Authors: Gary D. Schmidt
be able to touch me."
"Is that a bet?"
"Mr. Bottom, that is a bet."
Now you know what Lucas will be doing all summer.
There was only one more thing that needed to happen for June to be perfect—and it did. For a little
while. The last week of the month, when everything was warm and green, when there were hawks
gliding on the high breezes, Lil came home. On the first Saturday back, we went to the library together
and I showed her the Arctic Tern in John James Audubon's
Birds of America.
She looked at it and
started to cry.
I told you what art can do to some people.
June.
But Lil was only home for a couple of weeks, and then she went to Middletown Community
Hospital. I think she kept her eyes closed the whole way there.
Mr. Spicer took me to see her the morning that
Apollo 11
blasted off.
You remember how Mr. Daugherty seemed so big in our house? You remember that? Lil's room
was filled with huge machines, and they made the room tiny. There were pictures of birds on the
walls, not even close to good. There were two windows, but they were small and so high up that you
could only see the sky, and you could only see the sky if you angled your head just right.
More tubes. Stuff dripping into the tubes. Into Lil.
Lil with a kerchief on when I came in, which she pressed down, dragging her tubes up with her
arms, pressing down the kerchief so that I couldn't see that she had no hair. Crying.
I turned the television on and then lay down on the bed beside her—which took a lot of figuring
out. And we watched
Apollo 11
blast off to the moon. It was something. First, this flash of light leaps
out everywhere, all this fire behind it. And then big clouds of smoke right behind the fire, and then
slowly, like it is barely moving at all, this huge tower of a rocket starts to go up, and you can't believe
it's really going up, but it is. And then it starts to tilt a little bit, and then it heads up with the fire
beneath it, and up, and suddenly it's hurtling through the blue, flying faster than Audubon could ever
imagine. And then it gets smaller, and smaller, and you hear people at Mission Control clapping,
laughing—and you want to clap and laugh too.
Which Lil and I did together.
"It was beautiful," she said.
I looked at her. "Beautiful," I said.
We watched as the flickering light of the fire beneath the Saturn rocket—and I could tell you about
the thermodynamics of the fuel if you want to know—we watched as the rocket moved farther and
farther up into the sky, heading to the moon. To the moon!
To the moon!
I held Lil's hand.
It was trembling a little. The needle.
And when I looked at her, I could tell she was thinking of stats, even though they don't mean a thing.
"You know," she said, "if I close my eyes, I could almost be an Arctic tern flying over the water."
"Close them," I said.
She did.
"Imagine a whole lot of Arctic terns flying around you. A whole lot."
She smiled.
"Now imagine one coming down to fly right next to you to show you the next spectacular thing that's
going to come into your life."
Bigger smile.
"Like landing on the moon?" she said.
"Like landing on the moon."
Even bigger smile. Her eyes still closed.
"Will he stay next to me?" she said.
"Always," I said. "You think the moon's all there is? There's a whole lot more for us to see. Haven't
you ever heard of New Zealand?"
She snuggled closer, over the tubes.
"Always," she said.
"Always," I said.
And I'm not lying, I heard, all around us, over the sounds of the huge machines in the room, over the
sounds of
Apollo 11
heading to the moon, I heard, all around us, the beating of strong wings.
THE WEDNESDAY WARS
BY GARY D. SCHMIDT
Read on for a sneak peek at THE WEDNESDAY WARS, the Newbery Honor-winning companion
novel to OKAY FOR NOW!
September
Of all the kids in the seventh grade at Camillo Junior High, there was one kid that Mrs. Baker hated
with heat whiter than the sun.
Me.
And let me tell you, it wasn't for anything I'd done.
If it had been Doug Swieteck that Mrs. Baker hated, it would have made sense.
Doug Swieteck once made up a list of 410 ways to get a teacher to hate you. It began with "Spray
deodorant in all her desk drawers" and got worse as it went along. A whole lot worse. I think that
things became illegal around Number 167. You don't want to know what Number 400 was, and you
really
don't want to know what Number 410 was. But I'll tell you this much: They were the kinds of
things that sent kids to juvenile detention homes in upstate New York, so far away that you never saw
them again.
Doug Swieteck tried Number 6 on Mrs. Sidman last year. It was something about Wrigley gum and
the teachers' water fountain (which was just outside the teachers' lounge) and the Polynesian Fruit
Blend hair coloring that Mrs. Sidman used. It worked, and streams of juice the color of mangoes
stained her face for the rest of the day, and the next day, and the next day—until, I suppose, those skin
cells wore off.
Doug Swieteck was suspended for two whole weeks. Just before he left, he said that next year he
was going to try Number 166 to see how much time that would get him.
The day before Doug Swieteck came back, our principal reported during Morning Announcements
that Mrs. Sidman had accepted "voluntary reassignment to the Main Administrative Office." We were
all supposed to congratulate her on the new post. But it was hard to congratulate her because she
almost never peeked out of the Main Administrative Office. Even when she had to be the playground
monitor during recess, she mostly kept away from us. If you did get close, she'd whip out a plastic
rain hat and pull it on.
It's hard to congratulate someone who's holding a plastic rain hat over her Polynesian Fruit Blend
—colored hair.
See? That's the kind of stuff that gets teachers to hate you.
But the thing was, I never did any of that stuff. Never. I even stayed as far away from Doug
Swieteck as I could, so if he did decide to try Number 166 on anyone, I wouldn't get blamed for
standing nearby.
But it didn't matter. Mrs. Baker hated me. She hated me a whole lot worse than Mrs. Sidman hated
Doug Swieteck.
I knew it on Monday, the first day of seventh grade, when she called the class roll—which told you
not only who was in the class but also where everyone lived. If your last name ended in "berg" or
"zog" or "stein," you lived on the north side. If your last name ended in "elli" or "ini" or "o," you lived on the south side. Lee Avenue cut right between them, and if you walked out of Camillo Junior
High and followed Lee Avenue across Main Street, past MacClean's Drug Store, Goldman's Best
Bakery, and the Five & Ten-Cent Store, through another block and past the Free Public Library, and
down one more block, you'd come to my house—which my father had figured out was right smack in
the middle of town. Not on the north side. Not on the south side. Just somewhere in between. "It's the
Perfect House," he said.
But perfect or not, it was hard living in between. On Saturday morning, everyone north of us was at
Temple Beth-El. Late on Saturday afternoon, everyone south of us was at mass at Saint Adelbert's—
which had gone modern and figured that it didn't need to wake parishioners up early. But on Sunday
morning—early—my family was at Saint Andrew Presbyterian Church listening to Pastor McClellan,
who was old enough to have known Moses. This meant that out of the whole weekend there was only
Sunday afternoon left over for full baseball teams.
This hadn't been too much of a disaster up until now. But last summer, Ben Cummings moved to
Connecticut so his father could work in Groton, and Ian MacAlister moved to Biloxi so his father
could be a chaplain at the base there instead of the pastor at Saint Andrew's—which is why we ended
up with Pastor McClellan, who could have called Isaiah a personal friend, too.
So being a Presbyterian was now a disaster. Especially on Wednesday afternoons when, at 1:45
sharp, half of my class went to Hebrew School at Temple Beth-El, and, at 1:55, the other half went to
Catechism at Saint Adelbert's. This left behind just the Presbyterians—of which there had been three,
and now there was one.
Me.
I think Mrs. Baker suspected this when she came to my name on the class roll. Her voice got kind
of crackly, like there was a secret code in the static underneath it.
"Holling Hoodhood," she said.
"Here." I raised my hand.
"Hoodhood."
"Yes."
Mrs. Baker sat on the edge of her desk. This should have sent me some kind of message, since
teachers aren't supposed to sit on the edge of their desks on the first day of classes. There's a rule
about that.
"Hoodhood," she said quietly. She thought for a moment. "Does your family attend Temple Beth-
El?" she said.
I shook my head.
"Saint Adelbert's, then?" She asked this kind of hopefully.
I shook my head again.
"So on Wednesday afternoon you attend neither Hebrew School nor Catechism."
I nodded.
"You are here with me."
"I guess," I said.
Mrs. Baker looked hard at me. I think she rolled her eyes. "Since the mutilation of 'guess' into an
intransitive verb is a crime against the language, perhaps you might wish a full sentence to avoid
prosecution—something such as, 'I guess that Wednesday afternoons will be busy after all.'"
That's when I knew that she hated me. This look came over her face like the sun had winked out and
was not going to shine again until next June.
And probably that's the same look that came over my face, since I felt the way you feel just before
you throw up—cold and sweaty at the same time, and your stomach's doing things that stomachs aren't
supposed to do, and you're wishing—you're really wishing—that the ham and cheese and broccoli
omelet that your mother made for you for the first day of school had been Cheerios, like you really
wanted, because they come up a whole lot easier, and not yellow.
If Mrs. Baker was feeling like she was going to throw up, too, she didn't show it. She looked down
at the class roll. "Mai Thi Huong," she called. She looked up to find Mai Thi's raised hand, and
nodded. But before she looked down, Mrs. Baker looked at me again, and this time her eyes really
did roll. Then she looked down again at her list. "Daniel Hupfer," she called, and she looked up to
find Danny's raised hand, and then she turned to look at me again. "Meryl Lee Kowalski," she called.
She found Meryl Lee's hand, and looked at me again. She did this every time she looked up to find
somebody's hand. She was watching me because she hated my guts.
I walked back to the Perfect House slowly that afternoon. I could always tell when I got there without
looking up, because the sidewalk changed. Suddenly, all the cement squares were perfectly white, and
none of them had a single crack. Not one. This was also true of the cement squares of the walkway
leading up to the Perfect House, which were bordered by perfectly matching azalea bushes, all the
same height, alternating between pink and white blossoms. The cement squares and azaleas stopped at
the perfect stoop—three steps, like every other stoop on the block—and then you're up to the two-
story colonial, with two windows on each side, and two dormers on the second floor. It was like
every other house on the block, except neater, because my father had it painted perfectly white every
other year, except for the fake aluminum shutters, which were black, and the aluminum screen door,
which gleamed dully and never, ever squeaked when you opened it.
Inside, I dropped my books on the stairs. "Mom," I called.
I thought about getting something to eat. A Twinkie, maybe. Then chocolate milk that had more
chocolate than milk. And then another Twinkie. After all that sugar, I figured I'd be able to come up
with something on how to live with Mrs. Baker for nine months. Either that or I wouldn't care
anymore.
"Mom," I called again.
I walked past the Perfect Living Room, where no one ever sat because all the seat cushions were
covered in stiff, clear plastic. You could walk in there and think that everything was for sale, it was
so perfect. The carpet looked like it had never been walked on—which it almost hadn't—and the
baby grand by the window looked like it had never been played—which it hadn't, since none of us
could. But if anyone had ever walked in and plinked a key or sniffed the artificial tropical flowers or
straightened a tie in the gleaming mirror, they sure would have been impressed at the perfect life of an