Rosie Swanson: Fourth-Grade Geek for President (7 page)

I turned my eyes away from him.

Mrs. Munson took over from there. “Mr. Jolly is correct, Rosie,” she said. “And while we certainly won’t let Alan use your poems or copy your poster ideas, he is allowed to campaign for better lunches. If Alan thinks it’s a good idea, then he’s allowed to jump on the bandwagon, so to speak.”

Alan was practically puffing out with glee. You should have seen him. You could have popped him with a pin.

“I’m sorry I recited your poem,” he said. “But I still like the idea about making the cafeteria food better. No hard feelings, okay?” he said.

“Oh yes, there are, Alan,” I replied. “There’re
lots
of hard feelings. More hard feelings than you can even count.”

After that, I narrowed my eyes at Mrs. Munson and Mr. Jolly. And I walked out of the room.

I saw Earl on the playground at recess. He was crouching behind a tree trying to hide from me. It was all the confession I needed.

I took off running in his direction.

“You can’t hide from me, Earl! I know it was you! I’m coming to kill you, Earl.”

Maxie was standing next to him. When he saw me coming, he backed up a little bit.

By the time I got to the tree, Earl had put his sweater over his head. I yanked it off him and crouched down next to his face.

“IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A SECRET, EARL! IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A SECRET!”

Furiously, I took his four-leaf clover out of my pocket and threw it at his face.

“No wonder you wanted me to have this! No wonder you needed one for yourself! You and your ‘little problem.’ You were hoping I wouldn’t find out, but I did!”

“Stupid clovers,” muttered Earl quietly. “I knew that good-luck junk was a bunch of hog-wash.”

Finally, he looked up at me. “I’m sorry, Rosie. I’m really, really sorry. But they made me tell them. They did. I swear.”

I had to bite my lip to keep from crying. That’s how mad I was. And disappointed, too.

“Who, Earl?” I managed. “Who made you tell? Who made you ruin my whole entire campaign?”

His answer took me by surprise.

“Summer Lynne Jones,” he said. “Summer Lynne Jones and that friend of hers with the long black hair. They ran up behind me while I was walking home from school yesterday and started asking a bunch of stuff about your campaign.”

“Like what
kind
of stuff?” I asked.

He shrugged. “All kinds of stuff,” he said. “Like why you kept bragging that your campaign was so good. And what kind of posters I was drawing.”

“And so you just
told
her, Earl? You just spilled your guts about our campaign? Just because she
asked?
”

“No,” he said. “At first, I didn’t tell her anything at all. At first, I said we were keeping it a secret until the candidates’ meeting.”

I folded my arms. “So then how did she find out?”

Earl swallowed hard. “Well, we were just standing around in the grass. And then the one
with the long black hair patted the ground. You know, for me to sit down.”

“So?”

“So I sat.”

“And?”

Earl lowered his voice again. “And then Summer asked me if I was ticklish. And even though I said no, she and her friend started tickling me anyway. And you know how much I hate that, Rosie. But they kept tickling and tickling. And they said they wouldn’t stop until I told them about your posters.”

I couldn’t stand to listen to this. “Oh, Earl.”

“I know, I know. But I couldn’t help it, Rosie. Tickling is torture, almost. Plus, rolling in the grass was making me wheezy. And my nose was getting all plugged up and I couldn’t breathe. I
had
to tell them, Rosie. I was suffocating, practically.”

Now I was angry all over again.

“No, you weren’t, Earl. You weren’t suffocating. And being tickled is no excuse. What kind of traitor spills his guts to the enemy and then runs back to the general and says, ‘Sorry, General. I was tickled’?”

I pushed him. “Do you know what happened because of you, Earl? Summer Jones told Alan Allen all about my campaign. And Alan Allen stood right up in front of the entire fourth grade this morning and recited one of my poems. And now he’s going to campaign for better lunches. And Mr. Jolly is letting him!”

Tears started to fill my eyes. “Darn it, Earl! Why did you have to tell?”

Earl sat there for a second, just sort of staring off into space. Then all of a sudden, he got a funny look on his face.

“No. Wait a second. That can’t be right. How could he have recited one of our poems? I didn’t tell Summer Lynne any of our poems.”

“Yes, you did! You did, too, Earl! You told her the one about the fruit cup and the French fries, because that’s the poem he recited. If you didn’t tell her, then how else would Alan have known it?”

Not saying a word, Maxie quietly turned and started walking toward the school.

It took a second before it finally hit me.

I ran after him and spun him around.

As soon as I looked at his face, I knew.

“It was
you
” I said in amazement. “You’re the one who told Alan my poem.”

Maxie’s face changed.

“So what? So what if it was me? I don’t care what you say. I’m sick of getting insulted by kids like Alan Allen. Sixth-graders are bad enough. But Alan’s only
fourth
-grader and he was pushing me around.”

Maxie’s eyes narrowed. “He and his friends called me Poindexter! And a dweeb. And he said if I was such a brainiac, then how come I couldn’t figure out how to grow?”

Maxie pointed to Earl. “And he made fun of Earl, too. He said Earl couldn’t draw worth spit. ‘Earl Wilber is a doofus,’ he says. ‘My posters are going to kill your posters. Kill ’em, Zuckerman,’ he says.

“So I just try to be cool about it, you know? And I say, ‘Oh yeah? We’ll just see about that, Alan.’ And I start to walk away.

“Except then, a couple of his friends grab me and start spinning me in a circle until I can’t walk straight. And then Alan puts his arm around my shoulders like suddenly we’re pals. And he walks me over to the corner of the parking lot.

“ ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I’ll make you a deal, Maxie. I’ll tell you a secret about me, and then you can tell me your campaign secret. That way we’ll be even.’

“Then he whispers this stupid secret about how he stole a soccer ball from Mort’s Sports Store when he was in the first grade.

“So I say, ‘Big deal, Alan. What good’s a stupid secret like that going to do us? I’m not telling you anything.’ And that’s when Alan really gets mad. And he grabs the front of my shirt with both of his fists and starts slinging me around a little bit. And he’s getting me totally wrinkled. And so I say, ‘Knock it off, Alan. My mother just ironed this shirt!’

“And he looks at me like I was a lunatic or something. And he says, ‘God! How can such a skinny wimp be such a giant dork! Huh! I mean, how is that even scientifically possible?’

“And then he hits himself in the head and says, ‘What the heck was I so worried about? There’s no way in the world that you and that fat tub of goo, Earl Wilber, will be able to get your geeky girlfriend elected president of the fourth grade. No way.’

“After that, he let go of me and shoved me
backward. And I was so mad I could spit. And so I took a giant step right into his face. And then I stood on my toes until our noses were almost touching and I said, ‘Oh yeah? Well, laugh about this, you
snool. ’Cause this is what’s going to blow your campaign right out of the water!’ And then I blurted out the fruit cup poem.”

Maxie stopped and took a breath. “Look, I
know
I shouldn’t have done it, okay? And I wish it never happened. But I was so sick and tired of being picked on that day, I just had to make them stop.”

The bell rang. Maxie and Earl didn’t go in. Neither did I.

Instead, I sat down in the grass and pulled my knees up to hide my face.

Earl came over and tapped me on the shoulder. “Come on, Rosie. We’ve gotta go.”

I knocked his hand away.

“So go,” I said.

And they did.

7
THE
AMERICAN WAY

I didn’t speak to Maxie or Earl for two days. I wanted to hold out longer, but not walking to school with them was driving me crazy. If I don’t walk with them, they never use the crosswalks.

Friday morning, I finally showed up at Maxie’s house. It was kind of awkward at first. Mostly, we just stood around and looked at each other. We haven’t really been friends that long, so we’re still learning how to do it.

Finally, Maxie waved stiffly and said hi.

“Hi,” I said back.

“Hi,” said Earl.

After that, all of us stood there some more. Then, without any warning at all, Earl bent over and butted me with his head. I don’t know why he does stuff like that. It’s just the way his mind
works. It did the trick, though. It made us laugh and loosen up a little.

We didn’t have a big discussion about how they’d let me down or anything. Mostly, I just told them to forget about it. It was big of me to act like that, I thought. I told them that, too. “This is big of me,” I said.

What I didn’t tell them is that way deep down inside, I knew that part of what had happened was my fault, too. I mean, if I hadn’t been so braggy at the drinking fountain that day, Alan and Summer wouldn’t have been so curious about my campaign.

Anyhow, I was glad to finally have my friends back again. At school, things had been getting harder and harder to deal with. Like Alan’s posters were going up all over the place. And just as I thought, they were about cafeteria food.

They weren’t as good as mine, though. Most of his posters were just boring old pictures of pizza cut out of magazines. His slogan was stupid, too:

I mean, come on. Coke and vote don’t even rhyme. And here’s another dumb thing. Alan’s campaign buttons were little pepperonis. If you pinned them to your shirt, they left an oil stain.

Even Norman Beeman liked my stuff better. He plodded right up to me in the hall and said, “Your posters are way neater than his.”

I looked down at his feet. “Thank you, Norman,” I said. “Love your boots.”

Even Summer Lynne Jones’s campaign buttons were better than Alan’s. And at least Summer hadn’t stolen my ideas. Actually, she told Earl that she thought my food poems were revolting.

Instead, her posters were pictures of people at the beach doing “summery” things. At the top of every poster, there was a picture of the sun wearing sunglasses. It said:

Like a lot of girls I know, Summer dots her
i
’s with little hearts. Talk about revolting.

Her campaign buttons were little paper-doll swimsuits made of different-colored construction
paper. They even had tabs on them like real paper-doll clothes.

The girls loved them, too. When Summer passed them out after the candidates’ meeting, I could actually hear girls squealing because they were so cute.

Still, out of all the candidates, Louise the Disease’s campaign was the absolute stupidest. All her posters said the very same thing: