Absolutely Almost(14)

            There are ten words on the test every Friday. Ten words. No matter how hard I study on Thursday, I never get more than four of them right.





some bug.




            Darren Ackleman brought in a bug for Science Friday. It was a dead bug, a beetle, he said, even though it sort of looked like a cockroach. It was the biggest bug I’d ever seen, bigger than two giant pink erasers stuck together. It was trapped in a small clear box, and it was black with yellow splotches. Its head was crazy. It looked like it had horns, real horns, sticking right out the top. Lila screamed when Darren held it up, and Josie made fake barfing sounds, and Hillary and two other girls pretended like they were fainting, but all the boys thought it was really cool. Some of them even got out of their desks and rushed to the front of the room to see the bug closer. It got so loud in the classroom that Mrs. Rouse had to say, “Now, now, boys and girls!” in her very stern loud voice, and flash the lights on and off. But even then, it was hard to settle down.

            After a minute, the teacher from the classroom next door, Mr. Harrison, poked his head inside and said, “Everything okay in here? It sounds like a stampede of yaks.”

            And Mrs. Rouse shook her head and said, real tired, “Nope, only a dead bug.”

            At that point Mr. Harrison said, “That must be some bug,” and after he saw it, he asked Mrs. Rouse if he could bring his sixth-graders in from next door to look at it, because he thought they’d really love it too. So then all the sixth-graders came into the room and filed past Darren Ackleman at the front and screamed and hooted and shouted about the bug, until Mrs. Rouse made them sit down in the aisles between our desks so Darren could finish his Science Friday. Darren stood up at the front, grinning like it was his birthday or something while he explained all about the bug, how his dad bought it from a shop that sells bugs and skulls and all sorts of weird stuff that made the girls all shriek again, and how it was real expensive, and how his dad said he trusted Darren to take it to school for Science Friday, because he knew Darren was always really careful.

            I did not want to like the bug. I did not want to like the bug because I didn’t like Darren. But it was so cool, with its horns and everything, and I really wanted to count the yellow spots on its back, so when Mrs. Rouse said if we could all stay calm and remain in our seats, then Darren could come through the aisles and let us look at the bug more closely, I decided I would take a turn looking. I decided I could like the bug and not like Darren.

            Betsy liked the bug too, I could tell. She leaned forward in her seat beside me, trying to see better, and when Darren squeezed through her aisle, she peered down to look at it.

            “Out of the way, Buh-Buh-Buh-Betsy,” Darren hissed as he stepped over a sixth-grader’s legs. I heard him. “I’m trying to get through.” And she didn’t get to see the bug at all.

            I got to see the bug a pretty long time, because the sixth-grader who was sitting in the aisle next to me grabbed the case right out of Darren’s hands and stared at it for a while, and probably because the kid was so big, Darren didn’t tell him to give it back. So I got to see, right over the big kid’s shoulder.

            It was a cool bug.

            “Seven,” I told Betsy when we were on our way to lunch. We were walking through the hallways at the back of the lunch line, like usual.

            “Suh-seven w-what?” Betsy asked.

            “That’s how many yellow dots there were on the bug’s back,” I told her. “I counted. I thought you might be wondering.”

            Betsy didn’t say anything about that—Betsy didn’t usually say much of anything, so I was used to it. But she smiled at me, so I could tell she was happy about the spots. And at lunch she gave me three red gummy bears.

            “Did you know there’s a kind of cockroach that hisses?” I told Betsy while we ate. Some girls would be grossed out talking about bugs during lunch, but not Betsy. I could tell she thought it was cool, because her eyebrows went up on her face as soon as I said that about the hissing. “I saw it on TV,” I told her. “Whenever you touch one spot on their back, they hiss real loud, just like this.” And I made a hissing noise, just like the cockroach I saw on TV, right through my teeth. And Betsy giggled, so I hissed louder. Then she poked me in the back, like I was a cockroach, and I hissed. Every time she poked me, I hissed, and soon we were both laughing so hard we were almost crying, and I could barely get the hisses out. Betsy snorted and slapped her hand over her mouth, embarrassed, but that just made us laugh harder.