Pennybaker School Is Headed for Disaster

  “You named your scary head Helen?”

  “Helen Heirmauser,” she said. “Beloved math teacher of many years. Practically everyone in town had Mrs. Heirmauser for their teacher.” She gazed reverently at the statue. “Or wanted to. Even those who didn’t have her felt like they had. Including people who never attended this school. They say she even taught Louis Pennybaker himself in the eighteen hundreds.”

  I counted years in my head. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “She was pretty old when she died.”

  “She died?”

  Miss Munch knelt in front of the pedestal, placing her hand over her heart and bowing her head. “And the whole town shut down for an entire week.” She stayed like that for so long that I started to feel weird and began to kneel down next to her. But the second my knee touched the floor, Miss Munch wiped the corners of her eyes with her fingertips and stood up, leaving me kneeling there by myself with my hands pressed together like I was praying. Two girls walked by, looked at me, and giggled.

  “Now, this way, please,” Miss Munch said, completely unaware of my humiliation, and we were off again.

  We walked around the statue, past a window occupied by a woman who was talking on the phone, and through a door into the office.

  “Just let me get your schedule,” Miss Munch said. “Wait right here.” She gestured toward a bench that was currently occupied by a very small boy with glasses and a much bigger boy who kept staring at my tie-wad. I wished I had let Dad help me with my tie. I decided not to sit.

  Miss Munch moved behind the big secretary desk. She wiggled the computer mouse and tapped a few keys.

  “Miss Munch?” the tiny boy said tentatively.

  She glanced up. “Yes, Flea?”

  “I forgot my didgeridoo. I called my mom. She’s bringing it. But I might need a late pass.”

  Miss Munch got a crease between her eyebrows. “This is the third time this month,” she said.

  The boy stood, coming up to about my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Miss Munch. I won’t forget again, I promise. But if I don’t have it, Mr. Flugel’s whole concert will go down the tubes.”

  “Well, I certainly doubt the entire concert rests on one didgeridoo, Flea.”

  “But I’m the only didgeridoo,” the boy complained.

  “Actually, when played right, the didgeridoo is quite the commanding presence on stage, both because of its intimidating size and its soothing buzzing sound.” The larger boy with the perfect tie had stood up. His voice boomed through the office, clear and commanding and slightly Australian.

  “Thank you, Wesley,” Miss Munch said, looking irritated, before going back to the computer.

  “Of course, mate,” he said, bowing with a flourish and sitting down again.

  I tried to piece together what I’d just heard, but none of it made sense. Flea? Mr. Flugel? And what the heck was a didgeridoo, anyway?

  “Okay,” Miss Munch finally said, moving over to catch a piece of paper as it came out of the printer. “You should be all set, Thomas.”

  She brought me the paper and smiled. I took it and read the names of my classes.

  1st period: Biofeedback

  2nd period: Active Numbering

  3rd period: Four Square

  4th period: Lexiconical Arts

  5th period: Meat and Greet Gathering

  6th period: Claymaking

  7th period: Futuristic Arts

  8th period: Facts After the Fact

  “I don’t understand these,” I said, letting the paper droop.

  The bell rang. Miss Munch put her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, Wesley is going to explain everything to you. He’s your Pennybaker School ambassador.”

  The taller boy stood and bowed again, then pulled an old-fashioned white hanky out of his pocket and waved it around between two fingers like some dude in an opera. “At jor zervice, zir,” he said, but he said it in a funny voice. An entirely not-Australian voice.

  “What?”

  “I repeat. At yuh suhvice, suh.” Another different accent. But at least this one was an accent I understood. British, maybe. Or he had a stuffy nose. I couldn’t tell. It was allergy season, after all.

  Just then, a tiny woman burst into the office, dragging an instrument case that was twice her size.

  “Oh! Perfect timing! I might still get to class on time,” the boy named Flea yelped. He jumped up, took the instrument, and staggered out the door, dragging the case behind him just as the woman had been doing. The door banged into him twice before he finally got all the way out. Miss Munch had her eyes closed and her fingers pressed to her temples.

  “Let me just write you two some passes,” she said. “So you don’t have to hurry to class.” She bustled back to her desk and whipped out a pad of paper. “That way you can chat. And you, Thomas, can ask all the questions you need to ask.” Oh, I doubted there was enough time for that.

  Wesley leaned over my schedule. “Biofeedback is meditation class,” he said. “It’s supposed to be science. But everyone just sleeps. We call it nap class.”

  “What about these others?” I asked.

  He frowned, then went down the list. “Math, gym, English, the usual,” he said, pointing at my second-, third-, and fourth-period classes.

  “Meat and greet?”

  He smiled, then growled in a monster voice that made my hair fly back off my forehead and rattled my tie-ball, “LUNCH.” And then he added in a totally normal voice, “And then art. And computers. Which is taught by Mr. Püp.”

  Seriously? Butts and now Püp? What were the odds?

  Miss Munch came back, brandishing two pink slips for us. “Okay, you’re good to go.”

  “Shall we?” The British accent again.

  I followed Wesley into the hall, which was filled with only a smattering of kids now, all racing to get to class.

  “So as youse can see, we gots a pretty intricate operation going on around heres,” he said in a gangster voice.

  I’d had about enough. “Okay, what’s with all the accents?” I asked. “Does everyone here do that?”

  Wesley gathered himself up tall. “Only we thesssspians.” About a gallon of spit drenched my forehead. I needed windshield wipers.

  “What’s a thespian?” I asked, drying my forehead with my schedule. I didn’t know why I kept asking questions—every time I asked one, I just ended up more confused.

  “You know,” Wesley said. “An actor. Someone who loves the theater. We thespians never miss an opportunity to practice portrayal. Life is art. Art is life. Plus, auditions for Annie are coming up, and I’ve always thought Daddy Warbucks needed an accent. How do you feel about a Slovakian inflection?”

  I stared at him for a long time. He never said “just kidding” or started laughing, so he must have been serious. “Okay.”

  We walked past the head in the foyer and I shuddered.

  “You’ve met Mrs. Heirmauser, I presume?” Wesley said, pausing only long enough to place his hand over his heart and gaze at the head with reverence.

  “Why does she look like that?” I asked.

  “Like what?”

  “You know.” I made a buggy-eyed face and opened my mouth wide, rabid dog–style.

  “Oh,” he said. “She was passionate about math.”

  He started up the stairs, and I trailed behind him. “What does that mean?”

  He paused and thought about it. “She yelled a lot,” he said over his shoulder, then kept walking. “But it was a loving yell.”

  “Loving yell,” I repeated, casting one last look at the head. It didn’t look so loving. Or maybe it did—loving in the way a lion loves a nice, juicy goat.

  The bell rang, and all around us we could hear shoes frantically scuffling and classroom doors shutting.

  “Zoinks! We should hurry,” Wesley said, in what was clearly a cartoon voice. “We have to get all the way to the top.”

  I turned my eyes to the ceiling, which seemed impo
ssibly far away. Like we might need an airplane to get there. We walked for what seemed like forever, Wesley occasionally breaking out into show tunes, each of which he seemed to know only a few words of. My legs were killing me, and my necktie-clump had begun to shrink. My vest popped a button. It plinked down the stairs all the way to the foyer. Sweat trickled down my back, making it itch even more. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do this every single morning.

  Finally, we reached the top.

  “Your second-period class is right down the hall,” Wesley said. “I have that one, too, so I’ll help you find it. Enjoy your biofeedback.” He took a deep breath in through his nose and let it out through his mouth, yoga-style. “Ommm,” he said, then let out a loud snore. I had no clue what he was doing, but I was too exhausted to ask. He opened his eyes, smiled, punched me lightly on the shoulder, and said, “See ya!”

  “Wait,” I said. He stopped. I pointed to my schedule. “You didn’t tell me what my eighth-hour class is. Facts After the Fact?”

  “Oh.” Wesley brightened. “That’s history. Right now we’re studying Louis XIV.”

  And then he was gone.

  Death by history class.

  TRICK #3

  FLYING SALIVA PAPER

  It turned out Wesley was in most of my classes. Which was good, because, as strange as the accents and stuff were, he was a pretty nice guy. And a guy who suddenly sings the girl parts of High School Musical songs for no reason whatsoever is a guy who definitely isn’t going to judge someone if they do something embarrassing.

  Not that anyone at Pennybaker School would notice if I did something embarrassing—of that I was becoming certain. Seemed everyone in the school was a little bit off. Boys who spoke through ventriloquist dummies, girls who unicycled, teachers who wore ball gowns and clog danced in the middle of the lesson. And every four minutes, someone made a reference to the Great Helen Heirmauser, and the whole class would turn, hands over their hearts, and look toward the foyer, where the creepy, screaming, eye-buggy head was. God rest her soul. Or whatever.

  In Lexiconical Arts, a girl who wore black clothes under her uniform and a black beret on her head recited a poem she’d written for the Heirmauser bust:

  Ode to the great Helen Heirmauser

  Who always had a crease on the legs of her trouser

  If she were a cat, she’d be a great mouser

  And if she were a dog, she’d be better than a schnauzer

  She always made math not boring but wowser

  And she knew more answers than an Internet search engine.

  “Sorry,” she said to Mrs. Codex. “I couldn’t think of anything to rhyme on that last one.”

  Mrs. Codex blinked. “How about ‘Internet browser’?”

  “Oh, good point,” said the girl in black. “I should search for a rhyme on an Internet browser.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Codex. “‘Browser’ rhymes with ‘Heirmauser.’”

  The girl smiled wide, nodding. “What a coincidence, huh? I’ll bet that’s a good-luck sign that I’ll find the perfect word.”

  “No, no,” said Mrs. Codex. Her neck had started to turn red.

  “She means a browser and an Internet search engine are the same thing,” the boy named Flea piped from the back of the room.

  The girl in black looked very confused.

  “Not exactly true,” said a boy near the window. He had three computers on his desk, all open to different webpages. He also had a smartphone, a very complicated-looking watch, and, most interestingly, an upside-down spaghetti strainer on his head. He consulted a page on one of the computers. “Technically, a browser is what you have to open to get to a search engine.”

  “Close enough,” said Flea.

  The boy scratched his head under the spaghetti strainer and tapped a few keys on one of the computers, then input something into his phone. “Well, I suppose if Clara wants to be close enough in her poem written about our greatest teacher of all time.” The entire class paused, pressed their hands to their hearts, and gazed toward the door, which looked out upon the foyer. And the head. I sighed and tried really hard not to roll my eyes.

  The girl in black, who I’d now deduced was named Clara, looked stricken. “Oh, goodness, I don’t want that at all!”

  “I didn’t think so,” the boy said. “I can find you a rhyming word on Google—which is a search engine, by the way.”

  “Aha! I’ve got it!” Clara, beaming, leaned over Mrs. Codex’s desk, erased furiously, wrote a few words, and then stood up proudly to read.

  Ode to the great Helen Heirmauser

  Who always had a crease on the legs of her trouser

  If she were a cat, she’d be a great mouser

  And if she were a dog, she’d be better than a schnauzer

  She always made math not boring but wowser

  And she knew more answers than Google.

  Mrs. Codex looked like she was going to throw up.

  The class I was least looking forward to was the last one, where I had a sinking feeling I was about to have a Louis XIV Boring Torturous Lecture Adventure. I was also pretty sure I had a raging rash under my tie and my vest, and somehow both had managed to get tighter, even though I’d probably sweated off half my body weight. I felt like I was wrapped inside a live beaver. The last thing I wanted to do was spend an entire hour talking about the man who started it all.

  Louis XIV: Gnawed to death by a live beaver.

  Wesley and I took seats in the very back row.

  “Don’t worry. Mr. Faboo is an easy grader,” Wesley said. “And he really gets into history. He even has costumes. Sometimes he forgets we’re here at all. Which is why I brought …” He pulled two straws out of his backpack and held them up.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He ripped two sheets of paper out of his spiral notebook and handed one to me. “Boredom buster.” He tore a small scrap off one corner and tucked it into his mouth, chewing around a grin. After a few moments, he stuck out his tongue, a perfectly round, extraordinarily spitty spitwad perched on the end. He plucked it off his tongue and stuffed it into the end of the straw. Now watch, he mouthed, holding up one finger. I watched.

  “We have a new project to discuss today, class,” Mr. Faboo said. “A very exciting new project. I think you will like this one a lot.” He turned and picked up a marker, which had a giant feather taped to the end like an old-timey quill. He started writing on the board, and that was when Wesley let the spitwad rip.

  Patoo!

  The white ball sailed through the air, expertly skimming the very tops of our classmates’ heads, and found its home in the back of Mr. Faboo’s hair, which sproinged lightly as the paper landed. Mr. Faboo paused, scratched his head, and went back to writing. Twenty pairs of eyes turned to stare at Wesley and me incredulously. I gulped and turned to Wesley, who had already hidden his straw and was studiously scribbling away in his spiral notebook, as if he were taking notes. The tiniest of grins touched the corners of his mouth.

  I looked back and realized everyone was actually just staring at me.

  Because I was still holding my straw.

  My face burned and I looked down, giving myself a bowtie mustache.

  “Nationwide History Day,” Mr. Faboo cried, and everyone turned back toward him, as if nothing had just happened. “You are to research and study any history subject and create a multimedia presentation regarding said subject. For example, you might gather and present Native American artifacts or make a movie about Henry Kissinger.”

  I glanced at Wesley again. He was laughing so hard he was crying. “Your turn,” he whispered.

  “You’re crazy,” I whispered back. A bead of sweat disappeared down my back and into my underwear.

  “He’ll never know,” Wesley said.

  “No way.”

  “What, are you a chicken?” He bawked softly.

  “Shut up!”

  “Excuse me, young man,” Mr. Faboo said, and once again I felt the
eyes of the entire class on me. My face burned even harder, and more sweat rolled down my back. Great. Now I was having a Sitting in Sweat Pond Adventure. “Excuse me. Have we met?”

  I shook my head. “I’m new,” I said.

  “And you’re called?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What is your name?”

  “Oh. Thomas. Fallgrout. Thomas Fallgrout.”

  Mr. Faboo tickled his chin with the feather. “Tell me, Thomas Fallgrout, Thomas Fallgrout. Have you an idea for the Nationwide History Day project?”

  “Um …” No. All that my brain could think was, Spitwad spitwad there’s a spitwad in your hair spitwad spitty spitty spitwad. How could I think of anything historical with all that spitty wadiness right there for all to see?

  Mr. Faboo looked unimpressed. “Well, new student Thomas Fallgrout, Thomas Fallgrout,” he said, “I suppose you should do less talking and more thinking, then.” He turned back to the board. All the eyes followed him.

  All except Wesley’s, which were pointed directly at me.

  “I know ye’ve got it in ya, laddy,” he whispered in an Irish brogue.

  I didn’t. At least Thomas Fallgrout from Boone Public Middle School didn’t. But I wasn’t at Boone Public Middle School anymore, was I? I was sitting in Lake Buttsweat, getting yelled at in front of everyone by a guy who talked all old-fashioned and fancy like … like Louis XIV.

  My eyes narrowed. Maybe Thomas Fallgrout from Boone Public didn’t have it in him, but Thomas Fallgrout from Pennybaker School did.

  I swallowed, my whole body tingling with adrenaline.

  I tore a piece of paper and stuck it into my mouth, chewing quickly, feeling my chin bump the tie-ball with every chew.

  This is what I think of you, Louis XIV, I thought, then stuffed the spitwad into the straw, brought it up to my lips, and blew.

  Direct hit.

  Mr. Faboo scratched his head again. Twenty pairs of eyes glared at me. Wesley low-fived me under the desk.

  “Man,” Wesley said as we tumbled out of the classroom forty-five minutes later. “You really nailed him with that last one. Are you, like, a spitball master or something?”

  I grinned, loosening my tie and letting the ends of it dangle against my chest. I felt like I could breathe for the first time all day. “I’m pretty great with a Nerf gun, but this is my first weapon of slobberatic destruction.”