The Wednesday Wars

On New Year’s Day, a picture of Holling leaping across the stage as Ariel the fairy (yellow tights, feathers, and all) appears in the hometown newspaper. Holling is mortified, and his embarrassment only multiplies when at school on Monday, he finds that Doug Swieteck’s brother posted hundreds of the photos, filling every wall. As he walks through the halls, everyone snickers. Even Holling’s sister at the high school gets made fun of because of the photo.

At the family dinner table, Holling’s father, who was just announced Chamber of Commerce Businessman of 1967, informs the family that Hoodhood and Associates was invited to put in a bid for the new junior high school. They will be up against Kowalski and Associates, the other local architecture firm—one that’s probably headed towards bankruptcy if they don’t win the bid.

On Wednesday, Holling and Mrs. Baker discuss Macbeth. She chides Holling for mixing up the names of characters, and points out beautiful themes from the play, in particular, that, “compared with love, malice is a small and petty thing” (109). These words strike a chord with Holling, who at the moment, bears the brunt of Doug Swieteck’s brother’s malice in the form of the embarrassing newspaper photo plastering the halls. When Mrs. Baker tells him that people will soon forget about the photo, Holling says, “It’s not like it’s your picture in the halls, or that you have all that much to worry about” (110). He immediately regrets his words, knowing that Mrs. Baker’s husband is deployed in Vietnam.

The weather grows colder, and the streets turn icy, but nothing will deter Principal Guareschi from the New York State Standardized Achievement test. The buses continue to run, and school remains open. The morning of the test, Holling gets sweet vengeance when he covertly hits Doug Swieteck’s brother with a snowball, and feels things are finally starting to look up for him. Holling knows that the power is out all over town, so the classroom will inevitably be freezing. Accordingly, he wears his thermal underwear to make sure he stays warm during the test. Partway through the test, however, the power turns on and the radiators crank up. Before long, Holling is sweating so intensely he can hardly keep hold of his pencil.

When the test finally ends and he makes it to the bathroom, it’s full of eighth graders—including Doug Swieteck’s brother, who somehow found out the snowball that hit him earlier was thrown by Holling. Holling hightails it out of the bathroom, still a sweaty puddle. That day as he leaves school, he’s keeping a sharp eye for Doug Swieteck’s brother and the other eighth graders, when he sees his sister walking home from school, right in the path of a school bus that’s sliding on the icy roads. He pushes her out of the way just in time, but gets hit on the backside by the bus and flies into a snow bank. Mrs. Baker and Mr. Guareschi rush him to the emergency room to get an x-ray, and thankfully, nothing is broken.

The next day on the front page, Holling is once again flying through the air in a picture on the front page, but this time, he’s not in yellow tights. The headline reads “Local Hero Holling Hoodhood Soars Across Intersection to Rescue Sister” (128). At school on Monday, the original, embarrassing photo has been replaced by the new, heroic one. As Holling walks through the halls, everyone smiles—not because they are making fun of him, but because they are glad to see him.