Pennybaker School Is Revolting

by Jennifer Brown

  At this point, I wasn’t sure if we were talking about Mr. Faboo or frozen underwear or bunny rabbits or breakfast, but I had a feeling that Grandma Jo was trying to teach me a lesson about appreciating someone while they’re around, because you won’t know how much you’ll miss them until they’re gone and there’s nothing you can do about it.

  Which sounded exactly like what had happened with Mr. Faboo.

  I wadded up the empty cinnamon roll bag and threw it in the trash. Grandma Jo kept working on her orange. “So you’re off?” she asked.

  “You want to come? You’d have to dress up like Betsy Ross or something.”

  She waved me away. “Nah. This day has nap written all over it. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  The testing center was just a few blocks away from Pettigrew Park, so Chip and I biked there together. He kept losing his tricorn hat and doubling back to retrieve it, and my bike chain snagged my pantyhose and created a big hole right on the side of my leg, and it was so cold my nose was running, but we got there eventually. Owen, Colton, and Wesley were already there, dressed in their Act After the Fact costumes. They looked somber.

  “Where is he?” Colton asked as soon as I hopped off my bike.

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Faboo.”

  “He’s not here?”

  All three of them shook their heads.

  I went to the front door, cupped my hands, and peered inside. Sure enough, a dozen or so people waited expectantly with their pencils laid out on their desks. Mr. Faboo was not one of them. “Where is he?” I asked.

  “How should we know?” Colton asked. “We were asking you the same thing.”

  More kids pulled up on their bikes. Patrice Pillow was dropped off by a car. Everyone was wearing their costumes. Unsung Revolutionary War heroes, sea captains, one James Armistead Lafayette—a slave turned double agent spy—and one writer named Judith Sargent Murray. Cars slowed as they passed us, their passengers peering at us curiously, as if this was the first time they’d seen a group of seventh graders standing around in fancy coats and bushy white wigs. Wait. I guess it probably was.

  “Who was the last one to tutor him?” I asked.

  “Not me,” Owen said. “He got really good at Internet research, so he kind of didn’t need me anymore.”

  “Wasn’t me,” Colton said.

  “Nope,” Patrice added.

  One by one, everyone denied having been the last to see Mr. Faboo. Until I got to Chip. He was twisting his toe into the ground.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “Chip. Were you the last one to tutor Mr. Faboo?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do?” I repeated.

  “I tutored him.”

  “On what?”

  “On test taking.”

  “Oh no,” said Wesley, who had just arrived. “That’s not good.”

  “What did you teach him about test taking?”

  “I simply told him that test anxiety is a very common occurrence, with twenty percent of students suffering severe test-taking anxiety, and sixteen to twenty percent more struggling with moderate test-taking anxiety. I reminded him that, on average, students who don’t get a grip on their nerves score as many as twelve points lower than their confident counterparts. And, as we all know, twelve points could very well mark the difference between a passing grade and a failing one.”

  We all stared at him, our mouths hanging open.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, his palms out to calm us. “I reassured him that he is in good company, as Abraham Lincoln and Vincent van Gogh both suffered from anxiety. I did muse, however, that perhaps it was Van Gogh’s anxiety that compelled him to lop off an ear. Although the current theory is that he did it out of jealousy and fear at the news of his brother’s betrothal.”

  We all continued staring. Chip started to look uncomfortable. He cleared his throat.

  “Anyway, we discussed many anxiety-reducing techniques, such as getting a good night’s sleep and being prepared. So he should be just fine. Ready to take on the challenge, in fact!”

  I gestured toward the building. “Do you see him ready to take on the challenge?”

  “Perhaps there was traffic.”

  “Or perhaps you scared him out of taking the test. He was already afraid, Chip. That was why we were helping in the first place.”

  “But I’ve always found knowledge to be calming. The more one knows, the more one is prepared to weather life’s storms.”

  “This is not about the weather,” I said. I heard Patrice Pillow snicker lightly. “It’s about getting Mr. Faboo here to take the test so we can get him back in our classroom.”

  “Right,” Chip said, looking thoughtful. “I suppose I should apologize, then.”

  “Well, I don’t know how, given that he didn’t show up.”

  Chip gave me a strange look. “We can just go to his house.”

  “Huh?”

  He nodded. “We can just go over there and I can apologize, and we can all move on.”

  I leaned over Chip so far he kind of bent backward a little. If Chip was saying what I thought he was saying, we had a problem. A big, Civil War–reenacting, cow-pie-wearing, cupie problem. “You know where his house is?”

  “Of course,” he said. “It’s the History House, right off the square.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I learned it at the first Boone County History-Lovers Society meeting I attended.” He pulled a scrap of paper out of his back pocket and unfolded it. An address was scribbled across it. “They gave me his address. I had my mom drive by, and, really, we all should have known that was his house by the way it’s decorated.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I yelled. “You knew where he was all this time, and you didn’t tell me? We could have gone right to him, and instead you had me cheerleading and chasing bulls and—”

  Chip held up one finger. “Technically, the bull was chasing you.”

  I threw up my arms in exasperation. “Why, Chip? Why?”

  His eyebrows came together in confusion. “Because we were having exciting adventures,” he said, like it was the simplest answer he’d ever had to give. “Just like old times. I like our adventures. They’re quite exhilarating.” I didn’t know what to say, but partly because I knew he was right. And that only made me angrier. “I should go apologize to him now,” Chip said.

  “No, you should make it right,” I said. “Come on. We’ll do it together.”

  The crowd parted as we saddled up on our bikes and strapped on our helmets. We took off, the air biting through my clothes and making me cold. Every now and then I heard Chip shout “Wait up!” or “Slow down!” or “My legs are getting tired.” But I was pretty mad, so I kept going fast. It wasn’t just about him scaring Mr. Faboo out of taking the test after we had worked so hard to get him ready for it. It was about the wolf pack and the secret handshakes and the dance lessons and the Heirmauser head. It was about Chip being more popular than me when I had been at Pennybaker longer. It was about everyone accepting New Kid Chip right away when they had treated New Kid Thomas like the enemy. And, yeah, it was a little bit about his “leads” always ending up being disastrous, but really disastrous only for me. He always came away exhilarated while I was hobbling and humiliated.

  It was so many things, honestly, and I was really starting to think that maybe this was the end for Chip and me. We would fix the Faboo problem, and then we would stop being friends. He would go his way, and I would go mine.

  I was officially done with Chip Mason.

  Until I heard a crash behind me.

  I skidded to a stop and turned around. Chip was crumpled in a heap next to his bike, which was lying on the ground, half on top of him, the front wheel spinning in the air. I let my own bike drop to the sidewalk and rushed toward him.

  “You okay?” I asked. I crouched next to him, resting my hands on my knees. There were tear
s streaking down Chip’s cheeks, and that scared me. I had seen Chip wipe out more times than I could count. Sometimes—such as when he was “conducting a crash-test study” on an old tractor tire that his grandpa Huck had left behind—he wiped out on purpose. I’d seen him take dodgeballs to the face and baseball bats to the back. I’d seen him fall off his bike at least a hundred times. And never—not once!—had I seen him cry about it.

  He flailed a bit and then sat up and wiped his cheeks. “I’m not hurt in the physical sense,” he answered. “But I can’t help thinking you’re angry with me, and I don’t know why.”

  Oh. So that was what the tears were about. Ridiculous. I stood, placing my hands on my hips. “Why do you care?”

  He turned his face up to me. He looked kind of pathetic, the way his helmet smushed his forehead into creases. “Huh?”

  I let my hands fall to my sides. “I mean … you’ve got a lot of friends now, so why do you care what I think?” He looked at me the way I’d once seen him look at a wasp’s nest—full of curious concentration mixed with a little bit of disgust and fear. I went on. “You’re always dancing on the lawn or howling or making up a bunch of stupid handshake moves.” I waved my arms around to mock his secret handshake. “The guys want to sit with you at lunch, and most of the time it’s like I don’t even exist. You took my head-polishing job, Chip.”

  His expression jumped into one of surprised confusion. “I took that job to help you out. You think the head is creepy, so I figured the least I owed you was to not make you have to look straight into its eyes every day.”

  “Sure, it wasn’t about the glory of being the head polisher,” I said doubtfully.

  “No! Absolutely not! It was about helping you.”

  Well. That changed things a little. But only a little. There was still the matter of—

  “And I dance to take the attention off you. You’re the bravest person I know, so I figure if you’re afraid of dancing, there must be a really good reason. Everyone is complaining about how you won’t do it, so I thought if I held a few dance lessons, they would get so wrapped up in it they would forget about you not doing it.”

  That was actually kind of working, by the way. It had been days since anyone had bugged me about dancing. And I hadn’t even realized Chip was behind it.

  “And the real handshake was supposed to be with you, but you said it was babyish. I was just waiting for you to come around and choreograph one for us. And I was trying out moves on the other guys so I would be prepared for our own secret handshake. I even saved some of my better movements.” He snapped his fingers three times, clapping his hands in between each snap, then tucked his hands into his armpits and flapped his arms like a chicken, chin jutting forward, then wheeled his arms three times, brought his palms together, and looked like he was praying. I had to admit, it was kind of cool to watch. “That’s without the hips, of course,” he said quietly.

  “So you were doing all these things for me?” I asked, but it came out really skeptically. Maybe because I was really skeptical. Maybe being skeptical was my true unique gift. Maybe I could be a professional doubter. Actually, that didn’t sound like very much fun.

  Or maybe it was because sometimes it’s hard to go from really, really mad to un-mad after just a couple of sentences.

  “But … why? I thought you actually liked those guys.”

  A scraped patch on his elbow trickled blood down his forearm. “I do actually like those guys,” he said. “I like them a lot. But they’re not my best friend in the whole world, Thomas. You are. That’s why I did those things. Because that’s what a best friend does.”

  Correction: that was what a best friend like Chip Mason did. Best friends like me whined and got mad and stomped around and ignored and griped at their best friends. Which was not a friendly way to be a best friend at all. I was a rotten best friend.

  But, man, I felt so much better knowing that Chip wasn’t best friends with those guys. Which must have meant I thought he was my best friend, too. I probably should have seen that coming. What was it Grandma Jo had said? You have to eat your breakfast before it gets cold, because you’ll miss it after Mom throws it away? Something like that, anyway. I had assumed she’d been talking about Mr. Faboo. But it turned out she was talking about Chip, too. Just like Grandpa Rudy didn’t know how awesome Bill was until he hopped away, I guessed I just didn’t realize how awesome Chip was until I thought he liked someone else more than he liked me.

  “You’re my best friend, too, Chip.” I reached toward him. “And thanks for doing those things for me.” At first he flinched, like maybe he thought I was going to haul off and smack him one, but then he took my hand and let me pull him up. “Come on,” I said. “We’ve got to get Mr. Faboo to the testing center.”

  TRICK #30

  THE ROOSEVELT RUN

  Chip was right: it wasn’t hard to tell which house was the History House. It was a big white house on the square, right beside the courthouse. One of the first buildings built in our town, it was at least one hundred fifty years old.

  Chip explained that every month, the decoration of the History House took on a different theme. In the summer, it was the hippie movement, with lots of tie-dye and peace signs. In July, it was the American Revolution. This month, the theme was apparently the Renaissance, because there was a replica of the statue of David in the front yard, a Shakespearean hat on its head, complete with floppy feather. Telescopes adorned the front porch.

  We marched up to the front door and stared at it.

  “You should knock,” Chip said.

  “No, you,” I said, suddenly nervous about being at a teacher’s house. This seemed like the kind of thing that just begged for a boring lecture or extra homework or something.

  “It was your idea to come here,” he countered.

  “You were the one who scared him out of taking the test in the first place,” I said.

  “Technically, I just supplied him with some facts and basic information,” he said, poking one finger up in the air. I grabbed his hand and slapped his palm three times against the door. “Hey!”

  Fumbling and bumping sounds came from inside the house, and then the door slowly opened.

  “It should be noted that my knock was performed under duress,” Chip said before the door answerer could say anything. “I did not give knocking consent. Although, technically, I suppose it was more of a slap than an actual knock …”

  I was too busy staring at the man standing in front of me to even pay attention to what Chip was saying. He looked like Mr. Faboo, only a lot more drab and tired. He had big, dark circles under his eyes, and his cheeks looked sunken.

  But, most important, he wasn’t wearing any kind of costume at all. Just a plain red bathrobe, with a pair of plaid pajama pants and a stained gray T-shirt underneath. He had a newspaper crossword puzzle folded and tucked under one arm.

  “Thomas? Chip?” he mumbled, blinking in the sunlight. He wrapped the robe tighter around himself and tied it to ward off a gust of chilly wind. “What are you doing here?”

  “We came to ask you the same thing,” I said. “You’re supposed to be at the testing center right now. You don’t even look ready at all.”

  He looked down at himself, as if to verify what he was wearing. “Oh. Yeah. I’m not going to that.”

  “Why not?” I asked. At the same time, Chip said sagely, “Your testing anxiety has gotten the better of you, hasn’t it?”

  “Chip. Shut up about the anxiety,” I hissed.

  “Not talking about it won’t make it go away, Thomas,” he said in the same sage voice.

  “Stop it,” I said through my teeth, “or I will make you go away.”

  “It’s okay,” Mr. Faboo said. He held up the paper. “I have this crossword to finish anyway.”

  I snatched the paper away. “No you don’t. You have a test to pass so you can get back to your job at Pennybaker School.”

  He took the paper back. “You guys don’t need
me,” he said sadly.

  “Yes, Mr. Faboo, we do,” I said. “You don’t understand. History is boring; all those dates and facts and stuff. But you make it exciting. You bring it to life with your costumes and your stories about baboons. History just isn’t the same without you.”

  “We need you,” Chip added.

  “That’s really nice of you to say, fellas. But you’ll move on just fine without me.”

  I opened my mouth to argue with him, but instead of words, a long beep came out. And then another. And two more. Followed by a lot of whooping and hollering on the street behind us.

  Chip and I turned just in time to see Teddy Roosevelt rounding the corner on an ATV, complete with spectacles and a bushy mustache. He was pounding on the horn. On the back was Lewis Hallam, colonial actor, waving a white kerchief at us. Behind them was a long line of historical figures furiously pedaling their bikes or hitching rides on banana bike seats. Betsy Ross rode with Daniel Boone. Robert Smalls commandeered a Schwinn piloted by Thomas Jefferson. Unnamed colonists jogged behind the pack, carrying their hats in their hands.

  I turned back around. “I don’t think we will, Mr. Faboo,” I said.

  His cheeks were flushed, bringing some color into his sunken eye sockets, and for a minute I thought he might cry. The newspaper dropped out from under his arm and landed on his foot, but he made no move to pick it up. “What … What is this?” he asked, and he sounded the way I would imagine someone to sound if they found a softball-sized diamond on the sidewalk—like they had just won a huge prize and didn’t quite understand why, but were pretty sure they were set for life.