Chapter1
Going Buggy
Helen Zuckerman waltzed into room 201 like a movie star. No, she wasn’t sporting sunglasses or a mink coat. There were no bodyguards or flashing cameras. Helen had something better. Something that turned her into an instant celebrity.
She wore a cast on her left arm.
Even better, she had a black eye.
The girls in the room quickly gathered around Helen, like bees buzzing around spring’s first flower. Danika Starling grabbed a marker. They all eagerly signed Helen’s bright purple cast.
Clap, clap.
Automatically, the class responded to our teacher’s signal. CLAP, CLAP, CLAP. All eyes turned toward Ms. Gleason.
“Good morning, boys and girls. Happy Monday,” Ms. Gleason chimed. She looked at Helen and frowned. “Helen, dear, what in the world happened to you?”
Helen beamed. “I broke my arm in two places!”
The room filled with appreciative murmurs. Anybody can break an arm. But breaking it in two places—that took talent. Helen told us about her accident on the trampoline in her backyard. She did a flop when she meant to flip and went boom when she meant to zoom.
“Did it hurt very, very much?” asked Geetha Nair in her shy, quiet voice.
Helen grinned. “Sure, at first. But it doesn’t bother me now.” Helen banged the cast on a desk. “Pretty cool, huh?”
We all agreed that cool was the best word to describe it. Except for Geetha, who seemed horrified and concerned.
“Don’t sweat it. I’m fine,” Helen insisted to Geetha. “No biggie.”
We got started on our schoolwork. We did our morning sentences. That was when Ms. Gleason gave us two sentences that were all messed up. Words were misspelled. The punctuation was wrong. Names didn’t have capital letters. Stuff like that. We fixed them up in a jiffy.
“Who is our ant monitor this week?” Ms. Gleason asked.
Stringbean Noonan’s arm shot to the ceiling. I had to look twice to be sure it was still attached to his shoulder. “I am, I am, I am!” he cried.
You’d think Stringbean had won the lottery.
But that was Stringbean. He was buggy about ants.
Not uncles. Not cousins or brothers. And not my Aunt Harriet, either. A-N-T-S. The six-legged kind.
Go figure.
Ms. Gleason had sent away for an ant farm at the beginning of the year. It arrived last week. Ever since, we’d been doing lots of ant activities. From science to math, it was all ants, all the time. Ant songs, ant math problems, ant books. It felt like we had ants crawling around inside our heads.
Ralphie Jordan joked, “If we’re going to be farmers, I’m glad we’re ant farmers. It beats growing cabbage!”
Ms. Gleason drew a picture of an ant on the chalkboard. “Ants are insects,” she reminded us.
“And insects are our friends,” Stringbean warmly added. “They live in communities and work together as a team!”
Ms. Gleason laughed. “Yes, they do, Jasper.” (That’s Stringbean’s real name.)
Ms. Gleason labeled the ant’s body parts—head, legs, antennae, thorax, and abdomen.
Ms. Gleason glanced at the wall clock. “Oh my, look at the time. Clear your desks, boys and girls. Line up for art class. Mr. Manus will be out for another week. He’s still on paternity leave. Our visiting artist, Ms. Nicks, will be subbing again this week.”
I glanced at Mila Yeh. She rolled her eyes and made a funny face. Mila is my best friend. A while back we started a detective business together. We’ve been partners ever since. We’ve dug up buried treasures and tangled with haunted scarecrows.
But Ms. Nicks was the most unusual case we’d come across yet.
Chapter2
What’s That Smell?
Our whole class filed into the art room.
“Yuck, what’s that smell?” Bobby Solofsky complained.
Joey Pignattano blushed. “Maybe it’s me,” he admitted. “I might have stepped in something on the way to school.”
“It’s not you, Joey,” Mila said. “It’s that.”
Mila pointed to a wisp of smoke rising from a clay dish. The dish was in the palm of our substitute art teacher’s hand.
“Jasmine incense,” Ms. Nicks warbled. “It soothes the spirit and improves creativity.”
“I don’t know about that, Ms. Nicks,” Joey replied. “But it sure does smell funny.”
Ms. Nicks paid no attention. Instead, she glided across the room the way a breeze drifts across the tips of trees. Honest. Ms. Nicks didn’t walk like other people. Instead, she floated. Or it just looked that way because she wore such loose-fitting clothes—robes and shawls and long scarves and flowing skirts. I don’t think I ever saw her feet. She could have worn roller skates for all I knew.
Nothing that Ms. Nicks did or said was ordinary.
Bigs Maloney had a word for it: different.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” Mila made sure to say. “It’s good to be different.”
“It sure would be boring if we were all the same,” Ralphie Jordan agreed.
“I admire Ms. Nicks,” Mila said. “She is an individual.”
Ms. Nicks fussed with the computer on her desk. Soon lazy music wafted through the room.
“I know this music,” Kim Lewis exclaimed. “My dad listens to stuff like this when he does yoga. He says it’s relaxing.”
“Did someone say yogurt?” Joey asked hopefully. Joey always had his mind on food and cheese in his pocket.
“Not yogurt, yoga!” Kim said.
“Yoda?” Joes asked.
“No, I said yoga,” Kim repeated, shaking her head. “My dad and I take family classes at Fitness 365.”
“I’m hungry,” Joey grumbled.
Ms. Nicks pressed her palms together, closed her eyes, and began to hum. “Ommmmm.”
“Center your energies,” Ms. Nicks whispered.
“Does that mean ‘sit down’?” Eddie Becker asked.
“I think so,” I replied.
We sat on the floor in a semicircle facing Ms. Nicks. It was how she made us start every art lesson. (Hey, I told you she was an individual.)
Ms. Nicks took a deep breath. “Breathe in,” she whispered. “Breathe out.”
“Thanks for the reminder,” Ralphie joked. “Solofsky was starting to turn blue.”
Some of us giggled. Ms. Nicks opened one eye. Her lips tightened. She shut her eye again. “Empty your minds of all thought,” she whispered. “Ommmmm.”
Easy for her. I gave it a shot. But all I could think about was not thinking. I thought about jigsaw puzzles, and ants, and the itch on the tip of my nose.
“Don’t even scratch,” Ms. Nicks whispered. She looked at me with one open eyeball again. “Just be… in the moment.”
We sat in the moment for what seemed like forever. Maybe it was only thirty seconds. But it felt like a long time. Finally, Ms. Nicks took an extra-loud breath, uncrossed her legs, and stood up. “Now we begin,” she said.
Ralphie raised his hand. “Um, Ms. Nicks?”
“Yes, Ralphie?”
“Before we get started,” Ralphie said, “do you have an alarm clock? I think my foot’s asleep.”
Chapter3
Playing with Ideas
I’ll admit it. For all her unusual ways, Ms. Nicks knew how to make art fun. She showed us work by lots of famous artists.
“Making art should be like play,” Ms. Nicks told us. “Art is playing with ideas. Don’t think too hard. Just … feel. And let yourself go!”
I buzzed in Mila’s ear: “Earth to Ms. Nicks. Earth to Ms. Nicks. This is planet Earth calling. Please come home.”
Mila giggled. By now we were all in our smocks, making a mess. Working on our projects, chattering and laughing. Having fun.
Copyright © 2004 by James Preller