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Authors: Beverly Cleary

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BOOK: Mitch and Amy
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“Guess what page I'm on
now
?” said Amy.

Mitchell was not going to take any more remarks from Amy. He was in no mood to listen to his sister brag about being on page ten million. “You keep quiet!” he yelled, sitting up.

“I don't have to!” Amy yelled back.

“Now, Amy, stop interrupting,” said Mrs. Huff. “Mitchell is reading.”

Encouraged because his mother was on his side, Mitchell decided to tear into those four lines and get them over. He held the book, so that his mother could not see the text and slow him down with corrections, and read as rapidly as he could, “‘The cattle were frightened. They began to run. Jeff saw someone coming. “Look!” said Jeff. “Here come our fiends.”'” There Mitchell had finished the page, and fiends was one mistake he had made on purpose.

“Fiends?” said Mrs. Huff, while the sound of Amy's laughter floated across her book. “Mitchell, look again.”

His mother and Amy did not understand that he had deliberately made a mistake, because any boy would rather read a book about fiends than a book about friends, but did the people who wrote books know this fact? No, they did not. They were too dumb, just as his mother and sister were too dumb to know when he made a mistake on purpose. Mitchell held the book up close to his face and glared at the word. “‘“Here come our
friends
.”'” He finished with a yell and slammed the book.

“That's right, Mitchell,” said his mother calmly. “All you have to do is look at the words carefully.”

“Stamper,” Amy said softly to herself and giggled.

“You shut up!” yelled Mitchell.

“Now children,” said Mrs. Huff. “You know, Mitchell, it's too bad stamper isn't a real word—a sort of combination of scamper and stampede. And now why don't you
go outside and play?”

Amy put down her book. “Yes, Mitch,” she said, “why don't you stamper out and play?”

“That's enough, Amy.” Mrs. Huff spoke sharply.

Mitchell managed to give Amy a quick sidewise kick as he walked past her on his way to his room. He could not possibly have hurt her because he was wearing sneakers, but still Amy said, “Mom, Mitchell kicked me!” as she stuck one foot out in front of her brother.

Mitchell was too quick for her. “Tattletale,” he said, sidestepping. “And stop trying to trip me.” This did not count as tattling, because he was speaking to his sister and not to his mother.

“Mitchell, don't kick your sister. Amy, stop teasing your brother.” Mrs. Huff picked up a library book of her own and began to read.

“Funny little boy,” said Amy in her
annoying pat-the-little-fellow-on-the-head voice.

“Hah!” said Mitchell darkly. “You can't call me little. I'm taller than you.”

“But I'm older,” said Amy, sitting up straight.

“Ten minutes is all,” scoffed Mitchell.

“Ten minutes, but I'm still the oldest.” Amy was not ready to let the argument die. “You'll never be as old as I am. Never, never, never!”

“Shut up!” yelled Mitchell, because he had no answer.

Mrs. Huff looked up from her book. “Children, stop this instant.”

“He started it!” “She started it!” Mitchell and Amy spoke at the same time. They tried again. “Well, he did!” “Well, she did!” Still they spoke in unison. They glared at one another, each silently daring the other to speak first.

“Icka bicka backa soda cracker,” said Mrs.
Huff, and went on with her reading.

Mitchell and Amy looked at one another in surprise.

“Mom, what are you talking about?” asked Amy. “What do soda crackers have to do with it?”

“Don't you know?” asked Mrs. Huff. “It's a counting rhyme we used when I was about your age. I think of it every time you two start fighting.”

“How does it go?” Amy was always interested in rhymes. Maybe that was why she was such a good reader. Beginning back in the first grade, reading workbooks were great on rhymes. Cat, take away
c
and put an
r
in its place and what do you have? Rat. Amy had always enjoyed that sort of thing.

Mrs. Huff began to recite,

“My mother, your mother,

Live across the way.

Fifteen-sixteen East Broadway.

Every night they have a fight

And this is what they say.

Icka bicka backa soda cracker

Out goes she.”

Amy was delighted and picked up the verse at once. “My mother, your mother, live across the way—”

The fight was over, the out-loud part of it, but Mitchell went right on fighting in his thoughts. Icka bicka backa soda cracker, out goes Amy, he thought crossly, as he went into the kitchen and grabbed a banana and stuffed it into his pocket before he left the house and wheeled his bicycle out of the garage.

When Mitchell reached the street, he pedaled as hard as he could; pumping his legs up and down made him feel better. First Alan and the skateboard. Then the runny
pudding. And then Amy hearing him make a stupid mistake like stamper. She thought she was so good, reading all those thick books while he stumbled around in thin books. Well, Amy was good, and Mitchell had to admit that he was proud of her. The trouble was, he wanted to be proud of himself, too.

Pumping a bicycle in a hilly neighborhood was hard work, and Mitchell gradually slowed down. Oh well, he thought, as he pulled the banana out of his pocket, things were sure to be better in the fourth grade. When he came to a level spot in the street he rode without using the handlebars while he peeled the banana and stuffed the skin into his pocket. He must remember to throw the skin into the garbage can, he thought as he pedaled along. Last week his mother had put a pair of jeans through the washing machine with a banana skin in the pocket.

4
Amy and The Audio-Visual Aids

A
fterward Amy was sorry for the way she had behaved when Mitchell was struggling to read aloud. She really did not want to hurt his feelings, but whenever she saw him sitting there on the couch with their mother she could not help feeling left out. Acting that way was silly, she knew, because reading aloud was a chore for Mitchell, just as multiplication tables were a chore for her, a chore she managed to avoid
until the day finally arrived that she and Mitchell had waited for so long, their first day in the fourth grade.

As Amy had hoped, the morning turned out to be foggy, with moisture dripping like rain from the eucalyptus trees. By noon the sun would be out, but in the meantime Amy had a good excuse to wear her new pleated skirt, which was just enough too long to make her feel like a ten-year-old instead of a nine-year-old. Amy noticed that Mitchell, who had been saying that school was a bad word, was in a hurry to leave that first morning, and she wondered if he was trying to avoid Alan Hibbler. Mitchell had not mentioned the skateboard incident again, but Amy had not forgotten it and she was sure her brother had not forgotten it either.

“'Bye, Mom!” Mitchell yelled, and ran out the back door in his new jeans, size nine slim.

Amy left for school shortly after Mitchell
had disappeared into the fog. She was too happy and excited to wait any longer, but instead of running as if she had springs in the soles of her sneakers, she walked sedately, enjoying the feel of her new skirt brushing against the back of her knees and secretly hoping that people would think, There goes
a girl who is one decade old. Marla joined her, and she too walked sedately in her new pleated skirt. They acted very grown-up to the traffic boy, who led them across the street nearest to the school.

Familiar old Bay View School sat solidly in the midst of uproar and confusion. During the summer, construction of a new wing had started and concrete mixers rattled and growled at one end of the building. Temporary wooden classrooms covered half the playground, which swarmed with screaming, yelling boys and girls, most of them wearing new school clothes and all of them excited at seeing old friends. Amy glanced quickly around and located Mitchell playing kickball at one end of the playground and Alan Hibbler running through a second-grade girls' hopscotch game at the other.

Still trying to behave like ten-year-olds, Amy and Marla climbed the steps of the temporary wooden building that was to
be Mrs. Martin's classroom until the new wing was completed. “It's like going to an old-fashioned school,” remarked Amy, who had attended the third grade in the main building.

“I know,” agreed Marla. “I feel sort of like Laura in the Little House books.”

“We've walked miles across the prairie,” said Amy.

Marla took up the game. “With our scarves over the lower part of our faces to keep our noses from freezing.”

Amy objected. “Not on the first day of school, silly. Nobody's nose ever froze on the first day of school.”

“I guess you're right,” said Marla. “Leave out the scarves. Make it with our lunches in baskets instead. And sunbonnets on our heads.”

Amy soon discovered there was nothing old-fashioned about the inside of the temporary classroom. Boys and girls were
crowding around a lot of new equipment—a television set, a tape recorder, a record player, a slide projector, and a screen.

“Hey! TV at school!” said Mike Melnick, who had followed the girls up the steps.

“Hi, Amy! Did you know we were going to have TV in school?” asked Bonnie Puckett, who was Amy's next-to-best friend.

“Mrs. Martin will never let us watch anything good,” Marla reminded them. “Just educational programs and stuff like that.”

“These are our audio-visual aids,” Mrs. Martin explained, after her new class had saluted the flag. “
Audio
means to hear and
visual
means to see. Our audio-visual aids will help us to learn with our ears and our eyes.” To demonstrate one of the ways in which the new equipment could be used, she put a record on the phonograph, and the class heard someone playing
America the Beautiful
on the piano to accompany their morning song.

Amy enjoyed singing to the record, and
from the temporary building next door she could hear Mitchell's room singing to their recording of
America the Beautiful
. She decided that audio-visual aids might be fun in spite of being educational. She knew that Mitchell would think so, because he liked anything that could be plugged in and turned on.

Amy was even more pleased with the audio-visual aids as the day went on. When class elections were held and all the hands were counted, Amy was elected vice-president. She looked modestly at her hands in her lap while Mrs. Martin explained that it was the duty of the vice-president to play the record of
America the Beautiful
each morning after the president led the flag salute. Amy was proud of her new responsibility. In the third grade the class vice-president just sat around waiting for the president to get sick.

“Lucky!” whispered Marla from across the aisle.

Amy's pleasure lasted until arithmetic,
which was a review of multiplication facts. Mrs. Martin hinted at a test in the near future.

“Ee-yew, a test,” said Amy, as she and Marla lined up to go to the cafetorium for lunch.

“Multiplication, icky,” agreed Marla. “Ee-yew” and “icky” were popular expressions of dislike with fourth-grade girls.

That evening at dinner Amy started to tell about all the new audio-visual aids when Mitchell interrupted. “Guess what?” he said. “Miss Colby didn't tell us what to do in arithmetic. She turned on the tape recorder, and her voice told us what to do.”

“Mitchell,” said Amy sternly. “
I
was talking.”

“Well, she did,” said Mitchell. “And when the cement trucks and the workmen made too much noise we got to recite into a microphone. Or we did until the class in the building next door plugged in their slide
projector and blew a fuse. After that we just shouted above the noise.”

“Mom. Dad—” protested Amy, eager to tell about her audio-visual aids before Mitchell told everything.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Mitchell, speaking into a fork as if it were a microphone. “This is your friendly neighborhood fourth grader. Six times six is thirty-six. Six times seven is forty-two.”

That Mitchell, thought Amy, amused in spite of herself at her brother's performance. He could be so exasperating, bringing multiplication into the conversation purposely to annoy her.

“Mitchell,” said Mr. Huff. “Amy was speaking.”

With a triumphant look at Mitchell, Amy told about her duty as vice-president. “And we're going to get to watch TV, too,” she said. When she saw that her parents did not share her enthusiasm, she added hastily, “Of
course, it will be educational.”

“Our teacher is going to give us a test on multiplication facts to help decide which arithmetic group we belong in,” announced Mitchell.

Amy braced herself, knowing Mitchell must feel this way when she told what page she was on while he was reading aloud.

“What about your class, Amy?” asked her father. “Aren't you going to have an arithmetic test, too?”

“Ee-yew,” answered Amy, wrinkling her nose.

“That hardly answers the question.”

“Well, yes,” admitted Amy.

“Seven times four,” her father shot at her. He was an accountant who was probably born knowing his multiplication tables.

“Twenty-eight,” Mitchell answered promptly.

“Twenty-eight,” echoed Amy, relieved
that her brother had supplied the answer for her.

“Mitchell, let Amy answer. Five times nine.”

“Um. Um—” Amy was trying to think.

“Everybody knows fives,” said Mitchell.

“Five times nine is—um—forty-six. No, forty-
five
.” Amy hoped her father would forget about multiplication now.

“Amy, I think that we had better go over your tables this evening. You practice your cello while I do the dishes, and then I'll help you,” said Mrs. Huff. “And Mitchell, you had better read aloud for a little while.”

Mitchell groaned. “Do I gotta?”

“Yes, you gotta,” answered his mother, and Mitchell groaned again.

Amy sat through the rest of the meal positively hating the multiplication tables. She was not like Mitchell, who might squirm and dawdle and think up interruptions,
but would eventually do the things he did not want to do. When Amy did not want to do something, she did not want to do it one hundred percent. She simply did not want to learn her multiplication tables. They were so
boring
, as boring as visiting the post office with her old Brownie troop or having to sit quietly while grown-ups talked politics. Oh, she understood
about
multiplication all right. She had made graphs and done all the things that were supposed to make third graders understand the
reasons
for multiplication, but when she came to sitting down and memorizing them, Amy balked. Ask Amy three times four, and she would rather write down imaginary fours three times and add them up in her head than memorize a lot of boring old tables. Mitchell's popping out with the right answer ahead of her didn't help either. “Twelve!” Mitchell would say while Amy was still writing imaginary fours on an
imaginary blackboard with imaginary chalk.

By skillful management Amy managed to avoid reviewing the multiplication tables that evening. She set the timer on the kitchen clock to mark the half hour that she and Mitchell must practice their music. Then she played her cello with unusual diligence. When Mitchell struggled to blow the right notes of
The Red River Valley
on his French horn, she did not yield to the temptation to play the tune correctly on her cello. Nothing made Mitchell madder than having Amy play correctly by ear the music he was trying to play by note. As he so often reminded her, the French horn was the most difficult of the brass instruments.

When the timer ping-ping-pinged at the end of the half hour, Amy let Mitchell beat her into the kitchen to turn it off and instead skipped into the bathroom to take a bath without being told.

Amy spent a long time in the bathtub while out in the living room she could hear Mitchell plodding along with the story about Jeff and his pony. She lay back and was glad she was not out there trying to add up an imaginary column of six eights while her mother said, “
Think
, Amy.” Her mother always confused her by saying, “
Think
, Amy,” when she was halfway up the imaginary column, and then she had to start over again.

“Amy, what are you doing in there?” Mrs. Huff called through the bathroom door.

“Taking a bath,” answered Amy virtuously.

“Well, hurry up about it,” said her mother.

After her bath Amy brushed her teeth with careful up-and-down strokes while she ran the water so hard she could not hear her mother tell her to hurry. After that she had to fasten a dental rubber band to the retainer she was wearing to straighten her teeth. With
one thing and another the evening slipped by. Then it was bedtime, and there was no time for multiplication tables.

“You know, Amy,” said Mrs. Huff, when she had kissed her daughter good night, “you're never going to learn your multiplication tables until you really want to learn
them. There is nothing I can do to help until you decide to learn them.”

“Mm-hm,” murmured Amy sleepily. Nothing would ever make her want to learn her multiplication tables. Nothing.

Somehow, there was no time for multiplication in the morning either. In the midst of breakfast Mitchell remembered he was supposed to take some money to school for insurance in case he was injured during school hours while he was in the fourth grade. Amy said she was supposed to take insurance money, too, and there was confusion while Mrs. Huff wrote checks and Amy and her brother found the forms to be filled out. When school insurance was taken care of, Amy suddenly remembered she needed an old peanut-butter jar to use in a science experiment—the class was going to sprout beans in such a way that their growth could be watched through the jars. Then Mitchell
reminded his mother that they both needed money to pay for their lunches, which meant a search for the exact change to pay for two lunches so they would not slow up the line in the cafetorium.

BOOK: Mitch and Amy
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