Sam the Man & the Dragon Van Plan

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  Sam didn’t think that at all. What he thought was that after they repaired the book, he should sneak it back into Annabelle’s wicker trunk and hope that she never looked at it or asked about it again.

  “Sam?” Miss Fran was still looking at Sam, only now her look was a question that said, You’re going to do the right thing, aren’t you?

  Sam sighed. Sometimes he hated doing the right thing. “I guess so,” he told Miss Fran.

  “Okay, then, let’s get started!”

  Miss Fran put the pieces of her silhouette project in a large plastic envelope to make room for the three of them to work. “What we’ll need is some glue, some water, and a paintbrush,” she told Sam and Gavin. She handed Gavin a small plastic cup. “Can you fill this up at the sink, please? And can you please not splash water on the paintings that are drying on the counter next to the sink?”

  Gavin looked insulted. “I am the most careful person in the universe,” he said. “I never splash.”

  Miss Fran turned to Sam. “Your job is to put some glue into this dish.”

  Sam squeezed some white glue onto the blue dish Miss Fran put in front of him. When Gavin gave Miss Fran the cup of water, she poured a little bit into the dish and then mixed it up with a paintbrush. Then she poured in a little more and mixed a little more.

  “I’m thinning the glue,” she explained. “If you get too much glue on the paper, it’s going to get all gunky, if you know what I mean.”

  Sam and Gavin nodded. They knew exactly what she meant.

  “Good,” Miss Fran said. “Okay, I think we’re ready to start. First we’re going to remove the yarn that’s holding the book together so we can work on the torn pages one by one.” She handed Sam a pair of scissors. They weren’t her very sharp scissors, but they still looked pretty sharp to Sam. “I don’t think we can pull out the yarn without tearing the cover even more, so we’re going to clip it. You up for the job, Sam?”

  “I think so,” Sam said. He snipped the first piece of yarn, careful not to cut the cover. It worked! He pulled out the yarn and then cut the second piece and the third and fourth pieces and pulled them out too.

  “Well done!” Miss Fran said. “Now that we’ve freed the cover, I’m going to put it under that pile of art books over there. We’ll see if we can’t press those crinkles out.”

  “Do you think we can?” Sam asked hopefully.

  Miss Fran carried the cover over to the windowsill. “It’s not going to be perfect, Sam. But we can make it better.”

  Better was okay, Sam guessed. But would it be good enough?

  “Now on to the glue!” Miss Fran said when she returned to the table. “I’ll be in charge of this part, if that’s okay with you guys.”

  “It’s okay with me,” Sam said.

  “I guess it’s okay,” Gavin said. “Although I am an excellent gluer.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” Miss Fran said. “But this is a special process.” She held up page one of the book. “When you look closely, can you see that the torn parts of the paper are a little fuzzy? That’s the paper fiber. What I’m going to do is paint a very light layer of glue on the bottom fuzzy part, and then I’ll press the top part down onto the bottom part. With any luck the fibers will stick back together so that you can’t see the tear anymore.”

  “Wow, it looks perfect!” Gavin said when Miss Fran finished. “I want to learn how to do that!”

  “You just did,” Miss Fran said. She turned to Sam. “You know what, Sam? Why don’t you do the next page?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Sam. “I don’t want to mess it up.”

  “You won’t,” Miss Fran said. “And maybe if you help repair Annabelle’s book, you might not feel so bad about tearing it.”

  Maybe, Sam thought. But maybe not. Still, he could tell from looking at Miss Fran that she wasn’t going to let him say no.

  “Start with just a dab of glue, Sam,” Miss Fran said when he picked up the brush. “Get a feel for how it feels, if you know what I mean.”

  Sam didn’t know what she meant.

  “This paper is art paper, so it will feel different than painting glue onto regular white paper. It’s not as smooth.”

  Miss Fran was right. The paper felt rough. It felt like it wanted to stop the paintbrush from painting glue on it. Sam had already learned his lesson about pushing too hard, though, so he pretended the paintbrush was a feather he was dusting the paper with.

  “That’s right, Sam,” Miss Fran said. “Nice and easy.”

  When Sam finished painting on the glue, he pushed the top fuzzy part down onto the bottom fuzzy part. When he took his finger away, he could hardly see where the tear was.

  “It worked!” he said. “I fixed the tear!”

  “High-five, Sam the Man,” Gavin said. “You’re a genius!”

  Sam high-fived Gavin, and then he high-fived Miss Fran.

  “Come back at lunch, Sam,” she told him. “You can finish the other pages then.”

  “Could I come with him?” Gavin asked. “I’d like to tear up some sheets of paper and glue them back together.”

  “I’ll find you some scrap paper,” Miss Fran told him.

  Sam and Gavin walked back to Mr. Pell’s classroom. “I like a teacher who lets you tear stuff up,” Gavin said.

  “I like a teacher who helps you glue stuff back together,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, that’s a good kind of teacher to have,” Gavin agreed.

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “I’m pretty sure it’s the best.”

  No Bad News Is Good News

  “What’s the best way to give somebody bad news?” Sam asked Mr. Stockfish that afternoon as they walked over to Mrs. Kerner’s house.

  “What kind of bad news?” Mr. Stockfish asked.

  “Say someone let you borrow something really important to them, and you sort of messed it up,” Sam said. “That kind of bad news.”

  “I see,” Mr. Stockfish said. “You mean the kind of bad news that’s going to get you in trouble.”

  “Or at least make Annabelle really, really mad at me,” Sam agreed.

  Mr. Stockfish’s eyes widened. “Bad news that makes Annabelle mad is very bad news indeed.”

  “I know,” Sam said glumly. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell her. She might never find out.”

  “But you’d know,” Mr. Stockfish said. “What did you mess up?”

  “A book that Annabelle made about dragons. I fixed it, so she might not even notice that I squished the cover and tore some of the pages.”

  “Still, you’d know,” Mr. Stockfish repeated.

  Boy, everybody seemed to think that he’d feel bad if he didn’t tell Annabelle the truth. But Sam wondered if that was really true. He’d kept other secrets from his sister and felt okay. For instance, Sam had never told Annabelle that he’d accidentally flushed her green frog eraser down the toilet. He hadn’t meant to. He just wanted to see it go round and round. Somehow he thought the eraser would bounce out before it went down the hole.

  It hadn’t.

  As far as Sam knew, Annabelle never noticed her frog eraser was missing. Did he feel bad about flushing the frog down the toilet? Yes. Did he feel bad that Annabelle didn’t know that he’d flushed it down the toilet? Not really, no.

  So why did he need to tell Annabelle about the book if she might never notice something was wrong with it?

  Still, if she did notice, he needed to have a plan. “You haven’t told me the best way to give somebody bad news,” Sam said as he and Mr. Stockfish reached Mrs. Kerner’s backyard. “In case I decide to tell Annabelle about her book.”

  “You should tell her, Sam,” Mr. Stockfish said, opening the backyard gate. “Honesty is the best policy.”

  “Maybe,” Sam said. “But what’s the best way to be honest?”

  “Let me think about it,” Mr. Stockfish said. “Spending time with the chickens always helps me think better.”

  When they reached the backyard, they found Mrs. Kerne
r sitting in one of the lawn chairs by the chicken coop. “Hello there!” she called. “Sam, I hear you’re getting a new car!”

  “Actually, we’re getting an old car. My dad says we can use it to take the chickens to the vet if we need to,” Sam said as he opened up the coop to let the chickens out. “It’s a used new van so it’s okay if it gets some feathers in it.”

  “Maybe you could paint feathers on the outside of the van,” Mr. Stockfish said. He sat down in a lawn chair and settled Leroy on his lap. “The entire van could have a chicken theme.”

  “I think a dragon theme would be better,” Sam said. “I’m working on a design. Did you know that before birds were birds, they were dragons? I mean, like a million years ago.”

  “I believe that before birds were birds, they were dinosaurs,” Mrs. Kerner corrected Sam. “Not dragons.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Sam said.

  Mr. Stockfish cleared his throat. “Sam, you know that dragons are make-believe, don’t you?”

  “I’m pretty sure they were real,” Sam said. “They came after the dinosaurs, but before dragonflies. And birds.”

  “What’s real is this chicken,” Mr. Stockfish said, patting Leroy’s tail feathers. “And a chicken, being a bird, has its origins in theropod dinosaurs. Do you know what the word ‘theropod’ means?”

  Sam shook his head.

  “ ‘Bird foot,’ ” Mr. Stockfish said. “Well, some say it means ‘beast foot,’ but I beg to differ. Look it up when you get home. And look up dragons, too.”

  “It’s going to be bad news when I look up dragons, isn’t it?” Sam asked, slumping into the chair next to Mr. Stockfish.

  “Only if you believe dragons are real,” Mr. Stockfish said.

  “This has been a bad-news kind of day,” Sam said. “First, Annabelle’s book, and now fake dragons.”

  “But you repaired Annabelle’s book so it’s almost good as new,” Mr. Stockfish pointed out. “Which is good news.”

  Maybe, Sam thought. Except almost good as new wasn’t good enough.

  “Hey, Sam!” Sam’s dad called from the driveway when Sam got back from dropping off Mr. Stockfish. He was standing next to a very clean, very white minivan. “What do you think of our almost new, sort-of-used van?”

  The first thing Sam noticed was that the Grahams’ new-used white minivan looked a lot like a delivery truck, which wasn’t nearly as good as looking like a monster truck or even a mini–monster truck, but at least it was better than looking like a plain old minivan.

  The second thing he noticed was that this white minivan needed some serious decorating, just like he’d thought it would.

  Sam bet his parents had noticed that too. Still, he thought he should drop a few hints when his dad opened up the minivan doors so Sam could see inside.

  “It’s nice in here,” Sam told his dad. “But I bet it will look even nicer when Annabelle covers the seats with leopard skin. Maybe we can spiff up the outside, too.”

  “I always thought ‘spiff’ was a funny word,” Sam’s dad said as he rubbed at a smudge on the dashboard. “What does it mean, exactly?”

  Sam shrugged. “I think it means to make something a little more . . . well, a little more exciting, a little more fun to look at, in a nice way.”

  “Never a bad idea, Sam the Man,” his dad said.

  Sam wished that Gavin had been there to high-five. It was only a matter of time before his monster dragon van dreams came true.

  A school bus pulled up in front of their house. Annabelle! What if the first thing she did when she saw Sam was ask about her book? Sam popped out of the van, deciding he’d better take charge of this situation.

  “Look at our new car!” Sam called out as soon as his sister stepped off the bus. “It’s white!”

  “I can see that, Sam,” Annabelle said, rolling her eyes like she thought Sam was acting weird.

  “I’m not acting weird,” Sam blurted out. “I’m just excited about our new minivan!”

  Annabelle stared at him. “Did I say you were acting weird?”

  “Hey, Anna Bana—Belle,” Sam’s dad said. “Come look at the new car. Even though it’s used, it actually has that new-car smell. There’s a spray for that. Climb inside and you’ll see.”

  Dad to the rescue! Sam leaned back against the side of the minivan, relieved. He’d almost blown his cover. Was it going to be like this for the rest of his life? Would he spend every day trying to keep Annabelle from asking about her book or looking at it too closely?

  Maybe he should just tell her. It might be easier than being nervous about it all the time. But if he told her, he had to do it the right way. What had Mrs. Kerner said this afternoon when they’d talked about the best way to give bad news? Oh yeah—that you should always give a present. She said that if Sam had to give her bad news, he should give her a box of chocolate, too.

  “I like a steak,” Mr. Stockfish had said. “Medium rare, with a baked potato and green beans. But don’t overcook the green beans, or that will make the bad news even worse.”

  Sam thought about this now. He guessed Annabelle liked chocolate, but she liked other things better, like computer games and goats. Sam couldn’t afford a computer game, and his parents had said Annabelle couldn’t have a goat until she bought her own house. Too bad Sam couldn’t afford to buy Annabelle a house. Or—even better—a pink monster truck!

  Sam knew Annabelle would forgive him if he said he was really, really sorry and then handed her the keys to a pink monster truck.

  But he couldn’t afford that either.

  Sam sighed. And then his eyes opened wide. Wait a minute!

  He didn’t need to buy a monster truck.

  All he needed was some pink paint.

  An Impractical Plan

  “What’s the best way to paint metal?” Sam asked his dad at dinner. “Like if you wanted to paint a car?”

  “I’m pretty sure acrylic paint is best,” Sam’s dad said.

  “You’re not thinking about painting the car, are you?” Sam’s mom asked. She sounded worried. “I know the new van has a scratch or two on it, but I sort of prefer it that way.”

  “In case you hit another bus,” Annabelle said agreeably.

  Their mom’s cheeks turned pink. “Yes, Annabelle. In case I hit another bus. Which I won’t.”

  “The thing I’m painting is a surprise so I can’t say what it is,” Sam said. He turned to his dad. “Do you have any acrylic paint I could use?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t, Sam the Man,” his dad said. “But we could take a ride to the store after dinner, give the old minivan a spin.”

  “You mean the new minivan,” his mom said.

  “Or the new used minivan,” Annabelle suggested.

  Sam put his napkin on his plate. “I’m starting to get a headache,” he said to his dad.

  “I’m with you, Sam the Man,” his dad said. “Let’s hit the road!”

  The white minivan didn’t exactly smell like a new car, Sam thought as he climbed into the backseat, but it did smell nice. It smelled like lemon dishwashing soap mixed with pine needles.

  “I wonder what dragons smell like,” Sam said to his dad. “Or smelled like, before they went extinct.”

  Sam’s dad started the car. “I’ve got good news for you, Sam the Man. Dragons never went extinct.”

  Really? This was the best news Sam had gotten all day!

  “Of course, that’s because dragons never existed in the first place,” Sam’s dad continued. “Except in people’s imaginations.”

  Sam hated of-courses. Of-courses always went in front of bad news. But wait a minute. What did his dad just say? Sam thought about it.

  “So if something exists in your imagination, it can never go extinct?” Sam asked his dad after he finished thinking.

  “That’s right, Sam the Man.”

  “So that’s good news, right?”

  His dad nodded. “I think so.”

  Sam thought
so too. “Well, in my imagination dragons smell like fireplaces the day after you’ve burned a fire. Sort of smoky and cold.”

  “That sounds about right,” Sam’s dad said. “It’s a good smell, but also a little sad.”

  “Yeah, dragons do smell a little sad,” Sam agreed. “Maybe because people are scared of them. Maybe dragons are nicer than we think.”

  Sam liked having talks like this with his dad. His mom was nice to talk to too, but she was a lot more practical than his dad. His mom wanted to talk about whether or not it was time to get Sam new shoes or what kind of pie she should bake for Thanksgiving dinner at Grammy’s house—apple or pumpkin. His dad liked to talk about stuff like if words had colors, what color each word would be.

  Sam’s dad just seemed more interested in the important stuff in life, Sam thought.

  “So what exactly are you going to paint with this paint we’re getting?” Sam’s dad asked as they pulled into the shopping center parking lot. “You’re not really thinking about painting the van, are you? Because first of all, that would take a whole lot of paint.”

  Sam took a deep breath. He let it out. Was it time to tell his dad the real plan?

  “This paint is for something else,” he said. “But I would like to paint the minivan, too. In fact, I would like to paint it to look like a dragon. It would be a monster minivan.”

  “Like a monster truck, only a van?” his dad asked.

  Sam nodded, feeling excited. His dad understood his plan!

  “That’s a really cool idea, Sam the Man,” his dad said.

  Yes! His dad was going to say yes!

  “Of course . . . ,” his dad continued.

  Sam felt his excitement disappear as soon as he heard “of course.” He closed his eyes and waited for the bad news.

  Sam’s dad put his arm around Sam’s shoulder. “Of course, I don’t think it’s very practical.”

  Practical? Who cared about practical? Maybe Sam’s mom did, but his dad understood about dragons and monster trucks. His dad was the least practical person Sam knew if he didn’t count Gavin.