The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman (14 page)

“One! Two!
One, two, three, four!
” he shouted, and kept on going.

“I changed my mind!” he hollered. “This love is fine! Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire!”

Across town, Bethesda Fielding sat at the computer in the living room, reading an email she had just gotten from Jamey Cullers, a friend from the
Mary Todd Lincoln Gazetteer
who was a year older. Bethesda had asked her when Melville gave the Floating Midterm last year, and Jamey had just emailed back: April 23.

That was soon. That was really soon. If Melville was planning to give the test on April 23 again this year, that meant Bethesda had about three weeks to make some sort of breakthrough, to make history colorful somehow for Tenny Boyer.

Bethesda got up, stretched, and headed to her room, trying to think creatively. Hypnosis? Could Tenny be hypnotized into learning history? Visual aids? What about visual aids? What if, every time he got an answer wrong, she poured Snapple on his head? She laughed, picturing Tenny’s unkempt bird’s nest of hair soaked in orange strawberry.

Plus, he got every question wrong—where was she going to get all that Snapple?

She shouldn’t even be thinking about this right now. She had four Pre-algebra problem sets, a science project to plan, and a mountain of English reading she was behind on. In her room, she picked up her book bag, and then put it down again.

She still needed to practice the encore.

She put the old Red Herrings seven-inch on the record player and sang along. “You can call it overrated, tell me everything has faded! ” Bethesda sang in the tough-girl rock-singer voice she’d been working on for weeks now. “But it’s not so complicated! It’s not so complicated! ” She jumped around her room, wiggling and bouncing with such enthusiasm that at the end of the second chorus she whacked her elbow against the door frame.

She kept right on singing. As she sang, she pictured Tenny beside her, his eyes half shut, his head bobbing, playing his guitar.

Just a few streets away, in a small, comfortable home that smelled pleasantly of meat loaf, a plump gray-haired woman named Sally Ann was working on a project. Sally Ann had three giant piles of photographs of her
various grandchildren, and it was well past time that she organized the pictures into albums. As Sally Ann spread the pictures across the table and wondered where to begin, her husband, Harry, came whistling into the room. She looked him up and down. “Is that ‘Moonlight in Vermont’? ”

“Why, so it is,” her husband answered with a mischievous smile. Sally Ann set down her glue stick and looked squarely at Harry.

“All right, you,” she said sternly. “What are you plotting? ”

“Why, Sally Ann, I am neither plotting nor planning! I’ve just been figuring out my schedule, that’s all. I thought I might give my Floating Midterm a bit early this year. Like, this Friday.”

“Oh? And have you cleared it with the other teachers? Is there anything else on the schedule it might interfere with? ”

Mr. Melville’s eyebrows danced merrily. “Oh, I don’t think so,” he said with a dry chuckle. “Nothing important.”

“What S worse
than dressing as a giant hot dog?”

“I’m sorry, Principal Van Vreeland. Is that a riddle of some kind? ”

“No, it is not a riddle, you ignoramus! ” hissed Principal Van Vreeland at Jasper. “Time is running out! The Choral Corral is
tomorrow!
And I have yet to settle on the final terms of my bet with Principal Cohn!”

“Oh, yes, right,” said Jasper under his breath. “That.”

“So here is my current thinking: When they lose, Principal Cohn has to go to school in a giant hot-dog costume. For a week. No! A month! And here’s the best part: On the back of the hot-dog costume, it’ll say
GROVER CLEVELAND KISSES MARY TODD LINCOLN’S BUNS.”

“Ah,” answered Jasper noncommittally.

“What? ” Principal Van Vreeland said sharply. “See,
buns,
like, hot-dog buns, but also—”

“I get the joke, Principal Van Vreeland. But presumably, if
our side
loses the Choral Corral, then
you
would be the one who has to wear the giant hot-dog costume.”

“Lose?” Principal Van Vreeland brayed laughter. “We can’t lose!”

“But—”

“But nothing,” the principal interrupted. “Go find me a hot-dog costume! ”

“Very good, Principal Van Vreeland.” Jasper paused at the door. “At least the losing principal’s humiliation will be confined to school grounds.”

He closed the office door behind him, but not before he heard his boss say, “School grounds, eh? Hmmmmm …”

Jasper winced and scurried down the hall.

At that
very moment, Bethesda was sitting in Mr. Melville’s class, thinking,
Why?

And then she thought:
Stop it, Bethesda!

And then she thought:
Okay, but—why?

It was the mystery. It wouldn’t leave her alone. The same question that had been tugging at her since that night in the food court, when this whole strange adventure began.

Why the deception? Why have Tenny plan the rock show?

She had promised herself not to try to figure it out, to leave it alone, but her mystery-solving mind kept circling back around, dragging the mystery from the closet, saying,
Solve this! Solve it!
And now it was Thursday: the Choral Corral was only one day away. Soon this chapter of her life would be closed forever, and Bethesda feared she would never know the answer.

“What? Come on!”

Suddenly Bethesda realized that someone was yelling. Actually, everybody was yelling.

“But—but, Mr. Melville, you can’t! ” “We have to practice! ”

The voices of the students were outraged, horrified. “You
can’t
give the test tomorrow! ”

Mr. Melville, on the other hand, had never sounded so calm and pleasant: “Oh, but I think I can.”

Bethesda looked around. First-period Social Studies was in an uproar. And then she saw the words on the board, scrawled in thick, menacing all-caps:
FLOATING MIDTERM. TOMORROW.

Hayley Eisenstein waved her hand at Mr. Melville, spit flying out of the corners of her mouth. “The Choral Corral is tomorrow!”

“It
is?
” Mr. Melville tried to feign surprise, but the particular angle of his eyebrows left little doubt that this cruel bit of scheduling was no accident. “Well, I don’t expect anyone to be cramming this evening. If you’ve been preparing all along, as is your responsibility, the sudden arrival of the midterm should cause no surfeit of anxiety.”

Everybody groaned. No one in seventh-grade Social
Studies knew what the word
surfeit
meant, but they’d all be cramming like heck tonight, whether Mr. Melville expected it or not.

The mystery of Ms. Finkleman disappeared with a
poof
from Bethesda’s mind, replaced by a far more urgent problem. She craned around to look at Tenny Boyer, and saw in his eyes what she felt in her heart: Sheer panic.
They were out of time.
The test was tomorrow, and Tenny was going to fail. As Bethesda watched, he shut his eyes and shook his head helplessly, and Bethesda could just imagine what he was seeing: The cold metal gates of St. Francis Xavier Young Men’s Education and Socialization Academy, swinging opening with a chilling creak to beckon him inside.

As the bell rang and Mr. Melville’s students filed miserably into the hallway, still groaning, a plan materialized in Bethesda’s mind. There was one way she could save Tenny Boyer. But was it really the sort of thing that she was capable of?

The plan followed Bethesda through the rest of her day, from class to class to lunch and back to class and then home. She tried to ignore it, to order it away, but the plan only grew more insistent, followed her more closely, got louder and louder in her mind.

At dinner, the plan was still there, haunting her—tormenting her. She ignored it and tried to eat.

“Hello? McFuzz? Gertrude McFuzz? Are you in there?”

“What? Yeah, Dad.”

“I said, did you enjoy your lasagna? ” He pronounced it la-zag-nah, but Bethesda didn’t laugh. “I thought it was pretty grand.”

“Right. Hey, Dad, can I be excused from the dishes? I’ve gotta get to the library.”

Bethesda’s father shrugged as he stood to clear the dishes from the table. “Okey smokey, pokey. Just be home by nine, okay? Your mom is going to want to say good night. And you’ve got some serious day tomorrow.”

“Yup.”

Bethesda grabbed her backpack off the big chair in the living room where she had slung it.

“Oh, and before you go,” her father said. “Your friend Shelly called.”

“She did?”

“Yep. Oh, what did she say? She said please, please bring her copy of the lyrics tomorrow, because she wrote her bass part on it.”

Bethesda, who had been at the front door, gathering
up her bike helmet and shin pads, stopped, confused. “But Shelly’s not even in my band.”

“Oh, then it must have been the other one. Suzie. Man, I can
never
tell those two apart. Even in person. Forget about on the phone! ”

Standing at the front door, her bike helmet dangling from her hand, Bethesda opened her mouth wide.
Oh my god,
Bethesda thought suddenly.
Of course!

“
You know, there was this guy I went to college with whose voice sounded exactly like Beaker from the
Muppet Show,”
her dad continued. “Have I ever shown you the
Muppet Show?
Anyway, this kid …”

While her dad rambled on, Bethesda stood frozen, mouth wide, as the pieces flew into place in her mind.
Of course,
she said to herself again.
Of course!

She had solved the mystery of Ms. Finkleman. Why she had never told anyone about her rock-star past. Why she had secretly put Tenny in charge of the rock show, instead of doing it herself.

Her dad was still talking. “You know what they should do, those two? They should get totally different haircuts. Like, if Shelly had a mullet, and Suzie had a Mohawk, a person might be able to keep them straight. Will you do me a favor and tell them that for me?”

“Yes, Dad,” said Bethesda with a goofy grin. “I’ll tell them.”

Bethesda hopped on her bike and gave a mighty holler of happiness as she pedaled to the Wilkersholm Memorial Public Library.
It wasn’t that Ms. Finkleman was hiding the fact that she was Little Miss Mystery … that wasn’t it at all!

“Yes! ” she shouted, not even looking around to make sure no one was listening. “I’m a
genius!”

She turned into the parking lot and carefully chained up her bike. There was just one mystery left:
What was she going to do about Tenny Boyer?

That night,
at precisely eight o’clock, Chef Pilverton popped out of his hiding place in the food court in the Pilverton Mall and pleaded, in his lusty French accent, for everyone to
“Laissez les bon temps rouler! Avec pizza!”

But there was no one there to hear him. No one, at least, from the seventh-grade class at Mary Todd Lincoln Middle School. No one was pigging out on Boardwalk Fries, or shopping for necklaces at the Jangle Room, or deciding among the various schlocky sequels on offer at the cineplex. They were all at home, and though the Choral Corral was tomorrow at third period, they weren’t practicing their instruments. They were studying.

Chester Hu sat in the center of a giant pile of disorganized notebooks and scraps of paper, picking them up at random and trying to decipher his own handwriting. “Ugh! ” he shouted, every time he couldn’t
understand his own sloppy scrawl. “I stink! ”

On the other side of Chester’s bedroom, Victor Glebe lay on a beanbag chair with a stack of flash cards as thick as
War and Peace,
and (judging by Victor’s blank facial expression) equally incomprehensible.

Suzie and Shelly Schwartz sat on either side of their kitchen table playing an elaborate test-preparation game they had invented involving a big-size bag of Chewy Spree. Basically, in the center of the table was a giant pile of Chewy Spree, and if the opposing Schwartz sister asked you a question you couldn’t answer, you had to put a Chewy Spree in the pile; if you got it right, you got to take one out. Suzie was enjoying a slight lead (Shelly always won when they studied for math), until the game came to an abrupt conclusion when the Schwartzes’ doberman, Sammy Schwartz, leaped up on the table and ate the entire scoring system.

Meanwhile, at the Wilkersholm Memorial Public Library, Pamela Preston, Natasha Belinsky, and Todd Spolin had taken over a long oak table in the center of Young Adult. While Natasha and Todd took turns quizzing each other, Pamela twisted a finger through her blond curls, a sour expression on her face.

“Okay, Pamela,” Natasha said to Pamela, holding up a flash card. “What river did George Washington cross on Christmas Eve 1776?”

“I mean, honestly? Rock and roll isn’t even music,” Pamela said. Natasha peered at the back of the card confusedly. “Especially punk. It’s more just, like, noise. Noise to a beat.”

“Pam! Come on! ” said Todd, raising his voice enough to make the librarian look up sharply. “Are you seriously still talking about this?”

“Yeah,” Natasha agreed. “We have to study. Stop being annoyed about the rock show for three seconds and, like, focus. Ooh, hey, are those bar-b-que?”

“They are,” said Todd, passing Natasha his extra-large bag of Soy Crisps, which made a loud crinkling noise. The librarian glared at them. Todd stuck out his tongue and stuffed the chips in his book bag.

“You know what else I’ve been thinking?” Pamela continued, completely ignoring her friends’ attempts to study. “The
worst
part is that this whole rock nonsense would never have happened if it weren’t for Bethesda’s Special Project, which, technically, didn’t meet the requirements of the assignment. It was supposed to be solve a mystery in your
own
life, not a mystery in
somebody
else’s
life.”