A begonia for miss apple.., p.1
A Begonia for Miss Applebaum, page 1
Books by Pulitzer Prize Winner
PAUL ZINDEL
YOUNG ADULT CLASSIC NOVELS
The Pigman
The Pigman’s Legacy
Pardon Me, You’re Stepping on My Eyeball!
A Begonia for Miss Applebaum
The Undertaker’s Gone Bananas
My Darling, My Hamburger
Harry and Hortense at Hormone High
The Pigman & Me
The Amazing and Death-Defying Diary of Eugene Dingman
I Never Loved Your Mind
Confessions of a Teenage Baboon
David and Della
The Girl Who Wanted a Boy
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
(Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)
A Star for the Latecomer (with Bonnie Zindel)
To Take a Dare (with Crescent Dragonwagon)
THE ZONE UNKNOWN
Loch
The Doom Stone
Raptor
Rats
Reef of Death
Night of the Bat
OTHER TITLES
The Gadget
A BEGONIA
FOR
MISS
APPLEBAUM
PAUL ZINDEL
TO ANY KID WHO READS THIS:
Something terrible has happened. There are no lies in this book and nothing phony. We are writing it during our computer class at high school while most of
the other kids are playing Donkey Kong and Demon Attack. We have to tell the
whole story because we thought what we were doing was right. Well, maybe it
wasn’t. Maybe we were very wrong. We still don’t know. Maybe you will
understand, and be able to help us. Please don’t think we meant to hurt Miss Applebaum. Please don’t think that at all.
Contents
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Sneak Peak
About the Author
1
Well, you might as well know all about me and then you’ll understand how Zelda and I got involved in what happened to Miss Applebaum. You
probably never knew Miss Applebaum, but she was our 62-year-old biology
teacher last year at Andrew Jackson High. Our nickname for Miss Applebaum was “The Shocker” because she loved to surprise her classes. In fact, the exact
day we started to call Miss Applebaum “The Shocker” was when she brought in
a Bloomingdale’s gift box and opened it to reveal a dead cat. The cat was a weird-looking one with white-tipped paws and a black body. It wasn’t that she had just scooped it up off 59th Street after a taxi had hit it, or anything like that.
It was already embalmed and sealed in plastic. Miss Applebaum said dissecting
a dead cat wasn’t her idea of a good time, but it was part of the New York City
Board of Education syllabus. She told us she put it in a gift box so all the kids in the class would know this cat had given a present of its life in order for us to learn about cat anatomy. She also believed the cat deserved the dignity of a name. We voted to call it Louis. She didn’t allow smiling either when she demonstrated why the tabby was properly called Louis and not Louisa. Actually,
there are thousands of things Zelda and I have to tell you about Miss Applebaum, but you’d better know a few things about us first or you won’t believe what happened. First I’ll write about me, and then Zelda can write about
herself.
My full name is Henry Maximilian Ledniz. My parents gave me that name
when I was born because they must have been odd even then. All the kids at school call me Henry and it’s only when I come home to our apartment at 30
Lincoln Plaza that my berserk mother and father call me Henry Maximilian.
Zelda lives a block away at 40 Lincoln Plaza with her parents, who are very different from mine, though she’ll tell you about them when she feels like it. The main thing I need you to know now is that I’m very good-looking like Luke Skywalker, but in an alien sort of way. I’m just being truthful. People tell me how handsome I am. My mother kept me in a baby carriage for three extra years
so I could be rolled in and out of Zabar’s Delicatessen and the Nevada Meat Market to receive praise from other shoppers. Of course, I do have a few flaws.
My first flaw is my hair. It is mouse brown with a cowlick that grows straight up
out of my skull and needs a pound of mousse to subdue it. My hair is so thick that when I go to Pepe’s Haircut Salon, where all the kids from my school go,
Pepe has to use a thinning scissors like a hedge trimmer. He clips so much hair
off my head that when it falls to the floor, it looks like a decapitated head. My
eyes also pop out a little if you look closely, and there’s a tiny scar to the right of my upper lip from when I was ten years old and ran through a glass door at the
Magic Wok Cafe on Columbus Avenue. I should let you know that the middle-
aged lady who works in Sedutto’s ice cream parlor in the bottom of my building
always flirts with me when I go in there for a fix of cookies ’n’ cream. She says
I’m going to be a real heartbreaker like Casanova when I grow up, but I’m fifteen already. Zelda, who is reading over my shoulder, just yelled at me for bragging about my looks, but I’ve got to be truthful. She says it’d be much better if I just told you things I did and then you’d know as much about me as you could stand.
Seven things I did last week are:
1) I bought a copy of the Star Gazette and read “Why Alex the beer-serving dog has become the surprising new star of TV’s top 10 commercials.”
2) I watched reruns of Jaws I, Nightmare on Elm Street II, and Police
Academy III.
3) I went to the edge of Central Park to watch rats sunbathe on a rock.
4) I took Zelda to the Cosmic Soda Shoppe for a frozen hot chocolate and a macadamia nut cookie.
5) I had a dream I was flying inside a big, bright-red room that had a bamboo table with a candle burning on it. I think it was a sacrifice
chamber.
6) I gave a dollar to a bum who was screaming for God and asking if God’s real name was “Buddy.”
7) I ordered fresh flowers for Miss Applebaum’s grave.
Zelda says I shouldn’t tell the following because it’s irrelevant, but I often leave my calling card in phone booths. If you ever see the following, then you’ll
know Henry Ledniz was there:
Zelda looks very cranky now, so I’ve got to let her get at the word processor.
2
My name is Zelda Einnob and I am cranky about a lot of the things Henry wrote in the first chapter. There is simply no way I can make you
understand what happened to us concerning Miss Applebaum’s death unless you
know more accurate things about us than Henry told you. He always thinks of the craziest way to do anything because he has a hard time facing up to anything
that remotely resembles true emotion. That is Henry’s main flaw, not his cowlick. Deep down, he is one of the most compassionate, loving boys in the world, but he’d be the last to show you. I have known him all my life and when I
look back on our growing up together, I am filled with a great warmth and a strange, mystical belief that God really does exist. Without Henry, I don’t think I could have survived all the frantic and nerve-wracking events that have
happened.
Henry is very handsome. As he told you, everyone knows that, especially him.
For myself, I always wanted to look like Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, or Princess Di. I don’t. I am just normal-looking except for my black hair, which reaches down to my shoulder blades. The reason I grew it that long was because
I used to be in the children’s chorus at the Metropolitan Opera, which is right across the street from my family’s apartment. I’m not in the chorus now because
I grew too big for the children’s costumes, but the opera I loved being in the most was Puccini’s Turandot. The head diva in that opera wears a long black wig in the second act, after a stranger correctly answers three riddles she asks him. The story of Turandot is that if this stranger doesn’t know the answers to the riddles, he will have to face a distasteful fate. When I saw how beautiful and distinctive the diva looked, I immediately started letting my hair grow and I also started using a bit of English Lavender powder, crimson Max Factor lipstick, and
Maybelline mascara. Henry doesn’t need anything like makeup, but I need all the help I can get. I have taken a lot of singing and dancing lessons and I intend to go into a theatrical profession or be a psychiatrist. For a few examples of things I have done that would help you
1) WHAT MY ENGLISH TEACHER MRS. LARNER SAID ABOUT ME:
“Zelda’s assignments for English are always a pleasure to receive and
brimming with insight. Her ballad on Marilyn Monroe’s exploitation was
a knockout.”
2) LIBRARY SCIENCE WITH MR. WARWICK: “Zelda could refer to a
dictionary with more regularity.”
3) MATH WITH MISS GOLDBERG: “Miss Einnob worked well with the
concept of 3-digit divisors and she performed well on hypotenuses.”
4) FRENCH WITH MR. ALFIERI: “She effectively perceives the
differences between living and dead languages.”
5) HIGH SCHOOL CHORUS WITH MISS VROOMBA: “Zelda is now
singing with a very wide range (almost three octaves in warm-ups), and
is listening to others and trying to blend better with her soprano section.
Her hair makes her a particularly impressive soloist.”
6) ART WITH MR. LAHR: “Zelda’s collage of a clay girl sitting in an aluminum tree works beautifully.”
You also need to know a few ways that Henry and I are especially different.
First of all, I have regular-size blue eyes and he has giant green eyes like a hawk.
When we walk down the street, I look up at the buildings and treetops because I
love how beautiful they are, but Henry checks the gutters for lost money. Also,
he doesn’t remember his dreams, but I remember mine and keep a record of them in a journal. Last night, I dreamed I was walking down Broadway and saw
a mysterious girl with mushrooms growing out of her head. It was really very frightening. I remember trying to run away from her, but she chased me. When
she got close, mushrooms started growing out of my head. I started pulling the mushrooms out of my skull, but the faster I did, the faster they grew! I woke up
screaming, and when I told Henry about the dream, all he did was burp. Again, it
was his way of avoiding emotion and not wanting to face up to anything connected to what happened to Miss Applebaum; I’m afraid that just won’t do anymore.
It all started last September 9th around 8:30 in the morning. That was the first
day after the summer vacation. Henry and I went in the 82nd Street entrance of
Andrew Jackson along with about two thousand other noisy kids who were
trying to get their programs and say hello to friends they hadn’t seen all summer.
Henry and I just went straight up to the third-floor science laboratory because we wanted to sign up immediately to be two of Miss Applebaum’s lab assistants
again, which is what we had been during the year before. We practically exploded through the door calling out, “Hi, Miss Applebaum!”
But there was no Miss Applebaum.
There was only a man we’d never seen before, in a white lab coat, and he looked slightly nervous.
“Miss Applebaum isn’t here,” he muttered, and continued setting up some
kind of pulley system. “I’m her replacement,” he added, “Mr. Greenfield.”
“Is she giving up the lab?” Henry asked.
“No,” Mr. Greenfield said, looking us over suspiciously.
“Then where is she?” I wanted to know.
“Miss Applebaum retired.”
There was something about the tone of this Mr. Greenfield’s voice that was very neurotic, and the way he couldn’t look us in the eye made me feel as if he
knew some sort of secret. Some terrible secret.
I can’t write any more at this moment. I’m sorry.
3
Zelda is crying. She cries very easily because she’s too sensitive for her own
good. I have to tell you those things about her because she won’t. She’s too
polite. Like when she told you about the young stranger in the opera. She said if
he didn’t know the answers to Turandot’s riddles, he would have to face “a distasteful fate.” She should have just told you that they would have chopped his
head off. In fact, all through the opera, most of the stage is decorated with young men’s heads that have been chopped off and stuck on bamboo sticks for Peking
masses to behold.
Anyway, both Zelda and I felt very strange when this new lab teacher told us
Miss Applebaum had retired. We weren’t expecting it at all. Most kids might not
feel whacked out about a teacher retiring, but Zelda and I think the loss of a devoted schoolteacher is an important event. We think a lot more of
schoolteachers than they could ever imagine. We even like teachers we hate because we think of ways to drive them nuts. Teachers have always been powerful forces in Zelda’s life and mine. When we were very little at elementary
school, we thought teachers lived their whole lives inside of school buildings.
We thought there were secret staircases that lowered down at night, and after the
teachers got rid of the students for the day, they would go through mysterious passages to hidden condo units on the roof or to pup tents in the boiler room. I
remember the time Zelda and I first saw a teacher outside of school. It was our
principal, Miss McGillicuthey. She was walking down Fifth Avenue in the St.
Patrick’s Day parade, and we thought she had illegally escaped the school building.
But Miss Applebaum was the most special teacher we had ever met in our entire decade of academic pursuits. Her lab periods were in the morning, during
which she was in charge of supplying all the equipment, chemicals, and
paramecia that every science teacher would need. She was the only teacher who
had the experience and training for such a vast job. After her lab preparations, she would teach only two classes. From the first day, Zelda and I had known we
wanted to work with Miss Applebaum before school and during our free periods
in order to be around her and all the fascinating gizmos in the science lab. Of
course, we also earned extra service credits, but we would have helped clean test
tubes and adjust Bunsen burners for nothing. There is no way I can tell you all
the incredible things Miss Applebaum did to excite Zelda and me and all the kids
in her classes. But the things she did when it was just her, Zelda, and me in the
lab were spectacular. A few general highlights are:
a) Miss Applebaum once brought in over seventy cocoons from the park
and hung them by threads from the windows. A month later, we came to
class and there were seven million infant grasshoppers leaping all over
the desks and causing a riot.
b) Another time, Miss Applebaum explained in scientific detail how doctors
force a tapeworm out of a patient by giving massive doses of laxatives
and then searching through buckets until they find the worm’s head.
c) Last January, she let me demonstrate static electricity by permitting me
to charge up Zelda on a Van de Graaff generator. A good time was had
by all, except Zelda:
See? That’s how provocative she was just in class, not to mention all the adventures she gave us searching for amoebas and using microscopes to spy on
flies’ legs and human cheek cells.
Zelda has stopped crying now and wants me to tell you a few things about the
more artistic sides of Miss Applebaum. Well, I can’t lie. She was extremely creative, but some of the things she did only explained why a certain faction of
the faculty and kids thought she was eccentric. Basically, she baked bohemian ceramic earrings in the laboratory incubator during her spare time and sold them
to other teachers who wanted bargain birthday, Xmas, and Chanukah gifts.
Secondly, you might as well know that Miss Applebaum sometimes wore a
black homburg hat on days when she wanted to feel “special.” Also, it should be
