by Dave Barry
ALSO BY DAVE BARRY
With Ridley Pearson
Peter and the Starcatchers
Peter and the Shadow Thieves
Peter and the Secret of Rundoon
Peter and the Sword of Mercy
Bridge to Never Land
Science Fair
Text copyright © 2015 by Dave Barry
Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Jon Cannell
Cover design by Marci Senders
Cover art © 2015 Jon Cannell
All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.
ISBN 978-1-4847-1941-1
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Contents
Title Page
Also by Dave Barry
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
About the Author
For Dylan Maxwell Barry, a whole new generation
None of this stuff would have happened if I hadn’t been sitting next to Matthew Diaz.
Don’t get me wrong: Matt is my best friend. But he can be an idiot. But when we were in kindergarten, pretty much all the boys were idiots, so he didn’t stand out so much, and we became best friends. So now, even though we’re in eighth grade, and he’s sometimes unbelievably annoying, I’m kind of stuck with him.
That’s why I ended up sitting next to him on the plane on the class trip. I think about that sometimes. If I’d been sitting anywhere else, I would have had a normal class trip, and none of this insane mess would have happened.
On the other hand, when I think about what could have happened if I hadn’t been sitting next to Matt on that flight…
Okay, I guess this is starting to sound pretty mysterious. Let me start at the beginning:
My name is Wyatt Palmer. I’m an eighth grader at Culver Middle School in Miami. I know a lot of people think Miami is a weird place, but it’s my home, so I’m used to the kind of things that happen there that don’t happen in normal places.
Like there was this incident that happened about six months ago when my dad went outside to get the Miami Herald off our lawn. My dad likes to read the sports section while he has his coffee so he can complain about how much the Dolphins suck. So first thing every morning, he goes outside and gets the paper off the lawn.
For years he did this wearing only his boxers. My mom hated this. She was always telling my dad to at least put on a bathrobe, because what if somebody saw him. My dad said nobody’s going to be out there at six thirty a.m., and besides wearing boxer shorts is the same as wearing a bathing suit. This is not really true, especially if you saw my dad’s bedtime boxers, which have like zero elastic and a lot of holes and according to my mom are held together mainly by stains. A couple of times, she threw them away, but my dad went and got them out of the trash. He’s very loyal to his boxers.
So anyway, this particular morning my dad went outside as usual to get the paper, and as usual our dog, Csonka, stood in the doorway to watch him. Csonka likes to keep an eye on things, but he knows he’s not allowed to go outside without a leash. Anyway, my dad was out there, bending over to pick up the newspaper—trust me, you do not want to see that—and all of a sudden Csonka started barking like crazy. My dad jumped up and turned around, and he was about to yell at Csonka to shut up, when all of a sudden he saw what Csonka was barking at.
An alligator.
We live near a canal. There are canals all over Miami, and they connect to the Everglades, which means if you live here, you basically live in a swamp. I mean, we have houses and roads and shopping centers and stuff, but it’s all built on top of a swamp, and as far as the swamp animals are concerned, it’s still a swamp, and it’s still theirs. It’s normal for us to see snakes in our yards, and lizards, and all kinds of frogs, and big tall wading birds, and even crabs in some neighborhoods. And every now and then an alligator shows up.
This particular alligator, which was not a small alligator, was on our lawn maybe ten feet from our front walkway, which means my dad went right past without seeing it on his way to the newspaper. But he definitely saw it when Csonka started barking. And no way was he going to try to walk past it again.
He started yelling “Rosa! Rosa!” calling my mom. She and my sister, Taylor, and I all went running to the door to see what was going on. My dad was out on the sidewalk, holding up his boxers with one hand and using the other one to point the Miami Herald at the alligator, like it was a weapon or something. My mom screamed, and so did Taylor, and maybe I also made an unmanly noise, because it really was a pretty major alligator.
“CALL 911!” shouted my dad. “HURRY!”
“Okay!” said my mom, running to the kitchen.
By now Csonka was really going crazy barking. He was also out of the house, which was a violation of the leash rule, but I guess he figured he was protecting my dad. What he was really doing was upsetting the alligator, which started to move forward in that slow way alligators walk. I think it was going for Csonka, but it was moving kind of in the direction of Taylor and me, so my father came running down the walk, waving the Miami Herald toward the alligator and going, “Shoo! Get away!”
That was definitely the bravest thing I ever saw my dad do, but it did not impress the alligator. What it did was make the alligator turn more in the direction of my dad, who turned right around and went sprinting back toward the sidewalk.
“RUN IN A ZIGZAG PATTERN!” shouted Taylor.
The reason she shouted that was, in Florida, some people believe alligators can only run in a straight line, so they tell kids that if a gator is chasing them, they should run in a zigzag pattern. But it’s a myth. In fifth grade my science teacher, Mrs. Buntz, showed us a video of an alligator chasing a dead chicken being dragged by a guy in a zigzag pattern, and the gator had no trouble following it. Mrs. Buntz said you should run in a straight line.
“THAT’S A MYTH!” I shouted to my dad. “RUN IN A STRAIGHT LINE!”
“Are you trying to kill him?” yelled Taylor, punching my arm. She’s in sixth grade and very dramatic.
The truth was, my dad couldn’t hear either of us, because of Csonka’s barking, which was getting even louder. The alligator was now standing right on the walkway, and Csonka was getting pretty close to it, which was not good because alligators, besides being able to zigzag, can also move really fast when they want to. The one in Mrs. Buntz’s video caught the chicken and almost caught the guy dragging it.
The police came pretty fast, three cars in like two minutes. They stopped in the street in front of our house with their lights flashing. All the neighbors came out of their houses to see what was going on. Also people on their way to work were stopping their cars to watch.
The police got out of their cars but didn�
�t get too close to the alligator, which was still watching Csonka, who was still barking. So everybody just stood around for a few minutes, while more commuters stopped their cars, so by now there was a pretty big crowd out there with my dad.
Finally some animal-control officers showed up. They’re used to alligators on people’s lawns, and they handled this one in like five minutes. They snagged it with a noose, duct-taped its mouth shut, and took it away in a van. The neighbors went back inside, and the commuters drove away, and Csonka finally shut up, and it was all over except for my mom reminding my dad that she told him not to wear his boxers outside but did he listen? No! he did not listen, etc. etc. etc. like six hundred and fifty times.
That night, when we were eating dinner, I got a text from a kid in my class saying chan 4 now lol. So we turned on the kitchen TV and there was our house, in a cell phone video one of the commuters took. You could see the gator, and there was a nice close-up of my dad, holding up his holey boxers, with his belly sagging down and his hair sticking out every direction the way it does in the morning.
I said, “Real good look, Dad.”
My dad said, “They can’t show that without my permission, can they?”
Taylor said, “I’m gonna skip school for the rest of my life.”
My mom didn’t say anything, which is not like her. She’s Cuban. She just stared at the TV until the alligator story was over. Then she got up and walked out of the kitchen. About a minute later we heard the patio door open and close. We went to look, and there was my mom on the patio next to the pool, standing over my dad’s boxers.
Which were on fire.
When they were totally burned up, she splashed some pool water on the ashes and walked back into the house, right past my dad, not saying a word. I don’t know if they talked about it later. I do know that the next morning, when he went out to get the paper, he wore a bathrobe.
But my point (I bet you forgot I had a point) is that stuff like that—an alligator on the lawn—happens all the time in Miami. You get used to it, the way you get used to palm trees and hurricanes and hardly ever needing a sweater. Also you get used to hearing Spanish. Like my mom; she grew up in the U.S. and speaks English without an accent, but when her family’s around—all the aunts and uncles and cousins, like seventeen thousand of them—she switches to Spanish. I grew up understanding it, and at Culver Middle School some of my classes are totally in Spanish. Other kids take classes in French and German. Culver is a language magnet school. What it’s mainly a magnet for, if you want to know the truth, is nerds. But I’m basically a nerd myself—I admit it—so I like it.
And it turned out that being nerdy was pretty handy on the class trip.
The trip was for the Culver eighth-grade civics classes. Every year they go to Washington, D.C. This year there were forty-seven kids on the trip, plus two teachers and eight parent chaperones.
The teachers were Mr. Arnold Barto and Miss Christine Rector. Mr. Barto is my civics teacher, and he’s a good enough guy, but he forgets stuff. I mean, a lot of stuff. Like, he’ll say, “Today we’re going to cover the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution.” And we’ll be like, “We already covered that.” And he’s like, “We did? When?” And we’re like, “Last year, in seventh grade.” And he’s like, “Wait, you aren’t seventh grade?” And we’re like, “No, we’re eighth grade.” And he’ll look at us and blink like he just noticed us, and go, “Oh, right.”
You probably think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. He’s a good teacher, but his brain works kind of backward. Unless something happened two hundred years ago, he can’t remember it.
I never had a class with Miss Rector, but a lot of kids like her. She’s pretty, for a teacher, and she’s smart. I was glad she was one of the teachers in charge of the Washington trip, because if Mr. Barto was in charge all by himself we’d have probably ended up in Brazil. Although looking back on it, that might have been better.
The chaperones were six moms and two dads, and the most important thing about them was, none of them was my mom or dad. I mean, I love my mom and dad, most of the time, but the older I get, the more I like to love them from a distance, if you know what I mean.
The class trip left early in the morning from the Miami airport. My parents dropped me off. My dad gave me some money and told me to spend it wisely, referring to the time in fourth grade when my class went to the Seaquarium and my dad gave me five dollars and I used it to buy five bags of Cheez-Its from a vending machine and I ate them all and on the way back to school I threw up orange glop all over the bus. My mom hugged me really hard and told me she loved me very much, and she was going to miss me, and if I did anything stupid in Washington she would kill me.
When the parents were gone Mr. Barto gathered all the kids and chaperones together for a little speech. He told us that it was a privilege for us to be on this trip to Washington and he expected us to be on our very best behavior as ambassadors representing Culver Middle School. That was when Cameron Frank farted. He’s one of those kids who can fart whenever he wants to. His insides must be like 75 percent gas. Sometimes I think he could actually explode.
A bunch of kids laughed, and Mr. Barto glared at us and said that if we thought he was going to tolerate those kind of shenanigans—he actually said “shenanigans”—we were sadly mistaken, and he would not hesitate to send troublemakers home, and did he make himself clear?
Everybody was quiet for about ten seconds while Mr. Barto looked around at us with a look that I guess was supposed to be scary. Then Cameron Frank farted again.
This time everybody laughed. Even the chaperones were trying not to crack up. Mr. Barto said a few more strict things, but I think he realized he was losing us, so he clapped his hands and said, “All right, let’s go!” He started marching off, wearing his humongous backpack, like he was a general leading us into battle, except he was going the wrong direction. Miss Rector had to catch him and aim him the right way.
That was how we started our class trip.
We went through security and walked to the gate. I was technically walking with Matt Diaz and some other kids who are my friends, but I was trying to walk near Suzana Delgado.
I really, really like Suzana Delgado, who is the most beautiful girl in the eighth grade and probably the world. She has like 183 million Instagram followers. She’s also really smart and funny and pretty nice for somebody that beautiful. Basically she’s perfect, except for her height, which is: tall. Or at least taller than me. I’m kind of short. Okay, I’m not “kind of” short. I’m short. My mom claims everybody in our family started out short and I’ll wind up normal, but that doesn’t do me any good now.
The thing I wanted to do, more than anything else in the world, was to date Suzana Delgado. But I couldn’t ask her. Not because she was tall, but because she was dating Jean-Philippe Dumas, better known as J.P., who’s in the French program. He’s also tall, even taller than Suzana. Sometimes I look at him, standing around being tall without even trying, and I want to kill him, except he could definitely beat me up.
My plan was to wait for J.P. and Suzana to break up, and then see if she would date me. The problem was, they were like a permanent couple. When we went on the class trip, they’d been dating for nearly five weeks, which I think was a Culver Middle School record. But I still tried to talk to Suzana or text her whenever I could think of a reason.
Like, we were in the same math class, so every school night I’d text her to ask what the math homework was. The truth was, I already knew the math homework, and pretty soon she figured that out. But she went along with it, and it turned into kind of a joke, her making up funny answers. Like she’d say the math homework was to figure out the square root of a hamster, stuff like that. Sometimes we’d even make jokes about it in school, talking in person. I definitely think she liked me. But she was still dating J.P. And he was still tall.
So anyway, we got to our gate and stood around for a while, me standing near Suzana but not actually sa
ying anything to her. When it was time to get on the plane, Mr. Barto told us we all had to go to straight our assigned seats, which we all did, except for Mr. Barto, who went straight to the completely wrong seat and had to be steered to the right one by Miss Rector.
I was in a middle seat next to Matt Diaz, who had a window seat on the left side of the plane. On my other side, unfortunately, was Cameron “Gas Attack” Frank. Suzana was two rows behind me with two of her friends. In the row between us were an old lady and two guys, probably in their thirties. One of them was short, with really long stringy hair that looked like seaweed, wearing sunglasses and a backpack and purple Crocs, which you don’t usually see on a grown man. He had the window seat behind Matt. The other one was very big and very bald. He was wearing a black T-shirt, and he had huge arms with some kind of snakes tattooed on them. He was carrying a long black duffel bag, which he spent like five minutes trying to stuff into the overhead luggage space, holding up all the people trying to get to their seats. Finally one of the flight attendants, who was eighty jillion years old and probably was a flight attendant for the Wright brothers, came back and told the bald guy he would have to check the bag.
“No!” he said, like really angry. “It will fit!” He had some kind of accent, but not Spanish. He pushed the bag really hard and got it to go in. The flight attendant gave him a look, but didn’t say anything. He looked like a guy you didn’t want to get any more upset than he already was.
Which is exactly what my friend Matt, who I believe I already mentioned can be an idiot, proceeded to do. He pointed up at the luggage compartment and said—too loud, as usual—“What do you think he has in that bag? A missile?”
The big guy heard this. He looked down at Matt like he was about to pick him up by the neck and stuff him into the overhead space, which this guy was definitely big enough to do. The shorter guy with the sunglasses said something to him, and he sat down.
“Jeez,” said Matt, still too loud. “Maybe it is a missile.”
“Will you shut up?” I said, but it was too late: We looked back, and the big guy was leaning forward, his head almost in our row, glaring at Matt, for like ten seconds, just leaning over us and staring. He was really close, and he looked a little crazy, and I’ll be honest: I was scared. Then the little guy said something again, and the big guy sat back. Matt and I looked at each other, like whoa, but even Matt wasn’t stupid enough to say anything else.
