I wanted to. I wanted to be the kind of kid who helped out.

I didn’t want to be the kind of kid who made a lot of noise and smudged other people’s papers and called them things that were really bad. I hadn’t read the study guide yet, but if it was mostly about how to be at school…

I raised my hand.

“Okay. It’s Austin for the Superstars,” Ms. G. said.

I walked to the front of the room.

“Raise your hand to answer, please,” Ms. G. said. “Here is your question. Imagine you are monitoring the hallway at dismissal. A second grader is running. What should you do?”

My hand and Bertie’s hand shot into the air at exactly the same time.

“Tie!” Ms. G. shouted. “And with a tie, we go to written responses. Please wait to start writing until I say Go.”

She handed Bertie an index card and a pencil. She handed me an index card and a pencil.

“On your marks,” Ms. G. said.

The yellow jackets started revving up. “Now, this is more like it,” they were saying. “This is what we’re talking about.”

“Get set.”

It’s not like I could ask to go to the bathroom. Why would I raise my hand to volunteer if I had to go to the bathroom?

I could do a coughing fit. But I didn’t know the nurse rules at this school. Maybe they would tell my mom to come get me, and she’d get mad and upset because they called her at work and I wasn’t really sick.

The palms of my hands started feeling slippery.

“Go!”

Bertie turned to the wall and held her card against it. Then she started writing super-fast. Maybe that’s why their team was called Lightning. I couldn’t see her letters from where I was standing. And it wasn’t like I could copy, standing out there in front.

Everybody was looking at me, like they could see right through me. Even Ms. G. was looking at me that way. I dropped my pencil accidentally on purpose, and it landed in the big basket of markers. I stared at it in the middle of all those colors. It gave me an idea.

I picked up the pencil and set my card on top of Dee’s empty desk. Then I drew a person. Not a real person, just a stick one, like the swimmer on the pool sign at Hidden Rivers. But this stick person was standing with its hands up in the air. Then I found Ms. G.’s yellow highlighter and gave my person a big greater-than sign across its shirt.

I drew some small circles above my person’s face and wrote WALK!!!! in a big bubble at the top. Then I gave the person a smiley face. They weren’t saying it mean. It was a friendly reminder.