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 classâthe 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 sentencesâas 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 shortânever 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