The Report Card (2 page)

But later, when I was supposed to be taking a nap, I climbed out of my crib and crawled backward down the stairs. I went into the family room and sat down on the floor and put the whole puzzle together. I took a long look at Miss Piggy and Kermit and Fozzie Bear and Animal, and then I took the puzzle apart and left everything just the way it had been. And then I took my nap.

That day I learned some important facts about me. I learned that what seemed normal to me seemed strange to other people. I also
learned that I didn't like to perform. And that I hated to be pushed around.

For a week or so after that, I could tell my mom and Ann kept watching me. And my dad and my big brother, too. They were all watching to see if I would do anything else that was smart or clever. So I was careful, which might seem weird, but it was a fact. If my mom or dad or Ann or my big brother or any of the kids at day care started looking at me funny, I would stop whatever I was doing. I didn't want to be stared at. So I was careful.

And a few months later, when I figured out how to read, I was careful about that, too. Reading was amazing and wonderful and exciting, but I didn't tell anybody. And there were reasons. My brother's name is Todd, and he's three years older than I am, there in between me and Ann. When I first started reading, Todd was in kindergarten, and he didn't know how to read at all. So I figured that if little baby Nora let anyone see she could read, it would be a big deal. And I thought it might also make Todd feel bad, or mad at me, or both. Plus, I didn't want my mom and dad to
make me read my own stories at bedtime. So I kept the fact of my reading a secret.

I was still lying on my bed, thinking and thinking. And then I remembered my report card—the Ds on my first report card of fifth grade. Those Ds had become a fact. It had been nice to forget about them for a few minutes. But forgetting about a fact does not make the fact go away.

And I knew that pretty soon my mom was going to yell that it was dinnertime.

I got up off my bed, walked over to my desk, grabbed my report card, and licked the flap of the envelope. The glue tasted terrible. I waited a second and then pressed the flap shut. Now the report card was hidden away, sealed inside its ugly, brown, recycled-paper envelope. And I even flattened out the little tabs of the brass fastener.

Then I instantly analyzed what I'd done, and I knew why I had sealed the envelope. Those Ds were like a time bomb—tick, tick, tick, BOOM! The explosion was inevitable. I was putting it off until the last possible second.

I had thought about getting those Ds for a
long time. I felt pretty sure that my plan made sense—but still, my mom and dad had always been crazy about grades.

And I had to face a fact: Those Ds were going to have to be explained.

But not the part about Stephen. About how those Ds were related to him.

The part about Stephen wouldn't have to be explained until much later.

Maybe never.

S
oon my mom was going to call me downstairs for dinner. And after dinner would come The Reading of the Grades. And then, BOOM!

My whole life was flashing in front of me like a report on the six o'clock news. Memories kept flooding in. I couldn't help it. And I realized that this explosion had been building up ever since I first went to school.

Another fact from the memory files: I had gotten off to a bad start in kindergarten.

That's mostly because I spent my first two weeks at Philbrook Elementary School hiding under a table in Mrs. Bridge's room, pretending I was a cat. I meowed and hissed, and at snack time I poured my milk into a plastic bowl I had brought from home. That was so I could lap up the milk with my tongue.

I acted like a cat until 11:53 every day. Then I would get up, dust off my knees, put on my
jacket, and get ready to ride the bus to my afternoon day care.

The cat business had started a month before kindergarten began. I had read this great article in
National Geographic
about leopards, and then I had learned everything else I could about cats. And I had decided that cats were amazing and wonderful, and I thought it would be fun to see what it felt like to be a cat. That's where the idea came from.

But the real reason I began being a cat at school was because I knew that if I started doing schoolwork in kindergarten, it would be too easy. Everyone would have thought I was too good at it. Being too good would have made me seem too different. It was so much easier to be different by being a cat.

No one would suspect
that a cat liked to read the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
No one would guess that a cat had memorized thirty-eight of the poems in
A Child's Garden of Verses.

No one would suspect that a cat had taught herself to understand Spanish by watching the Univision channel. And no one would suspect that a cat was interested in maps and history and archaeology and astronomy and space travel and the Latin names for animals—like
Felis catus,
the domestic cat.

I was smart, but I didn't have much experience. I was still a five-year-old kid. So I made a miscalculation. Because I thought that once everyone at school had gotten used to the idea that I was pretending to be a cat, they'd pretty much leave me alone.

But, of course, that wasn't the way it worked at school.

Right away Mrs. Bridge called my mom. My mom got upset, and then she told my dad and he got upset.

I've always loved my mom and dad, but they tend to get excited too easily, especially about school stuff. That was why I always kept one part of myself hidden from them—the smart part. So back when I was in kindergarten, my parents didn't even know I could read. And really, it hadn't been that hard for me to keep my smart part a secret. My mom was working for a real estate company and my dad was running his own business, and then there was the
housework and the yard work plus three kids to take care of. Fact: My mom and dad have always been busier than sparrows. I never tried to get attention and I didn't cause any problems, so everyone left me alone most of the time. I was careful never to give my mom and dad anything to worry about. I spent a lot of time looking at books when I was little, and I'm sure they noticed that. But they must have thought I just liked to look at the pictures. And I also spent a lot of time watching TV.

But it's not like I was some kind of weirdo zombie tubehead hermit bookworm, because that would have
really
made them worry. I had friends at day care and in the neighborhood. And I liked to play soccer and mess around outside. Mom and Dad had thought I was an ordinary kid.

Then I went to school and turned into KinderKat.

So my mom and dad got worried and they called the principal, Mrs. Hackney. And then the special education teacher and the guidance counselor got involved, and everyone at school decided I had a learning disability. I could feel how they all started looking at me, and I
didn't like that. I didn't want people to think there was something wrong with me. So after two weeks I knew I had to stop being a cat.

But I didn't want to start being myself. That seemed dangerous too.

I thought about it and the idea I got was so simple:
Don't be a cat; be a copycat!
I decided that every day I would be like a different kid in my class. I would become a living average of all the other children in my kindergarten.

So one Wednesday morning, instead of getting down under the table, I picked out one kid to copy. I started doing whatever Stephen Curtis was doing—not exactly but pretty close. And he had no idea I was copying him.

When Stephen sat on a rug square and watched Susan help Mrs. Bridge pick out the right day of the week to hang on the date board, I sat and watched too.

When Stephen got out a puzzle, so did I, and I took as long to do my puzzle as it took Stephen to do his.

When Stephen began playing with blocks, so did I, and I tried to make my building look sort of like Stephen's.

When Stephen sat at a table and tried to draw the letter
A
with a pencil, I sat down nearby and worked on the letter
B
with a crayon. I could have written any letter perfectly, and hundreds of whole words, too. But I made it look like writing a
B
was as hard for me as writing that
A
was for Stephen.

The morning went by quickly, and I was amazed at how many different things Stephen did. Kindergarten took on a new meaning for me. It had become my laboratory.

The next day I decided to be like Caitlyn. She threaded beads, and so did I. She played in the dress-up corner, and so did I. When Caitlyn colored some butterflies, I did too, and I even joined Caitlyn and three other girls in a game of tag during outside recess. It was another educational day for me.

Mrs. Bridge was thrilled about the sudden change in my behavior, and so was the special education teacher, and, of course, so were my parents. And once I turned into an average kid, the pressure stopped.

However, I was just getting started with my research. Helen, Laura, Ron, Kathy, Philip,
Jeremy, Karen, James, Kim, Susan, Elliot—I played copycat day after day, always shadowing a different kid. Each day was new and interesting. I felt like I was part of the class, and I liked that feeling.

But I also learned that I liked being so smart. Because by kindergarten I had figured out an important fact about me: I was a genius. The things that most kids found difficult were easy for me. I had seen the other children working hard to learn their letter shapes, working hard to understand the sounds each letter made, working hard just to make their fingers hold a pencil or a pair of scissors. I knew that none of them were thinking the way I was, or reading the kinds of things I could read. Megan was the only other kid in my class who could read at all, and just some simple picture books.

Day by day I got a clearer idea of how far ahead I was. That didn't make me think I was better than the other kids, though. The more I got to know them, the more I admired them. I was amazed by all their hard work. I realized that I didn't have to work like they did and
that I never had. School was different for me. Everything was different for me.

There were fifteen kids in my kindergarten, and each one got a turn being copied. So it was about two weeks before I spent another day copying Stephen. And it was wonderful because right away I could tell he had made some progress. Stephen must have been working on his letter shapes because now he could draw
A
through
O
perfectly. Except he made his capital
G
backward every time. I wished I could help Stephen with that, but I knew I didn't dare. Not if I wanted to keep my secret. So I chose
D
as my backward letter, and I thought,
In a couple weeks, when it's time to copy Stephen again, maybe he'll have that
G
turned around.

But two weeks seemed too long to wait.

That's why I followed Stephen the very next day, and then the next three days after that. And then all the next week, too. I watched everything Stephen did for nine days in a row, and I heard everything he said. It was an in-depth study.

Stephen wasn't one of the smartest kids in
the class. I could see that. But Stephen was such a good worker. If he couldn't do something, he was patient and he didn't give up. If something was too hard, Stephen didn't get mad at himself. He simply moved on and then went back to it. And sooner or later he figured it out. He liked to sit alone sometimes and look out the window or draw shapes with a pencil or a crayon. He didn't
look
at the pictures in the picture books; he studied them. Also, when Stephen played a game, he always played fair. And the most important thing to me was that during all the time I watched him, Stephen never said or did one mean or angry thing. Not once. To anyone—even if someone was mean to him first.

Then one Monday morning Stephen was absent. Same thing on Tuesday and Wednesday. I almost called his house Wednesday night to make sure he wasn't dying or something. Because the thought of school without Stephen was suddenly the worst thing I could imagine. When he got off his bus on Thursday morning, I wanted to run over and give him a big hug. Of course, I didn't.

But that's when I decided that Stephen was going to be my best friend. He was just so nice. Because I thought,
Who could be a better friend than Stephen?
And I also thought,
If Stephen was my friend, then I could help him.
Because that's what friends do.

The best thing that happened during my first year at Philbrook Elementary School was getting to be friends with Stephen Curtis. And the best thing that happened during third grade was when Stephen's family moved to a house down the street from me. And the best thing that's happened all five years I've known Stephen is that we've kept getting put into the same classrooms with the same teachers.

So I stayed best friends with Stephen. And I kept helping him. Carefully. Not show-offy. Not smarty-pantsy. Just some friendly help once in a while. With little things. I was like an extra teacher. Half the time Stephen didn't even know he needed help or that I was giving it.

It was during fourth grade. That's when Stephen started to change. It was after the big tests we all had to take at the beginning of fourth grade, the Connecticut Mastery Testing.
Because Stephen didn't get good scores. And I knew why. I had watched him making faces and chewing his pencil and looking up at the clock every other minute during the tests. It was the pressure that got him, even after all the hours and hours and hours we had spent in class getting ready for the tests. I mean, he probably wouldn't have done that great even without the pressure—because, like I said, as far as school work went, he was an average student. But all the time pressure didn't help, that's for sure. So Stephen's scores on the CMT were sort of low. Not terrible, just low.