The Best School Year Ever

by Barbara Robinson

  If anybody but the Herdmans had stolen a baby and scribbled all over his head and then charged people money to look at him, they would have been shut up in the house for the rest of their natural lives. But since it was the Herdmans, most people just said how lucky Mrs. McCluskey was to get Howard back all in one piece, and that was that.

  The truth is that no one wanted to fool around with them, so you knew that unless they tried to hold up the First National Bank or burn down the public library, you weren’t going to see the last of them—especially if you had to go to the Woodrow Wilson School, and be in the same class with Imogene, and figure out something good to say about her before the end of the year.

  Chapter 2

  A lot of people, like Alice Wendleken’s mother, thought the Herdmans ought to be in jail, kids or not, but I knew that wouldn’t happen.

  Our jail is just two cells in the basement of the town hall, and the Herdmans aren’t allowed in the town hall anymore since Gladys and Ollie put all the frogs in the drinking fountain there. They were little tiny frogs, and Miss Farley, the town clerk, drank two or three of them off the top of the bubbler by mistake. She didn’t have her glasses on, she said, and didn’t see them till somebody hollered, “Evelyn, stop! You’re drinking frogs!”

  Miss Farley was hysterical! She said she could feel them jerking and jumping all up and down her windpipe. But even so she chased Gladys and Ollie all around the block, and she said if she ever caught any Herdmans inside the town hall again, she would put on roller skates and run them out of town so fast their heels would smoke.

  Of course they didn’t care. “What’d she eat our frogs for anyway?” Gladys said. “It’s not our fault she ate our frogs. She’ll get warts in her stomach, where she can’t scratch them.”

  “Warts don’t itch,” Alice Wendleken told her.

  “These will,” Gladys said. “We caught the frogs in a patch of poison ivy.”

  The town hall wasn’t the only place in town where the Herdmans weren’t allowed in to get a drink of water or go to the bathroom or call their mother or anything. They also weren’t allowed in the drugstore or the movie theater or the A&P or the Tasti-Lunch Diner.

  They used to be allowed in the post office, but that didn’t last. Somebody got hold of all their school pictures and put them up right next to the “WANTED” posters, and it seemed so natural for them to be there that nobody noticed till Ollie Herdman went up and asked the postmaster, Mr. Blair, how much money he could get for his brother Claude.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Mr. Blair said.

  “Some of those people are worth five hundred dollars,” Ollie said. “How much can I get for Claude?”

  So Mr. Blair went to see what he was talking about and sure enough, there were the Herdmans right up with the bank robbers and the mad bombers and all.

  Mr. Blair had a fit. “How did these pictures get up here?” he said: “Did you put these pictures up here?”

  Ollie said no, it was a big surprise to him. “Well, it’s a big surprise to me too,” Mr. Blair said, “but I can tell you that the F.B.I. is not going to pay you anything for Claude, or any of the rest of you either. How did you happen to pick on Claude?”

  “Because he’s the one I’ve got,” Ollie said.

  Mr. Blair said later that he didn’t like the sound of that. “I figured he probably had Claude tied to a tree somewhere.” So he mentioned it to the policeman on the corner, and the policeman said he’d better go investigate because with Herdmans you never could tell.

  He didn’t have to go far. There was a big crowd of people and a lot of commotion halfway down the block, and sure enough, Ollie had shut Claude up in the men’s room of the Sunoco station.

  When the policeman got there, Claude was banging on the door and hollering for someone to let him out, and there was a whole big family from South Dakota wanting to get in. The mother said they had driven almost a hundred and fifty miles looking for a Sunoco station because they were the cleanest, but what good was clean if you couldn’t get in?

  “I gave the key to one of those Herdmans,” the manager said, “and he went off with it. I should have my head examined.”

  “But you don’t need a key to get out,” the policeman said. “Why doesn’t Claude just open the door?”

  “I can’t,” Claude yelled. “The door’s stuck.”

  Ollie claimed later that he didn’t have anything to do with that; that he hadn’t even planned to shut Claude up in the men’s room or anywhere else, but when the door jammed shut he went off to get help, and that was when he saw the pictures at the post office.

  “You were going to get help at the post office?” the manager asked.

  “I was going to get my sister Imogene.”

  “And she was at the post office?”

  “No,” Ollie said, “she wasn’t there.”

  That was typical Herdman—there was a lie in it somewhere, but you couldn’t put your finger on where.

  Of course all that was later. In the meantime Mr. Blair and the Sunoco station manager had to get the fire department to break in the door and get Claude out. By that time the South Dakota people had left, and a lot of other people who wanted gas got tired of waiting and went somewhere else, and in all the excitement somebody walked off with two cans of motor oil and a wrench. Herdmans, probably, but nobody could prove it, just like nobody could prove that Ollie really meant to hand Claude over to the F.B.I. for money.

  So then the Herdmans weren’t allowed in the post office or the Sunoco station, and they got thrown out of the new Laundromat the very day it opened.

  They planned to wash their cat in one of the machines, but they didn’t know it would cost money, so they just dropped him in and went off to locate some quarters.

  Of course the cat didn’t like it in the washing machine, and it made so much noise hissing and spitting and scratching that the manager, Mr. Cleveland, went to see what was wrong.

  “I thought it was a short circuit,” he said, “or a loose connection—something electrical. That’s the kind of noise it was.”

  People said it looked electrical, all right. When he opened the lid, the cat shot out with its tail and its ears and all its hair standing straight up. It skittered around all over the tops of the machines and clawed through everybody’s laundry baskets, and knocked over boxes of soap and bottles of bleach and a big basket of flowers that said “Good Luck to the Laundromat.”

  Finally someone opened the door, and the last they saw of the cat it was roaring down the street, all tangled up in a tablecloth.

  Of course the Laundromat was a mess and all the customers were mad and couldn’t find their clothes and wanted their money back for the stuff the cat had spilled. Pretty soon people began to sneeze from all the cat hair and soap powder in the air, and one lady broke out in big red blotches all over because she was allergic to cats. Mr. Cleveland sent everyone outdoors till things settled down.

  But things didn’t settle down. Santoro’s Pizza Parlor was across the street, and when Mr. Santoro saw all these people coming out of the Laundromat sneezing and coughing and choking, he yelled, “What’s the matter? Is it a fire?”

  Somebody yelled back, “No—cat hair.” But Mr. Santoro thought they said “bad air.” He figured there was something wrong with the new plumbing connections, maybe a gas leak, and he ran to the top of the street to warn people away in case of an explosion.

  Some of the people he warned away were Herdmans—Imogene and Ralph and Leroy, on their way back with fifty cents for the washing machine.

  “You children get away from here!” he said. “The Laundromat may explode!”

  I guess they were pretty surprised. They probably figured the cat did it, but they didn’t know how. They also probably figured that if the cat was smart enough to blow up a Laundromat, it was smart enough to get away. So they just left.

  Mr. Santoro called the fire department too and they came right away. But of course there wasn’t any fire
and there wasn’t any gas leak, and by that time there wasn’t any cat and there weren’t any Herdmans either, just a lot of angry customers and a reporter from the newspaper who went around interviewing everybody.

  Most of the people didn’t even know what had happened because it happened so fast, so the newspaper story was pretty mysterious. “LAUNDROMAT OPENING MARRED BY UNUSUAL DISTURBANCE,” it said. “FIREMEN RESPOND TO ANONYMOUS ALARM. CUSTOMERS DESCRIBE WILD ANIMAL.” My father said at least they got that part right.

  Mr. Cleveland had to clean up the mess and replace everybody’s stuff and pay for the blotched-up lady to get an allergy shot, so he was pretty mad. Mr. Santoro was mad because they called him “anonymous,” and of course the firemen were mad because they knew the Herdmans did it, whatever it was.

  In the meantime the Herdmans were home, waiting for the cat to show up. The cat, crazier than usual because it was all wrapped up in a tablecloth, was tearing all over town, yowling and spitting and scratching at anything that got in its way.

  It ran in the barber shop and streaked up one side of the chair where Mr. Perry was shaving someone.

  “All of a sudden,” Mr. Perry said, “there was a cat. So I lathered the cat by mistake. Missed my customer and lathered the cat.”

  Then the cat ran through the lobby of the movie theater and picked up some popcorn there, and by that time you couldn’t tell what it was or what it had ever been.

  It finally clawed its way up a tree in front of the library, and the librarian, Miss Graebner, called the fire department to come and get it down.

  “I think it’s a cat,” she said, “and it looks like it’s been through a war.”

  “No,” the fire chief said, “it’s been through a washing machine, and as far as I’m concerned it can stay in that tree till the middle of next year.” Of course, Miss Graebner was mad about that.

  The only people who weren’t mad were the Herdmans, because when the cat finally came home, it was all clean and fluffy from the shaving lather, and that’s what they wanted in the first place.

  Chapter 3

  Naturally my mother wasn’t too crazy about the Herdmans since they were always mopping up the floor with Charlie, but she had too much to do, she said, to spend time complaining about them—she would leave that to Alice Wendleken’s mother, who was so good at it.

  Mrs. Wendleken complained about them all the time, to everybody. It was her second favorite subject, besides how smart Alice was, and how pretty, and how talented, and how it would all go to waste if Gladys Herdman bit her to death.

  Every time you turned around, Mrs. Wendleken was volunteering Alice to be the star of something—the main fairy or the head elf or the Clean Up Our Streets poster girl— and when the Chamber of Commerce bought a respirator for the hospital they put a picture of it in the paper and, sure enough, there was Alice hooked up to the respirator.

  Mrs. Wendleken said she didn’t have anything to do with that. The photographer just looked around and said, “I wonder if that pretty little girl would be willing to pose with the respirator.” But nobody believed her.

  Alice didn’t get any applause for this either, but she carried the picture around anyway, and showed it to anyone who would hold still. She showed it to Imogene Herdman at recess, and Imogene took one look and hollered, “Get away from me! Don’t touch me! Whatever you’ve got, I don’t want it!”— which brought the school nurse in a hurry in case Alice had smallpox or something.

  It emptied the playground in a hurry too. Everybody figured that if it was something Imogene Herdman was scared to catch, it would wipe out the rest of us because ordinary germs didn’t even slow the Herdmans down. They never got mumps or pinkeye or colds or stomachaches or anything. A snake once bit Leroy Herdman and Leroy’s leg swelled up a little bit, but that was all.

  The snake died. Leroy brought it to school and tied it all up and down the light cord in the teachers’ supply closet, and about five minutes later the kindergarten teacher, Miss Newman, came in and pulled the cord.

  She had all the day’s helpers with her—six kindergarten kids carrying pots of red finger paint—and when Miss Newman screamed, they all dropped their pots and finger paint flew all over the place.

  Then somebody upset two big boxes of chalk and they all tramped around in that, and when the janitor heard the racket and opened the door, he just took one look and went straight to get the principal. He said there had been some terrible accident and the supply closet was full of bloody people, apparently all cut up and screaming in pain.

  By the time the principal got there, Miss Newman had pulled herself together and was herding the little kids down the hall to the washroom, and then the recess bell rang.

  So the hall was full of kids, and teachers calling to Miss Newman, “What happened? What happened?” and the principal telling everyone to “Move along, move right along. Nothing here to see.” Of course there was plenty to see—the whole thing looked like a big disaster we had just read about in history called The Children’s Massacre.

  In all the commotion Leroy Herdman just walked into the supply closet, untied his snake and put it in his pocket, and walked out again.

  When we got back from recess, the principal and Miss Newman and the janitor and the boys’ basketball coach were all crawling around the floor of the supply closet, and Miss Newman was saying, “I tell you there was a snake crawling up the light cord!”

  Of course they never did find it, because nobody looked in Leroy’s pocket.

  I couldn’t understand why the snake died and Leroy didn’t, but when I asked my father, he said that Leroy probably stretched his story. “A snake bit him,” my father said, “and then he found a different snake that was already dead. That’s what I think.”

  My mother said she bet it wasn’t a snake at all, that Leroy just tied a whole lot of poor worms together. But I decided that Leroy was telling the truth for the first time in his life, that the snake was perfectly healthy, bit Leroy, and immediately died. So maybe Mrs. Wendleken wasn’t far wrong to pour iodine all over Alice, and maybe Alice should shut up about this treatment and just be glad she wasn’t dead, like the snake.

  Two or three days later Leroy stuck the snake in the third-grade pencil sharpener, tail first, and that teacher went all to pieces too. It was bad enough, she said, to find a snake in the pencil sharpener, but then she almost sharpened it by mistake.

  The snake was pretty worn out by then, so they threw it away, but nobody in the third grade would go near the pencil sharpener for the rest of the week.

  My mother’s friend Miss Philips worked for the welfare department, and one of her jobs was to check up on the Herdmans, so Mother told her about the snakebite in case Leroy should get some kind of shot for it. But Miss Philips just said she didn’t know of any shot that would benefit Leroy, and anyway, all her sympathies were with the snake.

  “I went once to that garage where those kids live,” she said, “but I never got inside and I barely got out of the yard alive. It was full of rocks and poison ivy and torn-up bicycles and pieces of cars and great big holes they’d dug. I fell in one of the holes and the cat jumped on me out of a window. Good thing I had a hat on or I’d be bald. Now I just drive past the place once a month, and if they haven’t managed to blow it up or burn it down, I figure they’re all right.”

  “But a snakebite,” Mother said. “Don’t you think that’s unusual?”

  “I certainly do,” Miss Philips said. “It’s the first time something bit one of them instead of the other way around.”

  The whole thing got into the newspaper: “REPTILE FOUND IN WOODROW WILSON SCHOOL,” the article said. “TEACHERS AND STUDENTS ALARMED.” That probably meant Miss Newman and all the kindergarten kids. “PARENTS SEEK ACTION” probably meant Mrs. Wendleken, seeking to get the Herdmans expelled or arrested or something. “SCHOOL OFFICIAL INSPECTS PREMISES” was Mr. Crabtree, the principal, who stuck his head in the third-grade room and said that if one more snake showed up
anywhere he would personally kill it, skin it, cook it, and feed it to whoever was responsible.

  I don’t know whether that would have scared Leroy or not, but it didn’t matter anyway because he wasn’t there. Imogene said he stayed home to bury the snake, and she had this messy scribbled-up note that said, “Leroy is absent at a funeral.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Imogene,” the teacher said. “Was it a member of your family? Why aren’t you at the funeral?”

  “It was a friend of Leroy’s,” Imogene said. “I didn’t like him.”

  Mrs. Wendleken was mad because the newspaper article didn’t say it was Leroy Herdman’s snake that caused all this trouble, and she was mad at the principal because he wouldn’t say so either.

  “I can’t prove who the snake belonged to,” Mr. Crabtree said, “and even if I could, why would I? It wasn’t a boa constrictor, you know, and it was dead to begin with.”

  But I guess Mrs. Wendleken was really out to nail Leroy, and she wouldn’t give up. “Of course it was Leroy’s snake! Everybody knows it was Leroy’s snake. Why else would he bury it? Why would Leroy Herdman bury someone else’s snake?”

  “I don’t know.” Mr. Crabtree was fed up with the snake and Leroy Herdman and Mrs. Wendleken too. “But if he did bury a snake for somebody else, it’s the first cooperative thing he’s ever done in his life, and I just think we ought to drop the whole subject, don’t you?”

  That would probably have been the end of it, except that Mrs. Wendleken described this conversation to my mother, who described it to Miss Philips. Then Miss Philips went to school and told Mr. Crabtree that she had a plan to civilize the Herdmans or, at least, one of them.

  “It’s about the snake . . .” she began, but Mr. Crabtree wouldn’t let her say any more.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “I don’t even care what it is you want, just so I don’t have to hear any more about that snake.”

  So Leroy got named Good School Citizen of the Month—“for an act of kindness,” the award read.