Free Anastasia Has the Answers by Lois Lowry Page B

educators were all hunched over their little notebooks. Emily Ewing was sulking at her desk. The other students all looked bored.
    And then—Anastasia could hardly believe it, but she looked at the clock, and sure enough, it was time—the bell rang and the period was over.

11

    "Boy, was I glad Rafferty didn't call on me," Sonya Isaacson giggled as they left the English class. "I know I would have goofed my poem up."
    "I didn't even know mine," Daphne confessed. "I was going to memorize it last night, but I watched a movie on HBO instead."
    "Anyway, of
course
he'd call on Emily and Jacob, those nerds," Meredith said. "Look at my gross gym suit. My mother ironed all these creases into it." She held up the folded blue gym suit and made a face.
    "Willoughby'll love it," Daphne said. "Hey, An
astasia, have you decided what you're going to do for the gym demonstration?"
    "What do you mean?" Sonya asked. "Anastasia has to blow the whistle while we all make fools of ourselves climbing ropes."
    Daphne grinned. "Anastasia has a surprise," she said.
    "What? What is it?" Sonya and Meredith turned to Anastasia. "What's the surprise?"
    But Anastasia shook her head. She didn't want to talk about it. She was depressed about the English class. She had rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed that poem. She had overcome her normal self-consciousness to the point that she had desperately
wanted
to recite that poem, that day, to that class, in front of that group of visitors.
    The warning bell rang. "You go ahead," Anastasia said to her friends. "I'll catch up."
    "Don't be late," Meredith said. "We all promised Ms. Willoughby we'd be on time."
    Anastasia nodded glumly. She wanted to walk to gym by herself. She wanted to think.
    Probably, she knew, she shouldn't disrupt the gym class in front of all the visitors, maybe embarrassing Ms. Willoughby. She should just be a good sport and blow the whistle the way she'd been told.
    If she'd only been allowed to recite the poem, probably she would be content to phweet the whistle. But now things were different. Now, if she didn't do anything about it, the entire day would go by and she would never be noticed. She would be a nothing. She would be a nonparticipant, a bystander, a nonentity, a nerd.
    A month from now, back in Stuttgart or Brussels or Liverpool, or wherever, the educators would remember their visit to American schools, and they would think of—
    Yuck. Jacob Berman. They would think, "That wonderful intelligent boy in a junior high school in a Boston suburb; that boy who quoted long passages from Sophocles, imagine that..."
    And they would think of—
    Barf. Emily Ewing. They would think, "That stunning girl with the perfect teeth and the smooth, shiny, long hair; too bad she didn't know much about poetry, but even so..."
    But if someone, by chance, asked, "What about Anastasia Krupnik?" they would scratch their heads. They would furrow their brows. They would say, finally,
    "WHO?"
    Anastasia couldn't bear it. The worst thing in the world, she decided, was to be on the receiving end of a brow-furrowed WHO.
    So she decided to disrupt the gym class. And she hoped that she could do it in a way that would make Ms. Wilhelmina Willoughby proud.
    ***
    It was a different group of visitors in the gym, Anastasia noticed as she marched in with her classmates, all of them in their clean, starched gym suits, white socks, and newly washed white sneakers.
    Jenny Billings had tried to get away with forgetting the white socks. "I'm sorry, Ms. Willoughby," Jenny Billings had said smugly in the locker room, "but I forgot my white socks. So I guess I'll just have to wear these striped knee socks."
    "No way, José," Ms. Willoughby replied. "Be my guest, kiddo." And she held up a brand-new pair of white socks from the supply she had waiting. Jenny groaned, took the fresh socks, and went to change.
    Anastasia glanced over at the guests, who were seated in a row in the bleachers, as she stood in her place in the