Pennybaker School Is Revolting Read online

  “A basketball team, of course,” he said. “It being basketball season and all.”

  I tossed and caught the new quarter a few times. “So what does this basketball team have to do with your plans?”

  “A little research turned up a very tasty little factoid about our absent educator.”

  I squinted at him. “Are you talking about something to eat?” I tossed the quarter. It bounced off Chip’s palm and rolled under the machine.

  “I’m talking about finding Mr. Faboo.” He dropped and crawled under the machine to retrieve the coin, but I simply dug a new one out of the cup. Chip crawled out. A spiderweb was stuck to his hair. “Turns out he has a bit of extra employment on the side.”

  “He’s a coach?”

  “Nope. He’s a mascot.”

  I stopped, the flipper frozen in the up position. The ball whizzed by and thunked into the gutter again. “Huh?”

  “He’s a pioneer,” he clarified. “Well, an imaginary pioneer. He dresses in costume and dances around on the court to entertain the crowd. Sometimes he dances with the cheerleaders or does little stunts. I’ve read that a mascot can even sometimes shoot T-shirts out of a gun. I’m having a hard time believing that a T-shirt would fit in a musket barrel, but—”

  “I know what a mascot is, Chip,” I said. The machine beeped at me, letting me know that it was waiting, but I ignored it. Envisioning Mr. Faboo dancing around a basketball court and leading cheers was enough for my brain to handle at once.

  “Well, he does enjoy dressing up,” I said, remembering the brown pants and suspenders that Mr. Faboo wore when we talked about the Oregon Trail. He’d mentioned that his dream was to someday own a covered wagon and live on salt meat. I didn’t know what salt meat was, but it sounded to me like if picky Erma lived in pioneer times, she would probably starve to death.

  “Indeed he does. And he must enjoy dancing, too. Perhaps even turning a cartwheel or two.” Chip tapped his chin. “I wonder if he would like to borrow my cartwheel socks.”

  I couldn’t imagine Mr. Faboo dancing, but I supposed anything was possible.

  “So what’s your plan? Go to a Prairie High basketball game?”

  “Yes.” Chip beamed.

  “And then get to Mr. Faboo?”

  “Yes,” he said again.

  “How?”

  “That’s the brilliant part of my plan,” he said. “We can’t expect to be allowed down onto the court as two fans, although I did consider faking an illness or perhaps telling the gatekeepers that we’re cousins of the point guard—but I decided there’s no reason to test karma with deceit. I know a lot of people don’t believe in karma. In fact, many people believe that—”

  “Chip! Focus!” I said, placing my palms on his cheeks and forcing him to look at me. He dropped the quarter he’d been holding, and it rolled back under the pinball machine.

  “Yes, of course. Focused,” he said, only I was kind of squishing his cheeks a little, so it sounded like, “Yesh, of courshe. Focushed.”

  I let go of his cheeks, brushed off his shoulders, and very slowly, very softly asked, “How are we going to get to Mr. Faboo?”

  “Breeches,” he said with confidence.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ve already asked, and my mom will take us to Prairie High. We’re going to dress up and pretend to be spirit leaders. It’s a thing. I looked it up. Apparently, a spirit leader is one who engages the audience—”

  “Crowd,” I corrected.

  “Yes, crowd. Engages the crowd in recitation of various plaudits perpetuated by the cheerleaders.”

  “I know what a spirit leader does—he gets the crowd to go crazy when the team does cool stuff.”

  “Exactly as I said.”

  I didn’t know if that was exactly what he’d said, but I was too busy thinking Chip’s plan through to argue with him. Besides, he pretty much always won arguments about vocabulary.

  “So if I understand you correctly, we’re going to dress up as pioneers, go to the Prairie High basketball game, and pretend to be spirit leaders.”

  “Correct.”

  This was the dumbest plan I’d heard in a long time. Or maybe just since our last dumb plan, which was also pretty dumb. Chip and I sort of specialized in dumb plans. I thought it over. Crashing a high school basketball game was a bold move.

  But it was still better than sitting in detention with boring Mr. Smith.

  “Will I have to wear pantyhose?” I asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “Then I’m in.”

  TRICK #19

  THE RACING BOUQUET WAND

  A click and a whoosh noise woke me up. I blinked at the clock. It was two in the morning. It took me a minute to realize that once again I was cold, and that the noise that had awakened me was the trick I’d planted in my window before I went to bed. I’d collapsed my flower cane and hooked the locking mechanism to the lock on the window using clear thread. When the window was opened, it would unlock the cane, and poof! There would be a beautiful bouquet of feather flowers.

  And hopefully Grandma Jo.

  But when I sat up, there was no Grandma Jo—only the flowers, dangling from the window shade, something stuck to the end of them.

  Quickly, I scrambled out of bed and examined the bouquet. It was sticking right through the center of a piece of paper. I pulled the paper off.

  It had a number on it—308—and the words “Boone County Speedway” written across the top, with a black-and-white checkered flag waving above them.

  Boone County Speedway, number 308?

  “A race car number?” I asked aloud. As if in response, an engine revved outside. I leaned out the window just in time to see a shadowy figure tiptoeing out to a slick-looking car, planting a helmet on its head as it moved along. The figure got into the car and it peeled out, leaving a small cloud of smoke and the rumble of loud rock and roll music behind.

  I closed the window and went back to bed, clutching the paper with the number to my chest.

  TRICK #20

  PICK A DRESS, ANY DRESS

  The next day at school, Chip and I invited Wesley and the others to join us in Prairie City that evening, but each of them had an excuse.

  I have rehearsal.

  I have practice.

  I have to babysit.

  I have to make dinner for my cat’s birthday.

  All the excuses boiled down to one thing—they didn’t want to go. Except maybe the cat one. I was pretty sure that was real.

  “So, Mom,” I said when I got home from school, “would it be okay if I went to a basketball game tonight?”

  Mom was kneeling, the top half of her inside the hall closet, picking up shoes, flipping them over to examine them, and putting them back down. A hunk of hair hung down over her face, and she looked kind of sweaty.

  “I didn’t know Pennybaker had a basketball team,” she said, her voice coming out all closety.

  “We don’t. It’s at Prairie High School.”

  She sat back on her heels and blew the hair out of her eyes. “Huh?”

  “It’s a Prairie High School game,” I repeated.

  “Oh, Thomas, I don’t know. A high school game? You know the kind of things that could go on at a high school game.”

  Actually, I didn’t. Mom had never let me have a High School Adventure before, mostly because she was worried that a High School Adventure would be a Horrible Things Happen to Thomas Adventure and she would maybe have to bail me out of jail or something.

  “Mom, I’ll be with Chip,” I said.

  “Oh.” She thought about it, blew the hair out of her face again, and leaned back inside. “Well, I suppose it’s okay, then.”

  Mom loved Chip. She would pretty much let me go to a chainsaw-sharpening convention wearing a shirt made of broken glass and eating a dead-fly sandwich made by a guy with the flu as long as Chip was going to be with me. I tried not to take it personally, mostly because I was afraid that taking it personal
ly would give her a reason to think things over and maybe change her mind.

  “Thanks!” I said, and started to walk away. Then it occurred to me that she was studying the bottoms of shoes. I turned back. “Hey, Mom?”

  “Yes, Thomas,” she said in her closety voice again, sounding a little aggravated.

  “What are you doing?”

  She sat back on her heels, a shoe in each hand. They were both Grandma Jo’s shoes—one from a pair that Grandma Jo wore when she had to go to a funeral or a fancy dinner like normal grandmas, and one from a pair that I once saw her wear to an archery lesson.

  “Checking shoes,” she said, as if that made total sense. I must have made a face that told her it didn’t make total sense at all, because she rolled her eyes, let out an exasperated breath, and held the soles of the shoes up for me to see. “I’m checking the bottoms of your grandmother’s shoes to see if any of them have fresh dirt on the bottom.”

  “Why?”

  Mom leaned toward me. If she was a cartoon, her eyes would have had swirls in them. “Because she’s up to something, I just know it. And she’s not doing it barefoot.”

  I didn’t know why Mom would assume that Grandma Jo wouldn’t get into an adventure while barefoot.

  Mom squinted one eye at me in her best I’m Getting to the Bottom of This Adventure look. “You don’t know anything about what she might be up to, do you, Thomas?”

  I remembered the figure I’d seen in the middle of the night, hurrying away from my window and hopping into the race car. That person was definitely wearing shoes. Boots, actually. But I didn’t think it was a good time to share that with Mom. Mostly because I was having fun trying to catch Grandma Jo in the act, and if Mom shut Grandma Jo down, she would be shutting me down, too.

  “Nope.”

  She sagged a little, then bent back into the closet. “Have a good time at the game. And be careful. And eat something before you go!”

  I threw on my jacket, raced into the kitchen, and stuck a hot dog in the microwave. Grandma Jo was sitting in front of the TV playing solitaire again. While my hot dog cooked, I crept into the living room.

  “Well, hello, Thomas,” Grandma Jo said, laying down a two of clubs. “Going out tonight?”

  I locked my eyes on hers. “Are you?”

  She gathered the cards together and shuffled them, then began laying them out again. “Nope, can’t say that I am. Just watching a little TV here.” She gestured to the television. I leaned forward to see what she was watching. Tiny cars roared around a racetrack.

  “Car races?” I said, more to myself than to her, but before she could respond, Erma bounced into the room.

  “There you are! Don’t go anywhere,” she said.

  The microwave beeped, and I went to it. “I’m going to a basketball game with Chip,” I said over my shoulder.

  “But you can’t,” she said, following me.

  “Mom said I could.”

  “But you can’t,” she repeated. “Sissy’s coming over.”

  I grabbed a slice of bread and quickly wrapped it around my hot dog. I definitely needed to get out of there before Sissy arrived. “Sorry,” I said. I took a huge bite out of my hot dog and hurried toward the front door. “Gotta go.” Only my mouth was full, so it sounded like, “Gorra gor.”

  “You haven’t even learned your dance at all yet. Thomas! Mom!”

  I didn’t look back; I just lunged out the front door before my stomach started in again.

  Chip was standing at the top of his steps, looking way too uneasy for everything to be okay.

  “What?” I asked, slowing with every step. With Chip, you never knew whether he looked uneasy because he had accidentally tromped on an anthill and was feeling guilty for decimating an entire ant universe or because something was really wrong.

  “Don’t get mad,” he said.

  So something was really wrong.

  “What?” I asked again, swallowing the last of my hot dog, which suddenly didn’t want to go down. “Are we not going? Because if we aren’t, I have to lay low over here for a little while. I’ll teach you how to burn a dollar bill without actually burning it.” Chip was always bribe-able with the promise of learning a magic trick.

  “No, no, we’re going,” he said. “It’s just … Follow me.”

  It was never good when Chip was talking like a normal kid. I didn’t want to, but I followed him inside his house and up to his bedroom, where a mess of clothes was scattered on his bed. Nothing really looked that out of the ordinary. Of course, that was mostly because Chip didn’t do ordinary, so everything looked out of the ordinary. It made sense in a converse sort of way.

  “Okay, so what’s the deal?” I asked.

  He went to the bed, picked up a wad of clothes, and held it up, letting it unfurl in front of him. It was a long pink dress with little white flowers on it.

  “A dress?” I still didn’t understand what the problem was, until he dropped it and shook out a second, blue, dress. That one had ruffles on the shoulders. “Oh no.” I shook my head. “No, no, no.”

  “Just bear with me,” he said, dropping the blue dress and coming toward me, arms outstretched as if to stop me from running.

  “No way, Chip. When you said pioneer clothes, I thought you meant man clothes.”

  “I did,” he said. “But unfortunately, the only garb I was able to secure on such short notice is of the feminine variety.”

  I pointed in his face. “That means you want us to dress like girls.”

  “No, I don’t want us to. It just happens that we have no choice in the matter.”

  “Correction. You have no choice in the matter. I’m not putting that on.” I kicked at the pink dress.

  “Of course not, of course not!” he said, bending to pick up the two dresses. “I never expected you to.” He pressed the blue dress against my chest. “Pink is a much more suitable match to my skin color than to yours.”

  “I’ll just wear this,” I said, pointing at my jeans, refusing to take the dress.

  “And get turned away by security. You will never pass as a pioneer in that ridiculous getup.”

  I glanced down at my “ridiculous getup,” which just happened to be my normal clothes. This from the guy holding a Laura Ingalls Wilder outfit.

  “Come on, Thomas. It’s for an hour at most. Don’t you want to solve the Great Faboo Mystery?”

  “The what?”

  “The Mystery of the Disappearance of Faboo.”

  “No. Chip. Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Title our … whatever this is.”

  “It’s a mystery. You said so yourself.”

  “I meant more of a … curiosity.”

  “The Mystery of the Lost Professor.”

  “No.”

  “The Skedaddled Scholar?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  He held the dress toward me again. I stared at it. “It’s just fabric,” he said. “We have to do this if we want to get onto that court.”

  I stared at the blue dress for a few seconds longer and then sighed and snatched the garment out of his hands. “Fine. But there better be a hat in there somewhere, because we are never going to pass for girls.”

  “Fear not!” he said, poking one finger to the sky. He practically dove onto his bed and came up with something white and frilly.

  “What is …”

  He wrapped the white frilly thing over his head and tied it with a big bow under his chin.

  “Bonnets!” he crowed. As if that was a good thing.

  We were silent as we climbed into our dresses and aprons and bonnets. Chip insisted that we roll our pant legs up to our knees and put on lace-up boots that made my feet feel like they were being strangled. “For authenticity,” he’d said.

  Finally, we stood side by side in the mirror, looking at ourselves.

  “Your dress fits better,” I said, plucking at my waist. “Mine is all baggy here.” I yanked up the dress and stud
ied my feet. “And my shoes don’t match at all. I should be wearing those cream-colored ones, and you should be wearing these …” I trailed off as I realized what I was saying. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  We went downstairs and found Chip’s mom, who was wearing sporty jeans and a sweatshirt. She squealed with delight when she saw us, and immediately ran for her camera. I gave Chip a death glare while she was gone.

  “Aren’t you two just the cutest little things?” she said, snapping away. “Oh, Thomas. Your shoes are just adorable.” Great. Exactly what I wanted to be: the cutest and adorable—and caught on camera for the whole world to see.

  After what seemed like nine hundred thousand photos, she finally put her camera away and shouldered her purse.

  “Should we go?”

  “Absolutely!” Chip said, sounding way too cheerful for a guy who was about to have to sit with his knees together for a whole car ride.

  Chip sang a bunch of goofy songs about valleys and starlight and some dog named Tray, and for a while it felt like Prairie High was on the other side of the earth rather than just on the other side of town.

  “Why don’t you sing something normal?” I asked as we pulled onto the highway.

  “This is normal for the eighteen hundreds. I figure if we’re going to act the part, we might as well be authentic.”

  I picked up a handful of skirt and waved it at him. “This isn’t authentic enough for you?”

  He rubbed the fabric between his finger and thumb. “Well, technically, not really. This dress is made of cotton, and it really should be wool or linen, as those were the predominant textiles available at the time.” I gave him a look. He shrugged. “What? You asked.”

  “No, I was not asking about what type of textures dresses were made of in the eighteen hundreds.”

  “Textiles,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Textiles,” he repeated. “You said ‘textures,’ and while it’s true that varying textiles do have varying textures, the word you were searching for was definitely ‘textiles.’ ”

  I stared at him, then turned to look out the window.

  Before he could get to the end of a song about firelight, we pulled into the Prairie High School parking lot. And it was only then that it really sank in that I was about to walk into a high school full of rowdy teenagers while wearing a floor-length dress and a bonnet. I stared out the window in horror as Chip bounded from the car.