Trout and Me

THE FLUNKING OF JOSHUA T BATES,
Susan Shreve

GOODBYE, AMANDA THE GOOD,
Susan Shreve

MACARONI BOY,
Katherine Ayres

JACKSON JONES AND THE PUDDLE OF THORNS
Mary Quattlebaum

THE LAST DOG ON EARTH,
Daniel Ehrenhaft

THE HERO,
Ron Woods

SONG OF SAMPO LAKE,
William Durbin

FEATHER BOY,
Nicky Singer

MATCHIT,
Martha Moore

TROUBLE DON’T LAST,
Shelley Pearsall

DELL YEARLING BOOKS are designed especially to entertain and enlighten young people. Patricia Reilly Giff, consultant to this series, received her bachelor’s degree from Marymount College and a master’s degree in history from St. John’s University. She holds a Professional Diploma in Reading and a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hofstra University. She was a teacher and reading consultant for many years, and is the author of numerous books for young readers.

This Monday, my last week of sixth grade, I was walking up the front steps of Stockton Elementary School and there was Trout. I was sure it was Trout. It had to be and my heart flipped over. He was standing at the top of the steps in front of the double green doors, looking around for me like he used to do every morning of the fifth grade. And my heart flipped over.

“So what’s up?” he used to ask.

“Not much,” I’d reply.

Then he’d throw his long arm around my shoulder and we’d go in the front door of school.

“Today I was thinking of pulling the fire alarm during sixth-grade lunch,” he’d say. “Whaddya think?”

“Bad idea,” I’d probably say, but I’d be laughing. I was happy almost every day that Trout was at Stockton
Elementary, from the time he came until the end of fifth grade, and then I had to go to sixth grade without him.

I walked up to the top of the steps, hoping and hoping that I was right, but as I got closer to the boy I thought was Trout, I knew with a sinking feeling that it wasn’t him at all. Just Billy Blister, who is as tall as Trout with soft blond hair, but with pimples and pink cheeks and no chin. And he is boring. Trout was never boring.

Long before Trout ever came to Stockton Elementary in Stockton, New Jersey, I’d been in trouble at school. I used to think I was an “amazing boy,” like my mom said. “More or less perfect,” my dad told his friends. I’d spend the days in play groups or at the petting zoo with my sister, Meg, or playing games at the park with my dad or at the circus with my mom or just hanging out kicking a ball on the blacktop behind our apartment, sometimes all by myself. And then I went to school.

I’ve hated school ever since first grade, when Ms. Percival got me sent home on Halloween for stuffing Mary Sue Briggs’s purple teddy bear into the lower-school toilet. The toilet is located just outside the first-grade classroom because six-year-olds sometimes forget they have to pee until the last minute. The door to the toilet is usually kept closed, but on that day it happened to be open while I was pushing the bear headfirst down that long tunnel, and
most of the class, including Mary Sue, were standing around the hall watching me. So it wasn’t exactly a secret.

But Halloween, of all days in the year. I will never forgive Ms. Percival for that. I had my Lion King costume in my cubby to wear to the parade on the blacktop behind the school just after lunch.

Then I forgot it when the principal sent me home, and the school was locked by the time I remembered, so I had to wear my regular jeans and a black mask to go trick-or-treating.

Mary Sue Briggs deserved a wet teddy bear. Even now, five years later and in the sixth grade, I’d do the same thing again. Except now it wouldn’t make any difference to Mary Sue. She doesn’t have teddy bears any longer, only purple lipstick and plastic bracelets and rings with colored stones she wears on all her fingers. But she still has the same mean character she had when she was six.

“Character” is a word my father uses. I’m not exactly sure what it means. He refers to my character as “good,” even though I have spent five years in nonstop trouble at school. He thinks that Mary Sue Briggs, who happens to be the best student in my class and a teacher’s pet as well, is a girl of “questionable character.”

“I don’t get what you mean,” I said, although I certainly agreed with anything bad he had to say about Mary Sue. “Everybody thinks she’s perfect.”

“Who is everybody?” he asked.

“The teachers like her. I mean, she plays up to them.”

“Exactly,” my father said.

“So is character about good guys and bad guys?” I asked.

“Sometimes the guys who are considered bad, especially at school, are actually kids of real character and the good guys like Mary Sue can’t be trusted. It’s worth thinking about,” my father said.

He’s always telling me something is worth thinking about, like I have all the time in the world to lie around my room thinking about character.

The thing I haven’t told you is that I have a lisp. I’ve always had a lisp since I started to talk. When I was very little, like two and three and four, before I went to school, my parents and especially my sister, Meg, thought a lisp was cute.

“Say ‘sweetheart,’” Meg would say to me.

I’d say “thweetheart” and Meg would laugh and call my mother, and I’d do it again and my mother would laugh, and then at dinner I’d say “thweetheart” to my father and he would laugh too. So I thought I was good at speaking and especially funny.

That lasted until kindergarten. On the first day of kindergarten, I was sitting at one of those little round tables with other kids, opening my lunch box, in which my mother had put a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with
the crust cut off, a thermos of vegetable soup, and a chocolate chip cookie. I told Ms. Ross, the teacher sitting next to me, that I didn’t need any help screwing off the top of the thermos, but as it turned out, I was wrong. The thermos turned over, the vegetable soup went all over the table and the floor, even onto the teacher’s lap, and I burst into tears. I mean, I was only five years old.

“I didn’t mean to spill my thoup,” I said.

“Soup,” the teacher said, mopping up the mess.

I looked up at her.

“Say ‘soup,’ Ben,” she said.

I didn’t even try. I knew I couldn’t say “soup,” so I pretended not to hear her and jumped up from the table and ran around the classroom.

That night my mom told me she had spoken with my teacher.

“I know,” I said. “She got mad at me for saying ‘thoup.’”

“Not mad, sweetheart. She’s a teacher and she was trying to teach you.”

“Okay, thweetheart,” I said, expecting her to laugh. But this time my mom didn’t laugh at all. Instead, she repeated “sweetheart” like I didn’t know the difference, just as Ms. Ross had done.

“So Daddy and I have decided it would be helpful if you saw a speech therapist, who will teach you to say
s
instead of
th.”

“I didn’t think it wath thuch a bad thing,” I said to her. “I thought it wath funny.”

“It’s not a bad thing,” my mother said. “But now that you’re in school, you need to learn to speak correctly.”

So first I saw Ms. Breese and then I saw Mr. Aiken and then I saw Ms. Potter and then I saw Ms. Wade and none of them was able to teach me how to say my
s
’s. Not even a little.

“I’m tired of speech therapists,” I said to my mother. “I don’t care if I lisp.”

That was before I met Mary Sue Briggs, who was given the desk next to mine in Ms. Percival’s first-grade classroom. Every morning she came to school with her book bag over her shoulder and her teddy bear scrunched up against her chest. She’d put her book bag in the cubby and wrap the stupid bear in a piece of fuzzy cloth, sort of like a blanket. She’d kiss its face and put it inside the desk, tell the stupid bear “night, night,” and there it would stay all day until it was time to go home.

So on the day that my life turned inside out and I became known as “Ben Carter in Trouble,” as if that were my whole name, we were sitting in the lunchroom, Mary Sue sitting on one side of me and Billy Bass on the other, and Billy Bass said to me, “What did you bring in your thermos?”

“Tomato thoup,” I said.

“Tomato thoup?” Mary Sue asked. “I never heard of that.”

“He means ‘soup,’” Billy said.

“But he said ‘thoup,’” Mary Sue said.

She turned to Elly Suregate on the other side of her.

“Did you hear that Ben has tomato thoup in his thermos?”

And she fell off the chair laughing. Elly was laughing too and told Tammy Anderson what I’d said, and they both laughed into the sleeves of their shirts.

“Say my name?” Mary Sue said when she could control herself.

“Rat fink,” I said.

I stuffed my lunch into my lunch pail and got up from the table. I was thinking about pouring my tomato soup over Mary Sue’s curly brown hair. But I didn’t do that. Instead, I left the lunchroom without a word and walked down the corridor, past the third and second grades, to our first-grade classroom. Ms. Percival was at her desk correcting our spelling. I hated spelling because I was bad at it and still am, even if I memorize all the words before a test and practice and practice with Meg. Mostly I fail, so I expected Ms. Percival to give me one of her sad “you’ve failed
again
, Benjamin” looks, but she didn’t. Instead, she looked up and smiled and said, “Hello, Ben,” in that singsong voice she has. I didn’t answer.

I walked over to Mary Sue Briggs’s desk, lifted the top,
took out her purple teddy bear, walked right past Ms. Percival, opened the door to the first graders’ bathroom, and started to stuff the bear’s head into the hole at the bottom of the toilet. Then I flushed the toilet. I don’t know what I thought would happen when I flushed the toilet with a bear in the bowl. I suppose I hoped that the bear would disappear into the darkness of the pipes and sewers. But what did happen is that the toilet overflowed all over my shoes and Ms. Percival’s shoes and water ran down the corridor and Jonno Bailey rushed by me and pulled the bear out of the hole in the toilet bowl and gave it to Mary Sue, who was crying.

Ms. Percival gave a little screech when the water from the toilet rushed over the toes of her shoes, grabbed me by the shoulder, and took me to the principal’s office, and the principal sent me home. Just like that.

I don’t know what happened to the teddy bear because Mary Sue never brought him to school again. He probably sat on her bed, his lavender fur all matted, and she went to bed every night thinking bad thoughts about me.

I do know what happened in the principal’s office.

The principal’s name is Mr. O’Dell and I don’t like him. He’s one of those guys who look at you with a sorrowful expression and say that they know exactly how you feel.

“I know all about you, Ben,” he’ll say to me. “I was a boy once, too.”

Well, he doesn’t know
anything
about the way I feel and never did. If he was ever a kid, it was for less than five minutes. My guess is he was about fifty when he was born, with the same stubby little black beard and slick black hair and fleshy cheeks he’s got now, only he was probably worse-looking because he was supposed to be a boy.

“So, Benjamin,” Mr. O’Dell said. “As you know, you shouldn’t have done that to Mary Sue’s teddy bear, but I understand how you might be angry about your lisp.

“I’m sure it’s also frustrating to have trouble learning to read,” Mr. O’Dell continued.

This was news to me. I couldn’t read very well, but I didn’t know Ms. Percival had noticed that. Usually when we read out loud for the class, I told her I was having a problem with asthma. I don’t have asthma, but Meg sometimes does and tells me she can’t talk. She has to save her breath.

“So I’m giving your parents a call,” he said, as if he were planning to invite them to the movies. “We’ll have a meeting, all of us, and decide how to help you with your schoolwork, Ben.”

“I don’t need any help,” I said. I was getting very upset. I had thought this meeting was going to be about the purple teddy bear, which would have been bad enough. And now it was turning out to be about me and my reading problems.

“You need some help in reading,” Mr. O’Dell said.

“I read,” I said.

He shook his head. “Reading
better,”
he said. “We want you to be happy here.”

“I am happy. Until today I was happy.”

“But you’d be happier if you learned to read.”

I decided to stop talking since we’d already had that conversation and it wasn’t going to be any better the second time.

And so Mr. O’Dell called my parents. A few days later, they came to his office and we all had a meeting and it was decided that I should be tested for learning disabilities.

“What are learning disabilities?” I asked on the way home from the meeting with Mr. O’Dell.

“I’m not exactly sure, Ben,” my mother said. “Children learn at different rates and Mr. O’Dell wants to find out about your rate of learning.”

“Because of what I did to the teddy bear?”

“No,” my mother said. “Because Ms. Percival says you’re having difficulty learning to read.”

“She’s completely wrong.”

“Maybe,” my mother said. “We’ll see.”

My mother always says “we’ll see” when she doesn’t know what else to say.

“We’ll see what?” I asked.

“We’ll see what happens,” my mother said.

Usually nothing ever happens, but this time it did. This time I went to see a special teacher at Stockton Elementary who has braces and curly hair the color of lemons. Braces and she’s a grown-up. Her job was to give me tests. I was supposed to talk and talk to her and draw pictures and tell her what I saw in the pictures she showed me, like a picture of a lamb looked to me like the black Lab I wanted for my birthday and didn’t get. By the time the test was over, I was so angry at Mary Sue Briggs for starting this whole mess I didn’t know what to do.

And it did turn out to be a mess.

First off, the special teacher decided I
did
have learning disabilities.

“Like what?” I asked my mother.

We were sitting in the living room on the couch next to the rug where my new basset puppy, Jetty, peed almost every morning before I had a chance to let her out. My mother was trying to pretend we were having the most ordinary kind of school talk, but I could tell that she was worried.