The Wednesday Wars Read Online Free PDF Page B

complain, this was it. I walked over and looked into the box. There must have been thirty erasers in there. White with six weeks' worth of chalk.
    This was really the time to complain.
    But I thought of the future of Hoodhood and Associates.
    I picked up the box of erasers.
    "I'll be in the ditto room," said Mrs. Baker.
    Just swell, I thought.
    But then Mrs. Baker said something that made the world spin backward. "If we both finish in time, you may have one of the cream puffs."
    I think I must have gone white.
    "You needn't look so shocked," she said.
    But I was shocked. She had offered the hope of a cream puff. A brown, light, perfect cream puff. It was as if Mrs. Baker had suddenly become not Mrs. Baker. It was like I had had another vision, only this one was real.
    So before the vision could fade, I carried the box of erasers down the hall, down two flights of steps, and outside.
    The day was still a perfect blue October day, as if it had been waiting for me since I'd missed it at lunch recess. It smelled of baseball, and the last cut of grass, and leaves drying out but still holding on. And for a while I could smell all of it.
    But the cloud of white chalk that comes out of thirty erasers is pretty impressive, let me tell you. I pounded and pounded them against the wall. And the chalk dust that didn't get into my lungs flew and twisted with the breeze that curled against the first-floor classrooms, coating all the windows—the teachers had learned to close them on Wednesday afternoons now.
    A cream puff. At the end of a long school day. Brown, light, and perfect. And no one—not Danny Hupfer, not Meryl Lee, not Mai Thi—no one needed to know.
    The cloud of chalk dust wafted higher. It flew up to the second-floor windows—all closed.
    Maybe Mrs. Baker would give me two. After all, there were twelve trays of the things. Maybe two.
    The chalk dust wafted with the swirling breeze—past the second-floor windows and then up to the third-floor windows.
    Maybe she would give me a third cream puff to take home.
    The chalk dust gathered by the seventh-grade windows.
    Windows someone had left open so the air could circulate.
    Mrs. Baker's windows.
    Open next to the brown, light, perfect cream puffs so that they wouldn't get soggy!
    I ran up desperately, lugging the box of thirty erasers, twenty-three of which had sent their chalk dust toward Mrs. Baker's windows.
    But I was too late.
    The cloud of chalk dust had drifted in, and then gravity had taken over. The chalk had fallen gently upon each one of the cream puffs. They looked like Mrs. Bigio had spread an extra-thick layer of powdered sugar on top.
    "Are you picking out the one you would like?" Mrs. Baker came back into the room with a pile of blue dittos.
    "Not really," I said.
    "Choose quickly, then," she said, "and we'll carry the trays down to my car."
    I picked one up off the tray. It felt a little gritty.
    Then I helped Mrs. Baker carry all the trays down to her car—one at a time—hoping that the Wives of Vietnam Soldiers would not notice the chalk dust all that much.
    Between trips, I threw my own cream puff into the Coat Room, beside the moldering lunches.

    You know how a story gets told in a small town, and how every time someone tells it, it gets bigger and bigger, until it's a flat-out lie? That's what happened to the story of the cream puffs at Saint Adelbert's that afternoon. By the time the story got back to my father—which took only sixteen hours, since he heard it the moment he arrived at Hoodhood and Associates Thursday morning—it said that every single one of the Wives of Vietnam Soldiers had nearly choked to death while eating cream puffs—which had to have been an exaggeration. At first, according to the story, they had turned on Mrs. Baker, but when they realized that Mrs. Baker could not even imagine pulling a practical joke, they had turned on Mrs. Bigio, who was also one of the Wives of Vietnam Soldiers. When Mrs.