“So?” said Donnica, running the tip of her pointy tongue along an envelope flap before adding it to the pile to be stamped.
“I’ve wanted to be in that club for years. Everyone who’s anyone is in it,” Mrs. Perfecto explained.
“Why don’t you just join if you want to be in it so badly?”
“It’s not that easy. You have to be invited. The board of directors comes and examines your landscaping before they’ll even consider you for membership.”
“What’s landscaping?” asked Donnica, licking another flap and tossing the envelope onto the pile.
“Flowers and bushes,” said Mrs. Perfecto.
“We have plenty of flowers and bushes,” Donnica pointed out.
“Yes, but they’re all droopy and sad-looking,” said Mrs. Perfecto. “That is, they were until Isabel Cooder stepped in. Ever since she showed me how to put crushed eggshells around my plants to keep away the slugs, my begonias have been blooming like there’s no tomorrow.”
“Hello? What do eggshells have to do with inviting Oggie Cooder to my birthday party?” Donnica asked.
“I need to stay on Isabel Cooder’s good side. She’s my only hope of getting into the club.”
“Mother,” Donnica whined, “Oggie Cooder is the dweebiest dweeb to ever walk the earth. I’ll die of embarrassment if he comes to my birthday party.”
But Mrs. Perfecto’s mind was made up. She stood over Donnica as she wrote Oggie’s name on one of the pink envelopes. Then, to make sure that Donnica didn’t “accidentally” forget to mail it, Mrs. Perfecto carried the invitation down to the corner and dropped it into the mailbox herself.
If Mrs. Perfecto thought that the battle was over and she had won, then clearly she had forgotten who she was dealing with.
“You’re joking, right?” said Hannah. “You didn’t really invite Oggie Cooder to your party, did you?”
Donnica reached into her pocket and pulled out her pink lip gloss.
“I invited him,” she said, pausing for a minute to slowly run the shiny gloss over her lips. “But trust me, he’s not going to come.”
Lunch hour was over. Hannah took care of throwing out the trash, then she and Dawn took up their usual positions on either side of Donnica, and the trio exited the Barf-eteria together. Amy Schneider and Oggie Cooder were in the same fourth-grade class as Donnica Perfecto and her friends, so they headed down the hall in the same direction toward Mr. Snolinovsky’s classroom. At the beginning of the year Oggie had found it difficult to remember how to pronounce his teacher’s name correctly. SNOW-LINN-OFF-SKEE was much harder to say than the names of any of his other teachers had been.
That afternoon in class, Oggie couldn’t seem to stop prrrrr-ip-ing. Mr. Snolinovsky spoke to him about it several times, but even so, Oggie prrrrr-ip-ed in the middle of math and twice during science. He was so excited about having been invited to Donnica’s birthday party he simply couldn’t contain himself. Oggie had always wondered what it would be like to swim in the Perfectos’ pool, and now at last he was going to find out.
The last hour of every school day, Mr. Snolinovsky’s class did creative writing. At the beginning of the year, Oggie had worried that he wouldn’t be able to think of anything interesting to write about. But once Mr. Snolinovsky had explained to him that stories were like seeds, and that Oggie was like a watermelon, loaded with seeds, Creative Writing had become his favorite subject. During the hour, Mr. Snolinovsky liked to walk around the room, peering over people’s shoulders to see what they were working on.
“Fascinating,” he said that day as he looked at the story Bethie Hudson was writing about her goldfish, Honeymoon.
“Exciting,” he said as he read the paragraph David Korben had just finished about a slam-dunk contest he’d been in at basketball camp.
“Hmmm,” he said as he bent down and squinted hard at Oggie’s paper. “Does that sentence say ‘Uncle Worm was from Switzerland’?”
Oggie had terrible handwriting, so it was no surprise that Mr. Snolinovsky was having trouble reading what he had written.
“No. It says, ‘Uncle Vern won the Stinkerama,’” Oggie explained. “It’s an armpit contest they have every year at the Zanesville County Fair. My uncle is the champion. He can play ‘Yankee Doodle’ with his hand under his arm, and his pits have been voted the stinkiest in the county for three years straight.”
“Impressive,” said Mr. Snolinovsky, stroking his mustache.
“That’s nothing,” Oggie told him. “You should see Uncle Vern chunk a mini-pumpkin. He made this catapult thing out of some old underwear elastic and a pair of chopsticks and, man oh man, he can make those babies fly. They have a contest for that in Zanesville, too.”
Mr. Snolinovsky laughed. His name might have been difficult to pronounce, but he was the first teacher Oggie had ever had who not only accepted Oggie for who he was, but seemed to genuinely like him.
When Creative Writing was over, everybody put their stories away and Mr. Snolinovsky wrote the homework assignment for that night on the board. There was a page of math problems to solve in the workbook, a spelling test to prepare for, and, at the bottom of the list, a strange word Oggie had never seen before — HAIKU.
“What’s hay-cue?” asked America Johnson, leaning forward in her seat as she squinted at the blackboard.
“It’s pronounced high-coo, and it’s a kind of Japanese poem,” Mr. Snolinovsky explained.
There was an unhappy grumble from the class, especially the boys.
“Poetry stinks,” groaned Jackson Polito.
“I’m down with that,” agreed David Korben, who was interested in only one thing in life — basketball.
“You like math, don’t you, Jackson?” Mr. Snolinovsky asked.
“Sure. Math is about numbers. Numbers are cool. Poetry is about mushy feelings and butterflies and other un-cool junk like that,” Jackson said.
“What would you say if I told you that haiku is a kind of poetry that uses numbers?” asked Mr. Snolinovsky.
“Poems about numbers?” said Dylan James, who hardly ever talked in class. Dylan had thick, blond hair, which he had a habit of smoothing back with both hands. Oggie had heard that his family had moved to Wawatosa from Chicago over the summer.
Bethie Hudson waved her hand in the air excitedly.
“Listen to what I just made up!” she said when Mr. Snolinovsky called on her. “‘Roses are red, violets are blue, two times eleven is twenty-two.”
Mr. Snolinovsky smiled.
“Very nice,” he said. “And I’m delighted to see you’ve been working on your times tables, Bethie. But when you write haiku, the only numbers you have to be concerned with are five, seven, and five.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to make us write five hundred and seventy-five words!” Jackson cried in horror.
“Don’t worry,” said Mr. Snolinovsky. “A haiku is a very short poem. It doesn’t rhyme and it’s only three lines long.”
“Yes!” cried Jackson.
“So what do the two fives and the seven have to do with anything?” asked America.
“You use those numbers to count the syllables in your poem,” Mr. Snolinovsky explained.
“You mean the poem only has to have sixteen syllables?” asked David, whose strongest subject was obviously not math.
“Seventeen,” corrected Mr. Snolinovsky. “And, yes, that’s how many syllables the poem has to have. Five in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third line.”
“Do the words have to be in Japanese?” asked Donnica. “Because the only Japanese word I know is ‘sushi,’ and I am not writing a poem about raw fish.”
Mr. Snolinovsky assured everyone that he did not expect the poems to be written in Japanese. Then he read a few examples from a book of haiku. The one that Oggie liked best was about a dog waiting for its owner to return home.
Friend beside the door
Ears up, head cocked, he listens
Eager fo
r footsteps
Turk was always very happy to see Oggie when he got home. And he was usually waiting right at the door when Oggie got there. Oggie wondered whether that was because Turk was listening for his footsteps like the dog in the poem.
“I want each of you to write a haiku tonight and bring it in to class tomorrow,” said Mr. Snolinovsky. “We’re going to do something with them that I think you’ll find very interesting,”
Actually, most of the kids in the class would find it interesting. But for one person — a certain individual sitting in the first seat of the third row in Mr. Snolinovsky’s fourth grade classroom — the experience was going to be absolutely shocking.
Amy raised her hand.
“What are our haikus supposed to be about?” she asked.
“Before I answer that, Amy, let me point out that the plural of ‘haiku’ is ‘haiku,’ not ‘haikus,’ ” said Mr. Snolinovsky. “And I want the haiku to be about you.”
“Gross, we gotta write a poem about Amy? What if we don’t want to write about a girl?” moaned Jonathan Bass, who had five sisters at home, which was five too many as far as he was concerned.
Mr. Snolinovsky laughed. “What I meant, Jon, is that I want each of you to write a haiku that tells us who you are.”
Jackson was counting on his fingers.
“Awesome!” he shouted. “I’ve got my first and last lines already: Jackson Polito. Pretty lucky to have a name with five syllables, huh?”
“Mine, too!” cried Hannah Hummerman excitedly.
“Hang on,” said Mr. Snolinovsky. “In order for us to do what I have in mind, you may not use your names in your haiku.”
“No fair!” cried Jackson.
“Yeah,” agreed David Korben, who hadn’t counted carefully enough and thought that his name had five syllables, too.
“In addition to keeping your names out of the poems, I also don’t want you to put your names on your papers,” Mr. Snolinovsky went on.
“How are you going to know whose is whose?” asked America.
“That’s where the challenge lies. If your haiku contains the essence of who you are, then it should be obvious who wrote it.”
“What do you mean by ‘essence’?” David asked.
“I think it has something to do with shampoo,” Dawn said.
“I thought ‘essence’ meant something smelly,” said Jonathan.
“Like Uncle Vern’s armpits, you mean?” Oggie asked.
Donnica rolled her eyes. Oggie Cooder was so annoying. If he wasn’t prrrrr-ip-ing all over the place or wearing bow ties, he was talking about his strange relatives in Ohio. There was no way, NO WAY he was coming to her birthday party. She was definitely going to see to that.
“Jonathan is right — ‘essence’ can mean smelly in some instances,” Mr. Snolinovsky explained to the class, “but in this case it means something else.” He pulled one of the classroom dictionaries off the shelf, turned to E, and read the definition: “Essence: the choicest or most important part of an idea, experience, or person.” He slid the dictionary back into its place on the shelf and turned to the class. “I want your haiku to be about the choicest, most important part of what makes you who you are.”
A few minutes later, as the class lined up at the door for dismissal, Donnica wasn’t thinking about the essence of who she was. Instead, she was demonstrating it.
“How could Daddy possibly think that I would want a juggling bear at my party?” she whined to her friends. “Juggling bears are for babies. Do I look like a baby? I mean, really. A juggling bear? Puh —”
“— leeze.” Dawn and Hannah automatically finished Donnica’s word for her.
Following an argument they’d had with Donnica earlier in the year, Dawn and Hannah had threatened to stop finishing her words for her. But the habit had proved too difficult to break.
As they left the classroom and started down the hall, Oggie and Amy, who were walking next to each other, got close enough to be able to overhear the tail end of what Donnica was saying.
“How could this be happening to me?” she said. “Bumbles the Bear at my birthday party.”
As soon as Oggie heard that, he let loose a particularly enthusiastic prrrrr-ip!
Donnica cringed at the sound.
Oggie had seen Bumbles many times, juggling at the farmers’ market on Sunday mornings. Bumbles wasn’t a real bear — he was a person dressed up in a fur suit who juggled bowling pins and fruit and other assorted objects in hopes that the people who stopped to watch would toss coins or, better yet, dollar bills into the battered black top hat he set out on the sidewalk. Oggie loved to watch Bumbles. He was funny and even though he sometimes pretended to drop things, that was just part of the act. He was actually a very good juggler.
“Prrrrr-ip! Prrrrr-ip! First you invite me to your party, and now I find out that Bumbles is going to be there, too?! I can’t believe it!” Oggie exclaimed happily.
“Me neither,” grumbled Donnica.
Everybody was so busy thinking about Donnica’s birthday party that nobody was paying any attention to Amy Schneider. If they had been, they would have noticed that she suddenly looked terribly uncomfortable.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she told Oggie, then hurried off down the hall.
Oggie stopped to get a drink of water at the drinking fountain while Donnica and her friends continued walking.
“Do you realize this could ruin my reputation?” Donnica said glumly.
Dawn shot a quick look at Hannah. Donnica was their friend, but her reputation wasn’t exactly something to be proud of, unless you happened to think that being bossy, mean, and completely self-centered was a good thing.
“Just think, if Cheddar Jam had come to your party, I would have gotten to meet J.J. in person.” Hannah sighed. “Maybe he would have even come over and talked to me. I one-hundred-percent guarantee that if that ever happened I would totally faint from happiness.” She put the back of her hand up to her forehead dramatically and fell over sideways onto Dawn’s shoulder in a fake faint.
J.J. was the lead singer for Cheddar Jam. Like the other three boys in the band, he was a senior at Wawatosa High School. At the Valentine Dance, Hannah had spent the entire time staring at him. She was crazy about the way his long hair fell into his eyes when he was singing.
“How can you be thinking about yourself at a time like this? Hello? I’m having a crisis here, in case you haven’t noticed,” Donnica complained. But Hannah seemed not to have heard her.
“If only your dad had hired Cheddar Jam,” Hannah continued dreamily, “that would have been in —”
“ — credible,” said Dawn, finishing the word for her.
“Hey!” Donnica said, stamping her foot. “How many times do I have to tell you two? I do the first syllables around here. That’s the rule.”
“Sorry,” Hannah apologized. “I was distracted.” Then she put the back of her hand to her forehead again. “I can’t stop thinking about J.J. — I’m telling you, if I ever get to meet him in person I one-hundred-percent guarantee —”
Donnica reached over and snatched Hannah’s hand away from her forehead.
“I one-hundred-percent guarantee I’m going to strangle you if you don’t stop saying that,” she growled. “Don’t you realize how humiliating this experience is going to be for me? There’s a juggling bear coming to my birthday party.”
“I have an idea,” Hannah offered in an attempt to get back on Donnica’s good side. “Since the party is going to be outside, why don’t you tell Bumbles he’s only allowed to juggle inside. That way nobody will even know he’s there.”
“You know, that’s not a bad idea,” Donnica said, brightening a little.
Hannah smiled, feeling very pleased with herself.
“Maybe you could do the same thing with Oggie,” she suggested.
“Oh, don’t worry about him,” Donnica said. “I already came up with a plan for how to deal with Oggie Cooder. I’m just waiting fo
r the right time to put it into action.”
And that right time happened to be right around the corner.
Oggie walked home alone that afternoon. On the way he passed a repair truck from the phone company. Two men — one tall and thin, the other short and squat — were standing on the ground pointing up at the telephone wires that ran high overhead. Then the short man climbed into a large white metal box attached to a long pole on the back of the truck. A second later the box began to rise up into the air until the man was close enough to the wires to be able to reach them.
“Do you mind if I ask you what that thing is called?” Oggie asked the worker who was still standing on the ground.
“It’s called a cherry picker.”
Oggie laughed. “That’s a funny name,” he said.
“Maybe so, but it sure beats climbing a ladder, which is what we used to have to do before this thing was invented,” the man replied.
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” said Oggie, suddenly remembering Ms. Hepper’s words.
“Did you make that up?” asked the man.
“No, some guy in Texas did,” Oggie told him.
* * *
As Oggie watched the man in the cherry picker working on the wires overhead, he absentmindedly reached into his back pocket and pulled out one of the slices of processed American cheese he’d been carrying around all day. Oggie always kept a few slices of cheese in his pocket in case he felt like charving. “Charving” is a combination of the words “chewing” and “carving,” and Oggie could charve cheese into the shape of just about anything he wanted. It was one of his favorite hobbies.
“What the heck are you doing with that cheese, son?” asked the worker, giving Oggie a funny look.
“Oh.” Oggie held up the cheese to show the man. “I was charving your cherry picker. See?”
The man’s eyes suddenly lit up with recognition. “You’re that boy who was all over the newspapers a while back, aren’t you? The one who was almost on that TV show.” He looked at the cheese, pointed, and laughed. “Well, I’ll be. That’s my buddy in the bucket right there, isn’t it?”