The Flunking of Joshua T. Bates

by Susan Shreve

  “No fourth grader is allowed to have friends in the third grade.”

  Joshua took a piece of Doublemint chewing gum out of his pocket and split it with Andrew.

  “Says who?”

  “Says Tommy Wilhelm.”

  “So?”

  “So he beat me up for being your friend,” Andrew said.

  “Brother,” Joshua said. “I guess it’s a lucky thing I got suspended for tomorrow.”

  And he sat down on the front steps next to Andrew, wishing he could erase the whole last year and return to the time when he was a regular third-grade boy with a reputation as an athlete and not a problem in the world except cavities.

  Six

  Andrew agreed to walk to school with Joshua, as they had always done when they were in the same grade.

  “As far as Thirty-eighth and Idaho,” Andrew said sheepishly. “And then you go down Thirty-eighth and I’ll walk across the field to Mirch so no one will see us together.”

  “I guess that’s okay,” Joshua said but he didn’t really mean it.

  “I know I’m chicken but I can’t help it,” Andrew said. “Tommy Wilhelm could squash me with one hand if he made up his mind to do it.”

  “Not me,” Joshua said, and the more he thought about Tommy, the more determined he was to be promoted to fourth grade as soon as possible.

  One afternoon at Mrs. Goodwin’s house, waiting for the sweet brownies in the oven to cook through, Joshua told Mrs. Goodwin about Andrew and Tommy Wilhelm.

  “I can’t even count on my own best friend,” Joshua said.

  Mrs. Goodwin took the brownies out of the oven and put a hot one on a plate for Joshua. She took two brownies for herself and sat down in a chair next to Joshua with The Joy of Reading: 4.

  “I know exactly how you feel,” she said. “Sometimes the only person you can count on is yourself.”

  “Have you ever had a best friend let you down?” Joshua asked.

  “For a very long time Mr. Goodwin was my best friend,” Mrs. Goodwin said softly.

  “And now he won’t even take his stinking snake away. Right?”

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Goodwin said, and they both laughed.

  By late September, Mrs. Goodwin had made Joshua her permanent assistant in the 3X classroom. He read with the bottom reading group, helping the children with phonics. He showed the new boys who had not had multiplication how to multiply and worked on arithmetic facts with flash cards. He helped the girls build a tepee in the classroom, building most of the frame himself. He was the captain of the third-grade softball team, the best player in the class.

  “So what?” Tommy Wilhelm said when Paulie Soll, one of the new boys in 3X, told him about Joshua’s athletic skills. “Of course he’s good. He’s a year older than everyone and twice the size of most of you.”

  “You’re probably jealous of Josh,” Paulie Soll said to Tommy and then reported the conversation to Joshua.

  “You bet,” Tommy Wilhelm said. “I always wanted to spend the rest of my life in third grade.”

  But the fact was that in a matter of weeks, Joshua Bates had become the most respected boy in 3X. Obviously he was smart, they all thought, because Mrs. Goodwin needed his help with the other children. Certainly he was the best athlete. He had taught Paulie Soll multiplication and Janie Sears three-digit addition and Sally Stone to sound out words phonetically. Everybody wanted to sit next to him in music and art class, where there was a choice of seats. He was chosen to play the part of Daniel Boone in the class play, Mercy, Be Kind to the Indians, and he was the only third grader to memorize the entire poem “Casey at the Bat” and recite it in assembly.

  By October no one in third grade cared a bit that Joshua Bates had flunked.

  In early October the fourth-grade softball team challenged the third-grade softball team to a game at recess.

  “Tommy Wilhelm wants to cream you,” Andrew said. “He has had it in for you ever since your fight on the playground. He’s told us to stop at nothing.”

  The game was a good-spirited one, an even match until just before the recess bell when the score was four to four and Joshua was up at bat with one person out on the third-grade team.

  He hit what surely should have been a home run. He ran easily past first, into second, but just as he came to second base, Billy Nickel put his foot out and Joshua sailed over second base stomach down in the dirt and was tagged out.

  “He was tripped,” Paulie Soll said.

  “I saw it,” Sammy Laser said, pointing to Billy Nickel. “He did it on purpose.”

  “I did not,” Billy Nickel shouted. “Joshua Bates is a third-grade klutz. He tripped over his own feet.”

  Joshua picked himself up off the ground, wiped the dirt off his bloody knees, and walked to home-plate.

  Sammy Laser, the smallest boy in 3X, was up at bat.

  “I’m batting for Sammy,” Josh said.

  This time he hit a groundball that slid right through Tommy Wilhelm’s hands at shortstop, right past Billy Nickel at second base, and surely would have been caught easily by Andrew if he had not at that very moment screeched at the top of his lungs that a bee had stung him on the elbow and started dancing wildly around the outfield.

  So, just as the final bell for the end of recess rang, Joshua ran around the bases, sliding into home plate, and the third grade won five to four.

  “Did you get stung badly?” Joshua asked Andrew on the way home from school that day.

  “There aren’t any bees in Washington in October, you dolt,” Andrew said happily.

  Seven

  On October 11, Joshua was ten years old. He woke up on the morning of his birthday feeling perfectly terrible, wanting, as he told his mother later, to sleep all day.

  Birthdays in the Bates family were occasions for great celebration, and for days before the actual date Joshua had been having mixed feelings about being ten.

  “Happy birthday,” Amanda sang as she rushed into his bedroom while he was still under the covers. “Turn over for ten spanks.”

  But Joshua pulled the covers over his head.

  “Beat it,” he said in a voice Amanda recognized immediately as serious.

  “Brother,” Amanda said, going into her parents’ room. “Don’t go out of your way to say happy birthday to Josh.”

  When Mrs. Bates knocked on Joshua’s closed bedroom door, he said, “Don’t come in. I’m dressing.”

  “Since when has Joshua worried about dressing?” Mr. Bates asked on his way downstairs.

  Mrs. Bates shrugged.

  “Happy birthday, darling,” she called through the door, but Joshua didn’t respond.

  “Josh?” she called again.

  “I’m still dressing,” he said.

  In the mirror over his dresser, he looked at his face to check for significant changes since yesterday when he was nine. He had to bend down to see himself in the mirror, which his mother had hung when she redecorated his room for his seventh birthday. He looked, he decided, very much the same as the day before except bad-tempered, which he certainly was.

  Everybody was at the kitchen table for breakfast when Josh came downstairs. His mother was making scrambled eggs in the electric frying pan with her back to him and didn’t bother to turn around. His father was reading the sports page as usual and Amanda was counting the friendship pins she had gotten that week.

  “One hundred sixty-eight in all,” she said happily.

  “One hundred sixty-eight friends?” Mrs. Bates asked.

  “One hundred sixty-eight close friends,” Amanda said absolutely.

  “Brother,” Josh said. “I only have one close friend.” But no one seemed to have noticed when he slipped onto the bench next to his father except Georgianna, who bopped him pleasantly on the head with the salt shaker.

  “Some of the children in Mrs. Goodwin’s class are still eight,” Joshua said crossly.

  “Not very many,” Mrs. Bates said. She served a plate of eggs to everyone in
cluding Georgianna, who dumped hers carefully upside down on the high-chair tray.

  “Enough,” Joshua said. “Nobody is ten. Nobody in the entire third grade including Molly Beaker, who is mentally retarded.”

  “Pretend you’re nine today,” Amanda said as she fastened the rest of the friendship pins to the tie of her left tennis shoe.

  “What a terrific idea.” Josh said crossly.

  “We don’t need to celebrate your birthday, Josh,” Mrs. Bates said.

  “What about presents?” Amanda asked. “I bought a present for four ninety-five, not including the tax, at Snyder’s on Saturday.”

  “Well?” Mrs. Bates asked. “What do you think, Josh? You could spend this year without a birthday.”

  “I like that idea very much,” Joshua said. He cleared his plate and put it in the dishwasher.

  “No party tonight?” Mr. Bates asked sadly.

  “No party,” Josh said absolutely.

  There was a knock on the door and Joshua answered it. Andrew stood there in his rain gear ready for school.

  “So happy birthday, Joshua,” Andrew said. He handed Joshua a small box wrapped in E.T. wrapping paper with green ribbon.

  “That’s very nice of you, Andrew,” Mrs. Bates said.

  “The thing is, I’m sort of forgetting my birthday,” Josh said.

  “How come?” Andrew asked.

  “If I stay in third grade much longer, I’ll be as old as the teachers,” Josh said as he put his bookbag over his shoulder.

  “Are you forgetting presents too?” Andrew asked.

  “Well …” Joshua shook the box Andrew had given him. “I haven’t quite decided.”

  “You’ll never guess in a million years what I got you,” Andrew said.

  “Open it, Josh,” Amanda said.

  “Please,” Andrew said.

  “I guess I should since you went to all this trouble.”

  It was a night light for his dirt bike and he went out to the shed with Andrew to attach it.

  “Have you changed your mind about presents now?” Amanda asked, standing beside her brother in the shed.

  “Maybe,” Joshua said. “Probably so, but no party and I don’t want you to tell anyone at school that I’m ten.”

  Mrs. Goodwin was not in a good humor. She didn’t even smile when Joshua arrived at school. After reading class she called him to her desk to say that she was going to cancel tutoring for the rest of the week because of personal complications. Besides, she said, she had to write all the third-grade report cards.

  “Report cards?” Josh asked weakly. “I had forgotten about them. I suppose you’ll have to write one for me even though I’ve already been in the third grade once.”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Goodwin said.

  “I’ve had quite a lot of bad news today already, so I don’t want to talk about report cards,” Joshua said.

  “Neither do I.”

  At recess Mrs. Goodwin asked Joshua to stay after the other children left.

  “What kind of bad news have you had today?” she asked.

  “It’s not a big deal,” Josh said, flipping through the spelling tests on her desk.

  “We seem to get our bad news on the same day, Josh. Mine is that Mr. Goodwin has filed for divorce.” Mrs. Goodwin got up from her desk to write the homework assignment on the blackboard. “Today I feel a hundred years old, too old to teach school any longer—too fat, too wrinkled, too gray-haired.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “I’m not but that’s how I feel, so it may as well be true,” she said. “And what about your bad news?”

  “Well,” Joshua said, considering. “Today I’m ten years old.”

  Mrs. Goodwin began to smile. Her lips turned up, her eyes curved, her skin turned pink, and she began to laugh out loud. She reached over and hugged Joshua hard.

  “Is that your terrible news?” she asked.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” Joshua said fiercely.

  “I won’t tell a soul,” Mrs. Goodwin said.

  All day on October 11 no one said anything to Joshua about his birthday.

  “The fourth graders have probably forgotten,” Josh said to Andrew on the playground.

  “I didn’t think you wanted anyone to know,” Andrew said.

  “I don’t,” Joshua said, “but it seems strange to be ten and not ten at the same time.”

  The afternoon crawled by so slowly, Joshua thought it would never end. Reading went on and on. Sports was cancelled because of rain. There was a movie about lions but the film snapped on the first reel, so the third graders had an extra library period.

  “I told my family to forget my birthday,” Joshua told Mrs. Goodwin at the end of the school day.

  “No presents?”

  “Well, maybe, since I let them know so late. But no party.”

  He copied down his homework assignment, picked up his books, and got up to leave.

  “Thanks for not telling anyone,” he said to Mrs. Goodwin as he left.

  Andrew had already left when Joshua got downstairs. Amanda had piano lessons. He stopped at People’s Drugs and played four extra games of Pac Man wishing the day would hurry on to October 12 so he wouldn’t have to think about cancelling his birthday. He got a double-dip maple walnut cone, two packs of baseball cards, a new Dr. Strange comic, and a rubber doll that wet her pants for Georgianna.

  He looked at the clock over the newsstand and it was only four o’clock. His mother wouldn’t be home from her exercise class until five.

  From the pay phone outside People’s Drugs he called Andrew, but Andrew was at a friend’s house and wouldn’t be back until after dinner. He called Mrs. Goodwin and to his great surprise nobody answered the telephone. In desperation, he called his father’s office, but the secretary said his father had left at three and was not expected back. Mr. Bates was a very regular man and never left his office at three o’clock. At least, Joshua thought, if he went home Plutarch would be sleeping on the living room sofa. Already it was dark as night outside and Joshua was beginning to think he would die of loneliness.

  All the lights were off in the house when Joshua arrived and opened the front door, but there was a strange and wonderful sweet smell in the hall and he sensed that he was not alone.

  “Plutarch,” he called absently, although he knew perfectly well that Plutarch never came when he was called. “Mama?” But there was no answer.

  He went straight upstairs to his room, dropped his bookbag on his desk, fed his goldfish, and went back down to the kitchen. He was just opening the freezer door to check for yogurt sticks when he heard Amanda’s voice from the living room and then his mother’s and then his father’s.

  “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Joshua, happy birthday to you.”

  And when he went into the living room, his heart beating like a small drum, the room was full of balloons and streamers in every color of the rainbow and a poster saying HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR JOSHUA, HOWEVER OLD YOU CHOOSE TO BE.

  The coffee table was stacked with presents and there in the middle was a large chocolate birthday cake.

  “All day I’ve been afraid you really wouldn’t have a party,” Joshua said.

  “Well, we did,” Mrs. Bates said happily.

  Eight

  One afternoon Joshua’s first-quarter report card was on the radiator on top of the rest of the mail when he came home from school to get his bike. He picked up the familiar brown envelope with the intention of opening it right away before his mother came home from the market with Georgianna. But just the feel of the envelope in his hand filled him with the terrors of his failures in past years. He dropped the envelope behind the radiator.

  “You got your report card,” Amanda called from the living room, where she was sitting in the rocker reading her own report. Joshua didn’t answer. He went into the kitchen, took a raspberry yogurt stick from the freezer, and started out the back door to the shed where he kept his dirt b
ike.

  “Bye,” he called as he left, not anxious for a conversation with brilliant Amanda.

  “Don’t you want to read your report?” Amanda asked, following him.

  “Mine isn’t there,” he said quickly.

  “I saw it when I came home. It was just under mine.”

  “Well, it’s not there now,” he said, exiting quickly. “How many subjects did you flunk?”

  “I got a B in language arts.”

  “Big deal,” Josh said. “If you’re not careful, you’ll be held back.”

  And he rode down Wisconsin Avenue to R Street as fast as his bike would go.

  Mrs. Goodwin was packing book boxes when he arrived. The small house was full of the sweet smell of sugar cookies baking, and on the floor of the living room next to the boxes of books, the boa constrictor slithered back and forth in its glass aquarium.

  “So,” Mrs. Goodwin said, as she sealed a box with masking tape. “Mr. Goodwin is finally going to be moving his things out of the house—on Halloween night, of all times.”

  Joshua followed her into the kitchen, where she took a tray of sugar cookies out of the oven and gave one to Joshua while it was still soft and hot.

  “Are you going to be divorced immediately?” he asked.

  “I suppose we are. Mr. Goodwin hasn’t told me his plans. Only that he wants to live alone.”

  She sat down next to Joshua and opened The Joy of Reading: 4 to a story about a boy and his grandfather.

  “I suppose it’s just as difficult to be a grownup as it is to be a child,” Joshua said.

  “Sometimes it is. This year for example,” Mrs. Goodwin said as she settled down next to him.

  “At least you don’t flunk,” Joshua said.

  “That’s not necessarily true. There’re all kinds of flunking.”

  That afternoon they read story after story, until Joshua, full to the brim with cookies and hot chocolate and love for Mrs. Goodwin, was reading with as much ease as anyone in fourth grade could possibly read.

  Afterward he helped Mrs. Goodwin pack book boxes and move the furniture which the movers would be taking to Mr. Goodwin’s house. In one box Mrs. Goodwin packed two pictures from the library and took a photograph of her two sons when they were small off the desk to pack.