Being Teddy Roosevelt

by Claudia Mills

  Sophie smiled. Riley saw she was wearing her earplugs. Then she made strange motions with her hands. She must be learning sign language.

  “What did you say?” Riley asked. He had a feeling that it was some kind of insult about boys.

  Grant made his own series of hand movements in return. Sophie looked puzzled.

  “Do you know sign language, too?” Riley asked him.

  “Nope,” Grant said cheerfully. “But that meant girls are dumb, and girls wearing earplugs and pretending to be Helen Keller are the dumbest of all.”

  This time Sophie glared at him. She must not be as deaf as she seemed. Or maybe she could read lips. That was probably it. In a week of practice, Sophie had already become a champion lip-reader.

  Riley found the encyclopedias and looked up Roosevelt, Theodore. The entry didn’t tell Riley anything new, but Mrs. Harrow thought it was important to double-check all facts. Teddy Roosevelt became a Rough Rider and charged up San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War. He was elected Vice President of the United States, and then became President when William McKinley was assassinated. He decided to dig the Panama Canal. He created 150 national forests and 5 national parks.

  Riley filled ten new note cards. His favorite told about the hikes Teddy Roosevelt used to take with his children. Their goal was to go over or through all obstacles along the way, but never around them. If they came to a rock, they had to climb right over it. If they came to a river, they had to jump in and start swimming.

  How would that apply to getting a saxophone? Riley thought about Sophie’s brother’s sax. It was easier to climb over a huge rock or cross a raging river than to come up with one hundred dollars when all a person had was four dollars and twenty-one cents.

  “Are you ready to go?” Grant asked him.

  “Sure.” Riley collected his cards, stuffed them in his envelope, and followed Grant out the door. “What’s Gandhi up to these days?”

  “Well, it’s actually pretty amazing,” Grant said slowly. “The guy was, like, really brave. He would never use violence against anybody, no matter how much violence they used against him. There was this unfair British law against collecting salt.”

  “Salt?”

  “I know, it sounds dumb, but that’s what it was. Gandhi and his followers marched all the way to the sea, hundreds of miles, to collect salt, and the British kept attacking them, but they didn’t fight back, they just kept on going.”

  “Wow,” Riley said. They had reached the bus stop. “What about the underwear? Why did he dress like that?”

  “He wanted to be poor and simple. And not wear any clothes made by the British.”

  “So what are you going to wear to the biography tea?”

  Grant stared at him. “What do you think? If I’m going to do this thing, I’m going to do it right. But I’ll wear my swimsuit underneath.”

  On the bus ride home, the bus driver had a perfect Teddy Roosevelt mustache. Riley and Grant sat in the back of the bus again and talked more about loincloths.

  “You’d have to wear a lot of sunblock all the time in the summer,” Riley said.

  “Yeah, and in the winter you’d need a coat or something. A swimsuit underneath and a coat on top.”

  This time Grant pulled the cord for their stop.

  The instant Riley got off the bus, he had a terrible feeling. “My note cards! I left them on the bus!” He watched in disbelief as the bus rumbled away.

  “The envelope’s not in your pockets?”

  Just to be sure, Riley patted his pockets, but he knew his cards were on the bus.

  Thirty note cards. A whole week of work. Everything he needed for his five-page paper. Gone. Forever.

  No. Not gone forever. If Teddy Roosevelt lost his index cards for a book report, he’d get them back. This was just another obstacle to climb over.

  Riley tried to stay calm. There was no way that he could catch up with the bus, however fast he ran after it.

  “If we wait for the next bus,” Riley said, thinking out loud, “maybe that driver can call this driver and tell him I left my cards. And then he can stop on the way back and give them to me.”

  “What if someone stole them?” Grant asked.

  “Who’s going to steal index cards for a report on Teddy Roosevelt?”

  “Someone else writing a report on Teddy Roosevelt?”

  Riley punched him in the shoulder.

  “Okay,” Grant said. “I’ll wait with you.”

  As they waited, the wind came up. A few drops of rain fell. Riley and Grant huddled under a tree. It seemed a lot longer than ten minutes, but finally the bus appeared. As soon as the door wheezed open, Riley blurted out his problem.

  The driver sighed. “I can’t be bothering another driver about some kid’s note cards.”

  “Please?” Riley begged. “Thirty note cards? For a five-page paper? On Teddy Roosevelt?”

  The driver sighed again. “Okay. But next time, check your seat before you get off the bus.”

  Riley was glad his mother wasn’t there to hear him say it.

  Two more buses went by as Riley stood shivering under the tree, glad that Grant had stayed by his side. Riley looked at each driver to see if he had a Teddy Roosevelt mustache.

  Half an hour later, a bus appeared at the stop, driven by a man with the right kind of mustache. Riley waited breathlessly while the door opened.

  Grinning, the driver presented Riley with his envelope of note cards.

  “Thank you!” Riley said, clutching it tightly.

  “No problem,” the driver said. “One time a lady left her kid on the bus. Had four kids with her, and got off with three. That was worse.”

  Worse for the driver, maybe, and for the lady, but not for Riley.

  Thirty note cards found! One raging river crossed!

  Now all Riley needed was a saxophone.

  7

  The next day, Riley worked on a list of ways that a fourth grader could earn money.

  1. Mow lawns.

  But he lived in an apartment complex where all the lawns were mowed by a lawn-mowing company.

  2. Shovel snow.

  It was only September. And when it did snow, all the walks where he lived would be shoveled by a snow-shoveling company.

  3. Walk dogs.

  His apartment complex didn’t allow pets.

  It was hard to earn money when you lived in an apartment. It was hard for a fourth grader to earn money, period. Riley called Grant. Grant always had lots of ideas. “I need to earn some money to buy that saxophone.”

  “Too bad you don’t want a trumpet. I’d sell mine cheap. If I could sell it without my parents finding out. Which I can’t.”

  Riley had an idea of his own just then. “Maybe I could have a yard sale. Like Sophie’s.”

  For a moment, he was excited. Then he remembered. He and his mom didn’t have a yard. And he and his mom had nothing to sell.

  “We could have one together,” Grant suggested. “I’ve been thinking. I don’t really need all my old video games.”

  Riley almost fell off his chair. He made a small, strangled sound of surprise into the phone.

  “Well, I don’t. I mean, it’s not like Gandhi had dozens of video games. He didn’t even have pants. I don’t play with half of my games anymore, anyway. My mom’d be thrilled if I got rid of them.”

  “But what would I sell?”

  If Grant sold his video games, Grant would make money, not Riley. And Grant didn’t need the money, Riley did.

  “You could help me with the sale, like make the signs or something, and we could split the money,” Grant offered.

  Riley’s heart soared. “Do you mean it?”

  “Sure. It’ll be the video game sale of the century.”

  That week, Grant and Riley told everyone at school about their yard sale. And Riley spent all Friday evening making signs on pieces of cardboard cut up from discarded cartons he found in the recycling bin, while jazz music blared on
the radio.

  GREAT VIDEO GAME SALE

  EVERYTHING MUST GO!

  “Everything doesn’t really need to go,” Riley explained to his mother. “That’s just a thing people put on yard sale signs.”

  First thing on Saturday morning, Riley biked around Grant’s neighborhood, putting up the signs, while Grant organized the games on two tables in his front yard. Grant’s mom donated free cookies and lemonade.

  To Riley’s amazement, their first customer was Erika. She rode up on her bike in queenly fashion. Riley wondered if she’d arrive at the biography tea wearing an old-fashioned dress, with one of those ruffly things around her neck, like Queen Elizabeth wore in pictures. He couldn’t imagine Erika wearing a ruffly thing or a dress.

  “I love video games,” Erika announced. She started sorting through the first pile.

  “There are no queens in any of them,” Grant pointed out apologetically.

  “That’s okay,” Erika said. “It’s not that much fun being a queen.”

  Grant and Riley exchanged glances.

  “You know how I told you that Queen Elizabeth’s father beheaded Queen Elizabeth’s mother? Well, when she was grown up, Queen Elizabeth had her one true love, the Earl of Essex, beheaded. She had to do it for political reasons. But it broke her heart to do it.”

  Riley bet it didn’t bother her one millionth as much as it bothered the Earl of Essex.

  Kids from school trickled in throughout the morning. Toward lunch, Sophie came with her mother and her brother. Sophie wasn’t wearing a blindfold or earplugs.

  “Do you have anything besides video games?” Sophie asked as her brother greedily pawed through the remaining piles on the table.

  “A trumpet,” Grant said hopefully.

  Sophie turned toward her mother. “Can I get a trumpet? I’d love to be able to play piano, violin, flute, and trumpet.”

  “I was just kidding,” Grant told her. Sophie looked disappointed.

  Riley remembered a question he had been meaning to ask Sophie. “How could Helen Keller use sign language if she couldn’t see the signs?”

  “Her teacher did the motions in her hand,” Sophie explained. “And for reading books, she used Braille. She learned to talk, too, but that was really hard, because she could never hear what she sounded like.”

  Sophie straightened the pile of games her brother had been looking through. She straightened the pile of game magazines, too. “Everything was hard for Helen Keller,” she said.

  Riley thought about that for a minute. Lots of things had been hard for Teddy Roosevelt. And for Queen Elizabeth, and for Gandhi.

  Maybe nobody’s life was easy. At least, nobody who got to be the star of a biography. Riley O’Rourke: The Boy Who Had No Problems Whatsoever. Who would want to read that one? “Obstacles overcome” was one of the main topics Mrs. Harrow wanted them to include in their reports. Without that, the reports would be pretty boring.

  Of course, one of the biggest obstacles in Riley’s life right now was writing a report about the obstacles in Teddy Roosevelt’s life. He grinned. Buthis report, all five pages of it, was almost ready for him to hand in on Wednesday.

  Riley had spent every single afternoon during the week organizing his note cards, making his outline, and writing his rough draft. Then he had thought of a few things he wanted to change, and he had written the whole thing over again. All he had left to do was copy it once more in his best cursive—and prepare to face the biography tea on Friday.

  Sophie’s brother bought five games. He was their best customer.

  When the sale was over, Grant and Riley counted the money together: thirty-six dollars.

  “So …” Riley did the math in his head. “Eighteen dollars each!”

  It wasn’t enough for Sophie’s brother’s saxophone, but it was eighteen dollars more than Riley had had three hours ago.

  “You can have the whole thing,” Grant said. He shoved the pile of crumpled dollar bills, quarters, dimes, and nickels toward Riley.

  “But—” Riley protested. It was too much.

  “Go ahead, take it.” Grant smiled. “Look, I’m poor and simple, right? I don’t even have a pocket in my loincloth to put the money in.”

  Riley swallowed a lump in his throat. He was lucky to be friends with Mahatma Gandhi.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  8

  On the day of the biography tea, Riley studied himself in the mirror.

  Bandanna around neck. Check.

  Eyeglasses. His mother had found an old pair and taken the glass out of the frames. Check.

  Broad-brimmed hat. Grant had one that Riley had borrowed. Check.

  No leather jacket. That had been impossible to find. But Riley looked suitably rugged in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. Check.

  Carefully, Riley peeled off the tape from the sticky back of his mustache and pressed the mustache between his nose and his upper lip.

  Check.

  “Bully!” Riley pronounced. It was cool to lookin the mirror and see Teddy Roosevelt looking back at him.

  “Are you ready to head off to school, Teddy?” his mother asked, giving him a hug.

  Riley grinned. “Charge!” He felt ready to head off to the White House.

  On the playground, Riley saw some other kids already in costume. Napoleon swaggered around in a navy-blue military uniform. Pocahontas was wearing a brown fringed tunic with matching leggings; her hair hung in two long dark braids.

  Helen Keller had on an old-fashioned dress, but she wasn’t blind or deaf yet. Riley wondered if Sophie would use a blindfold and earplugs all afternoon long, or just pretend. Either way, it would be interesting to see.

  Queen Elizabeth was in her usual jeans and T-shirt, but she carried a large shopping bag, stuffed with something made of bright purple velvet.

  Grant, too, showed up in regular clothes, with a much smaller shopping bag in hand.

  “Is it in there?” Riley asked.

  “One super-duper, deluxe, premium-grade loincloth. I’m not going to put it on until after lunch. My mom thought it would be too distracting.”

  Riley thought Grant’s mom was probably right. You could forget you were wearing a mustache if you didn’t happen to catch a glimpse of your reflection somewhere. But there was no way that you could forget you were wearing a loincloth. Or that anyone would let you forget.

  The morning dragged. Teddy Roosevelt would have done long division with gusto—he did everything with gusto—but it was hard when the answer to the problem on the board was 324, with a remainder of 7, and Riley came up with 410, with a remainder of 8. He’d have to work harder on his math homework if he was going to get to buy Sophie’s brother’s saxophone. With the yard sale profits, he had $40.21 now. He was almost halfway there.

  Finally, after lunch, Mrs. Harrow sent the kids who weren’t in costume to the restrooms to change. The others sat at their desks and waited.

  When Queen Elizabeth appeared, a ripple of astonishment ran through the classroom. There she stood, in an extremely fancy, long, purple-velvet, olden-days gown, with a crisp, stiff ruff around her neck. A crown sat on her newly red hair—a wig, Riley guessed. In her right hand she held a royal scepter.

  Riley almost leaped to his feet to bow, but he stopped himself in time.

  “What’s happening? Who came in?” Sophie asked Riley. She had her blindfold on, but not her earplugs. Riley was glad Sophie wasn’t trying to be blind and deaf simultaneously. Maybe she would alternate: blind for thirty minutes, deaf for thirty minutes.

  “Erika has a great Queen Elizabeth outfit,” Riley told her.

  “Does she have a crown?”

  “A crown and a wig. And she’s carrying a scepter.”

  Sophie clicked her teeth in frustration. Riley understood. It was one thing to be blind while doing homework at the library. It was another thing to be blind at the biography tea.

  Socrates entered, looking embarrassed in a toga. Marie Curie bustled by in a lab coat.r />
  “Has anyone seen Grant?” Mrs. Harrow asked Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, who had just emerged from the boys’ room in their costumes. “He’s the only one we’re still missing.”

  “He’s coming,” Shakespeare said. Isaac Newton gave a chuckle that came out sounding more like a snort.

  Riley flipped through his note cards one last time. He wanted to have all his facts straight in case anyone asked Teddy Roosevelt any hard questions.

  Suddenly the room exploded into shrieks of laughter. Riley looked up, startled.

  Mahatma Gandhi had entered.

  In a loincloth.

  And completely bald.

  “Grant!” Mrs. Harrow cried out.

  “The name is Gandhi. Mahatma Gandhi.”

  “Your hair!”

  “I shaved it off. I brought in my dad’s electric razor and plugged it into an outlet in the boys’ room.”

  “Do your parents know about this?” Mrs. Harrow asked faintly.

  Grant nodded. “I told them I needed to do it to get an A. So do I get an A?”

  Mrs. Harrow visibly pulled herself back together. “The grade for our biography unit is based on the written report, which I’ll hand back in a minute, and on the costume, and on how well you act as your character at the tea party. But for your costume today, yes, you get an A.”

  Riley felt a tiny bit hurt that Grant hadn’t told him about his head-shaving plan. But he also felt glad that he had the coolest best friend of anyone.

  Most of all, he felt nervous about his grade on the report. His mother would never let him do instrumental music if he ended up with a C or a D. But if he got a B—or even better than a B …

  “All right, class,” Mrs. Harrow said. “I’ll give you your reports, and then we’ll move into the library, where our room mothers have set up for our tea party.”

  She handed back the reports in alphabetical order. Grant got his before Riley.

  “A,” he signaled to Riley.

  Mrs. Harrow laid Riley’s report on his desk. He could hardly bear to make himself look at the grade at the end, but he did.

  A-!

  Mrs. Harrow had written, “Great job, Riley! Lots of interesting details, especially about the Roosevelt family’s hikes. Next time, check your spelling.” It was the best grade Riley had gotten on a report, ever.