Finchosaurus

by Gail Donovan

  David and Atticus were just listening now. They weren’t saying anything anymore. It felt like they weren’t even there. It was just him and Noah.

  But what if Noah wasn’t there, either? For a second, he imagined he was Finchosaurus, walking across a deserted plain.

  The day was dark as night. A meteorite had crashed, and dust covered the sun. All the other dinosaurs had died. Finchosaurus, alone, would survive.

  Finch didn’t like this feeling. He didn’t want to be the only dinosaur left on the planet. He put down his spork and took the pencil and wrote a big letter F on a paper napkin. “Okay,” he said. “Now what?”

  “Duh,” said David.

  “Duh,” echoed Atticus.

  “Friend,” they said in unison.

  Finch looked at David with his mop of I’m-taller-than-you-think camouflage hair and sandy, shaggy-haired Atticus. He hardly knew them at the beginning of the year, but they were friends now. He added “riend” after the letter F to make Friend.

  “Thanks, guys,” he said.

  Some kids were coming toward their table. Mohamed, Kael, and Khalid. They always sat together at lunch now, drawing comics.

  “Hey, Finch,” said Mohamed. He had the latest Captain Underpants book tucked under his arm. “Thanks for asking your mom to get more books.”

  “No problem,” said Finch. “But, you know, it wasn’t that big of a deal. Anybody can ask her.”

  “It was still nice of you,” said Mohamed, shrugging.

  “What do you have for us?” asked Noah.

  “Cool,” said Kael.

  “Courageous,” said Khalid.

  “Caring,” said Mohamed.

  “Excellent,” said Noah. “Thanks, guys.”

  Mohamed, Kael, and Khalid headed back to their table.

  “That’s what you were doing before?” asked Finch. “Asking kids for words?”

  “You’re welcome,” said Noah, nodding. “Now write those down.”

  Finch was writing down words beginning with the letter C, when up came Charlotte, Haley, and Graciela.

  “Angelika told us why she showed us that book,” said Graciela. “The Big Book of—you know. ’Cause you guys are on, like, a mission?”

  “So, that book was actually pretty good,” said Charlotte. “It had this whole chapter on how to get rid of—you know—and how to not get them again.”

  Finch noticed the three girls all had their hair braided like Samantha and Quinn, in those spiky-ridged dinosaur braids.

  “So, we think your ‘I’ word should be ‘Insect-buster,’ ” said Haley.

  “Insect-buster?” asked Noah. “What else do you have?”

  “Umm, intelligent?” suggested Charlotte.

  “Interesting?” tried Graciela.

  “Okay, thanks a lot,” said Noah.

  The girls wished him luck and took off. Finch was still writing down all their I-word ideas when Atticus hissed, “Bully alert!”

  Oscar and Oliver were heading straight toward them. But when they reached the table they only stopped long enough to drop a napkin on Finch’s tray, and then kept on walking.

  Finch picked up the napkin and read aloud: “Not

  -a-tattletale.”

  “That’s it?” demanded Noah. “I gave them the letter N and they come up with one word that’s not even a real word?”

  “Yeah, but I like it,” said Finch. “It’s funny.”

  “How’d you get them to go along?” asked David.

  Noah explained. “I may have said something about Finch’s brother, Sam. His big brother. His big, strong brother.”

  “You said Finch’s brother would beat them up?” asked Atticus. “But that’s threatening. That’s like bullying, too!”

  “I know,” said Noah with a shrug. “But I’m trying to write a poem in ten minutes. I was desperate.”

  Atticus and David laughed, and so did Finch. He felt good. He had words for four out of the five letters of his name, scrawled on napkins.

  All around them, kids were starting to bus their trays. In a minute, everyone here would go out to recess, except him. He had to spend recess in Mrs. Adler’s room. But that was cool—he was going to copy out his poem and come up with his last word.

  Then he spotted Mr. White’s white hair and beard and his green-and-white-checked shirt, all the way across the cafetorium. And Finch could feel it: Awesomeraptor was here for him.

  A minute later he reached their table.

  “Hi, guys!”

  “Hi,” echoed Finch, Noah, David, and Atticus.

  “I’m glad I found you, Finch. I’d like to have a little chat with you about something. Let’s go to my office.”

  “But—”

  “No worries!” said Mr. White. “I already spoke with Mrs. Adler. She knows you’ll be with me. You won’t be in trouble. Come on.”

  Finch rose and picked up his tray, trying to think of a way out of another friendly chat with the social worker. But he couldn’t think. The cafetorium was crazy-noisy and he was in the middle of a stampede toward the trash and tray drop-off place.

  There were bins for all the different kinds of trash. The one for food waste had a picture of apple cores and banana peels. Another bin had a sign they’d made in Green Team, with a picture of milk cartons and the words Recycling Saves Trees. Finch tossed his paper trash in the recycling bin, pushed his tray through the little window to where the lunch ladies worked, and followed Mr. White to his office.

  24. Rising Sixth Graders

  “Have a seat,” said Mr. White, pointing to a new chair.

  “Nice!” said Finch, sitting down in a chair just like Mr. White’s, except smaller. It could go up and down. It could swivel. It could rock back and forth.

  Mr. White smiled. “I thought you’d like it. I ordered that after one of our talks, actually.”

  For the next few minutes, while Finch swiveled, and rocked back and forth, and went up and down, Mr. White talked. He wanted to let Finch know there was a chance he might not be back in the fall. It depended on whether Mrs. Blake came back to work or took more time off to be home with her baby. It hadn’t been decided. But just in case he wasn’t here next year, he wanted Finch to know how much he’d enjoyed getting to know him.

  “What about Paleo Pals?” asked Finch.

  “If I’m not here, I’m sure you can find another adviser. I’ll put the word out, if needed.” Mr. White tapped the watch on his wrist. “Maybe you should head to your room. I’ll see you on the class trip, I hope?”

  The trip. The poem. He hadn’t written down his poem yet!

  Finch jumped up from the special chair and raced to Mrs. Adler’s room.

  “Hello, Finch!” said Grammy Mary with a smile.

  Finch was out of breath from running. “Hey, Grammy Mary,” he said, panting. “Hey, Mrs. Adler, can I still give you my poem?”

  Before she could answer, the bell rang, and suddenly kids were filing quietly into the room and taking their seats. Grammy Mary smiled at everyone the way she always did, but Mrs. Adler had a surprised look on her face. She had been asking kids to do this all year, but it had never happened.

  “Grammy Mary,” she said. “Do you hear what I hear? I think I hear the sound of rising sixth graders!”

  “I do, too!” said Grammy Mary.

  Mrs. Adler turned back to Finch. “All right, Finch,” she said. “What were you saying? You have your poem?”

  “Kind of,” he said. “But it’s my sloppy copy. I need to copy it out, okay?”

  “I’m happy to hear it,” said Mrs. Adler. “Go right ahead.”

  Finch stuck his hand in his pocket but there was nothing in there except the Band-Aid box. And suddenly he remembered. The recycling bin in the cafetorium. He had thrown the napkins away.

  “Umm, actual
ly, I don’t have it,” he said. “I guess I lost it.”

  “You had it, but you lost it?” asked Mrs. Adler. She sighed a tired, end-of-the-year sigh. “Well, do you think you can remember it?”

  “Mrs. Adler!” called Noah, waving his hand in the air. “Mrs. Adler! Mrs. Adler!”

  “Yes, Noah?”

  “So, I know this is kind of weird, but can Finch say his poem out loud? You know, recite it?”

  Mrs. Adler sighed another tired sigh. The messy bun her hair was always pulled into looked even messier than usual. “I would love to hear Finch’s poem,” she said, “but an acrostic poem is a visual poem, so I also need to see it. Finch, do you want to write it on the whiteboard as you recite it?”

  What was Noah doing? Finch had nothing. Nothing in his pocket. And nothing in his brain. He gaped at Noah. What are you doing?

  Noah just gave him a look that said, We got this.

  Finch walked slowly to the whiteboard. He picked up a marker. Holding his breath, he wrote a capital F.

  Nothing.

  Then David—the kid who Finch had donated his allowance for—stood up, along with Atticus.

  And Finch remembered their word. With a deep breath, he added riend, to make Friend.

  Then underneath the F he wrote the next letter of his name, a capital I.

  Up rose Charlotte and Haley and Graciela. They’d given him three words, but Finch could only remember the funny one that wasn’t really a word. Except he could make it a kind of a word with a hyphen. Insect-buster.

  Next Finch wrote an N, and Oscar and Oliver got out of their seats. He was going to need two hyphens for this word. Not-a-tattletale, he wrote.

  Below the N he wrote the letter C. Up stood Kael and Khalid and Mohamed, who waved his Captain Underpants book in the air. Finch added aring after the C to make Caring.

  He had come to the end of his name. The letter H. They hadn’t gotten to that letter during lunch. He was going to have to come up with something by himself. Right now.

  And now it felt like everybody was holding their breath. The room was so quiet he could hear sounds coming faintly from all over the school. Kids outside for gym, shouting, and kids in music class, singing, and someone click-clacking down the hallway.

  Finch gripped the marker. One more letter. One more word.

  Finally, Noah stood. Then Angelika. Then all the other kids who weren’t standing up yet. Fatouma and Millie and Quinn and Samantha. They were all rooting for him to come up with the last word. They were trying to help him.

  Because he had tried to help them.

  Helper, wrote Finch.

  Arms crossed, Mrs. Adler paced from one end of the room to the other, staring at the words on the whiteboard.

  Friend

  Insect-buster

  Not-a-tattletale

  Caring

  Helper

  Suddenly she seemed to realize that the whole class was standing up. “I want to see all my rising sixth graders in their seats,” she said.

  Everyone scrambled to sit.

  “I’m not sure what to say,” she said, pacing the length of the room again. “What do you think, Grammy Mary?”

  Grammy Mary didn’t answer in words. She gave a thumbs-up with one hand, and then the other. Two thumbs up.

  “Grammy Mary has spoken,” said Mrs. Adler. “And I agree. Finch, it appears you have written an acrostic poem and finished all your work. You can go on the class trip.”

  25. Every Piece of Paper

  Has Two Sides

  On June 19, Finch wasn’t making believe he was a dinosaur, or pretending he was a paleontologist. He didn’t need to. He was in dinosaur heaven.

  He was in Dinosaur State Park.

  He stood inside the big dome, on the walkway that overlooked the dinosaur tracks. He was three feet away from where a dinosaur had walked!

  The park guy, Ranger Sam, wore a pair of tiny wire-rimmed glasses and carried a pair of huge binoculars on a strap across his shoulder, like he wasn’t about to miss seeing anything, close up or far away.

  “In 1966,” he said, “Edward McCarthy was bulldozing this area to make way for a new building. Lucky for us, he saw something unusual. Lucky for us, when he saw something unusual, he didn’t ignore it. He didn’t say, ‘I don’t know what that is, so I’m just going to keep on bulldozing.’ He stopped. He asked questions. And because of him, we are able to see the tracks that dinosaurs made about two hundred million years ago. But what about the fossils of the dinosaurs themselves?”

  Finch’s hand shot up. “Nobody found them!”

  “Correct,” said Ranger Sam. “No fossils of the dinosaur remains were ever found. But there’s a lot we can tell from fossil tracks. We think the dinosaur was a predator, about twenty feet tall. We can tell this dinosaur was walking, not running. Now, let’s look over here . . .”

  Ranger Sam moved along, and everybody followed, mostly. Finch kept looking down at the deep shape pressed into the rock. He wondered what Edward McCarthy, bulldozer driver, did after his discovery. Did he keep hoping, every time he was on a bulldozing job, that he would find something so amazing? And then he never did? And did he care that nobody ever found fossils of the bones?

  “Finch, come along,” said Mrs. Adler. “Time for lunch.”

  Outside at the picnic area, under the blue sky, it was Finch’s favorite warm-but-not-too-hot temperature. Mrs. Adler and Mrs. Tomlinson passed out brown-paper lunch bags. Mr. White poured water into paper cups for everyone and Finch’s mom handed them out. And Grammy Mary drifted from table to table, making sure kids had what they needed.

  “That ranger guy was cool,” said Angelika. “He knows so much about dinosaurs!”

  “Finch knows just as much,” said Noah, loyally.

  “No, I don’t!” said Finch.

  “Pretty much!” said Angelika. “I know! You should tell him you’re president of Paleo Pals!”

  “No way!” said Finch.

  “Yes!” said Noah. “And then he’ll be, like, why don’t you come be my special assistant?”

  “Quit it, you guys,” said Finch. But he didn’t mind. Noah and Angelika could tease all they wanted. Because this was the best day of his life.

  One: Last week, Noah and the whole class had saved his butt by helping him write his acrostic poem.

  Two: This morning Mrs. Stuckey had announced that the final winner of the Golden Bucket Award was Mrs. Adler’s room! And then she had wished a very. Happy. Birthday. To . . . Finch Martin!

  Three: He was here. Now. And his mom was opening a big box.

  “Happy Birthday, Finch,” she said.

  Everyone sang “Happy Birthday to You,” and Finch got to pass out cupcakes. His mom had made vanilla with chocolate frosting, and chocolate with vanilla frosting. Finch made his way around the picnic area, from table to table, to where kids were sitting here and there on the grass.

  “Cupcake? Cupcake, anyone?”

  When he was done, part of him wanted to go back to the table where Noah and Angelika were sitting, so he could eat cupcakes with them and let them tease him about dinosaurs. But part of him wanted to be by himself. This was the best day of his life. Except for one thing: He still didn’t know who had written the note. He hadn’t gotten to the bottom of the story, like Guppy said. He felt bad he hadn’t talked to Guppy in so long. He wanted to call, but he’d been waiting. Hoping he would figure out the answer, first.

  He found a spot on the grass and sprawled out. Overhead, a breeze was pushing the clouds across the blue sky. It was rippling the leaves on the trees, too, sending whirligigs spinning down. Kids began catching the whirligigs, peeling open their seed pods and sticking them to their noses.

  “Acorn Comprehensive fifth graders!” called Mrs. Tomlinson. “We are starting to clean up. In fifteen minutes Ranger Sam is going to
help us make plaster casts of the tracks, so, let’s get ready!”

  Noah ran by with a whirligig stuck to his nose. “Finch!” he called. “Look at me, I’m Triceratops! Come on!”

  Usually Finch would be right there, running and pretending to be a horned dinosaur. But he didn’t go anywhere. Maybe if he looked at the note one more time . . .

  He stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out the Band-Aid box. He pried open the lid and pulled out the scrap of paper. He had looked at it so many times that the paper was getting soft and fuzzy.

  He was remembering something else Ranger Sam had said, about how to see. Edward McCarthy didn’t only see what he expected to see—rocks to bulldoze. He saw what was actually there in front of him.

  “One more thing, Acorn fifth graders!” called Mrs. Adler. “Dinosaur State Park recycles! So, sort your garbage and put the paper plates and paper bags in the proper bin. Let’s be good guests!”

  Something floated into Finch’s brain, like the clouds floating across the sky. Paper. Recycling. Every piece of paper has two sides.

  He turned the scrap of paper over.

  No words; he already knew that. But he saw something else: The paper wasn’t white. It was a faint, pale purple.

  Purple?

  Finch looked up. Looked around. Grammy Mary was sitting at one of the picnic tables with the other grown-ups. He went over and squeezed onto the bench seat between her and his mom. He put the note on the table.

  “Grammy Mary,” he said. “Did you write this?”

  Grammy Mary smiled one of her big Grammy Mary smiles. But then she put her hands over her mouth, the way people did when they were . . . crying! And then tears were trickling down her cheeks.

  “Mary!” said Mrs. Adler. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” said Grammy Mary.

  She picked up the scrap of paper, turning it over in her hands to show them: pale purple color on one side, and on the other side, the word Help.

  “I always want all the kids to have a good day,” she began. “But sometimes I feel I can’t do very much.”