5

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Painted in the entranceway of Queen Elizabeth Elementary School, just above the still-crooked picture of the queen, was the school motto.

IS IT FAIR? IS IT SAFE? IS IT KIND?

In October, the kindergarten teacher put up a frieze of construction paper leaves her students had made by outlining their little hands. Only when the frieze went up did people notice that the real leaves on the trees hadn’t changed color. One day it got very cold and the next the leaves were black and shriveled. Fall looked ugly, when normally Nicola thought it was the prettiest season.

The school janitor had already got out the ladder for the kindergarten teacher to put up the leaf frieze. Mrs. Dicky didn’t want to ask him to get it out again, except the kindergarten teacher had accidentally covered the school motto. You couldn’t see anymore when you entered the school that it was a safe, fair and kind place. Also, Mrs. Dicky wanted to straighten the picture of the queen. Several times a week she asked the janitor to do it, but the queen always ended up crooked again.

So that day, Mrs. Dicky decided just to drag a chair out of the office and stand on it.

Which was when she fell.

Nobody saw it happen. But at recess, while everyone was shivering in the early cold staring at the playground equipment they weren’t allowed to play on, they saw the ambulance take Mrs. Dicky away.

For several weeks the students and staff of Queen Elizabeth Elementary didn’t have a principal. By the time the temporary one came, he had so much catching up to do that there was no winter holiday concert. Some of the classes didn’t even have a party.

Ms. Phibbs’ class didn’t. Instead, they got extra homework for the winter break.

* * *

Over the holidays June Bug ate or destroyed most of the ornaments on the lower branches of the Christmas tree. She ate the Styrofoam balls that Jackson had pasted with pictures from Christmas cards. June Bug tore apart the Three Wise Men dolls that were Nicola’s favorite ornaments, chewing the bead eyes off their wise faces and ripping their stuffing out. Blobs of white stuffing covered the living-room floor the next morning. It looked like it had snowed inside.

Whenever Nicola took June Bug for a walk, Terence, asked — sort of joking, sort of not — for a report on what Christmas decoration had come out the other end of June Bug.

June Bug didn’t eat the glass balls because she was a smart dog. Instead she unhooked them with her teeth, dropped them on the floor and batted them around the house like a cat. Nicola checked all the rooms several times a day because her father had said, “Christmas or no Christmas, if anyone ends up in the emergency room with broken glass in their foot, June Bug is spending the holidays at the SPCA.”

So Nicola removed all the remaining decorations from the lower branches of the Christmas tree and hung them up higher. The tree looked funny after that, like it had forgotten to put on its pants. Also, there weren’t any presents under it. They couldn’t trust June Bug not to rip them open. All the presents were closed up in Mina and Terence’s bedroom.

After Nicola moved the decorations, several disaster-free days passed. She started to relax and enjoy the holidays. She helped bake the gingerbread. (June Bug loved gingerbread. She would Sit and Shake a Paw and Roll Over for gingerbread.) Nicola even went shopping with her mother and, while they were out, forgot completely that she had a bad little dog. Her stomach only started churning when she got home and Mina said, “I wonder what trouble June Bug got into while we were gone.”

None! Once the decorations were out of reach, she was almost a good little dog as well as a cute little dog — all white except for her black eye patch, and one black ear and the black leather of her nose.

Nicola had asked for only one Christmas gift — Three More Chances for June Bug.

“You’re sure about that?” Terence and Mina asked.

“Yes,” Nicola said. The money the family saved by not buying Nicola presents, she wanted put in a special June Bug damage fund, so Jackson could replace any cars June Bug stole, or Terence could buy some grass seed to patch June Bug’s holes.

“Ha!” Jared said. “Money isn’t going to buy me love.”

He was still mad about Julie Walters-Chen. All the hours he wasn’t playing on the computer in the den, he spent shut up in his room listening to rap music and tattooing JWC all over his arms with a ballpoint pen.

On Christmas Eve, after everyone had gone to bed, Mina moved the presents. She stacked them under the tree, making a perfect set of stairs to the higher ­branches.

Then she shut June Bug up in the kitchen so she couldn’t get into trouble.

And she wouldn’t have, if Terence hadn’t got up in the night and wandered sleepily into the kitchen for some gingerbread.

Terence forgot to close the kitchen door.

In the middle of the night, Nicola heard a crash. It sounded like Santa had missed the mark completely and flown into the chimney and knocked it down.

She sprang out of bed. Everyone did. Moments later, the whole Bream family was in the living room, gaping at the tree that lay across the floor like the day it had been chopped down on the tree farm. Little June Bug was leaping over it, joyfully flinging ornaments that, until a minute ago, had been so tormentingly out of reach.

“Now Santa won’t come!” Jackson wailed. “Santa won’t bring me a present!”

“Look at all the presents,” Mina said. “Santa already came.”

All the presents were under the fallen tree, lying in a pool of water from the tree stand.

Jared stabbed his finger at Nicola. “Two More Chances! Just Two More Chances for that dog!”

“Stop it!” Terence said. “For heaven’s sake! Let’s all go back to bed! It’s three o’clock in the morning!”

Everyone did, except Nicola, who rescued all the wet presents and set them out of June Bug’s reach. She wiped up the puddle of water. Then she sank down by the fallen tree and sobbed while June Bug danced around her, pushing a toy soldier ornament against Nicola’s leg, trying to get Nicola to chase her. When Nicola wouldn’t, June Bug jumped into Nicola’s lap and licked the snot and salty tears off her face.

The next morning, Nicola was up first, even before June Bug, who was still tired from her active night. Half an hour later Terence came into the living room, yawning and tying up his robe. He looked around and saw Nicola curled on the couch waiting for the rest of the family to wake up.

“I was hoping it was a nightmare,” he said.

Together, they stood the tree up again.

“Look,” Nicola said.

Not a single ornament remained on the branches. The lights, too, were mostly pulled off, lying in loops at the base of the tree. But at the very top the china angel still perched, unbroken, soundlessly blowing its golden horn.

June Bug hadn’t touched it.