The Candy Smash (7 page)

She looked at Evan. He was leaning over the top of his desk, his head resting in his hand, staring at her. He gave just a little shake of his head, as if to say,
What are you doing now, Jess?

Then David said, "Don't you want to know?"

"Know what?" asked Ryan.

"Know what everyone else is thinking? About boys and girls and love?"

That got most of the class laughing and calling out.

"Love!" hooted Scott Spencer, slapping his desk. "Oooh, lo-o-o-o-ve!"

"What's so funny about love?" asked Megan. "Love is a good thing."

"Yeah," said Salley. "Everybody should love everybody."

"I don't love anyone," said Christopher, "and no one can make me."

"So, what's the big deal?" asked Jessie. "Just write that down in the survey and hand it in."

"No way. What if I'm like ... you know ... the only one?" He looked around the classroom, and his eyes got big and he wasn't laughing anymore.

The class grew quiet when he said that. It was as if each kid was thinking the same thing:
Am I the only one?

David broke the silence. "So—don't you want to know?"

"It'll only take a couple of seconds," said Jessie. "But we've got to be quick because Mrs. Feeney is going to come back any minute, and I guarantee you she won't let us do this survey."

If there was one thing that united the kids in 4-O at that moment, it was their dislike of Mrs. Feeney.

"Just do it," said Megan, and she began to fill in her survey.

"Yeah," said Evan. "Do it."

Everyone started writing, and then a competition broke out over who could fold the paper the most number of times. (Six was the best anyone could manage.) Jessie quickly filled out a survey herself. Her answers were easy: "no," "no," "no idea." She stuffed hers in the box along with everyone else's.

"Hurry up!" said several of the kids as Maddy Garber, the last one, slid her paper into the sealed-up shoebox.

Jessie pressed the shoebox to her chest. "I solemnly promise that I will guard this box
with my life
for the rest of the day. I will keep it with me at all times, and I will report the results to you on Monday, Valentine's Day."

"She's coming!" shouted Jack, who had peeked through the glass of the door after sharpening his pencil.

Mrs. Feeney walked in and found the entire class of 4-O seated silently at their desks, all eyes staring at her expectantly.

"Well, I guess we can get started now," she said, as if she'd been waiting for
them
instead of the other way around. "Hopefully Mrs. Overton will be back after lunch. She had to take her cat to the vet."

"Langston?" asked Megan, looking around at the other kids in her desk group. Several kids started to talk, and Jessie's eyes couldn't help jumping to the laminated photo of Langston over the door with a speech bubble coming out of his mouth that read
BE KIND AND DO YOUR WORK
!

"Quiet!" barked Mrs. Feeney. "Some kind of an emergency, I guess. There's no lesson plan, I know that." She stared glumly at Mrs. Overton's neat desk.

Oh, brother,
thought Jessie. Mrs. Feeney practically needed to be dragged through the day. "We start with Morning Meeting," she said.

"And then the Poem of the Day," added Evan. Jessie frowned. She'd been hoping they could just skip that and get right to math.

"Poetry?" said Mrs. Feeney, raising her eyebrows. "Well, I don't know anything about poetry."

"It's okay," said Megan. "We'll teach you."

The class moved, fairly quietly, to the rug area and sat on the floor.

After Morning Meeting, Salley turned the page on the easel to reveal the Poem of the Day. Mrs. Feeney called on Ray to read the poem out loud.

 

T
OAD
by Valerie Worth

 

When the flowers
Turned clever, and
Earned wide
Tender red petals
For themselves,

 

When the birds
Learned about feathers,
Spread green tails,
Grew cockades
On their heads,

 

The toad said:
Someone has got
To remember
The mud, and
I'm not proud.

 

There was silence. Mrs. Overton had taught them to let a poem sink in before talking about it. But Mrs. Feeney didn't know about that, so she was the first to comment. "You see. That's what I mean. It doesn't make any sense to me. I'm just not a poetry person."

Well, Jessie wasn't a poetry person, either, but she thought it was pretty weak of Mrs. Feeney to just give up without even trying. She looked at Evan. He was reading the poem again to himself, his lips moving silently, shaping the strange words.

Megan raised her hand. "The flowers are kind of selfish," she said. "They're just thinking about themselves."

"What's a cockade?" asked Christopher.

"I have no idea," said Mrs. Feeney. She didn't move from her seat.

"We have a dictionary, you know," said Jessie.

"Well, feel free to look it up, if you want," said Mrs. Feeney.

Jessie stood up, exasperated, as Evan raised his hand and asked, "Why does someone have to remember the mud?" Jessie noticed he wasn't directing his question at Mrs. Feeney. He was looking at the other kids in 4-O.

Salley answered. "Because mud is one of the things you take for granted. No one bothers to
remember
it. But it's important. At least to a toad."

"Toads love mud!" said Malik.

"Hey, it's a love poem!" said Tessa. "A love poem for mud." And instead of laughing, the kids in 4-O nodded their heads and agreed. It turns out you could even write a love poem about mud.

"A cockade is a fancy thing you wear on your hat to show that you're better than everyone else," said Jessie, her finger still marking the spot in the dictionary—the
grown-up
dictionary—that Mrs. Overton kept on the shelf beside her desk. "It's a sign of rank." She looked particularly at Mrs. Feeney, but Mrs. Feeney didn't seem to be listening. She had her eye on the clock.

 

At recess, Jessie carried the box of surveys with her to the playground and guarded it safely. Three more days until Valentine's Day. Tomorrow, Saturday, and Sunday. Only three days to calculate the results of the survey and write her article. Kids kept wandering over to her on the playground. It was as if they were ants drawn to a big sticky spot of spilled lemonade on the sidewalk. They couldn't keep away.

But as soon as the class went back inside, they forgot all about the surveys. There was something much more interesting on their desks: more candy hearts! And the messages on these were just as personal as the other ones.

"Mine says
SMART GUY
," said David, waving his box in the air.

"Hey, look!" said Taffy Morgan. "Mine says
TWINKLE TOES
," and she held up one foot to show the glittery shoes she was wearing that day.

Jessie's hearts said
GO-GETTER
on them. It was as if the hearts were telling her to spring into action now that there was something to investigate!

Obviously, Mrs. Overton hadn't put these candy hearts on their desks. So who had? Jessie whipped out her reporter's notebook and began to write down the names of everyone in the classroom and the messages on their hearts. As she made her list, she wondered:
Will there be more hearts tomorrow?

 

Mrs. Feeney didn't know the new rule about no candy in the classroom, but she did know her old rule about no noise in the classroom, and she promptly threatened to send all of them to the principal's office if they didn't "pipe down and put a cork in it." She handed out math worksheets and said the first person to make a sound would miss lunch recess. Jessie thought that sounded pretty good. She'd rather stay inside where it was warm and work on her newspaper than go out on the playground and guard the survey box. So as soon as she finished the problems on the page, she got up to sharpen her pencil, but wandered over to Evan's desk. He was hunched over his math paper with a scowl on his face.

"What do your hearts say?" Jessie whispered, pointing to the box that sat on the corner of his desk. The box was open and a couple of hearts had spilled out.

"Nothing," he muttered. He grabbed the box and tried to scoop up the two stray hearts, but accidentally knocked one to the floor. Jessie stooped down to pick it up, and before she handed it back to Evan, she quickly read what it said.

 

cliché
(n) an overused expression that lacks power because it is so familiar; for example: "as bright as a penny" or "love comes in all shapes and sizes" or "one smart cookie"

 

After school, the guys wouldn't stop teasing Evan about being in love with Megan.

"I am not in love with Megan Moriarty!" he shouted at them as he pedaled his bike away from the playground, furious and embarrassed. Suddenly he felt that there were so many things he was ashamed of. He was ashamed that he liked Megan. He was ashamed that he liked poetry.

And he was ashamed that he was the only one in the class who got store-bought candy hearts when everyone else got special messages written just for them.

When it had happened the first time on Monday, he hadn't thought much about it. Candy was candy. Who cared if his hearts just said
FOR YOU
? But now it seemed as if whoever was giving out the candy was purposely pointing out that he was not very special. It made him feel the way he did when his grandmother forgot him but remembered everybody else.

On the way home, he rode right by Megan, and he didn't even say hello. He rode fast, as if he didn't see her right there on the sidewalk looking at him, one hand raised and smiling.

And why didn't Jessie know whether Megan had drawn the heart in the girls' bathroom? How hard was it to find that out?

"Just ask her, for Pete's sake," he'd said to Jessie in the hallway after recess.

But Jessie had waved the taped-up survey box in his face and said, "I'm a little busy, you know!"

He decided to loop the long way home so that he could pedal out some of his frustration. More than anything else, he wished he had basketball practice that afternoon. But it was Thursday, so no practice. By the time he got home, Jessie was already there. They walked through the front door together and found Mrs. Treski in the kitchen, pouring hot water from the kettle into a mug.

"Grab the mail, will you?" she said, so Evan doubled back and pulled a stack of letters and catalogs out of the mailbox by the front door.

"I've got stuff to do," said Jessie, heading straight for the stairs. "No interruptions!"

"Yeah, right," said Evan, dropping the letters on the kitchen counter.

"What's that about?" asked Mrs. Treski, flipping through the mail.

"Just some extra credit project she's doing," said Evan glumly.

"Hmm. That's Jessie. Hey, look. Here's something for you." She held up a small square envelope with red lettering on it. Evan's heart did a 360 backflip. Had Megan sent him a valentine? Should he open it in front of his mother? Did he even want it?

His mom held up another envelope that looked exactly the same. "And here's one for Jessie." She looked puzzled. "I wonder why..."

Evan tore open the envelope, not sure what he hoped to find inside. It was a card with a picture of Snoopy hugging Woodstock, and the message inside read, "Love comes in all shapes and sizes."

"It's from Grandma," he said.

"I know. I could tell from the handwriting."

"Look what she wrote," said Evan, holding out the card. "Dear Evan, I love you and miss you and think of you every day. Hope you have a great Valentine's Day. See you soon! Love, Grandma."

Evan looked at his mom, and they both started to laugh. It was hard not to, living with Grandma. Her brain worked in crazy ways these days. Sometimes she thought she was twenty years old. Sometimes she forgot she lived in the same house with the Treskis. Sometimes she didn't even remember who they were. And sometimes she was just fine.