Izzy Kline Has Butterflies
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017 by Beth Ain
Cover art copyright © 2017 by Julie Morstad
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ain, Beth Levine, author.
Title: Izzy Kline has butterflies : (a novel in small moments) / by Beth Ain.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Random House, [2017] | Summary: Izzy Kline is nervous about her first day of fourth grade, and with new changes at home, there are plenty of reasons for her to feel the butterflies in her stomach.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016005017 | ISBN 978-0-399-55080-5 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-0-399-55081-2 (hardcover library binding) | ISBN 978-0-399-55082-9 (ebook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Novels in verse. | First day of school—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.5.A39 Iz 2017 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9780399550829
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Summer Slide
Math
Indoor Recess
After-School Activities
English Language Arts
Substitute
Picture Day
Playground
Word Problems
Friday Night Lights
Monday Morning Quarterback
Thanksgiving
Common Core
Polar Express
Project
Punctuation
Field Trip
One Hundred Days
Social Studies
Assembly
Line Leader, Part One
Art
Line Leader, Part Two
Principal's Office
Spring Break
Colonial Fair
Nurse
Reading Log
Music
Sick Day
A Note from the PTA
Rehearsal
Camp Friends
Guidance Counseling
Science
Rounds
Geometry
Phys Ed
Rules
Time-Out
Early Dismissal
Overflow Table
Lemonade Stand
Butterfly Problems
Finale
Voice Mail
End-of-Year Picnic
Small Moments
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For my big brother,
Outener of the light,
ruler of the upstairs,
you are the walrus.
While I am busy
swimming in pools and lakes,
roasting marshmallows on a stick,
singing camp songs with camp friends,
scratching the itchy bite in the middle of my back—
caterpillars are busy too.
Busy eating their way out of their cocoons
and into something else.
Something that
flutters
when I cartwheel
down the backyard hill,
when I ride my bike
down into the cul-de-sac,
skidding to a screech when the mail truck rolls up
with those cards.
Room assignments, like anyone cares which room
they happen to be in with that old,
yelling teacher and that brand-new class of kids with
only one person I used to like
for five minutes
in kindergarten.
Lilly, with two l’s
where there should be only one.
Used to like
until I had a playdate with her, and she cried the
whole time and told me her toys
belonged to a superhero princess from Mars,
that she was just watching the stuff for a while,
TAKING VERY SPECIAL CARE of it,
that was why she could not share it with me.
It was a good one. Lilly with two l’s was clever
at least.
Anyway,
there were other friends to make
and not make
that year we moved here,
all those years ago.
But last week, when the mail truck rolled up
as I rolled
down,
that’s right about when the cocoon burst.
Right about when that VERY HUNGRY
caterpillar became one VERY ANGRY butterfly or
else one million butterflies.
Making me—on that last night before fourth grade—
into a night owl,
something moms say when they talk about us
to their friends.
Something they say that isn’t exactly the way it is.
I am a night butterfly.
Flitting around in my bed,
in my head,
all the way until 7:25 in the morning,
when the alarm clock, whose name is Mitchell
and who isn’t really an alarm clock
but who is a giant dog of the Saint Bernard variety,
licks my face.
Messy hair, rolled around and around in due to
certain BUTTERFLY PROBLEMS,
messy hair
and shorts
and a tank top.
Summer doesn’t end when school starts.
Doesn’t end with the reading of that
room assignment card.
Something they don’t teach you at school.
You learn it on your own when it is too hot
to pretend to be nice to Lilly with two l’s.
Too hot to build a building out of marshmallows and
very thin pretzel sticks,
and without talking.
An activity Mom will think
sounds like loads of fun when I see her later
and when she forces me to tell her
one interesting thing about my day that does not have
to do with being hot.
The good news is the old, yelling teacher is Mrs. Soto
and she doesn’t yell,
even when I laugh during the silent building of the
marshmallow buildings.
Nothing else interesting after that,
except for a girl named Quinn Mitchell
who stayed quiet during the marshmallow exercise
and who helped our table build a very tall,
leaning tower without my help since
I was disqualified
and she never said anything except at the end when
we/they won, when she said
no thanks to motormouth.
But she said it through a smile and also she fluttered
her eyelids,
like a butterfly,
and we all laughed because it wasn’t mean,
it was funny.
And the only thing I could say bac
k was
my dog’s name is Mitchell.
Ouch!
My middle finger. Yes, that one.
The finger that used to be guarded and important ever
since I learned it could curse
people.
Ever since someone else’s cursed me.
Jackson.
It is on fire.
Smashed between my table and Jackson’s chair,
which was flung out on purpose,
the way boys do things on purpose
without even knowing that they are doing them
on purpose.
I pull it quickly to my mouth—the cursed finger.
Kiss it? Lick it? Bite it off? What would be a good idea?
I look into the 4 sets of 2 eyes
of the FOUR ANNOYING BOYS who are staring,
waiting for me to cry
like a girl.
I bite my lip.
That’s 8 eyes, I think.
Multiplication.
One math fact memorized.
If it all had to do with the staring eyes of boys
who want you to fail, math would be easier
to understand.
I think this too while not crying,
while not kicking the chair back into his table,
not kicking him back into his table.
Bravery, James would call it later,
under his teenager breath.
The breath that I notice so much because it is so loud—
sighing, annoyed breath.
Well, anyway, that is James’s under-the-breath answer
when I say um a lot as I tell him
and Dad the story of my bruised finger and its
Popsicle-stick splint.
It is our night with Dad.
Our night at Dad’s weird apartment,
which he hasn’t decorated except for a framed
Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour poster on the wall
and a big stack of medical journals
on a glass coffee table
with sharp edges
that matches his own sharp edges
but nothing else.
What do you call that? I ask when I tell them how I
held in my tears with all my might.
The same kind of thing that always happens on my night
with you, my dad answers,
his voice edgy like the coffee table.
Dinner with a side of drama, he says.
Half smiling, half something else.
Fractions, also easier with people.
Proof of your giftedness at acting, my mom will say
tomorrow, hugging me tight
when I tell her about it.
The nurse gave me ice and a splint and said it was
okay to cry in her office.
Instead of crying I said when will it feel better?
Will heal one million times faster if you smile,
she said.
I’m not good at math,
I said.
They heard us laughing all the way in the front office.
I usually do not like the movies they show us
during indoor recess because they are
babyish or else they are about ogres
and I hate the whole idea of ogres.
Even Shrek.
I get why they made a movie about him, but I always
wish they would just let us color or something at
indoor recess.
Let us be.
But this was something today.
This Free to Be…You and Me video.
It was something different from the start, and not just
because there was singing and
music, which I love, but—and this is IMPORTANT—
because it was funny.
Two babies are talking in a nursery and they don’t
know if they are boys or girls because
they are both bald.
That’s funny.
And then there are so many other funny things,
funny characters, funny songs.
Don’t dress your cat in an apron, someone says later,
because it just doesn’t make any sense
to wear things that don’t make any sense
for who you are.
That was the point, I think.
And then another, called “Helping,”
which isn’t actually about helping at all
and which made us all laugh.
Even the boys.
And then I got the idea that this whole thing is about
LIFE LESSONS,
something Mom says in a big TV news voice she saves
only for when she’s talking to me about something
important,
and she thinks important things are funny, apparently,
or that they should be funny,
which is funny.
But she’s right.
I absolutely always remember the things
that made me laugh.
Like the idea that “Parents Are People,”
something they say in one of the songs,
or that women can do anything men can do.
Funny that anyone ever thought any different, I mean.
We’re going to put it on—the whole fourth grade—
in a concert,
and all I want is to sing a solo.
I want to sing “When We Grow Up” because I think
it is meant to be sung
by me.
I hope no one else in the whole fourth grade can sing,
then maybe I’ll have a chance.
I hope Quinn Mitchell isn’t as good at singing as she
is at building things out of food.
And I hope they make a boy sing
“It’s All Right to Cry.”
Because that would make me laugh.
And then I would remember it forever.
That LIFE LESSON.
You don’t do a play in third grade or fifth grade at
Salem Ridge Elementary.
Only in fourth.
And fourth grade, as far as I can see,
is when you—ahem—I will be the most nervous
I will ever be.
Not third or fifth.
Because I was younger in third.
Will be older in fifth.
Less nervous.
In middle school I will like boys,
I am told
by my grandmother,
who thinks I like boys now,
the way I go on and on
about these FOUR ANNOYING BOYS in my class,
who make me want to scream, even though they can
be funny when they make farting noises
or flip their eyelids inside out.
But it is hate, not like.
I only like James, my big brother.
Quinn would like an older brother but she has an
older sister, who talks on her phone all day and night
and slams her door a lot.
I have to walk you to drama, James mutters at me
after school.
I have to be a good actress so I can get a good part in
the fourth-grade play.
Okay, I say, and I go on and on about trying to be
serious enough to get the part of Baby Girl in
Free to Be…You and Me.
Well, you’re serious, he says, which makes me want
only to be silly.
I cross my eyes at him.
He says why can’t you hear a pterodactyl go to the
bathroom?
Why? I say.
Because the P is silent. The pee, get it?
That’s not a very serious-acting kind of joke, I say.
Free to Be…You and Me is not a play for serious
actors, he says.
Tell that to Marlo Thomas, I say. Marlo Thomas—
according to my music teacher,
&nb
sp; who is new and just married and wonderful
and who used to be Miss Hall for the first six weeks
of school and is now Mrs. Johnson.
And Mr. Johnson, her new and young and just-
married husband, is the orchestra conductor—
Well, according to Mrs. Johnson, Marlo Thomas is
the writer, the creator,
of Free to Be…You and Me.
I know James does not know who Marlo Thomas is,
because my brother is not the type of person to know
something like this.
He knows rock bands and sports teams and—
She’s the sick-kids lady, he says. Has a famous hospital
for sick kids.
No way, I say.
Truth, he says. Ask Mom.
After drama with Elana, who teaches me to sing and
to act, because they are intertwined, she says,
I call my mom at work and ask her about
Marlo Thomas’s hospital.
St. Jude’s, she says. That kid and his memory, she also
says.
She had thought James would be president one day
with that memory,
that everything.
When I hang up, James has gone to his room and
I know that means I can’t tell him he was right.
Can’t watch him stick out his pierced tongue at me
and wonder how much it hurt and what made him
do it and what it tastes like with ice cream on it, or
spaghetti, and does the spaghetti get tangled up.
Can’t duck when he throws a pillow at me to
make me stop asking
SO MANY QUESTIONS!
I may not remember everything the way James does,
but I bet I will always remember
what James’s pierced tongue looks like.
For the rest of my life.
Maybe James can still be president.
Maybe lots of people will vote for him
because they have been hoping
all this time someone would come along
with something as interesting
as James’s tongue.
Some things in Free to Be…You and Me make