When I met Willie at lunch on our first day of third grade, I could tell something was wrong. He looked sort of pale, like maybe he was going to keel over or something. I said, “Hey, are you okay?”
And he said, “No, I’m not okay. Mrs. Frule already hates me. I spent half the morning getting yelled at, and the other half trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.”
I asked, “What happened?”
Willie shrugged. “That’s what I don’t get. I didn’t do anything. I was just sitting there, and all of a sudden I saw Mrs. Frule looking at me. So I smiled at her, and she frowned and said, ‘Young man, wipe that smile off your face.’ So I did. I wiped my hand across my mouth like this, and I stopped smiling. But that made Robbie Kenson start laughing, so then Mrs. Frule got real mad and she made me get up and walk out into the hall. And then she came out and leaned down, like, right into my face. She got so close I could see all the way up her nose. And she shook her finger at me and said, ‘If you ever act like a smart aleck in my classroom again, you are going to be very, very sorry!’”
Poor guy. That was only Willie’s first day of third grade, and it didn’t get any better. All year long Mrs. Frule yelled at Willie at least three times a week. And he’s one of the good kids! The kids like Jay Karnes and Zack Walton—real troublemakers? For those guys, being in Mrs. Frule’s class was sort of like being in a prison camp. Maybe worse, because in a prison camp, if you mess up, you don’t have to get a note signed by your parents.
My third-grade teacher was Mrs. Snavin, and she was pretty nice most of the time. I wished Willie could have switched to my class. But it doesn’t work that way. Once school starts, you’re stuck with your teacher for the whole year, and you just have to make the best of it.
And that’s what Willie did. He didn’t have a lot of fun in third grade, but he lived through it. Even Jay and Zack survived. Because that’s what you do when your teacher is a grumphead. You learn what you have to do to stay alive, and you do it. And you know that once the year is over, you’ll never have that boss again. So you just do your best and wait for summer.
Like I said, most of my teachers have been pretty nice. Actually, the grumpiest teacher I’ve had so far wasn’t even a teacher. She was a student teacher. And I didn’t have her for that long. Only about three weeks. Which was plenty. Her name was Miss Bruce.
Miss Bruce showed up on a Monday morning in April near the end of second grade. Mrs. Brattle was my regular teacher that year, and she said, “This is Miss Bruce. She’s in college, and she’s studying to be a teacher. As part of her college work, she’s going to be here in our classroom for a while.”
I looked at Miss Bruce. She was younger than Mrs. Brattle. A lot younger. She was so young that she sort of looked like Link Baxter’s big sister. Except Link’s sister was only in high school. Plus part of her hair was colored pink. Or sometimes purple.
Miss Bruce’s hair was reddish blond. That first day she had on a blue shirt and a green skirt and blue shoes. Her nose was kind of small. Or maybe her nose was mostly hidden, because she wore a big pair of glasses with black rims. And her nose had freckles, too.
For her first three days Miss Bruce didn’t do much. Sometimes she helped Mrs. Brattle pass out papers. Once she read part of a story out loud. But most of the time she just sat in a chair near the back of the room and watched.
By Wednesday we’d gotten used to her hanging around. No one paid much attention to Miss Bruce. Except me. I kept looking at her during those first three days.
And I noticed something.
Back in second grade, Willie and I were both in Mrs. Brattle’s class, so at lunch on Wednesday I asked Willie a question. I asked, “Have you noticed anything funny about Miss Bruce?”
“Funny?” said Willie. “You mean like the way she squints and wrinkles her nose when she looks at the chalkboard? I think that’s kind of funny, don’t you?”
“No,” I said, “I mean funny like strange. Have you ever seen her smile?”
Willie was scraping the icing off an Oreo with his front teeth. He stopped right in the middle of the cookie. His eyes opened wide and he said, “You’re right! I haven’t seen her smile at all! Have you?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Not once. I wonder why.”
Willie finished his first scrape and then started licking the leftovers. He stopped with his tongue sticking out. Then he gulped real fast and said, “Hey! Maybe she can’t smile! Maybe she has a special problem, like if she smiles, her teeth fall out or something! Or maybe . . . maybe she’s . . . an alien! Yeah, she’s an alien, and she doesn’t know how to smile, and . . . and she’s going to use her special powers . . . to turn all of us into hamburgers and beam us up to her spaceship!”
Willie’s like that. He has a lot of imagination.
But in a way, Willie was right. Miss Bruce did seem to have some special powers.
And there was one power she had that was going to change my life for a while. Because Miss Bruce was about to turn me into Jake Drake, Class Clown.
Andrew Clements has been hailed by the New York Times as “a proven master at depicting the quirky details of grade school life.” His many celebrated books include the contemporary classic Frindle and the New York Times bestsellers The Landry News and The Report Card. He and his wife, the parents of four grown children, live in Westborough, Massachusetts.
Andrew Clements, Jake Drake, Teacher's Pet
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