Thirteen Ways to Sink a Sub Read online

  “You know, I can’t believe those guys,” Molly was saying, “not wanting to help with the box of stuff this morning. You’d think it wasn’t important, like it wasn’t practically our six-weeks’ grade. Where are they?” she demanded. Nick and I smiled quietly. “They were just here.”

  “They’d better not mess up,” Lisa said. “They’re always fooling around, like, and I worked really hard on this report until, like, eleven o’clock last night. I used the flashlight I keep between my mattress and headboard and I memorized the names of all the, like, major cities, and major mountains, and major rivers, and I’m going to be, like, scared enough without…”

  Nick sighed. “She’s gonna be, like, a major yawn,” he whispered.

  “Let’s not ever come out,” I said, as quiet as I could, twirling my moustache like half a villain. “Let’s just stay here in our minor cave and spy.”

  The class was getting noisier and nosier. Even though the sound was closed off by the cloth, we could have been hiding near a hive of cat-sized bumblebees or under a waterfall of voices. Molly and Lisa were right next to us, though, and we could still hear them perfectly clear.

  “They must have gone to the john,” Molly said, “while we were doing all the work.”

  “They’d look pretty funny walking down the hall in those clothes. But Hobie’s cueshee, though, don’t you think?’’ Lisa asked her. “Like in the car this morning. I think maybe I’ll marry him. Maybe when I twist the stem out of my apple at lunch, this time it’ll come out at H.”

  I gagged. Nick made a fist and poked me in the ribs. Lisa and Molly make up these words all the time, and they and the other girls in class use them like they are real words. Cueshee means “cute.” Big deal.

  “I guess you could say he’s cueshee,” Molly told her, “if you like rude dwerps, which I don’t. I’m going to marry Mr. Star.”

  Nick and I sat under the table hugging our knees, laughing, watching the girls pace up and down. Then their gym shoes pointed right at us as they started straightening things again on the table. Nick looked at me and I looked at Nick.

  “One-two-three-now!” he whispered, and we reached under the tablecloth at the same time to untie their shoelaces.

  A girl at the back of the class shrieked, “You guys…here he comes!”

  I could hear somebody setting up a fallen chair and desks scraping against the floor as kids skidded into them from across the room. And suddenly it was dead silent.

  3

  THE TING TANG SHOW

  Under the table it was as quiet as midnight, almost as dark, too. We were both breathing hard, and I was getting plenty sweaty in my green tent inside a purple tent. I knew I was scared because I could hear my heart beating. Mr. Star doesn’t exactly string you up by the eyelashes when you do something wrong, but he doesn’t pat you on the back and tell you what a great kid you are, either.

  For at least two minutes we didn’t hear a thing. There was this no-sound that was so quiet it hurt your ears. And then we could make out Mr. Star saying from the back of the room, “Listen, my friends…” in that way he has where you know he means the “listen” part, but not the “friends.” Everybody was listening. Us, too. “…When I am out of this room,” he went on slowly, “I expect—” Then he stopped as the door flew open. It slammed against the back wall, and an enormous voice burst out.

  “Is this it? Is this the China room? I hope I’m not too late. Molly said one-thirty. I’m Molly’s grandmother and you must be Mr. Star. I can tell. Molly’s told me all about your dear dimples.”

  If I could have breathed, I would have howled about the “dear dimples.” As it was, I barely managed a squeak. Still, Mrs. Bosco had saved our lives. No way Mr. Star was going to level the whole class in front of somebody’s grandmother.

  Molly moved her untied shoes away from the long table. “Mr. Star,” she called out, “Lisa and I have been ready for ten whole minutes, and the boys have gone someplace.” She said “boys” like it was “warts” or “air pollution.”

  There was another silence, and we knew we had to act.

  “Let’s break out the front way,” Nick said softly, “and pretend that’s what we meant to do.” I nodded and tried to pull the huge green kimono loose so my feet would be free.

  “One, two, three,” he began, and we got on our marks like in a race.

  “GO!” we yelled together and stumbled out from under the tablecloth like rockets that had misfired.

  “It’s the Ting Tang Show!” Nick shouted as he rose. He flung his arms wide and pointed at me. I blinked at the light, stuck my hands into the cuffs of my kimono, and bowed till my head touched my knees like I thought Confucius would.

  The class loved it. I mean, they’d barely missed getting squashed by Mr. Star and they really felt like cheering. They were laughing and stamping their feet and pointing at me just like Nick did. Even Mr. Star was smiling like he’d just told a joke or something. I smiled, too, like an inscrutable Chinese. And I swear it wasn’t till Molly swooped over, grabbed my left moustache by the tip, and yanked it off that I knew what they were really laughing at. At half-moustached me.

  “You squird,” Lisa said, and I couldn’t help remembering that she’d just called me “cueshee.” I didn’t think they meant the same thing.

  Everybody was roaring, especially Mrs. Bosco. She is really very fat, and she looked like a clown giving it the old ho-ho from a squat wooden chair in the back of the room. The February wind outside had blown her black hair around so it stuck out in little bat wings all over her head. And she was wearing a huge raccoon coat that heaped up on the floor like little wild creatures sitting at her feet. Her laughs rolled out, getting louder and louder. She wiped away a tear.

  My arms were still in the sleeves of her huge flowered kimono. I lifted them both up to cover the spot where the moustache had been. It hurt. It hurt a lot, like when the doctor pulls off adhesive tape that’s been on for a couple of weeks. I took my hands out of the sleeves, locked them behind me, and shouted, “It’s not funny!’’ but that only made them laugh harder.

  Molly was steaming. She was even frowning at her grandmother. We were ruining her report.

  “Our report on China is about to begin!” she yelled, and, picking up the mallet with both hands, she bonged the gong so loud I bet they heard it in Shanghai. “And the Ting Tang Show isn’t until the end,” she said with a scowl, hitting the gong again. Rolf, sitting in the third row right in front of her, clamped his hands over his ears. The little blue-and-white rice dishes clattered on the table. “Everybody get out a pencil and a piece of paper because you have to take notes so you can answer questions later.” Bongggggggggggg. Mr. Star rubbed his head with his fingertips.

  Lisa began. She held up this map of China that was about the size of a piece of construction paper. On the back of it she’d written the names of all the rivers and mountains and stuff. Memorized, ha! She read them off, poking the front of the paper at the same time to point out where things were. Off and on people would stop her and ask how to spell stuff like Szechwan and Yangtze (which she pronounced yang-tizzy), so it went pretty slow. It was, like Nick had said, a yawn.

  Nick’s crop talk wasn’t that much fun, either, for that matter. But he was very good at eating the rice and did like Mrs. Bosco had taught him to, holding the bowl right up there at his chin, shoveling it in with the chopsticks. She gave him a big hand. “That’s the way it’s done, sonny,” she called.

  “Oosick,” Lisa whispered to Molly.

  Then it was my turn. I bowed again, since that’s what you do in clothes like that. “I’m supposed to be Confucius,” I said, stroking my little pointy beard, all that was left of my makeup. Some of it came off in my hand, and I felt like a shedding Chinese Wolf Man. “Confucius lived in China a long time ago, from 551 B.C., when he was born, to 479 B.C., when he died. They called it the Chou dynasty. He was a teacher like Mr. Star and said lots of famous things that people wrote down. But he didn’t say
any of the Confucius-says stuff that people are always saying he said.

  “I mean, he never said, for instance, ‘He who lives in glass house dresses in basement.’ They didn’t have glass houses in 551 B.C.” I waited, but only Nick laughed. My dad had told me that one.

  “And Confucius never said, ‘House without toilet is uncanny.’ Write that down,” I told the class. “It’s going to be on the quiz.” Marshall laughed, and Michelle, who sits next to him, did, too, and pretty soon almost everybody started giggling and groaning, but Mr. Star didn’t look too happy. He was slouched against the door, and the edges of his mouth were turning absolutely down. I thought, Come off it, Mr. Star, you tell worse jokes than that every day and we laugh.

  But I decided to quick get serious. It was, as Molly said, practically our six-weeks’ grade. “What Confucius really did say was something like the Golden Rule. He said, ‘Do not do to others what you don’t want them to do to you.’ Except, of course, he said it in Chinese.”

  Then I read off a bunch of real Confucius-says things that I’d copied down. I proclaimed them like I thought old Confucius would. “If rulers are good then the people they rule will be good,” I said, waving one arm in the air. “Good rulers are more important than laws and punishments,” I yelled, waving the other arm.

  Now that is something Mr. Star will like, I thought. But he was sitting on the floor so far down I could barely see his face.

  After telling about the old-time emperors, I started on my grand finale. “Long ago, the Chinese invented things,” I said, “like paper and gunpowder. And they invented this…” I reached into my deep kimono pocket to pull out a string of sixteen tiny firecrackers my dad had brought back from a trip to Tennessee. They aren’t against the law in Tennessee, firecrackers aren’t. They are in Illinois, but he brought them to me anyway to set off on the Fourth of July. “Thunder Bomb,” the label said, “made in Kwangtung, China.”

  I felt around in my pocket for the long stringy fuse so I could fling the whole batch up and it would really knock them out. With my fingertips, I located what I was sure was the fuse, lifted it out of my pocket, and raised it high in the air like a torch. And everybody broke up again. I could have crawled back under the tablecloth. Lisa is right, I thought, I am a squird. Probably even a dwerpy squird. Instead of flashing the firecrackers, I was waving my long black right moustache. It must have sneezed itself straight down into the kimono pocket. R.X. leaned forward and poked Trevor’s left elbow, and they laughed like I was some genius comic, only I hadn’t meant to be funny at all.

  Tossing the moustache over my head to the purple tablecloth, I reached into the kimono pocket again, and this time I looked in before I pulled out. Fishing out the string of tiny firecrackers, I flipped them to the ceiling, and clapped two times before catching them on the way down. Everybody oohed and wowed. They knew I could have gotten busted just for having them.

  But Mrs. Bosco, who’d been sitting pretty quiet in the back of the room, boomed out, “Well, sonny, you better be careful with those. When I was in China it was during the Lunar New Year’s Celebration and everywhere, everywhere there were dragon parades. The fireworks never stopped. Day and night, day and night they shot them off. And while I have a teeny-tiny hearing problem, those firecrackers were so loud I tossed and turned all night long from the noise. Tossed and turned. Now you may not believe this, but…” she said, lowering her voice. And, without thinking about it, everybody leaned toward her to listen, “…When I was in Shanghai, just three weeks ago today, I saw a young man not much older than you are, sonny, get half his finger blown off by a string of firecrackers. I was right there when it happened. Right there. The noise was tremendous and that finger flew straight into the air. Straight up. There was blood spurting everywhere.”

  She leaned back and crossed her arms over the fur coat, looking pleased because all the boys were going, “Gross!” and all the girls were going, “Oosick!”

  Mr. Star, who’d been sitting next to Mrs. Bosco, his head against the wall, got up slowly, waved his arm weakly at Molly, and said, “Look, go right ahead. I—” Then he opened the door and rushed out.

  Nick and I looked at each other. Mr. Star had never done anything like that before. “Oh, my,” Mrs. Bosco wailed, “did I say something wrong?”

  You could see Molly was mad Mr. Star had left the room before her part of the report, but there wasn’t much she could do about it so she went ahead like he had said. She climbed up on a chair to be teacher-tall and got that I-am-in-charge-here-now look. Then she yelled, to be certain everybody listened. “Everybody, look at me! I’ve got on different Chinese clothes. My grandmother,” she said, pointing to the back of the room, “got these last time she was in China. In the year 1980.” Mrs. Bosco beamed. “It’s what a lot of Chinese people wore back then,” Molly went on. “It’s called a Mao suit.” She twirled around so everybody could see. She had on this blue-gray jacket and pants that looked like too-big pajamas. On her head she wore a cap that looked something like a baseball cap, only the top part was fatter. Pretty nearly every sentence she used started with “my grandmother,” and her grandmother kept nodding and smiling and even adding little stories of her own.

  Usually when Mr. Star is out of the class we fool around as much as we can. I mean, that’s when you can get away with anything. This time, though, Molly was standing up on her chair, shouting out a speech, while her grandmother sat on her chair like a fur mountain, staring at the backs of most everybody’s heads. Nobody knew for sure what to do.

  One thing for sure they didn’t want to do was take notes. Besides, even though it was only February, the sun was shining. David Trey wandered to the back of the room and got a drink from the sink in the corner next to the windows. He let the faucet run for a minute or two until Molly gave him a dirty look and he sat down. Marshall, whose paper airplanes had won the Fourth of July contest last year for distance, took one from his desk and aimed. It swooped into the air, and then, like it had radar in the tip, glided gently to the table and stuck, point down, in the cricket cage. Aretha Eliott whistled low. It was a great shot.

  “In China,” Mrs. Bosco boomed from the back of the class, “children are absolutely quiet in school. Absolutely. They are good. They desire an education.” She was like a bullhorn. Nobody said anything. We were quiet. Absolutely. And good. But we didn’t much desire an education. Not right then. Not from Molly, anyway.

  Molly stepped down from her chair and went on with her talk, holding up everything in sight on the purple tablecloth, all the stuff but the airplane and my moustache, which she flicked onto the floor. When she was finished, Nick took over and said, “It’s test time, comrades,” and he bonged the gong with a big smack.

  “It’s time for the TING (bong) TANG (bong) SHOW (bong-bong-bong)!”

  Before our ears had stopped ringing, the door opened, but it wasn’t Mr. Star like we thought it would be. It was Miss Hutter. You could tell she hadn’t expected to walk into a classroom that sounded like the inside of a bell. Putting her hands on her hips, she lowered her head like a bull about to charge. She did not smile, but peered at each kid like she was trying to decide exactly what was wrong here and whose fault it was. When her eyes reached Mrs. Bosco she nodded briskly and then turned to us and said, “Perhaps you all realize that Mr. Star is…indisposed.” Her face was grim. “He has gone home for the day.”

  Mrs. Bosco stood up at once. The fur reached her ankles. I bet it took a hundred raccoons to make a coat that size. She stepped toward the door. “Was it something I said?” she asked loudly.

  Miss Hutter was actually flustered. She must have thought Mrs. Bosco had been up in our room shouting at Mr. Star. “Oh, no…no. I’m sure not. I’m certain he was already…” She looked over her glasses at Mrs. Bosco and said firmly, “He has the flu. Five of our teachers are out with it today and a number of children are sick. Ms. O’Malley, the other fourth grade teacher—in the room next door—is absent today, too.”

&n
bsp; There are just two fourth grade rooms, and they’re across from each other on the second floor at the west end of the school. We’re 4B. They’re 4A. Another room used to be a fourth grade, but since there aren’t enough kids now, it’s just used for storage. I had been hearing rumbling all morning from 4A without knowing why, but just then there came a fat thunk against the wall followed by a roar of laughter, and I realized that, with Ms. O’Malley gone, those 4A lucks had a substitute teacher.

  We heard a second thunk. It sounded like those guys were juggling desks and dropping a few. Nick and I looked at each other and started to laugh. That’s the thing about subs, most of them don’t know the rules the regular teacher’s so strict about and most of them don’t know who you are, so you can really fool around.

  Miss Hutter’s eyes narrowed. “Excuse me a moment. I have something to attend to.” She left the room and almost at once the cackles across the hall stopped like she’d just gone in and pushed the “off” button.

  When she came back in she closed the door gently behind her and said, “Class, Mr. Star wasn’t sure he felt well enough to come back after lunch, but he did so because he was very eager to hear a report he said you’d been working hard on about…pottery, was it?”

  “China,” Nick said. “The country, not the kind that breaks when you drop it in the sink.”

  “Oh, yes,” Miss Hutter said. “I remember your box of supplies.” She smiled at me. “A very pretty kimono.” I turned so red I must have looked like a plugged-in Christmas tree.

  “We just finished,” Lisa told her. “It was very interesting.”

  “And we are about to have a quiz show, Miss Hutter,” Molly went on, “to ask the class questions.”

  “Oh, that’s splendid.” Miss Hutter smiled at Mrs. Bosco, and they both sat down on the little wooden chairs and started talking to each other.