Fourth-Grade Disasters (11 page)

Dog lay at Mason’s feet, contentedly chewing a rawhide bone. Mason’s mom had called the vet after the Puff disaster for advice on what to do about Dog’s chewing. The vet said to give Dog lots of extra chewing opportunities so he could channel his chewing energies more appropriately. Mason’s dad had been right all along.

Mason’s mother gave him another mysterious smile. Mason had learned once in art class that a smile like that was called a Mona Lisa smile, after the expression on a famous portrait painted by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. But Mason wasn’t in the mood for a Mona Lisa smile right now.

“Tell me!” he pleaded.

“I will in a minute. But first tell me: was Brody thrilled with his solo?”

Mason stared at her. “How did you know she was going to give the solo to Brody?”

“Mrs. Morengo told me yesterday, when we were talking on the phone. And who else could be Puff, if not Brody? He’s such a cute size, with that great big personality—”

Mason’s face must have given him away.

“Mason, you didn’t think—”

Was she also going to accuse him of having wanted to be Puff? She couldn’t, not his own mother. It was bad enough coming from his best friend, but at least Brody’s excuse was that he honestly couldn’t imagine that anybody in the universe might not want to be Puff.

She reached over and smoothed his hair, not that
it needed smoothing. “Oh, honey, I should have told you, so you wouldn’t worry. I just thought it would be such a great surprise.”

Apparently she had forgotten that Mason hated surprises. At least she had remembered that Mason hated singing.

“But, honey, Mrs. Morengo did say that you’re doing so well in the Platters! And, can you believe it, she even said that we should consider getting you voice lessons!”

The doorbell rang. Dog abandoned his bone and jumped up to go help answer it.

“Speaking of surprises …,” his mother said as she exited the kitchen behind Dog.

She returned carrying an enormous cardboard carton, practically as big as Brody.

“Dog, sit!” Mason’s mom commanded. Dog sat.

“Dog, bone!” she commanded. Dog resumed his contented chewing.

Using a kitchen knife, Mason’s mom slit open the tape sealing the top flaps of the box. Then, to Mason’s great astonishment, she lifted out a large stuffed animal. A large stuffed dragon. A faded, oversized stuffed dragon that looked exactly like Puff.

It
was
Puff. But how could that be?

“I found another Puff on eBay! You have no idea how relieved I was when I found it and they said they could overnight it to me. I came up with the live-mascot idea just in case Puff didn’t get here in time for the concert. And it turned out to be the perfect idea, didn’t it?”

Mason couldn’t decide if he should feel enormously relieved for the third time that day—he did feel enormously relieved—or sad for the first Puff, gone forever, and now replaced by this look-alike copy. Everyone at Plainfield Elementary—from Mrs. Miller on down to the littlest kindergartners—would think this was the true lucky Puff who had served Plainfield Elementary faithfully for twenty years.

Everyone except for Mason. And Nora.

Another thought struck him. Was this
cheating
? Like Dunk’s copying of his Footie story?

“Are you ever going to tell Mrs. Morengo what really happened?” Mason asked her.

She paused, as if asking herself the same question. “You know, I think we should just file this one under the heading ‘all’s well that ends well.’ ”

She was probably right.

He hoped that in another two days he’d be able to file his first—and last?—Platters concert under that same heading.

“I’m going right now to put Puff the Second up in my office, behind closed doors,” she said, even though Dog seemed much less interested in Puff the Second
than he’d been in Puff the First. Maybe Puff’s head hadn’t been that tasty—or easy to digest—after all. Or maybe he was cured of chewing stuffed animals for good.

Mason’s mother bustled away with Puff in her arms.

While she was gone, Mason pondered a question of his own: should he tell her he was going to be the stage crew for the show, or leave it as a surprise, since she was the one who liked surprises?

He voted for the surprise. He hoped she’d think it was a good surprise. As Nora had said, he’d still be in the concert. Well, sort of in the concert.

He’d still be giving the Plainfield Platters a fair try. Well, sort of a fair try.

But he wouldn’t be using his lovely voice, the voice that his teacher had praised, the voice that was worthy of voice lessons. He wouldn’t be standing up on the stage with Brody and the other Platters, singing with all his might about Puff, as his father filmed every second of the concert with his camcorder and his mother wiped proud tears from her eyes.

Oh, if only he could file the Plainfield Platters forever under “done, done, done.”

Brody wore his Puff costume for the Platters practice held the next morning, Thursday morning, on the stage in the gym. Mason’s mom had tried it on him the night before and made a few last-minute adjustments so it would fit him perfectly.

The Thursday-morning practice was also Mason’s first time working as stage crew. Oh, the bliss of not being on those risers with the other singers! He thought he did a good job as lightning guy. It would be a much cooler special effect tomorrow evening, when the gym would be dark, rather than bright with the morning sunlight that was now streaming through the high windows.

Mason caught Dunk staring at him, and sure enough, Dunk came up to Mason and Brody as soon as the practice was over.

“Did Morengo kick you out?” he asked hopefully, walking beside them as they headed to class.

Brody answered indignantly. “No! If she was going to kick out anybody, it would be
you
.”

“Well, why aren’t you singing anymore, like a dumb lady opera singer? Why are you just turning the stupid lights on and off for two seconds?”

“I’m the stage crew,” Mason said with what he hoped sounded like quiet dignity.

Dunk guffawed. “Was that your idea or her idea?”

It had been Nora’s idea, actually, but Mason refused to answer.

“Either it was Morengo’s idea because she finally realized you stink so bad she didn’t want you to ruin the concert for everybody else. Or it was your idea because you’re a scaredy-cat.”

Mason tried to keep his face from betraying any emotion, but he could tell that Dunk knew he had guessed correctly.

“You’re a little scaredy teapot, short and stout,” Dunk chortled.

“He is not!” Brody almost yelled. “The stage crew is a very important part of a show. It’s the most important part!”

“It’s definitely more important than singing a dumb solo in a dumb costume like a dumb Puff baby,” Dunk agreed.

Mason knew it was his turn now to defend Brody, but he couldn’t think of anything stinging enough to say.

Nora had been walking behind them, evidently listening all the time. Now she caught up to them, her eyes flashing. But her voice, as always, was calm and steady.

“I found an interesting site on the Internet last night,” she said to the three of them, as if simply offering a tidbit of neutral information. “It had a very detailed description of last year’s Super Bowl game. You’d like it, Dunk, since you’re so interested in football. You know, because of your story about Footie.”

That was all she said. But it was enough to make Dunk flush a deep, dull red.

“Oh, and I made a printout of it,” Nora added
casually. “I thought Coach Joe might like it, too. Since he loves sports so much. Except, of course, when anybody is cheating.”

She gave Dunk a last friendly smile.

Mason didn’t turn to look again at Dunk as they stashed their backpacks and took their seats in Coach Joe’s classroom.

Dunk ripped up his story. Mason saw him doing it. Not that Dunk ever did anything quietly.

Rip! Rip!
Dunk tore the paper he had already torn, again and again, until his desk was littered with a heap of paper scraps, some of them falling onto the floor as well.

The sound was loud enough that Coach Joe looked up from his desk. “Hey, Dunk,” he said in his cheerful tone of voice, “what’s up?”

Dunk looked close to tears. “I ripped up ‘Footie.’ ” He turned to glare at Nora, as if to say,
See what you made me do?

“Whoa,” Coach Joe said softly. He formed his hand into a time-out T. “Dunk, how about our own private huddle, one on one?” He nodded his head toward the hall.

Dunk stayed in his seat, obviously past caring if anyone else heard what he had to say.

“My story stinks! Sheng said so!”

Coach Joe looked expectantly at Sheng.

“I didn’t say it stank. I said it was short. That’s all I said.”

“You said it was
too
short. And I tried to make it longer, but I couldn’t think of stuff to write, so I copied some stuff from Wikipedia, and she”—he gave a baleful jerk of his head toward Nora—“printed it out and was going to give it to you, so now I’ve ripped it up, and I’ll get a zero, and my dad will freak out, and he won’t let me play football, and it’s all her fault!”

Dunk’s cheeks were red, and his lower lip stuck out, quivering. His eyes were bright with tears; he rubbed them defiantly as he glared again at Nora.

“Whoa,” Coach Joe said a second time, even more softly, as if trying to figure out how his team could have fallen apart so badly so close to the start of the season.

Mason sneaked a glance at Nora. She didn’t seem upset that Dunk blamed her for his ripped-up story. It was as if she had just poked a stick into an ant tunnel
and was watching with calm curiosity for what the ants would do next.

There was a long silence, Dunk sniffling and Coach Joe obviously thinking about how to get his team back on the field.

“Well, Dunk,” Coach Joe finally said, “if you copied your story from the Internet, you did the right thing in throwing it away. It’s better to lose the game than to win it by not playing fair and square. Copying somebody else’s work, and then trying to pass it off as your own, is plagiarism, and it’s wrong, no two ways about it.”

Coach Joe went on. “Now, the story is due tomorrow. As far as I can see, you have two options. Write your own Footie story, short or long, telling Footie’s story as
you
want to tell it. But maybe the problem is that you weren’t all that interested in Footie in the first place, and you really wanted to write about someone else. Your friend the toilet.”

A couple of kids giggled, not in a mean way, but just because they couldn’t help it. Even Dunk’s mouth twisted into a shaky grin.

“You said your dad didn’t want you to write about
the toilet. Maybe your dad didn’t know that on Coach Joe’s team, any subject is A-okay. Because you know what the first rule of writing is for my class?”

Mason tried to guess, but couldn’t.

“
Have fun
. If the writer is having fun writing, the reader will probably have fun reading. So maybe it’s goodbye, Footie the football, and hello, Tommy the toilet. Or maybe you want to give Footie one more chance—
your
best shot. Either way, it’s up to you.”

Coach Joe sat back down behind his desk. “So that’s my locker-room pep talk, team.”

The next time Mason looked over at Dunk, Dunk’s hand was racing furiously across the page and Dunk was grinning to himself as he wrote a line he seemed to think was particularly hilarious. Mason had a feeling that Tommy the toilet was busy flushing something very interesting.

That night, the night before the concert, Mason and his mother finished reading
Ballet Shoes
. The book ended with Pauline going off to Hollywood to be a movie star, Posy going off to Czechoslovakia to be a ballerina, and Petrova going off to fly planes with “Gum,” their great-uncle Matthew. It was a completely satisfying ending.

Dog thought so, too. He gave a low whimper of appreciation when Mason’s mother shut the book after the last page.

“If you liked
Ballet Shoes
,” she told Mason, “there’s a whole series of Shoes books.
Theatre Shoes, Dancing Shoes, Movie Shoes, Skating Shoes, Tennis Shoes, Circus Shoes
. All kinds of shoes.”