By Debra Frasier
Sage misses school with a cold, copies the vocabulary list down over the phone, and mishears 'miscellaneous' as the name of a lady.
Sage is home sick, so she phones her friend Starr for the week's vocabulary words and writes them down as she hears them. The last one comes through as 'Miss Alaineus,' and Sage, who is good at this and knows it, confidently defines her as a woman whose hair is so tangled it looks like spaghetti. She reads it out to the whole class. The whole class laughs. Sage goes home wanting to disappear forever and stay there. And then her mother helps her find the gold in it, and ten days later Sage walks into the school Vocabulary Parade dressed as Miss Alaineus, Queen of All Mix-Ups, with spaghetti in her hair.
The mechanism is a mishearing, the kind where your ear puts the word-break in the wrong place and 'miscellaneous' becomes 'Miss Alaineus.' Every child has done this and never had a name for it, and seeing it happen to somebody else on the page is a small relief. Frasier builds the whole book out of it: the margins are crammed with vocabulary words, each one illustrated, and there's a running border of the sentences Sage is writing for another assignment that tells you how she's actually feeling underneath. There's a lot on every page and a child who likes to hunt will stay a while. The real engine, though, is that Sage is publicly humiliated and comes back. She doesn't get rescued and the joke doesn't stop being funny, she just walks back in wearing it on purpose, and that's a useful thing for a proud child to watch somebody do.