by Sara
Pennypacker
illustrated by
Martin Matje
by Sara Pennypacker
illustrated by Martin Matje
Orchard Books
An Imprint of Scholastic Inc.
New York
Text copyright © 2003 by Sara Pennypacker
Illustrations copyright © 2003 by Martin Matje
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library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Pennypacker, Sara
Stuart Goes to School / by Sara Pennypacker;
illustrated by Martin Matje. — 1 st ed. p. cm.
Summary: Worried about his first day at a new
school, eight-year-old Stuart wears his magic cape
and hopes that it will help him.
ISBN 0-439-30182-3
[1. First day of school —Fiction. 2. Worry —Fiction.
3. Clothing and dress —Fiction. 4. Magic —Fiction.]
I. Matje, Martin, ill. II. Title. PZ7.P3856 Sm 2002
[Fic] —dc21 2001049781 CIP AC
e-ISBN 978-0-545-31183-0
First edition, July 2003
The text type was set in 12-pt. Sabon.
Title type was handlettered by Martin Matje.
Display type was set in Bad Cabbage ICG.
Book design by Marijka Kostiw
For my guys, Hilly and Caleb.
—S. P.
To my mother, who gave me my cape.
—M. M.
DAY ONE
As soon as he woke up, Stuart knew it was going to be
a bad day. You can smell a bad day coming. It smells a
lot like sour milk.
The first bad thing about the day was hanging on
his bedpost. A pair of green plaid pants, so bright they
hurt his eyes. A shirt with little cowboys on it.
Stuart was excellent at worrying. In fact, worrying
was his best thing. But he had forgotten to worry about
this. Every year, his mother made
him dress up for the first day of
school. In clothes nobody else would
wear.
Stuart and his family had just
moved to Punbury. He would be
new at school, so he already had
plenty to worry about. What if he
forgot everything he learned in
second grade? What if he couldn’t
find the bathroom? What if he could
find the bathroom, but he got stuck
inside and the teacher had to get him
out with firemen? What if nobody
wanted to be his friend?
And now this: green plaid hurt-your-eyes pants and
a cowboy shirt. Where did his mother even find clothes
like these?
“Stuart,†he heard his mother call. “I left you a nice
new outfit. It was your father’s when he was in third
grade! Now isn’t that something?â€
Stuart buried himself under his quilt. It would be
impossible to make friends now. The other kids were
going to fall down left and right laughing at him. Even
cowboys would fall down left and right laughing at
him.
He poked his head back out.
Wait a minute. He had a cape
now. He had made it last week out
of a hundred old ties. Just as he’d
hoped, magical things had been hap-
pening since he had started wearing
it. Adventures. A different one each
day.
So far, the magical thing of the day
had been a surprise. But maybe. . . .
Stuart pointed his brain at the ugly outfit. He
squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated powerful brain
waves on making it disappear. He concentrated hard
until he smelled brain-smoke coming from behind his
eyeballs. He opened his eyes.
The outfit was still there. It looked more horrible
than before.
Stuart sighed deeply and got out of bed. He put on
the awful clothes and wrapped his cape around himself.
One good thing about a cape: At least no one could see
what he was wearing underneath. He could go to
school in his underwear if he wanted to.
Not that he wanted to, of course.
Stuart’s family was eating breakfast when he came
downstairs.
“Good morning,†said his father cheerfully. He was
going off to his job as a carpet cleaner.
“Good morning,†said his mother cheerfully. She
was going off to her job as a beautician.
“Good morning,†said Aunt Bubbles cheerfully. She
was going off to her job as a baker.
“I don’t think it’s a good morning,†answered
Stuart glumly. He was going off to be a total flop as a
third grader.
Stuart had a lot to worry about, so he spread it out.
On the bus ride he worried about the bathroom
thing, of course. And what if he were the shortest kid in
the class?
Climbing up the big steps to school, he worried that
his fives might come out backward while he was at the
blackboard. And what if someone brought egg salad for
lunch, and the smell made him throw up?
Dragging himself down the long hall to room
3B he worried about getting locked inside his
locker. And what if a wasp were hiding inside his juice
carton at snack time and stung him, and his lip swelled
up like a water balloon?
Stuart found the seat with his name tag and began
worrying about the bathroom thing again. If worrying
were a sport, he would have a neck full of gold medals
by now.
“Good morning, children,†said the teacher. “My
name is Mrs. Spindles. Would anyone like to start by
sharing something for Our Big Interesting World?â€
A girl in the front row bounced up and down in her
seat so hard that a bunch of barrettes went flying. But
she had about a hundred left in her hair.
“Yes, Olivia?†Mrs. Spindles called on her.
“My daddy went away on important business last
week. He bro
ught me back this pocketbook. It has real
plastic diamonds on it.â€
“This used to be a muffin,†said a boy named
Nacho, proudly holding up a green lump. “I saved it
under my bed all summer!â€
Everyone in the class said, “Cool, Nacho,†except
for Olivia, who was still looking for her barrettes.
Stuart smacked his head and groaned. Our Big
Interesting World was the third grade name for
show-and-tell. He wished he had something interesting
to show. Like the false teeth he had found in the trash
yesterday. Or the squashed toad from his driveway.
Then all the kids would say, “Cool, Stuart.â€
But wait! He did have something to show!
Something so great that all the kids would fight over
who could be his friend.
Stuart’s hand shot up. He jumped around in his seat.
If he’d been wearing barrettes they would have gone
flying into the next classroom.
“Yes, Stuart?†Mrs. Spindles said. “Do you have
something interesting to show us?â€
“Yesss!†shouted Stuart as he ran to the front of the
room. This was going to be great!
“I made this cape!†Stuart told the class. “I
stapled a hundred ties together, and it’s magic!
Every day I have a new adventure. And look! I put a
secret purple pocket inside.â€
Stuart whipped open his cape very dramatically. He
had practiced this in front of the mirror a lot.
He waited for the kids to say, “Awesome!†or
“Wow!†or “Cool, Stuart!â€
He waited for a long time. The room was so silent
Stuart wondered if his ears had stopped working.
He felt an odd breeze. He looked down and froze in
horror.
The awful new outfit had disappeared, just as he
had wished. But now he was wearing nothing but his
underpants. In front of the entire class!
He snapped his cape shut, but it was too late. All the
kids began to laugh.When Stuart was embarrassed, his
ears got embarrassed. As the kids laughed, he could feel
his ears begin to blow up, like sausages on a grill.
Bigger and redder and hotter they grew, until suddenly
the room went quiet again.
“Wow!†said Olivia. “Exactly the color of my
Malibu Sunset Fashion barrettes.â€
“Wow!†said Nacho, holding two pieces of red con-
struction paper up to his head. “Giant mutant alien
radar ears.â€
“Wow!†said the rest of the kids.
Stuart fled back to his seat and buried his head in
his arms. He kept it there for the rest of the morning.
At recess, he hid behind an extra-fat pine tree.
At lunch, he pretended to be extremely busy count-
ing his raisins.
On the bus ride home, he put his lunchbox on the
seat beside him and stared out the window so no one
would sit with him.
He would never make a friend now. Not after this
morning. But so what? He had a really good friend in
his old town, and look what happened. He had to move
away.
Besides, the kids here looked like a lot of trouble. If
he made friends with Olivia he’d just spend his whole
life looking for her barrettes, or admiring her pocket-
books. If he made friends with Nacho he’d have to
watch out for moldy food.
No, it was better this way. He had a maniac cat that
he loved. He had met the trash collector yesterday, and
they were going to be partners in saving junk. And he
had his cape. All he had to do was be a little more care-
ful about what he wished for from now on.
DAY TWO
A brilliant idea woke Stuart up at the crack of dawn.
“Today I’m going to bring in something so interesting
for Our Big Interesting World that all the kids will
forget what happened yesterday,†he told One-Tooth.
Stuart crept downstairs. Right away, he found a
potato that looked just like his first grade
piano teacher. He found an enormous
hairball that One-Tooth had spit up.
These were wonderful
things, of course, but most
kids had seen potatoes and
hairballs. To make up for
what had happened yester-
day, he would need something they had never
seen before.
He raced outside and grabbed a shovel. He
dug a nice, deep, round hole. It was an excellent
hole, one of his best. But all that was in it was
dirt. No gold, no jewels, no mysterious bones.
No treasureful stuff at all.
Stuart dug another hole. Nothing but dirt. Again.
And again, and again, and again.
Plenty of holes. Plenty of dirt.
Plenty of nothing to bring in for
Our Big Interesting World.
Stuart dropped his shovel. He was getting worried.
Great things had been happening to him since he had
made his cape. He had grown toast, he had flown, some
animals had come over to play.
But lately, not-so-great things had been
happening. Yesterday, his clothes had disap-
peared.
And now this. Maybe his cape
wasn’t working anymore. Maybe it
was turning against him.
“Stuuuuu-aaaart!
Time for breakfast!â€
Aunt Bubbles’s voice
was very small, and Stuart
could barely see his own
house in the distance. He must have been digging for a
long time.
He bent down to pick up his shovel. It was stuck.
He tugged and pulled it free, but something was caught
on the end.
It was a hole! A hole had peeled out of the ground
and was dangling from his shovel! This had never
happened before. But of course, he had
never had a cape before.
The hole was beautiful and deli-
cate, like a bubble with the top cut off.
Carefully, Stuart lifted it from the shovel and blew the
dirt off. He folded it up and put it into the pocket of his
cape.
Inside, Stuart drank three tall glasses of orange
juice. Digging was thirsty work. “I have a hole in my
pocket,†he told his family.
“A big one?†asked his mother.
“Yep,†Stuart answered proudly. “Nice and round,
too.â€
“Don’t put any money in it,†warned his father.
“I wasn’t going to,†Stuart said.
“I don’t have time to sew it up today,†said Aunt
Bubbles.
“I don’t want you to sew it up,†Stuart explained.
He smeared a glump of jam over his toast and shook his
head. Grown-ups.
All through Our Big Interesting World, Stuart suf-
fered in silent gloom. One girl took off her shoe and
showed where a snake had almost
bitten her. A boy with braces showed
&
nbsp; his collection of things that had
gotten stuck in them. These kids probably have
hundreds of friends, Stuart
thought miserably.
If only he had more time, he
probably could have found some-
thing amazing. By now, all the kids would be crawling
all over themselves trying to be his friend. “Hey,
Stuart,†they’d say. “Show us that amazing thing you
found again!†Stuff like that. Stuart laid his head on his
desk to imagine what it would be like.
Just then, one of the big kids knocked on the door
and handed Mrs. Spindles a note. Mrs. Spindles read
the note. She gasped and clutched at her throat. Her
eyes grew so large that Stuart wondered if they were
going to pop out of her head and go zinging across
the classroom. He would really like to see something
like that.
“Attention, class!†Mrs. Spindles cried. “I have an
emergency announcement!â€
“Holes!†she read. “Hundreds and hundreds of
holes! Neighborhoods have been finding them all
morning. Detectives and scientists have been called in.
Be on the alert today, and report anything unusual.â€
Mrs. Spindles dropped the note. “Oh, my dearest
blue heavens!†she wailed. “Whatever could it be?â€
“Hailstones,
probably,†Olivia
said. “I’m going to
have to wear a
lot more barrettes.â€
“Giant earth-
worms,†Nacho
said. “We’re going
to need some really big robins to eat them!â€
All the kids had lots of ideas for what could have
made so many holes. Each idea made Stuart
feel worse.
Finally he raised his hand. “Maybe it
25
was a kid,†he said in a voice that came out a little
squeakier than he wanted. “Maybe a plain old regular
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