Judy Moody, Book Quiz Whiz

by Megan McDonald

Judy ran to get her Elizabeth Blackwell doctor kit. “Stink, this is worse than Pippi Longstocking having a major case of the freckles. What do you have, anyway?”

  “Grumpy,” said Stink. “Bacon.”

  Grumpy! Bacon? Oh, no! Stink had measles of the mouth. Chicken pox of the brain. He couldn’t even talk right!

  Stink took the thermometer out of his mouth. “The school nurse says I have a sensitive stomach,” said Stink. “That means tummy ache.”

  “Oh!” said Judy. “I thought you said grumpy bacon.”

  “Not even. It feels more like Ping-Pong ball stomach. Is that a thing?”

  “It is when you have a big important Book Quiz coming up,” said Judy.

  “The good news is, the nurse sent me home early, so I got to read more books,” said Stink. “More good news is Mom brought me sick food: ginger ale and buttered toast. Just like —”

  “Mercy Watson!” said Judy and Stink at the same time.

  “But the bad news is, what if I’m sick for the Book Quiz?”

  “I think if we just keep practicing, you’ll feel better about tomorrow.”

  Judy dug in her backpack for flash cards. “Lightning round!” said Judy. “Let’s see how many questions you can answer in sixty seconds. No peeking.”

  Judy took out a buzzer and a sand timer from one of her board games.

  “Do I get to buzz in?” Stink asked. “I get to buzz in, right? Because using the buzzer is good for a sensitive stomach.”

  “Fine.” Judy handed over the buzzer. She flipped the sand timer over. “Go! What’s the name of the brave pig in Charlotte’s Web?”

  Bzzz. “Wilbur.”

  “Who keeps a polka-dot horse on her porch and a monkey named Mr. Nilsson?”

  Bzzz. “Pippi Longstocking.”

  “What street do Ramona the Pest and her cat, Picky-picky, live on?”

  Bzzz. “Klickety-Klackety Street.”

  “Sorry, Stink. It’s Klick-i-tat Street. Next question: Name three toys in Toys Go Out by Emily Jenkins.”

  Bzzz. “StingRay; Lumphy, a buffalo; and Plastic, a ball.”

  “In Invisible Inkling, a boy named Hank has an invisible friend. What kind of animal is Inkling?”

  Bzzz. “A bandicoot!”

  “A banda pat! Can you tell me where Inkling is from?”

  Bzzz. “The Peruvian Woods of Mystery.”

  “Good. Whose bizarro library has holograms and hovercrafts and a white tiger?”

  Bzzz. “Mr. Monticello.”

  “Wrong! Stink! You always say Mr. Monticello! It’s Mr. Lemoncello.” Judy made a sour-ball face. “Think of sour lemons. Lemonheads. Lemon pie.”

  Ding-dong. The doorbell rang. Judy ignored it.

  “What is Mr. Popper’s job in Mr. Popper’s Penguins?”

  “He paints houses,” said fellow Bookworm Frank Pearl, coming into Stink’s room. “I remember because I read all the animal books twice.”

  “Hey, you can be in the lightning round, too,” Judy said to Frank.

  “Sure. Hit me.”

  “Okay. This one’s for you, Frank. Name three enemies of the Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

  “Easy,” said Frank. “Whangwangers, snogwogglers, and swozzdoodles.”

  Judy and Stink groaned.

  “What?” asked Frank.

  “It’s whangdoodles,” said Judy.

  “And hornswogglers,” said Stink, cracking up.

  “And snozzwangers,” said Judy.

  Stink cracked up some more. “Ow!” He clutched his sensitive stomach. “Don’t make me laugh.”

  “Are you okay?” asked Frank. “What’s wrong with you anyway?”

  “He’s going to be fine,” said Judy. “He just has a Ping-Pong ball stomach.”

  “Wait, what? You swallowed a Ping-Pong ball?” asked Frank. “Cool! Did they take an X-ray?”

  “Not a real Ping-Pong ball,” said Stink.

  “This is just like Chukfi Rabbit’s Big, Bad Bellyache! It’s number seven on Master List Two. That tricky rabbit faked a bellyache to get out of work.”

  “I’m not faking,” said Stink. “I have a sensitive stomach.”

  “It just means he’s worried about the contest tomorrow,” said Judy.

  “When I have a tummy ache, I eat crackers and drink milk,” said Frank. “No, wait. That might be for a headache. For a stomachache, I take a bath.”

  “A bath!” said Stink. “No way am I taking a bath when I’m not even dirty. How does a bath help, anyway?”

  “Oh, wait. Maybe it’s take a nap,” said Frank. “Not take a bath.”

  Ding-dong. Doorbell again. This time, Sophie ran up to Stink’s room.

  “I read every Babymouse book and I just finished Squish #6, Fear the Amoeba,” Sophie said. “Ask me anything.”

  “Okay,” said Judy. “What does Babymouse have to give up to become an ice-skater?”

  “Cupcakes!” said Sophie.

  “Who is Squish’s comic-book hero?” asked Stink.

  “Super Amoeba!” said Sophie. That’s when she noticed that Stink was in bed. “Stink! Are you sick? What’s wrong with you?”

  Stink said something with the thermometer in his mouth again.

  “Grumpy bacon?” Sophie repeated.

  “That’s what I thought he said, too!” said Judy.

  Stink pulled out the thermometer. “Tummy ache,” said Stink.

  “I know how to fix a tummy ache,” said Sophie.

  “I hope it’s not by taking a bath. Or a nap.”

  “Nope. All you have to do is talk to your tummy ache.”

  “No way am I talking to my tummy ache,” said Stink. “I’d feel stupid.”

  “C’mon, Stink,” said Sophie. “You want the Bookworms to win the Book Quiz Blowout, don’t you?”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll talk to it. Tummy ache, get out of here. Now. Begone!”

  Stink sat up. Stink took another sip of ginger ale. He smiled a big smile. He looked surprised. “Hey, I think my tummy ache is gone! For real.”

  “I think it was the ginger ale,” said Judy.

  “I think it was the talking,” said Sophie.

  “Wait, wait! Everybody be quiet for a minute,” said Stink. “I think my tummy ache is talking to me.”

  “What’s it saying?” everybody asked.

  “It’s saying, ‘The Bookworms are so going to crush the Bloodsucking Fake-Mustache Defenders.’”

  “Yeah we are!” Judy and Frank and Sophie chimed in.

  Judy was quizzing the Bookworms about Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing when the doorbell rang. Ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong. “Sheesh!” said Judy. “You’d think it was Girl Scout cookie time or something.”

  “Who else could it be?” asked Stink.

  “There’s only one Bookworm missing,” said Sophie.

  “Jessica A. Finch!” said Judy. She dropped her book and ran downstairs to answer the door. It was not Jessica Finch.

  It was Amy Namey.

  Amy Namey, Ace Reporter, rushed through the front door. She had her clipboard under her arm and a pencil behind her ear. “News flash,” said Amy. “I ran all the way over here to give you the big news in person.”

  Judy tried to think of really big news. She imagined these headlines:

  HURRICANE CAUSES BIG BAD BLACKOUT

  SWARM OF BEES FINDS FROG NECK LAKE

  BIGFOOT SIGHTING ON CROAKER ROAD

  Judy dashed upstairs with Amy. “Listen up, everybody. Amy has big fat news.”

  “Mr. Todd said I could be the reporter for the Book Quiz Blowout. I’m going to write about it for our school paper. I went to Braintree Academy to get a big scoop on the Bloodsucking Fake-Mustache Defenders. Guess what I found out!”

  “They all wear fake mustaches?” asked Sophie.

  “They’re really vampires?” asked Frank.

  “And they vant to suck the Bookvorm brains right out of our heads?” asked Judy in her best vampire voice.

&nb
sp; “No, no, no. Nothing like that . . . I found out . . . the other team has . . .”

  “Has the pukes?” asked Stink.

  “Has mustaches for real?” Frank asked.

  “Has supersonic speed-readers?” asked Judy.

  “The other team has a . . . fourth-grader!” said Amy in an almost-whisper.

  Sophie’s mouth dropped open. Stink’s eyes got as big as silver-dollar pancakes. The room went dead quiet. So quiet you could have heard a page turn.

  “Her name is Mighty Fantaskey,” said Amy.

  Gulp! “Her name is Mighty?” asked Judy.

  “What kind of a name is that?” asked Sophie.

  “Sounds like a mighty fantastic name to me,” said Frank.

  “Sounds like a superhero name!” said Stink. “She could be a superhero!”

  “Or she could be a fourth-grade nothing,” said Judy, holding up her book.

  “I didn’t meet her,” said Amy. “But the other kids on her team say she eats books for breakfast. That means she’s a brainiac.”

  “Stink’s a brainiac, too,” said Sophie. “His superhero name could be Encyclopedia Stink.”

  “And don’t forget Judy’s been to college,” said Frank.

  “Sort of,” said Judy.

  “Mighty Fantaskey knows how to speed-read,” said Amy. “They say she can read a whole page as fast as you can turn it.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Frank.

  “No, it’s not,” said Stink. “Judy can speed-read. She showed me.”

  “Not really,” said Judy. She hated to admit it.

  Amy went on. “They say she reads fifth-grade books, like Harry Potter Book Five. She didn’t just carry it around to look cool.”

  “No lie?” asked Judy.

  Amy nodded.

  “That’s almost nine hundred pages!” wailed Judy.

  “No fair,” said Stink. “Fourth grade is against the rules.”

  “That’s right,” said Sophie. “Fourth-graders are supposed to be on teams with fifth-graders.”

  “Not exactly,” said Amy. “The rule is that you just have to be seven to nine years old to be on the younger team. She’s nine.”

  “Nine!” said Judy. “That’s one whole birthday candle more than me.”

  “And two whole grades more than us!” said Sophie.

  Amy looked at her notes. “She was homeschooled till this year.”

  “Aagh!” said Frank. “That means she’s way super smart. She probably read every book in the whole entire library twice.”

  “Whoa,” said Judy. “That’s gifted.”

  “That’s not all,” said Amy. “She moved here from Royal Oak, Virginia. In Royal Oak, Virginia, Mighty Fantaskey was on a Book Quiz team called the Bookensteins.”

  “Oh, like Book Einsteins,” Judy said in a whisper. “Yipes.”

  The Bookworms got super quiet again. As quiet as the Ratso brothers eating cheddar cheese sandwiches. As quiet as the Borrowers when they hid under the floorboards from the human beans.

  “The Bookensteins were undefeated going into finals. Then Mighty moved.”

  The Bookworms were so quiet you could have heard a Grouchy pencil drop.

  “What are we going to do?” asked Sophie. “The Book Quiz Blowout is eighteen hours and twenty-three minutes from now.”

  Ding-dong. Doorbell again? Judy ran downstairs to answer the door. This time it was Jessica Finch. Judy brought her up to Stink’s room, where they took turns telling her about the fourth-grader.

  “O-nay iggie-bay,” said Jessica Finch when they were done.

  “Huh?” said Sophie and Stink.

  “It’s Pig Latin for ‘No biggie,’” said Jessica. “I’m almost nine and I’ve read a fifth-grade book before. The Advanced Fifth-Grade Practice Spelling, Student Edition.”

  “But this isn’t a spelling bee,” said Judy. “It’s a book quiz. And this Mighty girl is some kind of book Einstein.”

  “And your name’s not Mighty,” said Stink.

  Frank scratched his head. Sophie fidgeted with her glasses. Stink felt his sensitive stomach do a belly flop.

  The Bookworms were feeling lousy. They were in a slump. They were down in the dumps. Judy knew a thing or two about bad moods. And she knew a thing or three about how to change them.

  “Hey, Bookworms!” said Judy. “We have good stuff on our side, too.”

  “But we don’t have a fourth-grader,” said Frank.

  “A fourth-grade superhero,” said Stink.

  “We have something much better,” said Judy.

  “What could be better than a fourth-grader?” asked Sophie.

  “We have the courage of Wilbur and the imagination of Pippi Longstocking. Pippi would say that to win, we have to first be able to imagine winning. Close your eyes, everybody.”

  The Bookworms closed their eyes. “Now I want you to go to your happy place,” said Judy. “Just for pretend. I learned this when I went to college.”

  Judy imagined herself on the front porch of Villa Villekulla, the house where Pippi lived with her polka-dot horse and her monkey, under the soda-pop tree.

  Jessica Finch splashed in mud at a pig farm. Sophie rode a unicorn. Stink took part in a stinky sneaker contest. Frank imagined being at the Fur & Fangs pet shop.

  “Now,” said Judy, “imagine winning the Book Quiz Blowout.”

  Jessica saw herself taking a bow in a pink party dress with a swirly skirt. Frank pictured himself holding the light-up Book Quiz Wizard’s Cup. Sophie dreamed of tiny elves helping her with answers. Stink, aka Super Sticky-Note Man, flew through a sky full of sticky notes in his superhero cape.

  Judy imagined she was Moody Fantaskey, speed-reader of twenty thousand words a minute. “Now open your eyes and repeat after me,” said Judy. “We are the Bookworms.”

  “We are the Bookworms.”

  “We eat books.”

  “We eat books.”

  “We are not endangered!”

  “We are not endangered!”

  That night, Judy slept in fits and starts.

  She dreamed she was the Princess in Black. She dreamed she was El Deafo. She dreamed she was a mighty fantastic fourth-grade wizard. A wizard with the power to fly faster than the speed of speed-reading.

  At last it was Saturday. The day of the big Book Quiz Blowout. All morning, Stink could hardly wait for it to be quiz time. It was worse than waiting for the Great Pumpkin, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy combined.

  At breakfast, Judy read the last chapter of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Stink read the last chapter of Beverly Cleary’s Ralph S. Mouse. Dad didn’t even rip out the last pages of their books for reading at the table.

  “Exciting day, huh kids?” said Mom.

  “Do you feel ready for the big quiz game?” asked Dad.

  “I feel as strong as Pippi did when she lifted up her horse with two hands. I’m Judy Moody, Super Book Quiz Whiz!” Today was going to be mood-tastic!

  “And I finally memorized all the names of Mr. Popper’s penguins,” said Stink. “Want to hear? Captain Cook, Greta, Columbus, Victoria, Nelson, Jenny, Magellan, Adelina, Scott, Isabella, Ferdinand, and Louisa.”

  After breakfast, they got ready to go to the Book Quiz Blowout. Judy dressed up like Pippi Longstocking. She drew freckles on her face and put pipe cleaners in her short braids so they stuck out funny. She wore her lucky high-tops and tucked her lucky penny into her pocket.

  Stink dressed as a brainiac — aka himself, minus the Cape of Good Answers.

  When they got to Starlight Lanes, Stink’s friend Webster Gomez ran over to them. He was dressed like a worm with glasses and a graduation cap. “I decided to dress like a bookworm. You know, sort of like being your mascot.” He held up a printed sign. It read: CONGRATS BOOKWORMS, GRAND CHAMPS. “I made it myself!”

  “Thanks,” said Stink. “But we haven’t won yet.” He told Webster all about the Bloodsucking Fake-Mustache Defenders, including the mighty fantastic speed-read
ing fourth-grader.

  “¡Ay!” said Webster. “But don’t forget, the Bookworms are fantastic, too. ¡Buena suerte! Good luck!”

  Webster led them over to the Party Room. The room was abuzz with parents and teachers. And friends like Rocky Zang and Riley Rottenberger and Amy Namey had come with their families. Stink felt a jolt of excitement that made his hair stand up on end.

  Two long tables were set with name cards, water glasses, and buzzers. Judy and Stink ran to join the rest of the team — Frank, Sophie, and Jessica Finch. Jessica was giving tips for what to do if a team member got nervous.

  “And if you feel like you’re going to get brain freeze,” said Jessica, looking right at Stink, “just tap your nose. It really works.”

  Judy stole a glance at the Bloodsucking Fake-Mustache Defenders. Their team was wearing matching team T-shirts — all boys and one girl. The girl had a backpack covered with stickers and buttons about reading. Pencils that said READING ROCKS stuck out of the front pocket. Plastic reading charms hung from her zipper pull — a book bug, a reading trophy, a star.

  “That must be her,” Judy said in a whisper.

  Gulp.

  “Mighty Fantaskey, the fourth-grader,” said Judy.

  “Even her shoes look fourth grade,” said Frank.

  “Check out all her rubber bracelets,” said Judy. The girl’s arm was lined with bracelets that said things like I HEART READING and KEEP CALM AND READ ON.

  Around her neck, she wore metal dog tags on a chain. They jingled when she moved.

  “Wow. Look at all her prizes. So many brag tags,” said Sophie.

  “I bet they say things like STAR READER and READING ROCK STAR,” said Jessica.

  “And READING MACHINE,” said Judy.

  “Have you ever seen so many reading incentives in your life?” asked Jessica.

  “I bet that backpack is full of book bucks, too,” said Stink.

  Jessica nodded. Frank agreed. Despite all the excitement swirling around them, the Bookworms gawked in awe at Mighty Fantaskey, Fourth-Grader.

  At last the big match was about to begin!

  Book Quiz hosts Mr. Todd from Virginia Dare School and Ms. de la Cruz from Braintree Academy welcomed everyone. They explained the rules: The two teams would take turns answering the questions. During a team’s turn, the player who buzzed in first got to answer the question. Each correct answer was worth ten points. The next question would then go to the other team and so on. The match would go to one hundred fifty points.