Teacher's Pet Read online

  Teacher’s

  Pet

  JOHANNA HURWITZ

  Illustrations by

  SHEILA HAMANAKA

  Text copyright © 2014, 1988 by Johanna Hurwitz

  Illustrations copyright © 2014, 1988 by Sheila Hamanaka

  All rights reserved.

  Published by StarWalk Kids Media

  Except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and articles, no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher. Contact: StarWalk Kids Media, 15 Cutter Mill Road, Suite 242, Great Neck, NY 11021

  www.StarWalkKids.com

  Print version originally published by Morrow Junior Books.

  ISBN 978-1-62334-998-1

  For my friend

  Marilyn Freilicher Brownstein,

  in a class by herself

  Contents

  1 The Pickle Club

  2 Hiccups

  3 Another Rotten Afternoon

  4 “Personality of the Day”

  5 Cricket and the Bee

  6 The Brunch

  7 The Imperfect/Perfect Book Report

  8 The Teacher’s Pets

  1

  The

  Pickle

  Club

  It was the first day of school.

  Cricket Kaufman liked to plan ahead. For three weeks she had known what she would wear to school today. And she had bought all her school supplies over a week ago. Cricket loved buying a new notebook and new crayons and new pencils. Everything felt clean and smooth to her touch. At home, she had even enjoyed smelling the new notebook. But of course she wouldn’t do a thing like that sitting here at her desk. The other kids in her fourth-grade class would think she was weird.

  Cricket loved school. She loved her teachers. And every year since she had been in kindergarten, her teachers had loved her. It was no wonder. No student was more perfect than Cricket Kaufman. She was a dependable and helpful student who always paid attention and behaved like an angel. Her papers were always neat and her homework was always completed. She wasn’t like those goof-offs Lucas Cott and his sidekick Julio Sanchez who were sitting in the back row. Cricket knew it would only take a short while until Mrs. Schraalenburgh, her new teacher, realized how lucky she was to have Cricket in her class! All of the teachers who had ever had Cricket in their classes had called her a joy. She was always the teacher’s pet.

  Cricket looked around to see who else was in Mrs. Schraalenburgh’s class. She recognized everyone because even if they hadn’t been in third grade with her last year, they had been in her second-grade class the year before that. There were three sections of each grade and each year the children were moved from one section to another. When Cricket was in the first and second grades, Mary Claire Shea had been in classes with Cricket and had been her best friend. But Mary Claire had moved away during the summer after second grade and Cricket had been without a best friend all during third grade. But that year, Cricket’s sister Monica had been born. Someday, Monica would be big enough to be a friend, and then it wouldn’t matter anymore if Cricket had a special friend at school or not.

  As she sat waiting for school to begin, Cricket quietly turned the ring on her finger around and around. The ring had been a special gift from her parents when Monica was born. Cricket had wanted a ring for as long as she could remember. But her mother had always said that if she had one, she would probably lose it. Mrs. Kaufman presented Cricket with a tiny box on the day that Monica came home from the hospital. Inside was a silver ring with a dark red stone. “It’s your birthstone,” her mother explained. “It’s a garnet because you were born in January.”

  The ring fit perfectly on the middle finger of Cricket’s right hand.

  “Whatever you do, don’t take your ring off,” Mrs. Kaufman had warned her daughter. “That’s the best way to lose it.”

  Cricket certainly did not want to lose her new ring. She was very proud of it. So although she sometimes took the ring off at home, she was very careful never to take it off at school. But often, when she was sitting quietly at her desk, she turned it around and around on her finger.

  Mrs. Schraalenburgh entered the room. She was very tall and had curly white hair. Cricket had heard that she was really strict, but Cricket wasn’t afraid of her. Cricket was such a good student that she even got along with the strictest teachers who gave the most homework. Cricket liked doing her homework. It kept her busy on the afternoons when she didn’t have piano lessons.

  Behind Mrs. Schraalenburgh came a girl that Cricket had never seen before. She must be a new student in the school, Cricket thought. Cricket wondered if this girl was as smart as she was. She doubted it. She had always been the smartest person in her class.

  The new girl sat in a front seat right across from Cricket. Cricket liked sitting in front because that way she had a better chance of being chosen as a monitor to deliver messages or run errands for her teacher. Sometimes teachers seated the students according to size. Other teachers used alphabetical order. But Mrs. Schraalenburgh told them that they could sit wherever they wished for the first week. Of course, Lucas and Julio took seats in the last row. Cricket had known they would do that.

  Before Mrs. Schraalenburgh began to call the roll, she said, “I know many of you from seeing you around the building when you were younger. And some of you have older siblings who were in my class in the past.”

  “Siblings?” Julio called out. “What’s that?”

  “Who knows what . . .”

  Cricket’s hand was waving in the air.

  “I haven’t even finished my question,” said Mrs. Schraalenburgh. “Why are you raising your hand?”

  “Because I know the answer,” said Cricket.

  “She always knows the answers,” said a voice from the back. That was Lucas Cott speaking.

  Cricket smiled at this recognition from her classmate. She wanted to be a lawyer when she grew up, and always knowing the answer and reacting quickly were important to her.

  “Very well,” said Mrs. Schraalenburgh. “What is my question and what is the answer?”

  “You were going to ask what a sibling is,” said Cricket. “And the answer is that it’s a brother or a sister.”

  “You are absolutely correct,” said the teacher. She smiled at Cricket and Cricket smiled back at her. There, she thought to herself, I’ve only been in fourth grade for five minutes, but Mrs. Schraalenburgh already knows how smart I am.

  The teacher began calling the names of the students.

  “Connie Alf.”

  “Here,” called Connie, waving her hand.

  “Lisa Benson.”

  “Here,” Lisa called out.

  “Hope Dubbin.”

  Name by name, Mrs. Schraalenburgh called the roll.

  “Cricket Kaufman.”

  “Present,” Cricket called out. She always said “present” instead of “here.” It sounded more grown up.

  “I wouldn’t give her a present,” a voice called out.

  “Who said that?” asked Mrs. Schraalenburgh, standing up and looking around.

  Cricket’s face turned red. She knew who said it. She also knew that Mrs. Schraalenburgh couldn’t recognize the voices of the fourth-graders yet.

  “That was Julio,” said Cricket. She hoped he would get into a lot of trouble now.

  “We don’t want tattletales in our class,” said Mrs. Schraalenburgh sharply. She looked at Cricket. “But we do want good manners and polite behavior. I do not want to hear any of you speaking out unless I call on you first. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Schraalenburgh” said some of the students.

  Cricket felt awful. The teacher had asked who had spoken and when Julio
wouldn’t admit to it, Cricket had told on him. It was bad enough that he said something nasty about her. But instead of scolding Julio, Mrs. Schraalenburgh had made it seem as if Cricket had done something wrong. It wasn’t fair.

  “Zoe Mitchell,” said the teacher returning to the roll call.

  “Here,” said a voice across the aisle from Cricket.

  “Zoe, please stand up a moment so that everyone can see who you are,” said Mrs. Schraalenburgh. “Zoe has just moved to town and is new to our school. We’re delighted that you were able to make it for the first day,” said the teacher. “Since you are new, why don’t you tell the rest of the class something about yourself?”

  Zoe stood up. Instead of looking around shyly the way most of the kids would have if they had been asked to speak, she smiled and started talking. “My mother and my older sister Hailey, who is in sixth grade, and I just moved here because my mother remarried. Now I have a new stepfather and stepgrandparents and we live in a new house. And I have my own room, too,” she added.

  “Excellent,” said Mrs. Schraalenburgh, smiling at Zoe. “Welcome to our school and our town. We’re happy to have you here.”

  Cricket looked across at her new classmate as she sat down. She wasn’t sure she was so happy to have her here. She sounded too stuck up.

  When roll call was completed, Mrs. Schraalenburgh had many announcements to make. One of the things she said was that this year the school was planning to collect soup-can labels. When enough labels were sent to the company that had made the soup, the school would be given audio-visual equipment. With a lot of soup labels, the school might have a new film-strip machine or cassette player.

  “A good thing to do would be to ask your friends and relatives to start saving these labels, too,” said Mrs. Schraalenburgh. “That way we’ll get even more.” Cricket made a mental note to ask her mother to serve more soup to the family.

  After the announcements, Mrs. Schraalenburgh picked several of the boys to help her pass out the textbooks. Lugging the books around was not something that Cricket cared about. But Zoe leaned over and whispered to her, “That’s very sexist of her. Girls are strong enough to carry those books, too.” Cricket had never thought of that.

  Soon the morning was over and it was lunchtime. The lunchroom smells the same as last year, thought Cricket, as the students rushed in and took seats around the tables. Cricket put her lunch box down and hurried to the milk line. Today, because it was the first day of school, her mother had said that she could buy chocolate milk.

  Back at the table, Cricket discovered that she was sitting next to Zoe. “Look what I have,” said the new girl, unwrapping a piece of aluminum foil. Inside the foil was a huge pickle.

  “Lucky you,” called out Hope.

  “Do you want a bite?” Zoe offered. She passed the pickle down toward Hope.

  Cricket wrinkled her nose. She didn’t like pickles. She couldn’t even stand the smell of them.

  “Can I have a bite, too?” asked Lisa.

  “Sure,” said Zoe. “It’s big enough so that everyone can have some.”

  “You’ll get germs if you let so many people take bites out of your pickle,” said Cricket.

  “It’s worth the risk,” said Hope, crunching down on her mouthful of pickle. “It’s wonderful.”

  “Hmmm,” Lisa agreed.

  The pickle was passed from hand to hand around the table. Everyone took a nibble of it. When it reached Cricket, she passed it on to Zoe.

  “Don’t you want any?” asked Zoe. “Are you afraid of all our germs?”

  “I don’t like pickles,” Cricket admitted. She wiped the hand that had touched the pickle on her napkin. She hoped she wouldn’t smell like a pickle for the rest of the afternoon.

  “You don’t know what you are missing. This is wonderful,” said Zoe, taking a bite. “When was the last time you tasted a pickle?”

  Cricket shrugged her shoulders. She couldn’t remember. Maybe she had never tasted a pickle. She just knew she didn’t like them.

  “Come on,” urged Zoe, handing the pickle back to Cricket. “Take a tiny bite. I’ll bet you love it.”

  “It was delicious,” said Hope. “I’m going to ask my mother to put a pickle in my lunch tomorrow.”

  “Me too,” said Lisa.

  “We could have a pickle club and every day somebody else could bring a pickle for lunch,” suggested Zoe.

  “That’s a great idea,” said Hope, licking her fingers.

  Cricket took the pickle from Zoe. She didn’t want to be left out. Maybe if she took just a very small bite of the pickle it wouldn’t be too bad. She put it to her mouth and took the tiniest bite possible. The shred of sour pickle landed on her tongue. It tasted worse than it smelled. It was horrible. Cricket felt her eyes roll back in her head as she gagged into her napkin.

  “I guess you can’t be in the pickle club,” said Zoe, taking back her pickle.

  Cricket took a long drink of her chocolate milk through the straw. But the sour taste remained in her mouth. Who’d want to be in a pickle club? she thought to herself. It was the stupidest thing that she had ever heard of.

  All during the rest of the lunch period, Cricket was in a bad mood. She had been looking forward to school so much and now that it had begun, things weren’t going at all the way she had imagined them. She turned her ring around and around on her finger and thought about the morning.

  Zoe was talking with the other girls at the table as if she had known them all her life. Cricket looked at Zoe and wondered why she had been put into Mrs. Schraalenburgh’s section of fourth grade. Why couldn’t she have been assigned to one of the other classes? She blamed Zoe for both the bad taste in her mouth and the bad feeling that she had. Even if all the other girls seemed to like her, Cricket did not like the new girl at all.

  2

  Hiccups

  Back in the classroom, Mrs. Schraalenburgh began to tell the class about a book that she was going to read aloud to them. It was Mr. Popper’s Penguins. Cricket’s hand flew up into the air.

  “Yes, Cricket?” asked the teacher. “What do you want?”

  “I already read that book by myself,” Cricket announced proudly. She had read it during the summer vacation.

  “You did?” Mrs. Schraalenburgh looked surprised. “Well, you must be a very good reader.”

  “I am,” said Cricket.

  “Good. Now, let’s see if you can be a good listener, too,” said the teacher.

  A pencil rolled onto the floor from someone’s desk.

  “Take everything off your desks,” Mrs. Schraalenburgh instructed her students. “I don’t want anything to distract you. This is a time for listening and putting your imaginations to work. I don’t want to hear a sound.”

  Cricket knew that this would be difficult for Lucas and Julio. At the end of third grade, Lucas had been trying harder, but he still forgot and did silly things. And as for Julio, he didn’t try at all. If she were the teacher, she wouldn’t let those two boys sit next to each other. Mrs. Schraalenburgh would probably figure it out herself in another day or so. Lucas plus Julio equaled trouble.

  Cricket sat back in her seat. She loved listening to stories. The only problem was that teachers never read for a long enough time. They would read one chapter and leave you waiting eagerly for them to go on. Then they would say that if you were good, they would continue with the story the next day. Cricket could never wait.

  She would rush to the public library and take out a copy of the same book that the teacher had begun. Then she would quickly finish it at home. Cricket enjoyed hearing a story, even when she knew what was going to happen next, and was always able to listen quietly.

  “It was an afternoon in late September,” Mrs. Schraalenburgh read. “In the pleasant little city of Stillwater, Mr. Popper, the house painter, was going home from work.”

  “Hey. We’re getting our house painted right now. The painter came this morning, just when I was leaving for school,” Luc
as called out.

  “Maybe the man in this story is the guy painting your house,” suggested Julio.

  “I doubt it,” said Mrs. Schraalenburgh. “Now, I don’t want to have to tell you this again. There is to be no talking during story time. If you want to say something, you are to save it for later when I have finished. Do you understand?” She looked around the room. Cricket nodded her head vigorously. She was glad that she had already read Mr. Popper’s Penguins. It was a funny story.

  Mrs. Schraalenburgh began again. “It was an afternoon in late September. In the pleasant little city of Stillwater, Mr. Popper, the house painter, was going home from work.”

  Cricket worried for a moment that Julio or Lucas would call out and say that she had already told them that. But luckily no one spoke. All was quiet in the classroom as the teacher continued reading. Suddenly Cricket hiccuped. She swallowed hard. She wondered why now, of all times, she had to start hiccuping. Her mouth hadn’t been open, so she couldn’t have swallowed any air.

  “Hic!” A second little hiccup exploded inside her. Cricket felt her face turning red. Belching or having hiccups in the middle of story time was the sort of thing that one of the boys would do. It was not Cricket’s way of behaving at all. When the third little hiccup came, she was waiting for it. She kept her lips firmly pressed together so she wouldn’t make a sound. But she began to worry that she was going to hiccup all during the story. She waited tensely. A minute passed and nothing happened. Cricket gradually relaxed again. The hiccups have gone away as suddenly as they came, she thought. Then another one escaped from her throat. And because she hadn’t been expecting it, it was the loudest one of all.

  Mrs. Schraalenburgh looked up. She gestured to Cricket to go outside and get a drink of water from the fountain in the hallway. Quietly, Cricket stood up and walked to the door. She was very embarrassed, especially when she made another loud hiccup before she could get outside.

  She took a long drink of the lukewarm water at the fountain. It never tasted any good, but if it would stop her hiccups, she would be willing to drink a whole quart of it. She stood by the fountain, waiting. Nothing happened. The hiccups were really gone this time. Quietly, Cricket opened the door and tiptoed back into the classroom. She moved her chair quietly as she sat down. She knew that everyone was looking at her and thinking about her hiccups and not about Mr. Popper. And for a moment, she wished that she were in the Arctic or the Antarctic. Those were the places that Mr. Popper had always dreamed about going. Cricket had never wanted to go to the Arctic or Antarctic before, but right now she wanted to be anywhere but in her classroom. She didn’t like being a nuisance in class. It was not the Cricket way of behaving.