CHAPTER FOUR - It’s Only a Textbook
The next day, every seat in science class was filled five minutes before the bell rang. In fact, I had the misfortune of being the last one to reach class. Mary Ellen Paul had stopped me in the hall again to ‘chat.’
“My science teacher, Mr. Hornsby, is the most!” she had cried, grabbing my arm, and not letting me go even though I yanked and twisted to get away. “He let us mix a bunch of chemicals yesterday, on our first day in class!”
“That’s nice,” I said gruffly, kicking her in the shins. She immediately let go of my arm. “What’s the rush?” she asked curiously, while rubbing her shin. “You’re acting like you actually want to go to your next class! That’s not like you, Blake.”
She was right there. I’d never shown any more interest in school than I had to. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom before class!” I lied. Then I darted off before she could ask any more questions.
There was a low amount of chatter as I took my seat in science class. All around me I could hear statements like, “Can you believe what happened yesterday?” or “How did he do that thing with the jump rope?” or “Wasn’t it cool watching that guy get fried when he was hit by lightning?”
“Hey, Drywater!” called Donny Poindexter in his familiar, taunting voice. Reluctantly I turned to look at him. To my surprise, he didn’t sneer at me and share with the class how stupid I was, like he had always done in the past. Instead, he smiled at me and asked, “Did you tell anyone about what happened here yesterday?”
“No,” I replied simply. And it was the truth. I had considered telling my older sister Cheryl, but she was too busy whining and complaining to Mom about her clothes to listen. I had tried to tell my younger brother Adrian, who was so annoyingly smart that I thought it would be a good chance to point out I could learn something in school like he did. But for some reason, when I tried to talk about Phillip Booth and how he discovered electricity, my mouth went dry, and I couldn’t say a thing.
“I tried to tell someone, but couldn’t!” spoke up Johnny Geake which wasn’t surprising, since he tried to live up to his name). “When I went to tell my Dad, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t force the words to come out! It was the craziest thing!”
To my amazement, Donny Poindexter didn’t throw his book (or anything else) at Geake like he usually did. Instead he said simply, “Same here, when I tried to tell my brother.”
Suddenly a hush fell over the class. Looking up, I saw that Mr. Marlin had entered, and was looking around at us as if he was surprised to see anyone in his classroom. He was wearing the same lumpy suit as yesterday, and his mustache and beard were white where he had drank a glass of milk and forgot to wipe his mouth.
“Good evening, students!” he said cheerfully, even though it wasn’t evening. “I’m sorry to see you all looking so bored and unexcited to be here today, unlike yesterday when you were all so excited and jabbering that it was hard for me to get a word in edgewise.”
No one answered. Some of the slower ones in class had a concentrated look on their faces, clearly trying to figure out what he meant by what he had just said.
“In order to increase your level of excitement,” said Mr. Marlin as he took a seat at his desk, “please open your textbooks to page seven, and read the chapter on the inner earth. It’s such an enthralling piece of literature, I’m sure you’ll soon have a hard time keeping yourselves from jumping up and down on your desks.”
Everybody reached slowly for their bookbags and pulled out their SCIENCE! text. There were a few groans from around the room. After yesterday’s excitement, the prospect of reading a chapter of a dull textbook sounded about as much fun as pushing wet bamboo splinters under our fingernails.
“Mr. Marlin, sir,” said Geake, raising his hand. He was jumping up and down in his seat as if he needed to go to the bathroom.
“Yes, Mr. Geake,” said Mr. Marlin, peering at him over the top of his horn rimmed glasses.
“About yesterday, I was wondering—“
“I never discuss past lessons!” said Mr. Marlin sharply. From nowhere, he pulled out what looked like a magazine. But it’s cover was completely blank! Casually he flipped through the pages. We couldn’t help but see that all of the pages were blank too!
But apparently not to him. Finding something he liked, he started to read, his lips mouthing each invisible word as he did so.
“What’s he doing?” whispered Sam Bowly to no one in particular.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” said Poindexter under his breath. “He’s reading an invisible magazine. He can do that because He’s a wizard! I saw another magazine hanging out of his bag in the hall earlier today. It was called, ‘WIZARD’S WORLD.’”
“Let’s have less quiet, please,” said Mr. Marlin, thumbing through his magazine. “Too little chatter leads to trouble, you know.” He then seemed to ignore us completely, furrowing his brow at another article in the magazine that he must have found interesting.
Even though he had invited us to chatter—I guess (it was hard to tell just what he meant by what he said most of the time) most of us didn’t say anything. Except Clyde Steel, who mumbled fiercely, “I knew it was too good to last.”
Slowly I opened my textbook to page seven. There was a picture of a bunch of dirt, with a statement below it that said, “Dirt—What the Earth is Made of!” I hadn’t been excited about dirt since kindergarten, when I tried eating a mud pie that a girl in kindergarten had made for me.
I started to read. The text was unbelievably dull. It was all about Magma and layers of shelf rock, and other dirt facts that were about as important and exciting as knowing how many blades of grass you have in your lawn.
I looked up. Other people in the class were either reading or looking around bleary-eyed like I was, wondering how long they could stay awake reading such dullness. Mr. Marlin was still engrossed in his magazine. It was going to be a long hour until the class ended. I heard sighs and groans all around me.
And then I heard a scream. Or rather, a yelp. Everyone in the room turned to stare at Johnny Geake, who was looking in horror at his text book.
He looked up at us, his eyes wild (or at least, wilder than usual). “It bit me!” he said in disbelief. “It jumped out and bit me!”
In a rush, we all jumped up and peered over his desk. His text book was open to a page with a picture of a snake on it (he hadn’t been reading about dirt like he was supposed to). It looked like an ordinary snake and an ordinary picture.
Poindexter thumped Geake on the back (which must have hurt). “Why don’t you go wash your brain, Geake? Maybe then it’ll work right.”
“His brain’s too small to wash,” said Tyson. “It’ll go down the drain.”
“Is something the matter?” said Mr. Marlin, suddenly towering over us. Everyone went quickly back to his own desk, leaving Mr. Marlin standing over Geake.
“It bit me, Mr. Marlin,” said Geake, still in disbelief. “On the hand! Look!”
He held his hand up, and to the amazement of all, there were two bloody little holes above his thumb that looked exactly like a snake bite!
“My, my,” said Mr. Marlin, examining the thumb. “So it did. Well, it’s probably in a playful mood. Why don’t you see if it will do it again?”
“Will I die?” said Geake in a scared voice. “Is it a poisonous snake?” He stared down at the snake picture, reading the caption underneath.
“Oh, I’m sure it won’t hurt you,” said Mr. Marlin dismissively. “At least, not too much. The most it could cause is a mild case of textbookitis.”
“Textbookwhatus?” said Geake, looking up and blinking as if his mind were overloaded (which it probably was).
“Hey!” said Poindexter. “I’ve got my book open to the same page as Geake, but my snake won’t come out of the book.” He turned to stare back at Geake. “But there’s a snake bite on his hand! I don’t get it!”
“There’s nothing much to ‘get,’ as you call it
,” said Mr. Marlin, returning to his desk. “Mr. Geake merely exercised his mind while reading—something that all of you do most of the time, I’m sure—and the text came alive. That’s all. I’m sure it’s a common occurrence for all of you.”
Mr. Marlin suddenly stopped and looked sharply at a girl who always wore clothes having massive tangles of flowers and vines on them. “How about you, Miss Root? Haven’t you ever become interested in a book so much that it came alive?”
“Well,” stammered Root, “I guess that kind of happened when I read ‘The Secret Garden.’”
“Not at all surprising,” said Mr. Marlin. “Every time I read the parts of ‘Tom Sawyer’ where he fights someone, I come away all black and blue.”
“You mean,” said Poindexter slowly, as if his brain were straining to comprehend, “if I read this text as if I’m interested in it, then it will come alive? I mean, REALLY alive?”
“Could be,” said Mr. Marlin casually as he took his seat at his desk, and picked up his magazine again. “Of course, it’s not likely to work if you only read ‘as if’ you were interested. You have to REALLY be interested—like Mr. Geake was about the snake.”
Poindexter’s face screwed up as if he was in pain. “Is that possible?” he said in a strained voice. “With a text book, I mean? They’re always so boring!”
“There’s only one way to find out,” said Mr. Marlin, thumbing through his magazine again. Suddenly he looked up at us over his horn rimmed glasses. “Only, take care to remember it is ONLY a text book. That is, if you find yourself in trouble.” Then his eyes glazed over and—completely ignoring us—he looked down at his magazine again, mumbling, “Now, where was that article on turning eyelashes into fish hooks?”
I stared down at my text book again, as if seeing it for the first time. The same picture of dirt stared back up at me. Poindexter was right. How could I ever get excited enough about dirt that it would come alive? I tried to force myself to read in an excited way. ‘The soil of this world is essential to earth’s ecosystem,’ I read in my mind. I tried to force the words to sound as thrilling as a new Star Wars movie. Nothing happened.
I skipped down a few lines. ‘The earth’s inner core is mostly made up of iron,’ I read. I tried to add a mental exclamation point after each word. ‘The! earth’s! inner! core! is! mostly! made! up! of! iron!’ Still nothing happened.
Suddenly there was a scream from the back of the room. “Spiders!!” screeched Heidi Kirchner so piercingly that she probably broke all the glasses in the lunchroom down the hall. “They’re crawling all over me! HELP!”
Like everyone else in the class, I turned to stare at Heidi. There were no spiders on her at all. But she was dancing around and swatting at invisible things on herself as if she had completely lost her mind.
“There, there, Miss Kirchner,” said Mr. Marlin boredly, not bothering to rise from his desk. “Remember, it is only a text book after all.”
“But they’re alive!” screamed Kirchner with all her lungs. “And they’re crawling all over me!!” She ran out of the room and went screaming down the hall.
“My, what an excitable child,” said Mr. Marlin casually, turning a page in his magazine. A bunch of us got up and went over to Kirchner’s desk. Sure enough, her book was open to a picture of a swarm of spiders. The picture made my skin crawl, since I hated spiders. That was one page I would NOT try to make come alive.
Going back to my desk, I saw Poindexter staring at a picture of a massive shark in his science book. His face had a look of determined concentration on it.
My skin started to crawl again. Let him have the shark. He was nuts anyway. I flipped through my text book, looking for something interesting. It all looked dull. There was a chapter about flowers and plants, another about reptiles (such as Geake’s snake), and another about animals. The book was like bottled dullness. How could anyone get excited over this stuff?
I kept flipping through the book. I came across a chapter on the solar system that didn’t look quite as bad as the rest of it (though it almost did). I started concentrating hard on a picture of the surface of the moon.
All of a sudden, Poindexter cried out from my left. “Wow!” he said ecstatically. “This is great! My shark is nuzzling me with his snout, trying to pick out which part of me to bite off first!” He had a frenzied look in his eyes, as if he were seeing something that none of the rest of us could see.
Suddenly he gazed down at his hand, while a look of shock and surprise came across his face. “He bit off my hand!” Then Poindexter’s hand vanished!
“Really, Mr. Poindexter,” said Mr. Marlin severely. “Must you provide a bite by bite account of what limbs you are losing to your shark?”
Poindexter didn’t seem to hear him. He closed his eyes and murmured, “It’s only a text book. It’s only a text book.” He looked so bizarre, it reminded me of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, saying over and over, ‘There’s no place like home.’ ‘There’s no place like home.’
Suddenly, Poindexter’s hand reappeared. His eyes popped open, and he looked at it gleefully. “I’ve got my hand back! Look everyone! My hand is back! It really is only a text book!” He held up his hand triumphantly, as if we had never seen it before, even though most of us had seen it plenty of times, crashing towards us in the shape of a fist.
I turned to stare back at my text book. If Poindexter could do it, so could I. I closed my eyes, imaging the surface of the moon. But still nothing happened.
“Oooh!” cried Patti Peterson (whose eyes twitched a lot). “I’m running through a field of daisies! And there’s butterflies everywhere!”
Like many others in the class, I went over to her desk to see what page of the book she was on. To my surprise, there were no pictures on her page at all! There was just a bunch of boring text about daisies and other flowers, and how fields of flowers often had butterflies and bees swarming around. (Somehow Patti was ignoring the bees)
That must be the answer! I had been concentrating on the pictures, or trying to say words in the book in an exciting way, without paying any attention to what those words were telling me! To make something come alive, maybe I had to read as if it was real—and then it would be (or so I hoped).
I went back to my desk and began to read. It was slow going at first, because of all the screams, shouts, laughter, and horror cries all around me from my fellow students. “I’m being eaten by a moth!” screamed Tyson in terror. “My feet are being tickled by millions of maggots!” giggled Mary Wilson. “I’m being buried by a million tons of dirt!” yelled Clyde Steel in a crushed voice.
I glanced up at Mr. Marlin. He didn’t seem to care at all that his class was being dismembered, crushed or eaten. He was still flipping through his magazine, not paying any attention to the screams and pandemonium around him.
I turned back to my text book. There was NO way I was going to be the only one who didn’t get eaten, crushed, mangled or skewered. I’d never live it down. I could see it now—‘Hey, Drywater,’ Poindexter would say in the hall tomorrow. ‘Couldn’t even manage to get mangled, could you? You’re no good at ANYTHING.’
I started reading my text book again, about the surface of the moon. But it was hard to get my mind to accept the fact that something in a text book could be interesting. My brain seemed to have a natural reflex of instant boredom and yawning at anything textish in nature, just like a knee jerks when hit in the right spot.
I read some more. It was all about dirt again—only this time, the dirt was on the moon. What dull stuff! But what was this? Here was a part about asteroid showers. Billions of little rocks and pebbles, and bigger stones—some as big as a mountain—slamming into the surface of the moon. So that’s what made all those craters! I could picture it in my mind’s eye. A wild night on the moon. Massive pieces of rock screaming toward the surface at incredible speeds. And then some really big ones, so big that the crater they left could be plainly seen from thousands of miles away on earth.
&nb
sp; Here came one now. It was bigger than Texas. It was so big it was like a small world of its own, that could have plants growing on it, and critters running over its surface. It was hurtling toward me at incredible speed, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. In a matter of seconds I’d be flatter than a pancake!
A sudden wave of terror washed over me. This was no daydream! This was real! I could feel the moon under my feet shudder as massive asteroids slammed into the ground all around me. And looming so large that it blocked out the sun and almost everything else was that massive chunk the size of Texas. It was going to smash me any second!! What had I done?!
Suddenly everything went dark. My mind seemed to have gone into some quiet, black place where I couldn’t see a thing. Had I been crushed by the asteroid? All of me that I could perceive was a tiny little voice saying over and over, ‘It’s only a text book.’ ‘It’s only a text book.’ 'It's only a text book.'
Suddenly my eyes fluttered open. To my amazement, Poindexter was hovering over me, an unnatural look of concern on his pinched face. Other faces were also there. Clyde Steel, Petunia Angel, Sally Snarch, and even a surprisingly concerned looking Mr. Marlin. I was apparently lying on the floor, next to my desk.
“Wow, Drywater,” said Poindexter in a voice of awe. “That was some yell!”
“Yeah!” said Clyde Steel in an equally awed voice. “I didn’t think anything human could make a sound that loud. I’ll bet you shattered windows five miles away!”
“Yell?” I said curiously, as I shakily tried to sit up. “I didn’t yell.”
“You did so!” said Poindexter. “It was so loud I thought the school would come down on our heads!”
“There, there, my boy,” said Mr. Marlin, helping me to my feet. “I must agree, that was quite an ear-splitter. Just goes to show you have a healthy set of lungs. Which, incidentally, you can learn about on page 153 of your text book.”
“You mean I really yelled?” I said with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. “I didn’t think I yelled at all, even when I saw that asteroid coming toward me at a million miles a second!”
“Asteroid?” said Patti Peterson. “What page was that on? I’d like to see if it could make me scream like that!”
“I’m dreadfully sorry to disappoint you, Miss Peterson,” said Mr. Marlin, “but you won’t have the opportunity today. I’m afraid our class period is almost over.”
As if our heads were operated by single a remote control, we all turned at once to look at the clock. Sure enough, it was only two minutes until the class ended. The bell would be ringing pretty soon.
“Well, class,” said Mr. Marlin, returning to his desk, “that’s enough of text books today. Indeed, for some of you” (he threw me a knowing glance) “that may be enough of text books for the rest of your lives. But I’m happy to see that at least once in your school career, you have achieved the joy and satisfaction—not to mention the terror and horror—of really getting into your text.”
“Mr. Marlin,” said Johnny Geake, moving up and down in his seat again as if he had to go to the bathroom, “can I take my text book home and read it?”
“What a question!” sneered Poindexter at Geake.
“Of course you may, Mr. Geake,” said Mr. Marlin. “However, I should warn you that you may not experience quite the level of thrill, excitement and horror that you all achieved here in the classroom today.” He looked around him happily, as if the walls were his friends and he were talking to them, while completely ignoring us. “There’s something about a classroom and class time that seems to draw out the excitement to greater levels.”
“Is it the classroom, or the teacher?” whispered Mark Stratton to my right.
I didn’t say anything. I was pretty sure everyone else in the class was feeling the same disappointment that I felt. Somehow, we all knew that if we read our text books at home tonight, the only excitement that would happen would be our parents looking at us as if our heads had turned green. The magic here was obviously in the teacher, and not the classroom.
But just like everybody else in class, I took my text book home that night, just in case.