Walk Two Moons

13 BOUNCING BIRKWAY

It was time to tell Gram and Gramps about Mr. Birkway.

Mr. Birkway was mighty strange. I didn’t know what to make of him. I thought he might have a few squirrels in the attic of his brain. He was one of those energetic teachers who loved his subject half to death and leaped about the room dramatically, waving his arms and clutching his chest and whomping people on the back.

He said, “Brilliant!” and “Wonderful!” and “Terrific!” He was tall and slim, and his bushy black hair made him look wild, but he had enormous deep brown cowlike eyes that sparkled all over the place, and when he turned these eyes on you, you felt as if his whole purpose in life was to stand there and listen to you, and you alone.

Midway through the first class, Mr. Birkway asked for everyone’s summer journals. He flung himself up and down the aisles, receiving the journals as if they were manna from heaven. “Wonderful!” he said to each journal-giver.

I was worried. I had no journal.

On top of Mary Lou Finney’s desk were six journals. Six. Mr. Birkway said, “Heavens. Mercy. Is it—can it be—Shakespeare?” He counted the journals. “Six! Brilliant! Magnificent!”

Christy and Megan, two girls who had their own club called the GGP (whatever that meant), were whispering over on the other side of the room and casting malevolent looks in Mary Lou’s direction. Mary Lou kept her hand on top of the journals as Mr. Birkway reached for them. In a low voice she said, “I don’t want you to read them.”

“What?” Mr. Birkway boomed. “Not read them?” The whole room was silent. Mr. Birkway scooped up Mary Lou’s journals before she could even blink. He said, “Don’t be silly. Brilliant! Thank you!”

Another girl, Beth Ann, looked as if she might cry. Phoebe was sending me messages with her eyebrows that indicated that she was not too pleased either. I think they were all hoping that Mr. Birkway was not actually going to read these journals.

Mr. Birkway went around the whole room snatching journals. Alex Cheevey’s journal was covered with basketball stickers. Christy’s and Megan’s were slathered over with pictures of male models. The cover of Ben’s was a cartoon of a boy with a normal boy’s head, but the arms and legs were pencils, and out of the tips of the hands and feet were dribbles of words.

When he got to Phoebe’s desk, Mr. Birkway lifted up her plain journal and peeked inside. Phoebe was trying to slide down in her chair. “I didn’t write much,” Phoebe said. “In fact, I can hardly remember what I wrote about at all.”

By the time Mr. Birkway got to me, my heart was clobbering around so hard I thought it might leap straight out of my chest. “Deprived child,” he said. “You didn’t have a chance to write a journal.”

“I’m new—”

“New? How blessed,” he said. “There’s nothing in this whole wide world that is better than a new person!”

“So I didn’t know about the journals—”

“Not to worry!” Mr. Birkway said. “I’ll think of something.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant. I thought maybe he would give me a whole lot of extra homework or something. For the rest of the day, you could see little groups of people asking each other, “Did you write about me?” I was very glad I hadn’t written anything.

For a while, we didn’t hear any more about the journals. We had absolutely no idea all the trouble they were going to cause.