Allan A. De Fina

I sat at my desk trying not to look at her as she read through my four page dog-eared composition, “Mystery at Midnight.” She hadn’t asked us to write a story. In fact, she almost never asked us to write. But the last time we wrote about “Why I’m Thankful on Thanksgiving,” she was so pleased with what I wrote that she said, “Allan’s composition is so good that I’m going to read it as an example to the rest of you. You could learn a lot from Allan. He may grow up to be a writer.”
Of course, not too many of my classmates were happy with me that day—but since I brought a couple of extra Yodels for lunch, I was able at least to keep the two meanest bullies in the class from picking on me.
Now I watched her from the corner of my eye. She was on the last page. Was she smiling? I couldn’t tell. Her lips were twitching and puckering as she read. Finally, she put the paper down. She looked over in my direction, but I pretended not to notice. I kept my eyes focused on the worksheet in front of me. I kept busy choosing and circling to, too, or two in the set of exercises. When I finally felt her gaze lift from me, I spied on her again: What was she doing? She was hunched over my paper with her red pencil in hand.
My house was one of the noisiest places in the world. My two younger brothers and my older sister were always yelling or crying or complaining about something. For the longest time I thought the only words my sister knew were, “I’m telling!” Every day was another adventure in walking on thin ice (with ice-breaking spiked heels) with her. She would run to my mother (“They’re bothering me!) if we sat too close to her on the couch watching television—her shows, of course—or if we sat on the floor in front of her. “I’m telling mommy that you kids are going to ruin your eyesight sitting too close to the TV,” she would taunt.
To escape the madness, I would go to my bedroom, climb into the top bunk, and pull out a book from a pile of books I’d been collecting. Fortunately, because my bunk was above the level of my mother’s extraordinary eyesight, I could store all kinds of stuff in my mattress or between the covers without her ever knowing. Along with my stack of books to be read, ants and bugs trapped in hardened pink bubble gum, and toy soldiers, was my 64 page marble cover composition book. Not the notebook I used for school work; this was the book I used for jotting down interesting words, for writing love poems to Lisa Agostini (the most beautiful girl in all of second grade), and for writing and illustrating my very first book.
I figured that if I wrote a really great book I would become rich and famous and I would be able to move into a mansion far away from my sister. I wouldn’t completely forget about her if I got rich, but she’d only be allowed to visit on holidays—and then only if she promised not to hog the television set. I also figured that if I were a very famous author, I could dedicate my book to Lisa Agostini and she and I would live together in the mansion, with servants who brought us our favorite toys and big helpings of ice cream and Yodels for dessert.
“Mystery at Midnight” was the story of a boy my age who figured out who committed a crime by looking for clues in garbage cans—something I sometimes did around my neighborhood because I was very suspicious of some of the neighbors and because some of them threw away some great junk. Once, I found a whole telephone that looked like it had been ripped out of the wall. I took it apart and played with the bell and I unscrewed the mouth and ear pieces to examine the wires inside of the phone. I wondered if the person who threw that phone away did what my father was always threatening to do. My father would yell at my mother each month after the phone bill came that he was going to rip that phone right out of the wall! She would dare him to do it, but he never did. He would just walk away with his shoulders all high and his neck stuck low between his shoulder blades.
Anyway, I thought I had written a really great story. I figured that not only would the boy in the story be a hero—but that I would be too! Every kid in second grade—even the bullies—would have to admit that I was pretty smart and talented to become a famous author. And, even if they didn’t like me before, I figured they’d have to like me now if they wanted to ride in my big limousine or if they wanted to come spend the afternoon in my mansion, eating Yodels and ice cream.
So what was taking Mrs. Meanspirit so long to make the announcement to the class? I knew what she was going to say: “Boys and girls, Allan has done it again! And this story will become a best seller! He’ll be famous all over the world! Someday children will read about him in school—just like Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson!”
As I finished my last line of choosing between your and you’re, Mrs. Meanspirit rose from her wooden chair, screeching it backwards along the floor as she pushed herself away from her desk. She strode toward me, floorboards earthquaking beneath my seat. The whole time she headed toward me she didn’t look at me. She just clutched my paper in her thick grasp. Even though she wasn’t looking at me, I could feel every other pair of eyes in the classroom sneaking a peek in my direction.
Then, she bent her massive body at her mammoth middle and with her fist, she plastered my few pages to the desktop and my worksheets. Looking down at my composition, I could see lots of red marks, scratched between my awkward combination of cursive and print. At the same time she hammered my paper to the scratched wooden desk, she leaned in close enough for me to smell her breath. In a whisper loud enough for everyone in the back seats to hear, she said, “Next time you write, write about something real. Write about something you really know.”
So, I have. Here it is.



©2003. This story may be reproduced for personal classroom use only. It may not be otherwise reproduced, stored electronically, or quoted in whole or in part, without the written consent of the author, who is the copyright holder for this work