Read Online Fourth-Grade Disasters by Claudia Mills - Free Book Online

on rain dripping and dropping,and half on the patriotic medley, which was called “America!” It was a smushed-together mixture of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” “America the Beautiful,” and “God Bless America.” The important thing for this song, Mrs. Morengo told the Platters, was to look as patriotic as possible.
    “Stand up tall!”
    The Platters, including Mason, stood up taller.
    “Shoulders back!”
    The Platters, including Mason, pulled their shoulders back.
    “Tummies in!”
    Mason wondered what was especially patriotic about a tucked-in tummy, but he tucked his in.
    “Now gaze into the distance. You see a sweet land of liberty. You see spacious skies and amber waves of grain. You see the ocean, white with foam!”
    Mrs. Morengo must have decided that her singers looked sufficiently patriotic, because she signaled to Mr. Griffith to begin playing.
    “Sing!” she commanded majestically.
    The Platters sang, except for one lip-synching Platter on the end of the second row.
    As he stood in patriotic pose, not singing, Masonthought about Puff. His mother had finished mending Puff yesterday evening, but she decided that Puff needed to be cleaned so that he would be returned to school almost a brand-new dragon. Mason had reminded her three times that morning to be sure to leave Puff in her office with the door shut all the way.
    The only difficult part about the “America!” number was that eight students in the front row had to hold pieces of cardboard behind their backs, seven printed with the letters of A-M-E-R-I-C-A and one with the exclamation point. At a signal from Mrs. Morengo, the students were to produce their letters, in order, to spell out the word and trigger the crowd’s applause.
    On the first try, two students held their letters upside down. Mason couldn’t see their mistake, but he heard Mrs. Morengo’s cry of anguish.
    “M! Exclamation point!”
    She showed those two students exactly how to hold their cardboard letters, and they tried it again. But this time it was the R that was upside down.
    Mrs. Morengo looked ready to cry. Evidently she was picturing thousands—tens of thousands?—of Plainfieldians, perhaps even people from all over the state of Colorado, watching Channel 9 News and seeing that upside-down R.

    Mason was gladder than ever that he wasn’t standing in the front row. Brody, holding the I, could be counted on, of course. Brody would never hold the fifth letter in “America!” the wrong way. Though come to think of it, the I would look the same either way.
    Mason wasn’t about to make any suggestions. He had to conserve his suggestion-making energy for asking Mrs. Morengo whether he could flash the lights during the raindrop song.
    As soon as rehearsal was over, he forced himself toapproach her while she was gathering the letter cards from the fourth graders in the front row.
    “Mrs. Morengo?”
    She didn’t seem to hear him, so he tried again, more loudly.
    “Mrs. Morengo? I was wondering—”
    “T-shirts!” she shouted suddenly, as if alerting the students to T-shirt-shaped missiles about to tear through the classroom wall. Mason half expected the Platters to drop to the floor and cover their heads with folded arms.
    “I forgot the T-shirts! Fourth graders, I need you to stay a little longer.”
    Handing out the shirts took long enough that the second bell was ringing as everyone hurried to Coach Joe’s class, all wearing their green Plainfield Platters T-shirts, with Puff’s face in a big yellow circle on the front. Kids had grabbed the shirts in a great frenzy, without checking whether they ended up with small, medium, or large.
    Brody, the shortest boy in the class, had on a large T-shirt that hung to his knees like a dress.
    Mason, one of the tallest boys in the class, hadon a small T-shirt that made him feel like a sausage stuffed into its casing. A big, fat sausage stuffed into a bright green casing.
    He glanced over at Nora. As he would have