Gertie's Leap to Greatness (17 page)

Gertie's cheeks were so stuffed she couldn't answer.

“What are you
doing
?” asked a shrill voice. Mary Sue had appeared from nowhere. She was standing behind Junior and staring at Gertie.

Gertie froze, but only for a second. If she ate all the chocolates, there wouldn't be any evidence. If she ate them all, it would be like it hadn't happened.

“Those are not your chocolates!” said Mary Sue. “Those are the chocolates for the good kids.”

Ella ran up to them but skidded to a stop when she saw Gertie. “The Swiss chocolates!”

“Stop it right now!” said Mary Sue. “I'm going to tell.” But she didn't move.

People began walking over to see what was happening, because the first law of the universe was that if you didn't want anybody around,
everybody
showed up. They shoved Junior aside and gathered around Gertie. She ate faster. She had to eat all the chocolates. If she got them all in her belly they would be gone, and if anyone said,
Gertie took the chocolates,
she would say,
Prove it.

“The mother lode!” Leo said, seeing the pile of chocolates.

“Look at her,” Mary Sue said to the others. “Look at what she's doing!”

“You're going to get it,” said Ewan. “You're going to get it good.” He shook his head. “And when I say
good
, I mean
bad
.”

“You really are Evangelina,” said Ella. “All you eat is sweets.”

Gertie was unwrapping chocolates and stuffing them in her mouth as fast as she could.

“I've never had one,” said June.

“That's because those chocolates are not for everybody!” Mary Sue's face was turning red. “They're only for good kids!”

“
I'm
a good kid,” said June.

“Ugh!” Mary Sue stamped her foot. “They're for important people. That's what I meant.”

“Well, I've never had one,” Leo said. “Does that mean
I'm
not important?”

“That's not what I meant!” said Mary Sue. “You're making this all wrong. She's messing everything up!” She pointed at Gertie.

Gertie put her hands on her knees and leaned over, breathing through her mouth.

“She's gonna be sick,” Ewan predicted in a calm voice.

“Say, Gertie,” said Roy. “How do they taste?”

Gertie groaned. She'd been eating the chocolates so fast that she hadn't even tasted them.

Roy picked one up and peeled the foil away from the melted chocolate.

“You put that down!” Mary Sue squeezed her hands into fists. “That isn't for you!”

Roy ignored her and popped the chocolate in his mouth. His eyes closed. “Mmmm,” he moaned. He opened his eyes. “It's got that superior smoothness.” He licked his fingers. “It really has.” He picked another chocolate up and passed it to June. “Try it.”

People murmured.

June unwrapped the chocolate and put it in her mouth. Her eyes got big, and she brought her hand up to her lips. “Good. So good,” she mumbled.

Gertie looked at the pile of chocolates on the grass. She couldn't eat another one. She would explode. Now Mary Sue would go rat on her and show everyone the chocolates.

Jean's voice broke the silence. “You can do it.” Everyone stared at Jean, but she didn't even glance at them. She was watching Gertie. “Come on, Gertie,” she said under her breath. “You can do it.”

Gertie picked up another chocolate.

“Come on,” said Jean.

Gertie unwrapped it. She put it in her mouth and chewed it up and swallowed it. She held her poor stomach. Four chocolates were left.

“She's gonna blow,” Ewan warned again.

“No way,” said Leo. “Come on, Gertie. You can do it.”

“Stop it!” said Mary Sue. “Stop!”

“Come on, Gertie!” said June, and she started clapping.

Gertie looked up at Jean, who nodded. Gertie picked up another chocolate.

“Stop it!” Mary Sue spun around and ran toward the school, but Gertie didn't care.

Everyone was cheering. Three chocolates left. They began chanting.

“Ger-tie! Ger-tie! Ger-tie!”

Two.

It didn't matter if they were fickle. She was eating the chocolates for all of them. For June and Roy and Junior and Leo and all of them who had never been asked to take a note to the office. They were the gray crayons nobody cared about. They were the so-so students. They were the last-place losers and the skinned-kneed nobodies, and Gertie was their queen.

She stuffed the last chocolate into her mouth. Then she wadded up the last foil wrapper and threw it on the ground.
Wham!
She staggered to her feet and raised her arms in the air. “Yaaa!” she yelled.

Roy threw his own arms in the air. June and Jean were jumping up and down, hugging each other. Ewan was applauding politely. Junior was hiding his face in his hands, but he was smiling through his fingers. Then, across the playground, Gertie saw Mary Sue marching toward them. Ms. Simms was right behind her.

Gertie gulped, swallowing the final piece of evidence.

 

24

Everybody Messes Up

“That's what
understudy
means,” said Mary Sue to anyone who would listen and lots of people who wouldn't. “It means if the actress who was
supposed
to play the part turns out to be an immature, chocolate-stealing maniac,
I
come in and save the day.”

The fifth graders were filing out of the room.

“Of course,” said Mary Sue, “I never should've been the understudy to start with, but now everyone knows that.” She spoke in a loud voice so that Gertie heard every word. “And of course, I told my father not to expect much.” She flipped her hair. “I mean, this play is perfectly ridiculous. But at least now I can help all of you look better. You're all so lucky to get to meet my father, you know, because—”

The door shut behind Ewan, catching his shirttail. Then the fabric of his shirt disappeared, and Gertie was alone with Ms. Simms while the rest of her class was rehearsing with the new and not-improved Evangelina.

This was Gertie's punishment, and it was the cruelest and unusualest punishment in the history of punishment.

She wasn't Evangelina anymore. She wasn't the Cucumber or the Ham either. She wasn't the person who helped raise the curtain. She wasn't even the person who walked up and down the aisles with a flashlight, whacking noisy people and glaring at gum-chewers.

She was nothing.

She sank lower in her seat and opened and closed her locket.
Click-snap, click-snap, click-snap.

At the front of the room, Ms. Simms tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. As it turned out, it didn't matter whether or not Gertie had eaten the evidence, because adults didn't need evidence to punish a kid.

The principal had punished her without even hearing her side of the story. He didn't need witnesses. Even though everyone except Mary Sue swore on their lives that they hadn't seen any chocolates and that they had just found a pile of gold wrappers on the playground, which just sometimes happened, he still didn't believe them. He hadn't even
asked
Gertie if she had taken the chocolates. He just looked down his big greasy nose and bared his teeth and yelled, “Guilty!”

At least that was what it felt like.
Click-snap
went the locket.
Thump-bump
went Gertie's heels against the legs of her chair.
Click-snap.
The worst thing of all was that her mother was going to come to the play. And Gertie wouldn't have any part at all, and then her mother would know that she'd been right to leave Gertie, that she'd been right to get herself a new family, because Gertie wasn't the best fifth grader in the world. Not even close. Gertie was going to fail at her mission for the first time in her life.

“Why didn't you ask me if I'd taken the chocolates?” she blurted.

Ms. Simms glanced up from the papers she was grading. “I didn't ask,” she said, “because I already knew the answer.”

Gertie started to argue, but Ms. Simms cut her off.

“Gertie, you had melted chocolate from your forehead to your chin!”

“But you didn't
ask
me!” Gertie's voice scrabbled out of her throat. “I could've … I could've been framed. And nobody asked me
why
I would've taken them. Maybe I had a good reason.”

Ms. Simms leaned back in her chair, capped her pen, and placed it on the stack of grading. “I assumed you took them so you could”—she shrugged—“
eat
them.”

“Noooo,” said Gertie. “It's
hard
to eat that many chocolates! No one would eat that many chocolates for fun.” She took her hand off the desk and squeezed it into a fist. “It felt like my guts were about to explode, like—” Her fist burst open, fingers flinging out.

“Okay, okay,” said Ms. Simms, raising a hand. “Okay. Why did you do it, then?”

“Because…” Gertie's voice trailed off. “Because…” Now that someone had asked her, she realized it was one of those things that made perfect sense to her but was very hard to explain to someone else.

Ms. Simms waited.

“Because Mrs. Warner wasn't going to give me one!” Gertie said. “She gives a chocolate to everybody,
everybody
, who takes a note to the office. But when
I
took a note to the office, she didn't give me one, and that's not fair. It's not
fair
.” Gertie tried to put as much feeling into the word as possible so that Ms. Simms would know that what Mrs. Warner had done was utterly wrong. But Ms. Simms couldn't understand. She hadn't been there. She didn't know what it felt like.

“I understand,” said Ms. Simms.

“You don't under—” Gertie looked at her teacher. “What?”

“I do understand,” said Ms. Simms calmly. “It doesn't seem fair to you that Mrs. Warner gives chocolates to some students but not to others.” She paused. “And that
doesn't
seem nice. But they are
her
chocolates. So it's fair that she should do whatever she wants with her chocolates. Don't you think?”

Gertie didn't think so at all. “So it's fair that Mrs. Warner hates me?”

“Gertie,” groaned Ms. Simms, “Mrs. Warner doesn't hate you.”

“Then how come—”

“Maybe she was going to give you a chocolate if you'd waited a little longer,” said Ms. Simms. “Maybe she only gives them to people who ask for them. Maybe she had something else on her mind and she forgot.”

Gertie hadn't thought of that.

“All of those things are much more likely than Mrs. Warner hating you,” said Ms. Simms. “Trust me.”

Maybe, thought Gertie, Mrs. Warner didn't hate her. But that didn't change the fact that Ms. Simms didn't like her. “You said that you'd let me take a note to the office, but then you didn't.”

Ms. Simms tilted her head and frowned. “I had you take a note to the office just yesterday.”

“It was months ago,” said Gertie. “Right at the beginning of the school year, you said I could take a note to the office, but then you let Mary Sue go instead. And then you said that I could take the note next time, but you didn't ask me to.”

“I don't remember that,” said Ms. Simms. “But I'm sure you're right. I'm sorry, Gertie.”

Gertie opened her mouth and then closed it.

She wanted more than
I'm sorry.
She wanted Ms. Simms to admit that she liked Mary Sue better. She wanted Ms. Simms to say that she'd been
wrong wrong wrong
and that Gertie had been
right right right
.

“I thought the reason you never asked me to go to the office was because you didn't like me,” she said.

“Of course I like you, Gertie!” Ms. Simms sounded like she meant it, but it was hard to tell. “I like you very much. I like all of my students. Whether I ask them to go to the office or not.”

“Why do you choose some people more than others, then?” Gertie asked.

Ms. Simms laced her fingers together on top of her desk. “I don't put that much thought into it,” she said. Half her mouth twitched up, and she leaned toward Gertie. “Between you and me, I never choose Roy or Leo because I suspect they might get into trouble if I let them roam the halls alone.”

“Everybody wants to do it.” Gertie crossed her arms. “And you only let the same people do it over and over. You pick Mary Sue
all
the time. You never pick June. You never pick Junior. You never pick me.” She glanced down. “Except for yesterday.”

Ms. Simms was looking right at Gertie, and she had a thoughtful twist to her lips. “I guess I messed up, didn't I?”