Class Dismissed

by Allan Woodrow

One of the best things about writing is you don’t have to talk to anyone or worry about doing something stupid. As soon as your pencil starts moving, you’re lost in your own brain, where you can write anything you can think. And if you make a mistake, no one knows and no one cares. You can just erase what you wrote and start over again.

  I start to write about beef nachos, but then quickly change my mind and begin writing a short story about a classroom just like mine. I call it “The Flower Children.”

  In my story, kids goof off and never listen to their teacher, Mrs. Brick. She tells the kids to pay attention, but they ignore her. Finally, Mrs. Brick has had enough. No one knows that she’s a witch! She raises her wand and turns all the students into flowers.

  All the loud kids are loud, colorful flowers. The big kids are giant flowers. But one kid, a quiet kid who no one ever noticed, is a small, dull, nothing stem.

  Later that night, the principal walks into the class and spies flowers growing next to each desk. Those will make a beautiful bouquet for my wife, he thinks, and picks them.

  The large and bright flowers quickly get picked. But the principal doesn’t even notice that one boring plant.

  The next morning the spell wears off. The quiet kid wakes up at his desk. The other kids wake up in the principal’s house next to a broken vase and a small puddle of water that ruins the carpeting. Their principal refuses to believe they were flowers and suspends them all from school. Only the quiet kid avoids trouble.

  I look up from my story and gaze around the classroom. I was so busy writing that I lost track of what everyone else was doing.

  Adam draws on his desk. Emmy and Eli write on the whiteboard. Jade and Madelyn dance on their desks. They’d better be careful that they don’t get hurt—there’s no way they can go to the school nurse without our secret leaking out.

  With a wad of paper and a trash can, Trevor and Gavin play basketball. They both wear matching basketball jerseys every day, so I guess they love the sport. Maggie and the brains thumb through the teacher’s files. Cooper eats a candy bar and burps. I think part of the bar has melted, since his hands are covered in chocolate. He wipes his fingers on his desk.

  Everyone is breaking about a dozen class rules.

  Or rather, they are breaking our old class rules. There are no longer any class rules to break. Not anymore.

  “I’m going to open the door!” announces Ryan. She wears a baseball hat, which is against another rule: No wearing hats in school. Or rather, that was a rule. “It reeks in here.” As she walks, she spins in circles, like a dancer.

  The volcano vinegar fumes cover the room in a blanket of gag-creating stink. I forgot about the smell while I wrote, but now that Ryan mentions it, the odor bombards my nostrils.

  I pinch them shut.

  But before Ryan can open the door, Kyle yells out, “Wait!”

  Everyone stops what he or she is doing and turns to stare at Kyle.

  “It’s just … ,” he begins. “It’s just that I bet the smell will keep teachers away from our class. We should keep the door closed and let the smell stink people away, at least for a few days. It’ll just seep through the crack under the door and last longer that way.”

  I would have thought Kyle was incapable of a good idea, but he’s right. We should keep the lingering smell if we want to be safe. No one wants to enter a room that reeks of vinegar.

  It’s a pretty big idea from a Big Goof. I’m surprised. I didn’t know the Big Goofs ever had big ideas.

  Ryan spins back to her seat, leaving the door closed, and Kyle hurtles an eraser at her feet. It appears that Kyle is back to being a goof.

  I wonder how long we’ll keep the secret, though. Someone is going to spill it.

  But I know I won’t say a word to anyone. After all, I find it easy not saying a word to anyone.

  I am not a colorful flower. I will remain quiet and planted—right on my seat.

  The apartment building hallway smells of curry, and the odor gets stronger and stronger as I hurry past apartment 3F. I want to fling open their door and tell Mrs. Singh, who’s probably inside cooking dinner, “My teacher quit! My teacher quit!”

  I imagine running down the entire hall screaming at the top of my lungs.

  Someone would probably yell at me to stop running in the halls.

  But I can’t say a word, anyway. I’m sworn to secrecy. It’s hard to keep secrets. And yow, yow, yow, do I have an epic secret.

  This afternoon was fantastic. We played Eraser Wars, which is a game Seth, Brian, and I made up, and threw Lacey’s book back and forth while she shouted at us to stop. I just laughed, but at the same time I was laughing, a small voice inside my brain kept telling me that this was all too good to be true. Come on! said the voice. You can’t goof off for the rest of the year.

  Shut up, I told that voice. Why not? Go away! Let me goof!

  We have to keep our traps shut. That’s all, and then nothing will go wrong.

  So I march down my apartment hallway without banging on doors and without hollering my secret to everyone in the building.

  As soon as I open my door, Nate rams into my leg. “Be careful, little guy,” I say.

  My almost-four-year-old brother wears a blue superhero cape but nothing else. He bounces up off the ground and runs into the kitchen, calling, “I’m Captain Nate!”

  “You go, superhero,” I say with a laugh.

  In the kitchen, two-year-old Leah sits on the floor banging pots and pans. CRASH! BIM! TANG! Nate sits down and joins her in the mayhem.

  Mom yells from a back bedroom, “Kyle? Is that you? Can you take out the garbage and put the pizza in the oven for dinner? I’m going to give AJ a bath and then put him to bed!”

  I want to ask if she’s taken that promotion yet. When she does, and we move to a bigger apartment, I hope I’ll finally get my own bedroom. I’m sick of sharing one with Nate.

  “In a minute!” I yell. I walk back into the hallway and close the front door, which I accidentally left open. Mom hates when I do that. In the family room, my six-year-old sister, Marley, watches cartoons. “Move over, Squirt,” I tell her.

  She frowns but wiggles over.

  I drop my backpack on the floor. For the first time in forever there is no homework inside it, and no tests to study for. I spread my arms and smile. This is how prisoners must feel when they are let out after months or years of being locked away.

  Freedom! I lean back on the couch.

  “Twenty years!” cried the judge. The crook sobbed, “You’re too cruel.”

  The judge shrugged. “Could be worse. I could send you to school.”

  On the television screen, Squiggle Cat gets poked in the eye. He yells, “Yow! Yow! Yow!” I stretch out my legs and laugh.

  The show is an hour long, with lots of short episodes. Each is funnier than the last one.

  “How long until the pizza’s done?” Mom yells from a bedroom.

  When I hear my mom, I sit up. The pizza. Dinner. “I’m starting it now!”

  I spring off the couch.

  Back in the kitchen, Leah and Nate have grown bored with pot banging and are hitting the floor with a pair of wooden spoons. Leah hits my leg with the spoon, and I growl at her, like a bear. I raise my arms as if they are claws and bend down. “Roar!” She laughs and hits me again with the spoon.

  I suppose she thinks I’m more the teddy bear than the grizzly bear type. I doubt most of the kids in school would agree with her, though.

  A commercial blares from the family room television. I need to get the pizza in the oven and my butt back on the couch fast. I don’t want to miss the show.

  I take the pizza from the freezer. The directions are on the box. Preheat the oven. Put in the pizza. Set the timer.

  Easy.

  I turn on the oven and then—

  Wait. Stop. Take a breath.

  Mom needs two chores done. What was the other one?

  The garbage. Right.

  The trash smells
like it hasn’t been emptied in days. Then I remember that Mom asked me to do it yesterday, but I forgot.

  “The show is back on!” Marley says from the family room.

  “Yow, yow, yow!” yells Squiggle Cat.

  I’m a blur of action. I grab the garbage bag and heave. The top of the plastic bag tears, but I slide it out, anyway. I cram the pizza carton inside, although it doesn’t fit so well. But it’s only garbage. It doesn’t have to look neat.

  “You’re missing the show!” yells Marley.

  “I know!” I holler back.

  The garbage chute is all the way at the other end of the hallway, so I’ll walk the trash down later. After dinner. Or after that.

  I place the bag in the hallway. Then I hurry back to the kitchen, toss the pizza in the oven, set the timer for exactly eighteen minutes, and bang, bang, I plop back on the couch just as Squiggle Cat gets poked in the eye. “Yow, yow, yow!” he screams.

  It’s a funny show. Marley and I roll over on the couch, laughing. I close my eyes to take a short, happy nap.

  “What’s that smell?” Mom asks a few minutes later. Or maybe it’s a lot later. I pop open my eyes. A strong, burning plastic stink streams from the kitchen. The oven timer is buzzing.

  Mom dashes through the hall and into the kitchen. Then she’s yelling words that, if I said them, would get me grounded for a week. I jump up from the couch and peek into the kitchen.

  Smoke swirls and it would probably set off our smoke alarm if I had changed the batteries like Mom asked a few weeks ago. The new batteries still sit on the counter, a daily reminder to put them in, which I always swear I’ll do later. Mom removes the pizza from the oven, melted plastic merging with cheese, and tosses it into the sink.

  I was supposed to unwrap the plastic film from the pizza before I put it into the oven.

  But the directions didn’t say that! At least, I don’t think they did.

  The timer is still ringing, and Mom turns it off. I think it must have been going off for a long time. The buzzer is hard to hear over the TV when you’re napping.

  “All I ask is for a little help!” Mom yells at me. And yells and yells, as if I’m not good for anything.

  I was trying to help.

  And then Leah, who’s sitting on the floor gnawing on her wooden spoon, starts crying.

  Mom stops screaming and bends down, wrapping little Leah in a big hug. “Look what you’ve done!” she snaps at me, although it was her shouting that made little Leah cry.

  I stomp back to the family room, where Marley’s still watching TV. I walk with loud, angry stomps. I bet our neighbors downstairs can hear me, their ceiling shaking under my footsteps.

  I just wish I could snap my fingers and be back in school. My friends don’t act like I’m good for nothing. They don’t care if I can’t follow a few stupid directions.

  Now, without a teacher, I won’t have to worry about following directions in school again, anyway. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want.

  Without a teacher, we won’t have any rules, which sounds perfectly awesome to me.

  I’m in a class of blockheads. Really, truly, and absolutely. Lacey and Paige are not, certainly, but they are the exceptions. Or, maybe, probably, they are only semi-blockhead-ish, say 35 percent blockhead and 65 percent not.

  I can’t believe we haven’t had a teacher since yesterday and have agreed to keep this inconceivable secret for maybe the entire year.

  Inconceivable. That means unbelievable, extraordinary, and totally preposterous. The kids in class have lost their collective minds, if they even had minds. I’m guessing they didn’t.

  All the kids in class combined equal maybe one mind.

  Or maybe their minds are just made out of blocks, ergo blockheads.

  But I promised to keep quiet, too. And all because I was afraid of a smelly sock? I’m as big of a blockhead as everyone else.

  It’s taken all my willpower to keep from marching down to Principal Klein’s office and demanding a new teacher, now.

  But a vow is a vow is a vow.

  Which is the same as a promise, an agreement, an oath, a binding oral contract between the blockheads and me.

  And a smelly sock is a smelly sock is a smelly sock.

  I don’t smell like a sock, even if the whole idea is ludicrous and makes no sense. Are we supposed to like socks, hate socks, or what?

  Besides, everyone already thinks I’m the teacher’s pet. So I just had to go with the majority. I didn’t have a choice.

  I started to object, I really did, but then Trevor whispered to Gavin, and not very softly, that “of course Little Miss Bossy has a problem,” and then he called me the same thing out loud to everyone, so I couldn’t say anything.

  Still, this changes everything. And I mean everything! No teacher means no more teaching, no more teaching means no more learning, and no more learning means falling behind in school and having a life of miserable mediocrity.

  I, Maggie Cranberry, refuse to lead a life of mediocrity, thank you very much.

  I have my life planned out—perfectly planned out on a spreadsheet on my computer. After excelling throughout my secondary schooling, I will graduate number one in our high school class: top of the ladder, chief genius, and VIP of scholarly smartness. Then I move right on to Harvard—a full scholarship, naturally. Mom and Dad went to Harvard, and so did my aunts and uncles. They expect me to go, too. I won’t let them down. I won’t be the first Cranberry to fail.

  My great-great-great-uncle was only the fourth African American to graduate from Harvard, too! Or maybe he was the seventh one to graduate. Top ten, for sure.

  Paige tells me I worry about college too much since we’re only in fifth grade.

  With that attitude, you can be sure she’s not getting into Harvard.

  Paige also tells me that I need to relax. I tell her that I can relax when I’m old, like when I’m twenty-five.

  But all of my plans are now in jeopardy. How am I supposed to learn without a teacher?

  Teaching kids has to be one of the easiest jobs in the world, too. To teach first grade, you just need to reach second grade. And anyone who has reached third grade can easily teach second grade, and so on, and so on.

  As a fifth grader, I’m practically overqualified to be a teacher.

  And—and this is a humongous and—when you’re a teacher, kids do all the work while teachers just grade and judge it. How easy is that?

  I brought a math textbook to school today. I’m going to learn, even if no one else will. Let the other kids waste their time and their brain cells. My teachers say I’m a go-getter. So I’ll just go get myself an education.

  Lacey and Paige chat. They brought their textbooks, like I told them to do. They were planning on bringing games to class, and I reminded them we needed to set an example.

  But Lacey and Paige are helpless. Are they studying? No! They’re talking about boys and television and other monumental wastes of time.

  Although a couple of the boys in class are cute, sort of.

  Paige asks me, “On TV last night, did you watch—”

  My eyes narrow into slits. “No, I did not watch TV last night. I read.”

  The rest of the class ignores their minds as completely and ridiculously as Lacey and Paige disregard theirs. Cooper brought a pile of comic books, which he shares with Gavin and Trevor.

  A waste.

  In the corner, Samantha braids Giovanna’s hair.

  More waste.

  In back of me, kids talk, laugh, joke, play, and doodle. Jasmine and Danny, the twins, make paper fortune-tellers.

  Waste, waste, waste, waste, and waste.

  But worst of everyone in class, Kyle hurls erasers and wrestles with his equally irritating friends. I can’t think of a bigger waste than Kyle and his friends, even if I like the way Kyle’s bright red hair stands up on the top of his head.

  Kyle is sort of cute, in a redheaded Neanderthal sort of way.

  Neanderthal m
eans oafish, ape-like, and very, very annoying.

  The room is a din of noise and commotion. Why can’t kids goof off quietly? It’s hard to study with all these distractions. I want to scream at them to “BE QUIET, YOU BLOCKHEADS!”

  But then the class phone rings. It’s loud, abrasive, surprising, and sudden—a piercing wake-up call through the lazy glaze of goofing. Everyone quiets and stares at the phone, as if it will answer itself. Of course, my desk is closest to the teacher’s desk and phone. That’s where I always sit so teachers notice me raising my hand to answer their questions.

  The phone rings again.

  I suppose someone has to answer the phone, or it’ll ring forever. And I’ll never get any work done if the phone rings forever. So, I stand up, stride to the desk, and pick up the handset. I clear my throat. “Yes?”

  “Ms. Bryce, how are you?” It’s Principal Klein. I recognize his deep, booming voice.

  “I am terribly sorry, but I’m not—”

  “I’ll get right to the point, Ms. Bryce,” he says, interrupting me. “We did not get your attendance sheet this morning.”

  “I am not—” I repeat, but then I stop. Everyone stares at me, wondering what I’ll say next.

  “You are not what?” asks Principal Klein.

  A vow is a vow is a vow.

  A smelly sock is a smelly sock is a smelly sock.

  I clear my throat. I screech, so my voice sounds more like Ms. Bryce’s. “I’m not sure why I didn’t turn in the sheet. Everyone is here.”

  “And lunch?” he asks.

  Right. Lunch. We forgot about lunch. Every day, Ms. Bryce writes down on the attendance sheet who will buy lunch. It’s a simple routine. Yet we completely neglected to do it.

  It’s pretty obvious this class secret isn’t going to last for long, because everyone is a blockhead, including me. But I won’t be the one to blab. I gave a vow, even if the vow was moronic, inane, and completely without basic common sense.

  “No one is buying lunch today,” I say, my voice clipped.

  “Very well,” says Principal Klein. “But don’t forget to turn in those sheets tomorrow.”

  “Of course not. Who do you think I am?”