Pennybaker School Is Headed for Disaster

by Jennifer Brown

  Who wants to start their morning talking to an eighty-pound teddy bear with freckles? Not me, but I opened the window anyway.

  “Good morning, Thomas!” Chip said, leaning so far through my window that he was practically in my room. “What are you doing on this fine day?”

  “I was asleep. Like a normal person,” I said. As if on cue, my alarm clock buzzed. Time to get up for school. Dread. I slapped it into snooze and turned back to Chip. “What do you want?”

  “I saw something,” he said excitedly. Knowing Chip, it was an especially bright firefly, or maybe a documentary about bricks.

  “Good for you,” I said. “I have to take a shower now.” I started to close the window, but he refused to move out of the way.

  “I saw it on Saturday night,” he said. “After … you know.”

  Yeah, I knew. After Mom’s Straight Line for a Face Adventure.

  “I’ve been dying to tell you about it, but you never came out of your house.”

  “I’m sort of grounded forever,” I said, which wasn’t true. Unless you count that I’d pretty much grounded myself.

  “Huh,” he said. “My mom made me write an essay about my adventure so she could put it in my baby book.”

  It didn’t sound like Chip’s mom had the same idea about adventures as mine did. And Chip was still putting things in a baby book?

  “Don’t you want to know what I saw?” he prodded.

  I closed my eyes and counted to five. “Okay, Chip, what exactly did you see?”

  He spread out his hands dramatically. “It was the dark of night. The clock had struck seven. Owls were hooting, crickets were chirping, the moon was a waning gibbous. Or was it a waxing gibbous? You know, I always tend to get those mixed up. Which is really odd, since at fourth-grade space camp, this kid—his name was Arcturus, by the way, which is a funny name, but you see, he was named after the—”

  “Chip!” I practically yelled, then remembered that it was early morning and lowered my voice. “Would you just get to what you saw already? I have to go to school. And won’t your bus be here soon?”

  “I’m getting to that,” he said. “And don’t remind me.”

  So, obviously things still weren’t going well for Chip at Boone Public. I couldn’t explain why, but this kind of made me angry, like I needed to go over to Brandon’s house and tell him that there was Avoiding the New Kid, and then there was just plain mean.

  I motioned for him to continue. “Well, get to it. Fast forward past fourth-grade space camp. And fifth-grade space camp, too. And any other camps that might pop into your head.”

  He nodded. “Okay. Well, my grandpa was having a really bad craving for ice cream. But not just any ice cream. He wanted ice cream from Cathy’s Cow Barn. Butter brickle double chocolate chip. His favorite flavor.”

  Cathy’s Cow Barn was in town and was practically a monument in Boone County. It had been around … well, about as long as Helen Heirmauser had been. It was pretty much the only place anyone ever went to get ice cream.

  “And?” I nudged. “I want to know this why?”

  “And so my mom and I went to Cathy’s Cow Barn to get my grandpa some ice cream, because he’s not doing very well, and Mom says when a guy who feels like Grandpa feels wants some butter brickle, then he should get some butter brickle, even if it’s a pain for the people having to get it for him.”

  I was annoyed that Chip still hadn’t gotten to his point, but his face flushed pink when he talked about his grandpa, and it didn’t seem like the right time to hassle him about one of his stories.

  “Anyway. So we were driving to Cathy’s Cow Barn, and I saw a kid. He was wearing a black hoodie and one of those flimsy string backpacks and going into a building.” He leaned in and whispered, “An abandoned building.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows a few times like he’d just said something really important.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “So?”

  “So he kept looking over his shoulder as he was going into the building, like he was trying not to be seen. He walked around the street lamps, in the shadows with the hooting owls and the chirping crickets, where even a full moon couldn’t get to him, had it been a full moon, which it definitely was not. I know that much for sure.”

  “What are you trying to tell me, Chip?”

  “His backpack,” he said. “It sagged down almost to the backs of his knees. It looked heavy.” He darted a glance over his own shoulder, then leaned in again. “And it was head shaped.”

  “Are you sure?” I whispered. “Like, one hundred percent?”

  He nodded excitedly. “He went into the building, but first, he took off his hoodie. And you know what was underneath?” I shook my head, transfixed by Chip’s story now. “A brown vest and bow tie.”

  “He’s from—”

  “Pennybaker School,” Chip finished for me.

  “What did he look like? What color was his hair?”

  Chip shook his head sadly. “It was dark, and Mom was hurrying to get to Cathy’s before it closed. I didn’t have time for details.”

  Except for hooting owls and chirping crickets and a waxing gibbous moon, but I didn’t point that out. “That’s okay,” I said. “You remember where this building is?”

  “Yep.” He tapped his temple. “Got it memorized. You wanna go there after school? We can ride our bikes.”

  “Definitely. Maybe we can figure out who this kid is and find the statue, and then I’ll be off the hook.”

  I could barely concentrate on anything at school. I didn’t even care when Buckley and Colton swapped my desk with the uneven one again. I thunked my way through Facts After the Fact class without even realizing, my mind solely on who could have been the mystery kid with the head-shaped backpack. I watched everyone closely for signs.

  I was so certain that Chip and I had the thief that I didn’t even notice that Patrice Pillow was hanging out in the restroom hallway by the science-floor greenhouse until she tripped me when I walked by. I sprawled across the floor, my books flying out of my hands and the last button popping off my vest and plunging off the balcony.

  “What the—?” I said, pulling myself up and rubbing my elbow, which I’d bumped on the tile.

  “Shhh! Just come here,” Patrice said. “Hurry up.”

  There were monsters doodled all over the bottom of the notebook Patrice cradled in her arms. I was starting to think Patrice Pillow, while she seemed nice, was someone I wouldn’t want to run into outside of an abandoned warehouse with the hooting owls and the chirping crickets. I hoped she wasn’t the kid Chip had seen.

  She pulled my elbow, leading me into the hallway. “Are you going to write me into a story and kill me?” I asked.

  “Already have,” she said. “That’s not what I want. I just wanted to tell you something. The plans you saw about the spitwad war? The ones on Flea’s computer? It’s not the original boy versus girl war. It’s an everybody versus Thomas war. You need to watch your back. Just in case they decide to ambush you.”

  “Ambush?” I asked. “Everyone against me?” My hand automatically went to my pocket, but I remembered too late that in all my excitement over what Chip had seen, I’d accidentally left my straw at home. My heart skipped a beat. I felt a coating of sweat cover my upper lip. I rubbed it away. “When?”

  “I’m not sure about the details. All I know is I heard Wesley and Flea talking to Samara and AnneMarie, the leaders of the girls’ side. I heard your name, and I heard the word ‘ambush,’ and I saw them high-five each other. There is no way Samara would high-five the leader of the boys’ side unless they were planning something together.”

  Wesley. Of course. I knew somebody had to be organizing the snowstorm on my window.

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks for letting me know. I’ll watch out for them.”

  “No problem,” she said. She picked at the stray paper bits in the spiral of her notebook, staring down as if she was nervous about something. Probably about being caught ti
pping me off. “Just be careful.”

  “I will.” I started to walk out of the hallway, then changed my mind and turned back. “Hey, Patrice?”

  She looked up from her notebook. “Yeah?”

  “Why are you helping me?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Because I think I was wrong,” she said. “I don’t think you’re the cat.”

  I couldn’t change into my shorts and T-shirt fast enough. The sun would be going down before too long, Cathy’s Cow Barn was pretty far away, and Mom didn’t like me to be out on my bike after dark. We were going to have to ride fast.

  The ride to Cathy’s is flat and tree lined, and we took mostly side streets so we could avoid cars. The air was warm and the sky sunny, and Chip and I took turns doing stunts like riding with no hands and standing on our pedals and lifting one leg and even closing our eyes for a few seconds. We didn’t talk about the statue or the spitwad war or our mission to catch the real thief. For a second, I forgot that everything was falling apart and that Chip was completely insane. For a second, I felt like I was just riding my bike on a nice day with a friend. Which was something I hadn’t done in forever.

  When we got downtown, we moved over to the sidewalk. Not that there were a ton of cars in the downtown stretch of Boone City, but there were definitely more than we were used to, and Chip was getting pretty tired from pedaling.

  We got to Cathy’s Cow Barn and left our bikes against the wall. We went inside, where Chip sprang for vanilla ice cream for both of us. We sat on the sidewalk in front of our bikes and ate them while the sun began to sink. I knew we needed to get moving, but I figured it was probably a smart move for us to get some energy before the long ride back.

  Besides, we were playing a pretty fun game of I spy. Chip was terrible at it. He liked details. And a guy who likes details gives away way too many clues in I spy.

  “I spy with my little eye … something red. And blue. With a basketball on the front of it. And the words ‘Nuttin but Net.’ Spelled incorrectly, I might point out. And it’s made out of a polyester-cotton blend. Size youth extra-large. With a new ice cream stain on the sleeve.”

  “Chip. That’s my shirt. You have to get less specific.”

  “Okay. I spy with my little eye … a car.”

  “Better.”

  “With the license plate UNI 987.”

  “Not better.”

  We played until we were out of ice cream and out of things to spy.

  “The building is around the corner there,” Chip said when we’d finished. He clipped his helmet back on and pointed toward a deserted area of town. “Follow me.”

  As we got closer to the warehouse, my throat dried up and my stomach started to get tingly, like when I knew I was in trouble and Dad was about to go mushroom cloud on me.

  Louis XIV: Hit by a mushroom cloud of Dad doom.

  “Hey, Chip,” I panted. He seemed to be getting faster and faster. “Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this.”

  He slowed to a stop. “It’s that building there,” he said.

  Too late. We were already doing this.

  The building was enormous—a gray concrete-block rectangle that seemed to go on forever. The roof was metal and wavy and rusted. The windows—the ones that didn’t have rock holes in them—were filthy and covered with boards. In the center of the wall we were facing, there was a set of double doors, coated with peeling paint.

  “What do you suppose this building was used for?” I asked.

  Chip removed his helmet again. “Maybe some sort of roofing-supply company? Or car parts or something?”

  “Or it was a meat factory owned by a crazy man with saws for hands. Meat Man.” We blinked at each other. Clearly, I needed to stop talking to Patrice Pillow. “Sorry. So now what do we do?”

  “We see if we can look in one of those windows.” He stepped off his bike, rolled it a few feet, and leaned it against a Dumpster. He acted like he’d done this a million times. Like it wasn’t terrifying at all. I was forced to wheel my bike next to his or look like a wimp. There was no way I was going to look like a wimp compared to Chip Mason. The guy wore fluffy bunny slippers. Pink ones.

  “So, I was just thinking,” I said as we walked to the building. Our feet were moving way too fast for my taste. “What if there’s a whole stolen-art ring going on, and this place is patrolled by the mob or something?” I could almost hear Wesley’s mafia voice in my head. It made me miss him a little. Until I reminded myself that he was the ringleader of an ambush with my name on it.

  “I don’t know,” Chip said. “I guess we’ll figure it out when we get there.”

  “But what if they grab us and tie us up and put blindfolds over our eyes and potatoes in our mouths?”

  “And you say I have an overactive imagination,” Chip said. “Just relax and see if you can see through that window.”

  I craned my neck. The windows were a lot higher than they looked from across the street. “How am I supposed to get up there?”

  Chip thought about it, chewing on his lip. “You could stand on my shoulders.”

  I remembered how much his feet dug into my palms when I boosted him in through the window at Pennybaker. There was no way he would be able to handle my shoes digging into his shoulders.

  It would hurt.

  Payback.

  “Okay.”

  He hooked his hands together and bent low. I put my foot in his hands, but just as I was about to put my full weight on him, there was a noise behind us. A noise like footsteps and someone humming.

  “Did you hear that?” I whispered.

  Chip nodded.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Chip said, and then his eyes grew wide as he spotted something over my shoulder. “Quick! Hide!”

  We raced behind a stack of old pallets and hunkered down. I watched through the pallet slats as a kid in a hoodie walked toward the double doors. He was wearing a string backpack. A head-shaped string backpack. He looked over his shoulders, once, twice, let his backpack slide to the ground, and then took off his hoodie. Underneath were a brown vest and bow tie. And he was holding a long, skinny balloon.

  A balloon-animal balloon.

  The thief was Harvey Hinkle.

  I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Sure enough, there was the curly red hair, the thin arms, and the balloon that I knew so well from Facts After the Fact class.

  Harvey Hinkle ducked into the building, and the doors slammed closed behind him. Chip and I came out from behind the pallets.

  “Well?” Chip said proudly. “Did I tell you, or did I tell you?”

  “I know that kid,” I said angrily. “He’s in my history class.”

  “And he has a head in that backpack. And unless it’s a human head—doubtful, by the way, as a human head that’s not attached to a human body tends to smell pretty bad and … leak things—it has to be our missing head.”

  “That thief. That liar. That … that …”

  “Bandit? Crook. Plunderer!” Chip shook his fist while he said the last, then looked at my face and lowered his arm dejectedly. “I know. No vocabulary socks.”

  I decided to let it go. I was too mad at Harvey Hinkle to be annoyed at Chip. “We have to get it back.”

  “Yes.”

  I paced back and forth in front of the pallets. “But we don’t know what’s inside the building. It could be dangerous in there.”

  “True.”

  I paced some more. “But if we catch Harvey Hinkle red-handed, then the world will have no choice but to believe my innocence.”

  “Correct.”

  “So let’s go!” I started for the door, but Chip held me back.

  “We can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  This time it was his turn to pace. “These sorts of things have to be handled delicately. With finesse. We can’t just walk in with no plan. We have no camera. No recording device. It would be our word versus his.”

  “You’re right,” I said. �
�We need a plan.” I felt like someone in a spy movie, like I should be wearing a tuxedo or something.

  “Plus, it’s getting dark, and our moms are going to be mad at us.”

  I stared at him. This was definitely not a cool time to bring up a guy’s mom. Even if Chip was right.

  Chip went back to pacing. “Let’s go home and plan a reverse heist. You tail Harvey Hinkle at school, and I’ll tail him after he gets home. And then we’ll come back here tomorrow night and take back the statue and get proof that Harvey was the one who stole it.”

  We hopped on our bikes and headed home, talking the whole while. By the time we got home, we had a plan.

  We were going to steal back the statue.

  TRICK #27

  DISAPPEARING FROM SCHOOL

  The next morning, Principal Rooster was waiting for me in the vestibule. As usual, several students were congregating around the empty pedestal, talking in hushed voices, but most of them were looking at me from the moment I walked in the door. I had been thinking about Harvey Hinkle and how Chip and I were going to surprise him tonight and get the statue back, but even I could feel the tension in the air. I slowed, and then recovered, heading straight for my first class.

  “Mr. Fallgrout,” Principal Rooster said as I tried to slip by. He stepped into my path.

  “Yes, sir?” I squeezed my arms tighter around my books, hoping to conceal my vest, which had a way of flopping like a cape when I walked fast, now that it had no buttons.

  “I’m wondering if I can have a moment,” he said. He stepped to the side and held his arm out so that it was pointing toward his office. I knew that meant he wasn’t really wondering; he was just trying to be polite about telling me to get into his office, pronto.

  I followed him past Miss Munch, who glanced up at me and then pointed her face straight down at her keyboard. She even used one hand to shield her eyes, though she tried to make it look like she was just holding her forehead in her hand.

  Principal Rooster paused in his doorway and again used the arm-gesture thing. I wondered what he would do if I said, “Oh, no, no. That’s okay. I think I’ll pass.” Which was totally what I wanted to do. But then I was pretty sure I knew the outcome of that, and Mom would definitely not appreciate a Thomas Is Suspended for Being Flip Adventure.