Simon Ellis, Spelling Bee Champ

by Claudia Mills

  It was hard to concentrate on math, science, and art that morning. At least the third-grade teachers had declared the word walls officially closed. So Simon didn’t need to torment himself wondering what new words might appear that he didn’t know or couldn’t spell. He knew he had missed some anyway. He hadn’t checked the word walls every single day. Even if he had, it was hard to notice every single word that had been added to those crowded surfaces.

  Finally, after lunch, it was time for the bee to begin.

  The third graders, grouped by teams, filed into the cafeteria; the fourth and fifth graders had already had their bees in the morning. Simon saw his parents sitting together in one of the rows of folding chairs set up for the audience. They could take time off during the day for special school events, though Simon’s mom missed a lot of evening events for cello performances.

  Annika’s parents and Cody’s parents weren’t there, but Simon spotted Kelsey’s mom in the center of the front row, camera on her lap, presumably ready to film Kelsey’s victory. Jackson’s dad was at work, but his mom, seated next to Simon’s mom, gave both boys a friendly wave.

  Simon’s parents beamed over at him. He was glad they had both come. But seeing them looking his way with such pride in their eyes made his stomach clench even more with wanting to win.

  The four-member teams lined up in order around three sides of the room, beneath their posted team numbers, eighteen teams in all. Kelsey’s team was 13. Simon’s team was 16. At the rear of the room the three teachers and Mr. Boone sat at a long table, with a microphone, a timer, and word lists set out in front of them.

  Someone from each team was in charge of carrying the large pad of paper and a handful of markers. Jackson had theirs. Simon had made sure to let someone else be the one to carry it so he wouldn’t look bossy before the spelling even began.

  His team hadn’t done very well with Mr. Boone’s first word on the word wall: PRACTICE. But he was going to do his best at TEAMWORK. And then maybe they’d be rewarded with PIE.

  “Are you ready, spellers?” Mr. Boone asked.

  He looked like a normal principal, wearing a jacket and tie. Simon had thought today might be the day Mr. Boone would finally come dressed in a bee costume, but maybe he couldn’t find one in his size. Or maybe Mr. Boone was trying to let the spellers know that the time for silliness was past and the time for seriousness had begun.

  “Yes!” all the teams shouted in response to his question.

  In the bare cafeteria, their voices had an unsettling echo. It felt scarier and more real now, as they stood huddled together waiting to hear the words read out that would determine their fate.

  “Word number one,” Mr. Knox said. “Listen. In order to do well, it is important that you listen to instructions. Listen.”

  At first Simon thought Mr. Knox was giving them a final piece of advice for how to succeed in the spelling bee, but then he realized that listen was the word to be spelled. Each word would be spoken with careful pronunciation, then used in a sentence, and then spoken again.

  Simon forced himself to let one of his teammates speak first.

  “L-i-s-t-e-n,” Annika whispered so that the team next to them wouldn’t hear.

  Jackson nodded. Cody—imitating Jackson?—nodded, too.

  After Simon’s nod, Annika wrote the word on the top sheet of paper. When the timer beeped, Jackson held it up for the teachers to see. Looking around the room, Simon saw that all eighteen teams had spelled it correctly. It would have been pretty pathetic if they hadn’t.

  The next few words were harder—society, government, and experiment. Two teams got a stinger with government (they left out the first n) and another with experiment (they put a instead of i).

  After five more third-grade spelling words, no teams had been eliminated. Lots of teams had stingers now, but Simon’s team and Kelsey’s team still had a perfect record. A team from Mrs. Rodriguez-Haramia’s class had two stingers: one more, and they’d be out.

  The words became harder. Word-wall words at last! The audience now clapped after each round, both to congratulate the teams that had gotten the answer right and to praise the effort of the teams that had gotten it wrong.

  “Calendar,” Mrs. Molina read. “I turned the page of the calendar from March to April. Calendar.”

  “C-a-l-e-n-d-e-r?” Jackson guessed.

  “C-a-l-a-n-d-e-r?” Annika guessed.

  Cody didn’t ever bother to guess.

  “It’s c-a-l-e-n-d-a-r,” Simon corrected. He was sure about that one.

  No one raised any objection to Simon’s spelling. Annika had written down all their words so far. This time, for the first time, Simon was the one who wrote the word on the large pad to display.

  “Stinger for teams 4, 7, 9, 11, and 13,” Mrs. Rodriguez-Haramia called out. Team 13 was Kelsey’s team: their first stinger. Jackson started to cheer, but Annika silenced him with a stony look. Kelsey’s lip trembled, and her cheeks flamed. Simon couldn’t help feeling bad for her; he would have felt just as terrible if the stinger had been his.

  For the next three words, Simon didn’t even bother to consult the others. It was faster just to tell them how to spell principal (Mr. Boone beamed), agoraphobia (Simon’s word, yay!), and weird (short, but tempting to spell it wrong, as you’d think it followed the i-before-e rule, and it didn’t). Only six teams of the original eighteen were left now, including Kelsey’s team 13 and Simon’s team 16.

  Simon’s team had yet to have their first stinger. But Jackson was starting to look dangerously sulky as Simon told them how to spell separate. He knew it had an a in the middle because it was “a rat” of a word to spell.

  “What about teamwork?” Jackson asked. “I thought we were supposed to be a team.”

  What about practice, Simon wanted to reply, which none of you wanted to do for the last two weeks? What about winning?

  “How do you think we should spell it?” Simon asked Jackson, keeping his tone polite.

  “S-e-p-e-r-a-t-e,” Jackson told him, jutting his chin up.

  Did Jackson really think that, or was he just getting sick of being bossed around by Super Simon?

  The seconds were ticking down.

  “Annika? Cody?” Simon asked, itching to pick up the marker to write.

  “What Simon said,” Annika said.

  Cody gave his usual shrug.

  “Okay,” Jackson said, heaving an irritated sigh. “Everyone always has to do what Simon says, just like in the stupid little kid game, right?”

  As Mrs. Molina gave the three-second warning, Jackson grabbed the marker from Simon and scrawled the word in angry, jagged strokes. He held up their pad just as the thirty-second timer beeped.

  Thank goodness Annika had weighed in on Simon’s side!

  “Stingers for teams 2 and 16,” Mrs. Molina said.

  Team 16! Simon’s team!

  He heard a low murmur rising from the audience, but he didn’t let himself look out at his parents to see their reaction.

  That couldn’t be right.

  “What?” Simon called out.

  “The correct spelling is s-e-p-a-r-a-t-e,” Mrs. Molina said.

  “That’s what we wrote!” Simon protested. “That’s how we spelled it.”

  Mrs. Molina walked over from the teachers’ table to inspect the sign Jackson had displayed. For the first time, Simon looked at it, too.

  It said seperate.

  Shocked, he glared at Jackson. How could Jackson have done this? Were they a team or not?

  But Jackson, too, had a stunned look on his face.

  “That’s an a,” Jackson said in a choked voice, pointing at what Simon, and apparently Mrs. Molina, thought looked exactly like an e. “You just can’t read my writing! I wrote a. Really, I did. That’s what we all agreed on, and that’s what I wrote. You have to believe me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Molina said, her voice full of genuine regret. “But we have to go by what the word looks like, not what you me
ant it to look like.”

  She seemed to know that this wasn’t a good time to remind Jackson about the importance of legible handwriting.

  As Mrs. Molina headed back to the teachers’ table, Jackson seemed close to tears.

  10

  “If we lose the spelling bee, it’ll be my dumb fault,” Jackson muttered. “Simon’s always right; I’m always wrong. That’s just how it is.”

  “That’s not true!” Simon protested.

  Mr. Knox read out the next word. Simon put up his hand to signal the others to be quiet so he could focus with all his might on what Mr. Knox was saying.

  “Responsibility. It is important to take responsibility for your mistakes. Responsibility.”

  Simon recognized it from the word wall in Mrs. Rodriguez-Haramia’s room.

  He beamed another of his silent messages to his teammates: Please, somebody who isn’t me, spell it right!

  Annika shook her head, signaling cluelessness.

  Cody didn’t even bother to do that.

  Jackson stared straight ahead, eyes glittering, as if willing himself not to cry.

  Simon couldn’t stand it any longer. Super Simon cared about winning the spelling bee more than anything else in the world. But it didn’t matter anymore to plain-real-kid Simon, to Jackson’s best friend Simon.

  “Three-second warning,” Mr. Knox called out.

  “R-e-s-p-o-n-s-a-b-i-l-i-t-y,” Simon wrote.

  Hands trembling, he held it up for the teachers to see.

  “Stingers for teams 5, 7, 13, and 16,” Mr. Knox announced.

  At least Kelsey’s team had gotten a second stinger this round, too.

  “Wait,” Annika said. “We got another stinger? You got it wrong?”

  Simon nodded. He felt himself flushing.

  “That’s okay,” Cody said, trying to comfort him. “Only two teams got it right. I might be good with animals, but you’re great with spelling. You got more words right than the rest of us put together.”

  Somehow Cody’s kindness made Simon feel even worse.

  Jackson had yet to speak. His eyes met Simon’s and held Simon’s gaze.

  He knows, Simon thought.

  Would Jackson be mad at him all over again, even madder than he had been when Simon lost the Galaxy Warriors game on purpose?

  Jackson gave him a shaky smile.

  Simon gave him a shaky smile back.

  “Foreign,” Mrs. Rodriguez-Haramia called out. “It is useful to learn how to speak a foreign language. Foreign.”

  Only four teams were left now: Simon’s team, Kelsey’s team, a team from Mr. Knox’s class, and one from Mrs. Rodriguez-Haramia’s class.

  Simon wasn’t sure about this one. He remembered from the word wall that it had one of those unexpected consonants in the middle of it: f-o-r-e-i-g-h-n? “I think it’s f-o-r-e-i-g-h-n.” Or maybe it just had a g and not an h? “No, f-o-r-e-i-g-n,” he corrected.

  No one disagreed.

  He wrote it down and held his breath as Mrs. Rodriguez-Haramia called out a stinger for Mr. Knox’s remaining team.

  “Forfeit,” Mr. Knox read next. “A team that breaks the rules will forfeit the match. Forfeit.”

  His teammates shrugged. More confident this time, Simon wrote down the correct spelling. It was another one of those words that broke the i-before-e rule.

  Stinger for Mrs. Rodriguez-Haramia’s remaining team.

  There were just two teams left now: Simon’s team and Kelsey’s.

  “Trough,” Mrs. Molina read. “The pig eats his supper from his trough. Trough.”

  Simon didn’t remember that one from the word walls. But he knew he had missed some of the shorter words, as his eyes always went to the longer, fancier ones.

  He hesitated.

  “T-r-o-f-f,” Annika suggested.

  “That’s what it sounds like,” Jackson agreed.

  “No,” Simon said. “There has to be some trick to it, because the words are getting harder now.”

  It was probably one of those puzzling gh-words. Or was it a ph-word? The f sound was sometimes spelled gh, but it was sometimes spelled ph. Graph. Triumph. The boy’s name Joseph. They had already been asked a hard word with a g in it. The teachers probably wouldn’t pick a hard g-word twice. The trick would be that this was a ph-word instead.

  “It’s t-r-o-u-p-h,” Simon decided.

  He was about to write it down, when Cody spoke in his soft voice. “No.”

  The other three all stared at him.

  “It’s t-r-o-u-g-h,” Cody said. “It ends in gh, not ph.”

  “Which is it?” Jackson asked Simon.

  Now Simon wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure of much of anything right now.

  T-r-o-u-p-h? or t-r-o-u-g-h? Both sounded equally right. Or equally wrong.

  Then he remembered. Cody lived on a farm. Cody even had a pet pig. Cody’s pig probably ate out of that thing, however it was spelled.

  Simon picked up the marker.

  “T-r-o-u,” he wrote. Then he finished it: “g-h.”

  This time, for the first time, Cody held up the paper for the teachers to see.

  And this time, for the first time, Mr. Boone gave the verdict, instead of having one of the three teachers take turns doing it.

  Mr. Boone checked the two signs, one held up by Simon’s team and one by Kelsey’s.

  T-r-o-u-p-h for Kelsey’s team.

  T-r-o-u-g-h for Simon’s team.

  Only one of them could be correct.

  “Stinger for…” Mr. Boone paused dramatically. “Stinger for … team 13.” Third and final stinger for Kelsey’s team!

  The audience exploded into applause. Simon let himself look at his parents now. His father had thrown his arms wide to make a V for victory. His mother was hugging Jackson’s mom.

  Simon gave Cody a high five. Jackson thumped Cody on the back, and then thumped Simon on the back, too. Annika did a happy dance, her braids tossing in time with her feet.

  Then, abruptly, she broke off her dance of jubilation. Simon could see in her face that she had remembered that victory for her team meant defeat for her two best friends. Annika darted over to Kelsey and Izzy and gathered them both into a huge hug.

  Simon was glad to see them hug her back. In the end, no spelling bee rivalry could ever stop those three from being friends. And Kelsey deserved credit for leading her team to its neck-and-neck second-place finish.

  Mr. Boone dismissed the assembly and reminded the winning team—not that they needed any reminder!—to come to the conference room next to his office to eat their prize honey pie at the victors’ pie buffet. Their families were invited, too.

  Simon turned to Jackson.

  “Simon says…” he began, hesitantly.

  Simon says what?

  I’m sorry I act like Super Simon sometimes?

  I’m glad you’re my friend?

  But Jackson cut him off.

  “Jackson says, Let’s go stuff our pie holes with some pie!”

  * * *

  At the pie buffet for the winning teams there were ten different kinds of pie, each one labeled. Some were pies Simon had tasted before: apple, blueberry, cherry, pumpkin, banana cream. Others were unfamiliar: gooseberry, black bottom, Boston cream, shoofly. The honey pie stood on a pedestal in the center of the table.

  “Let’s each take a sliver of a couple of different ones,” Simon’s mother said to Jackson’s mother, after both moms had swept their sons into an embrace. “Then we can share tastes.”

  “Let’s each take a whole slice of all of them!” Jackson countered.

  “Now, Jackson,” his mother warned.

  Simon’s father grinned at Jackson. To Jackson’s mom, he said, “I’d say they’ve earned their pie. They had some tough words thrown at them, and they didn’t flinch.”

  Well, they had definitely flinched a couple of times.

  “Simon knew just about every word,” Jackson said. He had already grabbed a big piece of banana cream pie a
nd taken a huge bite. He wiped some whipped cream from his mouth with the side of his hand.

  “But Cody was the one who knew trough,” Simon admitted.

  Cody was the one who had spelled the winning word for the entire third-grade bee.

  Cody heard his name and flashed them a smile.

  Simon helped himself to a slice of honey pie and took a first taste of its sweet, golden-brown custard filling. Mr. Boone was indeed the best, funniest pie-baking principal there could be.

  Would the moment be even sweeter if Simon had won the bee all by himself?

  Maybe he wouldn’t have won. He wouldn’t have messed up on responsible if he had been spelling all by himself, but he would have messed up on trough instead.

  He wouldn’t have had a SPECTACULAR SPELLERS T-shirt. He wouldn’t have helped teach Annika’s dog to spell. He wouldn’t have heard Jackson and Cody snoring out spelling words, which, now that he thought about it, had been pretty hilarious.

  He wouldn’t have been on the same team as his best friend.

  Simon went up to Annika, who was getting her second piece of pie.

  “Thanks for letting Prime be our mascot,” he told her.

  “He can spell s-h-a-k-e now,” she said. “Kelsey and I taught him this week.”

  Flushed with the sweetness of victory, Simon found himself wishing Kelsey could be there eating honey pie with them. Maybe she could come over to his house sometime, and they could look up more long, cool words together. Or talk about books they’d both read. They could have fun arguing about which book was the best book in the whole world.

  In some ways, Simon actually had more in common with Kelsey than he did with Jackson. Maybe these days Jackson had more in common with Cody than he did with Simon.

  But Simon still wanted to play Galaxy Warriors and Amphibian Apocalypse with Jackson sometimes. They could kick a soccer ball around, or shoot baskets, too. Or even play Bird War.

  Simon turned back to Jackson.

  “Do you think we’ll ever play Bird War again?” he asked.

  “That dumb game?” Jackson scoffed. Then he said, “Sure!”

  Both boys took another bite of Mr. Boone’s famous honey pie.