Fourth-Grade Disasters by Claudia Mills

refused to answer.
    “Either it was Morengo’s idea because she finally realized you stink so bad she didn’t want you to ruin the concert for everybody else. Or it was your idea because you’re a scaredy-cat.”
    Mason tried to keep his face from betraying any emotion, but he could tell that Dunk knew he had guessed correctly.
    “You’re a little scaredy teapot, short and stout,” Dunk chortled.
    “He is not!” Brody almost yelled. “The stage crew is a very important part of a show. It’s the most important part!”
    “It’s definitely more important than singing a dumb solo in a dumb costume like a dumb Puff baby,” Dunk agreed.
    Mason knew it was his turn now to defend Brody, but he couldn’t think of anything stinging enough to say.
    Nora had been walking behind them, evidently listening all the time. Now she caught up to them, her eyes flashing. But her voice, as always, was calm and steady.
    “I found an interesting site on the Internet last night,” she said to the three of them, as if simply offering a tidbit of neutral information. “It had a very detailed description of last year’s Super Bowl game. You’d like it, Dunk, since you’re so interested in football. You know, because of your story about Footie.”
    That was all she said. But it was enough to make Dunk flush a deep, dull red.
    “Oh, and I made a printout of it,” Nora addedcasually. “I thought Coach Joe might like it, too. Since he loves sports so much. Except, of course, when anybody is cheating.”
    She gave Dunk a last friendly smile.
    Mason didn’t turn to look again at Dunk as they stashed their backpacks and took their seats in Coach Joe’s classroom.
    Dunk ripped up his story. Mason saw him doing it. Not that Dunk ever did anything quietly.
    Rip! Rip!
Dunk tore the paper he had already torn, again and again, until his desk was littered with a heap of paper scraps, some of them falling onto the floor as well.
    The sound was loud enough that Coach Joe looked up from his desk. “Hey, Dunk,” he said in his cheerful tone of voice, “what’s up?”
    Dunk looked close to tears. “I ripped up ‘Footie.’ ” He turned to glare at Nora, as if to say,
See what you made me do?
    “Whoa,” Coach Joe said softly. He formed his hand into a time-out T. “Dunk, how about our own private huddle, one on one?” He nodded his head toward the hall.
    Dunk stayed in his seat, obviously past caring if anyone else heard what he had to say.
    “My story stinks! Sheng said so!”
    Coach Joe looked expectantly at Sheng.
    “I didn’t say it stank. I said it was short. That’s all I said.”
    “You said it was
too
short. And I tried to make it longer, but I couldn’t think of stuff to write, so I copied some stuff from Wikipedia, and she”—he gave a baleful jerk of his head toward Nora—“printed it out and was going to give it to you, so now I’ve ripped it up, and I’ll get a zero, and my dad will freak out, and he won’t let me play football, and it’s all her fault!”
    Dunk’s cheeks were red, and his lower lip stuck out, quivering. His eyes were bright with tears; he rubbed them defiantly as he glared again at Nora.
    “Whoa,” Coach Joe said a second time, even more softly, as if trying to figure out how his team could have fallen apart so badly so close to the start of the season.
    Mason sneaked a glance at Nora. She didn’t seem upset that Dunk blamed her for his ripped-up story. It was as if she had just poked a stick into an ant tunneland was watching with calm curiosity for what the ants would do next.
    There was a long silence, Dunk sniffling and Coach Joe obviously thinking about how to get his team back on the field.
    “Well, Dunk,” Coach Joe finally said, “if you copied your story from the Internet, you did the right thing in throwing it away. It’s better to lose the game than to win it by not playing fair and square. Copying somebody else’s work, and then trying to pass it off as your own, is