The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson Page B

once.
    I was always in the same grade with Imogene Herdman, and what I did was stay out of her way. It wasn’t easy to stay out of her way. You couldn’t do it if you were very pretty or very ugly, or very smart or very dumb, or had anything unusual about you, like red hair or double-jointed thumbs.
    But if you were sort of a medium kid like me, and kept your mouth shut when the teacher said, “Who can name all fifty states?” you had a pretty good chance to stay clear of Imogene.
    As far as anyone could tell, Imogene was just like the rest of the Herdmans. She never learned anything either, except dirty words and secrets about everybody.
    Twice a year we had to go to the health room to get weighed and measured, and Imogene always managed to find out exactly what everybody weighed. Sometimes she would hang around waiting for the nurse, Miss Hemphill, to give her a Band-Aid; sometimes she would sneak behind the curtain where they kept a folding cot and just stay there the whole time, with one eye on the scales.
    â€œWhy are you still here, Imogene?” Miss Hemphill asked one day. “You can go back to your room.”
    â€œI think you better look and see if I’ve got what Ollie has.”
    â€œWhat does Ollie have?”
    Imogene shrugged. “We don’t know. Red spots all over.”
    Miss Hemphill looked at her. “What did the doctor say?”
    â€œWe didn’t have a doctor.” Imogene began scrunching her back up and down against the medicine cabinet.
    â€œWell, does Ollie have a fever? Is he in bed?”
    â€œNo, he’s in the first grade.”
    â€œRight now?” Miss Hemphill stared. “Why, he shouldn’t be in school with red spots! It could be measles or chicken pox . . . any number of things . . . contagious things. What are you doing?”
    â€œScratching my back,” Imogene said. “Boy, do I itch!”
    â€œThe rest of you boys and girls go back to your classroom,” Miss Hemphill said, “and, Imogene, you stay right here.”
    So we all went back to our room, and Miss Hemphill went to the first grade to look at Ollie, and Imogene stayed in the health room and copied down everybody’s weight from Miss Hemphill’s records.
    Your weight was supposed to be a big secret, like what you got on your report card.
    â€œIt’s nobody’s business what you get on your report card,” all the teachers said. And Miss Hemphill said the same thing—“It’s nobody’s business what you weigh.”
    Not even the fat kids could find out what they weighed, but Imogene always knew.
    â€œDon’t let Albert Pelfrey on the swing!” she would yell at recess. “He’ll bust it. Albert Pelfrey weighs a hundred and forty-three pounds. Last time he weighed a hundred and thirty-seven.” So right away everybody knew two things about Albert—we knew exactly how fat he was, and we also knew that he was getting fatter all the time.
    â€œYou have to go to fat-camp this summer,” Imogene hollered at him. “Miss Hemphill wrote it down on your paper.”
    Fat-camp is a place where they feed you lettuce and grapefruit and cottage cheese and eggs for a month, and you either give up and cheat or give up and get skinny.
    â€œI am not!” Albert said. “I’m going to Disneyland with my Uncle Frank.”
    â€œThat’s what you think!” Imogene told him.
    Albert had to believe her—she was always right about things like that—so all year he had fat-camp to look forward to instead of Disneyland.
    Sometimes Imogene would blackmail the fat kids if they had anything she wanted . . . like Wanda Pierce’s charm bracelet.
    Wanda Pierce weighed about a ton—she even had fat eyes—and her hobby was this charm bracelet. It had twenty-two charms and every single one did something: the little wheels turned, or the little bitty piano keys went “plink,” or the