Georgia's Greatness (4 page)

Before we could try to respond, Principal Freud turned to the creature. This was good, since we were all too awestruck to respond right away.

"Are you sure you're up to this, Ms. Harkness?" he asked gently. "You know, the Eights in particular do have a reputation for being ... um ... a little
rough
on teachers. If you'd like, there's still time. We can call in someone else to—"

"Oh, no." Ms. Harkness cut him off with a smile that could have ended wars. "I welcome the challenge."

"Very well," Principal Freud said.

Mandy Stenko raised her hand sharply, as though if someone didn't call on her soon, there might be a bad accident.

"Yes, Mandy?" Principal Freud said.

"Is she a substitute?" Mandy asked.

If we'd been standing closer to Mandy at the time, we would have kicked her. What a question to ask! It was like having guests arrive at your home and asking just a minute after they got there, "So, when are you leaving?" Mommy had told us it was rude every time we'd done it, which was whenever Aunt Martha and Uncle George, our only two relatives outside of our grandparents, had come to stay.

"Ms. Harkness," Principal Freud said with obvious pleasure, "is a little bit, um,
more
than just a regular substitute."

More than a substitute? What did
that
mean? we wondered. Whatever it meant, it sounded very good to us.

Mandy's hand shot straight back up again.

Really, was there ever a girl who needed kicking more than Mandy Stenko?

"Yes, Mandy?" Principal Freud said.

"But what about Mrs. McGillicuddy?" Mandy asked. "Won't she be coming back tomorrow?"

"I'm afraid not," Principal Freud said. "Mrs. McGillicuddy is sick. And, I'm sorry to add, the friend who called on her behalf said that Mrs. McGillicuddy is the kind of sick that will keep her out of school for more than a day. It could be as much as a week. It could be even longer."

Later, when we had a chance to talk among ourselves, we wondered if
we
were the real cause of the McG's extended absence. Had we finally driven her around the bend, as she'd always feared we might?

But there was no time to wonder about that right then. We had bigger things to think about. For instance, Principal Freud had said that a friend had called the McG in sick. The McG had friends?

Before Mandy could ask any more questions, Principal Freud took one of Ms. Harkness's hands in both of his.

"Then I'll leave you to it, Serena," he said warmly.

"Thank you, Frank," she said back, equally warmly. "I'll be just fine here."

Frank?
Now here was a new fact. Principal Freud's first name was
Frank?
When he took off his principal costume and went home at night, he was known around his neighborhood as
Frank Freud?

Who knew?

Ms. Harkness glided to the center of the room as Principal Freud left, closing the door behind him. Then she looked pointedly—not unpleasantly, as the McG might have done, but definitely pointedly—at the heap of our wet raincoats on the floor. Except for Mandy, whose coat wasn't there in the first place, all of us hurried over to the spot and quietly and neatly put our things where they belonged. This was hardest for Georgia to do, since she had to climb down off the teacher's desk first.

The way that Ms. Harkness had gotten us to put away our things with just a glance—it was like having Mary Poppins in the room, only no one was flying around under an umbrella.

Then, without even being asked to do so—or yelled at to do so, as the McG would have done—we all took our seats in an orderly fashion and folded our hands neatly upon our desks.

Well, all except
one
hand, that is.

Mandy's trigger-happy hand shot straight up into the air again.

"Yes, Mandy?" Ms. Harkness called on her sweetly.

Do you see what we mean about Mandy? They hadn't even been properly introduced yet, and already Ms. Harkness knew her first name. She knew none of ours, but she knew Mandy's.

Okay, we admit it: we were jealous.

"What will we be doing first?" Mandy asked. "Mrs. McGillicuddy always starts with morning meeting." Mandy turned to look at the clock on the wall at the back of the room. "But it's a little late for that now. After morning meeting, we always start with math, unless it's Tuesday, in which case we start with science. But it's Monday, not Tuesday, so perhaps we should start with math right away?"

We wanted to strangle her.

"I'm sure it will come in handy for me," Ms. Harkness said, "you being so familiar with how poor Mrs. McGillicuddy runs her classroom. You'll be able to help me figure out how to do things. But since this is
my
classroom, at least for now, I propose we start off today by doing something a little different."

Different? Did she say
different?
We liked different.

Before Mandy could
yet again
raise the hand that had launched a thousand migraines, Ms. Harkness told us her proposal.

"Principal Freud has already told me a little bit about each of you, the Eights in particular," she said. She even smiled as she said that last part. It was as though she didn't mind at all whatever she'd heard about us!

"But," she went on, "I'd really like to hear you introduce each other in your own words. So we'll start with Mandy and then work our way counterclockwise around the room. Now, then: each of you tell me something vital I should know about the classmate sitting next to you."

Mandy looked stunned at this. It wasn't the sort of assignment she was used to. So she looked at Will, just barely managing to stammer out, "W-will Simms is the only boy in the third grade at the Whistle Stop."

"Thank you, Mandy," Ms. Harkness said. "I'm so glad you pointed that out to me. Will?"

"Annie Huit," Will said with real admiration, "is so smart, sometimes it seems like she doesn't even need a teacher."

"Durinda Huit," Annie said, "cooks pancakes better than nearly anyone in the world."

Durinda sat up a little straighter, hearing that. She hadn't realized her cooking was quite so popular.

"Georgia Huit," Durinda said, "has been awfully depressed lately."

Ms. Harkness floated toward us from her position at the front of the room. She floated until she was standing right in front of Georgia's desk.

"I'm so sorry to hear that," she said, "but you won't be for very long. I'll be keeping a special eye on
you.
" Then she bent at the waist, reached out one slender finger, at the end of which was a beautiful long nail painted cotton-candy pink, and tapped Georgia on the nose.

Later, Georgia told us that when Ms. Harkness touched her nose, it felt as though she'd been brushed by magic. We believed her, since when it happened we could swear we saw glittery sparks.

It took Georgia almost a full minute to recover from that touch. When she did, all she could come up with was "Jackie Huit reads too much."

"Marcia Huit," Jackie said, "is very good at observing things. Really, not much that the eye can see gets past her."

"Petal Huit," said Marcia, "worries about everything too much, but we are all trying our best to address that issue."

"I'm worried," Petal said, "that if I don't say the right thing about Rebecca Huit, she will hit me later."

"Oh, I'm sure your sister would never do that," Ms. Harkness said.

For the first time, we saw a flaw in Ms. Harkness's perfection. How could she not see that that was exactly the sort of thing Rebecca would do?

Still, her soothing words had the effect of calming Petal.

"Fine," Petal said. "Pink frosting is never safe around Rebecca Huit."

"Zinnia Huit," Rebecca said, "thinks our cats talk to her."

We all glared at Rebecca, horrified that she'd let the cat out of the bag, so to speak. It was fine for us to make fun of Zinnia when we were all home alone, but it wasn't proper to do so in public. We knew how sensitive Zinnia was about her cat-talking illusions. Or, at any rate, we didn't want strangers to think we were harboring a loony tunes in our family.

"That must be wonderful," Ms. Harkness said to Zinnia. "I've always thought that cats must have so very many more interesting things to talk about than, say, dogs."

Made bold by Ms. Harkness's words, Zinnia opened her mouth to take her turn. But all that came out was "Mandy Stenko has red hair." She paused, then added, "And she raises her hand fairly frequently."

That was our Zinnia all over: always so careful not to say anything that might hurt someone else's feelings.

"Thank you," Ms. Harkness said with a slight bow of her head. "I'm sure the information you've all given me about each other will prove most helpful. Now, then."

Mandy's hand shot up.

"Yes, Mandy?" Ms. Harkness asked.

"Now that we've all introduced one another," Mandy said, "should we start math?" She looked back at the clock again. "Or I suppose maybe English, since that always comes after math and the time for math has passed?"

"No," Ms. Harkness said simply.

"But the time for math
has
passed," Mandy insisted.

"That may be," Ms. Harkness said. "But what would be the fun of doing things the way you always do them on our first day together?"

Fun?
First she wanted to do things
different
and now she wanted to have
fun?

It was like finding ourselves smack in the middle of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
only no one was getting hurt!

"But the
schedulek'
Mandy persisted, pointing to the schedule that the McG always kept taped to the upper-right-hand corner of the blackboard, the blackboard that was really green.

That's when Ms. Harkness turned on her heel—we saw now that she wore high heels, very high; they were leopard-print but somehow managed not to clash with her turquoise dress—and she strode slowly to the blackboard.

We noted that she had a nice stride, like a model's. We knew a lot about how models walked, since our father was one.

Once at the blackboard, Ms. Harkness reached up and peeled off the schedule the McG had taped up there back in September. All that was left on the board were four diagonal marks where the pieces of tape had been. Then Ms. Harkness wadded up the schedule into a ball of paper only slightly bigger than Georgia's infamous spitball and tossed it high in the air. It hung against the fluorescent lights for a full second, like the greatest basketball shot of all time, then dunked into the McG's empty wastebasket.

When the schedule disappeared from view, we did worry, briefly, that Mandy Stenko might faint away and then die. Not that that would have necessarily been such a bad turn of events, but it would have disturbed all the fun we were having. Still, briefly worrying about Mandy did not stop us from shouting, "
Swish!
" right along with Will, and the nine of us pumped our fists in the air.

Ms. Harkness brushed off her hands, one against the other. "There," she said. "Now that that's taken care of, who here is up for recess?"

CHAPTER FOUR

"Recess?" Mandy echoed. "But we never have recess until after lunch! And we haven't done any work yet!"

"Besides," Marcia observed—she hated to point it out, but it was the plain truth—"it's raining too hard outside for recess."

"So you'll have it indoors today," Ms. Harkness said brightly.

We sighed. We knew all about indoor recess. It meant staying in the same classroom where we spent the rest of our school day—this room—trying to convince ourselves it was
fun
and
different
, when really the markers and everything else we used were the same things we used during regular classes.

We were so disappointed, we put our elbows onto our desks and sunk our heads down into our open palms.

It was then, in that dark moment, that we heard the most musical of all voices say, "Ready?"