Authors: Gary D. Schmidt
symbol of the first inert gas, helium."
I shook my head.
He looked at me. "Glance back at the chart, find neon, and tell me what the symbol is."
I looked back at the chart. I shook my head again.
Mr. Ferris looked at me for a long time, then he walked back over to the chart and pointed.
"Ne," I said.
"Good. Try xenon," he said. "It has an atomic number of fifty-four."
"Xe," I said.
"Good. Now look over here at the transitional elements." He pointed to element 29. "This is
copper," he said. The symbol is..."
"Cu."
"Good." He moved his finger down one element. "The symbol for this one is..."
"Ag," I said.
"Good." He moved his finger down again. "And this one?"
"Au," I said.
He moved his finger over one. "And this one?"
"Hg."
"Good," he said. "Doug, of Ag, Au, and Hg, which one is the symbol for silver?"
I didn't even have a guess.
"Ag," he said.
And that was how Mr. Ferris figured out what no teacher had figured out before.
Terrific.
***
and Miss Cowper read her five minutes and then she called on Glenn Thomas, who was probably
surprised but he didn't say anything and got right to it.
And Miss Cowper—and you may think I'm lying here, but I'm not—Miss Cowper didn't look at me
until the end of class, just before the bell was about to ring and Jane Eyre was about to leave Lowood
Institution.
"Douglas," she said.
I looked at her. I had been waiting for something to happen, and I figured that this was it.
"Douglas, do you think that Jane Eyre should feel guilty for not being able to save Helen Burns
from dying?"
"It wasn't her fault."
"That's right," she said. "It wasn't her fault at all." She looked at the whole class. "There are some
things in this world that we cannot fix, and they happen, and it is not our fault, though we still might
have to deal with them. There are other things that happen in this world that we can fix. And that is
what good teachers like me are for."
A general groaning from everyone in the class. But not from me. Miss Cowper and I, we looked
each other in the eye.
Maybe,
I thought,
maybe everything is not ruined forever.
***
came in, he told me to report to Miss Cowper's room.
"How come?" I said.
"Because I am a mean old crank who is likely to beat you if you don't," he said.
"I think I better go to Miss Cowper's room," I said.
"I think you better," he said, and started Clarence rocking.
Miss Cowper was waiting for me when I got there. "Just the person I need," she said. She held up a
batch of dittos. Their blue, alcohol smell fluttered around them. "I've been developing a County
Literacy Unit, and I need a student to practice on. Would you be willing?"
"What do I have to do?"
"You play the part of the student who is learning how to read."
Are you a little suspicious here?
"The student who is learning how to read?" I said.
She nodded.
"Miss Cowper, if this is because you think—"
"Show me what you've been working on with Mr. Ferris."
I set my books down on my desk. I went up to the chalkboard. I wrote
Ag
"This is the symbol for silver," I said.
She came up to the board and took the chalk from my hand. She wrote
Silver
"So is this," she said. "Let's get started."
I bet Clarence was rocking.
I bet Clarence was rocking every day for the rest of the week, and every day for the next week,
when I stayed after school with Miss Cowper—and not for After School Detention, just remember,
but so we could work together on her County Literacy Unit and I could play the part of the chump
student who didn't even know how to read. So she took me through the letters and the sounds they
made by themselves and the sounds they made when they were working with one another. And then
we opened up
Jane Eyre
and picked out words that pretty much looked impossible but we figured
them out because of what we were learning about letters and their sounds working together.
No one ever told me this stuff ! How come no one ever told me this stuff ?
How come?
And by the way, in case you want to know, Au is the symbol for gold, which has a hard
g
and one
vowel that's a long
o,
and Hg is the symbol for mercury, which has two vowels—
e
and
u,
even
though
y
is sometimes a vowel in words like
my, fry, try, cry,
because every word has to have one
vowel at least (Did you know that?) and the
c
is hard, not like in
pace
or
cent,
where the
c
is soft, but
like in
cure
and
cur
and
care.
How come no one ever told me this stuff ?
On Saturday mornings during deliveries, I'd practice picking out new words in
Jane Eyre,
sounding
out the ones that needed sounding out—and I'm not lying, there were plenty. "'A new servitude! There
is something in that,' I soliloquized." I mean, who talks like that? Do you know how long it takes to
sound out a word like
soliloquized
? And even after you do, you have no idea what the stupid word
means except that it probably just means "said," which is what stupid Charlotte Brontë should have
said
in the first place.
When I delivered Mrs. Mason's groceries, she saw that I had
Jane Eyre
stuck under my arm. "Oh,"
she said, "that was my favorite novel in school."
"It was?" I soliloquized.
"Yes," she said. "Have you gotten to the part where Bertha bites her brother and almost kills him?"
"Mrs. Mason," I said, "I haven't gotten to anything half as good as that."
"Keep with it. You will." That morning she gave me three powdered sugar doughnuts.
When Mr. Loeffler saw
Jane Eyre,
he said, "You poor kid."
"Did you have to read this in school, Mr. Loeffler?"
He nodded. "Fortunately," he said, "I got appendicitis in the middle of it and almost died. Best
thing that ever happened to me. I couldn't go back to school for three weeks. How are you feeling?"
"It's a new servitude," I said.
"If I were you, I'd start thinking about pains in my gut."
When Mrs. Daugherty saw
Jane Eyre,
she said, "Do you like to read?"
"It's complicated," I said.
She thought for a minute or so, pushing back her kids like they were a tide about to flow out the
door.
"I'm looking for a babysitter for some Saturday nights," she finally said. "But you'd have to like
reading since not a single one of these kiddos goes to sleep without a book."
I looked at how many kiddos there were. I figured she must have had trouble finding a babysitter if
she was asking me, the brother of the twisted criminal mind. I looked at the five kids. Three of them
had something red dripping all over their hands. I was afraid to ask what it was.
Mrs. Daugherty was probably desperate.
"It pays very well," she said.
She was definitely desperate.
Now, this is the part where I should tell you something. You know how I'm making five dollars plus
tips every Saturday? And we both know that's good money, right? You might remember that my father
knows that I'm making five dollars every Saturday morning. And he thinks that's good money too. So
he takes it, since I'm supposed to be helping out with the household expenses. "It's about time," he
says.
So I'm living on the tips that I don't tell my father about—which is what you would do too. Don't
lie.
"It's a deal," I said to Mrs. Daugherty.
"Seven o'clock?"
"Yup."
"I'll have the books waiting for you."
Terrific.
Up at Mrs. Windermere's house, everything was quiet. No typing. No dinging. She came into the
kitchen when she heard me putting things away. "What kind of ice cream did I order?"
"Mint chocolate chip."
"That's a good kind of ice cream to eat when the god has fled," she said.
I guess that means no one was folding his wings beside her desk.
"What is that book in your back pocket?" she said.
"
Jane Eyre.
"
"Ah," she said, as if she had made a great discovery or something. "Come with me."
I put the mint chocolate chip ice cream into the freezer and followed Mrs. Windermere to her study.
She ranged over a bunch of shelves, and then pulled out three smallish, darkish books. She handed
them to me. "That," she said, "is a first edition of
Jane Eyre.
"
I looked at her. I guess she thought this was pretty all-fired important.
"A first edition," she said again.
"All three volumes."
"Wow," I said.
She sighed. "Skinny Delivery Boy, do you have any idea how hard it is to collect a first edition like
that?"
I looked over all the books on the shelves in her study. "It looks like you're doing pretty well."
"But this is
Jane Eyre.
One of the world's great stories. Love. Betrayal. Jealousy. The search for
the true and complete self. It's worthy of a play!"
She stopped, and stared at me. This smile slowly comes across her face and starts to fill it.
"And there's the god," she whispered, and she rushed to her typewriter. She rolled a page into it
and her hands started flying. You already know how.
I put the first edition of
Jane Eyre
back on the shelf, and slid all three books in carefully because I
guess it was all-fired important.
I sounded out words from
Jane Eyre
—the paperback edition, not the first edition—all the way
back into town. And I stopped at Spicer's Deli for the really cold Coke that Mr. Spicer always gave
me. I would have bought a pastrami sandwich if Mrs. Windermere had given me a tip, but I wasn't
getting a tip anymore because the bill was going on her tab, which you might remember, and the other
tips weren't enough to cover a pastrami sandwich and leave me much for the rest of the week.
And I don't want to complain or anything, but a tip would have been nice, since it was me, after all,
who brought the god back to her.
That afternoon when I got to the Marysville Free Public Library, Mr. Powell and Lil Spicer were
waiting for me. Mr. Powell was trying to get ahead on his cataloging so that Mrs. Merriam wouldn't
fuss at him, and Lil was speeding ahead on
Jane Eyre.
(She was almost done. Terrific.) We went
upstairs together to work on the Black-Backed Gull—or Mr. Powell and I did. Lil helped by letting
me know what I was doing wrong.
"Isn't there too much blood there?" she said when I spread my drawing out.
"It gives the drawing drama."
"His wing is slanted off to the side."
"Point of view," I said.
"And I think his neck is too far back."
"It's called composition."
And on like that until Mr. Powell told us both to hush because he wanted to talk about Audubon's
use of the white space around the wing and the contrast in spatial perception that the two wings gave
and artist stuff like that.
Lil hushed for a while, but she started again before too long.
And do you think I minded?
Do you think I minded when she leaned in right next to me to point something out?
Do you think I minded that she smelled like daisies would smell if they were growing in a big field
under a sky clearing after a rain?
Do you think I minded when she touched my hand?
You remember how I told you that when things are going pretty good, it usually means that something
bad is about to happen? This is true. Just ask the Black-Backed Gull.
About halfway through October, as I was thinking that I'd have to start wearing Joe Pepitone's
jacket to school because there wasn't anything else I could wear with sleeves that even pretended to
reach my wrists, someone broke into the Tools 'n' More Hardware Store. It happened on a Sunday
afternoon. The register got forced open and all the cash taken. There was a bunch of tools gone: a
chain saw, a drill set, a wrench set. And a bike too, which made the brilliant policemen of stupid
Marysville come to the conclusion that it must have been a kid who broke in.
So guess whose house they came to on Sunday night? And they didn't want any of the thawed
hamburgers or German potato salad my mother offered.
Mr. Daugherty was one of the policemen.
"Is your son home?" he asked.
"He's off with his friends," my mother said.
"Is your son ever home?" the other policeman asked. I think he was a little upset.
"What's he doing with his friends?" said Mr. Daugherty.
"Just playing," she said. She said it kind of hopefully.
Mr. Daugherty looked at me. "Do you know where he's playing?" he said. "We have a few