Iggy Is Better Than Ever Read online

  Ms. Schulberger winced when she saw him. “Oh, Iggy!” she said. “You poor kid!” Iggy smiled bravely (which actually did hurt), and Ms. Schulberger winced again. “If you need to lie down in the nurse’s office, just let me know. Anytime, sweetie.”

  It was great.

  At lunch, a fifth-grade kid who was famous for falling off the roof of the sports equipment shed came over to Iggy’s table. He looked at Iggy’s face and nodded. “Respect,” he said.

  It was great.

  That afternoon in art, after they were done gluing their collages, six girls in Iggy’s class—including Lainey!—made him Get Well Soon cards. Usually, Lainey ignored him.

  It was great.

  After school, as Iggy was leaving with Diego—who said he felt like throwing up every time he looked at Iggy—Mrs. Wander was standing by the gate. She called out, “Iggy Frangi!”

  He froze.

  Mrs. Wander stomped toward him, her eyeballs bulging.

  What? What was she going to do to him?

  “You fell off your bike,” she said.

  Iggy nodded.

  She frowned. “I hope you’ll learn to be more careful, Iggy.”

  Okay, that was not so great, but it could have been worse.

  When he went home, he got ice cream for snack because he couldn’t chew.

  Great.

  His dad brought him a Spider-Man book, because he felt bad about telling Iggy not to bug him.

  Great.

  As he lay in bed that night, Iggy touched his purple-and-green eye. It felt big, but it didn’t hurt that much. The scabby parts of his face didn’t hurt that much either. Even his nose didn’t hurt a lot. The inside of his mouth, though—he poked it with his tongue—yow, that hurt.

  But still, he thought, I’m not in trouble anymore. Nobody’s mad at me.

  Yeah, he thought. It was worth it.

  CHAPTER 17

  IGGY PLANTS FLOWERS BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD

  But the best part was yet to come. The best part happened two weeks later. It wasn’t just the best part of that month or that year. It was one of the best things that ever happened to Iggy in his entire life.

  Two weeks after Iggy mashed his face in the grass, he was mostly back to normal. Both of his black eyes were their regular color again. He only had one scab, on his forehead, and it was about to fall off. There was a yellow bruise and a tiny cut on his nose. Inside his mouth, all the stitches were gone, and he could chew stuff. There was one raised part on the inside of his cheek, but that was all.

  Iggy felt pretty normal.

  So, two weeks after wiping out, Iggy was sitting in Ms. Schulberger’s classroom one afternoon, feeling normal. Ms. Schulberger was talking about What a Paragraph Is.

  As far as Iggy could tell, it seemed like a paragraph could be anything. One sentence, two sentences, five hundred sentences.

  Now Ms. Schulberger was talking about starting paragraphs with topic sentences. Iggy began to feel a little bit sleepy. He yawned. He still couldn’t yawn all the way. He tried to balance his pencil on the tip of his finger.

  “Iggy!” said Ms. Schulberger. “Listen up!”

  Okay, okay. She talked more about topic sentences. Iggy poked around inside his mouth with his tongue. It was amazing that it didn’t hurt anymore. It didn’t hurt at all. It felt—wait. What was that? He ran his tongue over the inside of his lower lip. There was a lump in it. A long, thin lump.

  What was it?

  He couldn’t figure it out.

  He raised his hand.

  “Yes, Iggy?” said Ms. Schulberger.

  “Can I go to the bathroom?” He bugged his eyes out so she would know he really had to go.

  She nodded. “Scoot.”

  Iggy scooted. He scooted out the door, down the hallway, and into the bathroom, where he leaned close to the mirror and pulled his lower lip down to take a look.

  And he could not believe what he saw there.

  THERE WAS A BLADE OF GRASS GROWING INSIDE HIS MOUTH.

  It was growing under his skin, but he could still see it. A tiny piece of it was poking out of his skin, and it was green. The rest of it was in a line right where his stitches had been. It was growing sideways. It looked like it was smiling at him.

  It was the coolest thing he’d ever seen.

  He ran back to class. “Ms. Schulberger!” he yelled from the doorway. “Look!”

  Ms. Schulberger didn’t like it when he yelled. “Iggy! I’ve told you—”

  “No! Really! Check this out!” Iggy came to stand in front of her. “Look!” He pulled down his lip. “It’s grass!”

  She looked. And then she jumped back. “Oh my gosh!” she said. “It is grass!”

  All the kids came rushing up to look. And then they screamed. “OOOOOH!” “IT’S GRASS!” “GRO-OSSS!”

  Iggy turned to Ms. Schulberger. “Please, please, please take a picture, Ms. Schulberger. Please!”

  Ms. Schulberger was shaking her head with amazement. “There’s grass growing in your mouth, Iggy,” she said. “You’re a biome!” She got her phone and took a picture.

  Iggy nodded. He was a biome. A seed must have been sewed into his skin when they did the stitches, and now he was growing grass in his mouth. He poked at it with his tongue.

  Ms. Schulberger told him he could go to the nurse’s office to have it taken out. “No way,” said Iggy. “I’m going to leave it in there until it grows out of my mouth.”

  But once he sat back at his desk and Ms. Schulberger was talking about topic sentences again, he couldn’t help poking at it. Then he couldn’t help very, very gently biting the tiny green piece between his teeth and his tongue, and very, very gently pulling.

  Ms. Schulberger kept talking about topic sentences, but she also kept looking at Iggy. Pretty soon everyone else in class was looking at Iggy too.

  Iggy was the only one who could concentrate, and he was concentrating very hard on pulling the blade of grass out of his skin, a little bit at a time.

  He didn’t want to break it.

  Ms. Schulberger stopped talking to watch.

  All the kid turned around in their desks to watch.

  Iggy worked on the inside of his mouth.

  He almost had it.

  Almost.

  Almost.

  Then, with a squeak only he could hear, Iggy pulled the blade of grass out of his mouth.

  “Did it!” he shouted, and held it up for everyone to see.

  “Ew-wwww!” shrieked the class.

  Arch started to stomp. “Igg-Y! Igg-Y!” he yelled. Owen stomped too, and so did Donal and Nhat and Aidan.

  Ms. Schulberger began to laugh. She dropped into her chair and laughed and laughed and laughed. “I love my job,” she gasped.

  Aidan waved a dollar. “I’ll buy it off you!”

  “No way,” said Iggy, holding his grass tight. “I’m going to keep it. Forever.”

  And he did.

  He taped the blade of grass in a special book, and under it, he wrote, “The best thing that ever happened to me!!!”

  Which it was, until about four and a half months later.

  But that’s a different story.

  CHAPTER 18

  BETTER NOT

  Bummer. Iggy’s not any better than he was at the beginning of this book. He did one bad thing and then another (although we all can agree that he did the second thing by mistake), and then he got his face mashed up. It seemed like he was about to learn to be a better person. But then he didn’t.

  It’s okay with him. In the end, Iggy decided that he is fine the way he is.

  I think so too.

  But you?

  All I can say is: I hope you’ve learned your lesson.

  photo credit: Amy Perl Photography

  ANN
IE BARROWS doesn’t want to ruin this book by telling you what happens in it. But she really, really wants to say that the thing in this book you will find the most unbelievable—it involves something green—that thing is TRUE! It actually happened to a guy she knows at the gym. And guess what. He still has it, the green thing, in a scrapbook. How disgusting!

  anniebarrows.com

  @anniebarrowsauthor

  SAM RICKS is the illustrator of the Geisel Award winner Don’t Throw It to Mo! and the Stinkbomb and Ketchup-Face books. He is grateful his parents let him live through a surprising number of Iggycidents.

  Sam lives with his family in Utah.

  samricks.com

  @samuelricks

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  * Good work! You are really getting the hang of the asterisk thing. Do you want to know something else completely cool about the peacock flounder? Its eyeballs are on the ends of little stumps that turn in different directions so that one eye can look forward and one can look backward at the same time.

  * If you have read a book called The Best of Iggy, you may be saying to yourself, “Hey, didn’t he hurt a teacher in that book too?” Yup, he did. He was sorry about that. You may be asking, “Does this kid hurt all his teachers?” No. His first-grade teacher got through the whole year without a scrape.

  * By the way, this is a paragraph you should definitely not show to grown-ups. Even though it’s true.

  * You’re not going to believe this, but the dirt and bark mixture is another gardening supply. It’s called mulch, and guess what! It’s usually got poop in it too! People spread it around their yards to make their plants grow better. Gardening is weird.

  * This is not regular, sticky tape. This is called gardening tape, or sometimes tie tape, and it’s for tying plants to sticks to keep them from falling over. It’s not sticky, but it’s a little bit stretchy, so the plants can grow.