Thirteen Ways to Sink a Sub Read online

  Text copyright © 1982 by Jamie Gilson

  Reprinted in cooperation with Nancy Gallt, Literary Agent

  First Marshall Cavendish Classics edition, 2009

  All rights reserved

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  Marshall Cavendish Corporation

  99 White Plains Road Tarrytown, NY 10591 www.marshallcavendish.us/kids

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gilson, Jamie.

  Thirteen ways to sink a sub / Jamie Gilson. — 1st Marshall Cavendish classics ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: The boys and girls in the fourth grade devise a contest to “sink” their substitute teacher by making her cry.

  ISBN 978-0-7614-5587-5

  [1. Schools—Fiction. 2. Substitute teachers—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.G4385Th 2009

  [Fic]—dc22

  2008040559

  1 3 5 6 4 2

  Contents

  1 PIT BALL

  2 SPIES OF THE PURPLE CAVE

  3 THE TING TANG SHOW

  4 SVETLANA IVANOVITCH

  5 I’VE GOT AN ITCH

  6 HAVE A NICE DAY!!!

  7 THE FANGED FACE

  8 YOURS TILL NIAGARA FALLS

  9 FAIR’S FAIR

  1

  PIT BALL

  I slammed the front door, jumped the steps, and tossed my old red kickball across the yard to Nick Rossi, who lives next door. We had twenty-two minutes to get to school.

  “I’ve got the moustache,” I told him, clutching its long spidery hairs in my coat pocket. “Did you bring the bow tie?”

  “Yeah,” he said, dribbling the kickball down the sidewalk, “it’s in my backpack. My notes, too. Don’t panic. We’ll be spectacular.”

  I’d made the moustache out of fake hair off an old Wolf Man Halloween wig. It was part of my costume for our Social Studies report, which would be a long way from spectacular. But if it wasn’t at least good, our teacher, Mr. Star, would torpedo us. He grades hard.

  We got to the corner just as the school bus stopped for the sign. From inside it R.X. Shea yelled at us, waving his arms and pressing his nose pig-flat against the steamy window. Marshall Ezry aimed a paper airplane through his window, which was open just a slit. In Stockton, Illinois, where we live, kids whose houses are more than a mile from school get to ride free. Nick and I live eight blocks from Central School and, instead of paying big bucks to ride, we walk, even on February days that make our ears turn blue.

  Nick poked at a pile of frozen snow near the curb, trying to break enough loose so he could whip a snowball at the bus. I picked up my kickball and let it fly at Marshall’s window. But we were both too slow. The bus roared off in a cloud of blue-gray fumes, leaving Nick with a handful of ice crumbs, and me with my kickball somewhere across the street.

  As we ran to rescue it, the Oldsmobile waiting in line behind the bus honked at us. Oongk! Oongk!

  We ignored it.

  Oongk! Oongk! Oongk!

  Nick leaped up like a rocket into space. Actually, he jumped about four feet across a square. A concrete square on the sidewalk. I stepped on it. “Stinkfish!” he yelled. “I caught you! Stinkfish!” The square he’d jumped over was one of those with the concrete maker’s name stamped in it. “Laid by Jas. Wiggleton, Stockton, Illinois—1929—,” it read. There are lots of squares like that on the way to school and if you step on one, you’re automatically a stinkfish.

  “I got you. I finally got you,” Nick yelped. He picked the ball out of the bush it was stuck in and dashed down the sidewalk, yelling, “Stinkfish, stinkfish!”

  I know every one of those squares from my door to the door of Central School because I’ve walked there from kindergarten through the middle of fourth grade, and I’m very, very good at not stepping on them. I wouldn’t have got that one, either, if it hadn’t been for the stupid horn.

  Oongk! Oongk! Oongk! it blasted again, and I turned to snarl.

  “Hobie Hanson,” a voice shrieked from the car, “you want a ride?” Nick galloped back, yelling, “Hobie is a stinkfish!”

  “Nick!” the voice yelled again. “You’ve got to help us with this humungous box.”

  Nick and I looked at each other, decided we hadn’t heard a thing, and started off full speed toward school, still a good seven blocks away. We had run all of ten squares, though, when the car screeched up beside us.

  “Hobie and Nick, you stop now!” the voice demanded. We knew who it was, of course. It was Molly Bosco. We were giving our report with her and Lisa Soloman that afternoon. Not because we wanted to. We were assigned to be on the same team by Mr. Star, who keeps saying boys and girls should learn to work together. Aaargh! Anyway, in fourth grade Social Studies you spend a whole month on Cultures of the World. Our team’s culture was China.

  “Ho-bie, you left the rest of your rice candy at my house,” Molly yelled. She is the world’s bossiest kid, with a high squeaky voice that is soprano and then some. It was sticky candy from China, and I’d left it there because it tasted like perfume.

  “I’m not supposed to get in cars with people who offer me candy,” Nick told her, tossing the ball in the air and bouncing it off his head.

  Molly’s grandmother, Mrs. Bosco, was driving. Mrs. Bosco is very tall and very fat and deaf enough so she shouts a lot. She had given us the candy to eat while we sat through fifteen boxes of slides she’d taken on her three-week trip to China. Most of them were pretty fuzzy. A lot of them were temples.

  Next to her on the front seat was a cardboard box heaped with stuff she wanted us to show for our report, stuff like brass bowls with these flower designs on them, blue-and-white dishes, a cricket cage with no cricket in it, some grasshoppers and praying mantises made out of straw, and a shiny basket that looked like a rooster.

  We hadn’t moved toward the car, so she leaned toward us and honked the horn again. In the back seat with Molly, Lisa Soloman sat, giggling.

  “We always walk,” I called, edging off toward school.

  “You’ve got to help us carry this box in. It’s your report, too, you know,” Molly said, pinching her mouth flat.

  “Listen,” Nick told her, “we’d really like to, no kidding, but Officer Friendly told us in second grade that we should never accept rides from Mr. or Ms. Stranger Danger.”

  Molly flung her door open and leaped out. “My grandmother,” she said, “is not Ms. Stranger Danger.”

  Nick and I looked at each other and sighed. What else could we do? I shrugged my shoulders and climbed into the back seat. Mrs. Bosco had the front seat pushed as far back as it would go to give her and the precious box plenty of space, but it didn’t leave a whole lot of room for the rest of us. So when Molly piled in and then Nick followed with his backpack and my kickball, they pressed me over practically onto Lisa’s lap. I didn’t mean to squoosh her. I didn’t even want to touch her, but when I did she squeaked, threw up her hands like I was giving her boils, and yelled, “Oosick, cootie shot! Give me a cootie shot!”

  They’re always doing that, the girls in my class, when they touch somebody they don’t like. I crossed my arms and leaned back against the seat as hard as I could and watched Molly reach in front of me with a tic-tac-toe she made by crossing two fingers from each hand. Lisa stuck her finger in the middle of the criss-cross and Molly squeezed.

  Lisa sighed with relief. The cootie shot cured her from getting polluted by somebody as germy as me.
r />   I poked Lisa’s arm with my fist to give her as many more cooties as I could, but the cootie shot must have taken effect because she smiled at me. I did not smile back.

  Mrs. Bosco started talking loud. She talked all the way to school. “Have you boys had the flu yet?” she asked, not waiting for an answer. “It’s on the verge of being an epidemic. While there are always more people sick in February, this is disastrous, disastrous. Why, even in China people were…”

  Lisa started giggling, and this time I punched her with my elbow. Nick passed me the ball across the girls and I tossed it back.

  “Molly, my dumpling,” Mrs. Bosco said as we drove up in front of school, “couldn’t I just come in now?”

  “Molly Dumpling?” Nick whispered to me and we both laughed.

  “I’m very, very anxious to hear your report,” Mrs. Bosco boomed. “Perhaps I could just attend some of your other little classes.”

  “No, Grandmother,” Molly shouted so her grandmother could hear. “Later. Much. Come at one-thirty this afternoon. Otherwise you’d have to sit through Language Arts and Science and recess and Music and yucky lunch in the cafeteria. Come at one-thirty. That’s when it is.”

  Nick and I rolled out of the car still laughing at Molly being anybody’s dumpling. Then we realized we were early enough to get in a kickball game before the bell rang. That was one good thing about getting a ride, even like that one.

  “Thank you for bringing us, Mrs. Bosco,” I called in one breath as Molly opened the front car door. I was about to sprint for the playground with Nick when Molly said, “Don’t forget the box. It’s your report, too.”

  The dumb box. I slid it across the seat and out of the car. It wasn’t all that heavy. Molly grabbed the other side and we carried it easy while Nick hurried up the walk and threw open the door.

  Miss Hutter, the principal, was standing in the hall talking to two teachers. She turned and faced us like a wall. Looking over her red-rimmed half glasses, she said, “The bell, children, has not rung, and will not ring for a good twelve minutes.”

  “But our box,” Molly said desperately, letting her side sag like the box was heavy with stacks of bricks and important clay tablets. “It’s got valuable things in it for our Social Studies report. Please may we at least leave it in the office until the bell rings?”

  Miss Hutter looked us over, took a deep, impatient breath, and said, “I suppose two of you may come in with it. But the rest of you must go to the playground.”

  Lisa hung around the front door. Nick fled, dribbling my ball as he ran. As soon as Molly and I had stashed the box safely in the office, I followed him fast, with Molly and Lisa not far behind.

  Nobody else had brought a ball, so the kids must have come flocking when Nick ran out with mine. By the time I rounded the corner, the girl who sits in front of Nick in Mr. Star’s class, Michelle, was already pitching one to Marshall with slow, small bumps. He shot it low and past a lot of kids’ legs, getting almost to second base before David Trey scooped it up, whirled around, and slammed him out from about three feet away.

  I reached the outfield just as Nick came up to kick.

  “How do you want it?” Michelle asked him.

  “Fast and smooth,” he told her.

  Michelle threw it just like he’d called it. Nick ran forward and lifted the ball into the air with a really powerful kick.

  “Pit ball!” Nick yelled. He raised both arms, clenched his fists, and started to run. The ball arced high over the playground and dropped, sloosh, straight into the spit pit, an automatic home run.

  Pit balls are the ones that go in the spit pit. The spit pit is this outside stairwell on the back side of the school. It leads down to a metal basement door with a sign that says “Warning: High Voltage Electric Service Station, Public Service Company of Northern Illinois,” one of those locked doors you never see anybody go in. It’s called the spit pit because kids who wait in line to play, or who have very good aim from practicing, or who just lean over the railing with nothing else to do, spit in it. Sometimes they spit at things. Sometimes they just spit.

  Pit balls don’t happen often, but when they do there’s usually a fight about who has to climb into the gunk. You’d think the guy who kicked it would have to get it, but that’s not true. Not only do you get double points for making a pit ball, but somebody else has to bring it up. Supposedly it’s the kid who’s chasing it, but Molly and Lisa, who had both been following the ball’s curve, changed direction as soon as they saw where it was headed.

  “Hey, Molly, it’s your ball,” Nick shouted. He loped into home plate, smiling like a mad jack-o’-lantern.

  “I’ve got my new boots on,” Molly said.

  “Besides, it’s time for the bell,” Lisa told me. “We’ll go, like, get the box from the office. You get your ball.”

  Kids started disappearing like there’d been an attack of killer bees. Nobody else was going for it, so I ran over to look. The pit was, like always, filled with moldy old sack lunches, paper cups, chewed bubble gum, squashed Orange Crush cans, and junk like that. I took a deep breath and started down the steps, holding onto the railing because it was a risky walk. Even if it was in the spit pit, I wasn’t about to just leave my ball there. Old gray snow was frozen around the edges of the steps and in the corners, and, in some places, straight down the middle. One slide and you were at the bottom with all the junk.

  The bell rang.

  “Watch your step,” Molly sang as she passed. She laughed and ran inside. Marshall and R.X. leaned over to watch, and I put my free hand on top of my head, just in case.

  When I finally reached the bottom step and looked up, everybody was gone but Nick. He leaned all the way over the railing, his arms swinging loose from side to side, and smiled at me, a half-evil, plotting smile.

  “Don’t you dare!” I yelled.

  “Dare what?” he asked, grinning wider.

  “You know what,” I told him, making my way over to the ball, which had landed on somebody’s frozen mitten.

  “Some kick, huh?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I mumbled, squashing a half-dead bologna sandwich with the toe of my shoe, “some kick.” I lifted the ball with one finger of each hand, and, without holding onto the railing, stalked back up the slippery steps.

  2

  SPIES OF

  THE PURPLE CAVE

  Half my moustache fell off. The right half. It had been tickling the inside of my nose, and when I closed my eyes and sneezed, the right side just flew away like a cyclone had hit it. Off to Oz somewhere. So there I was, hunting around the long table at the front of the class, trying to find half a black moustache. You’d think it would be easy to see on a green tile classroom floor, but it just wasn’t anywhere.

  I was supposed to be this Chinese guy, Confucius, who was born in 551 B.C. One of the library books had a picture of him in it. His head looked square and, besides the weird curvy moustache, he was wearing a long pointed beard on the tip of his chin. So was I. It was Wolf Man hair, too.

  My shiny green kimono was one of those things that Molly’s grandmother had brought back from China for herself, and since she must weigh 551 pounds, I could have camped out in it. It had huge red and yellow flowers sewn on it, and Molly said it was too right not to use.

  We were setting up for the report even though Mr. Star wasn’t in the room yet. He was late getting back from lunch, which was weird, because Mr. Star is almost never late. He is big on promptness.

  Nick was going to talk about the crops of China for the report and demonstrate how to eat rice with chopsticks. Mrs. Bosco had given him a lesson before the slide show. “Hold the bowl high, sonny,” she kept saying. Anyway, he was sitting there eyeing his bowlful of rice when I sneezed the moustache off. After it flew, he sat there chuffing like a laugh box, watching me bird-dog around on my hands and knees.

  He was laughing harder than he really needed to. It wasn’t all that funny. “Confucius looks like Confucius’s barber we
nt chop-chop,” he said, and slid down on the floor to watch me search.

  I licked the sticky space on my right lip, covered it with one hand so nobody could see, and kept hunting with the other. “I don’t look any weirder than you do in that dumb bow tie,” I told him. He was dressed up like an M.C. for the Ting Tang Show we had planned to do after the report. You have to give a test of some kind, so we decided to put on this TV game show and ask questions about China.

  Molly and Lisa were fooling around in front of the table, setting up the Chinese gong for crashing when kids got the answers right. The rest of the class was shouting, fighting, tossing other kids’ books at the wastebasket, doing the kind of stuff you have to do when your teacher, who is never late, is late.

  Nobody paid any attention to Nick and me scrounging around on our knees looking for a moustache half. The table we’d been sitting at was covered with a huge purple cloth that was so big it piled up in heaps around the sides. In the front and back it reached almost to the floor. Molly’s grandmother had said that the China things would show up much better on her purple tablecloth, so there it was.

  The moustache wasn’t outside the cloth anywhere. Nick and I decided to see if it had slid underneath. We stuck our heads under the table and opened our eyes as wide as we could, but it’s hard to find a thin black moustache in a dark tent, which is pretty much what it amounted to. Our bottoms stuck out behind the tablecloth as we felt around in the corners for something hairy.

  “You sure it blew this far?” Nick asked. “Confucius sneezes like swift Yellow River.” He decided that was funny because there is a Yellow River, and his shoulders shook with laughing that doesn’t make any noise. He laughed so hard he had to lean back against the leg of the table. I crawled all the way under, too, and the tablecloth flapped down behind me. All of a sudden, it was a violet dark, and Nick’s shaky laugh stopped like it had been cut off with a sword. It was mysterious in there. We were hidden from everybody in a deep purple cave, a Chinese guy born in 551 B.C. and a game show host in a red bow tie. Outside we could hear Molly and Lisa talking.