Hunter Moran Hangs Out (10 page)

“Kidnapper?” Becca yells. “Has Linny been kidnapped? I didn't believe her when she told me.”

Yulefski runs her teeth over her Rice Chex–filled braces. “You didn't kidnap Fred?”

Becca's still yelling. “Not Sister Appolonia? Not Linny?”

“Fred,” I say.

Becca slaps her head. “Who'd steal that dog?”

We all look at each other.

We don't have a clue.

. . . to the classroom where we'll spend the rest of the year in captivity.

We're trying to think of books we might have read before Sister Appolonia gets hold of us.

“There was that girl,” Zack says. “Something about a pest?”

“We used her in a report last year,” I say. “Or maybe the year before. Or maybe even—”

“There's always that spider, or the kid on the prairie.” Zack snaps his fingers. “And what about that rabbit hole business?”

I shake my head. Did we read all that?

And there's Yulefski again, leaning against the brick wall, reading. She waves three fingers at us.

Sister Appolonia stands at the head of the stairs. She's not interested in our reading right now. She's interested in our dragging a hundred books up from the storeroom and moving her thousand-pound desk from one side of the room to the other. She's interested in our washing the
chalkboard, dusting the tables, and watering the half-dead plants, while she disappears somewhere.

We're standing at the windowsill, taking a rest, when we spot the new kid, Alex, coming out of the used-to-be-empty house. He's pulling along a Gussie's Gym bag that moves, and sways, and bulges.

Bent over like an old man, the kid sneaks across the street. But now something is happening to the bag; it's growing a hole. What appears is a brown weasel face with a set of choppers that are sharper than the teeth of the rats in Gussie's basement.

Fred!

The kid turns and sees what's going on in the bag as Fred wiggles out and heads for home.

“Go, boy!” Zack and I yell together.

The kid gives chase, and the two of them dash across the school lawn.

We shove up the window and poke our heads out as far as we can, but we can't see where they are.

There's only one thing to do. We climb out on the ledge, which is about four inches wide, and teeter there, two stories up, yelling, “Stop, thief!”

The kid looks up at us and keeps going around the corner. We keep going, too . . .

. . . along the ledge, holding on to the cement walls and the windows in between. We come to the corner, where we
can see the schoolyard, the basketball hoop, the handball court.

Fred and the kid are at the next corner. Which way are they going?

“Hold on, feet,” I tell myself. I lean out an inch, and then another.

My feet don't listen.

I feel it. I'm falling, my arms circling around like windmills. Zack's fingers pluck at my T-shirt.

Too late.

“Yeow!”
Yulefski yells.

The wind whistles as I sail through the air, down and down, and at the last minute, grab . . .

. . . the basketball hoop.

I hang out in the wind with screws and bolts popping out of the hoop. Zack looks as if he's going to faint.

The kid stares up, mouth open. “Hang on!” he yells.

Fred sinks one of his choppers into the kid's ankle, and halfway across the street, Bradley the Bully stops, one foot in the air. “Amaathing!” he lisps, looking at me.

Sister Appolonia comes across the yard and stands under the hoop, arms out like giant hams. “Drop,” she says in a voice not to be fooled with.

Another bolt pops. I close my eyes and let go.
“Yeeooooow!”

Oof
. I'm folded into Sister Appolonia's arms. Above me,
Zack sits on the ledge, his face the color of the eggshells we feed the worms.

“Suppose you finish the classroom before the twenty-third century,” Sister Appolonia suggests, and leaves me to catch my breath.

We're almost ready to work, but not yet.
“Komazahere!”
I yell.

Fred barrels toward me, doing somersaults, head over heels. He lands on my shoulders, takes a nip out of my neck, and wags what little tail he has.

“You're the kidnapper,” I say to Alex.

He shakes his head. “I've been looking for a girl. I think she owns him. What's her name? Lillian? Lenore? Something like that.”

“Linny!”

“Right. But I haven't seen her anywhere. I just rescued the dog from—” He breaks off and points.

And here comes Bradley, mooching himself across the street. “That wath thome dive,” he lisps. I can hear the admiration in his voice.

Fred froths at the mouth as if he's going to tear Bradley to pieces.

I telescope myself to the fullest height I can manage. “I do lots of stuff like that,” I say with a bully-type face.

Bradley takes a step back. “I wath going to borrow the dog for a couple of dayth,” he says. “I wanted to win that
animal conteth at Guthieth. Thikth buckth, you know? I'm tired of pulling the window in and out every night.”

“Thickth!” a voice says behind us. It's Yulefski, of course. “That's it! He meant
six
! It's the voice I heard in Vinny's Vegetables. He must have been talking to himself. And the third clue, the hand, the bandage.” She looks as if she's solved the mystery single-handed.

Sure.

I turn to Bradley.

Zack comes along in time to hear me warn him. “Don't give us any more trouble,” I say, knees trembling. “Otherwise . . .” I run my finger across my throat. “Toast!”

“Yeah,” Zack says from behind me.

Bradley nods earnestly. “Don't worry.”

Zack and I finish cleaning the classroom with one detour. We deliver Fred to Steadman, who is overjoyed.

For once, Linny smiles at us. “As Steadman would say,
notobado
,” she says.

Only one problem is left. We have to read three books that will change our lives in less than a day.

Mom stands at the front door with K.G. in her arms and Mary leaning against her legs. “Bye-bye,” Mary calls; Mom smiles at us and waves. Pop is smiling, too. He loves the first day of school. K.G. just screams, but that's all right; she's looking good.

We head down the street together, Linny, William, Zack, me, and Steadman for the first time. Fred follows until Steadman gives him a
“Gozahome.”
Fred turns, skinny tail down, and trots back to the front door.

Next to me, Linny smells like perfume. It's from the A. Ransom Company. Becca gave it to her for an early birthday present. “Everyone is getting some,” Becca says. “Didn't your mother get the letter? This is the one.”

She waves the letter around.

I look down at it.
Kids: Want to look like more than $1,000,000? Different from all the others? Line up from attic to cellar. Try New You Perfume from the A. Ransom Company
.

There's more, but I don't bother to read the rest. It's definitely the kidnap letter.

Sheesh.

“Actually, it's not so bad to go back to school,” Zack says, and yawns.

I yawn, too. We've been up all night, reading. Sentence after sentence. Page after page. Amazing. The books we brought home were all about worms.

Everyone else was up all night, too. K.G. sleeps about twenty minutes at a time. Then Mary chimes in. Fred barks whenever anyone goes near Steadman's door at night. He's not going to be kidnapped a second time.

But I'm thinking about the worm books. Did they change our lives? Maybe not yet, but soon. We're entering the worms in the Gussie's Gym Pet Contest. They squirm, they wiggle. They actually might do backflips.

I think they have a chance at winning.

I look back at Werewolf Woods and the pond. Bradley says it's a great fishing spot. He's been scaring everyone away, but because Zack and I are so tough, he's invited us to go with him.

Maybe we'll catch something.

Maybe not.

We go to school, happy.

But then . . .

Instead of reading, we have to write what we did during our summer vacation.

Boring.

Actually, we didn't do anything. We might have to make the whole thing up. A work of fiction, as Sister Appolonia would say.

Patricia Reilly Giff is the author of many highly acclaimed books for children, including
Lily's Crossing
, a Newbery Honor Book and
Boston Globe
–Horn Book Honor Book,
Pictures of Hollis Woods
, a Newbery Honor Book; and
Don't Tell the Girls: A Family Memoir
. An avid reader as a child she was also a reading teacher in New York City public schools for twenty years. She writes, “All of my books are based in some way on my personal experiences, or the experiences of members of my family, or the stories kids would tell me in school.” She now lives in Connecticut with her husband Jim.