by Tony Abbott
“Shhh!” said Frankie.
“Eight forty-four and thirty seconds,” one of the men said. “Forty seconds … fifty-two seconds … fifty-six … fifty-nine … and—”
Then, a fraction of a second before the clock chimed the quarter hour, the door swung open and Phileas Fogg stepped into the room.
In his calm voice he said, “Here I am, gentlemen.”
Ding! went the clock.
“Ya-hoooooo!” I screamed.
Stunned, the old men quivered and shivered and nearly fainted, but finally they shook Mr. Fogg by the hand, then handed over the money that they’d lost betting against him.
“I have done it in eighty days, gentlemen,” said Fogg, now joined by Aouda and Passepartout. “But I couldn’t have done it at all without my real friends here.”
That was, like, the most amazing thing to hear. Frankie and I started to get all misty ourselves.
“This is a good end to the story,” Frankie said.
“It is awesome,” I said. “But it’s not quite the end.” I pointed to the next paragraph.
Two days later—which really was Monday—we all piled into the Marylebone Church, and Fogg and Aouda became Mr. and Mrs. Phileas Fogg. Passepartout, grinning so big his smile just about covered his ears, gave the bride away. The newlyweds asked Passepartout to stay on forever as their servant and friend.
Of course, he said yes. After about an hour of jumping up and down.
Then, just as the exit music began playing and we were all leaving the church, we saw it. The blue flickery light of the zapper gates, tucked behind some shrubs by the front walk.
“Frankie, they’re back,” I said. “We really did do it in time! So the gates still work. We can go back … home … sort of … I guess ….”
Frankie must have been thinking the same thing as me. She knew what time it was. But she didn’t look all that happy about it.
“I don’t want to go home,” she said. “Not yet. I mean, we’ve been completely around the world with these people. We’ve done everything with them.”
I nodded. “Yeah. They’re our friends.”
We didn’t want to go, but we had to. The gates wouldn’t buzz and flicker forever. Passepartout grabbed us and embraced us all. We said good-bye to pretty Aouda, who hugged us very tightly, looked at me with those awesome eyes, and gave us kisses.
“We shall miss you,” said Mr. Fogg. “I shall miss you. Yes, indeed I shall ….”
You could see he was remembering everything that we had done together. All the adventure. All the danger.
Icy cool Mr. Fogg had definitely thawed out.
I couldn’t have asked for a better send-off.
Finally, with one last wave, Frankie and I ran straight for the bushes and dived at the glowing zapper gates.
The bright blue light surrounded us completely.
For a split second, we felt all electric and sparkly.
Then everything went dark, as if we were falling into some kind of tunnel. We bounced and tumbled for what seemed like forever, but finally stopped when my head slammed against a big aluminum bookshelf.
After my brain stopped hurting, I realized it was very quiet all around us. As quiet as …
“The library,” whispered Frankie.
Yep. We were back.
Chapter 23
We were in the library workroom we had left eighty minutes before. And there were the gates, the last little bit of sizzle leaving them.
“Holy crow, were we lucky—” I said.
“Shhh!” said Frankie, pulling me down. “I hear someone coming!”
The door swung open and the repair guy entered, his chin covered with traces of powdered sugar.
With him was Mrs. Figglehopper.
“I checked out the gates thoroughly,” he said to her. “Backward and forward, top to bottom.”
“And?” asked Mrs. Figglehopper.
“They really can’t be fixed.”
“Oh?”
“Well, they are very old, almost classic,” he said. “The newer gates are much more efficient. If you want, I can take these off your hands and use them for parts.”
“No!” I wanted to scream, but Frankie poked me.
Mrs. Figglehopper had a strange look on her face, as if she had been half expecting the tech guy to make such an offer.
“No,” she said. “These gates have been with me for a long time. I think I’ll keep them for a while longer.”
It was all I could do to keep myself from jumping around like Passepartout. Frankie sighed with relief.
After the repairman packed up his stuff and left, Mrs. Figglehopper spotted us lurking. “Frankie? Devin?”
We crawled out from behind the bookshelf.
“We were just, um …”
“Enjoying your great books!” said Frankie.
Mrs. Figglehopper’s eyes did this funny twinkly thing. “Did you enjoy your tour around the world—”
I gasped. “What! So you do know about it!”
She tilted her head as if she didn’t understand me. “I only meant, did you enjoy your tour around the world of books? That’s what every library has, you know. A world of books.”
Frankie nodded quickly. “Um, right, we heard. Mr. Wexler told us that, too. And, yeah, it was fun.”
The librarian walked us out to the main room. Just as we got there—”Hup! Hup!”—Mr. Wexler rounded everybody up. “Time to go back to class, class!”
Our ultimate field trip was over.
Frankie and I formed a line with the other kids who had only been looking at books and hadn’t been in one.
“That was a close call,” Frankie said. “Do you think Mrs. Figglehopper knows? About the gates, I mean?”
“I’m not sure,” I whispered. “But we definitely have to keep an eye on her. If she had really gotten them repaired, we might still be in 1872.”
“Back to class,” Mr. Wexler said as we filed into the hallway outside. “Excuse me, Devin, what is that?”
He pointed at my hand. I looked down. I still had the book. “Dude! I’m holding a … a … book!”
“Indeed!” said Mr. Wexler. “Please return it.”
I ran back inside and set the book back on the stand. Frankie put the watch back, too. Together, we read the last page once more. Then we closed the book.
“One awesome story,” I said.
“Definitely one of the best,” she said. “We did so much stuff in there. Lots of excitement and danger.”
“Passepartout was fun,” I said. “Mr. Fogg was pretty cool and calm through the whole thing, though.”
“He didn’t do much sight-seeing,” she said. “Plus, he spent a ton of money and brought back no souvenirs.”
“He found Aouda,” I said.
She grinned. “Yeah, he found Aouda. For a friend like that, I guess I’d make a trip around the world.”
“Me, too,” I said. “A couple of times, even.”
She chuckled. “It makes me want to get some T-shirts made up. Frankie and Devin—the World Tour!”
“I love it! Except it should be Devin and Frankie—”
“And you know,” she said, “I think we’re getting pretty good at this reading thing. If we ever read Around the World in Eighty Days again, with what we know now I bet we could shave a day or two off Fogg’s record.”
I stared at her. “Whoa! Is that a bet?”
Frankie grinned at me. “You bet it’s a bet!”
“You’re on!”
With a laugh, we shook hands on it, then raced off down the hall to join our class.
FROM THE DESK OF
IRENE M. FIGGLEHOPPER, LIBRARIAN
Dear Reader:
Don’t you just love to travel? Well, I do. And I’ve found no easier way to travel than by cozying up with a good classic book.
Around the World in Eighty Days is a delightful and funny book written by Jules Verne, who was born in Nantes, France, in 1828. As a young man, Jules studied law wi
th the idea of taking over his father’s practice. Instead, Jules surprised everyone by deciding to become a writer. He then spent several years trying to write hit plays.
Alas, his plays were failures.
But true inspiration was just around the corner!
Happening to meet the famous author Alexandre Dumas (who wrote The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, among other books), Jules declared, “If you are the great chronicler of history, I shall become the great chronicler of geography!”
And if you think about it, that’s exactly what he did. His first book, Five Weeks in a Balloon, published in 1863, became quite successful. Following this, he wrote Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and The Mysterious Island (1874). In all these books, Jules takes his readers on extraordinary voyages in and around our world and those of the imagination.
He was influenced by the British novelist Charles Dickens and the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, but most people acknowledge that Jules practically invented what we now call science fiction. Even today, he is known as “the founding father of science fiction.”
Jules was a hard worker all his life. By the time he died in 1905, he had written more than sixty novels.
His most popular is Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). When he wrote it, the era of speedy steamships and trains was approaching. Jules decided it would be fun to take some characters on a tour around the world, using all the quickest ways of getting from here to there.
What a fun journey! And what fun characters! I just love the emotional and lively Passepartout! Compare him to the cool and unflappable Phileas Fogg. Can you imagine two more opposite traveling companions?
Jules loved to write about geography and about worlds real or imagined, but his chief love was his characters. Even icy Phileas Fogg turns out to be quite lovable in the end. He is certainly a traveler in a hurry!
And speaking of being in a hurry, I must hurry. I have another class arriving in exactly—oh!—eighty seconds!
Note to self: Get Devin and Frankie to clean up the doughnut powder in the workroom.
Well, until next time—see you where the books are!
I. M. Figglehopper
Turn the page to continue reading from the Cracked Classics series
Chapter 1
“Hilli-ho, Devin!” a voice called out as I crashed through the front doors of Palmdale Middle School and tramped into the cafeteria.
“Yo-ho, there, Frankie!” the voice chirped as my best-friend-forever-despite-the-fact-that-she’s-a-girl Frankie Lang breezed into the caf alongside me.
Frankie and I screeched to a stop.
The chirpy voice belonged to Mr. Wexler, our English teacher. He came trotting toward us now, a huge grin on his face and his wispy hair flying up behind him.
“Warning, warning,” I said. “Mr. Wexler smiling. We have suddenly entered an alternate dimension of weirdness!”
Frankie chuckled. “Or maybe it’s just good old Christmas spirit. After all, it’s only two days till the big day.”
“Which translates to—the last day of school before vacation!” I added.
“Well, well!” Mr. Wexler said, his face still beaming. “What do you think? Pretty wonderful, isn’t it?”
He waved his arm around the cafeteria as if he were swishing an invisible cape.
The place was jammed with kids from our English class, taping red and green streamers to the ceiling, stringing twinkly white lights around the fake-frosted windows, decorating a Christmas tree, and piling up holiday baked goods on a couple of long tables.
“All this, just for us?” I said. “I feel honored. …”
Mr. Wexler laughed. “Ha! Good one, Devin. Now, really. What have you two brought in today, hmm?”
“Just ourselves, for a great day at school!” Frankie said, her smile twinkling like those Christmas lights.
“A great last day of school,” I said, just because it sounded so good.
But as cheery as Frankie and I were getting, our teacher wasn’t. He pointed up to a huge banner hanging over our heads. It read:
6TH-GRADE COMMUNITY CHRISTMAS BANQUET
FOOD DONATIONS DUE—TODAY!
“You do know our Christmas Banquet is today, don’t you?” he asked. “We’re hosting the Palmdale Homeless Shelter. You were supposed to bring in food for the charity dinner. You knew about this.”
I blinked at the guy. “Are you sure we knew about this? Because my brain tells me we sort of didn’t.”
“You should have known about it,” he replied. “We’ve talked about it for the last month in class—”
“Oh, in class!” said Frankie. Then she turned to me and whispered. “There’s the problem, Devin. You were probably snoring too loud for me to hear.”
I grumbled at my friend. “I don’t snore. I sleep quite soundly, thank you—”
“We’ve talked about how there are families, even in sunny Palmdale, who don’t eat as well as we do,” Mr. Wexler went on. “Some people—children like yourselves—don’t have as many clothes as we do.”
“That’s not good,” I said.
“Hundreds of people in our own town don’t have proper food or shelter,” our teacher said. “Our Christmas Banquet is just one way to help. It’s part of the book project we’re working on. Remember?”
Frankie frowned. “I guess we forgot to remember.”
“Or maybe we remembered to forget,” I said.
A huge sigh came from our teacher. “So, you didn’t bring in food. Did you at least read the book?”
We stared at our teacher.
One thing you have to realize about Frankie and me is that as bad as we are about remembering (or even hearing) about school stuff, we’re probably worse at the whole reading thing.
People say we don’t read well because we fail to grasp that we’re actually supposed to open the books, not just carry them around.
I say it’s because they cram too many words in books and make you read all of the words, or it doesn’t count.
“Do you even have the book?” Mr. Wexler asked, setting his hands on his hips in that out-of-patience way he has. “You both have backpacks. Are they empty?”
“Of course not!” Frankie scoffed. She tipped her backpack over. A hairbrush fell out. “Now it’s empty.”
Mr. Wexler grumbled, then turned to me. “Devin?”
“Mine’s not empty, but it sure isn’t crammed with books!” I said.
Narrowing his eyes, Mr. Wexler stepped over to a table, picked up a thin book, and held it up in front of us. “It’s called A Christmas Carol. Jog any memories?”
“Wait a second,” I said. “I know this book. Isn’t it all about a girl named Carol who wears red and green at the same time?”
“That’s right,” said Frankie. “Even though red and green together is a way tremendous fashion risk. I heard about that book, too. Wasn’t there a movie—”
“Not even close,” Mr. Wexler cut in, wrinkling his eyebrows. Or, I should say eyebrow, since he really only has one. It stretches over both eyes, is very bushy, and wiggles like a fuzzy black caterpillar when he gets mad.
It was wiggling now.
He shook his head at me. “Frankly, I expected much better things.…”
“No, I’m Devin. She’s Frankly,” I said.
I was joking. But actually we both knew why Mr. Wexler expected better things from us. You see, even though we find it tough to read, Frankie and I have actually gotten good grades in Mr. Wexler’s English class.
How, you ask?
I’ll tell you, I say!
In a single word—the zapper gates.
That’s three words, Frankie would say, because she’s such a math whiz.
What are the zapper gates, you ask?
I will tell you that, too.
The zapper gates are these old, supposedly busted security gates that our school librarian, Mrs. Figglehopper,
keeps in the library workroom. But—as Frankie and I have found out—those gates are anything but busted.
They are the most amazing—and secret—things ever. What happens when you get near them is—
Wait, I’ll tell you later. Mr. Wexler is talking again.
“Perhaps you’d both better just report to the library,” he said. “I’m sure Mrs. Figglehopper will find a copy of the book for you to read!”
“But if we go to the library, we’ll miss the beginning of the banquet,” I protested.
“And while you’re there,” he continued, “maybe you can think about how important this event is to everyone—and why it should be important to you, too.”
“But, Mr. Wexler, there’s food here. And we love food,” Frankie pleaded. “Do we have to go right now?”
He gave us the eyebrow.
We went right then.
Chapter 2
“This is so not fair,” I grumbled.
Frankie snorted. “Except that it probably is. We totally blew it, Devin. We’re slackers. Get used to it.”
“Oh, I’m used to it,” I said. “It’s other people who keep wanting to change us. As if that’s possible!”
We trudged out of the caf and entered the crazy maze of hallways to the library. Actually, the library was practically next door to the cafeteria.
It’s just that Frankie and I always take the long way.
Because, for us, the library usually spells work. Plus a few other words, like danger and weirdness and trouble and—did I mention work?
As we slunk past the main office for the fifth time and up to the double doors of the library, Frankie stopped.
“What’s that?” she asked, leaning very close to me.
“Um, I think it’s called my personal space—”
“No, that smell.”
“What smell? I don’t smell anything. There’s no smell. Say, isn’t the weather mild today—”
She gasped. “It’s chocolate!”
“No, it’s not. Chocolate? Here? That’s just nutty! Have you been chewing your pencils again—”
“You have chocolate!” she said, grabbing me by the shoulders. “Your mother made her famous chocolate-chip cookies, didn’t she? Oh! She did! I can smell them in your backpack! Open!”