Chapter Five - Worksheets and Manners

CHAPTER FIVE

Worksheets and Manners

IT STARTED WITH crayon math.
Two worksheets.
One pencil.
A whole lotta groans.

Everyone had their head down.
Scribbling, erasing, and chewing on pencil ends.
Everyone but Bluster.

He didn’t do worksheets.
He decorated them.

He drew mustaches on numbers.
Doodled lasers blasting the plus signs.
Wrote his name in bubble letters so big
it crossed into three other desks.

“Bluster, please try the first problem,”
Mr. Jenkins said.

Bluster rolled his eyes.
Then grinned wide.
“Already solved it! The answer is purple monkey dishwasher!”

Some kids laughed.
Some kids groaned.
Pebble just blinked.

But Maya didn’t laugh.
Maya sat right across from Bluster.
And she’d worked really hard on hers.

When Bluster grabbed her paper, “Let me help! I’ll fix this boring part,” he didn’t notice her eyes go wide.
He didn’t notice her voice get tiny.

He drew a mustache on her volcano diagram.
And an explosion that said “BOOM! MAYA FAILS!”

And when he handed it back,
he waited for the laugh.
Waited for Maya to play along.

She didn’t.

Instead, she looked at her hands.
And wiped her eyes real fast.

Bluster blinked.
The classroom got very quiet.
Even the pencils stopped moving.

“I... was just kidding,” he mumbled.

But the joke didn’t bounce.
It just... sank.

And for the first time all day,
Bluster didn’t feel big.
He felt small.

Like a speck in a hallway.
Like the last crayon in the box.
Peeled, broken, and quiet.

Mr. Jenkins cleared his throat.
“Maybe,” he said, “some help hurts more than it helps.”

Bluster nodded.
Slow.
Quiet.

This time, he picked up his worksheet.
Didn’t decorate it.
Didn’t joke.

He just stared at problem one.
And for once, it didn’t feel so silly
to try and figure it out.