Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus ... by Kristen Tracy

Author:Kristen Tracy [Tracy, Kristen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-375-89098-7
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2009-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Cat Fate

I really missed gifted reading. Because not only did I miss reading, but I also missed sitting in a bean-bag chair. Mostly, I missed Ms. Golden. So when Mr. Hawk said he had some bad news about Ms. Golden, I thought I was going to start crying in front of everybody.

“Ms. Golden will be out for another week,” Mr. Hawk said.

“Was there a problem with her surgery?” Penny asked. “Did they take out the wrong tonsil?”

I thought that was a pretty good question.

“No,” Mr. Hawk said. “She’s just taking an extra week to recuperate.”

He sat down at his desk and smiled.

“But I’ve got some good news,” he said. “Mrs. Zirklezack has tweaked her play to accommodate some of our class’s feedback. Also, she assigned the final part.”

Polly turned around and smiled at me. But I didn’t smile back. Because I wasn’t sure how I felt about this.

When we went to play practice, and Mrs. Zirklezack walked into the gym and smiled one of her spookiest smiles ever, I knew right away that I wasn’t going to like my part.

Mrs. Zirklezack called out a list of seven names. They were all girls, and my name was the last one. Penny Winchester, Gracie Clop, Nina Hosack, Lilly Poe, Zoey Combs, Hannah Pond, Camille McPhee.

“When I assigned the final part, I noticed that we had an odd number of animals. That didn’t work. So I changed some things. I’ve decided to make a chorus line,” she said, clapping. “You’re going to have your own musical number. You’re going to be cats.”

Lilly squealed.

“Does this mean I’m not a sea lion anymore?” Penny asked.

“That’s right,” Mrs. Zirklezack said. “I’ve decided to omit all references to aquatic animals. In the end, I thought it was a good idea not to load them onto the bus.”

“So I’m not a dolphin?” Lilly asked.

“Correct. You’re all cats,” Mrs. Zirklezack said. And while all the other cats started gabbing about how excited they were about their parts, Mrs. Zirklezack began explaining the cats’ “function.”

“Look around,” she said. And so we did. “No, I’m not talking about the Rocky Mountain Elementary School gymnasium. I’m talking about the civilized world. The cat population is out of control. I want our play to confront this issue head-on.”

Mrs. Zirklezack began distributing new scripts. We all flipped through them to see what our parts looked like.

“Oh my heck!” yelled Jasmine Rey, the amazingly popular sixth grader who’d been given the part of Nora. “You’re all going to die!”

I flipped through my script until I found the page. It was true. While all the other animals boarded the bus and headed to the sunny, safe place, the cats didn’t join them. There wasn’t room. Also, when Nora tried to catch us, we ran away.

“I want the audience to be reminded of how tragically overpopulated our communities are with unwanted cats,” Mrs. Zirklezack said.

We were supposed to sing a song called “We Can’t Come, We Won’t Come.” Mrs. Zirklezack wrote it herself. The song started off talking about how we wished there were more room for us.

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