Authors: Linda Crew
Nekomah Creek (4 page)
1 
“So that’s where you’ve been hiding!”
Mrs. Perkins’s voice jerked me right out of my paperback and back to the real world.
“Robert Hummer.” She pressed her lips together and frowned into the old dory where I’d been huddled down reading. “What am I going to do with you?”
A horrible gloom came over me. This peeling blue boat, beached in a pile of sand at the edge of the playground, had got me through a month of recesses. Why’d she have to come marching out here and find me now? I thought I was safe, what with the stretch of long wet grass between me and the merry-go-round. I should have known wet grass wouldn’t bother old Mrs. Perkins in her thick-soled shoes.
Now when I say old, I don’t really mean years. Mrs. Perkins was probably about average age for a grown-up. But something seemed old about her, like maybe she’d been thinking the exact same thoughts, over and over, for a real long time.
“Well, come on out now.”
I climbed over the side and stood in front of her, clutching my well-worn copy of
Encyclopedia Brown #5
.
She put her hands on her hips. I won’t say her
fat
hips. She was big but she was solid.
“Whatever is a healthy boy like you doing sitting here reading when you ought to be off playing with the other kids?”
I sighed. I’d already told her about five times—I hate recess.
Now I know that sounds weird. The other fourth graders all rip out like they’ve got rockets on their heels when that bell rings. Sixty seconds flat and they’re lined up for tetherball or foursquare. But I’m not big on sports.
We’d been through all this before though, so why answer? She didn’t want to hear it, just like she didn’t want to hear how I wish she’d call me Robby, how I think the hokey pokey is totally dumb, how the story problems in math sometimes don’t make any sense.
“If Johnny has fifty-five stamps,” she’d read out loud this morning, “and he pastes five on each page, how many pages will he need?”
“But that’s silly,” I said, forgetting to raise my hand. “He could fit a lot more than five on each page. And besides, you don’t
paste
stamps in the book. That wrecks them. You’re supposed to use stamp hinges.”
Mrs. Perkins just looked at the ceiling and took a deep breath like she was counting to keep calm. I guess extra talking loused up her schedule. Fifteen minutes for this, twenty minutes for that. She had to be totally organized.
“Robert,” she said now, “I don’t understand why you do this.”
I shrugged, listening to the creek rushing by at the edge of the playing field. I wasn’t the worst kid around by a long shot. I did my assignments. Unless you counted asking questions, I didn’t goof off in class. So why’d Mrs. Perkins want to pick on me? Right now, over by the gym door, two eighth-grade girls were having a shouting match—trading names you wouldn’t dare repeat to your mom and dad. Wouldn’t you think Mrs. Perkins’d want to hustle over and break it up?
But no—she was too busy with me.
I sighed. “I just don’t like sports.”
“Oh, come now. All boys like sports.”
Was I supposed to call her a liar or what? I stared at the grass. My shoes were getting soaked.
“This bookworm business is getting completely out of hand. I saw you trying to read during the film strip this morning. It’s got to stop!”
She was right about that. Reading in the dark was hard on my eyes. I’d have to smuggle in the tiny flashlight I used under the covers at night.
She held out her hand. “Let’s have the book, please.”
I held it out. So long, Encyclopedia. I sighed. I’d been right in the middle of a case.
“Mrs. Perkins? Didn’t you ever feel that what was happening in a book you were reading was more interesting than real life?”
She squinted at me like I was some weird bug in a box.
Well, gee. Seems to me lots of people like books or movies or television programs better than real life. When you’ve only got one life, in one place, it’s fun to go off in your mind to other adventures.
And books are best, I think. TV only shows you the story—a book takes over your whole brain. It may look like nothing but paper, but open it and start reading and presto—you’re in another world, maybe the past, maybe the future. It’s like magic. Really. Think about it—characters made from little black markings coming alive, barging right into your head and carrying on their business there. Sometimes they never leave.
Mrs. Perkins ought to understand this. Every time she opened her desk drawer to put in my milk money I’d see a different paperback tucked in the corner—usually the kind where a lady in a swirly
dress and too much hair is running away from a spooky castle …
She’d been looking off toward the creek. Now she turned back to me. “Why don’t we go see what Mrs. Van Gent thinks about this.”
I groaned. Not the new school counselor. What would Mom and Dad say? At the school board meeting, they’d stood up along with some of the other newer families and argued how important it was for Nekomah Creek School to have a counselor. But I figured they wanted a counselor to straighten out some of the wilder kids. I don’t think they were picturing
me
getting dragged into her office.