said, then walked back to his office.
That does it! I said to myself. I am not going to be known at RLS as June Mack’s little brother! I’m going to be Cheesie Mack, sixth-grade class president!
I walked over to the bulletin board, took one of the election registration forms, and stuck it in my pocket. I wasn’t trying to spy, but Mr. Stotts didn’t bother to close his office door, so I could see everything.
“I’ll make it short, Eddie,” Mr. Stotts said. He was standing over Eddie, one hand running through his buzz cut. “You’ve just bought yourself thirty days of probation. One more blue slip during that time, and you’re suspended for a week. End of discussion. Back to first period.”
That was actually five sentences. But maybe Mr. Stotts meant one sentence like the kind of sentence a judge gives a convicted criminal.
Edward Chapple, you are hereby sentenced to one month in Probation Prison!
“What’d you do this morning?” I asked Eddie as we left the office. “The other blue slip, I mean.”
“Skateboarding.”
“In the school yard?” I was stunned. There were NO SKATEBOARDING signs everywhere.
“Nope.” He gave me an almost-smile. “In this hallway.”
We passed by the recycling bin and turned into the corridor that led back to ro
om 113. “It’s none of my business,” I said, “but you had to know that you’d get busted both times, right?”
Eddie stopped walking, so I did, too. “You’re Ronald, right?” he asked.
“Everyone calls me Cheesie,” I said.
“You’re right, Cheesie. It’s none of your business.” Eddie stared at me just long enough to make me uncomfortable. Then he said, “But I’ll tell you anyway. I went to Bass Rock Elementary. I don’t know any of the kids from Goose Cove or Rocky Neck.”
That made sense. Gloucester has three elementary schools, and they all send their kids to RLS. So most of us knew only about one-third of the kids.
“But now word’ll get around,” Eddie continued. “Everyone will know who Eddie Chapple is.” He poked his thumbs into his chest for emphasis.
“In a bad way, maybe,” I said.
“Nope.” Eddie shook his head. “I didn’t do anything bad. You tell me what’s really bad about skateboarding and making a joke. It was funny, wasn’t it?”
“Kinda.”
“All I did was let everyone know that Eddie Chapple does things his own way.”
“But what if you get another blue slip?” I asked. “You’ll get suspended.”
“I won’t get another blue slip,” Eddie said. “At least not before the election. You see, Cheesie, those two blue slips were all part of my plan. I’m going to run for class president.”
He started walking again. I followed, my hand touching the election registration form in my pocket.
Me against Eddie Chapple?
I wasn’t worried.
Yet.
An Impossible Assignment
All the kids looked at us as we reentered room 113. Mrs. Wikowitz, on the other hand, was writing on the whiteboard and paid us no attention.
She turned to the class as Eddie and I took our seats. “When you submit a paper, or a report, or any homework at all, it must be in the proper format.”
Everyone had a format sheet on three-hole paper. There was one on my desk.
“Please put this sample in your SuperBinders for reference,” Mrs. Wikowitz said.
There was a lot of shuffling of paper and clicking of binder rings.
“If you do not follow the format exactly,” she continued, “you will get an F on the assignment. And when I say ‘exactly,’ that is exactly what I mean. If you write the date without a comma, you will get an F. If you write your first name but omit your surname, you will get an F. If you forget page numbers on a multipage assignment, you will get an F.”
She paused and looked around, but no one said anything.
“Good. Let’s begin with assignment number one. Take out a sheet of lined paper and write one page describing as much as you can remember of what has occurred in this room, beginning with my entering and culminating now. We will do this silently and without asking any questions of me or other students. You may choose any writing style you feel is appropriate. You have fifteen minutes.”
I frowned. There had been a whole chunk of time, when Eddie and I had gone to the office, during which I hadn’t been in the room. I raised my hand.
“No questions, Ronald.”
I put my hand down, sat for a while trying to figure out how to do an impossible assignment, and then began writing.
What I Wrote
September 3 Ronald Mack
Mrs. Wikowitz Core
Assignment #1
Detective Armack’s Report
I began my shift in room 113 at 8:12 a.m. I sat in the second row, surrounded by a small crowd, most of whom were strangers to me. On my right was a jagged young man identified by his name card as Edward Chapple. Since this was my first day on the job, I had no reason to suspect anything unusual was about to occur.
Into the room walked a tall woman dressed in dark clothes. She began by introducing herself in writing, her silence creating tension.
Then, in a manner that showed control and authority, she directed the crowd, one by one, to read from a book of strange and unusual regulations. At first this proceeded without incident. My turn came. I handled it without difficulty. Then Mr. Chapple read … but not in English. It was no language I had ever heard.
The crowd reacted with amusement, but then everyone fell silent as the tall woman identified the young man as a criminal and asked me to take him into custody.
I left with the alleged perpetrator, and while we were gone, it is my conclusion, based upon biological principles previously known to me, that all the people in room 113 grew microscopically. I also conclude, due to my experience and subsequent observation, that all of them continued to breathe, probably normally, although I suspect, as the result of a previous investigation, that a young man with red-framed glasses held his breath once for thirty seconds for no obvious reason.
My understanding of the earth’s rotation leads me to assume that daylight continued to come in through the windows, and my subsequent observation of the limited number of dust specks in the sun shafts suggests that the room had recently been vacuumed.
In the stomach of the young man with red-rimmed glasses, whom I had interrogated earlier that morning, a pancake breakfast was digesting and moving into his small intestines. Where it might go from there does not need further investigation.
When I returned with my prisoner, I was asked to file this report.
Signed: RLS Detective Armack
*
Since I had no idea what had actually happened in room 113 while I accompanied Eddie to the office, and Mrs. Wikowitz said we could choose any writing style, I decided to write assignment number one as a police detective. My dad, who reads police novels, has told me about alleged perpetrator and interrogate, which are police-talk for a) the person you suspect committed the crime and b) ask questions.
There’s no place in Mrs. Wikowitz’s report format for a chapter number. But the people who publish this book told me I had to call it something. So I used my homeroom and assignment numbers to make a police case number. You probably guessed how I came up with the name Armack.
Mrs. Wikowitz graded the papers while we read a short story.
I forgot to write the year in the upper left-hand corner.
I got an F.
(which is a continuation of Chapter 3)
Mulligans and Noogies
With only five minutes left in first period, Mrs. Wikowitz asked us to close our textbooks.
“The name of this school is …” She looked around the room. “George Sinkoff?”
“Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School,” he replied quickly.
“And who was Robert Louis Stevenson?”
I knew he was a long-ago writer but didn’t know what he wrote. I wasn’t surprised when Georgie shrugged an I-don’t-know.
“Anyone?” Mrs. Wikowitz asked.
Four hands went up, including Glenn’s. I wasn’t surprised. I bet Glenn is the smartest sixth grader at RLS even though there are plenty of smart kids from the two other elementary schools.
The girl sitting next to me also had her hand up. Mrs. Wikowitz called on her. “Oddny Thorsdottir. Did I pronounce your name correctly?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Oddny said. “Robert Louis Stevenson was a writer of fiction in the late nineteenth century. He is most famous for Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
“Have you read either of those novels?”
“Yes, ma’am. Both.”
“Good.” The corner of Mrs. Wikowitz’s mouth bent up. It might have been a tiny smile, but I wasn’t sure. “You can help the rest of the class over the next few weeks as we read and discuss this one.” She stood and passed out copies of Treasure Island. (When I showed it to Granpa that evening, he told me it was a “ripping good pirate yarn” with lots of “seafaring and treachery.” Treachery is a really good word that means double-crossing.)
We read aloud from Treasure Island until the first bell sounded. We could hear kids moving through the hall to their second-period classe
s, but since Core lasts for two periods, Mrs. Wikowitz paid no attention to the outside chatter.
She switched us from language arts to social studies and explained that our first topic would be ancient history, beginning with prehistoric humans. We spent the next chunk of time discussing how people lived back then. We talked about fire, tool making, hunting, and living in caves.
I was really enjoying Mrs. Wikowitz’s class. Maybe you’re wondering how I could enjoy getting an F on my first assignment. Well, I didn’t enjoy that, and neither did most of my classmates. (Over half the class, including Georgie, got Fs for one reason or another.) But just before Core ended, Mrs. Wikowitz explained, “No matter how clear and direct I am about following the format exactly, every year, most students fail the first assignment.” She picked up the stack of papers. “Who knows what a mulligan is?”
Georgie raised his hand. “It’s the same thing as a noogie except you clonk your knuckle on someone’s forearm instead of their head.”
Lots of the kids laughed. Mrs. Wikowitz didn’t. She arched one eyebrow, then said, “Not so. It is an informal term from the game of golf for a do-over, a second chance. I am giving a mulligan to all those with Fs and will regrade their papers.”
(If you have ever had a really excellent mulligan, go to my website and tell me about it.)
Then the bell rang, and everybody stood up to go to third-period class. As I gathered my stuff, I realized that even though I had known Mrs. Wikowitz for less than two hours, I needed to update my first impressions. I still thought she was unfriendly, demanding, and no-nonsense, but now I had to add interesting. The double period had gone by really fast.
At the door of Mrs. Wikowitz’s classroom I said goodbye to Georgie and watched him walk down the hall. Georgie and I had been in the same class every year since kindergarten. At RLS, however, Georgie and I only had Core and last-period physical education together. It was going to be weird being separated for most of the day! But our lunches were at the same time. And we would bike back and forth to school together.
Lana Shen and Glenn Philips were in all my classes (except Lana is in girls’ PE). I was glad Glenn was in my classes. Lana … I’m not so sure.
I headed up the stairs for science. According to my class schedule (you saw it on this page), my science class would be in room 220. A room in the 200s is on the second floor. Room 334 would be on the third floor, room 407 on the fourth floor, and room 8116 on the eighty-first floor … except RLS only has two floors!
