Leon and the Spitting Image
Page 20
“Isn’t it kind of unnecessary?” said Lily-Matisse. “You don’t have the doll anymore.”
“The pledge,” Leon insisted.
“Fine,” said Lily-Matisse. “Crossmyhearthopetodiestickaneedleinmyeye. There. Satisfied?”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“Sheesh!” Lily-Matisse sealed the oath with a feeble pretend ptooey.
“P.W.?”
P.W. said the pledge and spat without complaint. “Okay, so let’s hear it.”
Leon pulled a strand of orange yarn from his pouch. “Remind you of anything?” he said, wiggling it.
P.W. and Lily-Matisse exchanged confused looks.
“I’ll give you a hint,” said Leon. He pointed at Lumpkin, who was jostling his way to the front of the dunking-pool line.
Lily-Matisse stared at the yarn, then at Lumpkin, then at the yarn. She abruptly cupped her mouth with her hand. “Oh. My. Gosh.”
“What’s gotten into you?” P.W. asked.
“Lumpkin’s hair!” Lily-Matisse blurted out.
“What about it?” said P.W.
“It’s the same exact orange color as the yarn!”
“It is?” said Leon. A giant smirk stretched across his face.
P.W. looked at the yarn more closely.
“Un-freakin’-buhlievable!” he suddenly shouted.
“What?” said Leon with fake innocence.
P.W. gave an excited poke at the pouch. “What else do you have in that goody bag?”
Leon removed a scrap of green cloth.
“That’s a perfect match for Lumpkin’s army jacket!” P.W. cried.
“Really?” said Leon, grinning more than ever.
All at once Lily-Matisse, P.W., and Leon began laughing uncontrollably. When they finally stopped, P.W. said, “We’ll be totally noogie-proof!”
“And sidewinder-proof!” said Lily-Matisse.
“Basically, we’ll be Lumpkin-proof,” said Leon.
“Freaky!” P.W. exclaimed. “Our very own Henry Lumpkin doll! Think of the possibilities!”
“Knowing Leon,” said Lily-Matisse, “I bet he has.”
When Mr. Hankey clanged the final bell, Lily-Matisse, P.W., and Leon piled into Napoleon’s taxi and headed for the Trimore Towers.
“And how was your day, Monsieur Leon?” Napoleon asked. “One a scale of one to ten—”
“Eleven!” all three classmates shouted.
“Jinx!”
“Jinx!”
“Jinx!”
“Eleven?” said Napoleon. “Is such a thing possible?”
“Absolutely,” Lily-Matisse said. “Just ask the Hag. Leon got the highest grade in the class—eleven stitches per inch!”
The news pleased Napoleon immensely. “C’est magnifique! We must alert Madame Zeisel.” He grabbed his car phone and placed a call.
By the time the taxi reached the hotel, Leon’s mom and Maria were waiting out front.
“Terrific news, sweetie! I knew you’d pass. But top marks?” Emma Zeisel planted a big kiss on her son’s cheek. He blushed.
“Way to go, Leonito,” said Maria. “You showed that Miss Panty Hose!”
“Thanks,” said Leon.
A van pulled up to the hotel.
“Penguins!” shouted Lily-Matisse, pointing to the exiting passengers.
“Must be the Antarctica Society,” said Emma Zeisel matter-of-factly. “I better get back to Reception. Oh, Frau Haffenreffer is setting up some pastries and chips for the three of you in the coffee shop.”
“Want me to go change the signboard?” Leon asked.
“Not necessary, sweetie. Already taken care of.”
And indeed it was. When Leon and his friends pushed through the revolving door, they were greeted by the following notice:
“Went a little crazy with the exclamation marks, didn’t you, Mom?”
“Not at all,” said Emma Zeisel. “That’s all there were in the letter box. Otherwise I’d have used tons more.”
A penguin waddled toward the revolving door.
“Uh-oh,” said Maria. “I better get the Poop-B-Gone.”
“I have it covered,” said Emma Zeisel. She held up a diaper.
Maria laughed.
“So what are you kids going to do now that you’ve finished all those silly sewing projects?” asked Leon’s mother.
“Oh, they’re not all done, Ms. Z,” said Lily-Matisse.
“Really?”
“Really,” said P.W. “We’ve got a huge project we’re just about to start. Isn’t that right, Leon?”
Leon tapped his pouch and looked at his friends.
“Yup,” he said with a smile.
An excerpt from
Leon
AND THE
Champion Chip
CHAPTER ONE
The Purple Pouch
The evening before the start of fifth grade, Leon Zeisel was feeling unusually chipper. He sat on his bed in Trimore Towers—the six story, wedding cake-shaped one-star hotel he called home—and prepared his things for school.
Three-ring binder? Check.
No. 2 pencils? Check.
Pens? Check.
Lab notebook? Check.
After reassuring himself that all required materials were present and accounted for, Leon reached under his bed and pulled out the unrequired item that was making him so chipper.
Keen though he was to peek inside the large purple pouch that protected the item in question, Leon worried about jinxing things, so he resisted temptation. He placed the school supplies—plus the pouch—into his backpack, hung the backpack on the doorknob, and pushed the pouched item out of his mind.
For a while.
But in the middle of the night Leon awoke with a start. A single word pulsed through his head.
The word beat quietly at first: POUCH! POUCH! POUCH!
But soon it got louder: POUCH! POUCH! POUCH!
Then louder still: POUCH! POUCH! POUCH!
Leon couldn’t stop the tom-tom of temptation. Eventually he hopped out of bed and padded over to the bedroom door, dragging his blanket behind him. He placed the blanket across the doorjamb to make sure no light would seep into the living room. Once the blanket was properly positioned, he grabbed the backpack off the doorknob and switched on the lamp by his bed.
As soon as his eyes adjusted, Leon unzipped the backpack and removed the purple pouch. He took a breath. Then he squinched his eyes and clucked his tongue, a good luck ritual performed to ward off worry. And Leon Zeisel was feeling worried—and thrilled and antsy and eager.
After the squinch and cluck, he got down to business. With great care, he unpuckered the pouch by loosening the braided drawstrings, and he removed two objects: a small glass bottle filled with tarry brown liquid and a nine-inch-long handmade rag doll.
He set the bottle aside and directed his attention to the doll. It was a stocky figure of a boy dressed in an olive drab army jacket. The boy had bright orange hair, a surly looking mouth that curved downward, and beady eyes made out of actual beads. The beady bead eyes glowered at Leon.
Leon glowered back. “You staring at me, Pumpkinhead?” he whispered sternly.
Pumpkinhead remained silent.
“Wipe that look off your face now, soldier!” Leon commanded.
The doll failed to obey the order.
“Okay, lamebrain, you asked for it.” Leon dispensed a disciplinary noogie to show Pumpkinhead who was boss.
Actually, he made Pumpkinhead give himself a noogie—bunching up the figure’s tiny cloth fingers and grinding them into the soft, stuffing-filled skull.
“And there’s more where that came from, Pumpkinhead,” said Leon. “You’ll find that out for yourself tomorrow, bright and early.”
Reassured by the one-way exchange, Leon began packing up. As he reached for the bottle of tarry brown liquid, he felt a slight tug on the leg of his pajamas. He didn’t think much about it until his bed lamp came crashing down. A wire had wrap
ped around his shin.
Almost at once, Leon’s mother called out from the living room. “Sweetie? You okay?”
“Fine,” Leon managed, as he groped about in the dark.
“What are you to up to in there?”
Leon could hear the springs of the pullout couch in the living room creaking, a sure sign that his mom would soon burst in. “Just organizing stuff for school,” he shot back, as fumbled to repouch the bottle and rag doll.
The doorknob turned. “What’s blocking the door?” Emma Zeisel demanded.
Leon zipped up his backpack seconds before his mother pushed the blanket aside. She entered the bedroom and flipped on the wall switch.
Sniffing the air, she said, “I smell something fishy. You’ve been going through that collection of yours, haven’t you?”
“No, Mom. It’s just back-to-school jitters,” said Leon, his heart pounding.
“Well, jitters or no jitters, now’s no time for mischief—not the night before the start of fifth grade. Get it?”
“Got it.”
“Good,” said Emma Zeisel firmly. “Now get your behind back into bed.”
Leon crawled under the sheets. His mom then waved the blanket back over her son, tucking in the edges with the expert hand of a seasoned hotel professional. “There we go,” said Emma Zeisel. She gave her son a kiss and returned his bed lamp to the nightstand. “I’d tell you, ‘Lights out,’ but you seem to have taken care of that all by yourself.”
“I was just—”
“Hush now, and get some shuteye,” she scolded gently. “You have to be up by six thirty to walk the poodle in 309.”
“Six thirty?” Leon whined.
“At the latest, sweetie. You’re the one who told Napoleon you wanted to get to school before the first bell. Remember, he’s picking you up at a quarter to eight on the dot.”
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used to advance the fictional narrative. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
Leon and the Spitting Image
Text copyright © 2003 by Allen Kurzweil
Illustrations copyright © 2003 by Bret Bertholf
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
EPub Edition © JANUARY 2011
ISBN: 978-0-062-03397-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kurzweil, Allen.
Leon and the spitting image / by Allen Kurzweil.
p. cm.
“Greenwillow Books.”
Summary: Leon, a fourth grader at the Classical School, tries to outwit the school bully and learn to sew for fanatical teacher Miss Hagmeyer, with unexpected help from his final project—a doll with magical powers.
ISBN 0-06-053930-5 (trade). ISBN 0-06-053931-3 (lib. bdg.)
ISBN 0-06-053932-1 (pbk.)
[1. Schools—Fiction. 2. Sewing—Fiction. 3. Magic—Fiction. 4. Single-parent families—Fiction. 5. Humorous stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.K96288 Le 2003 2002035325
[Fic]—dc21
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