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Chapter One

Unless you're somebody like Huckleberry Finn, the first day of school isn't too bad. Most kids, by then, are bored with summer and itchy from mosquito bites and poison ivy and nothing to do. Your sneakers are all worn out and you can't get new ones till school starts and your mother is sick and tired of yelling at you to pick things up and you're sick and tired of picking the same things up.

Plus, the first day of school is only half a day for kids.

My little brother, Charlie, once asked my mother what the teachers do for the rest of the day.

"They get things ready -- books and papers and lessons."

"That's not what Leroy Herdman says," Charlie told her. "Leroy says as soon as the kids are gone, they lock all the doors and order in pizza and beer."

"Well, they don't," Mother said, "and how would Leroy know anyway?"

"He forgot something," Charlie said, "and he went back to get it and he couldn't get in."

"They saw him coming and locked the doors," Mother said. "Wouldn't you?"

Well, yes. Anyone would, because the Herdmans-Ralph, Imogene, Leroy, Claude, Ollie, and Gladys-were the worst kids in the history of the world. They weren't honest or cheerful or industrious or cooperative or clean. They told lies and smoked cigars and set fire to things and hit little kids and cursed and stayed away from school whenever they wanted to and wouldn't learn anything when they were there.

They were always there, though, on the first day, so you always knew right away that this was going to be another exciting Herdman year in the Woodrow Wilson Elementary School.

At least there was only one of them ineach grade, and since they never got kept back, you always had the same one to put up with. I had Imogene, and what I did was stay out of her way, but it wasn't easy.

This time she grabbed me in the hall and shoved an oatmeal box in my face. "Hey," she said, "you want to buy a science project?"

I figured that Imogene's idea of a science project would probably explode or catch fire or smell really bad or be alive and bite me-and, in fact, I could hear something squealing and scratching around in the oatmeal box.

"Miss Kemp already wrote this year's assignment on the board," I said, and it isn't a science project."

"Fine time to tell me," Imogene grunted. "What is it? The assignment." She shook her oatmeal box. "Is it mice?"

So I was half right -- Imogene's science project was alive, but it probably wouldn't bite me unless it was great big mice, and I didn't want to find out.

"No," I said, "it's about people."

"Mice would be better," Imogene said.

Later that morning Miss Kemp explained her assignment, and I thought Imogene might be right, because the assignment sounded weird.

"For this year's project," she said, "We're going to study each other. That's the assignment on the blackboard, Compliments for Classmates."

All over the room hands were going up and kids were saying "Hub?" and "What does it mean?" and "How many pages?" But Miss Kemp ignored all this.

"It means exactly what it says," she said. "You're to think of a special compliment for each person in this class, and please don't groan" -- a lot of people did anyway -- "because this is the assignment for the year. You have all year to think about it, and next June, before the last day of school, you'll draw names from a bat and think of more compliments for just that one person."

Somebody asked if it could be a famous person instead, and somebody else asked if it could be a dead famous person, like George Washington.

Miss Kemp said no. "This is a classroom project, so it has to be people in this class. We know all about George Washington's good points, but . . ." She looked around and picked on Boomer. "We don't know all Boomer's good points. More important, Boomer probably doesn't know all his good points."

"How many compliments?" junior Jacobs wanted to know.

"Up to you," Miss Kemp said.

Alice Wendleken raised her hand. "Would beautiful hair and shiny hair count as one compliment?"

This sounded to me as if Alice planned to compliment herself, which would save someone else the trouble, but Miss Kemp said, "I'm not talking about beautiful hair and nice teeth, Alice. I mean characteristics, personal qualities, something special."

This could be hard, I thought. Take Albert Pelfrey. When you think of Albert Pelfrey, you think fat. Even Albert thinks fat. It's hard to think anything else, so I would really have to study Albert to find some special personal quality that wasn't just about being fat. And besides Albert there were twenty-eight other people, including Imogene Herdman.

"What's a compliment?" Imogene asked me.

"It's something nice you tell someone, like if someone is especially helpful or especially friendly."

Alice looked Imogene up and down. "Or especially clean," she said.

"Okay." Imogene frowned. "But mice would still be better."

Mice would probably be easier for Imogene because the Herdmans always had animals around. As far as I know they weren't mean to the animals, but the animals they weren't mean to were mean all by themselves, like their cat, which was crazy and had to be kept on a chain because it bit people.

Now and then you would see Mrs. Herdman walking the cat around the block on its chain, but she worked two shifts at the shoe factory and didn't have much time left over to hang around the house and walk the cat.

There wasn't any Mr. Herdman. Everybody agreed that after Gladys was born, he just climbed on a freight train and left town, but some people said he did it right away and some people said he waited a year or two.

The Best School Year Ever. Copyright © by Barbara Robinson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.