Dawn and the Big Sleepover

  “Let’s have a hand for Haley, our own Madame Leveaux!”

  The kids cheered, and Mary Anne handed me Haley’s gift. “For your continued study of the stars, this fine telescope!”

  “Really?” Haley said. She ripped open the box, pulled out a brand-new miniature telescope, and held it in the air. “Oh, thanks, Dawn!”

  As she ran back to her seat, I announced, “And now for the person who donated the most clothes …”

  This time I didn’t have to ask for the drumroll.

  “… Rob Hines!”

  The ceremony went on like this. There were a dozen main prizes, all of them really nice — a skateboard, roller skates, video games, a sled, among others. We tried to spread the gifts to as many kids as possible. For instance, the Pikes shared a croquet set.

  I was afraid some of the kids would feel sad or bitter about not winning. But the toy store people had thought of that in advance. They had included a big bag of tiny prizes — buttons, stickers, coloring books, and puzzles. Everyone ended up getting some kind of reward.

  When the awards were over, I thanked everybody and gave a little speech about helping the pen pals. Then, putting aside my clipboard, I announced, “Okay, it’s game time! What do you want to play?”

  “Red Rover!” someone shouted.

  “Spud!”

  “Red Light, Green Light!”

  “Mother, May I?”

  “All right, if you want to play Red Light, Green Light, come to me,” I said.

  “I’ll take the Spud people!” Kristy volunteered.

  “Mary Anne and I will do Red Rover!” Stacey said.

  “Mal and I will do Mother, May I?” Jessi piped up.

  For about an hour, the kids went wild. Then we switched them over to quieter games — I Spy, Telephone, Ghost, Grandmother’s Trunk. It was almost nine o’clock.

  The children began to wind down. The teachers had thought to bring a huge selection of books for all different age levels. Before long, the gym was divided into small circles of kids. Each circle was being read to by a teacher or a BSC member. I read One Morning in Maine by Robert McCloskey, mostly to seven-year-olds. By the time I got to the last line, “Clam chowder for lunch!” I could see a few heavy eyelids.

  It was the perfect time to give them the best news of the night. I excused myself and got up. Then I went to my clipboard and announced, “Uh, before you all go to bed —”

  There were a few groans, but not many.

  “— I think you might like to know the grand total of the money you raised for your pen pals.” I made a big deal of flipping through the legal pad, then read the figure.

  It was a phenomenal total. I couldn’t believe it myself when we had added it up. I had made Stacey count it about four times.

  There were some gasps and wow’s, then a few kids began to applaud.

  I was proud of the kids, and glad they realized how impressive the total was. I began clapping, too. “Go ahead,” I said. “Give yourselves a hand. You deserve it!”

  They did, and you know what? The looks of satisfaction on their faces were almost enough to make me forget about all the days of hard work.

  Almost.

  It was bedtime, and trying to put a hundred tired elementary-school kids to sleep is no small task. We started with the second-graders, and took them to the boys’ and girls’ rooms, where they could change in the privacy of the stalls. Some of them were so tired we practically had to carry them. Then we waited patiently while they washed up and brushed their teeth — or refused to wash and brush. Then we went back for the next bunch.

  A little before ten, something happened that I don’t think I’ll forget for a long time. There was a little boy who had been very quiet that night, a second-grader whose name I didn’t know. I remembered that he’d brought a few things to the garage that first week — not a huge amount, but a couple of good-size boxes. I also remembered that he never looked at me in the barn. He seemed embarrassed.

  He was very tired after washing up, but as I walked with him to his sleeping bag, he looked straight into my eyes. “Is Johnny going to have dinners, too, now?”

  “Johnny?” I asked.

  “My pen pal,” the boy said. “He told me he wasn’t having dinners ’cause his house burned up, and he has to stay in a hotel.”

  “I … I hope so,” I said.

  “I donated lots of dinner food — tuna, and soup, and stuff like that.”

  “Well, then, the answer is yes,” I said, as I helped him unzip his sleeping bag. “We’ll make sure Johnny has dinners.”

  The boy crawled into the bag. As he snuggled into a comfortable position, there was a happy smile on his face. He looked at me again and said, “Thanks, Dawn. You’re the nicest girl I ever met.”

  “I … I … I … I …”

  The voice was coming out in frightened little hiccups. I didn’t know the girl, but for some reason she had decided to come to me.

  It was 10:09, and I was almost done tucking in the children. “What is it?” I asked, taking the girl’s hand. “Don’t worry, I’m listening.”

  “I … I … I don’t want to stay here!”

  “Aren’t you having a good time?” I asked. She must have been. She’d been running around like crazy all night.

  “Uh-huh,” she said, nodding her head.

  “Did someone hit you?”

  “Uh-uh.” She shook her head no.

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  She shrugged. “I just want to go home.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You feeling a little lonely?”

  She nodded.

  “You feel funny not sleeping in your own bed?”

  She nodded harder.

  “Okay, come with me.” I took the girl into the hallway and called her parents. They were very understanding and came right away.

  When they left, it was 10:21. All of the kids were in their sleeping bags by then. Not that they were asleep, of course. Many of them got their second wind as soon as they were down. There were little pockets of giggling conversation all over the room. Every once in awhile, someone would say “Sssshhh!” and the talking would stop — for a few seconds.

  This went on until eleven or so. By that time, most of the kids were asleep or almost asleep.

  Me? I was ready to drop, too. I was standing (barely) with the teachers and the rest of the BSC members under one of the basketball hoops.

  It was the first chance I had had to talk to Ms. Besser all night. “Congratulations, Dawn,” she said, smiling broadly. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this come off so well. I only wish your brother could have been here to see it. He would have been proud.”

  I nodded. I wished Jeff had been there, too. It was hard not to miss him at a time like this.

  Ms. Besser turned to all of the BSC members. “You all deserve nothing but the highest praise.”

  I was tired, but not too tired to smile. “Thanks,” I said. “But if it weren’t for you, this would never have happened.”

  Everyone agreed with me. Ms. Besser returned my smile and said, “Do me a favor. Would you mind staying exactly the same age for a few years until I have a child old enough to be baby-sat for?”

  We laughed. Some of the kids turned in their sleeping bags to see what was going on.

  “We’ll see what we can do,” I said. I paused. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m tired.”

  “Me, too,” said Mary Anne, Claudia, and a couple of the teachers.

  It was our turn to use the rest rooms, which was fun, like summer camp, but we kept quiet to avoid disturbing the kids.

  Sometime around 11:20 I fell asleep.

  At 11:31 I heard a girl say, “I have to go to the bathroom!”

  “Go ahead,” Mary Anne’s sleepy voice replied.

  “I can’t,” the girl said.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m afraid!”

  When I heard footsteps, I dozed again.

  But not for long
. “I have to go to the bathroom!” someone else announced.

  “Me, too!”

  “Me, too!”

  The second voice came from nearby. Wearily I rounded up three kids. Wearily I marched them to the rest rooms. Wearily I walked them back.

  I tried to go to sleep again — several times. Just when I would be starting a wonderful dream, some crisis would occur.

  At 11:52, Jordan Pike got into a fight over where he and another boy had the right to put their feet while they slept.

  At 12:06, a girl had a screaming nightmare. That was not fun. While Stacey calmed her down, two other kids began to cry and had to be comforted.

  I don’t know when these things happened:

  Buddy Barrett started sleepwalking, and Mr. Selden followed him patiently all around the gym without waking him up. (For some reason, you’re not supposed to wake up a sleepwalker.)

  A fifth-grader got a charlie horse.

  A second-grader had an … accident in a sleeping bag and woke up crying.

  Someone had eaten too much pizza. (Fortunately, a teacher got him to the bathroom in time!)

  Throughout the night, there were clusters of kids wanting to be taken to the bathroom — one would speak up, and the rest would follow.

  * * *

  Needless to say, when morning came, none of us had slept much.

  The supermarket delivery people came around 5:30, and we let them into the cafeteria, which was down the hall.

  About twenty minutes later, the cafeteria volunteers arrived. They went quietly to work.

  I think I will never forget the smell of pancakes that started seeping into the gym. I’m not a big fan of pancakes, but smelling them that morning made me weak with hunger.

  It also started rousing the kids. You’d think they had had the deepest, most peaceful night’s sleep in their lives.

  It was a new day, and they were raring to go, to say the least.

  “I’m hungry!” one kid called out.

  “Where’s the TV?” another demanded.

  Another started laughing, exclaiming, “Look at Jimmy’s hair!”

  The boy named Jimmy, whose curly hair had gone wild in the night, furiously tried to press it down.

  A group of boys ran around with their sleeping bags tied around their necks like capes, shooting imaginary space-age weapons.

  Somehow, us older people managed to arrange them into groups for wash-up time. Then, of course, they had to dress themselves in the stalls, which was another adventure. Some of them took forever. Some didn’t want to be seen in the clothes that had gotten so wrinkled overnight. Others teased their friends for no good reason.

  I thought the pancakes would turn to rocks by the time we got everyone to the cafeteria.

  They didn’t. In fact, they were incredible — much better than the meals I had in my elementary school. The kids had a choice of plain, blueberry, strawberry, or buttermilk pancakes. There was plenty of syrup and butter. And there was orange, apple, and grapefruit juice, and lots of milk and coffee.

  “My, you look slightly less than perfect!” Stacey said to me with a teasing smile.

  “I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck,” I replied.

  Stacey held out a glass of orange juice. “Here, have some of this. It’ll wake you up.”

  I shook my head. “No thanks.”

  My eyelids felt as if they weighed about a ton. And I really needed to be wide awake, because breakfast was like — well, you can imagine what breakfast for a hundred kids was like.

  “Hey!” Vanessa Pike suddenly shouted. A pancake had ended up on her head, and a few kids were covering their mouths and laughing. I took her away to the girls’ room.

  By the time I got back, every teacher and baby-sitter had his or her hands full.

  “Ew!” cried a group of girls, pulling their trays away from a huge syrup spill on a table.

  Splat! Jackie Rodowsky landed on his backside when he slipped on some spilled grapefruit juice.

  “Hey, look at me!” Byron Pike was entertaining a group of boys by putting two strips of pancake under his nose to look like a mustache.

  “Charlene took my juice!” a girl started shouting.

  “Well, you took my seat!” That must have been Charlene.

  This went on … and on … and on …

  Until Claudia poked me in the ribs. “Dawn, do you see what I see?”

  I looked up. A smiling man and woman were peering through the cafeteria door.

  “Daddy! Mommy!” a second-grader called out.

  “Parents!” I said, like someone stranded in the desert might say, “Water!”

  As more and more parents came, the chaos started again. Kids returned their trays (or didn’t), went back to the gym, lost their stuff, had trouble packing their stuff, mixed their stuff up with someone else’s, you name it.

  In the midst of all of this, the reporter and photographer came back to do a follow-up report — which delayed things even more.

  The Barretts were the last parents to come and the last to leave. As we watched them walk Buddy out to the parking lot, we stood in the door and waved.

  Then it was time for our celebration.

  “Whoopee!” Kristy shouted. “We did it!”

  All seven of us baby-sitters somehow managed to embrace each other. The teachers stood around us, smiling.

  Then we looked back into the gym.

  Strewn around the floor were candy wrappers, shoelaces, toothbrushes, plastic cups, underwear — even a couple of pizza crusts that had been overlooked.

  But you know what? Tired as I was, I suddenly felt full of energy. All I could think about was this: My great plan — every last complicated part of it — was over. And boy, had it been a success!

  As I cleaned up the remains of the sleepover, I could barely feel my feet touch the ground.

  As soon as we had cleaned up, my friends and I gathered at my house with the teachers and bundled everything up to send to Zuni. We loaded cars and Ms. Reynolds’s minivan, packing as tightly as we could, and still we had to make three trips.

  The postal costs came out of the money we collected, but we sent the rest in a check directly to the principal of the Zuni school (super sleuthing on Claudia’s part — she found his name in one of the Pike kids’ letters, then called New Mexico information for his home address).

  A week later, we heard from him. The letter came to SES and went like this:

  To the children of Stoneybrook, Connecticut:

  I have been an educator for twenty-seven years. As an English teacher and an administrator, I have guided my children to speak clearly with well-chosen words. But for the first time in my life, I find that words are inadequate to express my feelings — our feelings.

  Many of us were rendered speechless by your generosity and unselfish donation of time. The gifts of clothing and food were distributed where needed, and are already being enjoyed. The money has helped enable us to obtain financing for the construction of a new school.

  But the rewards of your work go beyond the gifts themselves. Our children have been inspired by you to do fund-raising of their own. They are planning various activities right now, and the community seems to be throwing its support behind them.

  The government, perhaps partly as a reaction to the positive efforts we are displaying, agreed today to grant us substantial disaster funding.

  With luck, our school will be built and stocked with supplies by the beginning of next school year.

  We hope to be left with a reserve fund for an exchange trip with our brothers and sisters in Stoneybrook, Connecticut.

  Once again, thank you all.

  Fondly,

  Joseph Woodward

  Pretty nice, huh? I felt shivers when I read it. Especially the part about “brothers and sisters.” I hope there really will be an exchange trip sometime — and I hope a few older kids will be asked to come along to help!

  Anyway, in the weeks after the sleepover, there was a l
ot of pen pal correspondence. Charlotte showed me a great letter from Theresa Bradley.

  And there was a letter that came to Mary Anne’s house in an envelope marked like this:

  “Um, Haley?” Mary Anne said the night she brought it to the Braddocks’. “Who’s Nancy Green?”

  “My pen pal,” Haley replied. “Why?”

  “That’s strange,” Mary Anne replied, handing her the letter. “Why would she write to you, as Madame Leveaux, at my address?”

  “Oh,” Haley said, “I — I wrote her a note from Madame Leveaux, you know, as a joke.” Haley was starting to squirm. “Well, I didn’t want her to know it was from me, so I gave her your address. I meant to tell you, Mary Anne. Really! I just — forgot.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you, Haley,” Mary Anne said.

  “I know,” Haley replied. “I’m not going to do it again. I’m sorry.”

  “All right,” Mary Anne said, turning to go. “See you.”

  “’Bye!” Haley quickly closed the door.

  As Mary Anne walked home, she couldn’t help smiling. What she hadn’t told Haley was that she’d opened the letter by mistake and read it already. Haley, as Madame Leveaux, had written her pen pal right around the time of the assembly. That was when I had asked all the kids not to tell their pen pals about our plans. Haley was dying to tell Nancy Green, but she knew she couldn’t.

  That didn’t mean Madame Leveaux couldn’t tell her …

  Anyway, this is what the letter said:

  Dear Mrs. Leveaux,

  You were right. Everything you said, all that stuff about help coming from a mysterious place in the east, it all came true. When I told my friends about your predictions, nobody believed me. Then, the day after your letter came, we got this great stuff from our pen pals. Clothes, food, even a huge check to build a new school! I can’t believe my pen pal, Haley Braddock, never mentioned anything about it!

  Now here are some questions for you.

  Did you know our pen pals are in the same exact town you live in? How did you know my address? How did you know about Pens Across America?

  Anyway, thank you for sending the fortune. Please send me another one. My friends and I can’t wait!