Fourth-Grade Disasters

“Fourth grade!” said Mason Dixon’s mother as she sat on the family-room floor surrounded by bags of school supplies. “Tomorrow is the first day of fourth grade!”

Lying on the floor next to her, Mason tried not to scowl. He must not have succeeded, because she said, “Stop frowning! Fourth grade is wonderful. It will be your best year yet!”

That wasn’t saying much. Third grade had meant sitting next to Dunk Davis instead of sitting next to Brody Baxter. Second grade had been Mrs. Prindle, who didn’t like boys. First grade had been a broken arm, when Mason fell off the climbing bars. And kindergarten—well, the less said about Mason’s biggest kindergarten disaster, the better.

Beside him on the floor, Mason’s dog, Dog, snored peacefully. Dog obviously wasn’t impressed by the thought of fourth grade. Mason felt a surge of love for Dog, a three-legged golden retriever who had come to live with him two months ago.

“Go sharpen your pencils,” Mason’s mom said. “I’ll put your name on your notebooks. I just love brand-new school supplies, don’t you?”

Actually, Mason didn’t. The trouble with brand-new school supplies was that they were brand-new
school
supplies.

“I’m so glad you and Brody are in the same class again,” she went on.

That was one thing Mason was glad about, too.

“Do you remember that time when Brody was absent in preschool and you went up to another child and said, ‘Let’s pretend you’re Brody’? Your teacher told me that. It was the cutest thing.”

Mason felt his scowl deepen. He had already heard the story fifty times. Maybe sixty.

“This year you’ll finally get to be in the Plainfield Platters!” his mom said.

The Plainfield Platters was the huge school chorus that practiced before school two mornings a week, open to all fourth and fifth graders. As far as Mason could tell, all fourth and fifth graders were in it. But surely, in the history of Plainfield Elementary, there must have been at least one fourth grader who wasn’t.

“Um—I don’t like to sing,” Mason reminded her, since she had apparently forgotten.

“You have a lovely singing voice!”

Mason couldn’t remember any time that she had heard him sing. It wasn’t an activity he ever engaged in voluntarily.

In kindergarten, Mason’s class had had to sing a song for a school assembly, presumably to show all the bigger kids how adorable they were. The song went, “I’m a little teapot, short and stout.” At the end of the song, when the little teapot got all steamed up and ready to shout, “Tip me over and pour me out!” Mason had tipped himself too far and fallen over, right there in the middle of the front row. The whole school had burst into laughter mingled with cheers, or maybe it had been laughter mingled with jeers.

It had been the worst moment of Mason’s entire life. He still dreamed about it sometimes.

“I don’t like to sing,” Mason repeated.
Especially not in front of the whole school
. “I’m not what you would call a singing person. I don’t want to be in the Plainfield Platters.”

And I’m not going to be
, he added, but only to himself.

“Mason.” Now it was her turn to frown. “We’re not going to have another year with a negative attitude. Your father and I have been talking about this. If you expect rain, you’ll get rain. If you expect sun, you’ll get sun.”

That might be the single falsest statement Mason had ever heard.

“You expected sun on my birthday,” he pointed out, “for my
outdoor
birthday party at Water World. And what did you get?”

“Mason, you know what I mean.”

Mason rolled over so that he was lying facedown, his nose squished against the scratchy carpet. In his sleep, Dog must have sensed Mason’s presence; Dog’s long tail thumped twice. That would be another bad thing about school: leaving Dog all day. Fourth grade wouldn’t be so bad if Dog could be there, too.

And fourth grade wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t the bizarre expectation that every single fourth grader would stand up on the stage in front of hundreds of people and sing. Oh, and sing while doing the occasional lively dance step as well. In addition to not being a singing person, Mason wasn’t a dancing person. Most of all, he wasn’t a being-up-onstage-in-front-of-everybody person.

It would be even worse if a big fourth grader fell over while trying to impersonate a tipping and pouring teapot. And Mason hadn’t thought his kindergarten calamity was all that amusing in the first place.

“Now go sharpen your pencils,” Mason’s mother said. “There’s nothing like a bunch of freshly sharpened pencils on the first day of school!”

Mason groaned.

“Mason! Go sharpen your pencils!”

Mason went.

Brody came over later that afternoon, to see Mason, of course, but also to see Dog. Mason and Brody shared Dog. Brody couldn’t have a dog of his own because his father was desperately allergic to all pets except Brody’s goldfish, Albert. In fact, Brody had been the reason Mason got Dog: Dog was supposed to be Brody’s dog, but lived next door at Mason’s house.

For a while Mason hadn’t even liked Dog, hard as that was to believe now. Mason had thought he wasn’t a pet person, but he had turned out to be wrong about that. Though not completely wrong. He still wasn’t a
pet
person. But he was Dog’s person. And Brody was Dog’s person, too.

Brody came staggering under the weight of a huge paper sack, which he placed carefully on the floor before swooping down on Dog for a hug. Dog licked
Brody’s face, his neck, his hands, any part of Brody that was lickable.

“What’s in the bag?” Mason asked Brody once Dog’s licking was completed.

“My school supplies! I thought we could compare school supplies.”

Mason stared at Brody. Even for Brody, the most enthusiastic person on the planet, this was a bit much.

“Compare school supplies?” Mason repeated in a strangled voice.

“You know, show each other what kind of markers we got, and how many colored pencils we have in our colored-pencil boxes, and if we got anything special. Like, I have a tiny little stapler with miniature staples in it, and my own personal pencil sharpener so I can sharpen pencils right at my desk if I don’t want to get up to walk all the way across the room to sharpen a pencil.”

“I already sharpened mine,” Mason said. “My mother made me.”

“I already sharpened mine, too—of course I did—but, Mason, they’re not going to stay sharpened all year long. So that’s when I’ll use my own personal
pencil sharpener, shaped like—” Brody’s voice broke off. “Guess what it’s shaped like!”

Mason couldn’t begin to guess. “I give up.”

Brody glowed with pleasure at having stumped Mason.

“It’s shaped like—a dog! I think it even looks a little bit like Dog.”

Brody dug in his sack for the pencil sharpener, pulling out heaps of notebooks with bright, busy covers: pictures of dogs, of cats, of all kinds of fish. Mason’s notebooks were plain, solid colors: red, yellow, green. He had wanted them all the same color, brown (to match the brown socks he wore every day), but the store didn’t sell brown notebooks. Besides, his mother had said it would be better to have a different color for each subject. She had obviously given a lot of thought to the notebook issue.

“Here it is!”

Brody held out his pencil sharpener, which did look sort of like Dog. The pencil-sharpening hole was in the dog’s tail.

“Cool,” Mason said, since he had to say something.

“Okay, Mason,” Brody announced after a long pause to give Mason time to appreciate the pencil
sharpener in its full glory. “Are you ready for a surprise? Because I have a surprise for you!”

Mason generally didn’t like surprises. But he couldn’t imagine that Brody’s surprise would be anything too terrible.