by Hilary McKay
Class Three became instantly quiet and sensible. Mrs. Holiday began reading once more. Lulu wrote IT’S HATCHING on her doodling paper, nudged Mellie, and pointed.
Mellie stared.
NOW? she wrote.
Lulu nodded.
DID YOU BUMP IT?
“No,” whispered Lulu.
ON ITS OWN?
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know they did that,” whispered Mellie. “Not on their own! From the inside. I thought the mother duck helped them break their way out.”
“Mellie!” exclaimed Mrs. Holiday. “Collect your things together and come and sit by me!”
Mellie did. But not before she had scrawled on her doodling paper: WONTITSUFFKET and pushed the paper toward Lulu.
Wontitsuffket, read Lulu, puzzled. Wontitsuffket? What is wontitsuffket?
She looked at Mellie. Mellie looked desperately back.
Won, read Lulu again. Or Wont? Wont it? Wont it suffket.
OH!
Won’t it suffocate?
“Please, Mrs. Holiday,” begged Lulu, “may I leave the room? Now? Quick?”
Mrs. Holiday nodded, and then noticed Lulu’s hands holding the front of her sweater and said, “Yes, you may. Now! Quickly! Mellie, go with her. Come back for me if Lulu is not well.”
“Hurry!” added Mrs. Holiday urgently, because if there was one thing she could not bear, it was people being ill in her classroom.
Lulu and Mellie hurried. They raced along the corridor, burst into the empty bathroom, thankfully shut the door, and leaned on it.
“Get it out! Get it out!” begged Mellie.
Lulu was already doing that. Her sweater was off. The hat nest was in her hand. She was turning back the rim.
“Weep!” called the occupant suddenly.
“Weep! Weep! Weep!”
There it was: a duckling. A fluffy head, already dry. Two questioning, shining black eyes. Two stumpy wings, fluttering in the sudden light. The rest still hidden in the shell.
“Weep!” called the duckling, a dry, thirsty call.
“It really is!” said Mellie. “It really, really is a real actual duckling!”
“Weep,” insisted the duckling.
“What does it want?”
“Could it want a drink?” wondered Lulu. She wet her finger and held it so that a drop of warm water touched the duckling’s beak.
“Weep!” it said, and swallowed the drop, and then another and another, and then it fluttered with sudden energy, and stepped out of its shell.
Lulu and Mellie forgot the classroom. They forgot Mrs. Holiday and Harry Potter. They forgot the guinea pig and the park. They sat on the cold bathroom floor with the hat nest between them, and for a long time all they said was: “Look!” and “Oh!” and “did you see that?”
In the classroom Mrs. Holiday was having a hard time. Class Three said she was not reading Harry Potter properly. They knew this was true because they had all seen the movie. They kept putting up their hands to complain, saying things like:
“Are you skipping bits, Mrs. Holiday?” and, “She’s not skipping bits, she’s putting extra bits in,” and, “when will we get to the train?” and, “My mom read it to me and there was nothing about drills,” and, “Hagrid didn’t talk like that!”
It seemed to poor Mrs. Holiday that every time she looked up, dozens of hands were waving in the air. Each hand was attached to a complaining listener.
“If you would like me to read you a book that has not been made into a movie, I can do that very easily,” said Mrs. Holiday at last, and picked up Key Stage 2 Mental Math.
The waving hands vanished and Harry Potter’s adventures continued. But after a while the questions began again.
“Is this book true?” and, “Mrs. Holiday, can you do magic?” and, “I’ve never seen an owl.”
“I’ve never seen a rat.”
“I’ve never seen a toad.”
“I’ve never seen an owl, or a rat, or a toad!”
“Hands down!” roared Mrs. Holiday, unable to bear one second more. “Yes, you too, Henry! Whatever it is, I don’t want to know!”
So Henry sat quietly and did not tell her that the guinea pig was out until it actually vanished along the windowsill and out of the window.
That was why it wasn’t for a while, not until the guinea pig was tracked down and recaptured, and the window closed, and everyone sitting quietly on their hands doing mental math, that Mrs. Holiday remembered Lulu and Mellie.
“We have to go back to class,” Mellie was saying to Lulu. “I have to anyway, otherwise Mrs. Holiday will think you are sick. I’m surprised she hasn’t remem—”
That was when Mrs. Holiday charged into the bathroom.
Chapter Five
Afternoon in the Park
Mrs. Holiday stood in the bathroom doorway and looked down at Lulu and Mellie and the duckling, all together on the bathroom floor, and her mouth opened and closed and opened and closed like a duck that had lost its quack.
“Lulu!” she said at last.
“Mrs. Holiday,” said Lulu earnestly. “I didn’t bring this duckling to school. I didn’t bring any animal to school. I promise I didn’t.”
“Please don’t swap the guinea pig for those awful stick insects,” pleaded Mellie.
“It was only an egg when I picked it up,” explained Lulu. “You can’t call an egg an animal.”
“Lots of people bring eggs to school,” pointed out Mellie. “Packed lunches.”
“Weep!” said the duckling. “It rolled out from the bush where the white-winged duck had her nest,” said Lulu. “I picked it up just before it got smashed on the path. All the other eggs were broken. I was going to take it to the vet.”
“Oh, Lulu,” said Mrs. Holiday, sighing.
“She made it a hat nest to keep it safe,” said Mellie. “But it hatched anyway.”
“Where did it hatch?” asked Mrs. Holiday. “Under my sweater,” said Lulu.
“Lulu,” said Mrs. Holiday, “I have been teaching in schools for twenty-seven years. In all those twenty-seven years, no one has ever hatched a duckling under their sweater...”
Mrs. Holiday paused to take a very clean folded handkerchief out from her pocket. She dabbed it carefully at the corner of each of her eyes.
“...as far as I know,” said Mrs. Holiday, and dabbed her eyes again.
Was she laughing, or was she crying? Lulu and Mellie could not tell.
“Well,” said Mrs. Holiday, putting her handkerchief away and becoming her old bossy self again. “This is no place for a duckling. It belongs in the park. Maybe... maybe... You girls wait here!”
With that she was gone, and Lulu and Mellie were left staring at each other.
“Was she angry?” wondered Lulu, but Mellie shook her head and said she did not know.
The duckling was crying again. “weep, weep.”
A lost, unhappy sound.
Lulu looked around the room. She saw bright, shabby paint and the underside of sinks. Drain pipes and tiles. A notice on the door: DON’T FORGET TO WASH YOUR HANDS!
Mrs. Holiday is right, Lulu thought. This is no place for a duckling.
She was still thinking this when Mrs. Holiday came back. She was carrying a box and she was in a great rush.
“We have twenty-five minutes until the bell rings,” she told Lulu and Mellie. “Hurry up! The secretary has very kindly agreed to stay with Class Three (heaven help her). Get your jackets, girls, and we will go back to the park. Perhaps we can find the duck with the white wing and give her back her duckling again.”
In no time the duckling was rushed into the box.
The secretary was given Mrs. Holiday’s exotic cookie tin to use as a last resort.
And then Lulu and Mellie and Mrs. Holiday set off to find the duck with the white wing, in spring sunshine that felt as warm as summer.
The park was as quiet as if nothing had happened. The paths were swept clean of spoiled nests and broken
shells. The flower beds were tidy again. No huge silly dogs tore through the bushes. No children squealed in the bandstand. On the lake the ducks were almost silent. Some of them slept on the little islands, one eye open, one leg tucked up. Little chains of ducklings looped in and out of the reeds at the edge.
“Measuring the perimeter,” said Mellie.
But on the bank by the bandstand a brown duck with a white wing searched among the bushes. Searched and searched, and called and called.
“Weep! Weep!” cried the duckling from the box in Lulu’s hand.
The duck with the white wing paused.
“She’s listening,” whispered Mellie. “Hurry, Lulu!”
So Lulu lifted the duckling from the hat nest and tucked him back under the bushes where he had lived so long as an egg.
He was hardly alone for a moment.
Lulu and Mellie and Mrs. Holiday sighed great sighs of happiness and relief, and went back to school just in time for the bell to go home.
“What a day!” groaned Mrs. Holiday, collapsing like a rag doll in a staff room chair. “What a day, what a day!”
Lulu and Mellie walked home together with Charlie and Henry.
They stopped to swing in the little park, all four in a row, which took up all the swings.
“You missed tons when you disappeared this afternoon,” Charlie told Lulu and
Mellie as they swung. “Mrs. Holiday trying to read Harry Potter and then going crazy. Mental math when nobody knew a single answer. The guinea pig escaping out of the window. The secretary and the cookie tin. We ate every single cookie in Mrs. Holiday’s special tin! The secretary made us do who-can-hold-their-breath-the-longest competitions and gave them out as prizes.”
“You missed the park, though,” said Mellie cheerfully, swinging so high and so wildly that hair clips tumbled from her hair and were lost in the grass forever.
“We didn’t. Not really. We were there this morning.”
“This morning,” said Mellie, “was completely different from this afternoon.”
This morning, remembered Lulu, I found my egg. I miss my egg.
“Better or worse?” demanded Henry. “Which was this afternoon? Better or worse?”
Although, thought Lulu, there are things you can’t do with an egg up your sweater.
“Better or worse?” echoed Charlie.
Lulu waited until her swing reached its farthest point forward, let go, and flew.
“A million times better!” she shouted, and landed in a heap.
“Crazy!” said Mellie, scuffing with her toes to make her own swing stop. “Crazy! nuts! You just shouldn’t do it, Lulu!”
“You say that every time!”
“If you’re going home now, can I come with you to see the animals?”
“You know you can.”
“Can we come too?” asked Charlie.
Lulu nodded.
“The rabbits and the parrot? Snail world and Sam? The hamster and those black-and-white mice? All of them?”
“All of them, except my duckling,” said Lulu. “I keep him in the park!”
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2011 by Hilary McKay,
Illustrations © 2011 by Priscilla Lamont
978-1-4804-1714-4
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