Pennybaker School Is Headed for Disaster

by Jennifer Brown

  Once I had my breath back, I edged out of the shadows, my eyes planted on the office in case Principal Rooster or Nurse Hale or Counselor Still were lurking about. The coast was clear.

  I darted across the vestibule, straight to the pedestal, and fell to my knees.

  Yes. Blue. Brainy-looking. Chewed gum smeared with slimy pink glitter.

  A clue.

  I searched my pockets for something to pick it up with. Chip would want to see this. No, Chip would need to see this. This could be the clue that solved the mystery. I had nothing—no paper, no Kleenex, no plastic bag. Only pocket lint and my special spitwad straw.

  As much as it pained me to do it, I reached down and peeled the gum off the edge of the pedestal with my bare fingers. It had gotten pretty hard on the outside, but was still squishy underneath.

  Which was gross.

  But even grosser because I was certain I knew whose mouth this gum had been in.

  I knew that slimy pink glitter.

  What I didn’t know was why Erma’s friend Arthura would have been anywhere near the Heirmauser pedestal.

  TRICK #22

  NOW YOU SEE US, NOW YOU DON’T

  I should have known when Chip agreed to meet me at the roller rink Saturday afternoon that he might show up in roller-skating socks.

  “John Joseph Merlin invented the roller skate in 1760,” Chip said, trailing behind me over the dirty carpet, a pair of skates hanging from one hand. “He actually invented what we would now call the inline skate, sort of like an ice skate with wheels for the blade. Did you know that, Thomas?”

  “No.”

  “It wasn’t until 1863 that the four-wheeled roller skate, called the quad skate, was invented. Do you know who invented it, Thomas?”

  “No.”

  “James Leonard Plimpton. And only three years later, he rented out a hotel in Rhode Island, and do you know what he created in their dining room?”

  “No.”

  “A roller rink! The first ever roller rink open to the public, in fact. And who knows, if he hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t have this roller ri—”

  “Why do you even know this stuff?” I asked, whirling on him. “Nobody normal cares.” He blinked at me but didn’t answer, so I sat down and shoved my feet into my skates. The music was loud, thumping along with dancing lights and a disco ball, but there weren’t many people there. Just a birthday party full of kids Erma’s age and a few teenagers, who were coming out from the locker area, which was a darkened little alcove by the restrooms. The single fluorescent light in that corner had flickered on and off—mostly off—for as long as the rink had been open. Most little kids were scared of that corner, which made it a perfect place for teenagers to do teenager stuff. Chip delicately placed his foot in a skate.

  I tied my skates and glided toward the alcove, trying to look nonchalant, even though I wasn’t the best at skating and I was on edge about the gum. “Come on,” I said.

  Chip followed me, even though he only had one skate on—roll-thump, roll-thump, roll-thump. “And did you know that there was a man named Russell Moncrief who skated all the way across the country on roller skates in only sixty-nine days?”

  “No.” I rolled into the alcove and pushed myself into the farthest corner, wedged between a locker and the wall.

  Chip stood at the very edge of the alcove as if he was afraid to come all the way in. He frowned. “I can’t quite remember who holds the record for longest roller skating limbo, though. Shameful.” He brightened and patted the side of the first locker. “But I can tell you who invented the locker—”

  “Would you just get in here already? I have something I need to show you.”

  Chip roll-thumped his way into the alcove. “This feels very clandestine,” he said.

  “Very what?”

  “Secretive. The origin of the word clandestine is ‘clam,’ which is Latin for ‘secretly.’” I stared at him. He stared back. “What?” he finally said.

  “Are you done, Dictionary Dan?”

  He nodded. “Probably not, but you may proceed.”

  I shifted over to one side and pulled a plastic bag out of my jeans pocket. He leaned forward, studying it carefully. “What is it?” he asked, poking at the gum through the plastic.

  “I found it stuck to the bottom of the pedestal,” I said.

  He gasped. “Explosives?”

  “What? No. It’s gum. You mean to tell me that you know the name of the dude who built a roller skate a hundred years ago, but you can’t tell the difference between a piece of chewed-up gum and a bomb?”

  “Actually, if you do the math, it was more like two hundred fifty years ago.” I shot him a look, so he squinted at the bag, then let out a breathy laugh. “Oh, yeah. That does look like gum.”

  “The thing is … I think I know whose gum it is. And you do, too, if you think about it. You saw a piece just like it being chewed in your driveway the other day.”

  Chip held out his hand, and I placed the bag in it. He looked at it through the swirling colored lights. He opened the bag and sniffed. He squished the gum between his thumb and forefinger. He put it up to his ear and listened. He pressed it to his forehead and closed his eyes. Then he repeated every step a second time.

  “Well?” I asked, when I couldn’t take any more of his stalling.

  He held the bag out to me. “I have no idea whose that is,” he said.

  “Think about it. Pink bike, tight helmet, really annoying voice …”

  Just then, a blur of purple and glitter rolled past the alcove, a shrieky laugh coming out of it. A new arrival at the birthday party. Arthura. I pressed my back harder into the wall, praying that she wouldn’t look over at us and see us analyzing her gum. “Come awwwn, Erma,” she said, around a wad of bright blue gum that looked just like the one in the bag that Chip was currently listening to again.

  He grinned. “Yeah. Yeah, I hear it now. That girl who came to your house. Erma’s friend. It’s like she’s standing right behind me.”

  I snatched the bag out of his hand and pulled him toward me.

  “What are you—”

  “Just hush and get over here,” I hissed. “She is right behind you.” I pointed toward the opening of the alcove. All I could see now was Erma’s and Arthura’s hands as they played some sort of clapping and slapping game together. Chip dropped his remaining roller skate, and it bounced with a clang off the locker. Erma started to look over.

  I had no choice. I grabbed Chip and pulled him into the corner in a hug. Erma looked harder. “What?” I heard Arthura say. Erma pointed into the alcove. I hugged Chip tighter and turned him so his back was to her. “Ew. Teenagers,” Arthura said. She grabbed Erma’s hand and they skated away.

  I let out a breath and released Chip, who stumbled backward, his eyes watering. “That was a close one,” he said.

  “I know. I can’t imagine what Erma would—”

  “I knew it!” Erma said, popping around the corner, her hands on her hips. “What are you two up to? Why are you hiding back here?”

  “Shhh,” I said. “Arthura will hear you.”

  Erma looked over her shoulder, then back at us, head cocked. “She’s skating. Besides, what do you care if Arthura hears me, anyway? What are you hiding? What is that?” She was pointing at the bag, which was hanging limply at my side.

  Chip and I looked at each other, and it wasn’t lost on me that we were doing that Talking Without Talking thing that Samara and Dawson had done that day in the vestibule. He nodded, and I sighed. “Come in here.” I scooted in tighter to make room for Erma. I handed her the bag. “This is what we’re looking at.”

  “You’re stealing chewed gum? That’s pretty creepy, Thomas. I’m telling Mom that you’re being creepy.”

  “I didn’t steal it. I found it. Arthura’s chewed gum. On the pedestal. Where the missing head used to sit. At my school.” Erma looked at me like she still didn’t get it, pinching the bag between two fingers like it was diseased. �
�Why would she be at my school, Erma? Why would she be around that pedestal?”

  Erma shook her head and shrugged.

  “It’s admittedly circumstantial, but we believe it to be evidence of Arthura’s presence at the scene of a crime. A larceny, to be exact.”

  Erma pointed to Chip. “You’re weird.”

  He nodded. “I know.”

  “We think maybe Arthura is the one who stole the statue, Erma.”

  Erma laughed out loud. “Why would she want that old thing?”

  “Why would I?” I countered. “But everyone seems to think I took it.”

  “Duh. To practice your magicky hoo-hoo on it.” She wiggled her fingers in the air, the bag falling to the ground. I reached down and snatched it up. I finally had concrete evidence against someone, and I wasn’t going to lose it now.

  “So then what’s your explanation for this?” I asked, wagging the bag at her.

  She turned her palms up, frustrated. “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “Like she would tell us the truth,” I said. “I need more evidence before I confront her.” We all stood there, thinking. I had no idea how I was going to get more evidence from Arthura. She was not the most cooperative person in the world. And she definitely didn’t trust me.

  “Hey, I know! Will you help us get it?” Chip asked.

  “No.”

  “Come on, Erma,” I said. “This is important. Everyone hates me.”

  “Never.”

  “I’ll teach you some magic.”

  She made a face. “I don’t want to learn your dumb magic. I’m not five.”

  “I’ll catch you your very own frog,” Chip suggested.

  “Disgusting.”

  I thunked my head against the locker a few times, and then it occurred to me. “I’ll take your shift babysitting Grandma Jo next week. And I’ll let you have my TV time.”

  She tapped her chin a few times, thinking about it, then leaned in. We both inched toward her. “Tell you what. I’ll question her. I’ll get it out of her without her even knowing it. Give me an hour, then meet me out back and I’ll tell you what I found out.” She pointed down the long corridor next to the rink. At the very end of the corridor—what was commonly known as Fifth-Grade Corner, on account of all the fifth graders who hung around back there—was a plain red metal door. Rumor was it was equipped with a silent alarm that went straight to the manager’s office, and that only the baddest of the bad kids dared go through it. If you went through it, they said, the manager would handcuff you in his office and torture you. Or call the police. Or your parents, if they were scarier than the police.

  I was pretty sure Mom was scarier than the police. Especially when she was on a Yelling at Thomas until Her Eyes Got Uneven and Her Vocal Cords Tied Themselves into Knots Adventure.

  But Arthura was Erma’s best friend. If there was anything to confide, Erma would get it out of her. It was a chance I had to take. I swallowed.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll see you outside in an hour.”

  TRICK #23

  WALKING THROUGH DOORS!

  “You open it.”

  “No, you open it.”

  “You.”

  “You.”

  After Chip and I took off our skates, we spent a good majority of that hour trying to work up the nerve to open the back door. I had a feeling that the silent alarm and handcuffing manager were just stories. Rumors tended to go that way—just there to scare the heck out of kids like us. But I wasn’t certain enough to want to give it a try. Because sometimes rumors worked.

  “Come on, Chip, what’s the worst thing that could happen? Just open it. We can pretend you fell into it. And hurry up—Erma won’t ask Arthura until we leave.”

  “The worst thing that could happen is that I could end up handcuffed in the manager’s office. What if he never lets me out?”

  Louis XIV: Handcuffed in skating rink manager’s office for all eternity.

  “Well, I can’t be the one. I’m in enough trouble already with the missing head.”

  “Can’t you do some of your magic and make it so we can just … walk through it?”

  “I don’t do that kind of magic, Chip. And no.”

  “Well, I’m not going to open it.”

  “Neither am I.”

  Erma skated by and gave us a death stare, a clueless Arthura skating by her side. Get going, Erma mouthed.

  Chip and I both stared at the door, our arms crossed defiantly. I wished I could do some magic and just walk right on through, like Chip wanted. Grandpa Rudy would probably have been able to figure out a way to do it.

  Chip turned to me. “Can we go out the front door and walk around to the back?”

  I shook my head. “There’s a fence.” And about a zillion teenagers who like to hang out by the side wall, I didn’t add. The truth was, teenagers kind of scared me, even when they weren’t doing anything scary. The thought of pushing through a whole group of them around the side of a strange building made my heart pound practically out of my chest.

  “What if we both opened it at the same time?” Chip asked. “The rumor doesn’t say anything about two sets of handcuffs. Only one. And they can’t just blame one of us if both of us are guilty. They would be forced to let us go.”

  I gave him a stare. “They could handcuff us to each other.” Which, when I thought about it, could be worse than being handcuffed by yourself in the manager’s office.

  I glanced at the skate floor. Erma was rounding the corner to come toward us again.

  “Okay,” I blurted. “Let’s just give it a try.”

  We both placed our hands on the bar handle. We looked at each other and swallowed nervously. Chip’s eyes were huge.

  “You should see your eyes—they’re huge,” Chip said.

  Okay, so apparently he wasn’t the only one. “On three. One … two …”

  And then right when I said “three” and shoved open the door, Chip pointed his finger in the air and said, “Are we pushing on three or are you going to say the word ‘push’ after th—”

  “Really?” I asked, the door ajar, with my hands—and only my hands—all over it. “Are you kidding me?”

  “What?”

  “Nice,” I said. “Way to leave me hanging, Chip.”

  “It’s a common question in the rule of three,” he said.

  “It is not a common question. ‘On three’ means you push ‘on three.’ If I wanted to go on ‘push,’ I would have said, ‘on push.’”

  “Nobody says ‘on push.’”

  “Exactly!” I cried out, throwing my hands in the air. The door clanged shut. We both stared at it.

  “Hurry up,” I heard behind me, and turned just in time to see Erma whiz by again.

  “You let the door shut,” Chip said.

  “Thank you. I know I let the door shut.”

  “What if the alarm is already sounding and the manager is getting out his handcuffs as we speak? We’re going to have to reopen it. Are we going to do it on three or on pu—”

  “Oh, here, just let me,” I said, shoving open the door and slipping out, Chip trailing behind me.

  The door shut with a soft click, snuffing out the music and lights on the other side as if they didn’t even exist. My ears rang from the silence. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the sunlight. Behind the rink there was a Dumpster that smelled like hot dogs, even from far away, and a Mr. Cheesy vending machine truck, its back door yawning open, exposing a dark interior.

  “What do we do now?” Chip asked.

  I shrugged. “We wait for Erma to show up, I guess.” I leaned against the truck and crossed my legs, trying to look a thousand percent more casual than I felt. Chip bent to pick up pieces of gravel, which he held up to the light and squinted at, one by one. Time ticked by. It seemed like forever. It seemed so long that I wondered if Erma had gone home. All I had to measure by was the click of Chip’s rocks hitting the ground, one by one. So far he’d dropped one hundred forty-tw
o.

  “Hey, Thomas?” Chip asked.

  “Hmmm.”

  “Do you think she’ll actually come out here?”

  “You were right there. You heard her say she would.”

  “Yeah, but … I mean, won’t she be afraid of the door, too?”

  I thought about it. Erma was a lot of things, and most of them not good. She was pesky and loud and messy and sometimes downright annoying. And she lived to stick it to me. But would she go this far? Would she set me up to walk through the forbidden door at the skating rink and get trapped inside the fence … if I didn’t get handcuffed by the manager in the process?

  Yes. She totally would.

  “It’s a setup,” I said angrily. “When I get my hands on Erma, I’m going to—”

  But I didn’t get to finish my sentence, because just then the door clunked and slowly opened. A man pressed through it, back-first.

  The manager? Maybe. With handcuffs? Probably not. But I wasn’t going to wait around to find out.

  “Chip!” I whispered, “Follow me!”

  I quickly assessed our situation. It was going to be either hide inside the Dumpster or hide inside the truck. A swarm of flies created a black cloud over the Dumpster. The truck it was! I hopped up on my rear end and swiveled so I was facing what looked like dozens of boxes of vending machine snacks. Chip scrambled up next to me, our clothes making shush noises against the metal floor as we scooted backward on our rumps.

  “In the back,” I whispered.

  On our hands and knees, we crawled to the back of the truck and wedged ourselves between a box of cheese puffs and a box of cheese-flavored tortilla chips. We held our breath, staying as still as humanly possible. Chip’s leg rubbed up against mine.

  But instead of an angry manager yelling at us to show ourselves, the man started whistling. The rattle of something metal rolling on the ground got louder and louder. I leaned forward and squinted between two boxes.