“Yeah,” Chance replied. “She likes thistles.”
For a long moment Mark looked at Chance. Chance worked hard to hold his gaze. Finally, something changed in Mark’s eyes.
“All right, kid. I gotta get some sleep. You want to keep her for the night, be my guest, but we’re gonna take her back to school together in the morning.”
“Sure,” Chance said and, not wanting to risk another change of heart, hastily left the room.
Chapter 14
There was no way to hide the fact that the missing caterpillar had returned. Chance had put her back in the tiny plastic container on top of the leftover crumbs of food. He added a few shreds of thistle plant for good measure and held the container tight in his fist inside his pocket.
Mark had insisted on carrying it the whole way to school, to keep Matilda safe, he said, making anger bubble up in Chance once again. But they had arrived before the bell, and Mark had been unable to resist the soccer field, so, “Here you go, kid,” he had said, and off he had gone.
Chance had the school door open before the bell had finished ringing, but other kids were close behind, some with parents in tow. They were all excited about the butterflies now too. Parents crowded into the classroom with their children to see the chrysalides slowly transforming inside their thin skins.
Once inside, Chance walked straight to the ledge where the slow bloomers were. He had Matilda out of his pocket now. He didn’t have much time. Once they had seen the chrysalides, the kids always came en masse to see if any more caterpillars had attached. With his back to the butterfly bush, Chance whisked the lid off Matilda’s tiny cup. Luckily he had kept it, and it still had some goop inside along with all the weird thready bits that the caterpillars left behind as they moved around. He grabbed the bits of thistle between his fingers and shoved them in his pocket.
“Time to attach, Matilda,” he breathed as he snapped the lid back on and set her down on the shelf. Then he turned and headed casually to the cloakroom.
The cry he had been expecting came almost immediately, “Ms. Samson, Ms. Samson, there’re eight now. The missing caterpillar is back! It’s back!”
Chance finished getting his stuff out of his pack. He walked over to the bush and took a look at the chrysalides. Please let Matilda be one of them soon, he thought, ignoring the excited hubbub around the return of the missing caterpillar. He pulled a chair off the stack at the back of the room and headed for his desk. That was when his eyes met Ms. Samson’s. She knows, he thought, looking right back at her without blinking. Well, what’s she going to do about it?
“Good morning, Chance,” she said. “Did you hear that our missing caterpillar has returned?”
“Yeah, that’s great,” Chance said as he settled down at his desk and waited for what she would do next.
Then his eyes met Ken’s. Chance couldn’t decide which was stronger in Ken’s expression, anger or curiosity.
Ms. Samson didn’t give him time to find out. The class was to study their spelling words, she said, with small chalkboards and partners, while Ms. Samson herself took the two caterpillars who had recently attached and whose chrysalides were now fully formed and found them their spots on the butterfly bush.
Two days later, one of the remaining caterpillars died. The whole class trooped outside in the rain to bury the tiny creature. Three children cried. Chance did not. But his stomach knotted up at the idea that tomorrow they might be burying Matilda. Or the day after that. And if they did, it would be his fault.
“Crybabies,” he hissed as the class trooped back into the classroom.
“Ms. Samson,” Ralph called instantly, infuriatingly.
“Tattletale,” Chance said, at full volume now.
“Take your seat, Chance,” Ms. Samson said. “I’ll speak to you after school.”
Mark had to wait outside the closed classroom door.
“What did you do now?” Mark asked when Chance was released.
“I didn’t do anything. Leave me alone!” Chance took off at a run. Mark kept up, and when they burst through the door together, he was good and mad. They both stopped in the front hall to fling off their coats and catch their breath.
“I’ve been way nicer than you deserve, kid. I helped you save your little stolen pet’s life. I let you wake me up in the middle of the night and shove a bunch of leaves in my face. And right this minute I couldn’t tell you why I bother.”
“You’re not so nice,” Chance said, but by the time he said it, he was halfway up the stairs.
Chapter 15
Chance sank his teeth deep into his last pencil. It felt good, chewy with a slight crispness to the paint. He worked his way down from the eraser end, examining the perfect tooth marks after each chew.
Ten bites, evenly spaced, and on the tenth, snap. That was the formula. On the tenth bite, he gripped the tip of the pencil between his fingers, sank his teeth a little deeper, and drove his chin down toward his chest hard. The pencil snapped.
Satisfied for the moment, he tossed the halves into his desk where they joined the jumbled, crumpled mess that had gathered since his arrival in Ms. Samson’s class. The math paper he was supposed to be working on would soon be added to the mix.
It was a page of word problems. Butterfly word problems, but butterflies were no different from dandelions or teacups where math was concerned. Actually, math, reading and writing combined. That’s what word problems were.
Pencil disposed of, Chance looked around the room. Ken sat next to him.
He was carefully coloring in the butterflies on his page with pencil crayons. Ken’s page was different from Chance’s. Ken had a baby page. At least, that’s what Martha and some of the other kids, the Martha clones, called it. All pictures and numbers, no words.
It seemed as if Ken didn’t care when they said that, because he didn’t understand English. He was even newer to the class than Chance was. And he had moved a lot farther to come here. All the way from Hong Kong across the Pacific Ocean, Ms. Samson said. Ken didn’t seem to care when the other kids told substitute teachers about him either. “He can’t do that,” they would say, all serious, helping the teacher. “He doesn’t understand English.”
Chance cared though. It made him mad, especially since half the time they were wrong anyway. And Chance suspected that when Ken sat there with his face all blank while they talked about him, he actually did understand. And if he did understand, then he cared too.
Chance cared even more when they said stuff about him. “He’s always bad like that,” they would say loudly. “You have to put his name on the board.” Or, “You should keep him after school.” Or, “Send him to the principal.” As bossy as that, ordering around him and the substitute, both.
He glanced at his paper again, but the words had done nothing to untangle themselves. He knew that if he tried, he would probably be able to find the word butterfly in every problem. And there’d be number words. He knew those. But there were other words too. And with Matilda sitting on that ledge, all alone like she was, he just wasn’t going to try.
Right now, this very minute, Ms. Samson was attaching the last three chrysalides to the butterfly bush. The last three, that is, except for Matilda. Matilda was still a caterpillar. A munching, crunching caterpillar. A caterpillar who could not get enough green guck to eat. But caterpillar through and through.
And Chance knew perfectly well that that was his fault.
Every bit on purpose, he crumpled up his paper, his butterfly-word-problem paper, and threw it right onto Ken’s desk. Ken looked up, startled. And Chance grinned at him. He thought it was a friendly grin, like he was saying, “Forget the baby pages. Look at me!” And, Ken had stopped coloring. He was looking at Chance. But he wasn’t grinning back. Instead, he looked kind of mad.
And one of the Martha clones was calling out, “Ms. Samson, Chance is being bad again.”
“Julie, unless you are in physical danger, I do not appreciate tattling,” Ms. Samson said from t
he butterfly bush.
“But, Ms. Samson,” said another of the clones, “he’s bugging Ken. And Ken doesn’t even know English.”
“All right, Preeti,” Ms. Samson said. Her voice was sharp. But she did look over. She took in Ken’s angry face and the crumpled paper. The whole class watched, breathless, hoping, Chance knew, that she would do something. But Chance cut her off at the pass. He jumped up and grabbed the paper off Ken’s desk, knocking Ken’s pencil to the floor while he was at it.
“Pick up Ken’s pencil,” Ms. Samson said patiently. But not really. She wasn’t patient at all.
Chance knew how to prove that. He could prove that Ms. Samson wasn’t patient every time. He did it by moving slowly.
He headed for the recycling box.
“I said, pick up Ken’s pencil, Chance,” Ms. Samson said, her voice a little tighter now.
Chance tugged at the ball of paper until he found an edge. Then he smoothed it out. After all, they weren’t supposed to put crumpled paper in the recycling.
Now she was striding in his direction. And her shoes made sharp noises, even on the carpet. She walked right up to Chance, towered over him. Chance looked up at her. He paused. Then, just as she was taking in a good, big breath to speak to him again, he strode as smartly as she had over to Ken’s desk, bent, picked up the pencil and handed it to Ken. He even tried a little smile, but Ken took the pencil from his hand without looking at him and without twitching a single muscle in his face.
Chance sat down and scuffed at the floor with his foot. So now Ms. Samson was mad at him, Ken was mad at him, and Matilda was going to be a caterpillar forever. She was probably going to die a caterpillar. And she had turned out to be such a greedy little caterpillar. She was always hungry.
That thought gave him the idea, the brilliant, best-ever idea.
Chapter 16
Forgetting that he was in disgrace, he was at Ms. Samson’s desk in a moment, whispering eagerly in her ear. And the more she listened, the more she smiled. When he finished, she nodded her head, turned and pulled a book off the rack by her desk.
She took the book and walked to the front of the class.
“I think that someone in this class would very much like to hear this story,” she said, smiling.
“But we’ve all heard it a million times!” said Ralph, who always complained about rereading books, but then loved them as much as anyone else.
“Well, Ralph, maybe not a million times,” Ms. Samson replied. “But there is someone in this class who I’m almost certain has NEVER read The Very Hungry Caterpillar.”
Martha’s hand shot up. “It’s Ken,” she said when Ms. Samson gave her a chance. “You mean Ken.”
“No, Ken was here when I read it a few weeks ago. No,” she said, “put your hands down. We have one caterpillar left in this class. And she is a…”
“Very hungry caterpillar,” Chance filled in, joy flooding his heart. “Can I bring her to the story corner?”
“Yes, please do. And let’s the rest of us get ready to tell our very last, very hungry caterpillar her very first story.”
Ms. Samson let Chance hold the little creature in his palm so she could see the pictures. “Listen carefully, Matilda,” he whispered to her. He held her a little closer to the book when the very hungry caterpillar turned himself into a cocoon, well, a chrysalis really, but they called it a cocoon in the book. Chance knew, as did the rest of the class, that if it were really a cocoon, that would make her a moth instead of a butterfly.
Matilda lifted the front of her body right up, high in the air, and Ms. Samson looked over at her and smiled.
After the story was done, Chance took Matilda for a tour of the butterfly bush. “Look,” he whispered to her. “One of those should be you. Soon you’ll be a chrysalis too.”
He looked down at her, nestled in his hand. That was when he noticed the chrysalis lying on the table under the bush. He scanned the bush, but couldn’t find the lid that it had fallen from. It looked different from the other chrysalides, even the newest ones. He couldn’t see the butterfly inside, just hard whitish skin.
“Chance, it’s time to get back to work,” Ms. Samson said. “We’re going to start making butterfly story-boards.” And she held a big sheet of paper up to the class. It was divided into sixteen roomy squares. “With just pictures, just words, or both, I want you to plan a story with a butterfly or a caterpillar in it,” she said.
Chance looked down at the still, hard chrysalis for one more moment. Then he turned away, put Matilda back in her container on the ledge, and settled down to work. The story was halfway unfolded in his mind before he had unearthed his pencil crayons from his desk.
Chapter 17
Most of the class was eager to get out the door when the three o’clock bell rang. It was easy for Chance to linger unnoticed, putting the finishing touches to one of the squares on his storyboard, while he waited to have the classroom to himself. When he saw Mark hovering in the doorway, he beckoned him in.
Ms. Samson had been saying goodbye at the door, but now she was at her desk, reading over the story-boards. She had just said, “Time to go, Chance,” as she passed his desk. Now she seemed to have forgotten that he was there, although Chance considered that unlikely.
Mark stood just inside the door, looking annoyed. “Come on, kid,” he said. “Get it together. I don’t have time for this.”
Ms. Samson paused in her work. “Oh, hello, Mark. We read a book you’ll remember. Your brother picked it out!” And she held up the book with the big green caterpillar on the cover. Mark came a few steps farther into the room.
“Hey, I love that book!” he said. “But it’s not a painted lady, is it? The very hungry caterpillar turns into a different kind of butterfly.”
“That’s right,” Ms. Samson said. Mark was standing by her desk now, flipping through the book.
Chance stood up. “I want to show you something,” he said in a loud clear voice, addressed to both his teacher and his foster brother. “But I think it’s something bad,” he added, and walked over to the butterfly bush without waiting for a reply.
Mark followed, but Ms. Samson stayed where she was.
“Oh, Chance,” she said, “I was hoping no one would notice. I was going to take it away tonight.”
“What?” Mark said. “What is it?”
And Chance pointed to the small gray object on the table under the bush. Then, without even asking if it was all right, he reached under the netting and took the little chrysalis into his hand. That was when he really knew that it was dead.
“We have to bury it,” he said, softly. “Near the caterpillar. We have to do it now. The other kids will freak out if they see this.”
“Yes, Chance. Let’s bury it. Mark, will you join us?”
And the three of them walked outside and buried the small dead creature. Chance felt sad, and he felt scared. Matilda had to live; she just had to!
On the walk to the house, Chance and Mark were quiet.
But when Chance’s hand was on the doorknob, Mark stopped him.
“That wasn’t our caterpillar, was it?”
“No,” Chance said quietly. “Our caterpillar is still a caterpillar. She eats and eats, but she won’t attach. She just won’t! That’s why we read the book today. We read it to her, to teach her what she’s supposed to do.”
“Did she listen carefully?” Mark asked, smiling.
“I think she did,” Chance answered. And he smiled back.
The next morning he flew to school, Mark on his heels.
“You can’t get in anyway,” Mark called out breathlessly, but Chance kept right on running.
Lots of kids were milling around at the entrance under the overhang to keep out of the rain. Ralph was already stationed right by the door, and he wasn’t about to give Chance his place.
“I was here first,” he said in a strong, clear voice. “And you can keep your elbows to yourself.”
Chance scowled, but he
let Ralph have his way. A teacher was standing nearby anyway. So he waited beside Ralph, right up against the door, ready to push his way in the second the bell went. The wait seemed extra long this morning.
When he finally got into the room, rushed to the ledge and held the container up to the light, he wished that he had just stayed out there. Matilda was still a caterpillar.
That was the day the butterflies started coming out. Four, before recess.
Outside, at recess, in a fine drizzle, Chance went looking for Ralph. When he found him, he said loudly, “I’ll keep my elbows to myself if you want, but say hello to my fist.” And he punched him right in the gut. Ralph doubled over, but his friend turned to find the supervisor. She was right there. She had seen the whole thing. Chance spent the rest of recess in a chair outside the principal’s office, and the half hour after recess in the principal’s office, being talked at, talked at, talked at.
Why had he punched Ralph? she wanted to know. What kind of question was that? Because Ralph was a know-it-all, bossy tattletale and he deserved it. Because every caterpillar but Chance’s was turning into a butterfly and someone was going to pay. But those answers wouldn’t satisfy Mrs. Laurence. They didn’t even satisfy Chance. So Mrs. Laurence waited for an explanation that never came.
Finally she gave up and phoned Angie. Ralph was called in, and Chance had to apologize. The principal explained that she could suspend him right now, but that she was going to give him one more chance.
Then she got a grade-six girl to walk him back to class.
“Hey, Chance, you missed it. Two more butterflies are out since recess,” Martha informed him as soon as he was through the door.
So, on the way to his desk, Chance casually slid Martha’s storyboard away from her, tore it in half and handed it back.
The grade-six girl was still there. Ms. Samson had her walk Chance right back up to the office. Doug had to be called away from work to come get him, because Louise was napping and Angie couldn’t get away. While he was waiting, the principal asked if anything was wrong at his house. Chance shook his head hard.
Chance and the Butterfly Page 5
