No Talking (11 page)

T
here were two hundred and twenty-seven green tile squares on the hallway floor between the cafeteria and the school office. Dave counted each one to keep from thinking about what was going to happen next. But he thought about it anyway.

Mrs. Chaplin pointed at the principal's door. “Go right in.”

Dave knocked. He knew he didn't have to, but it bought him another two seconds of delay.

Mrs. Hiatt said, “Come in,” and Dave thought,
At least she's not using her bullhorn.

He opened the door, and she was standing with her back to him, looking out the windows into the school courtyard.

Dave blurted out, “I'm sorry,” and he said that because he knew he shouldn't have yelled at the
principal, even if he had been right. Which he still believed he was. He also apologized because he hoped it might help save his life.

Mrs. Hiatt turned around, and Dave was shocked to see the look on her face. Because she wasn't mad. She almost looked like she'd been crying, and her nose was pink.

She shook her head. “That's why I sent for you, so
I
could say that. I'm the one who got angry. And I yelled first, and I set a terrible example. So I hope
you'll forgive me.
”

Dave couldn't remember the last time a grownup had apologized to him. And to have the
principal
saying she was sorry, well, he could barely manage a nod at her.

She nodded back, and then paused and said, “So, what are we going to do about this . . . situation?”

“Um . . . not sure,” Dave said.

She frowned. “Please, you can talk freely in here. None of your friends can hear us.”

Dave shook his head. “Honor system.”

Mrs. Hiatt's eyebrows went up. “Oh? Of course. Very admirable. Well, maybe you can answer some questions for me, just to get started.”

Dave said, “Sure.”

“First of all, how did all this get going? Who started it?”

Dave smiled. “Mahatma Gandhi.” “Pardon me?” Mrs. Hiatt said.

Dave said, “He stopped talking.”

The principal said, “And someone wanted to try that here, at school, right?”

Dave nodded, and pointed at himself. “All my fault.”

“I see,” she said. “How did you learn about Gandhi?”

He said, “Social studies report.” “And why did he stop talking?”

Dave shrugged. “To think more.” “But you're not keeping
silent
, not totally—why?” Dave thought a moment and then said, “Respect. For school,” which he knew was going to make him sound like a goody-goody. But it was true. He and his friends weren't trying to shut down the school. Not at all.

Mrs. Hiatt nodded slowly and said, “Oh.”

She seemed to be out of questions.

And during that three or four seconds of silence, an idea jumped into Dave's mind—but he pushed it out. It was too outrageous.

But the idea bounced back into his head, and this
time Dave just blurted it out. “Want to join?”

Mrs. Hiatt bunched her eyebrows together. “What do you mean?”

“Join—stop talking.”

She looked at Dave as if he had just told her to put on a grass skirt and dance the hula on the roof of a school bus. “Don't be silly—I'm the
principal
. Do you have any idea how many people I have to speak to? Every single day?”

Dave pointed at a notepad on her desk. “May I?”

She nodded, and he wrote, “You can say only three words in a row. And only if a teacher or a grown-up talks to you first. Except you can talk to a kid first. Because you're sort of a teacher. And no talking at all outside of school—honor system. And the whole thing's almost over anyway—just until tomorrow.”

Then Dave smiled up at her and said, “It's . . . interesting.”

Mrs. Hiatt shook her head. “I could never—” Dave put up his hand like a traffic officer: “There! Stop: three.”

Mrs. Hiatt smiled—and it wasn't a principal smile. Dave could tell. She was smiling a real person smile.

She smiled because she realized Dave had offered her something important. Just five minutes earlier
she had acted like—like a monster. But she wasn't, not really.

Still, she
had
behaved terribly. Everyone in the cafeteria knew that, kids and grown-ups both. And news like that spreads quickly. So somehow she needed to remind everyone that she
wasn't
a monster—fast.

And Dave had just offered her a way to become human again. Because it's a well-known fact that monsters do
not
have a sense of humor.

She tore Dave's sheet off the notepad, bent over the desk, and did some writing of her own.

She stepped quickly into the office and handed Mrs. Chaplin the paper.

The secretary read it over quickly and said, “And I should . . .”

The principal held up one finger and said, “Type.” Then she held up two fingers and said, “Duplicate.” And then she held up three fingers and said, “Distribute.”

And Mrs. Chaplin said, “Got it.”

Then, turning to Dave, the principal said, “Ready, set, go.”

Dave's head was spinning, but he managed to say, “Where?”

She was already out the office door, and over her shoulder Mrs. Hiatt said, “To the cafeteria.”

A
t this point, it might be fun to tell how Dave followed the principal back to the cafeteria, and how Mrs. Hiatt apologized to the whole fifth grade—by trading three-word phrases back and forth with Dave. Who also apologized.

And describing the looks on the faces of all those fifth graders in the cafeteria, not to mention Mrs. Marlow and the rest of the staff—that might be fun too.

Or it might be interesting to tell how Mrs. Hiatt called an all-school assembly five minutes later by chiming the school intercom and then saying, “Everyone: auditorium. Hurry!” And how all the teachers in every grade were given five minutes at the assembly to explain the new no-talking rules to their students, and how loud and confusing it was as they did that; and then how completely quiet it got
when the principal announced, “Silence starts . . . NOW!”

And it might be enlightening to explain how Mrs. Hiatt had changed the contest, so that the kids in kindergarten through fourth were competing grade against grade to see who could say the fewest illegal words during the next twenty-three hours—and why she thought her way was a better idea than boys against girls.

And it might be thought-provoking to explain how Dave felt about all this—how he felt that he was sort of like Gandhi, and how Mrs. Hiatt was sort of like the British Empire, and how he felt like there had been a great victory, “with liberty and justice for all”—which included Mrs. Hiatt herself.

And Mr. Burton—there's a lot that could be told about him, because he went completely stratospheric. He spent the last twenty-four hours of the contest scribbling down notes, taking photos, and using a little handheld recorder to capture as many three-word sentences as possible. He collected so much great material that he began thinking that he could not only write that paper for his Human Development course, he could practically write a whole
book
about the way the kids and teachers at Laketon Elementary School had
changed the way they expressed themselves, changed their view of language itself—what it is, and how it works, and how communication can take so many different forms.

And speaking of human development, it might be fun to explore why the very youngest kids could not even
imagine
how to go without something as amazing and powerful as talking, not even for ten minutes—which is why the whole kindergarten was immediately excused from the activity.

And how about Thursday morning—when the boys reported zero honor system word-goofs and the girls reported only one? Telling how Dave and Lynsey reacted to
that
news would be revealing.

And then it would certainly be fun to peek at the challenges Mrs. Hiatt faced as she kept to a strict diet of three words at a time. On Wednesday afternoon, and again on Thursday morning, she talked with parents, with the superintendent, with the principals of other schools, with the electrician who arrived to repair the milk cooler, and, of course, with her teachers and with hundreds of kids—all of whom thought it was great to have a principal who just might be a little bit crazy.

In fact, the story could jump a whole week ahead, or even months ahead to see the way the fifth
graders completed the school year as kinder, more careful talkers. And thinkers.

Because there's absolutely more to tell. There's
always
more.

But, as tempting as it is, it's not the time to tell about all that. Because this is the time to jump right to fifth-grade lunch on Thursday, right to that point when the
original
contest was coming to an end, right to that moment of truth when the boys and the girls were getting ready to compare their final scores.

Because with all the goodwill and the happy vibes that swirled out of Mrs. Hiatt's change of heart, plus the excitement of having the whole school go quiet, you might think that somehow the fifth-grade boys-against-girls contest didn't matter anymore.

But it did.

Remember when Dave stood up and shouted at the principal on Wednesday? Did you think no one was counting? Not true:
Everyone
was counting. Dave had said thirty words—grand words, brave and true.
However
. . . all but three of them were illegal.

At 12:14, one minute before the end of the contest, the cafeteria was silent. Every fifth grader was
watching the second hand on the big clock. And so were all the fifth-grade teachers. And Mrs. Hiatt. And the custodian. And the school secretary, and the school nurse, too. No one wanted to miss this moment in the history of the Unshushables.

Dave and Lynsey sat across from each other at the same lunch table, ready for the big tally. Dave dug around in his back pocket and found the crumpled sheet listing all the points against the girls. And Lynsey pulled her little red notebook and a pencil out of her backpack, and she bent over it, adding and scribbling away.

Glancing down, Dave saw something poking out of the top pouch of Lynsey's backpack: a huge permanent marker, a red one.

And Dave had no trouble at all imagining a big
L
on his forehead. Because he already knew the final scores for both teams, and he was sure Lynsey did too.

With just fifteen seconds to go in the silent cafeteria, Lynsey stood up, looked down at the red notebook, took a deep breath, and—she talked. “I have to say this. My whole opinion changed. About boys. You really did the honor system great. And being quiet? Also great, everyone together. So . . . thanks.”

And then the second hand pointed straight up,
and it was twelve fifteen, and the contest was over.

A yell went up that nearly peeled the tiles off the floor. Kids jumped out of their seats and ran and stood bouncing face-to-face with groups of friends, and everyone jabbered faster and louder than human beings ever should, laughing and nodding and telling everybody
everything
they were thinking and feeling.

And the louder it got, the louder everyone had to talk to be heard above the rising tumult, and the sound spiraled up toward that point where dogs run and stick their heads under a sofa.

And amid the burst of joy and noise and confusion, Lynsey shouted to Dave, “What's the official count?”

Dave nodded, cupped his hands around his mouth, and bellowed, “Forty-seven. Against the girls.”

Lynsey looked at her notebook. She didn't try to talk—it was too loud for that. She turned the notebook around, and at the bottom of the page a number was circled. Seventy-four against the boys—a huge defeat.

Lynsey gave him an odd little smile, and Dave was ready for the teasing to begin. She shouted, “You didn't count?”

He was confused. “Count? Count what?” Lynsey yelled as loud she could. “What I said, at the end.”

Dave shook his head. “What?” The sound around them was deafening.

Lynsey flipped a page, and then turned the red notebook around so Dave could see it. And there was her whole little speech, written out word for word. The last word was “thanks,” and above it she'd written a number: twenty-seven.

Dave nodded slowly as he stared at the speech and saw what Lynsey had done. He did the math in his head . . .
seven plus seven, and carry the one
. . . She had made the contest an exact tie—seventy-four points for each team.

And their private war? To see who got to label the other a loser?

Also a tie—her twenty-seven words matched the illegal ones he had yelled at Mrs. Hiatt.