Happy Kid! (15 page)

I was definitely feeling good in advisory the next morning, even though Friday was current events day in social studies again, and I was hunting through that day's newspaper for an article to bring to class. A short article, of course, because the A-kids always went for the long ones.

Then Melissa arrived.

The first thing she did was start badgering me.

“It's been over a week since Mr. Borden gave us the ‘Scenes from
The Odyssey
' assignment. Do you know what we're supposed to do?” she asked.

“Don't you?” I replied.

“Of course I do. I spoke to Mr. Borden before class yesterday.”

“Are you going to make me guess?” I asked her. “It would go a lot faster if you just told me.”

“Mr. Borden wants us to adapt scenes from
The Odyssey
into short plays and then act out the parts for the class.”

“We have to write plays? Well, it could be worse, I suppose,” I had to admit. “Mr. Borden could be writing them.”

“I picked five scenes I think would work best, and I've assigned one to each of the five people on the team. Yours is the scene where Odysseus meets the Cyclops.”

“What if I don't want that scene?” I asked.

“I gave you the easiest one! How can you not want it?”

She gave me the easiest scene? She thought I needed the easiest scene? I could have pitched a fit about that, but I was afraid Melissa would take the easiest scene back and give me a hard one.

“I do want it. I like the Cyclops. I don't blame him for hating Odysseus. I hate him, too.”

While we were talking, I glanced at a headline that read “Elderly Woman Trapped in Car for Two Days.” The article that accompanied it had only three short paragraphs. Perfect, I thought as I tore it out of its page.

“We're all going to have to act out parts in each other's play,” Melissa said as I opened my backpack and started sliding the rest of the newspaper into it. “I suppose it's too much to expect you to memorize anything.”

My backpack was full, and I had to jiggle it and poke at things a bit in order to get the paper in nice and flat. Something slid out and landed on the floor. Melissa bent down to pick it up. “Oh, what have we here? I can't believe it. You're reading a self-help book.”

I couldn't believe it, either. Once again something had fallen out of my backpack and was going to get me into trouble.

“A Young Person's Guide to Satisfying Relationships and a Happy and Meaning-Filled Life!”
Melissa read aloud as I tried to grab the book away from her. “This is sad. Really sad.”

Melissa Esposito felt sorry for me. My father was wrong. You could die of embarrassment.

“That book isn't what you think it is,” I said.

She held it out to me as if it were something dirty. “Of course it's not.”

How long would it be before every A-kid in seventh grade knew Kyle Rideau was so miserable, he had to resort to reading a book for help? I wondered. When would Chelsea find out?

Then I noticed something just a little bit odd.

When Melissa picked
Happy Kid!
up off the floor, she only grabbed the front of the book. Her fingers were actually in between a couple of pages.

“Ah, Melissa, open the book to the page where your fingers are,” I said. “Read the beginning of the new chapter your hand is touching.”

I caught her off guard with that request.

“Why?” she asked.

“Just take a look at it and tell me what it says,” I told her.

Melissa always does what she's told. It's a very bad habit. “Listen to Others Sometimes,” she read out loud. “You might want to hear what they have to say just in case you're mistaken and you don't actually know it all. Perhaps your problems forming satisfying relationships have something to do with the way you treat—”

“That's enough,” I said, stopping her from going on.

“Already read that part, Kyle?” Melissa asked.

“No. I've never seen that page before. But I think I might understand what it means,” I said slowly. “Close the book, Melissa. Close it without marking your place. Leave the bound edge of the book in your hand just like you've got it there, and let the pages fall open by themselves. Now read the page that showed up.”

“Listen to Others Sometimes. You might want to hear what they have to say just in—”

I snatched the book away from her. “All done. I'll take this back now.”

“What was that all about?” Melissa asked.

I finally got it. But she didn't. She thought
Happy Kid!
was just a regular self-help book for a kid who needed to help himself. And that, I was afraid, was what she would tell people.

“Watch this,” I told her.

I held the book in my hand just the way she had so it would open by itself. It opened to the first new chapter I'd seen in over a week.

“Oh!” I said when I finished reading. “It sounds as if I'm going to get a surprise.”

“That's not what it sounds like to me,” Melissa replied.

I shut the book with a snap and let it fall open again.

“Look! It fell open to the same place.” I closed and opened the book again. “And it opened to the same place again.” I closed and opened the book over and over again. Every time it opened, it opened to the same place—“Enjoy Surprises! That's What They're There For!”

I closed the book and handed it to Melissa.

“Now you let it fall open,” I ordered.

She did, looked down, gasped, and closed the book again.

“You see,” I said, “this isn't a regular self-help book at all. It doesn't give sappy advice like ‘listen to your parents because they're your best friends' or ‘be nice and share your cookies.' It gives readers messages that are just for them.”

I smiled, trying to look really creative and fascinating so that Melissa would think I was like the artistic loner in a teen movie instead of the one who dresses funny and brings his lunch from home. I could tell from the look on her face that it wasn't working.

I stopped smiling and shifted to a less pleasant plan. Telling her the truth. “If you let the book fall open to where the book wants to fall open, you'll find a chapter that has something to do with what is going on in your life.”

“The word for that is ‘coincidence,' Kyle. I hope you had it as a vocab word sometime in your past. It means ‘two unrelated events that just happen to occur at the same time.' ”

“It's not a coincidence if the two unrelated events happen at the same time over and over again.”

“You're reading too much into those messages of yours. They're like horoscopes or fortune cookies. They mean what you want them to mean,” Melissa said. And she sneered while she was saying it.

I shoved
Happy Kid!
at her. “Try again.”

“Okay,” she said after she looked down at the open book. “I am seeing that same ‘Listen to Others Sometimes' passage. Oooo. Spooky. The thing is, it doesn't have anything to do with me.”

“Oh, come on! The book all but said you're a know-it-all. You'll never make me believe no one has ever called you that before. Don't worry,” I concluded as Melissa started to object. “I won't tell anyone what your message was. Unless someone finds out about the book and says something to me about it, of course.”

“You're trying to blackmail me,” Melissa said, way too calmly for someone who was about to give in to blackmail. “That's really clever. I didn't think you were smart enough to do something like that. Okay. I won't tell anyone you're a loser who's trying to improve his pathetic life by reading a book. For now. But if I feel I need to sometime in the future, I will.”

“Now
you're
trying to blackmail
me
,” I pointed out.

“And succeeding,” Melissa said as she turned to walk back to her desk.

I hoped that Melissa agreeing to keep her mouth shut for a while wasn't the good surprise
Happy Kid!
had been talking about. I had been hoping for something better.

 

 

I got a math test back first period with a big red C at the top of it. No surprise there. Jake got thrown out of art class for the first time for making body function jokes. That was only surprising because it had taken Mr. Ruby so long to do it.

When I got to social studies third period, I wasn't expecting any surprises. It was current events day, after all, and current events day is always the same. I spend most of the period waiting for everyone else to get tired of talking so I can get a chance to say something. I was so certain nothing unexpected would happen that I didn't even listen particularly closely to what the A-kids were saying. I couldn't help but notice Melissa's current event discussion, though, because in addition to knowing everything, she's kind of loud about it. And she's obsessed with stories about politicians and businesspeople committing crimes at work or cheating on their taxes. According to her, that sort of thing happens
all the time
and it is
just plain wrong
. Well, okay.

So I was just sitting there wondering about whether or not my mother had remembered to throw my dobok in the washer before she went to work when Brad started to speak. Like all A-kids, he went on and on for a while and then all of a sudden he said something that sounded like, “Blah blah blah blah blah
test scores for accelerated and honors courses
blah blah blah.”

“What?” I exclaimed. “What test scores? What courses?” Had he said “accelerated courses” the way I thought he had?

“Weren't you listening?” Melissa complained.

Brad gave me a summary without acting as if I must be brain-dead not to have picked up on what was going on when he talked about it the first time. “The point of the article is that some teachers in our state want the SSASies revised so they're easier to give to students. Test scores have had to be thrown out several times because teachers made mistakes giving the instructions or used the wrong kind of materials to help students prepare for them. The test results have to be accurate because a lot of schools use them to identify students who need extra help and should go to summer school or to identify students who are doing really well and should take more challenging courses the next year.”

“But Mrs. Haag said the tests were for the schools, not the students,” Melissa objected.

“They are,” Ms. Cannon said. “But once the schools have all these scores on student achievement for the different subjects, they can use them for the students individually as well as for the schools as a whole. So a lot of school systems use the results to place students when the kids move from one school to another within the school system.”

“From middle school to high school, for instance,” Brad added.

I was definitely getting the picture. “So next year we'd better be really careful when we take the SSASies, huh?” I said.

“I hope you were careful when you took them
this
year,” Ms. Cannon replied. “Those scores will be used to determine whether or not you can take any of the ninth-grade courses the high school offers for eighth-graders.”

That wasn't a good surprise. I thought I was just going to automatically move on with Chelsea next year to those courses. I had to take a test to be with her?

I managed to casually glance around the room to see how everyone else was taking the news. There were some nervous laughs and a few people were making faces. And Melissa looked as if she really regretted not choosing the “Are we alone?” essay topic.

I tried to look as if I didn't have a care in the world, but all the time I was thinking, Sure, I always get good scores on the SSASies. But just how well do you have to do to get into those ninth-grade classes?

 

 

After another bad day at school, I was looking forward to taekwondo that evening. But by the time I finished warming up and practicing my form, only five more people had arrived, all blue belts or higher, with me being the only person under thirty or so.

I was busy trying not to be negative about having to spend Halloween with old people who were all better at taekwondo than I was when I heard the door to the men's locker room opening up behind me. Mr. Goldman nodded at whoever had just come into the dojang. I looked over my shoulder to see if it was someone I recognized.

A figure wearing a black belt over his white dobok was bowing before walking onto the mat. He straightened up, took one step forward, saw me, and stopped. Then he came toward me with his hand out. He had to come all the way to me because I couldn't move.

The look of shock on Mr. Kowsz's face as we shook hands would have been really funny if I hadn't been so sure that I was wearing one just like it on mine. We bowed to one another. Neither one of us had expected this to happen.