Leon and the Spitting Image Read online

“Check and double check,” he said reassuringly.

  “Oh, I almost forgot.” Emma Zeisel handed her son a string-tied box.

  “What’s inside?”

  “Dough balls. Frau Haffenreffer baked an extra batch just for you.” Emma Zeisel gave Leon a quick motherly inspection. “Your laces, sweetie.”

  “They’re fine,” he answered, mildly annoyed. He craned his neck toward the street and looked for an available taxi.

  Since the middle of third grade, Leon had been taking taxis by himself. He had no choice. The school bus didn’t stop near the hotel, and his mom almost never finished work early enough to make the trip with him. After accompanying her son to school on a few trial runs, Emma Zeisel had handed Leon a blank notebook.

  “What’s this for?” he had asked suspiciously. He disliked anything that involved writing.

  “It’s to register the drivers’ names,” said Emma Zeisel. “You can get them off the hack license.”

  “Hack license?”

  “The driver’s picture ID,” she explained. “It’s always posted. It’s the law. And if you start getting goosey, just ask the cabby where he comes from and add that to your notes.”

  Leon took the assignment seriously. He returned from his maiden voyage proudly announcing, “I got a guy named Cesar Viana. And you know what? He’s from the Philippines!” A few seconds later Leon said, “Where exactly are the Philippines, Mom?” Almost before Leon finished asking the question, Emma Zeisel whipped out the atlas she stashed behind the reception desk and showed him.

  On his second taxi trip, Leon flagged down Juan-Pablo Zapata from Mexico. And on his third, he hailed Push Singh from India. Each name and nationality went straight into the travel book.

  And so began the taxi-driver collection.

  For Leon’s ninth birthday, Emma Zeisel bought her son a huge foam-backed map of the world and a box of pushpins tipped with colorful plastic banners. From then on, Leon recorded every country he “visited” on the map that hung above his bed as well as in his travel book. By the time fourth grade rolled around, he had collected thirty-seven nations and nineteen states.

  * * *

  Leon lifted an arm and expertly extended one finger toward the oncoming traffic. Despite the downpour, he managed to nab a taxi almost at once. (Drivers generally picked him over businessmen urgently waving briefcases.) He gave the cabby the address of his school, then squinched and clucked, hoping for an Alaska, or a Botswana, or—best of all—a Suriname. Suriname was the one country he still needed to complete South America.

  Leon opened his eyes and looked at the name on the driver’s photo ID: Ladislo Szekacs.

  He recorded the name in his travel book and said, “Excuse me, Mr…. uh … ”

  “It is pronounced ‘say catch,’” said the driver. “Like in your American baseball.”

  “Thanks,” Leon said. “Could you tell me where you come from, Mr. Say Catch?”

  “Why should you know?” the driver asked suspiciously.

  “It’s for my collection,” Leon said.

  “What collection?” the driver demanded.

  Leon had his routine down pat. “Some kids collect baseball cards. I collect taxi drivers.”

  The cabby hesitated.

  “Please,” Leon said. He held up the travel book. “It’s important.”

  “Hungary,” the driver mumbled.

  “Yes!” Leon exclaimed.

  “Why are you so happy? This is good?”

  “This is great,” said Leon. “You’re my first Hungary.”

  “And you, little boy,” said the now smiling driver, “you are my first taxi-driver collector.”

  Leon closed the travel book and gazed out the window. A mail truck, idling at a traffic light, made him think of envelopes, which in turn made him think of the confidential report he had uncovered the night before. The memory prompted a sudden uncontrolled shiver. The assessments from Sloat, Toothacre, and Joost seemed so unfair. And it didn’t help that the identity of his fourth-grade teacher was a total mystery.

  Leon tried to forget about school, but he couldn’t. When he struggled to break through the red string on the pastry box, a phrase from the home report popped back into his head. Nimble fingers make for nimble minds. What lamebrain thought that one up?

  The only good thing about the first day of school was that Leon would see his two best friends, P.W. and Lily-Matisse. They had both been away all summer.

  P.W. was called P.W. because his real name—Phya Winit Dhabanandana—tended to scare people off. P.W. was a short kid with a long name, whose parents came from Thailand. He loved math and building things. He hated spelling and keeping quiet. He had a reputation for being a bit of a smart aleck.

  As for Lily-Matisse, she was lean and lanky (like Leon) and had buck teeth. (“Dentists must love that girl,” Leon’s mom had once conjectured.) She was an awesome jump roper, a gifted gymnast, and the daughter of the school art teacher, Ms. Jasprow, which meant she knew lots of stuff other kids didn’t.

  “Little boy, you hear me?” said the taxi driver. “We are arrived.”

  Leon paid the fare, and dashed out into the rain. He hadn’t even made it up the limestone steps when he took his first tumble of the school year. He fell hard, face forward. Dough balls rolled down the steps and into the gutter. Embarrassed and bruised, Leon tried to pick himself up. He couldn’t.

  A very large army boot was pressing down on one of his untied shoelaces. Intentionally.

  “Hey there, Zit-sel,” a voice bellowed. “Welcome back.” The owner of the boot completed his greeting with a brutal punch to the arm.

  Leon winced, but said nothing. He knew his attacker would soon lose interest and seek out other targets.

  The assault came from a beefy eleven-year-old named Henry Lumpkin. Henry Lumpkin had been torturing Leon nearly as long as teachers had.

  Lumpkin’s methods differed from theirs, however. To inflict pain, he relied on dead-arms and dodgeballs, not confidential reports. He was a thoroughly nasty life-form who picked up nicknames the way crooks acquire aliases.

  Some kids called him Lumpkin the Pumpkin because of his bright orange hair and his pumpkiny shape. Others referred to him as Hank the Tank, in recognition of the armored body hidden under the olive drab army jacket he always wore to school. And still others identified him as the Lethal Launcher because of the force and accuracy of his dodgeball throws.

  But to Leon he was just Lumpkin, a blockhead and a bully whose sudden and unpredictable attentions always spelled trouble.

  Leon stayed put on the ground for almost a minute, even though it was raining. When the coast was clear, he darted into school. Lily-Matisse and P.W. were waiting near the water fountain.

  “Hey,” said P.W.

  “Hey,” said Leon.

  “Hey,” said Lily-Matisse.

  “Hey,” said Leon.

  “You okay?” Lily-Matisse asked.

  “Why shouldn’t he be okay?” P.W. said.

  “Well, for starters, he’s limping,” Lily-Matisse observed. “Plus he’s rubbing his arm.”

  Leon glanced at the human tank rolling down the hall.

  “Did Lumpkin do that?” Lily-Matisse asked.

  “Yup.”

  “We’d better take cover,” P.W. advised.

  The three friends hung up their rain gear and entered the classroom.

  “Holy cow!” said P.W.

  “Geez!” Leon exclaimed.

  “My mom told me our homeroom was going to be different,” said Lily-Matisse.

  “This is so weird!” P.W. said enthusiastically. He pointed to the back of the room, at a massive metal cabinet mounted on heavy rubber wheels. “Look at the lock on that thing! What do you think is inside?”

  “And what about those!” Leon said, gawking at a series of wall posters featuring severed hands.

  “Sure beats those poems Mr. Joost had on his walls last year!” said P.W.

  “Don’t count on it,” sai
d Lily-Matisse. “My mom told me—”

  “Here it comes,” P.W. interrupted. “Previews of upcoming attractions. Let’s hear what your mom says.”

  “Well, my mom told me—”

  DRRRRINNNNNG!

  The school bell put a stop to Lily-Matisse’s update.

  A thin shadow darkened the frosted glass of the classroom door.

  Leon squinched and clucked. Please make this teacher better than the last ones, he told himself.

  The knob turned and the door opened.

  When Leon unsquinched, he found himself in the presence of a tall, thin woman wearing a long black cape. Not a Batman cape. More the kind of cape Florence Nightingale would have fastened around her neck before heading off to nurse the wounded.

  Leon stared at the clasp on the cape. For a moment, he thought the clasp was formed from two yellow marbles linked by a chain. But the more he looked at the “marbles,” the more they seemed to look at him.

  All of a sudden he understood why.

  They’re not marbles, he said to himself…. They’re eyeballs!

  Leon lifted his gaze from the glass eyes to his teacher’s eyes—two dull black beads set deep into a narrow face framed by a helmet of unnaturally black hair. The severe hairdo exaggerated the thinness of the head and drew attention away from a mouth so pinched it looked as though it had been stitched in place by a doll maker who had pulled too hard on the thread.

  The teacher hung up her long black cape and revealed a long black dress underneath. Not everything she wore was black. Between the bottom of her dress and the top of her precisely knotted lace-up boots (which were also black), there was a small stretch of leg covered by panty hose the color of cooked liver.

  Leon wasn’t the only one shocked by the new fourth-grade teacher. The rest of the class was equally amazed. They all watched in nervous silence as she marched over to her desk and began emptying her satchel. Leon made a mental list:

  one clipboard

  one container of cottage cheese (small-curd)

  one box of chalk

  one chalk holder

  one metal pointer

  one brass key

  It didn’t take a hotel detective to figure out that the key must go to the giant padlock on the cabinet. Leon observed his teacher insert a piece of chalk into the sleeve of the chalk holder and adjust it like a lipstick. She then wrote her name on the blackboard with terrifying neatness:

  Miss Hagmeyer

  P. W. leaned over to Leon and whispered, “Hag is right.”

  “Suspend the verbal games at once!” Miss Hagmeyer snapped.

  P.W., lowering his voice to a murmur, said, “How’d she hear us?”

  “Must have radar,” Leon whispered back.

  “I do,” Miss Hagmeyer said. “So I advise all of you to keep quiet and concentrate on the matters at hand.” She went back to writing on the blackboard.

  “There,” she said moments later, turning to face the room. “I would like all of you to read out loud what I have written.”

  The students dutifully repeated the phrase. “A place for everything and everything in its place.”

  “Louder,” Miss Hagmeyer commanded.

  The class said the phrase once again.

  “Better,” she allowed. “Those nine words will guide us throughout the year. There will be a proper place for books, a proper place for supplies, and a proper place for worksheets. There will be a proper place for study, a proper place for play, and a proper place for each of you to sit.”

  With that, Miss Hagmeyer put down the chalk and called everyone up to the front of the room. She then reached for her clipboard and pointer and began reading off the names of students—last name first, first name last. The roll call started with “Brede, Antoinette” and finished, inevitably, with “Zeisel, Leon.” After stating each name, Miss Hagmeyer aimed her metal pointer at a chair.

  Leon ended up at the very rear of the room, sandwiched between a desk assigned to Warchowski, Thomas, and the padlocked cabinet. Though the seat assignment separated Leon from his friends, it did have one advantage. It was beyond the range of Lumpkin’s spitballs, noogies, and dead-arms.

  Brede, Antoinette, wasn’t so lucky. Because of the configuration of the chairs, she got stuck directly in front of the class bully.

  The moment Lumpkin thought Miss Hagmeyer wasn’t looking, he reached forward to give Antoinette a poke with a brand-new highly sharpened No. 3 pencil (No. 3s being the ones with the extra-hard lead). But before he could complete his attack, Miss Hagmeyer whipped around.

  “Stop that at once!” she barked. “Did you fail to register my earlier warning? I hear everything, Mr. Lumpkin—everything.”

  “But I didn’t touch her,” he protested.

  “You were about to. I heard you leaning over, and don’t bother denying it.” Miss Hagmeyer lifted her unnaturally black hair to reveal a truly shocking pair of ears. “These little beauties never fail me.”

  Leon found himself gawking. Even from the back of the room he could see that the so-called little beauties were neither little nor beautiful. Quite the opposite. They were huge and gnarled, like the giant mushrooms one sometimes finds growing on rotten tree stumps.

  It’s never a good idea to praise your own body parts. It’s an even worse idea when the body parts in question resemble a primordial fungus. Miss Hagmeyer must have sensed as much, because she quickly let go of her hair. “Now that we have established that I can hear you,” she said to the class, “it is time to find out whether you can hear me.”

  She tapped her blackboard motto. “I did not invent this nine-word phrase. A medieval master who trained apprentices composed it. Which is fitting, since our year together will concentrate on the Middle Ages, that period between the fifth and fifteenth century that gave the world horseshoes, hard soap, and the horizontal loom. And as you will soon discover, the Middle Ages emphasized discipline and charity. That I shall supply. The Middle Ages also put stock in obedience and diligence. That you shall provide. And by stitching together my discipline and your dutiful diligence, we will create a glorious tapestry of learning. Do all of you follow what I am saying?”

  A hesitant round of “Yes, Miss Hagmeyers” filtered through the room.

  “Good. Now some of you might be wondering: How will we create this glorious tapestry of learning? I shall answer that question by quoting another medieval saying. Listen closely. ‘I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I make and I understand.’ In this class you will make. And by making you will learn. You will exercise your fingers and, by doing so, exercise your brains. That is the Classical way. That is the way of all apprentices wishing to become masters.”

  Leon gulped. Mention of fingers never sounded promising.

  Miss Hagmeyer walked over to her desk and grabbed the metal pointer. She held it up in the air and said, “In short, I will make your minds and your fingers nimble by teaching you how to use this!”

  And that’s when Leon learned the horrible truth. The metal pointer wasn’t a metal pointer.

  It was a giant instructional sewing needle!

  FOUR

  Coach Kasperitis

  Leon felt miserable as he left the classroom and headed for the gym. A whole year in the clutches of a teacher who threatened her class with a dagger-sized sewing needle? Something told him that Miss Hagmeyer’s projects would be a lot more demanding than macaroni necklaces. And for a student who had trouble writing neatly and tying his shoes that did not bode well.

  “Okay, here’s the scoop,” said Lily-Matisse as she, Leon, and P.W. made their way to PE. “Mom told me the Hag is a total maniac.”

  “No kidding,” said P.W. “What clued you in? The glass eyeballs? The weird things she made us recite? Maybe it was her nickel-sized earlobes?”

  “The Hag’s earlobes are a lot bigger than nickels,” said Lily-Matisse. “They’re quarter sized at least.”

  “Could we argue about lobe size later?” said Leon impatiently. “Wha
t did your mom tell you, Lily-Matisse?”

  “Well, for starters, the Hag is totally obsessed by sewing. She’ll teach us math and English and stuff like that. But basically we’ll be using needles and pins more than anything else. And you know those posters on the wall?”

  “The surgery ones?” said P.W.

  Lily-Matisse shook her head. “They’re not about surgery. They’re sewing instructions. And that big cabinet with the lock on it—the one Leon can touch from his desk? It’s crammed with cloth and tools and other sewing junk.”

  “Great,” said Leon despairingly.

  “And that’s not all,” Lily-Matisse said as she entered the gym. “You know her hair? How it’s super black and shiny? Mom says it’s a wig!”

  “A wig?” said Leon.

  “No way,” said P.W.

  “Way,” said Lily-Matisse. “Mom heard the Hag adjusting it in the teachers’ lounge.”

  “What do you mean, heard?” said P.W. skeptically.

  “Mom’s pretty sure it’s attached with Velcro.”

  “Velcro?” said Leon.

  P.W. dropped to one knee and started pulling at his sneaker strap. Sccritchh! Sccritchh! “Did it sound like this?”

  Lily-Matisse made a face. “Cut it out, P.W. That’s gross.”

  A shrill whistle blast put an end to P.W.’s sneaker concert.

  Coach Skip Kasperitis was a whistle-happy ex-baseball player with a great big heart, a great big behind, and a great big soft jowly face. But the most distinctive thing about the coach had nothing to do with any of those things. It had to do with a very unfortunate habit he’d picked up as a pitcher in the minor leagues.

  That very unfortunate habit was tobacco.

  Naturally the Classical School had a ban on smoking tobacco. But no one had thought to prohibit chewing it. And because of that oversight in the teacher handbook, Coach Kasperitis was able to indulge his unhealthy addiction.

  Colleagues complained, of course, as did some parents. But the principal of the school, Hortensia Birdwhistle, turned a blind eye. She never liked raising a stink. Besides, she felt sorry for the coach. She knew he had cut back and that he was doing everything in his power to quit.