I looked at my desk. I didn't see any trip wires, so probably there weren't any explosives. I checked the screws. They were all still in, so it wouldn't fall flat when I sat down.
Maybe there was something inside. Something terrible inside. Something really awful inside. Something left over from the eighth-grade biology labs last spring.
I looked at Mrs. Baker again. She had looked away, a half-smile on her lips. Really. Talk about guilt.
So I asked Meryl Lee Kowalski, who has been in love with me since she first laid eyes on me in the third grade—I'm just saying what she told me—I asked her to open my desk first.
"How come?" she said. Sometimes even true love can be suspicious.
"Just because."
"'Just because' isn't much of a reason."
"Just because there might be a surprise."
"For who?"
"For you."
"For me?"
"For you."
She lifted the desk top. She looked under English for You and Me, Mathematics for You and Me, and Geography for You and Me. "I don't see anything," she said.
I looked inside. "Maybe I was wrong."
"Maybe I was wrong," said Meryl Lee, and dropped the desk top. Loudly. "Oh," she said. "Sorry. I was supposed to wait until you put your fingers there."
Love and hate in seventh grade are not far apart, let me tell you.
At lunchtime, I was afraid to go out for recess, since I figured that Mrs. Baker had probably recruited an eighth grader to do something awful to me. There was Doug Swieteck's brother, for one, who was already shaving and had been to three police stations in two states and who once spent a night in jail. No one knew what for, but I thought it might be for something in the Number 390s—or maybe even Number 410 itself! Doug Swieteck said that if his father hadn't bribed the judge, his brother would have been on Death Row.
We all believed him.
"Why don't you go out for lunch recess?" said Mrs. Baker to me. "Everyone else is gone."
I held up English for You and Me. "I thought I'd read in here," I said.
"Go out for recess," she said, criminal intent gleaming in her eyes.
"I'm comfortable here."
"Mr. Hoodhood," she said. She stood up and crossed her arms, and I realized I was alone in the room with no witnesses and no mast to climb to get away.
I went out for recess.
I kept a perimeter of about ten feet or so around me, and stayed in Mrs. Sidman's line of sight. I almost asked for her rain hat. You never know what might come in handy when something awful is about to happen to you.
Then, as if the Dread Day of Doom and Disaster had come to Camillo Junior High, I heard, "Hey, Hoodhood!"
It was Doug Swieteck's brother. He entered my perimeter.
I took three steps closer to Mrs. Sidman. She moved away and held her rain hat firmly.
"Hoodhood—you play soccer? We need another guy." Doug Swieteck's brother was moving toward me. The hair on his chest leaped over the neck of his T-shirt.
"Go ahead," called the helpful Mrs. Sidman from a distance. "If you don't play, someone will have to sit out."
If I don't play, I'll live another day, I thought.
"Hoodhood," said Doug Swieteck's brother, "you coming or not?"
What could I do? It was like walking into my own destiny.
"You're on that side." He pointed.
I already knew that.
"You're a back," he said.
I knew that, too. Destiny has a way of letting you know these things.
"I'm a forward."
I could have said it for him.
"That means you have to try to stop me."
I nodded.
"Think you can?"
I suppose I could stop you, I thought. I suppose I could stop you with a Bradley tank, armor two inches thick, three mounted machine guns, and a grenade launcher. Then I suppose I could stop you.
"I can try," I said.
"You can try." Doug Swieteck's brother laughed, and I bet that if I had looked over my shoulder, I would have seen Mrs. Baker peering out her third-floor classroom window, and she would have been laughing, too.
But the thing about soccer is that you can run around a whole lot and never, ever touch the ball. And if you do have to touch the ball, you can kick it away before anyone comes near you. That's what I figured on doing. Doug Swieteck's brother wouldn't even come near me, and I would foil Mrs. Baker's nefarious plan.
But Doug Swieteck's brother had clearly received instructions. The first time he got the ball, he looked around and then came right at me. He wasn't like a normal forward, who everyone knows is supposed to avoid the defense. He just came right at me, and there was a growl that rose out of him like he was some great clod of living earth that hadn't evolved out of the Mesozoic Era, howling and roaring and slobbering and coming to crush me.
I expect that the watching Mrs. Baker was almost giddy at the thought.
"Get in front of him!" screamed Danny Hupfer, who was our goalie. "In front of him!" His voice was cracking, probably because he was imagining the propulsion of a soccer ball as it left Doug Swieteck's brother's foot and hurtled toward the goal, and wondering what it might do to his chest.
I didn't move.
Danny screamed again. I think he screamed "In front!" But I'm not sure. I don't think he was using language at all. Imagine a sound with a whole lot of high vowels, and I think you'd have it.
But it didn't make any difference what he screamed, because of course I wasn't going to get in front. There was no way in the world I was going to get in front. If Doug Swieteck's brother scored, he scored. It was just a game, after all.
I stepped toward the sideline, away from the goal.
And Doug Swieteck's brother veered toward me.
I ran back a bit and stepped even closer to the sideline.
And he veered toward me again.
So as Danny Hupfer screamed vowels and Doug Swieteck's brother growled mesozoically, I felt my life come down to this one hard point, like it had been a funnel channeling everything I had ever done to this one moment, when it would all end.
And that was when I remembered Jim Hawkins, climbing up the side of the Hispaniola to steal her, tearing down the Jolly Roger flag, sitting in the crosstrees and holding Israel Hands back.
Guts.
So I glanced up at Mrs. Baker's window—she wasn't there, probably so she wouldn't be accused of being an accomplice—and then I ran toward the goal, turned, and stood. I waited for Doug Swieteck's brother to come.
It was probably kind of noble to see.
I stood my ground, and I stood my ground, and I stood my ground, until the howling and the roaring and the slobbering were about on top of me.
Then I closed my eyes—nothing says you have to look at your destiny—and stepped out of the way.
Almost.
I left my right foot behind.
And Doug Swieteck's hairy brother tripped over it.
Everything suddenly increased in volume—the howling and the roaring and the slobbering, the whistling of Doug Swieteck's brother's airborne body hurtling toward the goal, the screams of Danny Hupfer, my own hollering as I clutched my crushed foot. Then there came an iron thunk against the goal post, which bent at a sudden angle around Doug Swieteck's brother's head.
And everything was quiet.
I opened my eyes again.
Doug Swieteck's brother was standing and sort of wobbling. Mrs. Sidman was running over—though, properly speaking, what she did wasn't really running. It was more a panicky shuffle. She probably saw "Negligent Playground Monitor" headlines in her future. When she got to him, Doug Swieteck's brother was still wobbling, and he looked at her with his eyes kind of crossed. "Are you all right?" Mrs. Sidman asked, and held on to his arm.
He nodded once, then threw up on her.
He had eaten a liverwurst-and-egg sandwich for lunch. No one ever wants to see a liverwurst-and-egg sandwich twice.
&nb
sp; And Mrs. Sidman's rain hat did not help at all.
That was the end of the soccer game, except that Danny Hupfer—a very relieved Danny Hupfer—ran up to thump me on the back. "You sure did take him out!"
"I didn't mean to take him out."
"Sure. Did you see him fly? Like a missile."
"I didn't mean to take him out," I hollered.
"I never saw anyone get taken out like that before."
Doug Swieteck ran over. "You took out my brother?"
"I didn't mean to take out your brother."
"Everyone says you took out my brother. I've been wanting to do that since I was out of the womb."
"It was like a missile," said Danny.
I limped back into school, trying not to look at an unhappy Mrs. Sidman, who was holding the wobbling Doug Swieteck's brother at the same time that she was using her rain hat to do not very much. Liverwurst is like that.
Meryl Lee was waiting for me at the door. "You took out Doug Swieteck's brother?" she asked.
"I didn't mean to take him out."
"Then how did he end up flying through the air?"
"I tripped him."
"You tripped him?"
"Yes, I tripped him."
"On purpose?"
"Sort of."
"Isn't that cheating?"
"He's three times bigger than I am."
"So that means you can cheat and make him look like an idiot."
"I didn't try to make him look like an idiot."
"Oh. And you didn't try to make me look like an idiot, opening your desk for some dumb surprise that wasn't even there."
"What's that got to do with it?"
"Everything," said Meryl Lee, and stomped away.
There are times when she makes me feel as stupid as asphalt. "Everything." What's that supposed to mean?
Mrs. Baker's face was pinched when we came back into the class—the disappointment of a failed assassination plot. Her face stayed pinched most of the afternoon, and got even pinchier when the P.A. announced that Doug Swieteck's brother was fine, that he would be back in school after ten days of observation, and that there was a need for a playground monitor for the rest of the week.
Mrs. Baker looked at me.
She hated my guts.
We spent the afternoon with English for You and Me, learning how to diagram sentences—as if there was some reason why anyone in the Western Hemisphere needed to know how to do this. One by one, Mrs. Baker called us to the blackboard to try our hand at it. Here's the sentence she gave to Meryl Lee:
The brook flows down the pretty mountain.
Here's the sentence she gave to Danny Hupfer:
He kicked the round ball into the goal.
Here's the sentence she gave to Mai Thi:
The girl walked home.
This was so short because it used about a third of Mai Thi's English vocabulary, since she'd only gotten here from Vietnam during the summer.
Here's the sentence she gave to Doug Swieteck:
I read a book.
There was a different reason why his sentence was so short—never mind that it was a flat-out lie on Doug Swieteck's part.
Here's the sentence she gave me:
For it so falls out, that what we have we prize not to the worth whiles we enjoy it; but being lacked and lost, why, then we rack the value, then we find the virtue that possession would not show us while it was ours.
No native speaker of the English language could diagram this sentence. The guy who wrote it couldn't diagram this sentence. I stood at the blackboard as hopeless as a seventh-grade kid could be.
"Mr. Hoodhood?" said Mrs. Baker.
I started to sweat. If Robert Louis Stevenson had written a sentence like that in Treasure Island, no one would have ever read the book, I thought.
"If you had been listening to my instructions, you should have been able to do this," said Mrs. Baker, which is sort of like saying that if you've ever flicked on a light switch, you should be able to build an atomic reactor.
"Start with 'what we have,'" she said, and smiled at me through her pinched face, and I saw in her eyes what would have been in Long John Silver's eyes if he had ever gotten hold of Captain Flint's treasure.
But the game wasn't over yet.
The P.A. crackled and screeched like a parrot.
It called my name.
It said I was to come to the principal's office.
Escape!
I put the chalk down and turned to Mrs. Baker with a song of victory on my lips.
But I saw that there was a song of victory on her lips already.
"Immediately," said the P.A.
I suddenly knew: It was the police. Mrs. Baker had reported me. It had to be the police. They had come to drag me to the station for taking out Doug Swieteck's brother. And I knew that my father would never bribe the judge. He'd just look at me and say, "What did you do?" as I headed off to Death Row.
"Immediately," Mrs. Baker said.
It was a long walk down to the principal's office. It is always a long walk down to the principal's office. And in those first days of school, your sneakers squeak on the waxed floors like you're torturing them, and everyone looks up as you walk by their classroom, and they all know you're going to see Mr. Guareschi in the principal's office, and they're all glad it's you and not them.
Which it was.
I had to wait outside his door. That was to make me nervous.
Mr. Guareschi's long ambition had been to become dictator of a small country. Danny Hupfer said that he had been waiting for the CIA to get rid of Fidel Castro and then send him down to Cuba, which Mr. Guareschi would then rename Guareschiland. Meryl Lee said that he was probably holding out for something in Eastern Europe. Maybe he was. But while he waited for his promotion, he kept the job of principal at Camillo Junior High and tested out his dictator-of-a-small-country techniques on us.
He stayed sitting behind his desk in a chair a lot higher than mine when I was finally called in.
"Holling Hood," he said. His voice was high-pitched and a little bit shrill, like he had spent a lot of time standing on balconies screaming speeches through bad P.A. systems at the multitudes down below who feared him.
"Hoodhood," I said.
"It says 'Holling Hood' on this form I'm holding."
"It says 'Holling Hoodhood' on my birth certificate."
Mr. Guareschi smiled his principal smile. "Let's not get off on the wrong foot here, Holling. Forms are how we organize this school, and forms are never wrong, are they?"
That's one of those dictator-of-a-small-country techniques at work, in case you missed it.
"Holling Hood," I said.
"Thank you," said Mr. Guareschi.
He looked down at his form again.
"But Holling," said Mr. Guareschi, "we do have a problem here. This form says that you passed sixth-grade mathematics—though with a decidedly below-average grade."
"Yes," I said. Of course I passed sixth-grade mathematics. Even Doug Swieteck had passed sixth-grade mathematics, and he had grades that were really decidedly below average.
Mr. Guareschi picked up a piece of paper from his desk.
"But I have received a memo from Mrs. Baker wondering whether you would profit by retaking that course."
"Retake sixth-grade math?"
"Perhaps she is not convinced that your skills are sufficiently developed to begin seventh-grade mathematics."
"But—"
"Do not interrupt, Holling Hood. Mrs. Baker suggests that on Wednesday afternoons, starting at one forty-five, you might sit in on Mrs. Harknett's class for their math lesson."
Somewhere, somewhere, there's got to be a place where a seventh-grade kid can go and leave the Mrs. Bakers and Mr. Guareschis and Camillo Junior Highs so far behind him that he can't even remember them. Maybe on board the Hispaniola, flying before the wind, mooring by a tropical island with green palms crowding the mountains and bright tropical flowers—real ones—pokin
g out between them.
Or maybe California, which, if I ever get there, you can bet that I would find the virtue that possession would show us.
But Mr. Guareschi returned to his form and read it over again. He shook his head. "According to this record," he said, still reading, "you did pass sixth-grade mathematics."
I nodded. I held my breath. Maybe I could dare to believe that even a dictator of a small country might have a moment of unintended kindness.
"Mrs. Baker does have a legitimate concern, it would seem, but a passing grade is a passing grade."
I didn't say anything. I didn't want to jinx it.
"You'd better stay where you are for now," he said.
I nodded again.
"But"—Mr. Guareschi leaned toward me—"I'll double-check your permanent record, Holling Hood. Be prepared for a change, should one be necessary."
In case you missed it again, that's another one of the dictator-of-a-small-country techniques: Keep you always off balance.
Mr. Guareschi scribbled over Mrs. Baker's memo. He folded it, then took out an envelope from his desk. Looking at me the whole time, he placed the memo in the envelope, licked the flap, and sealed it. He wrote Mrs. Baker on the outside. Then he handed it to me.
"Return this to her," he said. "The envelope had better be sealed when she receives it. I will make a point of inquiring about it."
So I took the envelope—sealed—and carried it back to Mrs. Baker—sealed. She unsealed it as I sat back down in my seat. She read what Mr. Guareschi had written and slowly placed the letter in the top drawer of her desk. Then she looked up at me.
"Regrettable."
She said all four syllables very slowly.
She could probably diagram each one if she wanted to.
I watched her carefully for the rest of the day, but nothing ever gave away her murderous intentions. She kept her face as still as Mount Rushmore, even when Doug Swieteck's new pen broke and spread bright blue ink all over his desk, or when the Rand McNally Map of the World fell off its hangers as she pulled it down, or when Mr. Guareschi reported during Afternoon Announcements that Lieutenant Tybalt Baker would soon be deployed to Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division and we should all wish him, together with Mrs. Baker, well. Her face never changed once.