Pennybaker School Is Revolting Page 6

  “But that’s not fair,” I said.

  “Okay, Mr. Fallgrout,” Mr. Smith said. “Since you seem so interested in fairness, I’ll be expecting the same paper from you.”

  “What? You can’t—”

  “Due next Friday.”

  “But—”

  “Now, everyone go grab a textbook and turn to page fifty-three. We’ll begin there, and then we’ll discuss these essays.”

  We shuffled toward the dusty, spiderwebby shelf, all looking at one another as if something horrible had just happened. And, in a way, it had.

  “When Mr. Faboo finds out about this, he isn’t going to like it one bit,” Wesley whispered as we bent to pick up our books.

  But then Flea whispered what we were all thinking but were afraid to say. “Let’s just face it—Mr. Faboo really isn’t coming back.”

  Thirty minutes later, the bell rang, and we all bolted, many of us leaving our textbooks on our desks, the pages fluttering in our wakes. I had no idea what page I was even on. I’d spent most of my class time thinking—about the essays, about the extra assignment that Chip and I now had to do.

  About revolutions.

  That was it. We were thinking too small. Finding Mr. Faboo was a big job, and if we intended to get it done, we needed to all-out revolt.

  “Can you believe he did that to us?” I railed, catching up with Chip in the hallway. “So not fair.”

  “Agreed. Mr. Faboo would have never assigned such a paper,” Chip said. “He would have known that you can’t sum up eight years of bloody battle in just five pages. Eight years of fighting against oppression, of yearning for freedom. Of refusing to bow to the crown. The American spirit! The foundation of our democracy! The very insurrection that this country was built upon! In five pages? I’ll need at least twenty.”

  “Chip. Focus,” I said, grabbing his arm and turning him to face me. “We’re not writing those papers.”

  “We’ve been assigned,” he said, confused. “He didn’t mention it being optional.”

  “We’re not doing it, because we’re going to have our own revolution.”

  “We are?”

  I nodded, putting my arm around him and walking toward the door. “We’re going to fight against our own oppressor. We’re going to fight against Mr. Smith.”

  “But how? I’m afraid I don’t even own a pair of revolution socks.”

  I stopped and turned him to face me again. “We’re going to find Mr. Faboo and get him back.”

  “Hey, Thomas! Thomas!” Chip was hurrying to catch up with me after the next class. “Look what I found.” He held out a postcard. “A clue!”

  I took it from him and studied it. “Boone County History-Lovers Society? Where did you find it?”

  “In Mr. Faboo’s desk drawer,” he said proudly. “I clandestinely snuck in and snatched it when Mr. Smith went to the restroom.” He beamed.

  “You stole it?”

  “I found it.” His face clouded over. “You’re right. I should return it.” He took it from my hand, his shoulders sagging guiltily. “I was just so excited to be sleuthing with you again.”

  “It’s okay, Chip,” I said, taking the postcard back. “So what are we supposed to do with it?”

  His toothy smile returned. “I figured we could look up the events calendar for the Boone County History-Lovers Society and go to a meeting. Surely Mr. Faboo will be there. And then we can get to the bottom of this whole debacle.”

  I wasn’t sure what a debacle was. But I was sure of two things—Chip was kind of a genius, and his plan was perfect.

  TRICK #10

  THE WEB OF TEXTBOOK

  “Good news,” Chip said the next day, sidling up to me as we walked to Four Square class. “As of last evening, I am a card-carrying member of the Boone County History-Lovers Society. I have my sights set on a leadership role. I have some cutting-edge ideas about properly honoring the founding of Boone County. And, even better news, there is an upcoming event.”

  “What kind of event?” I asked.

  “A Civil War reenactment,” Chip said. I stopped.

  “A what?”

  Chip nodded ferociously. “With rifled muskets and swords and cannons and horses. If Mr. Faboo is the historian I believe him to be, he will be at that reenactment.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep; there’s a battle today, and my mom says she’ll take us.”

  I knew I should have been a little skeptical of Chip’s ideas, because the only place they ever seemed to really get us was into trouble. And embarrassment. I had learned that much when the Heirmauser head went missing.

  But the problem was that Chip’s ideas always sounded really awesome. I mean, what guy doesn’t want to run around a field with a sword, yelling and fighting without actually getting hurt?

  “Okay,” I said, despite my own reservations. “Let’s reenact the Civil War.”

  I’d spent an entire week faking nosebleeds and stomachaches and sore knees. But Coach Abel was getting doubtful about my ailments, so it was time to get creative. I came out of the locker room with my pockets weighed down by ten smoke cartridges, but if I kept my T-shirt untucked and pulled down low, they were mostly hidden.

  Of course, we weren’t supposed to have our T-shirts untucked and pulled down low, so it was the first thing Coach Abel noticed when he saw me.

  “Mr. Fallgrout, would you mind dressing according to the rules?” he asked when I joined my squad for calisthenics.

  I pretended to be confused. “But I’m wearing the standard-issue shorts and shirt, Coach.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But you’re not wearing them correctly.”

  “I’m kind of hot,” I said. “I was thinking since we weren’t playing a contact sport—”

  “Tuck!” he barked, so I tucked.

  I had barely sat down in my squad line when Chip Mason leaned back. “What’s in your pockets?” he asked.

  My hands immediately flew to my sides. “Nothing.”

  “Granted, I’m not wearing my telepathic socks, because they’re not part of the approved physical-education dress code—which, as you’ve just been made aware, is extremely important to our coach—but I can clearly see that there’s something in your pockets. Not in my mind, of course, like a regular telepath would see it, but with my actual eyes. Nearsightedness notwithstanding.” He pushed up his glasses.

  “I thought I told you to stop using the word ‘notwithstanding,’ ” I said.

  Coach trilled on his whistle and told us to get started on sit-ups. We all fell back. I kept my arms at my sides, pressed against my pockets so the smoke cartridges wouldn’t fall out.

  “That’s not how you do it,” Wesley whispered. Like Wesley would know. He was always too busy singing a song from some musical about prisoners to actually do any of the calisthenics.

  “My neck hurts,” I whispered back. “I need to rest it.”

  Chip sat up. “Technically, if it’s your neck that’s aggrieving you, you should lace your hands behind your head to give it support.” He modeled a perfect sit-up for me—one time down, one time up. “Did I say ‘aggrieving’? I would suppose ‘aggravating’ would be a better word. Although ‘aggravating’ assumes a state of mind, and your neck doesn’t possess a mind. Though it does have the very esteemed duty of holding one up. Which is quite ironic, when you think about it.” He laughed.

  “I don’t think about it,” I said. “Nobody but you thinks about it.”

  He went back to his sit-ups.

  “Hey, what’s in your pockets?” Wesley asked, his voice just a little too loud. I shushed him, catching the coach’s attention. He looked up, and we all double-timed our sit-ups until he yelled out, “Push-ups, gentlemen,” and looked down again.

  “If you must know,” I whispered, flipping over, “it’s a magic trick.”

  “Cool,” Wesley said. “Can I see it?”

  “You will, okay? Be patient.”

  We finished our calisthenics, ran w
arm-up laps, and waited for the girls to arrive. The chatter got loud as everyone paired off with their dance partners and found a spot on the gym floor with room to move. I stayed rooted to my spot, hoping that maybe Sissy Cork was absent. Or had quit school altogether. Maybe moved out of state. Or to the moon. And took her ballroom dance with her.

  No such luck. “You ready?” She had come up behind me. I jumped and whirled around. Her arms were crossed, and she looked about as excited about dancing as I did. “You ready to dance or what?”

  “What,” I answered, but she had already taken my hand and begun pulling me to a vacant spot on the floor. I pressed my arms to my sides, hoping the cartridges wouldn’t rattle when I walked. Once again, my stomach heaved.

  “What’s your deal?” she asked. “Why are you walking all stiff like that?”

  “No reason,” I said. “I think I pulled something in my back.”

  “Oh. I’ve done that before at a strong-man competition. You know what they say about sore muscles—the best way to make them feel better is to move them.”

  “She’s right,” Chip said, as he and Patrice whirled by. Chip was dancing like someone who’d been doing it his whole life, and the music hadn’t even started yet. “It’s the lactic acid released during strenuous activity. Interesting thing about lactic acid …” He kept talking, but Patrice had danced him out of earshot.

  “Okay, friends!” the girls’ dance coach hollered, clapping her hands together three times. “Let’s get started.” She reached over and pushed a button. The music started, and everyone began moving, all eyes on Chip to lead them.

  The timing was perfect.

  “You ready?” Sissy asked, holding out her arms.

  All I had to do was …

  “Hello, Earth to Thomas.”

  Slip my hand into my pocket …

  “I’m not going to stand around waiting all day.”

  Grab a cartridge, squeeze the two sides together, and …

  There was a long, loud farting noise that made my shorts shiver. Everyone stopped and looked over. The noise was followed by a thin contrail of smoke rising from my backside.

  Darn it. That was what I got for using smoke cartridges that had been in a trunk for ten years.

  Sissy Cork started to cough, waving her hand in front of her face. “Gross! Did you just—?”

  “You guys!” Buckley shouted. “Thomas just ripped one!” He pointed at the smoke. “And it’s smoking!”

  “No,” I said, reaching into my pocket. “It wasn’t me.”

  Sissy coughed again and turned away. “I can’t believe you, Thomas Fallgrout.”

  “It was a smoke cartridge!” I said, pulling out one of the cartridges. The movement set off another cartridge, and a louder, longer fart noise erupted.

  The entire class burst into laughter. Except for Sissy Cork, who crossed her arms and stormed off to the girls’ locker room.

  Well, at least the trick was successful.

  TRICK #11

  CAMP CONFUSION

  On the way to the reenactment camp, Chip’s mom told us all kinds of stories about the Civil War. She told us about a brave slave named Robert Smalls, who stole a Confederate steamship called the CSS Planter and delivered it to the Union Navy. She told us about Belle Boyd, who was an amazing Confederate spy. And she told us that 620,000 men died in the Civil War, but a lot of them died from mumps, measles, and malaria rather than gunfire.

  Chip was a lot like his mom.

  In fact, Chip’s mom was planning to join us in the reenactment. She knew a guy who used to be friends with Chip’s grandpa Old Huck Mason, and he told her she could be the camp cook. I didn’t know why anyone would want to cook with all that awesome battling going on all around, but she seemed really happy to get such a fun job.

  The camp was bustling with guys in uniforms, guys in ratty clothes, guys with horses, guys with soot on their faces, guys chewing straw, guys drinking out of Aquafina bottles when nobody was looking, guys doing pretty much everything you could think of. The camp was also filled with women who were cooking things over open fires and shaking out dusty blankets and sewing buttons onto jackets. The air was crisp with burning, crackling wood, and rang with the whinnying of anxious horses tied to trees.

  Chip’s mom’s friend greeted us outside his tent. He was old and craggy and looked a lot like Huck Mason, except not quite as sick. Chip’s mom called him Bud.

  “Welcome, welcome, y’all,” he crowed, climbing out of the tent, his hands extended to each of us. He gave Chip’s mom a quick hug and called her Gert—which was weird, because I thought her name was Sherry—and then clapped Chip and me on the back and asked if we were ready to go to war. “Come on over here, now,” he said, leading us toward another tent. “We can’t have y’all heading out there in Nikes and Levis, now, can we?”

  “Technically,” Chip said, “Levis weren’t invented until 1873, which makes us just a few years too early for them.”

  “Exactly,” Bud said. “Plus, y’all soldiers need uniforms if you’re going into battle.”

  Bud parted the tent flaps, and we ducked inside. It was more of a teepee than a tent, with furry skins laid out all over the floor and trunks overflowing with supplies lining the walls. Bud knelt with a grunt and began pulling clothes out of one of the trunks and tossing them to us. “Pants, shirt, braces.”

  “Braces?” I asked.

  “Suspenders,” Chip whispered. “The kind that button into your pants instead of clipping on.”

  “Here’s a whole load of socks,” Bud continued, tossing a handful of socks at our feet. “And you’ll need these shirts here. And jackets for you Union folks. Those are hanging up over there.”

  We gazed at a far wall, where three dark-blue military coats hung. They were enormous and would have hung down to our ankles.

  “Technically,” Chip said, “most of the Confederate Army wore regular clothes rather than uniforms. That was one of the things that made them difficult to spot.”

  “You are correct, sir,” Bud said. He clapped Chip’s shoulder twice, and Chip looked really pleased with himself. “Y’all are fightin’ for the South, then. Get dressed and meet me outside for instructions. Battle should begin soon, so don’t dillydally.”

  Bud left the tent, and we scrambled around trying to find the right clothes. Nothing fit. Everything was either way too small or way too big. My gut hung out the bottom of my shirt, and my pants didn’t want to stay up. What was worse, the braces Bud had handed us were all broken. I was forced to hold on to the waistband of my pants as I walked.

  “How am I supposed to go to battle like this?” I asked. “I can’t do everything one-handed.”

  We filed out of the tent, blinking in the sun.

  “Keep your eyes peeled for Mr. Faboo,” I said. I tried to peer under the brim of every hat for a familiar face, but it occurred to me that without his typical white wig and tights, I might not recognize him. He’d never come to class dressed as a Civil War soldier.

  The rest of the camp had already cleared out, and I could see Bud standing with a group of guys off in the distance. He waved me over while a lanky man pulled the bluecoats aside. I jogged to Bud.

  “Okay, now. In a minute, someone will blow a horn. When you hear that horn, you just follow me, and I’ll keep you safe. The last thing you want is to be separated from your unit, you hear?” I nodded. “If someone tells you that you’ve been hit, you need to fall down and keep real still and wait for the battle to be over. But do not get hit. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  I stood there, energy buzzing through me as I contemplated what my plan of action would be. I would storm the front line, sweep around the back, and—

  The horn blasted, and everyone sprang into action, running every which way, shouting orders. Bud had assured us that the guns fired only blanks—no real bullets—but I didn’t expect blanks to be so loud. I jumped every time one went off, and I wasn’t even close to any of them.

&nb
sp; Basically, I was the worst soldier ever. I stood in one place, whipping my head from side to side, trying to figure out what to do or where to go. “Mr. Faboo?” I cried, but my voice was lost in the noise. “Mr. Faboo?”

  “Run!” I heard, and turned just in time to see Chip barreling toward me, holding his hat on his head with both hands, a terrified expression on his face. “Run, man! Forget Faboo! Save yourself!”

  I sprinted past him, though I had no real idea where I was going. I thought I could see Bud ahead of me, but the men had all started to kind of look alike, and when the man turned, he wasn’t Bud at all. I veered left, only to find myself heading right toward another stranger in a blue jacket. I wheeled back the way I’d come and discovered that Chip was gone. I spun in place, breathing heavily, twitching, gripping the waistband of my pants. Everywhere was chaos, and even though I knew this was all fake, a part of me was genuinely scared. It must have been really frightening to actually be on a battlefield.

  “Run!” I heard again, out of nowhere, and Chip whizzed past me, this time going the other way. “Move, move, move!”

  Just as my muscles tensed to make a run for it, there was a huge blast right behind me. I turned to find three men wheeling a cannon in my direction.

  I squealed just like Erma does when something gross touches her, and my feet began churning and my arms pumping without me even telling them to.

  To be honest, I wasn’t sure who exactly won our simulated battle. I only know that I spent the second half of it hiding behind a tree on the edge of the field. A dog found its way to me, and I sat on the ground and scratched its ears while the chaos raged on in the distance. I guessed I wasn’t much of a soldier.

  Don’t get me wrong—Chip wasn’t much better. It was just that he didn’t give up. He continued to race around the field, yelling and running, yelling and running. After a while, a horn sounded, and everyone stopped in place, red-faced and panting, their uniforms soaked through with sweat. They took off their hats and fanned themselves with them. A couple got out their cell phones and answered texts. Finally, a chance to get a good look at faces.