The Best School Year Ever

by Barbara Robinson

  Imogene told him it didn’t make any difference because the password that day was softball.

  “Did you try it?” Charlie asked. “Did you get in?”

  “I don’t want in.” Imogene gave him this dark, squinty-eyed look. “If a kid gets in that room, they never let him out. Remember Pauline Ellison?”

  Charlie shook his head.

  “Neither does anyone else. She got in the teachers’ room. Remember Kenneth Weaver? Did you see Kenneth Weaver lately?”

  “No, because he’s got the mumps.”

  “That’s what you think. Kenneth doesn’t have the mumps. Kenneth got caught in the teachers’ room.”

  I guess this was too much, even for Charlie. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  Imogene grinned her girl-Godzilla grin. “Neither did Kenneth,” she said. “I told him he better not go near the teachers’ room but”—she shrugged—“he did it anyway.”

  For once nobody believed Imogene. Nobody told her so, but Alice Wendleken said that from now on Imogene couldn’t shove people around anymore because she was a proven liar, and no matter what she said everybody would laugh at her and maybe knock her down. Nobody believed that either, but it sounded great.

  “Just wait till Kenneth comes back!” everybody said. But Kenneth didn’t come back.

  Charlie hunted me up at recess with this news. “He’s never coming back,” he said. “The teacher gathered up his books and moved Bernadette Slocum into his seat and said, ‘Well, we’ll certainly miss Kenneth, won’t we?’ It’s just like Imogene said!”

  “Oh, come on, Charlie,” I said. “You know they haven’t got him shut up in the teachers’ room.”

  Still . . . you had to wonder. First Imogene said Kenneth was gone, and then he was gone. What if Imogene was right?

  I wasn’t the only one who thought about this, and I wasn’t the only one who found reasons to stay away from the teachers’ room, and even to stay away from the whole third floor. Kids suddenly couldn’t climb stairs for one reason or another or kids got dizzy if they went above the second floor. Alice had what she called a twisted toe and limped around holding on to chairs and tables, all on one floor, naturally.

  But Louella McCluskey told the real truth, for everyone. “I don’t think Imogene Herdman is right,” she said, “and I don’t think kids disappear into the teachers’ room, but maybe she is and maybe they do, and I’m not going to take any chances.”

  Then two teachers and a district supervisor and Mrs. Wendleken all got locked in the teachers’ room by accident. They were in there for an hour and a half, banging on the door and yelling and even throwing things out the window. They took down the curtain and climbed up on chairs and waved their arms around at the top of the door, but nobody saw them and nobody heard them because nobody ever went near the teachers’ room.

  They were all pretty mad, especially the district supervisor, and Mrs. Wendleken was hysterical by the time somebody let them out. By that time, too they were all worn out and hoarse from yelling and dizzy from waving their arms around in the air.

  Who finally let them out was Imogene.

  She said that she stood around trying to decide what to do, and that made Mrs. Wendleken hysterical all over again. “What to do!” she said.

  “Open the door and let us out is what to do!”

  “But it’s the teachers’ room,” Imogene said, looking shocked, as if she had this rule burned into her brain. “We’re not allowed in the teachers’ room.”

  “You’re allowed to let people out of the teachers’ room!” Mrs. Wendleken hollered.

  Then the district supervisor got mad at Mrs. Wendleken. “This child has saved the day,” she said. “We ought to thank her. And let me tell you, there are plenty of schools in this district where the students spend every waking minute trying to break into the teachers’ room, or sneak into the teachers’ room. You wouldn’t believe the wild tales I’ve heard. Now here’s a student who seems to understand that teachers need a little privacy. I hope you have more boys and girls like . . . is it Imogene?”

  “We have five more exactly like her,” one of the teachers said.

  The district supervisor said that was wonderful and nobody argued with her—too tired, I guess, from jumping up and down yelling for help.

  This whole thing got in the newspaper. “SCHOOL PERSONNEL LOCKED IN THIRD FLOOR ROOM,” it said. “RELEASED BY ALERT STUDENT.” It didn’t name the alert student but it named everybody else who was there.

  “Except Kenneth Weaver,” Charlie said. “It doesn’t say anything about Kenneth Weaver.”

  “That proves it, Charlie,” I said. “He never was in there.”

  “Why in the world would Kenneth Weaver be in the teachers’ room?” Mother said. “That whole family moved to Toledo.”

  “Did they take Kenneth?” Charlie asked.

  “Certainly they took Kenneth! Who would move away and leave their children?”

  “Mr. Herdman,” I said, but Mother said that was different.

  Alice Wendleken cut out the newspaper article and gave it to Imogene. “I thought you’d want to keep it,” she said, “since it’s about you. Of course nobody knows it’s about you because they didn’t print your name. I wonder why they didn’t print your name.”

  “They didn’t print Kenneth’s name either,” Imogene said. “So what?”

  “So Kenneth wasn’t there!” Alice said.

  Imogene stuck her nose right up against Alice’s nose, which naturally made Alice nervous and also cross-eyed. “Why do you think I opened the door to that room?” she said. “You think I opened the door to let all those teachers out? Who cares if they never get out? I let Kenneth out.”

  “My mother was in there,” Alice said, “and she didn’t see Kenneth.”

  “Did you ask her?”

  “No, because I know Kenneth Weaver is in Toledo.”

  “He is now,” Imogene said.

  This was typical Herdman—too shifty to figure out, and Alice didn’t even try.

  Aside from congratulating Imogene, the district supervisor said that the worst part of being shut up in there for an hour and a half was the furniture. “Lumpy old sofa,” she said, “broken-down chairs, terrible lighting. It doesn’t surprise me that the door was broken. Everything in that room is broken.”

  So the teachers got a new sofa and chairs, and the furniture store donated a new rug, and they painted the walls and fixed the door and bought new curtains and a big green plant.

  They left the door open too for a couple of days so everybody could see the new stuff, which just went to prove, Alice said, “that there’s nobody hidden there and never was.”

  Imogene shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  Charlie was feeling brave too. “Where would they be?” he said. “There’s no place for them.”

  “Sure there is.” Imogene pointed. “How about that? The plant that ate Chicago.”

  “The plant?” Mother said that evening. “Well, I would have chosen some normal kind of plant like a fern, but I guess they wanted something scientific for the teachers’ room. That plant is a Venus’s flytrap. It eats flies . . . swallows them right up.”

  Charlie looked at me, his eyes wide, and I knew what he was thinking—that maybe you could say the password by accident, disappear into the teachers’ room, and never be seen again because of death by plant.

  “It eats flies, Charlie,” I said. “Nothing but flies.”

  “Well, after all, it’s just a plant,” Mother said. “It doesn’t know flies from hamburger. I guess it eats anything it can get hold of.”

  Once Charlie spread that word around, you would normally have had kids lining up to feed stuff to the plant—pizza, potato chips, M&M cookies—and they would probably have had to keep the door locked and put up a big sign that said “Private, Keep Out, Teachers Only.” But none of this happened because nobody would go near the teachers’ room, not even to watch a plant eat lunch.

  When the
district supervisor came back to see the new furniture, she mentioned this and said that the teachers could thank “that thoughtful girl. What was her name? Imogene” for all this peace and privacy.

  I guess she was right, in a way, but I didn’t see any teachers rushing to thank Imogene. And never mind how much I needed to find a compliment for her, I certainly couldn’t write down “Imogene Herdman is thoughtful,” no matter what the district supervisor said.

  Chapter 6

  Once a year we had to take an IQ test and a psychology test and an aptitude test, which showed what you might grow up to be if the Herdmans let you get out of the Woodrow Wilson School alive. But the only test the Herdmans ever bothered to take was the eye test.

  This surprised everybody, because it meant that at least they knew the letters of the alphabet. You had to cover up one eye with a little piece of paper and read the letters on a chart, and then cover up the other eye and read them again. If you couldn’t do it, it meant that you had to have glasses.

  Sometimes it just meant that you were scared, like Lester Yeagle.

  “If you don’t do it right,” Gladys Herdman told Lester, “it means your eyes are in backward, and they have to take them out and put them in the other way.”

  This made Lester so nervous that he couldn’t tell L from M or X from K and when the doctor said, “Well, let’s just switch eyes,” he went all to pieces and had to go lie down in the nurse’s room till his mother could come and get him.

  Besides having three other kids and a baby, Mrs. Yeagle was a schoolbus driver, so she couldn’t waste much time just letting Lester be hysterical. But Lester was too hysterical to tell her what happened—all he said was “Herdman.”

  “Which one?” Mrs. Yeagle said. “Which one did it?” and Lester said Gladys did it.

  “Did what?” the nurse wanted to know. “Gladys wasn’t even there.”

  “I don’t know what,” Mrs. Yeagle said, “and I can’t wait around to find out because I had to leave the baby with the Avon lady and it’s almost time to drive the bus. Come on, Lester, honey . . . maybe you can find out,” she told the nurse.

  Of course Gladys said she didn’t do anything, and the eye doctor said he certainly didn’t do anything. “But I got a look at that kid’s braces,” he said, “and I’ll bet that’s his problem.”

  I didn’t think so. Having braces was no problem—not having braces was a problem. Gloria Coburn’s little sister got braces and Gloria didn’t, and Gloria cried and carried on for weeks. “I’ll grow up ugly with an over-bite,” she said, and she didn’t even know for sure what one was. She just wanted braces like everyone else.

  That night the nurse called Mrs. Yeagle to say that apparently Gladys didn’t do anything to Lester. “We think the trouble may be his braces,” she suggested.

  “What braces?” Mrs. Yeagle said. “Lester doesn’t have braces.” But then she went and looked in his mouth and she nearly died.

  “What have you got in there?” she yelled. “What is all that? It looks like paper clips!”

  Sure enough, Lester had paper clips bent around his teeth and he got hysterical all over again because his mother pried them off.

  The nurse said she never heard of paper clips, “but you know they all want to have braces or bands or something. And they don’t know how much braces cost.”

  “Well, these cost thirty-five cents,” Mrs. Yeagle said. “According to Lester, Gladys Herdman put them on him and that’s what she charged him. And let me tell you, that kid better never try to get on my bus! Or any other Herdmans either!”

  Getting thrown off the bus was almost the worst thing that could happen to you. You had to go to school anyway, no matter what, so if you got thrown off the bus it meant that your father had to hang around and take you, or your mother had to stop whatever she was doing and take you, so you got yelled at right and left. You even got yelled at when it happened to someone else—“Don’t you get thrown off the bus!” your mother would say.

  Mrs. Herdman probably never said this, but she didn’t have to worry about it anyway. The Herdmans never got thrown off a bus because nobody ever let them on one. Sometimes, though, they would hang around what would have been their bus stop if they had one, smoking cigars and starting fights and telling little kids that the bus was full of bugs.

  “Big bugs,” Gladys told Maxine Cooper’s little brother, Donald. “Didn’t you ever hear them? They chomp through anything to get food. You better give me your lunch, Donald. I’ll take it to school for you.”

  Of course that was the end of Donald’s lunch, but at least, Maxine said, it was just a day-old bologna sandwich and some carrot sticks so they probably wouldn’t do that again.

  “They’re just jealous,” Alice told her, “because they have to walk while everybody else gets to ride and be warm and comfortable.”

  “Come on, Alice,” I said. “If you think the schoolbus is warm and comfortable, you must be out of your mind.”

  But Imogene Herdman was standing right behind us, so Alice ignored me and said again how wonderful it was to ride the schoolbus, and how she would hate to be the Herdmans who couldn’t ride the schoolbus because they were so awful.

  After that they began to show up every morning at Maxine’s bus stop, looking sneaky and dangerous, like some outlaw gang about to hold up the stagecoach.

  “But they don’t do anything,” Maxine said, looking worried. “They just stand around. It’s scary.”

  It scared Donald, all right, and after three or four days he wouldn’t even come out the door, so Maxine stood on her front porch and yelled, “My mother says for you to go home!”

  “We can’t go home!” Imogene yelled back. “We have to go to school.”

  Then they all nodded at each other, Maxine said, just as if they were this big normal family of ordinary kids who got up and brushed their teeth and combed their hair and marched out ready to learn something.

  Maxine felt pretty safe on her own porch, so she said, “Then why don’t you just get on the bus and go!”

  “Get on your bus?” Imogene said. “Get on Bus Six?” And Gladys hollered that she wouldn’t get on Bus 6 if it was the last bus in the world, and Leroy said, “Me neither.”

  “And then when the bus came,” Maxine told us, “they all ran behind the McCarthys’ front hedge and just stood there, staring at us.”

  “What did Mrs. Yeagle do?” I asked.

  “She yelled at them, ‘Don’t you kids even think about getting on my bus!’ and Ollie said, ‘I’ll never get on Bus Six!’ He said it twice. Listen . . .” Maxine leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I think the Herdmans are scared of the bus.”

  This was the craziest thing I’d ever heard. “It’s just a bus,” I said.

  “I know that,” Maxine said, “but it’s my bus and I have to ride on it, and I don’t want to ride on a doomed bus!”

  This sounded crazy too, but nobody laughed, because if the Herdmans were scared of Bus 6, it was the only thing in the world they were scared of, so you had to figure they must know something no one else knew.

  Whatever it was, they weren’t telling, but every day there they were at the bus stop, whispering and shaking their heads.

  Charlie thought they were stealing pieces of the bus, one little piece at a time, and someday the whole bus would just fall apart and scatter kids all over the street.

  Eugene Preston brought in a copy of Amazing Comics, about a robot bus that suddenly began to go backward and sideways and turn itself over and lock all its doors, so the people were trapped inside, yelling and screaming. In the comic book the Mighty Marvo showed up and rescued everybody, but Eugene said he wouldn’t want to count on the Mighty Marvo if he was up against the Herdmans.

  “I just know something’s going to happen,” Maxine said. “I keep hearing this strange noise on the bus.”

  I don’t know how she would hear anything except kids hollering, but Eloise Albright said she heard a strange noise too. Some kids sa
id they smelled something on the bus, but who doesn’t?—egg sandwiches, poison ivy medicine, Alice Wendleken’s Little Princess perfume.

  Lester finally asked his mother if there was anything wrong with their bus, but she just said, “Yes, it’s full of kids.”

  Then Bus 6 was assigned to take the third grade to a dairy farm to study cows, and Ollie Herdman refused to go. “Not me,” Ollie said. “Not on that bus!”

  Of course this was good news for the cows, and the teacher was pretty happy, but the rest of the third grade was scared to death. Boomer Malone’s little sister Gwenda said the suspense was awful—waiting for the bus to blow up or turn over—and between that and having to milk a cow, the whole third grade was wiped out for the rest of the day.

  By this time Maxine was a nervous wreck, along with Donald and Lester and everybody else on Bus 6. More and more kids were feeling sick to their stomachs and then feeling fine as soon as the bus left, and they all said the same thing—that they were scared to ride the bus because the Herdmans wouldn’t get on it.

  “What kind of reason is that?” my mother wanted to know. “Of course they won’t get on the bus. Thelma Yeagle won’t let them on the bus. Nobody wants them on the bus!”

  “Something bad is going to happen,” Charlie told her, “and the Herdmans know what it is. That’s why they won’t get on. They know Bus Six is doomed.”

  “Doomed!” Mother stared at him. “You watch too much television. Is that what everybody thinks?”

  We said yes.

  “Then why doesn’t somebody just put the Herdmans on the bus and make them ride it?” Mother said.

  Since it wasn’t my bus, I thought that was a good idea and so did Charlie and so did Mr. Crabtree, I guess, because that’s what he did.

  “We have to ride your bus, Lester,” Gladys said. She grinned this big grin so Lester could see her teeth all shiny with paper clips. “The principal said.”