The Best School Year Ever (7 page)

Imogene
was
all the things I said she was, and more, and they were good things to be— depending on who it was doing the inventing or the creating or the enterprising. If Imogene could keep it up, I thought, till she got to be civilized, if that ever happened, she could be almost anything she wanted to be in life.

She could be Imogene Herdman, President . . . or, of course, Imogene Herd-man, Jailbird. It would be up to her.

At the end of the day Miss Kemp said, “Which was harder—to give compliments or to receive them?” and everyone agreed that it was really uncomfortable to have somebody tell you, in public, about the best hidden parts of you. Alice, however, made this long, big-word speech about how it was harder for her to
give
compliments because she wanted to be very accurate and truthful, “and not make things up,” she said, looking at me.

“I didn’t make things up,” I told her later, “except, maybe, brave. I don’t know whether Imogene is brave.”

“You made her sound like some wonderful person,” Alice said, “and if that’s not making things up, what is?”

When the bell rang everybody whooped out to get started on summer, but Imogene grabbed me in the hall, shoved a Magic Marker in my face, and told me to write the words on her arm.

“On your arm?” I said.

“That’s where I keep notes,” she said, and I could believe it because I could still see the remains of several messages—something pizza . . . big rat . . . get Gladys . . .

Get Gladys something? I wondered. No, probably just get Gladys.

There was only room for one word on her skinny arm, so Imogene picked
resourceful.
“It’s the best one,” she said. “I looked it up and I like it. It’s way better than graceful, no offense.” She turned her arm around, admiring the word. “I like it a lot. I’m gonna get it tattooed.”

I didn’t ask who by—Gladys, probably.

Charlie was waiting for me on the corner, looking gloomy. He always looks gloomy on the last day of school, and it’s always for the same reason.

“It happened again,” he said. “Leroy Herdman didn’t get kept back.”

“Leroy Herdman will never be kept back,” I told him. “None of them will.”

“He’s going to be in my room forever!” he groaned. “What am I going to do?”

“Charlie,” I said, “you’re going to have to learn to be . . . resourceful.”

“How?” he said. “What is it?”

“Ask Imogene,” I said. “I think it’s going to be her best thing.”

I
t was the principal’s idea, but it was the Herdmans’ fault, according to my mother.

“Don’t blame Mr. Crabtree,” she said. “It wasn’t Mr. Crabtree who piled eight kids into the revolving door at the bank. It wasn’t Mr. Crabtree who put the guppies on the pizza. It was one of the Herdmans, or some of the Herdmans, or all of the Herdmans . . . so if there’s no Halloween this year, it’s their fault!”

Of course the Herdmans couldn’t cancel Halloween everywhere. That’s what I told my little brother, Charlie. Charlie kept saying, “I can’t believe this!”—as if it was unusual for the Herdmans to mess things up for everybody else.

It wasn’t unusual. There were six Herdmans—Ralph, Imogene, Leroy, Claude, Ollie, and Gladys—plus their crazy cat, which was missing one eye and half its tail and most of its fur and any good nature it ever had. It bit the mailman and it bit the Avon lady, and after that it had to be kept on a chain, which is what most people wanted to do with the Herdmans.

I used to wonder why their mother didn’t do that with them, but, after all, there were six of them and only one of her. She didn’t hang around the house much anyway, and you couldn’t really blame her—even my mother said you couldn’t really blame her.

They lived over a garage at the bottom of Sproul Hill and their yard was full of whatever used to be in the garage—old tires and rusty tools and broken-down bicycles and the trunk of a car (no car, just the trunk)—and I guess the neighbors would have complained about the mess except that all the neighbors had moved somewhere else.

“Lucky for them!” Charlie grumbled. “They don’t have to go to school with Leroy like I do.”

Like we all do, actually. The Herdmans were spread out through Woodrow Wilson School, one to each grade, and I guess if there had been any more of them they would have wiped out the school and everybody in it.

As it was they’d wiped out Flag Day when they stole the flag, and Arbor Day when they stole the tree. They had ruined fire drills and school assemblies and PTA bake sales, and they let all the kindergarten mice out of their cage and then filled up the cage with guinea pigs.

The whole kindergarten got hysterical about this. Some kids thought the guinea pigs ate their mice. Some kids thought the guinea pigs
were
their mice, grown gigantic overnight. They were all scared and sobbing and hiccuping, and the janitor had to come and remove the guinea pigs.

All the mice got away, so I guess if you were a mouse you would be crazy about the Herdmans. I don’t know whether mice get together and one of them says, “How was your day?”—but if that happens, these mice would say, “Terrific!”

“So was that it, Beth?” Charlie asked me. “The mice and the guinea pigs? Was that, like, the last straw, and then everybody said, ‘All right, that’s it, the last straw . . . no Halloween’? Was that it?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think it was everything else.”

There had been a lot of everything else because Labor Day was late, so school started late. Parents had an extra week to buy their kids school shoes and get their hair cut; kids had an extra week to finish the fort or tree house or bike trail or whatever else they’d been building since June; and teachers had an extra week to pray they wouldn’t have any Herdmans, I guess. . . . And of course the Herdmans had an extra week, too, to tear up whatever they’d missed during the summer.

That turned out to be a lot and, as usual with the Herdmans, it wasn’t always things you would
expect
them to do.

The police guard at the bank said that he had seen them come in. “Can’t miss
them
!” he said. “So I went right over and stood by the big fish tank. I figure, if I see a bank robber coming I’ll defend the money, but if I see those kids coming I’ll defend the fish.” He shook his head and sighed. “Didn’t occur to me to hang around the revolving door.”

Nobody got hurt and everybody got out all right, but they had to call the fire department to take the door apart, and they had to close the bank till they got the door back up.

The fire chief said he never saw anything like it. “Two kids,” he said, “maybe even three kids might go in that door at the same time to see what would happen, but this was eight kids! What you had was one section of a revolving door full of kids. Couldn’t move the door forward, couldn’t move it back, had to take it down . . . unless, well, you couldn’t just leave them in there.”

This was supposed to be a joke, but most people thought it would have been a great opportunity to shut the Herdmans up
somewhere
, even in a revolving door.

It
would
have been a great opportunity, except that by then it wasn’t Herdmans in the door. It was eight different kids, including Charlie.

“Why?” my father asked him. “Why would you follow the Herdmans anywhere, let alone into a revolving door?”

Charlie shrugged and looked up at the ceiling and down at the floor and finally said he didn’t know. “It was just that they were all around,” he went on. “There were Herdmans in front of us and Herdmans in back of us, and then Ralph said, ‘Let’s see how many kids will fit in the door,’ and so . . . ” He shrugged again.

The bank manager was mad because of his door, and the bank guard was mad because he picked the wrong thing to guard, but nobody blamed him. How could he know what the Herdmans were going to do? Most of the time, I don’t think even the Herdmans knew what they were going to do.

I don’t think they
planned
to mix up the mice and the guinea pigs until they happened to see some guinea pigs, and I don’t think they decided to find some kids and shove them into a revolving door until they happened to see the door and a bunch of kids all at the same place at the same time.

There probably wouldn’t have been any trouble at the pizza parlor either if Mr. Santoro hadn’t introduced a new variety— sardine pizza—and
that
wouldn’t have caused any trouble if Boomer Malone didn’t have to get rid of his guppies.

Boomer started out with two guppies in a fishbowl, and by the next week he had about a hundred guppies in jars and bottles and bowls. Mrs. Malone told my mother that she even found guppies in ice cube trays.

Boomer’s original idea had been to sell the guppies, but he finally had to pay Leroy Herdman fifty cents to take them away. According to Gladys, they were going to dump all the guppies into their bathtub and then charge kids a quarter to come and see the guppies go down the drain, all at once.

“It won’t hurt them,” Gladys said. “They’ll just go wherever the water goes and swim around. They’ll like it.”

Maybe so, but it never happened. Before they got the guppies home to the bathtub, Leroy and Claude and Gladys stopped in the pizza parlor, saw six sardine pizzas on the counter, and immediately swapped guppies for the sardines.

Nobody ever did think that sardine pizza would be a success but, as Mr. Santoro said, “After
that
, sardine pizza didn’t have a chance.”

Other Books by Barbara Robinson

T
HE
B
EST
C
HRISTMAS
P
AGEANT
E
VER

T
HE
B
EST
H
ALLOWEEN
E
VER

M
Y
B
ROTHER
L
OUIS
M
EASURES
W
ORMS

And Other Louis Stories

The Best School Year Ever

Copyright © 1994 by Barbara Robinson

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Robinson, Barbara.

    The best school year ever / Barbara Robinson.

        p. cm.

    Sequel to: The best Christmas pageant ever.

    Summary: The six horrible Herdmans, the worst kids in the history of the world, cause mayhem throughout the school year.

    ISBN 0-06-023039-8 — ISBN 0-06-023043-6 (lib. bdg.)

ISBN 0-06-440492-7 (pbk.)

    [1. Schools—Fiction. 2. Humorous stories.] I. Title.

PZ7.R5628Bg   1994

[Fic]—dc20

93-50891
CIP
AC

EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780062089953

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