AFTER BREAKFAST, MIKE and I ducked into the toilet instead of going to Mr. Cluck’s classroom for Hebrew school. In the hall outside, feet thundered by.
Mike turned on all the faucets. “I hate Visiting Day.”
On Visiting Day, his aunt and grandpa always came, and Mike was always extra jumpy. But he’d never said anything about it before. He turned off the faucets. “Grandpa doesn’t even recognize me anymore. He took care of me till he started forgetting.” He flushed the toilets. “So then I had to come here.”
“He’d still take care of you if he could, wouldn’t he?” Not like Ida.
“Yeah.” He lifted a toilet seat and then let go of it. Blam!
The noise in the hall was dying down. “Shh. They’ll wonder what’s going on.”
“Sorry.”
“If nobody’s in the front hall,” I said, “I’m going to knock on Mr. Doom’s door. I want to see if he’s in there. Be ready to run.”
Mike swallowed. I saw his Adam’s apple bob up and down. “If he catches us, we can gang up on him.”
Yeah. Mosquitoes are small, but they bite.
And one swipe kills them.
I opened the door. A prefect was at the end of the hall, walking away from us. Nobody else. We stepped out, spies entering enemy territory.
We turned into the front hall. The hall and the lobby were empty. We crossed the lobby. My hands were icy. We stood in front of Mr. Doom’s office. I knocked. He rumbled, “Come in,” and we ran. The stairwell door at the end of the hall looked a million miles away.
We reached the door, and slipped in. I put my fingers over my lips for Mike to be quiet, and somehow he was.
Footsteps in the hall. I stopped breathing. They came closer. Stopped. Started again. Closer, closer. Maybe farther away. Definitely farther away. Silence.
Mike started to grin. I shook my head. He might still be out there. We waited. Mike wiggled his fingers in the air, action without noise. We waited.
Mike snapped his fingers, then remembered and stopped. Mr. Doom had to be gone by now. I started to inch the door open. I heard footsteps again. I froze. Mike froze, sort of.
The footsteps came closer. The door was open a sliver. I couldn’t close it without making noise. The footsteps got louder.
I could see most of the front hall through the sliver. Mr. Doom’s back came into view, walking away from us. He opened his door without using a key and went in. For all the good it did, the door had been unlocked the whole time he was in the hall.
Nothing happened after that. Mr. Doom stayed in his office. When Eli and Harvey came to take our place, we went to Mr. Cluck’s class. The chart with the Hebrew alphabet was on a stand at the front of the room, but Mr. Cluck was giving his usual lecture.
As soon as I sat down my eyes closed, and I slept till the bell rang. At lunch, the twins said they’d seen Mr. Doom come out of his office and lock it right before lunch. They couldn’t stop talking about their adventure.
“He locked his door. Then he walked right by us,” Jeff said.
“We just rushed by like—”
“Like we were taking a message to President Coolidge.”
“It was easy.”
“He didn’t even look at us.”
I’d never get the carving if his office was always locked when he wasn’t in it.
“You can’t tell anything from a weekend, Dave,” Eli said, seeing my face. “He could leave his door unlocked for hours on a weekday.”
“We’ll find out tomorrow,” Mike said.
Visiting Day lunch was the best meal of the week. This Sunday, we had stew with actual pieces of meat in it, and they weren’t all gristle either. There were big chunks of potato and carrots too. Even with Moe taking his half, I felt like I had eaten.
After lunch, almost everybody went to the lobby to wait for their visitors. I went to our room along with Eli and a handful of other elevens who didn’t expect anybody. As we climbed the extra flight, we heard the kids downstairs, laughing and yelling.
We were supposed to spend the time writing letters. If we didn’t have any family to write to, we were supposed to study. I never wanted to study, so I always wrote a letter. If Mr. Meltzer came around that’s what he saw—me writing a letter. Sometimes I wrote to Ida. Sometimes I wrote to Gideon. If I needed to figure something out, I wrote to Papa. When Visiting Day ended, I flushed the letters to Gideon and Ida, but I saved the ones to Papa.
This time my letter was to Gideon. “We just came back from lunch,” I wrote.
The first course was chicken soup. When I was done I found the wishbone in the bottom of the bowl. My problem was I had nothing to wish for, it’s so nice here.
After the soup they brought out stew with big pieces of meat and potatoes, and there was as much bread as we wanted to soak up the gravy. For dessert we had chocolate cookies. No one is skinny at the HHB (Heavenly Hotel for Boys).
I don’t remember if I ever told you about our library. It has thousands of books, and every day we have a choice of an hour playing stickball or an hour in the library. I hit two homers yesterday.
I looked up. A few boys came in with their families. The best real thing about the HHB—the buddies—wouldn’t interest Gideon.
The twins came in with an old lady who walked with a cane. Joey, who sat catty-cornered behind me in Mr. Cluck’s class, was with a man who had a bushy beard. Mike must have gone somewhere else with his aunt and grandpa. Harvey didn’t come in either. I had never seen his mother, and I was curious about her.
“Yesterday Mr. Gluck, our teacher, started teaching us about labor unions,” I wrote.
(Remember Mr. Gluck? In my last letter I told you he’s the best teacher in the whole orphanage.) Lots of kids asked questions, and Mr. Gluck answered all of them. I guess it was interesting. I didn’t listen much because I was thinking about stickball.
It would be exactly right for you here. Maybe you’ll get lucky and Uncle Jack will die and you’ll be able to
“. . . Such a good boy. Dave is smart . . .” It was Mr. Meltzer’s voice, but I didn’t know what Dave he was talking about.
I looked up. Solly, carrying a big brown paper bag and looking as rumpled as ever, puffed along behind Mr. Meltzer.