4B Goes Wild Read online

  Molly frowned. That was no answer.

  “But,” Lisa asked, “but which one are you going to marry?”

  Miss Ivanovitch eyed us all and shook her head. “Ah,” she said, “while I do hate to disappoint you, I don’t have plans to marry anybody.”

  I think Mr. Star smiled. He must have been worried, too.

  Molly looked suspicious.

  “Something you should know,” Mr. Star said to us, filling in the silence, “is that fourth grade and fifth are going to be in the same hall next year. We’re moving things around this summer.”

  “And I’m going to hang one of your gravestone rubbings in the new hall,” Miss Ivanovitch said, nodding to Nick and me.

  “You’re hanging it?” Molly asked. “Why you?”

  “Me,” Miss Ivanovitch answered, “because Miss Hutter has asked me to come to Central School next year to teach fifth grade.” She looked around proudly. “Mr. Swansong is moving to Iceland. I’ll be taking his place in 5B.”

  “Smile!” Mrs. Ezry called, kneeling down in the grass and aiming up at us. We smiled automatically, even Molly, while the programs in our heads got rewritten.

  “You,” Eugene said slowly, “are going to teach fifth grade at our school next year?”

  “Yes,” she told him, “my very first year as a regular teacher.”

  “That’s really wonderful,” he told her, and he shook her hand before heading off to where his mother stood waiting. She’d been waving to him and calling something in a language I didn’t understand.

  “Then,” I said, suddenly realizing it, “we might get you next year.”

  “There are two teachers, so it’s a fifty-fifty chance.” She hopped into the van, rolled down the window, and called, “Keep clear of crocodiles and creatures of the night.” She waved at us with both hands as they drove away.

  “Isn’t that lovely,” Mrs. Bosco said. She tugged at her cowboy kerchief. “Don’t you think it’s absolutely lovely, Molly?”

  “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe Miss Hutter would do that to us,” Molly said, dragging her suitcase behind her.

  “It’s terrific,” Aretha yelled, and ran to claim her bag.

  “Smile,” Mrs. Ezry called again, and those of us who were still left smiled.

  “Hobart,” Miss Hutter said, drawing me aside, “about our lunch at the Chuckwagon tomorrow.”

  “Oh, lunch,” I told her, “I meant to tell you about lunch …” I’d totally forgotten to make up a foolproof excuse short of pneumonia. I wiggled my tooth with my tongue, but it hung in there. Too bad. It would have bled like crazy.

  “Come to my office directly after the lunch bell—”

  “No kidding, that’s all right. I can just eat at school. They’re having tuna casserole in the cafeteria tomorrow anyway, and that’s my favorite.”

  Rolf stepped right up to see me suffer. He was swinging his sack of Articles To Be Left at Home, and he had a smirk as wide as a smiley face. When Miss Hutter glanced at him, he was grinning so big, she smiled back.

  “I have an idea,” she said. “Why don’t you bring one of your friends along …”

  “But I—”

  “Perhaps Rolf would like to join us.” She looked at him with interest.

  “Sure, Rolf,” I said, whomping him on the back. “Miss Hutter and I would like you to have a hamburger with us at the Chuckwagon tomorrow. Got any other plans for noon? No, of course you don’t. Noon is lunchtime. That’s great.”

  “I … I …” he gagged.

  “He’d love to,” I told her. “He’s just naturally shy. Thanks, Miss Hutter.”

  As she hurried off to the office, I told him, “It’ll be a ball, Rolf, no kidding. We’ll tell her all about trucking. And the next time you’re in the office for skateboarding in the cafeteria, you’ll have something to talk about.”

  Brong, bronk. We jumped at the horn. Mrs. Rossi and Toby pulled up in their little gray station wagon. “Sorry to be late,” she called as she climbed out, “but—”

  I hurried over. “How is Dad?” I asked.

  “You already know?” She sighed. “Oh, good. I’d been worrying about how to explain gallstones. The dictionary didn’t help.” She leaned over till she was exactly my height and said, “Hobie, he spent much too long pretending it didn’t hurt, but he’s OK. The doctor tells him he has to lose some weight, and your mother says he’ll hate that.” She hurried over to hug Nick. He hugged her back like he’d missed her too.

  Toby, his dinosaur cape on wrong-side out, bounced, kapong, out of the car. “Ribbit-roogie,” he said.

  “Hi, Tobe, who are you?” I asked him.

  “Ribbit-roogie,” he croaked again, springing forward on his toes.

  “He’s a frogosaurus,” his mother laughed, “and he’s been very jumpy waiting for you guys to come home.”

  “Did you put the fish to bed? Were there tarantulas?” Toby asked Nick as he hurried to the car. “Was there a lion?”

  “There was a cat who thought he was an owl, and there was a skunk called Kitty-Kitty,” Nick told him, and Toby laughed. He knew a good lie when he heard one.

  “What did you do?” Toby asked me, grabbing me by the leg and digging his heels into the ground.

  What I did, I thought, was make it through two nights with nobody but Miss Ivanovitch and the woollyworms knowing how bad I wanted to be home.

  “Talk to me!” Toby said. “What was it like?”

  I leaned over, opened the car door, and tossed my red bag inside. “It was wild,” I told him, poking him in his soft frogosaurus belly. “It was wild.”

  Afterword

  Q: In 4B Goes Wild the kids go on Outdoor Education. How did you find out about Outdoor Ed?

  A: Easy. It’s firsthand research. I went on Outdoor Education. When a local school asked me if I’d like to go with the fifth graders for three days and two nights to a lakeside camp in Wisconsin, I said, “Sure. Maybe I can write a book about it.” 4B Goes Wild is that book.

  But 4B Goes Wild is fiction. I made up the story. In order to do that, I took a lot of notes. In the bus on the way to the camp, I wrote down what the kids were talking about and what songs they were singing. When we arrived, I saw that somebody had draped underwear on the camp sign. That went in my notes and in the book. Later, the illustrator used it too.

  After dropping off our bags in the camp dorm, we walked almost a mile to a nearby cemetery that had really amazing old gravestones. The teacher had brought big sheets of paper and crayons along so the kids could make rubbings of the stones. In my notes, I wrote, “A graveyard is a good place at midnight.”

  On the way back from the graveyard we smelled a skunk.

  In my story, two of the boys ruin one of the rubbings and go back to the graveyard at midnight to make another one. And on the way back from the graveyard, they actually encounter a skunk.

  I did my research on how a skunk sprays, though, by reading about it in books. Some things you don’t need to learn firsthand.

  If you’d like to know more about me, my books, and how I write them, all you have to do is go to my website at www.jamiegilson.com. To ask me questions, send an email to [email protected].

  About the Author

  “‘I know why you write about us,’ a sixth-grade boy once told me. ‘It’s because we’re middle-aged and things are happening to us.’ And it’s true. My characters are all in the process of growing up, of being astonished by the strange way their world works.

  “You can see yourself and your weaknesses in someone else as easily when you are laughing at his muddle as when you are weeping at his despair. That’s what I try to do—make my readers laugh and understand at the same time.

  “Before writing I always do research. I’ve talked to boys about collecting beer cans, to refugees about what it was like coming to America, to teachers of children with learning disabilities. I once went with a class to outdoor education camp. I’ve asked kids what it was like to be in programs
for the gifted and talented. It is this close observation that I hope makes my books seem real.”

  Born in Beardstown, Illinois, Jamie Gilson spent her early years in several small midwestern towns where her father worked as a flour miller. After graduating from Northwestern University, she married Jerome Gilson, then a law student and now a trademark lawyer. In addition to writing, Mrs. Gilson has worked as a junior high school speech and English teacher; a staff writer and producer for the Division of Radio and Television of the Chicago Public Schools; and as continuity director for radio station WFMT. The Gilsons have three grown children, Tom, Matthew, and Anne, and live in a suburb of Chicago.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Other Books by Jamie Gilson

  Can’t Catch Me, I’m the Gingerbread Man

  Dial Leroi Rupert, DJ

  Do Bananas Chew Gum?

  Thirteen Ways to Sink a Sub

  4B Goes Wild

  Harvey, the Beer Can King

  Hello, My Name Is Scrambled Eggs

  Hobie Hanson, You’re Weird

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1983 by Jamie Gilson

  Published by arrangement with Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Books

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 83-948

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, 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 HarperCollins e-books.

  Epub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 978-0-062-12667-2

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