Pennybaker School Is Headed for Disaster

by Jennifer Brown

  By the time they knew it was a lie, Chip and I would have already made the head reappear, and I would be back in school, and they would be so happy that they would forget all about the lie in the first place. Or at least that was the plan.

  I biked ahead of Chip so I could set up the lenses before anyone got there. That meant I had to hang on to the vines outside the bathroom window we’d broken into before and climb up the side of the building, then squeeze myself through the tiny hole that Chip had gone through. Just like Chip’s, my foot landed in the toilet. But I was in too much of a hurry to care. And it was mostly flushed, anyway.

  The school was dark and empty. I thought maybe I could hear a faint growling sound coming from the basement—NAAAW!—but it was probably just in my head. I hoisted my backpack tighter and squish-ran through the hallways, all the way to the vestibule.

  The pedestal was, of course, empty. I set up my lenses, hoping to hide them where nobody could see them.

  I had just finished and was standing back admiring my work—maybe I really was gifted at this magic stuff—when I heard howling. Very loud howling.

  I squish-raced back through the hallways to the bathroom and opened the window. Chip was standing on the ground, still clutching the handle of the wagon, his head thrown back and his eyes closed. He took a deep breath, then let out another howl. “Ow-ow-owoooooo!”

  “You were supposed to make an owl noise,” I hissed.

  He opened his eyes. A smile spread across his face. “Oh, hey, Thomas.” He waved. “I’m here.”

  “You were supposed to make an owl noise,” I repeated.

  “Huh?”

  “An owl. You were supposed to be an owl.”

  “Oh.” He scratched his chin a little. “I thought you said I was supposed to howl.”

  I grunted. “Never mind, just pass it up.”

  Carefully, Chip dug the newspapers out of the wagon and uncovered the statue. He cradled it in his arms, rolled the wagon directly under the window, stepped up into the wagon, and held the statue over his head. He could barely lift it, and I had to lean way out to get my hands on it. For a second, the statue wobbled, slipping from our fingers. I gripped it harder and pulled it inside.

  This was the first time I’d ever touched the statue. It was really the first time I’d even looked at it up close. It had been the thing that had taken my life apart, and would be the thing to put it back together. It was the most important thing in my world at that moment. It was a memorial to an amazing woman who was important to a lot of people.

  And it was still the ugliest thing I’d ever laid eyes on.

  I shivered and poked my head through the window. “Okay, I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”

  “Aye-aye, captain,” Chip said, saluting me.

  My breathing was fast and loud, and I was pretty sure my heart was galloping ahead of me down the hall, but I forced myself to squish-walk back to the entryway so I didn’t accidentally drop the bust and break it. Carefully, carefully, I placed it back on the pedestal and positioned it just so. Then I stepped back and arranged the lenses a touch here, a scooch there, until …

  “Gone,” I whispered as the statue disappeared.

  TRICK #34

  AND NOW MY ASSISTANT WILL GET CAUGHT

  The morning started out as usual. Chip and I watched the school from behind a tree. Miss Munch was the first one into the building, unlocking the front doors with a giant set of keys and then yanking them open. I saw lights flicker on, one by one, and soon Mr. Faboo and Coach Abel and Miss Pancake and Principal Rooster began arriving. They were all just as mopey as ever.

  Just wait, I thought. Just you wait. Your day is about to get a whole lot better.

  Soon cars began to pull up, and students trickled out of them, rushing up the stairs in ones and twos and threes. Next came the buses, loud and hissing, and then the front steps really got busy. My palms sweated uncontrollably as I replayed the plan in my head over and over.

  “Now, you think?” Chip asked as the last few students began to pour out of their cars and rush up the steps.

  “Wait for the warning bell,” I said.

  No sooner was it out of my mouth then the familiar tinkle rang through the air. My throat instantly turned into a desert. “Now,” I croaked.

  Chip and I confidently walked across the lawn and up the steps. We paused only long enough to give each other a you-got-this glance and then, together, pulled open the big front doors. Principal Rooster was right on the other side. He turned, and the welcoming grin he’d been wearing fell from his face.

  “Mr. Fallgrout?” he said questioningly. “I thought we agreed that you were on a break for a while.”

  “Hear me out, Principal Rooster,” I said. Chip slipped past me and slithered over to where the closest lens was positioned. “I want to come back to Pennybaker School.” Yeah, I couldn’t believe I said it, either. And, more so, I couldn’t believe I actually meant it. “I think your punishment is unfair.” I said it loudly—loud enough to make the vestibule go quiet. Kids stopped on the stairs and watched. Some of them whispered.

  Principal Rooster’s forehead got very red. “Come to my office and we can discuss this further,” he said.

  “No, sir,” I said loudly. Some kids gasped.

  “Mr. Fallgrout, you’re making a scene.”

  “I don’t care. I want to know why you suspended me. And it’s not about the spitwad war.” This time a few kids—especially Wesley—turned their faces and cleared their throats, looking very guilty.

  Principal Rooster puckered his lips. His cheeks shook. Finally, he said, “You’re right. It’s not about that. You were suspended because you stole an important piece of history from this school.”

  “I did not take that ridiculous head,” I said.

  “Well, can you explain why it’s missing, then?” He gestured to the empty pedestal.

  “But it’s not missing. See?” Chip’s cue. I watched out of the corner of my eye as he nudged one of the lenses just enough to break the illusion.

  A long and loud scream pealed through the vestibule. I turned just in time to see Crumbs faint into the arms of the Mop, who fainted into Byron the Basement-Dwelling Country Singer’s arms. All heads were turned, all eyes bugged out, as Helen Heirmauser’s statue sat, frozen in midscream, for all to see.

  Principal Rooster’s cheeks puffed and deflated several times. “How did you …? What happened? This was missing just moments ago …” He turned to Miss Munch. “It was missing, wasn’t it?”

  Miss Munch was fumbling with a tissue. “I—I think so, sir,” she said.

  “Was it not missing?” Principal Rooster said to the crowd at large, which mumbled that, yes, it had been missing, and how on earth could it have just appeared suddenly out of nowhere?

  Everyone started talking over one another. Some of the girls were crying. Some boys were standing with their hands over their hearts. A few kids were taking pictures with their phones.

  “It’s a miracle!” Principal Rooster declared, throwing his hands into the air. “We all just witnessed a miracle.”

  And then Buckley’s voice cut through the crowd. “What is this?” Everyone turned to look at him. He was holding up the lens that Chip had nudged out of place. “And who are you?” he asked Chip. Chip opened and closed his mouth just like a fish that had been caught and pulled out of a lake. He looked at me, panicked.

  I cleared my throat and used my best magician’s voice, the one that made me think of Grandpa Rudy’s shows. “This,” I intoned, “is Chip the Great! He is my assistant. And you have all just witnessed the greatest illusion in Pennybaker School history. Alacadabra and ta-da!” I clicked my heels together and swept my arms out, proudly framing the statue.

  “You mean … this was a magic trick the whole time?” Wesley asked.

  “The head was always here?” Miss Munch added.

  “You made something disappear for weeks?” Principal Rooster asked, bug-eyed.

 
; I shrugged. “I’m gifted.”

  TRICK #35

  THE HOAX OF THE CENTURY

  For a while, there was talk of making a statue out of my head to go next to Helen Heirmauser’s, just like Chip had predicted. But, thankfully, I got out of that one when I pointed out that I was not dead yet. And also that my hair wasn’t quite as frizzy and my mouth didn’t open nearly as wide.

  Principal Rooster let me back into school immediately, my suspension lifted. He escorted me to first period, asking me question after question about how I’d pulled off such an elaborate trick. I mostly mumbled stuff that sounded technical and fudged my way through the rest of it, but he ate it up.

  The newspaper came to my house. They took photos of me with Mom and Dad and Erma. But not Grandma Jo, because while everyone was so busy fussing over me, she had taken the opportunity to go on a whitewater rafting trip with some new friends she called Toaster, Echo, and Jungle Pete. The newspaper article headline read, “Boone County Genius Pulls Off Hoax of the Century.” I had to stand next to the head for another picture. It was still horrifying, but it had kind of started to grow on me.

  The day that I revealed my “big hoax” to the school, Wesley, Buckley, Colton, Flea, and Owen called me to their lunch table. I went over warily.

  “Top o’ the mornin’, my good laddie,” Wesley said. He’d broken out his Irish brogue, which could only mean one thing: things were right again between us.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Have a seat, have a seat.” Wesley stood and brushed off the bench next to him.

  “Have some pudding.” Flea offered me a bowl of chocolate. I gazed into it to see if he’d drowned some flies in it or something.

  “Don’t worry, we didn’t do anything to it,” Buckley said, leaning into my ear. Not that I would trust anything Buckley had to say.

  “Or maybe we did,” Colton joked, elbowing Buckley.

  “All right, all right. No more acting the maggot,” Wesley said.

  I pushed the bowl away. “You put maggots in it?”

  “No, laddie. ‘Acting the maggot’ is an Irish way of saying ‘playing around.’ I’m telling these two dopes to stop playing around. We’ve got business to attend to.”

  “We do?”

  He nodded and smiled. “I’ve got something for you.” He reached into his back pocket. “I believe this belongs to you, sir.”

  “My straw!” I said, taking it. Or at least a pretty good reproduction. “Does this mean …?”

  Wesley clapped me on the back. “Yes, indeed, boyo. You’re back on the team. And the war’s still on. We’ll even reinstate you as team captain.”

  “And we’re sorry,” Flea said, settling onto the bench next to me. “About that whole ambush thing.”

  Owen’s face popped up from behind a laptop across the table. “Yeah. We acted like real jerks. We should’ve trusted you.”

  “Do you forgive us?” Wesley asked in a baby voice.

  I smiled and slipped the straw into my pocket. “Of course I do. Oh, and Wesley?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You can have your brilliant Nationwide History Day topic back. I’ve got a new one. Mr. Faboo already approved it.”

  “What is it?” Owen asked. “The history of pudding and other gelatinous desserts?” He stuffed a spoonful of pudding into his mouth.

  “Yuck,” Flea said, staring into his own pudding. “When you put it that way …”

  “Nope,” I said. “I’m studying Eugene Francois Vidocq.”

  They all exchanged glances, then looked back at me questioningly.

  I grinned, holding a spoonful of pudding. “The first-ever detective.”

  TRICK #36

  ENCORE! ENCORE!

  I was heading out for target practice at Pettigrew Park when I saw Chip in his front yard. He was wearing a pair of tan slacks and a white shirt, and his hair was slicked back. He was doing some sort of victory dance as he walked toward me.

  In a pair of penny loafers.

  “Guess what, Thomas?” Chip hollered, way too loudly for someone who was just a few feet away from me. His hands were behind his back.

  “You’re wearing your dancing socks?”

  He pulled up his pant legs to show bare ankles. “Nope.”

  “You’re studying the history of tan clothes?”

  “Nuh-unh.” He was grinning so wide it looked like it hurt.

  “I give up.”

  “Behold!” he crowed, his arms flying out. In one hand he held a brown vest. In the other, a brown bow tie. “You’re looking at the newest sixth grader at Pennybaker School for the Uniquely Gifted. And because I’m your assistant, Chip the Great, we’re in all the same classes. Isn’t that the best?”

  There was a time when I would have thought that was anything but the best. In fact, there was a time, and not that long ago, when I would have thought having to hang around with Chip Mason all day, every day was the absolute worst.

  But now it seemed like a pretty cool thing.

  “Congratulations, Chip. We should celebrate. Do you have any straws in your house?” I asked. “And something a little more … camouflaged?”

  He ran inside to get one and came back outside wearing a very hairy olive green suit. He looked like a deranged Muppet.

  “I didn’t mean actual camouflage,” I said.

  “Do you know what this is called?” he asked.

  “Ugly?”

  “It’s called a ghillie suit. Or, if you’re in the Australian army, you might refer to it as a yowie suit—a yowie, of course, being a Bigfoot-type monster.”

  I started walking, Chip trailing along next to me, sucking up all the air with facts about the ridiculous outfit he was wearing.

  “It’s a little-known fact that ghillie suits were invented by Scottish gamekeepers, and that a gille, in Gaelic, means ‘lad.’” He said “lad” in a heavy accent.

  “Say that again.”

  “Lad.”

  “Now say it with an ‘i-e’ at the end.”

  He twisted up his mouth. “Laddie,” he said.

  I nodded. “I have this friend I’m going to introduce you to. His name’s Wesley.”

  I told him all about Wesley and Flea and Owen, and even about Patrice Pillow and Mr. Faboo, as we walked to the park. Chip seemed to get more and more excited about Pennybaker School with every detail. It was as if he just knew he was going to fit right in. And somehow, I thought, he probably would.

  “I already taught myself how to tie a bow tie,” he boasted.

  “Really? You might want to teach me.”

  “Okay!” He bounced around me in circles. “Did you know that the first person to wear the bow tie for fashion was—”

  “Louis XIV,” I finished for him.

  He stopped, his eyes wide. “How did you know that?”

  I shrugged. “He used to be my mortal enemy.”

  CURTAIN CALL TRICK

  FLYING OBJECTS

  “So, I just blow on the straw?” Chip said, turning a white dot around on his tongue.

  “You blow through the straw,” Wesley said. Southern drawl.

  “But first you put the paper inside it,” Flea said.

  I shook my head. “The paper that you’re chewing up right now,” I said. Sometimes you had to be really clear with Chip Mason about the simplest things.

  “Huh,” he said, holding the straw up to one eye and peering through. “It seems there would be more aerodynamic ways of doing this.” He lowered his straw. “Would you be willing to pause this operation while I go home to fetch my NASA socks?”

  “No!” we all said in unison.

  I leaned over him. Our voices were echoey inside the entrance to the tunnel slide, which we were all wedged into. “For the last time, your battle socks should be just fine.”

  “Captain,” a voice hissed. I peeked out the end of the slide. A familiar sheet of black hair was looking up at us. “The enemy is approaching.”

  “Thanks, Patrice,” I said
. “How long do you think we have?”

  “Let me ask the girls.” Patrice Pillow scurried off to the monkey bars, where the girl battalion was stationed.

  Some of the boys had balked when we gave the girls the front line. But the truth was, the girls had much better aim than we did, mostly because the boys had a tendency to get distracted by spit, and if we were going to combine forces, I wanted to do it very strategically.

  And we definitely needed to combine forces for the army we were about to fight.

  “They’ll be past the merry-go-round in twenty seconds,” Patrice called, running through the Pettigrew Park playground. “Man your battle stations! This is not a drill!”

  “All right, fellas,” I said, loading my straw. “This is what we’ve been training for. Remember to protect the girls’ blind side.” I motioned in the direction of the seesaws.

  Wesley raised his straw. “For Chip Mason,” he said in his important-guy-giving-a-toast voice.

  We all raised our straws. “For Chip Mason,” we repeated.

  “I’m not certain this is a very hygienic endeavor,” Chip said.

  I got on my knees and peered over the top of the slide. The enemy was approaching. Line after line of soldiers, holding their straws and wearing their Boone Public Middle School sweatshirts and chanting their Boone Public fight song. Brandon and Paris and Gavin were front and center. I narrowed my eyes and then started down the slide.

  “For Pennybaker School!” I shouted.

  “For Pennybaker School!” the guys shouted, and one by one, we slid down the slide with our straws loaded.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As an author, I get lots of ideas (some good, some not so good, some outright crazy!). That’s my job. I write down those ideas in mostly complete sentences that go together to make a story. That is also my job. But to believe in those ideas and take those mostly complete sentences and shift and shape them into a book … well, that’s sort of magic. In fact, it’s an awesome stage show featuring fog machines and rock music and a lot of star magicians. And I would like to thank some of those magicians here.