That’s the kind of person Miss Easter is. She is all right. She looks kind of like Marilyn Monroe with glasses, only not so plump. But she was always having desk inspection. Mr. Barrie didn’t care what you kept in your desk. And he was nicer to Miss Easter than she was to him, which was funny since he was my pick of the two.
Anyway, in this conversation Miss Easter was criticizing Mr. Barrie and praising Tod Reed, a creep who works in his father’s bank and chases girls, as everybody knows. Willie said it was plain to see that Miss Easter really hated Mr. Barrie, which was funny since everybody else in the world, I guess, liked him. Except for owning a Jaguar, Tod Reed couldn’t hold a candle to Mr. Barrie, who owned a 1949 Chevy. But Willie said Miss Easter couldn’t find anything good to say about Mr. Barrie except that he was insufferable. This is true, because although Mr. Barrie is getting middle-aged, at least twenty-seven by now, he is healthy and has a lot of muscle.
Willie, who can get things pretty mixed-up, said it seemed to him Miss Easter was mad because Mr. Barrie wasn’t mad when she got friendly with Tod Reed. Willie admitted this did not make sense, but he said none of the conversation hung together much, although they kept using the same words over and over, like men and husbands. The only thing that was absolutely clear, Willie said, was that Miss Easter hated Mr. Barrie because he didn’t know his own mind.
Willie said Miss Easter really looked down on men who didn’t know their own minds. And she said the men who got ahead in the world were the ones who made things happen, not those who just waited for something to happen. Willie was relieved when they left the room and he could crawl out from under the table with Homer XVIII and get back in his seat. He said it was a really punk recess, all things considered.
But that afternoon, when we were going home from school, I got to thinking about Miss Easter saying you should make things happen, instead of just waiting for them to happen.
“You know,” I told Willie, “I think she’s got something there. If we could just figure out how to start a case that would get everybody’s attention, then we could solve it and build up our reputation.”
I was remembering something I read once where somebody sent a letter to a lot of people saying, “All is discovered. Get out of town” — and how if we sent that to the most suspicious people in town, then when they left, we could work on why they beat it out of town. I didn’t want to tell Willie about this yet though, because Willie is the type that always wants to get started fast, and I thought it needed some thinking over. But the next morning during recess Willie came up to me looking as if he’d just won the hundred yard dash.
“I got it,” he whispered. “About making things happen. It came to me just like that. C’mon around here.”
We went around to the back of the building where we had found a loose brick we could pull out and there was a little place where we kept things we might need any minute, like water pistols and gum. Willie looked over his shoulder like in “I Led Three Lives,” then jerked out the brick.
I almost died. I’d have recognized that male Io anywhere.
“Miss Easter’s glasses!” I said.
“Boy, was that a good idea of yours,” said Willie.
“My idea?” I said. “I’m for law and order.”
“Sure we are,” said Willie. “And now we can prove it. It came on me like a flash. Just now I was sneaking back in the room to get Homer, and there were Miss Easter’s glasses lying on her desk, and I remembered what a racket Aunt Gertrude made about hers and yet how it wouldn’t be stealing to take them because who would want anyone else’s glasses? So now we find Miss Easter’s glasses for her and build up our reputation just like you said.”
Well, I could see it from Willie’s point of view. But then I got to seeing it from my father’s point of view. Willie said Miss Easter herself would approve because basically it was her own idea. But I said if Willie’s dad ever found out about it, what would his basic idea be, and he was twice as big as Miss Easter. So then Willie got to seeing it from his dad’s point of view, and we decided to put the glasses back.
We didn’t get a chance. I had them in my pocket ready to put them on her desk when we went in from recess, but I couldn’t get near it. Miss Crockett was running around looking on all the book shelves and tables and filing cabinets, and Miss Easter was opening and shutting her desk drawers and looking under and behind everything on her desk.
I was getting so nervous that it was a relief when she gave up the search and started geography recitation. Boy, her eyes are not worth a nickel! She had Freddie Clark point out the Euphrates River on the map, and when he pointed at the Nile River, she said, “Very good.” I think she was afraid we would find out she couldn’t see us because she kept telling Jackie Carr to pay attention, which is always a pretty safe thing to say. But once he was. And Ronald Pruitt looked cross-eyed four times when he recited, and you could tell she didn’t even know it.
I didn’t get a chance to put the glasses back in the afternoon either, and having them in my pocket was hard on my nerves. After lunch Miss Easter asked the class if anyone knew where they might be, and I almost died when Willie held his hand up. But he just suggested maybe she had laid them on the window sill and they had fallen out into the bushes. Miss Easter was trying everything, so she sent Willie out to look, and he looked all through history lesson. Willie hates history because it’s all over. Besides, he wasn’t as worried as I was, since the glasses weren’t making a bulge in his pocket.
But I had heard there was going to be a teachers’ meeting after school, so just as soon as they marched us out that afternoon, Willie and I hung around for about fifteen minutes, then sneaked back into the building. We could hear the Principal up in the room where they hold meetings to talk about us, but we peeped around Miss Easter’s door just to be sure the coast was clear, and who should be cleaning the blackboard but that creep Ronald Pruitt. He is always doing this to get in with the teacher. He has probably washed more blackboards than the average janitor.
So Willie and I slipped into Mr. Barrie’s room next door to talk things over. And then I remembered that right after lunch, when some of the teachers were hunting for the glasses again, Mr. Barrie had offered, if they did not turn up before evening, to drive Miss Easter home from school and take care of getting her car home, since she could not see good enough to drive. Miss Easter had said in an unfriendly tone that she would ride with Miss Crockett, but Miss Crockett said that unfortunately she had to stay and grade papers after the teacher’s meeting. For some reason Miss Crockett winked at Mr. Barrie. So Miss Easter said perhaps she’d better just call a taxi anyway. So Mr. Barrie laughed and said after she got her glasses back, he was willing to remember that a state of war — and at that point Miss Easter looked hard at us kids who were standing around interested and told us to go to our seats and the bell hadn’t even rung.
Anyway, I decided since Mr. Barrie was the one stuck with driving her home, I would put the glasses on his desk. That way he could find them, and it would save him the trip. After we got outside again, Willie complained because he said the whole thing had caused even more excitement than he had hoped, and we were losing the chance of a lifetime. But, personally, I was glad it was all over.