X Marks the Spot

by Tony Abbott

Then, as if by magic, I heard a quick flutter of wings overhead, and a flash of green circling the deck. Then there was a sharp cry. “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

  I jumped. “The parrot!”

  “Arrh! My own Captain Flint!” Silver shouted.

  But the bird didn’t settle on his shoulder. It shot across the deck and down the stairway to the storage rooms below.

  “After it!” I yelled.

  We rushed down the stairs to the storage rooms, and there, amid all the cartons and boxes and crates of treasure was the parrot.

  But that wasn’t the amazing part.

  The amazing part was that the green bird was perched right on top of—guess what?

  The flashing blue zapper gates!

  Chapter 20

  “Holy cow!” I gasped when we screeched to a stop. “The zapper gates are calling us home, Frankie!”

  The room was sizzling and flickering in blue. Just beyond the gates was a black crack in the air. It was deep and smoking and scary looking, but I knew what it was.

  “Frankie, it’s our way back home.”

  “But we can’t leave until we get Mrs. Figglehopper’s bookmark back,” she said.

  “Figglehopper?” said Long John Silver, clomping down the stairs and eyeing the heaps of treasure.

  “Figglehopper! Figglehopper!” the parrot shrieked.

  We heard a sudden stomping rush of feet on deck. A moment later, everyone tramped down the stairs.

  “What’s going on here?” demanded the captain.

  “Are they eating my cheese?” chirped Ben Gunn.

  “No, Long John Silver is trying to escape!” said Jim, pointing at the deep crack behind the zapper gates.

  “He can’t go there,” said Frankie. “No one can. That leads to—”

  “It leads to the way I shall escape,” growled Silver, pulling a pistol from one of the chests and aiming it as us. Then, stuffing his pockets with coins, he backed slowly toward the flickering gates. “There’s still two crosses on the map of Treasure Island, marking where Flint buried more loot. Now that my parrot is with me, perhaps I’ll be going back for them—”

  “Stop him!” cried the captain.

  “I will!” Jim shouted. He rushed Silver, but the pirate’s crutch swung around swiftly and Jim tripped to the floor.

  The blue light began to swallow Silver. The parrot fluttered to his shoulder, ruffling its feathers at me.

  “Silver, get out of there!” Frankie yelled, rushing in.

  “And we need a feather!” I shouted. “And we’re not taking no for an answer! Parrot, it’s you and me!”

  “Me! Me!” it squawked.

  I leaped at the bird, just as it flew across the light.

  All of a sudden—kkkkk!—the storage room flashed blindingly bright blue, then crashed into total darkness.

  “My friends!” Jim shouted. “Where are you?”

  “Going home!” I yelled.

  “Bye, Jim!” said Frankie. “It’s been fun—ooof!”

  Frankie and I tumbled into each other, and we were instantly sucked into the blue light of the gates.

  It definitely felt like there were more than the two of us hurtling around in that darkness. I heard the sound of wings fluttering. And my back was struck by something that felt a lot like an old wooden crutch.

  But when we tumbled out of the dark, dropping down into the library workroom, and slamming into a stack of heavy book cartons, it was only Frankie and me.

  Well, almost.

  As we lay there heaped on the floor, I looked up into the sizzling, fading blue light of the gates and saw a single green feather fluttering through the air. It landed on the floor, right on the map Mrs. Figglehopper had made for us.

  I sat up, snatched the feather, and held it up.

  Frankie rubbed her eyes and stared at it, too. “Whoa, was that weird or was that weird?”

  “A little of one and a lot of the other,” I said.

  Instantly, there was the noise of scuffling feet.

  Mrs. Figglehopper slid in between the boxes and looked down at us. “I hope you didn’t come away empty-handed?”

  “Um, no,” I said. “We have the bookmark … and the book.”

  “Ah, the book!” she said. “Talk about treasure. You two hit the jackpot. Classic books are the richest treasures of all.”

  The librarian took the feather from me, ran her finger along the green edge of it, and smiled a sort of faraway smile. “This came from a friend,” she said.

  Then, as if she shook herself awake, she blinked. “Yes, well now, you two had better scoot back to class, or Mr. Wexler will come looking for you.”

  She scampered away with the bookmark.

  We got to our feet, edged through the maze of boxes, and out to the library doors. With Treasure Island firmly in hand, we headed back to Mr. Wexler’s class.

  To make a long story short, Frankie and I aced our book reports. Mine was all about how Long John Silver was a bad pirate who had probably taken down a whole crew of people in his day, but was both smart and sometimes kind, and even funny. He’d probably saved Jim’s life as often as he’d threatened to hurt him. I wrote how the author, Robert Louis Stevenson, probably sort of liked Silver, too, which is why he let him escape at the end.

  Frankie’s report was excellent, too. She told how by the end of the book Jim Hawkins had become really brave and could stand up for what he believed in. The whole adventure with pirates had made him more sure of himself. He wasn’t such a kid at the end, but he was a real nice guy.

  Mr. Wexler’s long, hedgy eyebrow wriggled and twisted all the way through reading our reports, but at the end he nodded and put a big A on each of them.

  Mrs. Figglehopper read them and liked them, too.

  “You’re right about people liking Long John Silver, she said. “Despite all the bad things he did, they really do!”

  But the weird part happened when the dismissal bell rang that day.

  As Frankie and I rushed down the hall for our bus, we heard a strange sound coming from the library.

  It was Mrs. Figglehopper, singing.

  Singing a very familiar song.

  “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—

  Yo-ho-ho—”

  I screeched to a halt, and Frankie screeched with me. We froze outside the library doors, listening to that old pirate favorite one last time.

  “Not exactly the librarian national anthem,” said Frankie.

  I gave her a nod. “No kidding. Um, Frankie, you don’t think Long John Silver’s ‘bookish lady’ is, you know, our own, sort of Mrs. Figglehopper … do you?”

  Frankie frowned at me. “No way. Uh-uh. Nope. Can’t be. Never in a million years. Do you think?”

  “Not unless I have to,” I mumbled. “But if I did have to, I’d have only one thing to say about it.”

  “What?” asked Frankie.

  “Arrh, arrh!” I said.

  “That’s two things,” she said.

  Then she chased me all the way down the hall and out the doors to the bus.

  FROM THE DESK OF

  IRENE M. FIGGLEHOPPER, LIBRARIAN

  Dear Reader:

  Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m sure sailing to a distant island with a crew of nasty pirates is not my idea of a good time. But what fun it is to read about! And Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson is high adventure at its best!

  Certainly, Frankie and Devin seem to have enjoyed their trip! By reading the book, I mean.

  Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1850. Unfortunately, he developed tuberculosis, a terrible lung disease, at an early age, which kept him in bed much of his youth. Thankfully, he used the time reading and writing. And by the time he was sixteen, he had penned his first historical tale.

  He continued writing all the way through college and afterward, beginning to publish stories in his twenties.

  Alas, his ill health continued to bother him, and so he took to t
raveling to warmer countries. In 1880, his journeys took him to sunny California (not too far from Palmdale, I might add!), where he married a woman named Fanny Osbourne.

  Now, here it gets interesting. Legend has it that one day Fanny’s son from an earlier marriage, Lloyd, together with Robert, sketched a treasure map of a made-up tropical island. When Lloyd wished that there were a book about the island, the idea for Treasure Island was born! Robert began his great pirate adventure at once, and it was published to great acclaim in 1883.

  This was followed soon after by his other major adventure novel, Kidnapped, and his classic horror tale of a man with a severely split personality, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Talk about scaring the biscuits out of you! Don’t read that on a dark and stormy night!

  In these three masterpieces, Robert focused as much on the quirks of character as on action and suspense. Even as we admire Jim Hawkins’s transformation from boy into young man in Treasure Island, we find ourselves taken with the shenanigans of Long John Silver, Ben Gunn’s oddities, and the silliness of Squire Trelawney.

  Ever following the warmer weather, Robert and his family moved in the late 1880s to the island of Samoa, in the South Seas, where the islanders called him Tusitala, “the teller of tales.” He died there in 1894 and, reminiscent of the treasure in his most famous book, is buried on a high hill overlooking the sea.

  In his short life, Robert Louis Stevenson managed to give the world some of its most enduring classics.

  And now back to work.

  Note to self: keep my bookmarks hidden. Maybe in the old wooden chest at home!

  Well, yo-ho-ho! See you where the books are!

  I.M. Figglehopper

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Cracked Classics series

  Chapter 1

  “Ha, ha, ha!” I laughed as I stared at the door of Mr. Wexler’s classroom.

  “Hey, Devin, it’s English class, not TV,” said my best-pal-even-though-she’s-a-girl, Frankie Lang, who just happened to walk up behind me. “What’s with all the laughing?”

  Chuckling still, I pointed to a small sign taped to the classroom door and said, “Behold!”

  The sign read PLAY IN THE CAFETERIA TODAY.

  I smiled. “Frankie, our teacher has given us an assignment. We must play in the cafeteria!”

  She nodded. “Wow … but why—”

  “Never question such things!” I said sternly. “When teachers tell you to play, you play! This alone is good. But when they tell you to play in the cafeteria, which is where they keep the food, then, Frankie, the stars shine down on us, destiny is on our side, and school is good.”

  “That was a beautiful speech, Devin,” she said. “And let me be the first to say that I approve of this new subject of ‘play.’ In fact, I’m thinking we should be in honors. We’d be excellent.”

  “Then, let us go and excel,” I said happily, heading with my friend to the cafeteria.

  Now, at Palmdale Middle School, where Frankie and I are sixth graders, we have one of these cafeterias that is also the auditorium. It has a stage at one end, with a big maroon curtain, a flagpole, and everything. Frankie and I like to sit on the edge of the stage to eat. Until the lunch ladies see us and chase us off.

  Just as I was planning what sort of game we’d play, we rounded the corner and entered the caf. Right away, I knew something was wrong. Instead of a lot of playing going on, there was a lot of what looked like work.

  First of all, everyone from our English class was hustling around, pushing the lunch tables aside and setting up chairs. Some kids were actually sweeping the floor.

  “How are we supposed to play with all this work going on?” I asked.

  “Beats me,” said Frankie.

  “Ah! Frankie and Devin! You’re here!” called a voice.

  We turned to see our teacher Mr. Wexler next to the stage, a small book in one hand, and a stack of weird, brightly colored clothes in the other.

  “What’s with the pile of pajamas?” Frankie asked.

  “They’re costumes,” our teacher replied dryly.

  “Costumes?” I said, stepping back. “It’s not Halloween yet. Costumes for what?”

  “For what, you ask?” He smiled largely, put the costumes down, handed the small book to Frankie, and using both hands, yanked open the curtain.

  “Ta-da!” he chimed.

  I gasped. On the stage were big wooden cutouts of crooked, old-style buildings. To the left were some pink-colored buildings, to the right were a bunch of blue ones. In between was a small open square with a fountain. Sticking up behind the buildings were several wobbly towers with banners hanging from them.

  It looked like a scene from some old fairy tale.

  Mr. Wexler took a deep breath, cleared his throat, then spoke loudly: “‘Two households, both alike in dignity—in fair Verona, where we lay our scene—from ancient grudge, break to new mutiny.…’”

  He stopped.

  We stared.

  Finally, I spoke. “Mr. Wexler, the last time I checked, you were an English teacher. But you’re not talking English. You’re talking some other language. A weird one!”

  He laughed. “No, no, Devin, it is English. In fact—it’s Shakespeare, William Shakespeare, one of England’s greatest playwrights. He’s the author of Romeo and Juliet, the play we’re putting on for the other classes today. Didn’t you see the sign on the classroom door?”

  “That sign said ‘play in the cafeteria today,’” I said. “It means we’re supposed to play in the cafeteria.”

  He shook his head. “No, it means we’re putting on a play in the cafeteria!”

  “Then the sign wasn’t written in good English,” I said.

  “Neither is this,” said Frankie, turning the book every which way. “The words are all crazy.”

  Our teacher chuckled. “True, Frankie, the language is different. After all, the play was written over four hundred years ago. But you’ll see how the story comes alive when we perform it for the school on this stage today. These are some of the costumes our class will be wearing.”

  He held up the pajamas again.

  I frowned. “Mr. Wexler, you must be speaking that other language again, because it sounded like you said our class will be wearing funny clothes on stage—”

  “Exactly,” said Mr. Wexler. “We’ve been reading Romeo and Juliet for the last week. So we’re all quite familiar with the parts … wait … don’t tell me you haven’t read the play?”

  I turned to Frankie. She turned to me.

  Reading. That was the problem. As good as Frankie and I were at the playing thing, we weren’t all that good at the reading thing. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I think it has something to do with all the words they put in books. To get what’s going on, you’re supposed to read all of them. That’s the problem.

  “Um … define read …” said Frankie.

  Mr. Wexler gave out a big sigh. “Yes, yes, I can just imagine. You were probably too busy playing around to read the book I assigned.”

  “Hey,” I said, “it’s what we’re good at.”

  He made a face. “Well, in a nutshell, Romeo and Juliet are two young Italian people who fall in love—”

  “Love?” I gasped. “Whoa! I thought school was supposed to be rated PG!”

  Mr. Wexler laughed. “Oh, it’s a wonderful play, full of romance, of course, but full of action, too. It ends rather badly, of course. It’s one of Shakespeare’s tragedies.”

  “It sounds pretty tragic,” I mumbled to Frankie.

  Mr. Wexler pointed to a building on the stage that had an upstairs balcony overlooking a garden filled with painted bushes. “The balcony scene between Romeo and Juliet is one of the most famous scenes ever. Why, just listen to this wonderful poetry.…”

  He gazed up at the balcony, extended his hand toward it, and launched into some pretty strange wordage.

  “‘But soft,’” he muttered, “‘what light through yonder win
dow breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun—’”

  All of a sudden, someone came out onto the balcony. We gasped. It was a woman, but not a young Italian woman, if you know what I mean. She had grayish hair pulled up tight behind her head, and wore a bright flowery dress.

  “Mrs. Figglehopper!” Frankie said.

  It was Mrs. Figglehopper, our school librarian.

  She looked down at Mr. Wexler, clasped her hands together, then spoke some wacky lines of her own.

  ‘“How camest thou hither, tell me? The orchard walls are high and hard to climb, and the place death, considering who thou art, if any of my kinsmen find thee here.’”

  “‘With love’s light wings did I over-perch these walls,’” Mr. Wexler replied. “‘For stony limits cannot hold love out, and what love can do, that dares love attempt. Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me.…’”

  Let me tell you, it was very weird watching our teacher and our librarian talk like that. I was pretty embarrassed for them, although they didn’t seem to be.

  “Four hundred years old,” Frankie grumbled, still squinting at the book. “I guess people had more time on their hands back then. They needed it to figure out what the other people were saying!”

  Mrs. Figglehopper tramped down the stairs from the balcony and came out on stage, full of chuckles.

  “It’s not that hard to understand!” she boomed. “Besides, a good story is a good story!”

  “Quite right,” added Mr. Wexler. “In fact, Mrs. Figglehopper and I shall be in today’s play, too. Of course, not as Romeo and Juliet … oh, you know, I just had an idea.…”

  He got a sudden weird look in his eye, and he moved that look over at me. “You know, Devin …”

  “Uh-oh,” I said, backing away. “Here it comes.”

  “Devin, performing in this play is the best way to learn it. If you want to do your best on our Romeo and Juliet test next week, you should probably play the part of Romeo.…”

  I looked at my teacher. “I’m suddenly feeling faint. And I always faint at home. I’d better go there now—”

  He blocked my way.

  “And Frankie shall be Juliet!” said Mrs. Figglehopper, clasping her hands together again in delight.