Because of Mr. Terupt Read online

  Credit is extended to Marilyn Burns, creator of the dollar-words problem, and to Catherine Little, for her article on counting blades of grass in the September 1999 issue of the journal Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Rob Buyea

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Buyea, Rob.

  Because of Mr. Terupt / Rob Buyea. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Seven fifth-graders at Snow Hill School in Connecticut relate how their lives are changed for the better by “rookie teacher” Mr. Terupt.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89615-6 [1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Teachers—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction. 3. Family life—Connecticut—Fiction. 5. Connecticut—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B98316Bec 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010003414

  v3.1

  For the third and fourth graders at Bethany Community School, who inspired me to write, and whose everyday mysteries and spontaneity gave me a story to tell

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Part One

  September

  Peter

  Jessica

  Luke

  Alexia

  Jeffrey

  Danielle

  Anna

  October

  Peter

  Luke

  Jeffrey

  Anna

  Jessica

  Alexia

  Danielle

  November

  Luke

  Peter

  Luke

  Jessica

  Jeffrey

  Anna

  Danielle

  Alexia

  December

  Peter

  Jessica

  Luke

  Alexia

  Jeffrey

  Anna

  Danielle

  Jessica

  January

  Jessica

  Anna

  Danielle

  Peter

  Jessica

  Luke

  Jeffrey

  February

  Peter

  Luke

  Jeffrey

  Peter

  Jessica

  Luke

  Jeffrey

  Anna

  Danielle

  Jessica

  Luke

  Peter

  Danielle

  Jessica

  Peter

  Luke

  Peter

  Anna

  Danielle

  Part Two

  March

  Jessica

  Luke

  Jeffrey

  Anna

  Danielle

  Anna

  Danielle

  Jessica

  Anna

  Danielle

  Jessica

  Alexia

  Anna

  Danielle

  Luke

  April

  Jessica

  Luke

  Danielle

  Anna

  Jessica

  Jeffrey

  Jessica

  Jeffrey

  Luke

  Alexia

  Jeffrey

  Anna

  Danielle

  Jeffrey

  May

  Jessica

  Luke

  Danielle

  Jessica

  Jeffrey

  Danielle

  Alexia

  Peter

  Jessica

  Luke

  Jeffrey

  Jessica

  Anna

  Danielle

  Jessica

  June

  Jessica

  Alexia

  Danielle

  Anna

  Luke

  Jeffrey

  Jessica

  Luke

  Alexia

  Jeffrey

  Anna

  Danielle

  Peter

  Jessica

  Luke

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  I was no child when I first read and admired this instantly engaging first novel, which was once called (more seriously) Voices from the Classroom and then became (more whimsically) The Dollar-Word Man; at the time, I was finishing my twelfth novel. I’d already passed my midsixties when I saw Rob Buyea’s excellent book grow and emerge as Because of Mr. Terupt—a more fitting title for a story about a life-changing teacher, one we all wish we had (and some of us did).

  As for the children who tell us about Mr. Terupt, they are no less authentic than their magical teacher; they will remind you of your own friends and enemies. Even the accident toward which this novel is inevitably headed is no accident; it is as masterfully set up and skillfully concealed as the rest of this riveting story.

  —John Irving

  part one

  september

  Peter

  It’s our bad luck to have teachers in this world, but since we’re stuck with them, the best we can do is hope to get a brand-new one instead of a mean old fart. New teachers don’t know the rules, so you can get away with things the old-timers would squash you for. That was my theory. So I was feeling pretty excited to start fifth grade, since I was getting a rookie teacher—a guy named Mr. Terupt. Right away, I put him to the test.

  If the bathroom pass is free, all you have to do is take it and go. This year, the bathrooms were right across the hall. It’s always been an easy way to get out of doing work. I can be really sneaky like that. I take the pass all the time and the teachers never notice. And like I said, Mr. Terupt was a rookie, so I knew he wasn’t going to catch me.

  Once you’re in the bathroom, it’s mess-around time. All the other teachers on our floor were women, so you didn’t have to worry about them barging in on you. Grab the bars to the stalls and swing. Try to touch your feet to the ceiling. Swing hard. If someone’s in the stall, it’s really funny to swing and kick his door in, especially if he’s a younger kid. If you scare him bad enough, he might pee on himself a little. That’s funny. Or if your buddy’s using the urinal, you can push him from behind and flush it at the same time. Then he might get a little wet. That’s pretty funny, too. Some kids like to plug the toilets with big wads of toilet paper, but I don’t suggest you try doing that. You can get in big trouble. My older brother told me his friend got caught and he had to scrub the toilets with a toothbrush. He said the principal made him brush his teeth with that toothbrush afterward, too. Mrs. Williams is pretty tough, but I don’t think she’d give out that kind of punishment. I don’t want to find out, either.

  When I came back into the classroom after my fourth or fifth trip, Mr. Terupt looked at me and said, “Boy, Peter, I’m gonna have to call you Mr. Peebody, or better yet, Peter the Pee-er. You do more peein’ than a dog walking by a mile of fire hydrants.”

  Everybody laughed. I was wrong. He had noticed. I sat down. Then Mr. Terupt came over and whispered in my ear, “My grandpa used to tell me to tie a knot in it.”

  I didn’t know what to do. My eyes got real big when he said that. I couldn
’t believe it. But that didn’t matter. Mr. Terupt just went back to the front board and the math problem he was going over. I sat there with my big eyes. Soon a smile, too.

  “What did he say?” Marty asked. Marty’s desk was right next to mine.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Ben and Wendy leaned across their desks to hear. They sat right across from us. Our four desks made up table number three. Mr. Terupt called us by tables sometimes.

  “Nothing,” I said again. It would be my secret.

  How cool was Mr. Terupt? His reaction was better than being yelled at like the old farts would have done. Some kids in my class would have cried, but not me. And somehow, I think Mr. Terupt knew I wouldn’t. It was his way of letting me know he knew what was going on without making a huge stink about it. I liked that about Mr. Terupt. He sure could be funny. And I’m a funny guy. This year, for the first time in my life, I started thinking school could be fun.

  Jessica

  Act 1, Scene 1

  The first day of school. I was nervous. Somewhat. The sweaty-palms-and-dry-mouth syndrome struck. This wasn’t surprising—after all, I was coming to a brand-new place. My mom and I had just moved all the way from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, over here in Connecticut. So it was my first, first day in Snow Hill School. My mom came to help me get settled.

  We walked through the glass doors and beautiful entryway and stopped in the main office to ask for directions. A red-haired woman who proved to be exceptional at multitasking greeted us with a smile and a slight nod. She did this while the phone rested between her ear and shoulder, allowing her hands to scribble notes from a conversation she was having in her free ear with the brown-haired lady standing next to her. We waited. My fingers dug into the hard cover of my book.

  “Hi. I’m Mrs. Williams, the principal.” This was the brown-haired lady speaking. She looked serious, all decked out in her business suit. “Welcome to Snow Hill School. Can I help you with anything?”

  “We’re looking for Mr. Terupt’s room,” Mom said. “I’m Julie Writeman and this is my daughter, Jessica. We’re new in town.”

  “Ah, yes. It’s a pleasure to meet you both. Let me show you the way.”

  Mrs. Williams led us out of the office. I glanced at the secretary one more time. She’d be a great character in one of Dad’s plays, I thought. My dad directs small plays in California, where I still wanted to be.

  “How are you today, Jessica?” Mrs. Williams asked.

  “Fine,” I said, although that wasn’t really true.

  We followed Mrs. Williams across the lobby and upstairs in search of my new fifth-grade classroom. The halls smelled stuffy but clean, like they’d just been disinfected. I wondered if the custodians had done that on purpose, to make a show of how clean their school was. I followed Mom down the blue-speckled carpet and past the rows of red lockers, where some kids were already unloading new supplies. I could feel all their eyes studying the new girl in town. After the stares came the whispers. My face burned.

  “Here you are,” Mrs. Williams said. “This is your floor. There are four classrooms up here, all fifth grade, two on each side of the hall with the bathrooms right in the middle.” Mrs. Williams pointed as she spoke. “That’s your classroom.” She pointed again. “Room two-oh-two. Have a good first day.”

  “Thank you,” Mom said. I just nodded.

  Act 1, Scene 2

  We walked into the classroom. The teacher looked up from his desk and smiled at us. The butterflies in my stomach fluttered as if I were on a Tilt-A-Whirl.

  “Good morning. I’m Mr. Terupt,” the teacher said as Mom and I walked in. He came right over to greet us.

  “Good morning,” Mom said back. “I’m Julie Writeman, and this is Jessica. I think she’s a little nervous being a new student.”

  My tongue felt so swollen that I couldn’t talk. I settled on returning Mr. Terupt’s smile. It was a friendly one.

  “Well, this is my first day, too. So I guess we’ll try to figure things out together,” he said.

  My smile grew.

  “Your seat is right over there at table two. You’re with Natalie, Tommy, and Ryan. Being near the windows should give you some good reading light. That’s a great book you have there, Jessica.”

  I looked down at my book, A Wrinkle in Time. I rubbed my hand over the cover.

  “I really like happy endings,” I said.

  “Me too,” Mr. Terupt said. “I’ll do my best to give you a happy ending this year.”

  I smiled again. I couldn’t believe it. My teacher was new, too. And he liked what I was reading. I don’t know why, but somehow he made my butterflies disappear and my tongue shrink. Things were going to be okay.

  LUKE

  I like school. I’m good at it. I get all As. So when Mr. Terupt announced our first math project, I was excited.

  Dollar Words was crazy. Definitely not a worksheet problem, like all the others I’ve ever been given. Not even close! We had to assume that the letter a was worth one cent, b two cents, c three cents—and so on, making the letter z worth twenty-six cents. The challenge was to find words that equaled one dollar when you added up their letter values. Not ninety-nine cents or a dollar and one cent, but one dollar exactly.

  Mr. Terupt gave us time to get started. He wanted to make sure we understood the project, and he said he wondered who would be the first one to find a dollar word.

  I immediately made a data table of all the letters and their corresponding values. A quick reference for me. Then I started putting down any word that came to mind that had some of the bigger letters in it. Pretty = 104. Walnut = 91. Mister = 84. Then I thought, Hey, wait a minute, what if I just tack on the letter s? Misters = 103. No good, but very close. I figured this could still be a worthwhile strategy for other words.

  So there I was cranking out words, trying to find the first dollar word of the year, when what do I hear? Peter and Alexia.

  This is the fourth year Peter’s been in my class, and my third time with Alexia. Peter’s funny, but sometimes he gets to be too much. If I’m concentrating on my work and he just wants to joke around, it annoys me. But I like him. He’s fun, and he’s no stranger to trouble. Alexia, on the other hand, is always involved in some “girl war.” That stuff I don’t get. She loves to wear flashy clothes—dresses, skirts, fancy shoes—and she always has the accessories to go with them. And she says the word like way too much. Alexia isn’t a stranger to trouble, either. She and Peter are a good match.

  Peter elbowed Alexia. Then I heard him whisper a word to her.

  That’s not even close to a dollar, I thought.

  “Fifty-three,” Alexia said. “No good. Try …”

  Were they crazy? They were trying out rude words and giggling the whole time. I just knew they were going to get caught.

  “That’s no good, either,” Peter said. “Maybe …”

  What a butthead! As soon as I thought it, I knew it was a word worth calculating. Sure enough, butthead equaled 81. I tacked on the s. There wasn’t just one butthead but two buttheads (dollar word). I was just about to call out that I had found one when Peter beat me to it.

  “I’ve got a word!” he yelled. “Buttocks!” He strutted to the board like he was the coolest thing since sliced bread and wrote it for the class. “Buttocks,” he said again. “B-U-T-T-O-C-S.” Peter went on to demonstrate how the word added up to a dollar. Mr. Terupt didn’t interrupt. Just as I was about to, the new girl did.

  “Buttocks is spelled with a k in it, Peter,” Jessica said.

  Peter looked to Mr. Terupt. “Sorry, Peter. She’s right. Better try again. And maybe you should choose a different type of word than the ones you’ve been coming up with.”

  Peter slunk back to his seat. No surprise to me, Mr. Terupt knew what Peter was up to the whole time.

  I raised my hand. “Mr. Terupt, I’ve got one.” I walked up to the board and wrote butthead. That was followed by a chorus of laughs. “Butthead,” I
said. “B-U-T-T-H-E-A-D adds up to eighty-one cents, but if we have more than one, then we get buttheads. And buttheads is a dollar word. Just ask Peter and Alexia.”

  Mr. Terupt snickered. “That’s enough, Luke. I must say, this isn’t a word I was expecting, but nonetheless, it’s our first dollar word. Congratulations.”

  Dollar Words was the best math project ever. We started it on a Wednesday (dollar word) and worked for three weeks. Through trial and error, a few strategies that I learned along the way, and some helpful hints from Mr. Terupt, I broke the record for most dollar words. My final poster was covered with fifty-four of them.

  Mr. Terupt looked at my work and smiled. “Luke, this is excellent.” (Dollar word.) “You are the dollar-word champ.”

  Alexia

  I was like, I have this new guy for a teacher. That’s so cool.

  Mr. Terupt was nice. He let us sit in tables, not rows. I was like, no way, are you serious? And like, the best was I got to sit with my friend Danielle.

  There was this new girl in our class, Jessica. She wasn’t at our table, but I needed to talk to her. I needed to tell her who she could be friends with. She seemed like she could be pretty cool, even though she carried a book around like a teddy bear.

  I found her at recess. Outdoor recess is held behind the school. There’s a big blacktop area with basketball hoops and hopscotch. There’s playground equipment in another spot, and a large field for running around and playing sports, like kickball or football. That’s where the gazebo is, too—by the edge of the field. I found Jessica sitting alone on the steps of the gazebo. She was reading a book. I was like, What a loser, but I went up to her.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hi,” she said back.

  “You’re Jessica, right?”

  “Yes.”

  I blew a bubble with my gum and sat down. “I’m Alexia,” I said. “My friends call me Lexie.” I found the compact mirror in my purse and checked my Rock Star Purple lip gloss. Then I was like, “Where’d you come from?”

  “We moved from California,” the new girl said.

  “I used to live in California, too.” I started playing with the stones that lay under my feet. It’s always been easier for me to lie when I don’t have to look at the person’s eyes. “We moved because, like, my dad got sick and needed the doctors here.”