The Best School Year Ever(10)

“I don’t know. Unless . . . maybe he’s going to juggle them.” Charlie brightened up. “That would be good! Even if he drops some, that would be good!”

It seemed to me that if Eugene could juggle anything we would all know about it, but maybe not. My friend Betty Lou Sampson is double-jointed and can fold herself into a pretzel, but she won’t do it in front of people, because of being shy. It could be the same way with Eugene, I thought.

I also thought he might back out, but on the night of the talent show there he was, so for once we had something different to look forward to.

There isn’t usually anything different or surprising about the talent show. One year a girl named Bernice Potts signed up to do an animal act and the animal turned out to be a goldfish, which was different. But then the act turned out to be Bernice talking to the fish and the fish talking back and Bernice telling the audience what the fish said. Charlie loved this, but he was in the first grade then and believed anything anybody told him.

Mrs. Wendleken said this act didn’t belong in the talent show because it didn’t have anything to do with human talent. “Even if the fish could talk,” she said, “that would just mean the fish was talented, not Bernice.”

Mrs. Wendleken didn’t think Eugene should be juggling walnuts either, according to Alice. “If he can do it,” Alice sniffed, “which he probably can’t.”

Eugene didn’t even try. He came out on the stage carrying a big bowl of walnuts while Mother was introducing him. “Our next talented performer,” she said, “is from the second grade. It’s Eugene Preston, and Eugene is going to—”

Mother never got a chance to finish, because Eugene began smashing walnuts on his forehead one after another, just as fast as he could, and walnut shells flew everywhere.

People sitting in the back of the auditorium couldn’t figure out what he was doing, and people sitting in the front of the auditorium knew what he was doing but couldn’t believe he was doing it. The principal, who was sitting in the back row, thought kids were throwing things at Eugene, so he started up the aisle and ran smack into Mrs. Preston, who was yelling for someone to stop Eugene before he killed himself with walnuts.

Nobody heard her. There was too much noise. Kids were jumping up and down and clapping and hollering, “Go, Eugene! Go, Eugene!” and then, “Go, Hammerhead! Go, Hammerhead!” Boomer Malone began counting walnuts: “. . . twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four . . .” And pretty soon everybody was chanting, “. . . thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight . . .” Boomer said Mrs. Preston fainted when Eugene got to forty-five walnuts, but she didn’t really faint. She just collapsed onto a seat, moaning something about “scrambled brains.”

Eugene used all his walnuts and then he set his bowl down on the stage and walked off. He looked taller to me, but that’s probably because I was looking up at him for a change.

Eugene didn’t win first prize, but neither did Alice. Her piano solo was called “Flying Fingers,” and it would have been pretty flashy except that there were so many walnut shells stuck in the piano keys that she kept having to stop and start over. Eugene was the popular favorite, but I guess the judges didn’t want to reward a scramble-your-brains act, in case that did eventually happen to him, so they gave the first prize to the kindergarten rhythm band, which was probably the best thing to do. It made all the kindergarten mothers happy and it didn’t make anyone else very mad.

Of course, kids were all over Eugene, telling him that he should have won, that he was the best, and wanting to feel his head.

“Did you always crack nuts that way?” someone asked, and Eugene said no, that it was Gladys Herdman’s idea.

“Why?” Charlie said. “What was in it for Gladys?”

If you didn’t know any better you might think that Gladys felt guilty because of Eugene’s dog haircut, but no one at the Woodrow Wilson School would think that. So when we went to get the delicious refreshments, no one was very surprised to find they were all gone.

Mrs. McCluskey was in charge of the food, and when Mother asked her what happened she said, “I’d just put the last plate of cupcakes on the table when Gladys Herdman ran in here yelling that Eugene Preston had gone crazy in the auditorium and was trying to kill himself. Now normally I wouldn’t pay any attention to anything a Herdman told me, but I could hear a lot of noise and stamping around and people yelling, ‘Eugene! Eugene!’ so naturally I went to see.” She shrugged. “I still don’t know what happened to Eugene, but I know what happened to the refreshments.”