The Boys Start the War the Boys Start the War

  Buckman Elementary was an old building of dark redbrick that didn’t look anything like the new school they had left behind in Ohio.

  “Quaint,” said Beth, when she saw it.

  “Dismal,” Eddie proclaimed.

  Caroline hadn’t decided what to think about it until she passed the auditorium with its high stage and velvet curtain.

  She stopped in her tracks and stared. Back in Ohio the only auditorium was the cafeteria. There the stage was a foot off the floor, with no curtain at all. But here there were fixed rows of seats for the audience, the kind you saw in movie theaters, and the curtain was maroon on one side, gold on the other. She knew positively when she saw it that somehow, sometime, on that very stage, she, and Beth and Eddie would perform, and that she, Caroline Lenore Malloy, would have the leading role.

  What she did not expect was that she would find herself in the same classroom with one of the boys across the river. She didn’t even know his name, but she recognized him from his sneakers that morning.

  “Welcome to fourth grade,” said a large woman at the front of the room-—a woman as round and rosy as an apple, whose name was—incredible as it looked there on the blackboard—Miss Applebaum.

  If Caroline weren’t so precocious, she would have been entering the third grade, because she was only eight. But she had learned to read at four, subtract by five, and when she was six, she was in first grade only a month before she was transferred to second. If she was surprised to find herself in the same room with one of the boys across the river, however, the boy himself seemed even more astonished. His eyes grew as large as turnips when Caroline came through the door and his face turned petunia-pink.

  “If you can remember just one thing, class, we’ll get along famously,” Miss Applebaum was saying. “When I talk, you listen. Now, the first thing we’re going to do is seat you alphabetically.”

  I sure hope his last name isn’t Mahony or something, Caroline thought, watching the boy.

  Miss Applebaum was calling out names of students and pointing to seats, one after another, in the first row. She called out, “Wally Hatford,” and pointed to the first seat in the second row, and the boy took it.

  Wally Hatford, huh? Caroline said to herself.

  Well, the Hatfords would soon find out they were no match for the Malloys. Miss Applebaum was filling up the rest of the second row, and when she called out, “Caroline Malloy,” Caroline realised that the apple-shaped teacher was pointing to a desk directly behind Wally.

  Caroline quietly took her seat, and hardly dared move. She was sure that the moment the teacher’s back was turned, the boy would turn around and say something so awful, so embarrassing about Caroline and her sisters tricking him and his brothers that she would be forced to think of something awful and embarrassing to do to him next.

  Wally did not turn around, however. He said nothing at all, and Caroline could not stand it. He kept his head pointing straight forward, hands on his desk, where he was holding a ruler between his thumbs, and as Miss Applebaum droned on and on, Caroline leaned forward and blew, ever so gently, at the fine hairs on the back of his neck.

  This time she saw goose bumps break out on Wally’s skin. Caroline smiled to herself. She leaned forward even farther until her mouth was just inches away from Wally’s left ear, and then she said, “Wal-ly.”

  The boy did not move, but his ear—both ears—turned bright red.

  “Wal-ly,” Caroline whispered again, just behind him. “There is a gigantic black spider with eight hairy legs dropping down from the ceiling about five inches above your head.”

  “Where?” Wally said, throwing back his head, and crashed right into Caroline’s nose.

  “Ow!” she yelped, covering her face.

  “Caroline Malloy and Wally Hatford!” said Miss Applebaum. “I don’t believe either of you is paying the slightest attention. What’s wrong?”

  “There was a big spider coming down from the ceiling over my head,” said Wally. “She told me.”

  He seemed to be trying hard not to smile, but Caroline could hardly think because her nose ached so.

  Miss Applebaum came down the aisle and stood beside her. “Let’s see this gigantic spider,” she said dryly. “A spider like that we should study in science. Where is it?”

  “Gone, I guess,” Caroline said, still holding her nose. It was bleeding a little. She hoped it wasn’t broken. Actresses with broken noses never got the good parts.

  “Since Caroline and Wally have cost us some class time, I think it would be fair for them to stay after school and make it up,” said Miss Applebaum. “If you see any more big hairy spiders, Caroline, you may collect them in a paste jar. And if you hear any other girls telling you about spiders descending over your head, Wally, I suggest you pay no attention whatever. Do you want to see the nurse, Caroline?”

  “No.” Caroline answered, snuffling, and spent the rest of class with a tissue wadded beneath her nose.

  She didn’t see her, sisters all morning. When the fourth grade was doing arithmetic, the fifth and sixth grades were having recess. When the fourth grade was having recess, the fifth and sixth grades were having lunch.

  It was halfway through the afternoon when Caroline happened to pass Eddie’s class in the hall on the way to the library. She grabbed her sister’s arm and said, “Eddie, is my nose broken?”

  “What?”

  “Is it crooked?”

  “No. What happened?”

  “Wally Hatford.”

  “What?” cried Eddie, but by this time her classmates were well down the hall, and she had to run to catch up.

  What bothered Caroline most about her predicament was that she wouldn’t be able to walk home with Beth and Eddie, and would have to wait to tell them about Wally Hatford banging her nose.

  At three o’clock everyone left except Caroline and Wally.

  “What is so wrong about not listening when I’m talking,” Miss Applebaum told them, “is that you disturb other students as well.”

  Caroline stared down at her desktop. She wondered how old it was. There were all kinds of things scratched in the wood—initials and numbers and little cartoon faces.

  “And because listening is the most important thing in my class, and talking out of turn is so distracting,” Miss Applebaum continued, “I want to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Come up here, both of you.”

  Caroline got woodenly to her feet. Miss Applebaum wasn’t going to paddle them, was she? She didn’t think she could stand the humiliation. Wasn’t that against the law? Or could teachers do things like that in West Virginia?

  She followed Wally up front where Miss Applebaum was placing two chairs, face to face, about three feet apart.

  “I want you to sit here,” she told them, “and I want you to talk to each other for ten minutes. Perhaps at the end of that time you will have said everything there is to say, and there will be no more disturbances in class.”

  No! Caroline thought. She would rather be paddled! One minute would be bad enough, five minutes would be cruel and unusual punishment, and ten was torture!

  She lowered herself sideways into one of the chairs. What was she supposed to say to a boy who, up until that morning, had thought she was dead?

  Miss Applebaum stood with arms folded. “Well? I’m waiting.”

  Caroline crossed her ankles. “You started it,” she said to Wally.

  “What did I do?” he mumbled, sitting sideways himself.

  “Dumping all that dead stuff on our side of the river.”

  “So you pretended to die.”

  “Is this a normal conversation?” asked Miss Applebaum as she picked up a box of supplies and headed for the closet at the back of the room.

  “No,” said Caroline, but she was talking to Wally, not her teacher. “This is not a normal conversation because you and your brothers aren’t normal human beings. Normal people don’t go dumping dead fish and birds around the neighborhood.”

&nbs
p; “It wasn’t my idea,” said Wally. “Well, actually it was my idea—dead fish, I mean—but it was Jake and Josh who—”

  “So none of you are normal.”

  “We’re not normal?” said Wally, his voice rising. “What do you call people who go burying each other in the river?”

  “It was a great performance, and you know it.”

  “It was dumb.”

  “You believed I was dead.”

  “I believe you’re crazy.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “Whatever you two are arguing about, you’d better get it out of your systems now, because when you come to school tomorrow, I expect you to pay attention,” Miss Applebaum called, sticking her head out of the supply closet.

  “You and your dumb brothers,” Caroline muttered because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “You and your stupid sisters,” said Wally.

  “We’re smarter than the four of you put together,” Caroline told him.

  “We’ll see,” said Wally.

  “If you’d just left us alone instead of dumping that dead stuff, things would be okay,” said Caroline.

  “If you’d go back where you came from, there wouldn’t be any more trouble,” Wally replied.

  “Oh, yeah? If you went back to where you came from, you’d be in a cave!”

  “That does it,” said Wally, hotly. “The war is on.”

  “Okay,” called Miss Applebaum, coming back to the front of the room for another box. “If you two have settled things, you may leave now.” She looked from Caroline to Wally. “Unless, of course, you are not agreed.”

  “We agree,” said Caroline emphatically. The war is definitely on.

  She could hardly wait to get home and tell her sisters.

  What she discovered when she got outside was that she wasn’t the only member of her family who had been kept after school. Eddie had stumbled over Jake’s foot in the cafeteria and, sure that he’d tripped her on purpose, brought her tray down on his head. Beth, of course, had waited for Eddie, so there they were again, the three of them coming home late on the very first day.

  Mother was dusting shelves in the hallway. “Whatever happened to your nose?” she asked, looking at Caroline.

  “She bumped into something that needs a little fixing,” said Beth.

  “Needs a lot of straightening out,” put in Eddie.

  “Well, how was school?” Mother asked.

  “Urk,” said Eddie.

  “Ugh,” said Beth.

  “It has possibilities,” said Caroline.

  Peter, Josh, and Jake were waiting in the bushes when Wally came around the bend.

  “What happened?” asked Jake. “The Malloys just stomped by, mad as anything.”

  Wally was miserable. “I just declared war,” he said, and told them what had happened.

  “Hoo boy!” Josh whistled.

  “Wow!” said Peter.

  For the rest of the way home Jake and Josh talked about what they would do if the Malloys tried to get even with Wally for bumping Caroline’s nose. They were in the same class with Eddie.

  “That Eddie would try anything,” said Jake. “If she’d dump her tray on me in front of teachers and everybody, you can imagine what she’d do when no one was looking.”

  “Did you watch her pitch at recess? Whomp! The ball comes at you before you can look at it cross-eyed,” Josh went on.

  “Who’s the other sister?” Peter asked, walking fast to keep up.

  “Beth,” Josh told him. “She’s weird. Sits on the steps at recess and reads a book.”

  “A Whomper, a Weirdo, and a Crazie,” said Jake, and sighed. “I wonder how the Benson guys are doing down in Georgia. I’ll bet they miss us like anything.”

  When they reached the house, Wally took a box of crackers up to his room and sat on the floor to eat them, his back against his bed. He still couldn’t believe that he was the one who had officially declared war on the Malloys. How had it happened? Only a week before he was lying on his back in the grass, and how here he was: Number One on their Most-Wanted list. He was on bad terms already with his teacher, had almost broken Caroline’s nose, and had made everything worse by calling her sisters stupid.

  Well, they were stupid. And deep down, seven layers beneath his skin, Wally knew he was glad that he had thrust his head back and bumped Caroline. He’d just wanted her to stop bugging him, that’s all. But her nose sure looked peculiar by the end of the day—a lot redder and fatter than it had looked that morning.

  Then he had another thought: What if it really was broken, she had to have an operation, and he had to pay for it? His hands began to sweat, and he swallowed the piece of cracker in his mouth without chewing. Was there such a thing as just a sprained nose? A bruised nose? A slightly but not completely fractured nose? A bent nose, maybe?

  Peter came into Wally’s room and sat down beside him on the rug.

  “What are we going to do next?” he asked excitedly, helping himself to a cracker. He rested one hand on Wally’s leg, looking up at his older brother.

  What Wally wanted to do, in fact, was sit on this rug for the rest of his natural life and never have to face the Malloys again.

  “You’re the general,” said Peter.

  “Huh?”

  “That’s what Josh said. He said you’re the one who declared the war, so you’ve got to call the shots. That’s what he said, all right.”

  Wally gave a low moan.

  “What I think we should do,” said Peter, “is dig a large hole and cover it with leaves and sticks, and when Caroline and her sisters walk across it, they’ll fall in and we’ll keep them trapped forever.”

  “Go out and play, Peter,” Wally told him.

  The boys were strangely quiet when their father came home from his mail route about four. Jake was planning strategies in a notebook, Josh was drawing a picture of Eddie dropping her tray on Jake, just for the record, and Peter was building a pit out of toothpicks, then running a Matchbox car over it and watching the car tumble in. Wally was looking out the window, wondering how for away he could get if he climbed on the first Greyhound through town.

  Mr. Hatford took off his cap and went out to the kitchen for a Mountain Dew. Then he leaned against the doorway and looked at the boys. “You’ll be interested to know that the Malloy girls are Eddie, Beth, and Caroline.”

  “Tell me about it,” Jake mumbled.

  “The way their mother described them, they sound like three live wires to me.”

  “Crossed wires is more like it,” said Josh.

  “Short circuits,” said Wally.

  “A Whomper, a Weirdo, and a Crazie,” Peter repeated.

  Mr. Hatford frowned. “You boys can either make yourselves miserable by wishing the Bensons were back, which they’re not, or you can enjoy a great September day, which it is. And I, for one, aim to enjoy the day.” He took his soft drink out onto the side porch along with the paper.

  Jake looked at Josh. “I’ll bet they’ll spread it all over town how they tricked us. Everyone will be laughing.”

  “You know what we could do, don’t you?” said Josh. “Totally ignore them. Freeze them out. Not even give them the time of day.”

  “If we see them coming, we could just turn and walk the other way,” said Peter.

  “We can’t,” said Jake. “Wally declared war.”

  “Oh, yeah. Right,” said Josh.

  Hoo boy! thought Wally.

  The hardware store was open till nine most evenings, and this was Mrs, Hatford’s night to work. When she popped in about six to make dinner, she said, “Boys, I’ve got a job for you. I baked a cake this morning before work, frosted it at noon, and I want you to take it over to the Malloys right now so they can have some with their supper.”

  Wally stared at his mother as though she had just grown another head.

  “Well, don’t look so astonished,” she said, coming out of the kitchen with a large square bo
x. “It’s the traditional way to greet a new family in the neighborhood, you know. The Bensons did it for us the first week we moved in, and I’ll never forget how good that cake tasted after unpacking all day.”

  “But—” Wally began.

  “Just hand it to whoever answers the door, tell them it’s from the Hatfords, and say, ‘Welcome to Buckman.’ That’s all you have to say. Then come right home because dinner’s almost ready.”

  “Could we—could we just leave it on their porch?” Wally asked.

  “Wallace Hatford, you certainly may not!” his mother scolded. “A dog could get into it, there might be a rain … all sorts of things could happen. What’s the matter with saying a few cordial words to a new family? Hurry up, now. Who’s going to take it over?”

  Wally looked at Jake, who was looking at Josh, and then they all turned toward Peter.

  “Peter is not going over there alone. This is a three-layer chocolate chiffon with whipped cream frosting, and I worked on it a total of two hours and set it on the plate I got from Aunt Ida at Christmas. I want to make sure it gets there in one piece. You can all go. Hold this box steady, now,” she instructed, thrusting it into Wally’s hands. “If the cake slides around, the icing will come off on the sides of the box. Tell them there’s no hurry about returning the plate.”

  Wally and his brothers moved down the front steps as though they were headed for a funeral and Wally carried the remains of the deceased in the box. This can’t be happening, he said to himself, but it was. After half breaking Caroline’s nose, this would look as though he were saying he was sorry. He was not sorry, and now he was mad as anything.

  “If Caroline comes to the door, Wally, let her have it,” said Jake. “Swoosh! Right in the schnozz. It’ll be worth the whipping we get when we go home.”

  “Uh-uh,” said Josh. “Dad’ll march us back over there and make us apologize, and that would be worse.”

  “You take it,” Wally said, holding the box out toward Jake. “Eddie dropped her tray on you in the cafeteria, and you could drop this on her. We’d just say we were getting even.”