I knew exactly what bad joke she would end the story with, but much less about long division.
We were supposed to be learning long division, but something had reminded her of Martin.
Martin had transferred schools half way through the year, so I always felt to me like that one shouldn’t count. I tried to listen back in to Miss Weaver, just in time to hear the end of her story about Martin Shandals, the now-famous comedian. I knew right away, in a way that I could think better than I could say, that this frog was different. Stagwood Forest was just beyond the schoolyard and it was riddled with frogs, but they always avoided people. Maybe some frogs blinked, but with its eyes smushed against the glass, this one didn’t. I couldn’t stop looking at the frog and it couldn’t stop looking back. And if I hadn’t been trying to decide whether my dragon should have four legs or two, I might not have looked out window at that exact moment, dropping my pencil on the page. If it had chosen to press its little green face against any other window, I might not have seen it. I had barely gotten started when it appeared, and changed Stagwood, and me, forever.
But, on that day, I never even got to the first pair of wings. And they each had a story that I wanted to tell. They’d have horns where horns don’t go, fur where scales should be, and all the wings. Most days, I drew imaginary places and then spent the rest of the time whipped up creatures to live there. So, instead of trying my hardest to listen, I spent most of class drawing in my notebook. The State Senator who was a teacher’s pet. The professional football player who got excellent marks in Math. But, by the second week of school she had started repeating herself, just like her outfits.īy then, I knew all the stories by heart. The first couple of times weren’t bad, maybe even kind of interesting. She was obsessed with tales of former students who had become some kind of famous. The biggest problem, though, was the stories.
It was the kind of boring that made your eyes shut without permission. For another thing, she was mind-numbingly boring. For one thing, she did, in fact, wear the same outfit every day the colors changed, but she always had on striped pants and a striped jacket. Before the school year started, I’d heard a few rumors about her, and within a week I realized that they were all true. Miss Weaver had been my teacher for a few months, and was known around Stagwood Elementary for the stack of black hair that rose a foot above her head. I was sitting in class when I first saw it.
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