by Ali Sparkes
“I forgot something, Miss,” came back Charlotte’s increasingly familiar voice. And then she was running across the room right toward the spot where Danny and Josh were frozen under the bench. “My bag!”
“Don’t!” shrieked Miss Biffle. “That’s right where the snakes are!”
But Charlotte not only grabbed her bag, she also tipped it over and scrabbled around by the bench, scooping all her bits and pieces back into it. “It’s OK!” she called back. “They’re only small ones. And they’re not venomous—they’re constrictors. And … I have to be honest … um … they’re not real.”
“I beg your pardon!” squawked Miss Biffle.
Then the girl whispered under the bench. “Quick! Get into my bag! NOW!”
Josh and Danny gaped at each other and then slid right into the open neck of the duffel bag—passing, as they did, some long, thin, rubbery things.
Charlotte dug her hand back into her bag the second they were both coiled up inside it, amid her pens, paper, and crumpled-up sweet wrappers. She pulled out the long, thin, rubbery things.
“Josh!” whispered Danny. “Did you see that? Did you?”
“Yes! But shhhhh! We have to stay quiet!” urged Josh.
Danny had seen two amazing things. One was that they had just been replaced, under the bench, by two rubber toy snakes.
The second was that he knew who Charlotte was. And they could not have asked for a better rescuer.
“Charlotte Wexford—what ARE you talking about?” shouted Miss Butcher. “I demand you tell me this instant!”
“Well …” sighed Charlotte. Through a gap at the top of the bag Josh and Danny saw her reach under the bench and pull out the two fake snakes. “It was kind of a joke … that’s all. I didn’t think everyone would freak out quite so much.”
“You mean to tell me,” spluttered Miss Butcher, “that you came in here, planning to play a trick on everyone, deliberately, calculatingly, smuggling in two rubber snakes in your bag?”
“Yeah—rubber ones!” Charlotte said, picking up her bag and putting it carefully over her shoulder. “I mean—I’m not going to go around with real snakes in my bag, am I?”
In her bag, two real snakes grinned at each other.
“I can’t believe it!” whispered Danny. “It’s Charlie!”
The face that peered down at them through the opening in the duffel bag had big brown eyes, a cloud of curly black hair, and a naughty grin that Josh and Danny had last seen at their adventure camp in the summer holidays. Charlie was the only friend they had who knew about S.W.I.T.C.H.
“Josh! Danny! The teachers have put me back on the bus as a punishment,” Charlie called in a low voice. “You can come out now! I mean … it is you two, isn’t it?”
“Yess!” hissed back Danny. “But how on earth did you know?”
Of course, Charlie couldn’t work out what he was saying, but she seemed to guess. “I’ve got no idea what you two are doing in the middle of my school trip, S.W.I.T.C.H.ed into snakes,” she went on. “And you nearly got completely caught out this time! The keeper was just running up from the bottom of the path when we all came out of the reptile house.”
Charlie giggled. “Then I saw her! Petty Potts! Standing there on the path with a little white S.W.I.T.C.H. spray bottle in her hands, looking at us as if her underwear had just caught fire! And in that second I realized what was happening. A pair of escaped snakes under the bench! Petty Potts in the area! It had to be you two! And so I had to think fast—really fast! And guess what? I’d just bought these rubber snakes from the gift shop! Of course, they’ve been confiscated now,” she sighed.
“She’s brilliant! Just brilliant!” Danny said. “Best girl in the world!”
“Danny,” Josh said. “We’d better get out of this bag. We could S.W.I.T.C.H. back at any minute. It’s a nice bag but I don’t want to end up wearing it!” Josh lifted his head through the top of the bag and began to slither across Charlie’s arm.
“Wow! You are fab!” murmured Charlie, running her fingers along the smooth black and yellow scales that formed a three-pronged arrow shape on his head. Josh soon slid across to the spare seat next to her, and Danny began to wind out of the bag too. “YEE-OW!” added Charlie. With some cause. Suddenly an eight-year-old boy was sprawling across her lap.
“Ahem. Sorry,” Danny said, scrambling off, looking a little pink.
“Thank you!” Josh said, also back in boy form now. “So much! If you hadn’t come along and swapped those toy snakes for us, we’d be in captivity now. Behind glass. Probably with one of the real anacondas deciding which one of us to crush first.”
“Glad to be of service.” Charlie beamed. “After all—you helped me out back at summer camp. I still can’t believe I got to be a frog! It was the best thing ever!”
“What happened to your hair?” Danny asked. In summer camp, where he and Josh had first met Charlie, she’d had her black hair in many long beaded braids.
“Oh—that!” Charlie tugged at the bloom of frizzy black curls with a frown. “St. Gwendoline’s doesn’t allow hair with beads in. I had to have them all taken out—and now I have to brush my hair every day! Can you believe it? Me?”
“It still looks cool,” Danny said. “But you don’t like St. Gwendoline’s much, do you?”
Charlie shrugged. “Mom thought it might calm me down, you know … being in a fancy school where you have to wear a proper uniform and all that. With strict teachers and … eurgh! Straw hats! But it’s not that bad. Most of the girls are all right … apart from Isobella!”
“Did you really stick corn puffs up her nose?” chuckled Danny.
“She had it coming,” sniffed Charlie. “Next time it’ll be Pringles down her pants!”
“We should probably try to find Petty,” sighed Josh when they’d all finished laughing. “She’ll be getting worried.”
“Doesn’t stop her, though, does it?” Charlie said. “What have you been S.W.I.T.C.H.ed into since we were all frogs in the summer?”
Danny counted on his fingers, “Um … common lizard and sand lizard … chameleons … leatherback turtles and—just last week—geckos!”
“Geckos!” echoed Charlie, her face awash with first awe and then envy. “Ooooh! I would love to be a gecko! Did you walk up walls?”
“Yup!” Josh said. “And across ceilings!”
“I have got to get some of that spray from Petty!” Charlie said. “It’s brilliant that you found those cubes and got the REPTOSWITCH formula for her.”
“That’s not all we’ve found,” Josh said, more seriously now. He and Danny exchanged glances.
“What? What’s going on?” asked Charlie.
“We’ve been getting marbles …” explained Danny. “Or rather, clues to find them. Sent to us or delivered in some way.”
“Who from?” asked Charlie.
“That’s just it … we don’t know. We call him—or her—The Mystery Marble Sender,” Josh said. “We’ve followed the clues and found four of them now.”
Charlie shrugged. “Well … marbles are no big deal. I’ve got bags of them at home. Why would anyone bother?”
“They’re not ordinary marbles,” Josh said. “They contain code, like the REPTOSWITCH cubes. Petty Potts’s code!”
Charlie looked confused. “Umm … so is Petty Potts sending the clues to find S.W.I.T.C.H. marbles to you? And … er … why?”
“No!” Danny said. “She says she isn’t. She’s just as confused as we are. She recognized the marble we showed her right away but said she’d forgotten she’d made it. We think it’s for a kind of MAMMALSWITCH.”
Charlie’s eyes widened. “What … like tigers and elephants and all that?” she murmured.
“Maybe,” Josh said. “But there are still two more to find before we can give Petty the whole code—and in the meantime … it’s kind of creepy. Who’s sending them to us? And why? What do they know about S.W.I.T.C.H. and Petty? And what are they going to do next?”
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“Whoever it was even followed us on holiday to Cornwall,” added Danny. “They sent us a clue on a parachute! We found that marble in a ruined fort just off the coast.”
“Ooooow! I wish I’d been there!” Charlie folded her arms and huffed. “You two have the best fun!”
“Yeah—and nearly get ripped apart by hungry owls, dropped from a great height, drowned while trapped in fishing net, forced to be gladiators by crazed princesses …” listed Danny.
“Sheeesh!” Charlie raised an eyebrow. “Crazed princesses … that does sound scary.”
“Thing is … whoever this is … are they watching us now?” murmured Josh.
They were all quiet for a while, glancing around them uneasily, and then Charlie went on, “Anyway … is there any chance Petty might let me have just a little gecko S.W.I.T.C.H. spray? Or snake S.W.I.T.C.H. spray? I’d love to be a snake! I’d love to be a DUCK!”
“A duck?” Josh looked confused. “You want to be a duck?”
“NO! DUCK!” yelled Charlie. “Miss Butcher’s coming!”
Josh and Danny threw themselves into the aisle, crawled at top speed toward the back of the bus and hid behind the seats—just in time. The bus door opened and Miss Butcher strode in.
“Charlotte Wexford!” she barked. “I’m afraid you have to come with me. As much as I would like to leave you here on your own all afternoon, we are heading down to the river walk now, and health and safety rules mean I can’t leave you unsupervised. Although it’s certainly what you deserve for your appalling behavior.”
“Yes, Miss Butcher,” Charlie said. She didn’t sound remotely troubled.
“You can wipe that cheerful look off your face, too,” snapped Miss Butcher. “You needn’t think, just because I have to bring you along, that you’re about to have any fun. You’ll stay right between Miss Biffle and me the whole time. And I will call your mother into the school to discuss your future just as soon as we get back today.”
Charlie sighed. “Yes, Miss Butcher,” she said, getting to her feet and managing to sound a bit less chipper.
“I really don’t know what gets into you,” muttered the teacher, stepping out of the bus. “You’re easily as clever as the other girls, but you’re always so naughty.”
“I’m not really naughty,” Charlie was saying as the bus door closed. “I’m just misunderstood …”
Danny got up from behind the seat and peeped out of the window as the teacher and their friend walked away. “It’s not fair,” he said. “Charlie got herself into big trouble—just to save you and me! And now she’s going to get into even more trouble when they call her mom in. What if she gets expelled? It’ll be our fault—and Petty’s fault too.”
“There must be something we can do,” Josh said. “But I can’t think what. We can’t tell them that Charlie was actually saving our lives. Nobody would believe us.”
“No …” sighed Danny. “Being S.W.I.T.C.H.ed is amazing, like having super powers. But how much good is it? Charlie’s doomed. There’s nothing we can do …”
Petty was worried. Really worried. Josh and Danny might imagine that she was a heartless scientist, obsessed only with her own success, but she really did care about what happened to them. After all … who else was going to help her with her experiments if Josh and Danny got eaten?
Of course, if they were still in anaconda form, it was highly unlikely that anything would try to eat them … but a panicky member of the public might stamp on them, or the keeper might catch them and put them in with another constrictor and it might … Petty shuddered, imagining two Josh- and Danny-shaped bumps moving slowly down the body of the huge green anaconda she’d seen in the reptile house. This breed had been known to eat each other—and small humans. So, S.W.I.T.C.H.ed or unS.W.I.T.C.H.ed, Josh and Danny could be lunch.
There had been no sign of them in the reptile house, and the keeper, coming out past her as she went in, had not been carrying a bag of captured snakes. So where had Josh and Danny gone? She’d searched for them in the zoo shop, the café, even in the small Chatz TV marquee which was set up near the penguins, recording some kind of wildlife program. Josh would love that! But he wasn’t there.
She could see that group of schoolchildren—an expensive girls’ school by the look of the straw hats—heading along the path toward the river. She hurried toward them and called out, “Have any of you seen two boys—blond—twins—about your age?”
The girls looked at each other and then back at her. Some of them shrugged and several of them giggled. “I love her hat!” snickered one girl with a shiny fair bob of hair and a superior expression. “It’s soooo antique.”
Petty narrowed her eyes at the girl as she patted her battered beanie. “Well, I’d offer to swap it for yours,” she said. “Except your head is far too small. Such a tragedy, an undersized brain!”
“Well! I’ve never been so insulted!” gasped the girl.
“Really?” said Petty. “I’m surprised nobody’s made the effort.”
Another girl, with a cloud of black curls and dark brown eyes, hooted with laughter and gave Petty a little wave as the party was hurried along the path by its two guardian teachers. The laughing girl was walking close to the teachers. They were deep in conversation with each other and paying no attention to her as she turned back to Petty and motioned urgently at her … as if she wanted Petty to follow.
Uncertainly, Petty followed, keeping a short distance from the school party. Then the girl dropped down and started to fiddle with her shoe. Her teachers, calling out to their pupils ahead to make notes of the trees along the river, didn’t notice.
Petty caught up, and the girl immediately bounced up on her feet and gave her a friendly punch on the shoulder. “Petty! It’s meeee! Charlie!”
“Good gracious!’ Petty squinted through her smeary glasses. “So it is! Whatever happened to your hair?”
“Never mind that now,” Charlie said. “We haven’t got long! Josh and Danny are OK. I rescued them in my bag. I had to leave them on the school bus, though, hiding.” She waved back toward the zoo parking lot.
“Thank heavens for that!” sighed Petty, turning to go.
“But wait … can’t I have just a little S.W.I.T.C.H. spray before you go? Pleeeeease?” Charlie gave Petty the big eyes treatment. “I mean … I did just save Josh’s and Danny’s lives! Probably!”
“And I thank you very much,” Petty said. “But I don’t hand out S.W.I.T.C.H. like candy, you know. Well … I did once, but that was a bad idea …”
“But I’d be ever so careful!” insisted Charlie. “I would never use it in public or …”
“Charlie! You are a first-rate girl, and I would love to get you on the S.W.I.T.C.H. Project,” Petty said. “But I’m not handing over S.W.I.T.C.H. spray to you just for fun. You know how dangerous it is. Didn’t you nearly end up as a heron’s breakfast last time? No—I’m sorry, but that’s that.”
And Petty turned on her heel and fell over.
“Oooh—these stupid woodland paths!” she snapped, as Charlie helped her to her feet. “What’s wrong with a nice bit of tarmac?” And, carefully stepping over the tree root that had tripped her, Petty hurried away.
Charlie was about to call after her. She really was. Because a small white bottle with a squirty spray button on it had fallen out of Petty’s coat pocket as she tripped. Charlie really wouldn’t have kept it if Miss Butcher hadn’t, at that moment, turned around and bellowed at her from farther along the path.
“Charlotte Wexford! Come here AT ONCE!”
“Oh, well,” muttered Charlie, slipping the bottle into her blazer pocket. “I’ll be able to mail it to her. Probably.”
Josh and Danny hit the emergency exit button and got off the bus at the back, without getting noticed. Happily, it didn’t set off any kind of alarm. A minute later they found Petty Potts stomping up to the parking lot, muttering to herself.
“It’s OK—we’re safe,” called Josh.
“
You’ll never guess what!” called Danny, as they reached Petty on the path to the parking lot. “We were rescued by—”
“Charlie Wexford!” Petty said. She seemed to be turning out her pockets. “Yes, I know. I just met her on the river path. And I do believe the little lightfingers pickpocketed my S.W.I.T.C.H. spray!”
“What—Charlie? Steal? She wouldn’t do that!” Josh said.
“Don’t be so sure,” sniffed Petty. “She’s a very determined young lady, and she wanted some S.W.I.T.C.H.”
“Even so,” Danny said. “Charlie’s all right!”
“I didn’t say she wasn’t all right,” Petty said. “I’ve been known to steal things myself when it was desperately important. But not just for fun! Come on—we have to find her and get that spray back. There’s been far too much upset today. Why on earth did you think it would be a good idea for us to try out a S.W.I.T.C.H. at the zoo?”
“We didn’t!” Josh said, stonily. “You did!”
“I did not!” Petty turned and stomped back into the park again, and they hurried along with her.
“You did!” Danny said. “You said you wanted to see how S.W.I.T.C.H.ing near real snakes affected us.”
“Yes, of course I did!” Petty said. “So why did you say I didn’t?”
“Petty, you could have some amazing arguments just on your own,” sighed Josh.
They saw Charlie, at a distance, down by the river with the other St. Gwendoline’s students following the river wildlife walk. “We’ll run ahead,” Danny said. “Make sure she doesn’t get away!” He and Josh took off, leaving Petty grumbling as she marched on after them, looking out for trippy tree roots.
“Get that S.W.I.T.C.H. spray back!” she called after them. “Charlie has no idea how dangerous it can be! If she uses it, there will be trouble. Desperate trouble …”
Charlie caught up with the others as they reached the river, which wiggled through the many acres of the zoological park, passing the enclosures of giraffe and rhino and ostrich. At this end, though, it had left the exotic animals behind and was rushing into the countryside. Little information posts along the path offered tips on where to spot woodpeckers, kingfishers, and foxes.