Pennybaker School Is Headed for Disaster

  I sat up, too. No. No, no, no. I did not want to be Chip Mason’s best friend. Quickly, I tried to conjure up an image of my real best friend, Dustin, who’d gone to Boone Public Elementary with me. We had ridden our bikes together for miles. We’d eaten more Pizza Rolls than anyone could even count. We’d wrestled and swapped homework and even held hands with girls on the same skating party night in fifth grade. Dustin was my best friend.

  My best friend, whom I hadn’t heard from even one time since I started going to Pennybaker School.

  My best friend who walked right past me at the ice cream shop last Saturday with Duncan Flannery, of all people, and didn’t even say hi.

  My best friend who, let’s face it, wasn’t my best friend anymore.

  But hey, you have Wesley, I tried to tell myself. You have Flea and Owen and even spine-chilling Patrice Pillow. You have all the (oddball) unique (kooky) gifted (freaky) students at Pennybaker School. You may not exactly fit in right now, but you’re working on it, and before you know it, you will spitwad your way to best friendom with … with …

  I sighed. With nobody.

  “Seven hundred sixty-two,” Chip murmured next to me, inspecting the collection of bugs on his socks. A fly landed on his finger. “Sorry, little buddy. You’ll have to lay your larvae somewhere else. Mom will kill me if I let you pupate on my feet.”

  But especially not with Chip Mason.

  I stood, grateful that the elevation took me out of the rancid sock cloud. “I’ve gotta go,” I said. “I think maybe Mom needs some help.” Grandma Jo had mounted her skateboard and was currently careening down the driveway with Mom running behind her, shouting things about broken hips and hospital bills and spring chickens. From the look of things, she wasn’t going to catch Grandma Jo anytime soon.

  We watched as Mom stopped at the end of the driveway and raced back to her purse, which she’d dropped by the garage door, then grabbed her car keys and ran to the car, yelling, “I will see you and Barf and Booger and Zit and whoever else is going to teach you to Gingersnap at the skate park! You’ll see, Mother! You! Will! See!” She got in and zoomed to about a foot behind Grandma Jo and then slow-speed chased her around the corner.

  “Oh, good! You’re free!” Chip said, standing and brushing off the back of his shorts.

  “No, I’m pretty sure I need to … do something … for when she comes back. Dinner, probably.”

  “But it’s only twelve thirty.”

  “Complicated dinner. And I’m not a very good cook. Plus, I should probably call Dad.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to come inside for a serous ichor of citric acid, sucrose, and Adam’s ale?”

  As usual, I had no idea what he was talking about, but, given that he was holding a pair of the stinkiest socks ever in existence, I figured there was a good chance I didn’t want a “serious ick” of anything he had to offer.

  Seeing the look of confusion on my face, he grinned. “That’s a liquid mixture of lemon, sugar, and water.” I still wasn’t getting it. “Lemonade!” he clarified. “Perhaps you would like to come inside for some lemonade? Or I can bring it out here.”

  “Oh, uh … no thanks. I need to take off my uniform.” Although I’d learned how to tie my tie sort of properly by now, I was beginning to suspect that it would never stop being scratchy and miserable.

  “Okay, but maybe after you’re done you can come back out and show me a new trick?”

  “I don’t have any new tricks.” If I did, I would make you disappear, I thought. I had edged all the way to the street, but Chip Mason followed me, matching me one tiny step at a time, so that it seemed like neither of us had ever moved at all.

  “You could show me an old one, then. I don’t mind.”

  “I’m sort of out of magic,” I said.

  He flung his head back and laughed. I got to see all of his teeth. “Out of magic! Whoo-hoo-hoo! Ah-ha-ha!” He bent forward and slapped his knee a few times, a cloud of bugs lifting off the socks in his hand and landing again. He wiped his eyes with one. I held back a gag. “You’re a real cutup, Thomas Fallgrout. Out of magic. As if that’s possible.”

  I had no idea what I’d said that was so funny. The truth was, since going to Pennybaker School, I hadn’t done as much magic as I used to. Which was ironic, given that I was at Pennybaker because of my magic. We were all encouraged to use our special and unique gifts in our classwork, but that was easier for someone like Owen, whose computer skills actually helped his classwork, than it was for someone like me. What was I going to do? Saw my assignments in half? Suddenly I had an urge to boil water in a paper bag or turn blue water clear.

  I pulled a deck of cards out of my pocket.

  “Okay. Here, Chip,” I said. “Pick a card, but don’t tell me what it is …”

  TRICK #9

  PRODUCING A SMUGGLER OUT OF THIN AIR

  I still had a lot of day left, and I was bored. After I taught Chip a few card tricks, he was so wrapped up in perfecting them that he completely forgot I was there. Erma got home from school and immediately began watching TV. And Mom and Grandma Jo had never come home.

  I plopped on my bed and bounced a tennis ball off the ceiling, trying to distract myself from the troubling realization that I was so bored I would rather have been at school. It’s unfair the way the brain works against you sometimes.

  I wondered what tomorrow would be like. Surely everyone would have calmed down by then. Maybe the statue would have even been returned. All a big misunderstanding.

  A big misunderstanding that Reap had something to do with. That, I was sure of.

  I rolled off my bed and went downstairs.

  “Erma, where’s the laptop?”

  “Shhh!” she hissed. “This is a good part.”

  “I just want to find the laptop.”

  “So open your eyes.” She still had never looked away from the TV. I was starting to wonder if her eyes were magnetically fused to it.

  “Where did you last put it?”

  “I didn’t. Hush.”

  “You were the last one to use it, Erma.”

  Finally she turned around, her face an angry splot. “If you don’t be quiet, I’m telling Mom that you were bouncing a ball off your ceiling again.” I picked up the remote and just stared at her, pointing it toward the TV, until she rolled her eyes. “Fine. I used it in the kitchen.”

  I tossed the remote to her. “Was that so hard?”

  “Shhh!”

  Sisters.

  I found the laptop and opened it, pulling up the Pennybaker homework chat site—a webpage that was designed for students to help each other finish projects. There was always someone on it, and usually that someone was Wesley—the most extroverted person who ever attended Pennybaker School.

  Sure enough, he was logged in, so I messaged him.

  TFallgrout: Hey

  StageStar: Hey Thomas, what’s up?

  TFallgrout: I was thinking about the head of horror just now

  StageStar: …

  TFallgrout: Okay, okay, I mean the statue

  StageStar: What about it?

  TFallgrout: Reap

  StageStar: ???

  TFallgrout: I think he had it under his vest. He looked really suspeesh sushipsh suspecc

  StageStar: Suspicious?

  TFallgrout: Yeah that. He definitely didn’t want to get caught carrying whatever he was carrying. THE ZOMBIE HEAD.

  StageStar: I am making a stellar stop-that face at you right now.

  TFallgrout: Ok ok. Let’s confront him

  StageStar: Who?

  TFallgrout: REAP!!!!!!!

  StageStar: That’s a jolly idea, ol’ boy. I say yea and a pip pip.

  (Wesley was convinced that people could hear his accents online.)

  TFallgrout: So tomorrow? We can follow him out of Claymaking and wait until we get him alone.

  StageStar: And den smash bang crash we’ll have da moichendise back, see?

  (Okay, so maybe he was right about
the accent thing sometimes.)

  TFallgrout: Everyone will be happy

  StageStar: We will be heroes!

  TFallgrout: See you tomorrow before school for you know what practice?

  StageStar: Bright and early!

  I signed off and shut the laptop, feeling much less bored now that I had a plan to think about. We would follow Reap. We would get him alone. We would make him confess.

  And we would get the statue back.

  TRICK #10

  VANISH ALL THE THINGS!

  Mom and Grandma Jo were trying to set grouchiness records the next morning. Turned out Grandma Jo had shaken Mom on the way to the skate park by grabbing on to the bumper of a passing pickup truck, and by the time Mom found which skate park she was at, Barf and someone named Shredding Fred were teaching her how to do a Salad Grind. Mom stepped in and tweaked Shredding Fred’s nose, refusing to let go until Grandma Jo was in the car. The skateboarders gave Mom a nickname that Mom refused to repeat while Erma and I were in the room, and Grandma Jo gave Mom an even worse nickname than that. They’d been snapping at each other all morning.

  “Would you like some scrambled eggs, Mother?” Mom asked when Grandma Jo came into the room.

  “I probably shouldn’t. I might burn my tongue or poke my lip with the fork.”

  “Oh, Mother, don’t be like that. Here, have some coffee. You’ll feel better.”

  “Are you sure it’s safe for me to do that? Maybe you should call my babysitter. Oh, wait. You are my babysitter.”

  “I am not your babysitter!”

  “Well, you’re sure acting like one!”

  “Only because if I didn’t, who knows what sort of antics you’d get into?”

  On and on they went, Erma and I pretending we weren’t there, just in case Mom or Grandma Jo should decide we needed to take a side. Or worse, in case Mom or Grandma Jo got irritated enough to make one of us clean up the breakfast dishes.

  When Dad came through to grab a cup of coffee on the way out, I sprang up from the table.

  “Hey, Dad? Can you give me a ride today? I need to get there early.”

  “Of course, buddy,” Dad said, unplugging his phone from its charger and slipping it into his pocket. “Be ready to leave in five minutes.”

  “Me, too,” Erma said, jumping up next to me. Ordinarily I would have been irritated that she was tagging along and would tell her to buzz off and stop being such a pest. But as Grandma Jo pointed to the paper towel roll and asked Mom, “Permission to tear off a towel, sir? It has sharp corners and I might put an eye out,” I understood why Erma wanted to go to school early today, too.

  Chip Mason was outside as we pulled away, school backpack on, staring through a telescope into a knothole in the big tree in his front yard instead of standing with the rest of the kids at the bus stop. There was no way he was seeing anything but infinite blackness. Or at least that was what a normal person would have seen. Who knew what Chip Mason would see? He probably had his miniature civilization socks on and was looking into an entire society.

  Erma waved manically at him, even though he didn’t see her. Erma was just weird enough to like Chip Mason without being forced to.

  “It’s probably a good thing you’re going to school early today,” Dad said as he pulled onto the highway. “Mom and Grandma Jo are in a real pickle of a mood this morning.”

  “You should have stayed home with them, Thomas pickle-puss,” Erma said from the backseat. I looked in the side mirror and saw her cross her eyes at me. I ignored her.

  “They’ll get over it,” Dad said. “They’re just having growing pains.”

  “I thought growing pains were for teenagers,” I said. “And were actual pains.”

  Dad thought about it. “Sometimes growing pains are just about figuring out a new way to do things. Mom and Grandma Jo are trying to figure out how to do … this.”

  Mom and Grandma Jo were having a Growing Pain Adventure. From the look of things, it wasn’t any better than actual pains.

  “So, speaking of growing pains, how are things going with your new school? I hope that going in early doesn’t mean you’re having troubles that I need to know about.”

  “No, it’s just a … meeting,” I said.

  “Oh, a club?” Dad brightened, glancing at me excitedly before reaching for his coffee.

  I shrugged. “Sure, I guess you could say that.”

  “What kind? Running club? Debate? Ooh, did you start a magic club?”

  I thought about it. The spitwad war was like magic in a lot of ways. We were meeting in secret, working hard on our skills by practicing them over and over again, and if we were to get caught and interrogated by Nurse Nothing That Involves Spit Is Fun, we would never tell how it was done.

  “Yeah. Kind of,” I said. “It’s a secret sort of club.”

  “Mom says it isn’t nice to keep secrets,” Erma said from the backseat.

  “Can it, Erma,” I said. “It’s not a secret from Mom, so it doesn’t count.”

  “Sounds like a fun club,” Dad said, pulling up the long drive to Pennybaker School. All our heads angled over to the right, just like they always did when we approached the crooked school. “Just make sure you’re letting everyone be a part.”

  “Oh, trust me, everyone is a part,” I said. Word was most of the school was now involved somehow. Walk down the hall without protective headgear and you ran the risk of showing up to class looking spackled.

  “Huh. Seems pretty quiet,” Dad said, coming to a stop in front of the building. Mr. Crumbs was outside, listlessly sweeping the steps, but there was nobody else around.

  “They’re probably meeting in the cafeteria,” I said. But I was unsure. Wesley said we would have our meetings on the steps, and Wesley never missed an opportunity to practice a monologue on an elevated surface. I didn’t want to take the chance that Dad might take me back home to Mom and Grandma Jo’s fight or Chip Mason’s … whatever it was he was doing with that telescope, so I opened the door and shouldered my backpack. “See ya!”

  “Wouldn’t wanna be ya,” Erma said, but I shut the door without paying her any attention.

  “Have a good day, pal,” Dad said through his open window. “See you at dinner!”

  Dad pulled away, and it was just me and the shhh-shhh of Mr. Crumbs’s broom.

  “Um, excuse me?” I asked hesitantly. I’d never actually talked to Crumbs before, and after seeing him the other day, I was half afraid he’d pass out on me if I startled him. “Hello?”

  His eyes flicked up toward me and he grunted. I guessed that was his way of asking what he could help me with.

  I cleared my throat. “Have you seen anybody else? Other kids, I mean? My friend Wesley, maybe? The kid who always has an encore at lunch?”

  Crumbs never stopped moving, never stopped sweeping. Although I don’t know that I would actually call it sweeping, as half the time the broom just barely grazed the ground. The same dead ivy leaf swirled in lazy circles each time he moved past it. “I haven’t seen anybody, kid,” he said. “Maybe you should check inside.”

  I hurried away before he started getting swoony, and pulled open the big, heavy doors. They had a creak. Not like a normal creak, but one of those metal-on-metal creaks that make you think about things popping out of graves and stuff.

  I’d never noticed that creak before. How had I never noticed that creak before?

  The answer occurred to me the minute I walked into the vestibule.

  The empty, completely silent vestibule.

  Never before had I realized how noisy the foyer at Pennybaker School always was. It wasn’t just the entrance to the school; it was the gathering place for the students. It was where romances started and ended, where jokes were told, assignments finished, disagreements ironed out, stories reenacted. It was where everyone felt the most … alive.

  Right next to the dead head. Made no sense to me.

  I realized, after sensing some movement, that there was somebody in
the vestibule with me after all. A custodian—one I’d never seen before—was standing behind the now-empty pedestal. I’d heard of another custodian at Pennybaker. His name was Byron. He hung out in the basement, mostly, and was a little strange. But nobody would ever tell me exactly how he was strange. I had lots of theories.

  Theory #1: Byron the Rat King, who spent his time in the basement lording over his kingdom of furry, pink-eyed residents. He taught them sign language and potty-trained them and fed them students’ tears for dinner.

  Theory #2: Byron the Vampire, who couldn’t come out of the basement during daylight hours for obvious reasons. Of course, now that I’d seen him standing in a beam of sunlight behind the pedestal first thing in the morning, it was clear that the vampire theory had some holes in it.

  Theory #3: Byron the Student, who hadn’t come out of the basement since he failed his seventh-grade science test in 1982 and still tells his parents he “just hasn’t graduated yet.”

  Theory #4: Byron the Alligator-Human Hybrid. I hadn’t really fleshed this one out yet, because every time I thought about it, I got lost in the awesomeness of it all and started thinking up theme songs.

  But at the moment, he was just Byron, the custodian with a huge shrub of jet-black hair and a pointed nose that dipped so low it nearly rested on his chin. In one hand, he held a dirty blue rag, stained with gray spots and limp with cleaner. He was frozen, rooted to his spot, as he stared at me and I stared at him.

  I was just getting ready to ask him if he’d seen Wesley or anyone else carrying a bundle of straws and paper when he quickly swished the rag over the top of the pedestal and down each side, and then darted off through the back hallway that led to the basement stairs.

  I stood for a moment, alone in the silent, empty vestibule, wondering what I’d just seen. “Ohhh-kay,” I said aloud, and then said to myself what I’d said about a billion times since starting here, “That was definitely unique.”

  I passed through the vestibule, my penny loafers clicking especially penny-loaferly against the tile floor, and headed for the cafeteria. There was nobody there, and it was dead quiet except for maybe some faint rodenty scurrying, which I pretended not to notice, because who wants to notice rodents in the same place where your grilled cheese and tomato soup are cooked? I wound through the first floor hallway to the theater, thinking maybe Wesley had been struck with a sudden need to Hamlet (which, yes, he used as a verb, and which tended to happen more often than you would think). But the theater was dark, Mr. Cheeksbear sitting silently in the front row, watching a stage full of nothing. There was nobody in the greenhouse, nobody in any of the restrooms, and only Miss Munch, still clutching a crinkled tissue in one hand, in the office.