The Best School Year Ever Read Online Free PDF Page A

encyclopedia, but we looked under living instead of sculpture and never got past living sacrifice , which was all about torture, and that sure didn’t make Eugene feel better.
    “Come on, Eugene,” I said. “Don’t be crazy. No one’s going to make you be a sacrifice.”
    “Hah!” he said. “How about Gladys Herdman?”
    He was really worried, and between being worried and short and having his hair all chopped up, Eugene began to twitch and wiggle and bite his fingernails and bang himself on the head.
    “I can’t help it,” he said. “It makes me feel better.”
    Actually, there wasn’t a kid in the Woodrow Wilson School who didn’t wiggle or twitch or tie knots in his hair or something. Boomer Malone once ate a whole pencil without even knowing it till he got to the eraser and broke off a tooth. Some kids banged their heads, too, when they didn’t have anything else to do, and of course the Herdmans banged other kids on the head, but nobody did it as hard as Eugene.
    This was fascinating to Gladys Herdman. She quit hitting him and hollering at him and just followed him around everywhere— waiting for him to knock himself out, we all thought.
    “Why do you do that all the time?” she asked him, but Eugene was scared to tell her the truth. He figured if he said, “It makes me feel better,” she would pound him black and blue and claim it was a good deed.
    My mother thought Eugene ought to enter the talent show. “It would take his mind off his troubles,” she said, “and there must be something he could do.”
    I couldn’t imagine what, except maybe stand up on the stage and be short, and I never heard of a show where part of the entertainment was somebody being short. So I was pretty surprised, along with everybody else, to learn that Eugene had a hidden talent that he would perform at the talent show.
    “And then on TV, probably,” Gladys Herdman said. Gladys was the one who discovered this talent but she wouldn’t tell anybody what it was and she wouldn’t let Eugene tell anybody either, not even his mother—so Mrs. Preston didn’t know whether to get him a costume or a guitar or elevator shoes or what.
    My mother didn’t know what to put on the stage for him to use. “Maybe he needs a microphone,” she said. “Maybe he needs some special music. I’d really like to know, because I want Eugene to be a success.” It would be wonderful, she told us, if Eugene could win first prize in the talent show.
    What she really meant was, it would be wonderful if anybody besides Alice Wendleken would win first prize for a change, but I knew that wouldn’t happen unless Alice broke both her arms and couldn’t play the piano.
    I guess Charlie thought it was worth a try, though, because he asked Eugene what he needed for his talent act.
    “He needs walnuts,” Charlie reported, “but he says he’ll bring his own. He doesn’t want to. He’s scared to be in the talent show, but he’s more scared of Gladys.”
    “What’s he going to do with walnuts?” Mother asked.
    “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.