Free Soup by Robert Newton Peck

Chapter One

A Note from Miss Kelly
     
    Dear Mrs. Peck,
    Your son Robert made a rude remark to Miss Boland, our school nurse. Perhaps it was not intended to be as coarse as it sounded. Miss Boland thinks that you (his mother) should be informed of this. I quite agree.
    Miss Kelly
     
    I stood stock-still in the kitchen while my mother read the note. Underneath my corduroy knickers, the underwear was starting to itch my legs. But I didn’t scratch. Instead I just stood there and masterminded various routes of escape.
    “What does the note say, Mama?”
    This was step one. Soup and I had, of course, both read the note over and over all the way home and could have recited it upside-down in a barrel of water. But by asking Mama what it said, she would have to believe in my innocence. And as I asked the question, I made sure my eyes were open as wide and pure as I could force them. It was also a good trick not to blink as long as possible, which made your eyes water.
    “Let me see it,” said Aunt Carrie.
    Aunt Carrie read the note, looked at Mama, and made her customary statement. It was what she always said, usually about ten times in just the forenoon.
    “What he needs is a good, sound thrashing.”
    “Yes,” said Mama, “he certainly does.”
    “No, I don’t,” I said. “It was all a mistake. Honest. It was really Miss Kelly’s fault.”
    “Miss Kelly’s fault?”
    When either Mama or Aunt Carrie started asking insteadof telling, I knew that the cause was not lost. There was still a chance to miss the whip, if I could just keep talking. And so I made the explanation as long-winded as possible to let their ire cool. Soup always said it was important to keep talking.
    But I must advance with caution, being careful not to demean the noble name of Miss Kelly, who for the past one hundred years had taught first, second, third, and fourth grade (I was in third) in the small red brick Vermont schoolhouse. Kids who were my fellow classmates often remarked that
their
mothers and fathers had learned many a stern lesson from no other than Miss Kelly herself. So there was no way that I could push all the blame on such a worthy soul. I must step with stealth.
    “Well,” I said, “I don’t really mean it was
all
Miss Kelly’s fault. But the other day, she was teaching us on how to talk.”
    “A lesson you don’t need,” said Aunt Carrie, who believed that little boys and little girls should be seen and not heard—a rule that applied until our ages caught up to hers, which would be never.
    “Miss Kelly said that when you talk to somebody it’s like you’re playing ball. First the somebody asks you aquestion, and that means they throw the ball to you. But you have to do more than just catch a question like you catch a ball. Here’s the important part. You
have
to throw the ball back. When somebody asks how you are, you just can’t say, ‘Fine.’ You say, ‘Fine, thank you, and how are you?’”
    “What does all this have to do with …?”
    “Everything,” I said. “Miss Kelly said you have to throw the ball back. So I threw it back, and by mistake the ball hit Miss Boland.”
    Miss Boland, who was our school nurse, was about three times as big as Miss Kelly and about ten times as big as I was. You couldn’t throw a ball anywhere in the whole world and not hit Miss Boland. That’s when I got to thinking about it and almost giggled. Could have been a disaster, laughing when on trial.
    “You hit Miss Boland?” said Mama. “I’m afraid, Robert, that I don’t see all of this. Miss Kelly’s note says you
said
something to Miss Boland. Did you?”
    “Sort of.”
    “Exactly,” said Aunt Carrie, adjusting her calico apron as if it were a judge’s robe, “what
did
you say?”
    “It’s Miss Boland’s job to be the school nurse,” I said. “She comes around once a week to look at ourteeth and see if we wash our hands. And she always looks in our hair to find cooties.” (Nothing ever made Miss Boland