The Candy Smash (6 page)

 

He started moving the words around. He tore one word in half.

 

 

He lumped together all the words that started with
f

 

 

He gathered up the short
u
sounds.

 

 

Then he grouped the long
i
sounds.

 

 

He added more words and tossed out others. Half an hour later, he leaned back in his chair and looked at the poem on his desk.

He liked it. He felt proud of the words on the page.

From his top desk drawer, he pulled out a piece of paper and quickly copied the poem over. He was worried Jessie would come knocking again before he finished. But when he was done, he noticed that in his haste he'd misspelled three words. When he tried to fix them, his poem looked like a mess.

He took another piece of paper from his desk drawer and copied the whole poem over again, slowly and neatly, in his best handwriting. Then he put the good copy in his desk drawer, buried under several notebooks and old copies of
Mad
magazine, and crumpled up the messy draft and threw it in his trash can.

survey
(n) a series of questions that investigates the opinions or experiences of a group of people

 

Jessie was irritated. The color photocopier in her mom's office wasn't working. At least, it wasn't printing color copies. A yellow light blinked, telling her that one of the color ink tanks was empty.

To Jessie, this was a tragedy. The wings of the butterflies were supposed to be bright blue. The hearts were meant to be red. The delicate centers of the daisies were colored a buttery yellow.

In disgust, she punched the "copy" button and printed out twenty-seven copies of her survey in boring black and white.

Then she packed the special survey box she'd made into her backpack and walked out the door.

On the playground, she stayed apart from the others, waiting for the bell that would signal it was time to line up. Megan, of course, was late as usual, and Jessie didn't know if the other girls were mad at her, too. She decided not to ask them. Evan had explained this to her: asking people if they were mad at you sometimes made them even madder.

Jessie wasn't the only one keeping to herself that morning. David Kirkorian was also on his own, wandering along the edge of the playground, picking up rocks, and talking to himself. Eventually, he worked his way around to where Jessie was standing, waiting for the bell.

"What's that?" he asked, pointing at the stack of papers that Jessie held to her chest.

"Nothing," said Jessie.

"It can't be nothing," said David. "Just say 'None ya' if you don't want to talk about it."

"Okay, none ya."

"Why?" asked David. "Is it a secret?"

Jessie thought about that. It
wasn't
a secret. But it was
about
a secret, or really a whole lot of secrets. Jessie had that uncomfortable feeling that she was about to mess around in something she didn't really understand. Maybe David could help her figure it out.

"Well, it's a survey. A bunch of questions. Everyone in the class fills one out—
anonymously
—and then I add everything up and hand out the results. In my newspaper. It's going to be the front-page story."

"A survey about what?" He seemed really interested, and Jessie felt encouraged. Maybe this
was
a good idea.

"Love," she said. "The survey asks if the person likes anyone, you know,
like
-likes.
Anonymously.
Obviously, no one's going to say out loud if they like someone else." She looked at David closely to see if he agreed with this statement.

"Obviously," he said, looking up at the sky.

"And then there are some other questions, too. You want to see?"

"Sure," said David, but he shrugged one shoulder casually as if to say that he didn't think the topic was really worth talking about.

Still, when she handed him the top sheet from her stack, he readjusted his glasses and started to read with lightning speed. When he got to the bottom of the page, his eyes went right back to the top and started reading again.

"Mrs. Overton is never going to let you pass this out," said David, giving the sheet back to Jessie as if it were a losing hand in gin rummy.

"I'm going to convince her," said Jessie. "It's my extra credit project for math: finding practical ways to use decimals. She can't argue with that."

"Yes, she can," said David, his lip curling just a little at one end. "She's the teacher. She can do whatever she wants."

This was so true! Teachers did get to do whatever they wanted. Still, Mrs. Overton was pretty fair. Fairer than most. She
couldn't
say no to a project that involved the whole class
and
decimals. Could she? Jessie was even planning to make a pie chart once she had collected the data. A pie chart! Mrs. Overton loved pie charts almost as much as she loved poems.

But when they trooped into the classroom to begin the day, Mrs. Overton wasn't there. Instead, Mrs. Feeney was sitting behind Mrs. Overton's desk, and the hearts of all the kids sank. Mrs. Feeney was, by far, the worst substitute teacher. She was old and sour and hardly paid any attention to what was going on in the classroom. She also sent more kids to Mrs. Fletcher's office than all the other substitute teachers combined. Jessie couldn't figure out why the school kept hiring her. It must be because she was available at a moment's notice.

"Settle down," bellowed Mrs. Feeney as the students walked into the classroom.
We're not even making any noise!
thought Jessie. She took her chair down from her desk, then walked up to Mrs. Feeney with her survey held tightly to her chest. For some strange reason, David walked up right behind her.

"Mrs. Feeney, I have something I need to pass out to all the kids." She held up the stack of papers, but didn't turn them around.

"What is it?" Just then the ding-a-ling of a cell phone was heard coming from behind Mrs. Overton's desk. Mrs. Feeney immediately moved to retrieve her phone from her enormous handbag.

"An extra credit project," said David. "For math."

"How long will it take?" Mrs. Feeney's eyes were on her phone, reading the screen. "Oh, for Pete's sake!" She poked at the phone a few times, but this didn't seem to improve her mood.

"Less than five minutes. And I guarantee everyone will be quiet and stay in their seats the whole time!"

"All right. Be quick. I need to take this call. But I am
right outside in the hallway,
so no monkey business. And don't think I don't mean it." She sailed out into the hallway, with the phone already at her ear, and closed the door behind her.

Jessie looked at David, who looked right back at her. Their eyes seemed to say,
That was just too easy.

"Okay, everybody listen up," said Jessie in her best in-charge voice. "I'm doing an extra credit project—"

"Dweeb!" shouted Paul, but he said it jokingly. During the course of the year, the kids in 4-O had gotten used to Jessie. Sometimes she was a bossy pain in the neck, but at other times she had good ideas. Different ideas. Like the time she got the whole class to create a courtroom on the playground, complete with a judge and jury and verdict. Jessie was almost never boring.

"It's a survey," she said, ignoring Paul. "And
everyone
has to fill one out. But don't write your name, and when you're done, fold your paper up a bunch of times and put it in this special box." Jessie showed them a shoebox with the lid taped on and a thin slot cut into the top. Once a paper went through the slot, there would be no way to get it out without cutting through the cardboard.

While she was talking, Jessie was handing out the papers, one on each desk, face-down. Tessa was the first to talk.

"I'm not answering this!"

"Me, neither," said Paul.

Megan raised her hand. "This is kind of private stuff."

Jessie stared at her and tried to figure out whether Megan was still mad. Then she looked around the room. A lot of kids were shifting uncomfortably in their seats. No one had written a single thing on the survey. Why were they against this? It was just a survey, and it was anonymous. Jessie couldn't see what the big deal was.