The Pirate Book You've Been Looking For

by Annabeth Bondor-Stone

  Margo helped him up and gave him a hug as big as the grin on her face. “Shivers! Albee! I’m so happy to see you! What are you doing here? And how did you get your head stuck in that jaguar?”

  Shivers wiped some fuzz from his forehead. “Well, I’ve always been told that when you see a wild animal you should stick your head in its mouth to show it that you’re not a threat.”

  “That’s terrible advice,” said Margo.

  “That’s what I said,” Albee complained, but no one seemed to notice.

  “Margo,” Shivers said urgently, “I’ve got bigger problems than this jaguar security guard. I’m cursed!”

  “You’re what?” Margo asked.

  “CURSED! I’m cursed by the ghost of Quincy Thomas the Pirate!”

  “Who’s that?”

  “I don’t know! Some evil old pirate!” He grabbed Margo’s shoulders and shook them. “You’ve got to help me get uncursed!”

  Margo was thrilled. It had been three days since she had last hit the high seas with Shivers. School had been so boring that she was crawling out of her skin. And she hated crawling—it was for babies. Her brain started whirring with the excitement of pirate ghosts, evil curses, grizzly sword fights, bloodthirsty sea creatures, and—

  “Margo! Are you going to help me or what?” Shivers shook her shoulders again. She had been standing there with a dreamy grin on her face for the last five minutes.

  “Of course!” Margo said, leading Shivers into the school. As badly as Margo wanted to leave, she knew they had to make one stop first. “If we’re going to get you uncursed, we need the facts. We’re going to the library.”

  Shivers narrowed his eyes. “If we need facts, shouldn’t we be going to the truthbary?”

  Margo and Albee both sighed, and the three made their way down the hall.

  “I’ve never been to a school before,” Shivers marveled.

  “I have,” said Albee, but no one understood he was making a fish joke.

  They passed by the gym and Shivers stopped to look inside. He saw a kid climbing a tall rope. “Where is he going?”

  “Nowhere,” Margo explained. “He just goes up and down as many times as he can.”

  “So he’s a human yo-yo?” Shivers said with a shudder.

  They kept walking. “This is the art room,” Margo said, pointing to a classroom full of kids working with clay.

  Shivers pressed his face to the window. “Wow, those sculptures of children are so realistic!”

  “Those are real kids, Shivers.” Margo shook her head in disbelief and yanked him down the hall by his sleeve.

  They were nearing Mrs. Beezle’s classroom, so Margo decided to pick up the pace. She hurried past the door, ducking down so that not even her ponytail would pop up in the window. Shivers lagged behind to peer in. He was spellbound—and they weren’t even having a spelling test.

  Mrs. Beezle was busy asking questions and half of the students were holding their hands high in the air. Shivers turned the doorknob to go inside.

  “Shivers!” Margo whispered furiously. “What are you doing?”

  “There’s a whole bunch of kids in there who need high fives!” he explained.

  “Come on! You’re going to get us caught!” she said, pulling him away.

  They turned a corner and reached a pair of wooden doors with a sign above them that said, WELCOME TO THE LIBRARY. NOW BE QUIET!

  Margo pointed at the sign. “Can you do that, Shivers?”

  “No problem, easy peasy!” Shivers said, walking through the doors. “AAAAAGHH!” he screamed. “It’s a book graveyard!”

  “Quiet!” chirped the librarian. She was a tiny woman in an enormous sweater as frayed and fluffy as her frizzy hair.

  “Sorry.” Shivers winced, retreating into one of the many rows of bookshelves. He had never seen so many books before. Books weren’t very popular with pirates. Growing up, Shivers’s parents had only one book. It was a book of maps. He tried to read it once but someone had drawn an X on almost every page, which made it very hard to get through.

  Shivers looked wide-eyed at the seemingly endless stack of stories. Then he grabbed the biggest, most colorful book in sight. “Oooh, this one is pretty! Maybe we can find something useful in here.”

  Margo looked over his shoulder. “Shivers, that’s just a book of fairy tales.”

  “AAAAAAGHH!” Shivers screamed. “I didn’t know fairies had tails! That’s disgusting!”

  The librarian whipped around the corner of the bookshelf. “Silence!”

  “He’s never been in a library before,” Margo explained. “He doesn’t understand the rules.”

  “Forget the rules, I’m just looking out for my extremely sensitive ears!” the librarian whined. “I hate loud noises! I have ever since I was a small child and my father played the jackhammer.”

  “The jackhammer’s not a musical instrument,” said Margo.

  “Exactly,” the librarian said, her shoulders slumped. “And I’m not even a real librarian, I just needed to work somewhere quiet.” She turned on Shivers. “And you’re ruining that! If this section is too scary for you, why don’t you try a picture book?” She grabbed one from a nearby shelf and handed it to Shivers. But it wasn’t just a picture book. It was a pop-up book.

  Shivers opened it and the pictures practically pounced off the page. Shivers screamed, flinging the book wildly across the library.

  The librarian shook her tiny fist in the air and screamed, “BE QUIET!!!” The volume of her own voice made her cringe and cover her ears with her hands. “My ears! My precious ears!” she cried softly, then ran to her desk, where she kept a jar of cotton balls to stuff in her ears in case of emergency.

  Shivers shuddered. “I didn’t realize libraries were so dangerous.”

  Margo shook her head. “Before you, I didn’t realize a lot of places were so dangerous. Come on, we’re in the wrong section.”

  Margo, Shivers, and Albee snaked through the shelves until they reached the nonfiction section. Margo scanned the subjects. “Pilots, Pinwheels, Piranhas . . . Pistachios? No, we’ve gone too far. Here we go. Pirates!”

  Margo got up on tiptoe to check out the small collection of books. A worn, leather-bound book caught her eye. Immediately, she knew it was the pirate book she’d been looking for. It was called The Pirate Book You’ve Been Looking For. As she pulled it off the shelf, Shivers and Albee admired the gold letters on the pale green cover.

  The book was divided into three sections. “Pirate Heroes,” Margo read, “Pirate Zeros, and Pirate Curses.” She flipped to the last section and found the entry on Quincy Thomas the Pirate.

  She began to read aloud, “Quincy Thomas the Pirate terrorized the Seven Seas with his blood-crusted sword and ugly face. One day, he attacked a pirate crew on their brand-new ship. He was about to brutally slaughter the entire crew when they began to cry. Their tears made a puddle on the deck. Quincy slipped on the puddle and fell to his death. Now, on the day a pirate gets a brand-new ship, if he lets a drop of water touch the deck, he’ll be cursed by the ghost of Quincy Thomas.”

  When Margo looked up from reading, she saw that Shivers and Albee were curled up in a ball on the floor. “That’s the scariest story I’ve ever heard,” Shivers stammered. “What happens when you’re cursed?”

  Margo read on, but decided it was probably not a good idea to read out loud anymore. As she read to herself, the color drained from her face. Finally she shut the book and turned to Shivers.

  “Well, the good news is there is one way to break the curse. You have to plunder a piece of treasure and bring it to Quincy Thomas’s grave on the Cape of Cods.”

  “That sounds like bad news,” Shivers moaned. “What’s the badder news?”

  Margo bit her lip. “If you don’t succeed, the ghost of Quincy Thomas will hunt you down and eat you before your next birthday.”

  Shivers’s eyes popped with panic. “Margo,” he said, “My next birthday is tomorrow.”

&n
bsp; Then he opened his mouth to scream louder than he had ever screamed in his whole life.

  BY THE TIME MARGO got Shivers to stop screaming, the librarian had quit her job and run off to work at a mime school. Margo scooped him up from his meltdown and hurried him out into the hallway with her eye toward the exit.

  “What am I going to do? And how am I going to do it? I only have one day before I’m eaten by a ghost!” Shivers cried.

  “You’re not going to get eaten by a ghost. We just have to find some treasure and make our way to the Cape of Cods!” Margo said excitedly.

  “How am I supposed to find treasure?” he groaned.

  Margo was already two steps ahead of him. “Tie up a pirate crew and jab them with swords until gold falls from their pockets!”

  “Did you say jab?!” Shivers squeaked, gnawing at his fingernails.

  “Or we could swim into the belly of a man-eating whale and hope he ate someone who was carrying treasure!”

  “Did you say swim?!” Shivers balked.

  “Or we could load ourselves into a giant cannon, point it toward a dark cave, and then—”

  “STOP!” Shivers screamed, mostly because he didn’t want to hear the end of the idea but also because he had spotted something glimmering at the end of the hall. He ran toward it and skidded to a halt. “Look! There’s treasure right here!” He was staring up at the school’s trophy case.

  Shivers was overwhelmed with the options. There was a golden statue for first place in football, a silver goblet for second place in soccer, and a shiny plaque that said, To the Chess Team—You should really consider checkers.

  Shivers grabbed the hinges of the glass doors and pried them open. He grabbed the first trophy in sight, but it was made of plastic. They were all made of plastic!

  Then he heard the sharp shriek of a whistle, followed by a voice barking, “You’re busted, buster! Back away from the case!”

  Shivers turned around and saw a skinny little stick of a kid huffing toward him, carrying a yellow notebook and wearing an orange sash.

  Margo’s big green eyes bulged like baked eggs. “The Hall Monitor!”

  “The Hall Monitor?” Shivers backed away from the trophies with his hands held high. “What’s that? Are we going to Hall Jail?!”

  “No, but I will write you a yellow slip,” said the Hall Monitor, holding his pen above the page threateningly.

  “What does that do?” Shivers asked.

  “No one knows!” said Margo. “Run!”

  As Margo, Shivers, and Albee charged around the corner, they heard the Hall Monitor bellow, “It goes on your permanent record!”

  They bounded into the front lobby, past the stuffed jaguar, and out the front doors. The rain had stopped, and the playground was packed with kindergartners running around wildly and screaming at the top of their lungs.

  Shivers braced himself and looked around in fear. “Margo, what’s going on? There must be an emergency! You save these kids; I’ll run and hide. Albee, you supervise.”

  “It’s just recess,” Margo explained, shaking her head in disbelief.

  “Is Recess the name of an angry bear?!” Shivers recoiled.

  Before Margo even knew where to begin, a little girl in pink overalls ran up to Shivers and smacked him on the knee.

  “You’re It!” she shouted, and then ran away.

  Shivers suddenly looked more uncomfortable than a cow doing a cartwheel. “I’m . . . It?” he said with utter confusion.

  Margo could see that Shivers was nearing a gold-medal meltdown. She snatched Albee from his hands to protect him from any flailing.

  Shivers began to pull at his hair. “What does that mean? What is It? What am I? HOW AM I IT?’”

  “They’re playing tag and you’re It,” Margo said.

  “I’m not It, I’m Shivers! I’m a human boy!”

  Margo threw up her hands in frustration and sighed. “Shivers, you don’t get it.”

  “I have to get It?! I thought I was It!” Shivers clutched his cheeks. “Margo, if you don’t start making sense, I’m going to throw an It fit!”

  “All It means is that you’re the one who’s supposed to chase after everybody!”

  “Ohhh.” Shivers finally understood. “Well, that’s a problem because I don’t chase. I get chased.”

  The gaggle of kindergartners was staring at Shivers expectantly, ready to run.

  “You’d better tag someone, otherwise they’ll never let us get out of here. Kindergartners . . .” Margo shuddered. “They’re not kind. And they don’t garden.”

  Shivers took one lousy lunge toward them and they all leaped backward, screaming with delight. He gingerly followed a particularly slow blond boy onto the jungle gym. But just as Shivers had almost caught up, the boy decided to take the slide down. And there was no way Shivers was getting on that death trap.

  Margo was starting to worry that they would waste their whole day here. She had already wasted enough of her day at school. If they were ever going to make it to the Cape of Cods, she was going to have to get Shivers out of the sandbox. There had to be a way to make these kids stand still.

  But how? she thought.

  Then, suddenly, the answer came in the form of a question.

  “Hey!” Margo yelled as loud as she could. “Who here likes pepperoni pizza?!”

  The kindergartners stopped in their tracks and raised their hands high in the air. Shivers saw opportunity knocking—well, more like holding its hand up for a high five. He ran down the line of kids, high-fiving each of them with a satisfying smack.

  The kindergartners were so confused. “Everyone is It!” they shouted as they chased each other in circles. Margo, Shivers, and Albee ran across the yard and out of the gate.

  SHIVERS AND MARGO SAT on the captain’s deck of Shivers’s new ship. He couldn’t believe that he was already taking it out on a dangerous mission.

  As the ship splashed over the surf, Shivers whined, “Margo, turn around and head back to the beach! This ship is called the Groundhog, not the Waterhog!”

  “Which is scarier? Sailing on the open sea,” Margo said as she held out one hand, “or getting eaten by an ugly pirate ghost on your birthday?” She held out the other hand.

  “Is there a third hand?” Shivers asked hopefully.

  Margo shook her head.

  “Okay, point taken,” Shivers said. Normally he hated taking anything pointy, but he had to admit Margo was right. So he did the only thing he could do at a time like this. He leaned over the railing and puked. “Now that that’s over with, which way do we go?”

  Margo pulled the pirate book out of her backpack and turned to the last page, which was a detailed map of the Eastern Seas. The Cape of Cods jutted into the sea, far north of New Jersey Beach. On the map, it looked like a bony finger beckoning them toward it.

  “That’s where we’re going?” Shivers said in disgust. “It’s the ugliest cape I’ve ever seen. And I know capes.”

  “We can make it up there before the end of the day, but we’re going to have to move fast,” Margo said, spinning the helm to steer the ship north. “And we’re going to have to be prepared.” Margo flipped through the pirate book to the section on Quincy Thomas. She had to make sure they knew all the details. “Now, where was I? Oh right, the part where you die tomorrow.”

  Shivers screamed.

  “Sorry,” said Margo. Then she ran her finger down the page until she got to a section titled “So You Think You’re Cursed?” She read it aloud:

  “Here’s a handy list of signs that you are one-hundred-percent definitely cursed by the ghost of Quincy Thomas the Pirate:

  You will smell his foul odor everywhere you go.

  You will start to become as violent and merciless as he was.

  There is no 3. You’ll be dead by then.”

  “AAAAGGH! Margo, why did you tell me that?!” Shivers wailed.

  “It’s better to know than to be in the dark,” she said.

  �
�Hm . . . I do hate the dark.”

  “Exactly! Now if we start to see any of those signs, we’ll know the ghost is getting closer. And in the meantime, we have to plunder some treasure!” Margo said, pumping her fist in the air.

  “Could you not sound so excited about it?” Shivers groaned.

  Margo couldn’t help it. She was overjoyed to be on a real pirate plundering mission. “Plundering treasure is as easy as pie.”

  Shivers narrowed his eyes. “Have you ever tried to actually make a pie? It’s extremely difficult.”

  “Okay, then. It’s a piece of cake!”

  “Margo, you know I can’t eat cake! I get C-sick!”

  Margo couldn’t stop herself from laughing. “Come on, let me teach you how to plunder.” She climbed the ladder down to the song and dance deck, where they would have more room.

  “Oh this is going to go well,” said Albee.

  But before Albee’s bubbles reached the surface, Shivers scooped up Albee’s bag in one hand and a bowl of popcorn he’d been munching on in the other. Then he followed gingerly behind Margo.

  “There are all sorts of ways to plunder treasure,” Margo began. “One is by force.”

  “What does that—”

  Shivers never got a chance to finish his question because Margo was already charging at him like an angry waterhog. She pried the popcorn bowl from his hands with such strength and speed that by the time he figured out what was going on, Margo was already on the other side of the deck, triumphantly throwing popcorn in the air like kernels of confetti.

  “Hey, that was my after-school snack!” Shivers whined.

  “You don’t go to school,” said Margo.

  “I did today,” he argued. “It was my first after-school snack ever.”

  Margo thought that plundering by force was not going to be Shivers’s strong suit. She handed the bowl back to him. “Another way to plunder treasure is by threatening.” She opened up the mop closet and scooped a skinny stack of mops under her arm. Then she pointed at Albee and in her most gravelly growl said, “Give me that fish or all these mops are going overboard.”