The Flunking of Joshua T. Bates

by Susan Shreve

  “Jonathan was exactly your age there,” she said, handing the photograph to Joshua. “He was terrible in school. I had to go in to see his third-grade teacher every week. He couldn’t spell. He refused to learn his multiplication tables. And now he’s a doctor.”

  She put the photograph in the box with the pictures.

  “You won’t be in the third grade forever,” she said, ruffling Joshua’s hair. “Did you get your report card?”

  Joshua hesitated.

  “Well, it should be there when you get home,” Mrs. Goodwin said. “I think you’ll be surprised.”

  The brown envelope was still behind the radiator when he got home from Mrs. Goodwin’s house. He slid it out, tucked it under his T-shirt, and went to his bedroom to read it. He was astonished.

  He had an A in everything except spelling and reading.

  “Joshua is doing excellent work in third grade,” Mrs. Goodwin had written. “I plan to give him a standardized test in November just before Thanksgiving. There is a chance, if he does well, that he will be promoted before the end of the year.”

  “So how’d you say you did in language arts?” he asked Amanda, who was practicing handstands against the front door.

  “B. B in math too. And a C-plus in history. It’s the worst report I’ve had in my whole life.”

  “Bad luck,” Joshua said and he went into the dining room, where his mother was putting supper on the table.

  “My report card came,” he said casually. He lifted Georgianna out of her high chair, and took a bite of the soggy arrowroot cookie in her plump hand.

  “Oh good. I hoped it had come,” his mother said. “Have you looked at it?”

  “Yup,” Joshua said, shrugging his shoulders to conceal his great pleasure. “It’s not bad.”

  Nine

  By late October the dark mornings of the school day had begun to diminish entirely for Joshua. On Halloween morning he awoke to bright autumn sunlight in his window and realized to his very great surprise that he had slept the night without a nightmare of spelling tests and lost math papers and teachers flying like demons through the open windows of his room; that he didn’t have a stomachache for the first time since Labor Day; and when he got out of bed his knees didn’t fold like spaghetti beneath him as he anticipated the terrors of another morning at Mirch Elementary.

  He looked at himself in the mirror over his dresser. He was looking quite wonderful, he thought. He tried on his baseball cap so the bill just shaded his eyes and decided he was actually beginning to take on the appearance of a professional baseball player. He could imagine himself at twenty years old playing shortstop for the Orioles.

  At breakfast that morning he had seconds on eggs and two pieces of toast.

  “Well, Josh, you must be feeling pretty well,” Mr. Bates said.

  “I’m feeling terrific,” Josh said. “Before you know it, I may pass straight through third grade into fourth.”

  On the morning of Halloween, Tommy Wilhelm came into the third-grade classroom dressed as a pirate with pumpkin cookies from the fourth graders to pass out.

  “So how’s third grade going second time around?” he asked Joshua.

  “Swell,” Josh said, not looking up for fear that if he saw a smirk on Tommy Wilhelm’s face, he would be inspired to knock it off with his fist.

  Mrs. Goodwin, who had been until that very moment correcting math tests at her desk, stood up and motioned Tommy Wilhelm to sit down in the empty desk next to Josh.

  “I understand you haven’t learned to behave like a fourth grader, so you’re going to spend some time in third grade with me.”

  “That’s not true,” Tommy said, alarmed. “Nobody told me.”

  “I’m telling you now,” Mrs. Goodwin said. She reached into her bookcase, took out The Joy of Reading: 3, and opened it on the desk in front of Tommy.

  “I’d like you to read aloud, please.”

  Tommy began to read, but he was so shaken by the terrible news of his demoting that he halted at every word.

  Mrs. Goodwin shook her head sadly.

  “I simply don’t know how you were promoted from Mrs. Nice’s class,” she said.

  “I got all A’s. Well, nearly all A’s,” Tommy said desperately.

  Mrs. Goodwin rolled her eyes. She handed Tommy a copy of the math test she had given to the third grade that morning.

  “Try this for me,” she said.

  “It’s a cinch,” Tommy said, and he completed the math test as fast as he could.

  When Mrs. Goodwin corrected it, she handed it back with a fat red 60 on the top of the page.

  “Not cinchy enough,” she said.

  Tommy Wilhelm sat in his pirate costume at the desk next to Joshua. He did third-grade social studies and language arts and math. He missed recess with the fourth grade and the Halloween party. By lunch time he was almost in tears.

  “Please let me go back to my own class now,” he said to Mrs. Goodwin.

  She raised her eyebrows but made no response.

  “You must be the dumbest boy in the fourth grade,” Paulie Soll said.

  “I’m smart enough when I’m in my own class,” Tommy said.

  “We just made up a new rule,” Sammy Laser said. “Anyone in third grade for more than one class can’t play with fourth graders for a week.”

  “Please.” Tommy Wilhelm, his face as bright as cranberries, looked desperately at Joshua. “Make them lay off.”

  Joshua looked up from his reading. “How come you need my protection?” he asked.

  “I swear on a stack of Bibles I’ll never make fun of you again.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “Ask Mrs. Goodwin to let me go back to my own class,” Tommy begged.

  “Ask her yourself.”

  “If you let me go back to my class, I promise I’ll never bother Josh again for the rest of my life.”

  “No bargains, Tommy. You’ll go back when I’m ready for you to go back.”

  When the bell rang, Mrs. Goodwin dismissed Tommy from the class first. He had to walk straight across the front of the classroom in front of the whole third grade sitting in dead silence for his departure. Just as the door shut behind him, Paulie Soll, who could see through the glass, reported that Tommy had darted into the boys’ room, where according to Paulie, he would probably cry his eyes out.

  “I doubt you’ll have much more real trouble from Tommy,” Mrs. Goodwin said to Joshua as he left for lunch.

  “Thanks a lot,” Joshua said.

  When Joshua arrived at Mrs. Goodwin’s house on the afternoon of Tommy Wilhelm’s humiliation, there was an orange Round the Clock moving van in front of the house and two movers were carrying the red chintz couch out the front door. Mrs. Goodwin stood on the porch holding the glass aquarium with the boa constrictor; a small balding man with a thin-haired mustache was directing the movers.

  While Joshua watched, they carried out a bed, a dresser, a rocking chair, the kitchen table, the Chinese rug from the dining room, the large desk from the study, two chairs, boxes and boxes of books, and countless lamps. Then the balding man took the aquarium from Mrs. Goodwin, got in a red Volkswagen with bucket seats, and drove off.

  Joshua followed Mrs. Goodwin into the house. She was very quiet. In the living room she looked in the cage of the mother finch at the two finch babies happily pecking at each other. She kneeled down to pet the yellow Labrador, who raised his head and opened one eye but without enthusiasm. In the kitchen she put up a card table where the kitchen table had been and unfolded two chairs.

  “So,” she said with great tiredness. “Sit down and get to work.”

  Joshua sat down.

  “I didn’t make cookies,” she said, “because of the move.” She poured him a glass of milk and sat down beside him.

  She looked suddenly very old, older than his grandmother, centuries old, the way her skin fell in pockets and her eyes, puffy with crying, were lost in the hollow sockets of her head. Joshu
a felt terrible for her. Instinctively, he leaned against her warm fleshy body with his weight, as if by his touch she could be young again.

  Ten

  Two days before Thanksgiving vacation, Joshua took the standardized tests in reading, math, and spelling to determine if he was ready to go into fourth grade.

  “I’ve got my fingers crossed,” Mrs. Goodwin said when she gave him the tests to take in the library.

  He did the tests in a whiz, even the spelling. On the playground at recess he hit a double in softball which Tommy Wilhelm, at shortstop, missed by a mile.

  “I quit playing the third-grade team,” Tommy said crossly after the game.

  “After today I’m not in third grade any longer,” Joshua said. “I took a test for fourth grade this morning and aced it.”

  “I’ll believe that when I see it,” Tommy Wilhelm said.

  The next morning Joshua woke up with a familiar sadness. It was a gray November day striped silver with a thin rain and he didn’t want to get out of bed and go to school.

  “Sick?” Amanda asked, standing in the doorway to his room already dressed for school.

  “Homesick,” Joshua said out of the blue, but homesick was exactly how he felt.

  He had been homesick before. Every September since kindergarten, he was homesick during the first few days of school. And then, the summer he was eight, he had visited his uncle’s farm in Michigan for a month. The second his plane took off from Washington National Airport, whizzing over the Potomac River toward Michigan, he had suddenly felt ill with a terrible sadness. For a while after his uncle and cousins met him at the airport in Detroit, he felt better, but as soon as the sun went down at his uncle’s farm and Joshua climbed between the covers of his new bed, the sickness came back in waves until he thought he would sink beneath the undertow.

  “I feel empty a lot of the time,” he wrote to his mother the first week he was in Michigan. “It’s as if half of me spilled out somewhere.”

  “You’re homesick,” his mother wrote back. “Eventually you’ll feel better.”

  And Joshua did. Every day he was a little stronger, as if he were recovering from a virus.

  Then to his great surprise, when the month was over and his uncle took him to the airport in Detroit, the same familiar sadness came over him as the plane took off for Washington. For the first few days back home, he lay around the house without the energy to play ball or ride his dirt bike or even play soldiers by himself.

  “I miss the farm,” he told his mother.

  “I’m sure you do, darling,” his mother said.

  “I mean I feel homesick for the farm and it’s not even my home.”

  “I know, Josh. Homesickness will probably happen to you a lot in your life—almost every time you have to leave someplace or someone you love.”

  “Brother,” Joshua said. “That’s very bad news.”

  “Josh is homesick,” Amanda said at the breakfast table.

  Mr. Bates raised his eyebrows.

  “For what?” he asked.

  Joshua shrugged. “That’s how I felt when I woke up this morning.”

  He couldn’t eat his eggs at breakfast, and on the way to school his eyes filled unaccountably with tears.

  “Brother, Joshua,” Amanda said. “What is the matter with you?”

  “Beats me,” Josh said and skipped a pebble straight across Lowell Street.

  He guessed that he was not homesick but sick with fear that he had failed the test.

  “So what if you don’t pass, Josh,” Amanda said, trying to be of some comfort. “It won’t be the worst thing in the world.”

  “The trouble is that right now I don’t want to leave third grade and I don’t want to stay there either,” Josh said.

  Mrs. Goodwin was sitting at her desk correcting the reading assignments when Josh came in. She called hello but she didn’t look up as if, he decided, she didn’t want to tell him the bad news.

  He sat down at his desk, opened his bookbag, and took out a stack of baseball trading cards, but he couldn’t concentrate on the players. He read over his book report for second period and his composition on Indian ballgames for social studies. From time to time he glanced at Mrs. Goodwin, who seemed not in the least interested in telling him how he had done on the test for fourth grade.

  Maybe, he thought, she hadn’t had time to correct it. Or she had just checked his spelling and thrown up her hands in sorrow and frustration at his failure.

  “Mrs. Goodwin,” he said, unable to wait any longer. “Did you happen to check my test?”

  She looked up from her correcting with an expression of real sadness. “Yes, Josh. I corrected it last night and you did wonderfully.” She handed him the test booklet to look over. “Better than I ever dreamed you would do.”

  “So I’m in fourth grade?”

  “So you are,” she said, careful not to let on how much she would miss him. “Congratulations, Joshua.” She shook his hand.

  “Congratulations to us both,” Josh said.

  “So I passed,” he said to Amanda on the playground at recess.

  “Josh will be in fourth grade after Thanksgiving,” Amanda told Tommy Wilhelm.

  “I did fifth-grade work on the test,” Joshua said cockily.

  “Maybe you’ll graduate from high school at eleven,” Tommy said.

  “Brother,” Andrew said on the way home. “This is the happiest day in my life.”

  “I passed,” Joshua called to his mother as he burst in the front door of his house.

  “Josh pass,” Georgianna said happily.

  And he sat down at the kitchen table with Plutarch on his lap to celebrate with a hot fudge sundae.

  “No more tutoring,” he said. “I can play outside all afternoon.”

  “Or play Pac Man,” Amanda said.

  “Or ride my bike to Hearst Playground and play softball.”

  “Just be home at five-thirty as usual,” his mother said.

  So Joshua put on his rain parka, went to the shed, got his dirt bike, and rode off in the direction of People’s Drugs, but he didn’t stop at People’s. He rode down Wisconsin Avenue at a pace, screeching to a stop at the crossroads, and turned left at R Street. He locked his bike on the familiar birch tree and went up the steps.

  Mrs. Goodwin had just settled down with a cup of tea, a piece of chocolate cake, and a Mounds bar when Joshua rang her front door.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m very glad to see you.”

  She poured him a cup of tea and sliced a piece of cake. Then she pulled up a chair and sat down across from him.

  “This morning when I woke up, I was homesick,” Joshua said to her.

  “You know, Joshua,” Mrs. Goodwin said, halving her Mounds bar with him. “So was I.”

  Trout and Me

  by Susan Shreve

  Ben has always been a good kid; it’s just that things keep happening that get him sent to the principal’s office—ever since first grade, when he tried to flush Mary Sue Briggs’s favorite purple teddy bear down the toilet after she made fun of his lisp. Now that he’s in fifth grade, things are a little better, until the day Trout shows up in class and attaches himself to Ben like Velcro. At first Ben is afraid Trout’s badness will rub off on him, but soon he starts to enjoy Trout’s pranks, and then they’re in more trouble than ever. When the school and parents decide it’s time to do something about the boys, it’s up to Ben to come to his friend’s rescue and show everyone that Trout isn’t all bad: he’s just a kid. And Ben is just a kid too, trying his best to do what’s right.

  “Funny and honest.”—Booklist

  “In this moving novel … Shreve introduces characters of uncommon dimension and complexity—and leaves readers with subtle issues to ponder.”

  —Publishers Weekly, Starred

  Under the Watsons’ Porch

  by Susan Shreve

  Twelve-year-old Ellie Tremont is b-o-r-e-d, and she wishes something, anything, would happen to make
her feel alive. So when fourteen-year-old Tommy Bowers moves in next door, with his floppy black hair, lanky swagger, and mysterious past, Ellie knows her summer is about to get a lot more interesting.

  When Tommy suggests they start a camp for the kids on their street under their elderly neighbors’ porch, Ellie quickly agrees. And when Tommy gives her a diamond necklace that he says he bought, that he says is real, Ellie is suspicious—but smitten. By the time Ellie’s parents step in and ask her to stop spending so much time with Tommy—he’s a troubled kid, they say—she’s already given him her heart.

  “This novel … renders the mundane magical, making seeds sprout love and lollipops.”

  —Booklist, Starred

  “[Shreve] tenderly evokes the thrill and anxiety of first love.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred

  A BOOKLIST TOP 10 YOUTH ROMANCE

  Joshua T. Bates Takes Charge

  by Susan Shreve

  Joshua T. Bates is no stranger to bullies. After he flunked the third grade, Joshua became big Tommy Wilhelm’s prime target. But it’s fifth grade now, and Tommy and his gang, the Nerds Out, have a new victim Sean O’Malley, the dorky kid with the Mickey Mouse lunchbox He’s little, he’s wimpy, and—to Joshua’s relief—he’s taking up all of the gang’s time

  The trouble is, Sean thinks Joshua is his new best friend. Now Joshua has a tough decision to make. Should he stick up for the geek—and risk his own neck?

  “A perceptive story that makes it plain what it’s like to be an outcast and also what it takes to be a hero.”

  —Booklist

  “Welcome back, Joshua T. Bates!”

  —School Library Journal

  There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom

  by Louis Sachar

  “Give me a dollar or I’ll spit on you.” That’s Bradley Chalkers for you. He’s the oldest kid in the fifth grade He tells enormous lies He picks fights with girls, and the teachers say he has “serious behavior problems.” No one likes him—except Carla, the new school counselor. She thinks Bradley is sensitive and generous, and she even enjoys his farfetched stories. Carla knows that Bradley can change, if only he weren’t afraid to try.