The Wednesday Wars

  I knocked at Meryl Lee's door.

  "Go away," she said.

  I knocked again. I heard her chair scrape against the floor, and her footsteps stomping across the room. Her door opened. "I told you—" Then she stopped. Her mouth was open.

  "I thought you might be thirsty," I said.

  Her mouth was still open.

  "Are you?"

  "Am I what?"

  "Thirsty."

  She looked at the Cokes in my hand. "Yes," she said.

  I handed her a bottle and pulled the opener out of my pocket. I love the sound of a brand-new bottle of Coke when you pry the lid off and it starts to fizz. Whenever I hear that sound, I think of roses, and of sitting together with someone you care about, and of Romeo and Juliet waking up somewhere and saying to each other, Weren't we jerks? And then having all that be over. That's what I think of when I hear the sound of a brand-new bottle of Coke being opened.

  On Thursday, before the school board met to decide on its new architect, Kowalski and Associates withdrew its bid for the new junior high school. Hoodhood and Associates was given the contract.

  "What chumps," said my father. "They were going to win hands down. What chumps." He shook his head. "They're bound to go under now, but if you can't play for keeps, you shouldn't be in the business in the first place. And Kowalski never could play for keeps. And Hoodhood and Associates can." He rubbed his hands together like Shylock onstage.

  And that's when something changed. I suddenly wondered if my father was really like Shylock. Not because he loved ducats, but because maybe he had become the person that everyone expected him to become. I wondered if he had ever had a choice, or if he had ever felt trapped. Or if he had ever imagined a different life.

  With this new contract, he was a sure bet for the Chamber of Commerce Businessman of 1968. It's probably what everyone expected.

  For the first time, I wondered if it was what he wanted—or if there was a time when he might have wanted something else.

  Or if I wanted something else.

  Or if we were both only Fortune's fools—like Romeo.

  Meryl Lee and I were partners on Friday for sentence diagramming. We ate together at lunch. And we decided to be partners for Mr. Petrelli's next geography assignment, which was on "The California Gold Rush and You." "Make it relevant," said Mr. Petrelli. We sang together in Chorus for Miss Violet of the Very Spiky Heels, and when it came time at the end of the day to clean the board, we did that together, too.

  And that's why we were at the board together when Mr. Guareschi came into the classroom to give Mrs. Baker a yellow telegram—a telegram that she took out of the envelope, then read, then dropped onto the floor as she rushed out, leaving Mr. Guareschi standing in front of the class without any idea what to do.

  When we picked up the telegram to put on her desk, Meryl Lee and I could hardly not read it ourselves. Or at least the words that mattered:

  DOWNED HELICOPTER TRANSPORT STOP KHESANH STOP LT T BAKER MISSING IN ACTION STOP

  March

  The news from Khesanh that Walter Cronkite reported each night kept getting grimmer. The five thousand marines there were cut off and could get supplies only by air, even though any helicopter that flew over took a lot of enemy fire from the twenty thousand surrounding Vietcong troops. Meanwhile, the marines were dug into bunkers covered with three feet of earth to protect them from the mortar shells that the Vietcong were lobbing into the camp—about five hundred mortar shells a day. And when they weren't lobbing shells, the Vietcong were digging tunnels that they could use to put explosives beneath the marines. Some reports said that the tunnels were only a hundred yards away from the barbed wire around the Khesanh base. The marines had started to use stethoscopes and divining rods to see if they could find them.

  You know things are bad when the United States Marine Corps is using stethoscopes and divining rods.

  Still, the White House announced that the enemy offensive was running out of steam, that casualties at Khesanh were light, that we would never give up the marine base there.

  We watched Walter Cronkite together every night after supper now—even my sister. We were all quiet, and not just because my father would have hollered if anyone had interrupted Walter Cronkite. Sometimes, though, my father himself would shake his head and whisper, "Five thousand boys trapped. Good Lord. Five thousand." We'd watch the pictures of the marines in their zigzagging trenches, or deep in their bunkers, holding their hands over their ears inside their helmets because of the thunder of the mortar shells. Then my father would reach for my mother's hand, and they would look at each other.

  My sister sat rigid—with anger, I guess. She probably wanted to say something like "I told you so" or "If President Johnson had listened and gotten us out of there in time" or "No one in Washington knows what he's doing," but she didn't. When five hundred mortar shells are coming in every day on top of soldiers huddled in holes with their hands over their ears, even a flower child who wanted nothing but world peace could only watch and hope.

  I also was watching the newscasts and hoping for a sign, any sign, of Lieutenant Tybalt Baker. There never was one—not in any of the films of the mortars or the trenches or the downed and burning helicopters or the wounded. Walter Cronkite didn't read off the names of the missing in action, so Lieutenant Baker was never mentioned. But I still watched anyway, holding my breath, hoping.

  Which is what I think the whole town was doing.

  Which is certainly what Mrs. Baker was doing.

  But you would never have been able to tell that she was holding her breath at Camillo Junior High. She moved through our classroom as coolly as if Khesanh were just a proper noun in a sentence that needed to be diagrammed. It was early spring and we were her garden, and she was starting to see the bulbs and seeds that she had planted in us last fall coming up. She raked away our dead leaves, spaded new soil around us, and watered and fertilized.And we grew fast and green, let me tell you. Especially Mai Thi, who was now the best sentence diagrammer in the seventh grade—which may not sound like much, but with Mrs. Baker, it was a big deal.

  During class, it didn't seem as if anything was bothering Mrs. Baker at all.

  Except maybe the eight bulging asbestos ceiling tiles, which now had about as much bulge as asbestos ceiling tiles can take. They looked like sails in a full breeze.

  We still didn't know exactly what was making them so heavy. Maybe the rats were hoarding supplies for the summer drought up there. Maybe Sycorax and Caliban were just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. But whatever it was, no one wanted those tiles to come down with whatever was bulging them out. Not even Danny Hupfer.

  Which was why on the first Wednesday afternoon in March, while Mrs. Baker was grading and I was at my desk starting in on Julius Caesar—who, let me tell you, was a whole lot smarter than Romeo, even though he ended up pretty badly, too—Mr. Vendleri came in with a ladder, eight new asbestos ceiling tiles, and a heavy mallet.

  Mrs. Baker looked at him.

  "A mallet?" she said.

  He brandished it in the air, like Julius Caesar himself. "You don't know how big a rat on the loose can get in five months," he said.

  Mrs. Baker looked up at the bulging ceiling tiles. "I have some idea," she said.

  Mr. Vendleri set his ladder under one of the bulges. He steadied it, and grabbed his mallet tightly in his right hand. He took three steps up the ladder. Then, with his left hand, he slowly reached up to one of the bulging tiles. He tapped it a couple of times, and we listened.

  Nothing.

  He pushed against it.

  Nothing.

  He hit it lightly with the mallet.

  Still nothing.

  He came back down the ladder and went over to the corner of the room. He picked up the trash can and came back to the foot of the ladder. "I'll need someone to hold this underneath the tile when I take it off, just in case stuff comes out," he said.

  "'Just in case stuff comes out?'" said
Mrs. Baker.

  "That's right," said Mr. Vendleri.

  Mrs. Baker looked over at me.

  Sometimes, I think she still hates my guts.

  So there I was, holding this trash can underneath the eight bulging asbestos ceiling tiles, and Mr. Vendleri started to push up on one of them with his mallet. "You won't catch the stuff standing over there," he said to me. I moved a little closer. "Right here," he said, pointing to the target area. Then he turned and lifted one of the ceiling tiles with his mallet. We listened for the scrambling of two large rats.

  Nothing.

  So Mr. Vendleri tilted the tile to get it out ... and Shredded Everything came pouring down: homework announcements, PTA letters home, blue dittos, Bazooka bubblegum wrappers (these were from Danny), chewed up Number 2 pencils, red and green and blue and yellow construction paper, napkins from the cafeteria, part of a black sneaker (this was from Doug Swieteck, who had been looking for it for a couple of months), a gnawed picture of me leaping across stage in yellow tights, and scraps of Meryl Lee's "Mississippi River and You" project. It all came down like wet snow.

  "Hold the trash can under it!" hollered Mr. Vendleri.

  Which is exactly what I was doing, except that the stuff was also falling into my eyes and hair and down the back of my shirt, and I think I must have started screaming because Mrs. Baker came and took the trash can from me. "Maybe you should find a different way to collect the refuse," she said to Mr. Vendleri, brushing the rat-chewed stuff off me.

  By the time Mr. Vendleri brought back a tarp, I had pretty much gotten my shaking under control.

  He handed me that mallet. "What am I supposed to do with this?" I asked.

  "Swing at anything that has yellow teeth," he said.

  "Oh," I said quietly. I wasn't sure if that was better than having the rat-chewed stuff come down on my head.

  But even though I started to shake again, I held the mallet over my shoulder ready to strike, which you have to admit is not only brave and courageous and true and blue and worthy of Jim Hawkins himself, but also pretty remarkable, considering I still had rat-chewed stuff in my hair and down my back.

  But we never saw Sycorax or Caliban. Mr. Vendleri replaced the bulging ceiling tiles with eight new ones, then stepped from the ladder and stood back. "Good as new," he said.

  "Are you sure?" asked Mrs. Baker.

  "I'm sure," I willed him to say. "I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure."

  "I'm sure," said Mr. Vendleri.

  "Then," said Mrs. Baker to me, "you may return to Julius Caesar"

  But let me tell you, it's not easy to read a Shakespeare play when you've just been holding a mallet over your shoulder, ready to swing at anything that has yellow teeth, and Mr. Vendleri is still poking at the other tiles to see if they were bulging, too, and knowing that any tile could come crashing to the floor along with Sycorax and Caliban, and they would not be happy, let me tell you.

  I wanted to read Julius Caesar standing on my desk, but that would definitely not have been worthy of Jim Hawkins.

  When he finally left, Mr. Vendleri told us he'd come check on the new asbestos ceiling tiles tomorrow. "Thank you," said Mrs. Baker. Then she went back to her grading. I wondered if she had wanted to stand on her desk, too.

  Grading, by the way, is also something that makes it hard to read Shakespeare. When your teacher is covering papers with red ink a few desks away from you, and you know that yours is in the stack and it's probably coming up soon, and that your grasp of nonrestrictive clauses might not be all that it should be, it's hard to read anything. Even though there was some good stuff in Julius Caesar: "You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!" It doesn't have the cut of a Caliban curse, but it's all right.

  It also didn't help that Mrs. Baker kept wiping at her eyes during her grading. She'd told us that she had a terrible cold, but she hardly needed to tell us. Her eyes were mostly red all the time, and the way she blew her nose could be pretty impressive. Sometimes while sitting at her desk, she'd just stop doing whatever she was doing and look somewhere far away, like she wasn't even in the classroom anymore.

  It was a terrible cold, and day after day it kept on, and even seemed to be getting worse. Meryl Lee said that she was up to half a box of Kleenex per class, which has got to be some kind of world record.

  So when she announced on Friday that members of the school board were coming to our room to observe and evaluate classroom performance by both students and their teacher, she told us in a soggy voice that drowned at the end. But drowning or not, she kept going.

  She was Mrs. Baker.

  "I will expect you all to be polite to the school board members. I will expect you to be on your very best behavior. I will expect you to show in an appropriate manner what you have been studying this school year."

  "When are they coming?" asked Meryl Lee.

  Before I tell you what Mrs. Baker said, I have something else to tell you, because you won't believe what happened otherwise if I don't. When Julius Caesar is coming into Rome—which is a place where very bad things will happen to him—this soothsayer comes up to him to tell him what's going to happen. And this is what he says to Julius Caesar:

  Beware the ides of March.

  So now I'll tell you what happened after Meryl Lee asked, "When are they coming?"

  "Beware the ides of March," I said.

  And Mrs. Baker looked at me, and her eyes opened a little bit, and without looking away from me, she said to Meryl Lee, "A week from today, Miss Kowalski."

  Which was the ides of March!

  "You are a soothsayer, Mr. Hoodhood," said Mrs. Baker.

  "Sometimes I scare even myself," I said.

  "Prophecy is not an unalloyed gift," she said. "Be careful how you use it." Which is a teacher strategy to get you to look up the word "unalloyed," which I did, and it still didn't make much sense.

  But what happened later that day was even weirder.

  In Gym, Coach Quatrini announced that he was planning to form the Camillo Junior High School cross-country team. It wouldn't be a regular team, since cross-country was a fall sport. But he wanted to start the seventh and eighth graders now so that he could choose a varsity team and have them run over the summer and be ready to begin real competition by September. He expected everybody to try out—everybody—and to get us started in our training, we would be running two miles at tempo.

  "What's 'at tempo'?" I asked.

  "Race pace," he said.

  "How bad could that be?" I said to Danny.

  "Bad," Danny said.

  Coach Quatrini had us stretch for three minutes, then do four short sprints down the length of the gym, and then stretch for another two minutes. Afterward, he took us outside to the track—where there was a pretty brisk March wind that cut right through my T-shirt. He put us at the starting line, held up his stopwatch, and blew his whistle.

  Danny was right. Race pace could be bad.

  I don't know how many times Coach Quatrini used the word "faster," but if a word can get worn out and die, this one died like Julius Caesar. He liked to add words to the front of "faster," words like "a whole lot" and "can't you go any" and "you'd better get" and "dang it." He also added words after "faster," like "you wimps" and "you slugs" and "you dang slugs" toward the end. It wouldn't have taken much for him to be able to play Caliban on the Festival Theater stage.

  Afterward, when we all had our hands on our knees and were trying to suck some air into wherever it wasn't that it needed to get, he reminded us that we all had to try out for the varsity team and promised that tryouts would be a whole lot harder than what we'd just done.

  Toads, beetles, bats.

  Now here's where the weird part comes.

  Into my head jumped this sentence: Tryouts will be in a week, on the ides of March.

  And as soon as I thought it, Coach Quatrini said, "Tryouts will be in a week, and you better be a whole lot faster than this, you dang wimpy slugs."

  I wondered if s
omewhere down deep within me, I really was a soothsayer—even if only the first parts of the sentences were the same.

  I ran over the weekend, not because I was worried that Coach Quatrini would think I was a dang wimpy slug, but because I was pretty sure that if I didn't, I might have something awful happen to me after running at tryout pace on the ides of March. I ran three miles on Saturday, and then four miles on Sunday afternoon, even though it was the Sabbath and I deserved some time off.

  And actually, there was another reason for running over the weekend. An even better reason.

  My father was mad at my sister, which meant somehow that he was mad at me, too, and it was better to be running with my lungs screaming for air than be in a house with my father screaming at me.

  And let me tell you, it wasn't for anything I'd done.

  Now that he had the new junior high school contract, my father needed to hire someone else in his office as a receptionist for weekday afternoons and Saturday mornings, and since he didn't want to pay anyone much for this, he decided that my sister should do it, and he would pay her $1.35 an hour, and not take out any taxes.

  He announced this at supper on Friday night.

  "I can't," said my sister, while passing the lima beans and not taking any.

  "Of course you can," said my father. "It's about time you started a real job."

  "I'm already working," said my sister.

  We looked at her.

  "Who for?" my father asked.

  "For Bobby Kennedy," she said.

  "For Bobby Kennedy?" said my father.

  "Mr. Goldman is letting us use the back of his bakery for campaign headquarters."

  "Bobby Kennedy?" said my father again. "Bobby Kennedy is a rich kid from Cape Cod who's never done anything on his own his whole life."

  "Bobby Kennedy will end the war, end the discrimination that's splitting our country in two, and end the control of the government by a handful of fat old men."