Our thank-you jar was a pickle jar. Ms. Keene washed it three times, but if you put your nose inside you could still smell the pickles. This was the first thing I liked about it.
The second was that whoever made the most thoughtful contribution would present it at open day. I had never presented anything except the class hamster, and that had ended with Mr. Ellery standing on his desk. I wanted another chance.
We had to write one thing we were grateful for each afternoon. At first it was easy. I wrote about my mother finding my bus card. Then I wrote about our goalkeeper. Then I wrote about the cheese roll in my lunch, which Ms. Keene said needed more detail.
“Who made it?”
“The supermarket.”
“Who bought it?”
“My mother.”
“There you are.”
I added my mother in small letters. She got four thank-yous that week, mostly for buying things she would have bought anyway. I did not tell her about the contest. She was busy trying to get a delivery company to admit it had left our new washing machine in somebody else’s hallway.
Mina sat beside me. She liked drawing buildings with all the inside parts visible. You could see stairs, pipes, people in the bath. She made our school into a tall crooked palace with a slide between the library and the kitchen. It took her nine lunchtimes. On the tenth, Ms. Keene borrowed it for the front-office display.
“I’ll bring it back,” she said.
On Monday Mina asked for it. Ms. Keene couldn’t find it. On Tuesday she asked the office. On Wednesday she said it had probably been recycled with the old notices.
Mina put her pencil away. She did not shout, which I thought was remarkable. I would have shouted. I had shouted at my brother for recycling a cereal box I needed, and the cereal box hadn’t even been interesting yet.
“I’m sorry,” Ms. Keene said. “It was a beautiful piece.”
“Yes,” Mina said.
That afternoon she wrote nothing for the jar.
Ms. Keene came around checking. She said it was all right to have difficult feelings and still notice something good. Mina stared at the blank paper. After Ms. Keene moved on, I asked whether she could be grateful her pencil hadn’t been lost too.
“No,” she said.
I wanted her to laugh. She didn’t.
On Thursday Ms. Keene asked two volunteers to sort the notes for the display. She chose me and Idris. Idris had no interest in presenting. He wanted to use the stapler, and Ms. Keene had said sorting included stapling. We emptied the jar onto the big table. Some notes had names. Some did not. One said MY DOG in letters so large it had needed folding into eight pieces.
Mina’s blank note was there too. She had put it in after all, folded twice like everyone else’s. I recognized the corner she had cut off to test her new scissors.
There were headings on the display board: HOME, SCHOOL, OUR COMMUNITY. School was mostly lunch and the goalkeeper. Ms. Keene said we needed something about learning.
I thought of Mina’s drawing. Everyone had admired it. It had made our actual school look dull and disappointing, but in a complimentary way.
On the blank note I wrote, Thank you for sharing our work so people can see what we can do. I didn’t write Mina’s name. I didn’t think I had to. When Ms. Keene saw it, she said it was exactly the sort of thought she meant.
She asked if I would explain the board at open day.
I said yes before Idris could stop using the stapler long enough to be considered.
On Friday we rehearsed. I stood at the board with my hands out of my pockets. Ms. Keene gave me a page to read, but I said I could remember it. I had practised in the kitchen while my mother waited on the delivery company’s telephone line. She held up one finger for me to pause, then made a face at the phone and said, “Carry on. They’ve put me back on hold.”
My mother said I sounded very official. It was the best thing anyone had said to me all month.
When we reached the school heading, Ms. Keene called Mina over.
“This one is yours, isn’t it?”
Mina looked at the note. Then she looked at me.
“I thought you could stand beside Ellis and tell people about the drawing,” Ms. Keene said. “We have a photograph of it somewhere.”
“I didn’t write that.”
Ms. Keene frowned. “Well, someone did.”
Nobody spoke. Idris clicked the empty stapler. The sound was so loud that Ms. Keene took it away from him.
“We can still mention your work,” she told Mina. “It was part of the project.”
Mina went back to her seat. I should have said something then. Instead I watched Ms. Keene search her phone for the photograph. She found a picture of the office display. The drawing was at the edge, behind a plant. You could see half a bathroom and a little man falling off a staircase.
“There,” she said. “We haven’t lost it entirely.”
At lunch Mina sat with other people. Idris asked whether I had written the note. I said it didn’t have a name on it.
“That’s not what I asked.”
He had carried his sandwich over because his usual table was full. He went back and stood there eating it. I finished mine alone.
Open day began at two. My mother came wearing her work jacket. The delivery company had found the washing machine but wanted another fee to move it. She told me this quietly and then said, “Show me the jar.”
I wanted to show her everything: the headings, the careful staples, my name on the presenter card. Ms. Keene gathered the parents around the display. Mina’s father arrived carrying a motorcycle helmet. Mina stood behind him, holding the back of his sleeve.
I gave the first part of the speech. My mother smiled. Mr. Ellery appeared at the classroom door, and for once he seemed to expect a presentation without a loose animal in it.
Then Ms. Keene called Mina forward.
“One of our artists,” she said. “She made a wonderful picture of the school, and she’s written a note about sharing our achievements.”
Mina let go of her father’s sleeve. She came to the board slowly. Her face was not the face in the photograph Ms. Keene had printed that morning. In that one she had been laughing at the little man on the stairs.
I heard my own voice say, “It was me.”
Ms. Keene turned.
“The note. I wrote it.”
“Yes, Ellis, you’ve organized—”
“On Mina’s blank paper. After her drawing got thrown away.”
The parents became quiet in a way the class almost never did. Mina’s father asked what drawing. Ms. Keene answered him. I could hear her trying to explain it without making the story worse. It was impossible. I knew because I had been trying since Thursday.
“I thought it would make the board better,” I said.
My mother stopped smiling.
Mina took the note off the board. The staple tore it at one edge. She gave it to me.
“It’s yours,” she said.
I folded it. There wasn’t a bin close enough to use without making another performance. I put it in my pocket.
Ms. Keene apologized to Mina and to her father. He asked whether she had looked in every classroom. She said she would ask again. Mina said the picture had already gone. Nobody told her to notice something good.
I did not finish the speech. Idris took over from the home heading, where I had started going wrong by skipping two words. He read from the page and did a better job than I would have. Afterward Ms. Keene told me we would talk on Monday. My mother took me home, stopping at the supermarket because we needed washing powder for a machine that still wasn’t ours.
“You could have told me,” she said outside the shop.
“About the note?”
“About wanting to do the speech.”
I told her I wanted her to be surprised.
She looked at the bags, then at me. “I was.”
On Monday the jar was still there, but we did not have to put anything in it. Ms. Keene said she would ask before borrowing our work. Mina kept her new drawing in a folder that went home every day. She let me look once. The school had no slide this time. It had a very large lost-property cupboard.
At the end of the week Idris lent me his ruler. Mine had a crack that made every line bend slightly in the middle. I used his to draw a border around my geography page. Before giving it back, I wrote him a note on ordinary paper: Thanks. Yours is straighter.
He read it and asked whether he got any points.
“No.”
“Good,” he said, and used the blank side to calculate what we both owed him for the football stickers.
Loading comments…