Simon Ellis, Spelling Bee Champ

by Claudia Mills

  “Almost,” Jackson repeated.

  “Well, he might have learned if I had kept on trying.”

  “I’m not coming,” Jackson said. “Mrs. Molina didn’t say we had to practice. Your dog can’t really learn to spell.”

  Simon couldn’t disagree with that prediction.

  But to Simon’s surprise, Cody said, “I’m coming.” To Jackson, he said, “You haven’t even given him a chance to try.”

  “Okay, I’ll come, too,” Jackson said grudgingly.

  So now the three boys were at Annika’s house on a Saturday afternoon, greeted at the door by her friendly brown-and-white beagle.

  Simon flinched as Prime jumped on him in welcome. Even a small dog like Prime was a lot bigger than Ferrari the ferret, and at least Ferrari didn’t sniff Simon with a doggy snout or lick him with a doggy tongue.

  Jackson reached down and gave Prime a friendly pat.

  Cody was clearly the one Prime loved most. The dog lay on his back, all four feet in the air, as Cody scratched his exposed belly, apparently finding all of Prime’s itchiest spots for rubbing. Simon remembered that Cody lived on a farm outside town and had his own pig, Mr. Piggins. Maybe Cody also milked cows on the farm, or rode horses, or helped out with other animals.

  “You’re a good dog! Yes, you are!” Cody kept saying as the dog squirmed in ecstasy.

  When they headed into Annika’s family room, Prime followed Cody.

  When they sat down on Annika’s couch, Prime positioned himself by Cody’s feet.

  “Why does Prime like you so much?” Simon asked, puzzled.

  Cody gave a slow smile. “Because I like him, I guess. Isn’t that right, boy? Is that why you like me? Because I like you? That’s right, I do.”

  The dog was once again sprawled out on his back, eager for more of Cody’s tummy rubs.

  After another fifteen minutes of dog scratching, dog patting, paw shaking, and dog-related conversation, no one had yet spelled a single word: no human, no animal. Simon refused to be the first one to mention this fact.

  He was grateful when Annika finally said, “So, should we do some spelling?”

  “Sure,” Simon said, trying to make it sound as if he really didn’t care one way or the other.

  To Simon’s relief, Jackson and Cody didn’t offer any protest.

  Annika clapped her hand to her head. “I forgot to bring home my spelling notebook! Did any of you remember to bring one?”

  The other two boys had come to Annika’s empty-handed, so their answer was clear.

  Simon unzipped his backpack, set beside him on the floor. “I did,” he said.

  Jackson and Cody, whose faces had lit up at Annika’s confession, now moaned.

  Annika said, “Well, we won’t be using our school words for Prime anyway. We can’t start him with third-grade words right away.”

  “What words are you going to use with Prime?” Simon asked. “And how can he spell them if he can’t even talk or write?”

  “We’ll spell words to him,” Annika explained. “If he understands what we’re saying, then we’ll know he can spell. Words like sit, stay, and lie down.”

  That sort of made sense. It wasn’t the same thing as real spelling, more like reverse spelling, but Simon was still curious to see if Prime could do it.

  “Let me try first,” Cody said.

  He fished a dog biscuit from the bag Annika had provided. Champion human spellers would have slices of Mr. Boone’s honey pie as their reward; champion dog spellers would get Bow Wow brand doggie treats. Annika had also produced a plate of chocolate chip cookies for the team, not as a prize, just as refreshments for the afternoon.

  “Prime,” Cody commanded. He had stood up from the couch and spoke with an authority Simon had never before heard in his voice. “S-i-t.”

  It was the first time in any spelling practice that Cody had actually spelled a word.

  Prime looked up at Cody expectantly, wagging his tail.

  “S-i-t,” Cody repeated.

  To Simon’s great surprise, Prime sat.

  “Good dog!” Cody praised him. He gave Prime the biscuit, and Prime gulped it down in one bite.

  Even Jackson started clapping for Prime, and Simon joined in.

  “See?” Annika beamed. “I told you he was smart!”

  “Well,” Cody said slowly, giving Prime another friendly rub behind his ears. “Most dogs are going to do whatever they think you want them to, if they see a treat, and sit is the thing they learn first.”

  He held up a second Bow Wow treat and moved a few feet away. “C-o-m-e,” he spelled.

  Prime didn’t come. Once again, Prime sat.

  “See?” Cody said. “He thinks everything is sit.”

  “Okay, maybe he can’t spell yet,” Annika conceded. “That’s what we’re here for today. To teach him how.”

  Well, and also to improve their own spelling skills for the bee, which was now less than a week away. But Simon didn’t say that.

  Cody tried again. “C-o-m-e!” As he spelled the word, he bent down and patted his legs, to call Prime to him. Prime bounded over to Cody.

  Success?

  Impressed, Simon grinned his congratulations at Cody. Cody gave a shy grin in return.

  But then Cody shook his head. “Maybe I gave him too much of a clue for that one. Let’s try stay.”

  But when Cody said “S-t-a-y” and started to back away, Prime didn’t stay. Then again, even when Cody gave him the plain, non-spelled-out “Stay” command, Prime couldn’t bear to be left behind and kept bouncing toward Cody.

  “That one doesn’t count,” Annika decided. “He’s not really a staying kind of dog.”

  “L-i-e d-o-w-n” was also a failure. While Prime did respond obediently to the spoken command “Lie down,” the string of seven letters was apparently too much.

  “Some words are too long for him right now,” Annika explained. “Asking him to spell lie down is like asking one of us to spell…”

  “Pneumonoultramicroscopic—”

  Annika cut Simon off. “Exactly.”

  “I’ll try it just with l-i-e,” Cody said. “We can skip d-o-w-n.”

  Cody spelled the word, pushed Prime into a prone position, and then gave him the Bow Wow treat. Sure enough, after a few tries, Prime had mastered l-i-e.

  Or maybe not. When Cody tried going back to s-i-t, Prime got the commands confused. He lay down for s-i-t and sat for l-i-e.

  “He’s getting tired,” Annika explained. “That was a lot of spelling for a dog that never spelled before.”

  It was a lot of dog biscuits, too. Simon was amazed that a small-sized dog could hold such a large-sized quantity. The four humans had also eaten a considerable share of cookies.

  “Well,” Jackson said, looking over at the clock on Annika’s DVD player. “I told my mom to pick me up at four.”

  “My dad’s picking me up at four, too,” Cody said.

  Apparently spelling practice was over. The only words that had been successfully drilled in all that time had been s-i-t and c-o-m-e and l-i-e d-o-w-n. Oh, well. Simon had to admit the afternoon had been fun.

  It was cool that Cody had a talent for animals that Simon hadn’t known about. You didn’t know everything about somebody from what he was like at school. When it came to animals, Cody was Super Cody.

  “You’re great with animals,” Simon said to Cody as he stuffed his unopened spelling book into his backpack.

  “Thanks,” Cody said, sounding as if he meant it.

  The doorbell rang.

  “It’s probably my dad,” Cody said. “He might be a bit early.”

  But when Annika opened the door, there stood Kelsey and Izzy.

  “I just got back from running,” said Izzy.

  “And I just got back from the library,” said Kelsey.

  “And we thought we’d stop by,” Izzy continued.

  “To see if you wanted to go for a walk,” Kelsey finished.

  Then, for the
first time, Kelsey noticed the boys. She looked from Annika to Simon, Jackson, and Cody, and then back at Annika again.

  “We were practicing for the spelling bee,” Annika explained.

  “Oh,” Kelsey said, her tone suddenly icy. Her glistening eyes and lifted chin clearly spelled the word traitor.

  But it wasn’t Annika’s fault that she had been assigned to a different spelling team from her friends. And Simon would hardly call stuffing Prime full of Bow Wow treats “practicing for the spelling bee.” He was willing to bet Kelsey’s team was practicing that weekend, too, and that they would be spelling practice words themselves, not just coaxing someone’s dog to recognize spelled-out words.

  “Sorry for interrupting,” Kelsey said haughtily. “Come on, Izzy, let’s go.”

  She turned on her heel and left. Izzy shot Annika an apologetic grin and then trailed after Kelsey.

  Was competition going to cause as much trouble for Annika and Kelsey as it already seemed to be causing for Simon and Jackson? And Simon and Jackson were even on the same team!

  As soon as the door shut behind her friends, Annika sighed. Then she gave a little shrug, as if shaking off Kelsey’s attempt at a quarrel.

  “Don’t mind Kelsey,” she said. “She gets like this when she really wants to win something.”

  That was plainly true.

  Simon could understand. He wanted to win, too. But as he looked over at Jackson and Cody rolling on the floor with Prime, who was done with spelling for the day, he wondered if somehow he had already lost.

  6

  By Monday the word wall in Mrs. Molina’s room was filling up nicely.

  As Kelsey was adding her words on the far edge of the wall, Simon tried to find an empty place to add more words in his small, precise writing, so different from Jackson’s unreadable scrawl.

  Delicious.

  Delectable.

  Delightful.

  Just as he was about to write delirious, Mr. Boone came buzzing into Mrs. Molina’s room.

  Mr. Boone wasn’t wearing a bee outfit, though Simon expected to see him appear any day in black-and-yellow stripes complete with gauzy wings.

  Instead, Mr. Boone was wearing a ruffled apron, printed with pictures of different pieces of pie. In one hand, he carried what Simon recognized as a flour sifter. In the other hand, he carried a long wooden rolling pin. On his head was a tall white chef’s hat with bunches of fake bright red cherries pinned on the top.

  “Good morning, third graders!” Mr. Boone boomed.

  “Good morning, Mr. Boone!” the class shouted back.

  Mrs. Molina smiled weakly. She always seemed a bit ill at ease when Mr. Boone’s larger-than-life energy exploded into her calm, orderly classroom.

  “How are a-l-l of y-o-u doing with your…”

  He trailed off midsentence as his gaze fell upon the spelling wall. He staggered back a few steps as if overcome by the sight of so many words all in one place.

  “I guess I can answer my own question!” he said heartily.

  Approaching the wall, where Simon and Kelsey were still standing, markers in hand, he started reading out words at random.

  “Microwave. A most useful device, but not good for making honey pie. Extraordinary. Precisely the word I would use to describe the taste of my honey pie. Delicious and delectable. Ditto! The person who wrote those words must have had my honey pie in mind when he or she wrote them. Oh, and here’s one of my favorites!”

  Mr. Boone began singing “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from Mary Poppins, loudly and off-key.

  So maybe you didn’t have to be good at everything, or at least good at music, to be a principal.

  Or maybe Mr. Boone was just trying to be funny. Certainly everyone in the class was in stitches, and even Mrs. Molina was smiling a real smile now.

  Then Mr. Boone squinted at the first word Simon had written last week. “Oh my goodness!”

  He started trying to sound out Simon’s longest long word.

  “Puh-new-monomono-monomono-ultra-something. No, let me start over again. Puh-new-mono-ultra … volanco?”

  The class laughed even harder.

  Simon felt a tingle of pleasure that it was his long word that was causing Mr. Boone so much hilarious trouble.

  “I give up!” Mr. Boone declared. “Who can help me out here?”

  Still standing by the board, marker in hand, Simon said the word as fast and as perfectly as he could, one syllable spilling out after another, each one in place.

  When he was done, Mr. Boone whacked his sifter and his rolling pin together in applause, and the rest of the class clapped along with him.

  If only Mr. Boone would come to their class every day! Maybe Jackson wouldn’t blame Simon so much for being Super Simon.

  “Now,” Mr. Boone said, “I have a few words of my own that I want to add to your wall, if I can remember how to spell them. May I?”

  He reached out for Simon’s green marker and handed him his sifter in exchange. In a blank space on the board, in large green letters, he wrote PRACTICE.

  Simon hoped that Jackson and Cody were paying attention.

  Then he borrowed Kelsey’s orange marker, letting her hold his rolling pin. With Kelsey’s marker, he wrote TEAMWORK.

  Simon didn’t like that word as much.

  Then in the biggest letters of all, he wrote one more, very short word, just three letters, short enough that even Prime could spell it: PIE.

  The class cheered.

  Mr. Boone returned Simon’s and Kelsey’s markers and collected his baking implements.

  Whistling “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” perfectly in tune this time, he headed out the door.

  * * *

  After school that day, instead of hurrying home to practice violin and search in his parents’ dictionary for some new mega-cool words for the word wall, Simon peeked into the third-grade classroom next to Mrs. Molina’s. If the spelling bee words could be drawn from any class’s word wall, it was time to check out the walls in Mr. Knox’s and Mrs. Rodriguez-Haramia’s rooms.

  A thought popped into his head. The kids in Mrs. Rodriguez-Haramia’s class would have to be good spellers just to spell their teacher’s hyphenated name.

  Mr. Knox, much younger and cheerier than Mrs. Molina, looked up from his desk.

  “May I help you?” he asked in a friendly way.

  Simon found himself feeling shy. “I’m from Mrs. Molina’s room. I was wondering … would it be okay … would you mind if I looked at your spelling wall? Just for a minute?”

  Mr. Knox chuckled. “Someone else from your class was here on Friday. A girl who had her spelling notebook with her. Kacey, I think her name was. Or Kelly?”

  Kelsey!

  That sneak! That spy!

  Then Simon remembered that sneaking and spying were exactly what he himself had come to do.

  “Did you let her look?” Simon asked.

  “Sure I did,” Mr. Knox replied. “I figure, the whole point of a spelling bee is to get kids excited about spelling, right?”

  Simon couldn’t agree more.

  As Mr. Knox turned back to grading papers, Simon studied this new word wall. Someone in Mr. Knox’s class had also written supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Didn’t anyone else care that it was just a fake movie word? No one had written Simon’s longest of all long words. He saw three hard words, all in the same handwriting, presumably from their class’s best speller: pathetic, paranoid, peculiar. Simon wrote them down in his spelling notebook; Kelsey wasn’t the only one who carried a spelling notebook everywhere.

  “Thanks!” Simon told Mr. Knox when he was done.

  “Good luck at the bee!” Mr. Knox said. “Though, as I’m sure you know, practice counts a lot more than luck does. Practice and teamwork.”

  Simon noticed that Mr. Boone had written the same three words—PRACTICE, TEAMWORK, and PIE—on Mr. Knox’s word wall, too. He wished his class had been the only one Mr. Boone visited. Maybe Mr. Boon
e had sung the song from Mary Poppins loudly and badly for Mr. Knox’s class, too.

  But he knew that Mr. Boone hadn’t botched the pronunciation of pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis for them.

  Thanks to Simon, that was a special, funny thing he had done for Mrs. Molina’s class alone.

  * * *

  That evening after dinner, once Simon had finished his homework, practiced violin, and found some more words for the word wall (obstinate, obelisk), Simon and his parents set up their favorite game on the kitchen table: Scrabble.

  In Scrabble, you drew little wooden letter tiles and had to make words out of them. The hard thing about it was that you couldn’t just plop your word on the board anywhere; with the exception of the very first word, it had to link up with some word already there.

  Each letter in your word was worth a certain number of points: from one point for common letters like e, a, and r up to ten points for the most special letters, q and z. Where you placed your word on the board mattered, too. You could double or triple the value of a letter or a word depending on where you put it.

  Simon loved the challenge of Scrabble. But the most fun thing about it was watching his quiet, kind, gentle, book-loving parents turn into the world’s worst cutthroat, competitive fiends.

  “Okay, you two,” his father crowed partway through the game as he began laying his letter tiles down on the board. “Beat this!”

  His father spelled out quilt, with the ten-point q falling on a triple-letter space, so earning thirty points for that one letter alone.

  “That’s nothin’,” his mother shot back.

  On another part of the board, using an m that was already there, his mother spelled out the word mailbox. Its seven letters meant that she used up all her letter tiles in one fell swoop, a feat worth an additional fifty bonus points. Plus, x was already worth eight points all by itself, and her word fell on a triple-word space. One hundred and four points!

  Both his parents looked his way.

  “Your turn, squirt!” his father taunted.

  “Can you spell pitiful?” his mother jeered.

  Simon studied his letter tiles. He had horrible letters: six vowels, with just one consonant, s. No letter he had was worth more than one point. Pitiful was right.