The Flunking of Joshua T. Bates

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  Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books

  a division of Random House, Inc, New York

  Text copyright © 1984 by Susan Shreve

  Illustrations copyright © 1984 by Diane de Groat

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-78902-0

  Reprinted by arrangement with Alfred A Knopf Books for Young Readers

  v3.1

  For Caleb

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  One

  On Labor Day, driving home from the beach, Joshua’s mother told him that he was going to have to repeat third grade.

  “Nope, I’m not,” Joshua said when his mother told him quietly so his miserable older sister, in the back seat of the bright blue van, wouldn’t overhear, although of course she did.

  “I’ve already been in third grade once,” Joshua said very reasonably.

  “Of course you have, darling, but the teachers feel that you’re too young for your class. You need another year to mature.”

  “I am very mature,” Joshua said crossly. “What do they expect at nine years old. A beard?”

  “They expect you to be able to read, Josh,” Amanda said helpfully from her perch in the back seat. She was reading a fat book with small print just so Joshua’s father would say to his mother, “Isn’t Amanda a fine student.” And his mother would sing back, “Just wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.”

  “You’re a jerk, Amanda,” Joshua said to her. “I hope you grow up to be a third-grade teacher and that your hair falls out.”

  “I’m going to be a surgeon with long hair, which I’ll wear in a French twist when I’m operating on people.” Amanda crossed her legs like a woman, so she looked to Joshua very much like a forty-year-old reading teacher with buck teeth and sunglasses. He wanted to bop her but resisted.

  “I want to be a crook,” Joshua said fiercely.

  “That’s quite enough,” his father said crossly, settling into his customary bad humor for long car trips with children. “Get in the back seat, Josh.”

  Joshua did. He lay in the far back of the van and played with toy soldiers on his stomach. Georgianna, in her baby carseat, took a soldier and put it in her mouth. Then she took her wet pacifier with traces of applesauce from lunch and stuck it in Joshua’s mouth.

  “Josh baby,” she said happily.

  “You bet,” Amanda said.

  “Please,” their mother said.

  “Will Joshua have to repeat third grade all year?” Amanda, with her usual bad judgment, asked pleasantly.

  “Not any of the year,” Joshua said, taking matters into his own hands. He leaped on his sister’s back and tore one of the pages of her thick book. He was crayoning her face with purple Magic Marker when his mother scrambled between them in the back seat.

  “This is an awful time for Josh,” she said to Amanda. “Leave him alone.”

  “He doesn’t need to kill me; it’s not my fault he can’t read.”

  “He didn’t kill you,” their mother said.

  Very sweetly, she took Joshua in the front seat with her.

  “Sometimes I think about Amanda falling by accident into a sewer and floating to Delaware,” Joshua said to his mother as he leaned sadly against her and watched the trees whip by his window. Already the leaves were tipped with red, promising the beginning of school.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about third grade in June?” Joshua asked. “Didn’t you know then?”

  “I knew, but I didn’t want you to have all summer to be upset about it.”

  “If I’d known, I would have left home in June. Now I have only one night to pack up, and all my clothes are dirty.”

  “I’m sure that after the first week, you’ll find it’s not so bad to be in third grade again.”

  “It won’t be bad at all because I’m not going to be in third grade again. By Halloween I’ll probably be in East Africa.”

  Joshua climbed over the front seat, stepped on Amanda’s bare foot as hard as he could, and lay down on the back seat with his soldiers.

  The Bateses were on their way back home from the beach after two nearly perfect weeks at the ocean. Joshua had fished and swam and crabbed and sailed with his father. At night they had sat up late, eating dinner by candlelight, listening to the ocean pound like thunder on the dark shore. His father told stories. His mother read to them. Even Georgianna, chomping on her pacifier, listened. Some nights Amanda, sweeter than he’d ever seen her, played Chinese checkers or Monopoly or gin rummy until Joshua’s eyes, heavy with sleep, closed and his father carried him off to bed.

  Mornings at the beach, he’d occasionally wake up with a terrible dread like a black hole dug suddenly in his stomach while he was sleeping and remember school. And how he hated it. And how he’d have to go back and back and back year after year until he had feet the size of his father’s.

  Especially he had hated third grade.

  Mrs. Nice was the third-grade teacher. According to stories Joshua had heard from past third graders, she had been hired to teach at Mirch Elementary after she won first prize for Child Hating, Especially Boys, in a contest sponsored by Peanut Crunch Natural Cereals.

  “Josh-u-a,” Mrs. Nice had said to him every morning right after recess. “Did you happen to memorize your spelling words?”

  “Yes,” Joshua would begin. “I memorized my spelling.”

  “Next time you had better memorize all of the words and not just half of them,” she would say, smiling her grape jelly smile, flapping his spelling paper in her hand so no one in the class could possibly miss the big red 50 at the top. “Now, Joshua, could you read the paragraph you practiced for me?”

  And Joshua would read, blushing the color of apples, halting at every
word. The terrible class would giggle and whisper and give one another knowing looks. Even Billy Nickel, who couldn’t read either.

  “And what about your composition on a favorite holiday?”

  “I don’t have a favorite holiday. I love every single day I’m not in school and I hate every day that I am. I quit third grade.”

  And he had picked up his book, his spelling, his composition with “My Favorite Holiday” written on blue-lined paper, and dropped them in the teacher’s wastebasket at the front of the room.

  Of course, he was back in Mrs. Nice’s classroom the following day. His mother didn’t believe his stomachache or his flu symptoms or the tumor he was certain had developed in the back of his knee during the night. What his mother did believe, quite rightly, was that Mrs. Nice was not fond of children, especially boys, particularly Joshua T. Bates. And she told Mrs. Nice exactly that.

  In return, Joshua promised that he would stick it out in third grade and not quit again.

  He had meant he’d stick it out for one year. That was that. A deal’s a deal.

  “You lied to me about third grade,” he called to his mother from the back seat of the blue van. He was lying on his back with ten dead Confederate soldiers and two living ones on the battlefield of his stomach, “You promised.”

  That night his mother tucked him in bed, where he settled with his Matchbox cars, forty-six metal soldiers in different positions for shooting, and twelve stuffed animals.

  “Did you lay out your clothes for tomorrow morning?” his mother asked.

  “I won’t need clothes in East Africa. They wear bones in their heads and go naked.”

  His mother took pants and a polo shirt and socks from his top drawer and put them on the table next to his bed.

  “I’ll try to get you a chicken bone in the morning.” She kissed him good night. “I’m very sorry about third grade, Josh.”

  “Me too.” He turned on his side so the metal cars wouldn’t stick in his back. “Please don’t tell me life is full of these kinds of disappointments like you usually do.”

  His mother laughed and ruffled his hair. “At least you won’t have Mrs. Nice for third grade again. You’ll be in the other class with Mrs. Goodwin. Do you remember her?”

  “Oh, great,” Joshua moaned. “You’d have to be blind not to remember Mrs. Goodwin. She looks exactly like a military tank.”

  “I understand that for a military tank, she is a very good teacher,” his mother said. And then she explained to Joshua the reasons for his flunking the third grade. Some children, boys especially, she said, grow up more slowly than others. Which doesn’t mean they aren’t just as smart; in fact, one day they will catch up, maybe even sail ahead of their friends. But for right now, she told Joshua, he was one of those slow-developing children who hadn’t learned to read well enough to keep up with his classmates.

  “It’s a question of eye-hand coordination, Josh,” she said.

  “I was the best baseball player in third grade. My eyes and hands coordinate fine.”

  “For baseball but not for reading yet. Soon, I promise, you will be reading as well as you play baseball.”

  “Not with Mrs. Goodwin,” Joshua said crossly.

  “I think you’ll learn to like Mrs. Goodwin, Josh,” his mother said as she kissed him good night.

  “Not a chance,” Josh said.

  Joshua tried to put himself to sleep with wandering dreams of Mrs. Goodwin. In one dream she had arms like an octopus, only thousands of them, full of spelling books and remedial books and reading books, S.R.A. material. He couldn’t even see her face. In another dream she carried a pitchfork everywhere, even to the ladies’ room, with Joshua seated on the top of the spears. When she gave directions for tests, her voice had the low rattle of a city squirrel and he couldn’t understand a word she said, even if she repeated the directions.

  In the morning he didn’t eat breakfast or kiss his mother good-bye. When he saw Amanda examining her dimples in the hall mirror, he called her by a name he wasn’t allowed to use.

  His father, trying hard to be pleasant, said he would walk Joshua to school.

  “I think I’ll walk alone,” Joshua said, needing some time to plan his trip to East Africa.

  “We’ll both go with you,” his mother said brightly, guessing, as she always did, that he was not going to school at all but planning to leave the country.

  “Do you think I’ll stop by People’s Drugs and play Pac Man instead of going to school?” he asked as they walked down Rodman Street with his mother on one side and his father on the other so he felt like an escaped juvenile delinquent who couldn’t read.

  “It crossed my mind,” his mother said, taking his hand. “And in a way, Josh, I wouldn’t blame you.”

  Just to confirm his worst fears, there was Tommy Wilhelm walking into the fourth-grade classroom as Joshua walked into Mrs. Goodwin’s class with his parents.

  “Joshua T. Bates!” Tommy Wilhelm called at the top of his lungs. “You’re going into the wrong room.”

  Joshua didn’t answer.

  “What’s the matter, Josh? Did you flunk third grade?” Tommy Wilhelm shouted again.

  For one moment before he entered the third-grade classroom and saw Mrs. Priscilla Goodwin sitting behind her desk, Joshua had a terrible thought about what he would do to Tommy Wilhelm on the playground. And then Mrs. Goodwin got out of her chair and, without even a trace of laughter on her lips, walked toward Joshua and his parents.

  She looked, with her broad, compact body, exactly like a military tank, as he had remembered.

  “Brother,” Joshua said and before he knew it, his parents had slipped like ghosts out of the room and he was left there to face Mrs. Priscilla Goodwin advancing on him all by himself.

  Two

  Mrs. Goodwin was a small, square woman with curly gray hair, thick, wire-rimmed glasses, and a serious face which at that moment seemed to Joshua fierce enough to wipe out a battalion of metal soldiers with a single glance.

  “I’m Joshua Bates,” he said.

  “I know,” she replied, shaking his hand.

  On the bulletin board behind Mrs. Goodwin’s desk, there was a sign painted in bright colors: WELCOME TO THIRD GRADE.

  “I suppose you know that I’ve been in third grade once already,” Joshua said as he sat on the edge of one of the desks.

  “Today is the worst day in my life,” he added combatively, hoping she would consider herself at fault.

  “Mine too,” Mrs. Goodwin said matter-of-factly as she wrote the date on the blackboard. Joshua wanted immediately to ask her why, thinking perhaps it was his arrival in the third grade that had ruined her life as well as his, but the other children were beginning to arrive so he said nothing. He slid into one of the desks in the front of the room, took a pencil and paper out of his bookbag, and appeared to be hard at work on cartoon drawings of Star Wars figures. He hoped no one would recognize him.

  “That’s a good place for you to sit so I can keep an eye on you,” Mrs. Goodwin said as she placed a red reading book titled The Joy of Reading: 3 on his desk.

  Joshua didn’t bother to tell Mrs. Goodwin that he wasn’t going to be around to keep an eye on. She’d find out soon enough.

  Instead he looked at The Joy of Reading, which was the same book Mrs. Nice had made him read one terrible day after the next.

  “I’ve had this book already,” he said. “I know these stories by heart.”

  Mrs. Goodwin looked at him crossly over her wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Recite them,” she said.

  “Not by heart exactly. You know what I mean.” He leaned back in his chair and with his eyes closed, he imagined the pleasure of throwing the warm, soft tomatoes rotting in his mother’s garden at Mrs. Goodwin’s gray print dress.

  The classroom began to fill with children whose faces were familiar to Joshua from the playground but whose names he did not know, of course, since it was a matter of principle at Mirch Elementary to k
now only the names of the older children, never the younger ones. These children were smaller than Joshua had imagined possible. He felt like a huge, dumb grizzly bear, he told Amanda later. Not one of these third graders came to his shoulder.

  At the desk next to him was the smallest girl Joshua had ever seen in grade school, or so she seemed. She had pale pink cheeks, tight yellow curls, and a foolish-looking dress with aqua hippopotamuses all over it.

  “Are you actually in third grade?” he asked her. Certainly he wasn’t going to spend the year with a girl so young that she still wore zoo animals on her dresses.

  “Of course, dummy,” she said quite pleasantly. “I remember you from last year. You’ve been in third grade once already.”

  “No kidding,” the boy in back of her said. “Did you flunk or something? I have a cousin who flunked third grade twice.”

  “I didn’t flunk,” Joshua said, glaring at the tiny boy. “I’m just visiting. Tomorrow my family is moving to East Africa.”

  By the time the final bell for school had rung and Mrs. Goodwin’s class was full of the smallest people he had ever seen gathered together in the same room with him, Joshua had developed a serious stomachache and asked to be sent to the school nurse immediately.

  “After the spelling test,” Mrs. Goodwin said as she passed out paper for the first spelling test of the year.

  “I may be dead after the spelling test,” Joshua said, but he took the test anyway, scored a 50 as usual, and asked to be excused to go to the boys’ room.

  The hallway of Mirch Elementary was empty. He walked diagonally across to the fourth-grade classroom and looked through the window of the door. There, right in front of him looking like the enemy on TV, was Tommy Wilhelm, and behind Tommy was Andrew Porter, Joshua’s best friend from Mrs. Nice’s class, the only person in the whole world that at this moment in his life he liked a bit. Including his parents.

  Bravely, he opened the fourth-grade classroom door, walked up to the desk of a new teacher hired that year to teach fourth grade, and said that he had to see Andrew Porter immediately. It was an emergency.