“Yikes,” said Leon, loosening his grip. “I think I’ll let Groot handle things from here on out.”
THIRTY-SIX
Bad News
Two days later, much to everyone’s surprise, Lumpkin was released from the Birdcage. His recess detention was over. High atop the jungle gym, underneath the basketball hoop, from the free throw line to the handball wall—all fifth-grade eyes focused on the large, lone figure shuffling into the yard.
There was no way to know what Lumpkin would try next, but given his recent behavior, everyone assumed it would be weird.
After all, he had fused a frozen potato chip to his lip. That was weird.
He had given frontsies to third graders. That was weird.
He had eaten twenty-three brussels sprouts. That may not have been weird, but it was certainly disgusting.
And he had made himself a hot fudge sundae. That was very weird.
As Lumpkin approached, students backed away. They all knew the law of the jungle gym—the savage beast is far more deadly when wounded.
Lily-Matisse, Leon, and P.W. monitored Lumpkin from behind the giant maple.
“Something’s different,” said Lily-Matisse. “He looks smaller—tiny, almost.”
“‘Tiny’ is not a word I think of when I think of Lumpkin,” said P.W.
“Must be that he’s not wearing an army jacket,” said Leon.
“Probably in the wash,” P.W. suggested. “Hot fudge must be tough to get out.”
“Remind me to bring some Poop-B-Gone to school,” said Leon.
The joking stopped abruptly when Lumpkin’s target became clear.
“He’s heading over!” said Lily-Matisse.
“Quick,” cried P.W. “Grab Lumpy!”
“I can’t!” said Leon. “He’s in my locker.”
“Why’d you leave him there?” Lily-Matisse said anxiously.
“How was I supposed to know Lumpkin would get released? After the—”
“Shh!” Lily-Matisse hissed. “Here he comes!”
It was clear from the glower and the clenched fists that Lumpkin wanted to make up for lost time.
P.W. bravely stepped forward and faced the bully head-on. “So what’s it going to be today?” he said fearlessly. “A noogie? A purple nurple? A blood bracelet? No, I know. You’re going to test out your patented Howlitzer.”
“Nah,” said Lumpkin, cracking his knuckles. “Gotta be on my best behavior—at least for a while.” He glanced up at the principal’s office. “Just thought you guys would want to know, seeing how you’re all charter members of the Franklin Sparks Fan Club …” Lumpkin smiled maliciously.
“Know what?” Leon demanded.
“That your favorite teacher is toast,” Lumpkin revealed.
“What are you talking about?” said Lily-Matisse.
“Let’s just say I’m not the only one who’s been Birdcaged. Take a look for yourselves.”
Lumpkin pointed toward the principal’s office. Sure enough, Mr. Sparks was standing in the window, his back to the playground.
Lumpkin snickered. “Birdwhistle wasn’t too happy when she found out I got a fat lip in science class.”
“But you did that to yourself!” Lily-Matisse said angrily.
“Maybe,” Lumpkin admitted. “But when Birdwhistle kicked me out to grill Sparks, I heard her say, ‘It’s good-bye chips, mister!’ She said it twice, and she said it mean.”
Leon had heard enough. “Come on!” he said. Joined by Lily-Matisse and P.W., he hightailed it out of the playground and up the stairs. When they got close enough to view Mr. Sparks and the principal through a large plate-glass window, they ducked down and took turns peeking in.
“Boy, they’re really going at it,” said P.W.
“Can you hear what they’re saying?” asked Lily-Matisse.
P.W. shook his head. “The darn glass is too thick. Can either of you make out what’s on that piece of paper Birdwhistle is waving at Sparks?”
Leon inched up to get a better look. “Well, whatever it is, it’s not good. The big fat Confidential stamp at the top always, always means trouble.”
“We’ll just have to swipe it,” P.W. said.
“Are you crazy?” exclaimed Lily-Matisse. “We can’t just walk in there and take it.”
“We don’t have to walk in there,” said P.W.
Lily-Matisse made a face. “What are you talking about?”
“He’s talking about using Lumpy,” Leon said as he rose to his feet. The three fifth graders rushed back to Leon’s locker, retrieved Lumpy, and dashed out to the playground, where Lumpkin had reclaimed his favorite spot at the top of the jungle gym.
Leon took up his position behind the maple and used Lumpy to lower Lumpkin from his perch. By the time he had guided the bully into the building and up the stairs, the Birdcage was empty.
“How should we do this?” P.W. asked.
“One of you has to be lookout,” said Leon. “The other has to be the reader. I’ll be way too busy with Lumpy to handle anything else.”
P.W. posted himself at the end of the hall. Once he gave the all-clear signal, Leon sent Lumpkin into the Birdcage.
“Which sheet should I get him to grab?” Leon asked Lily-Matisse. She scanned the interior of the principal’s office.
“I can’t tell,” she said. “I’ve got to get a closer look.” As she moved toward the plate-glass window, she accidentally hit Leon’s arm and triggered a chain reaction. Leon jerked Lumpy. Lumpy jerked Lumpkin. And a large stack of files toppled off the principal’s desk.
Leon panicked as he struggled to get Lumpkin to retrieve the scattered papers.
“Hold it!” said Lily-Matisse. “Make him lift up the sheets one at a time before he puts them back.”
Leon worked Lumpy’s arm. The effect was instantaneous—Lumpkin, entranced by the power of his spitting image, pressed a document against the plate-glass window.
“Nope, that’s not it,” said Lily-Matisse. “That’s a memo about sword safety during the medieval carnival. Next… Nope. This one’s a requisition for mops. Next… Next… Nope … Ix-nay … Next…
Leon (and Lumpy and Lumpkin) repeated the robotic pickup procedure nearly a dozen times before Lily-Matisse hit pay dirt.
“Bingo!” she exclaimed.
Out of the corner of his eye, Leon could see the blood-red Confidential stamp. “What’s it say?” he demanded.
“Ohmygosh!” said Lily-Matisse. “Listen to this.” She read the key passage out loud:
“… Nimble fingers make nimble minds, Mr. Sparks, but not when those fingers are forever handling potato chips. I am sorry to report that complaints have only intensified since your Parents’ Night presentation. Certain members of the Classical School community believe you have been feeding the fifth graders the mental equivalent of junk food, and frankly I am hard-pressed to dispute that charge. Unless I can offer our parents concrete proof that your unconventional methods benefit our children educationally, I will have no choice but to release you from your duties following the science fair at the end of the year.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
A Hypothesis
The campaign to save Mr. Sparks and the all-chips-all-the-time science curriculum began the very next day. Leon pulled aside a few classmates and told them to meet at the playground maple during recess. There he made his pitch simply and directly.
“Okay, here’s the thing,” he said. “Sparks is in trouble. A bunch of parents are trying to get him fired.”
“That’s just wrong!” protested Flossy Parmigiano.
“What do you expect?” said P.W. “Parents tend to be a little thick.”
A murmur of agreement spread through the ranks.
“Anyway,” Leon continued, “there are barely two months of school left. Which means from now on, every chance we get, we’ve got to bring up potato chips and show how they’re worthwhile.”
“How do you expect to pull that off?” Antoinette Brede asked skeptically.
&nbs
p; “You’ll see,” said Leon. “I’ve got a few ideas.”
The first of those ideas was presented at the start of the next math class. Leon, P.W., and Lily-Matisse snuck in five minutes early and scribbled three word problems on the blackboard:
Principal Birdwhistle caught wind of the scheme and handed out a word problem of her own.
THE CLASSICAL SCHOOL
“Where Nimble Fingers Make for Nimble Minds”
Office of the Principal
To the fifth-grade class,
If 18 students disrupt a math class with word problems about potato chips, and each student receives 4 hours of detention, how many total hours of detention will the students receive?
Yours,
Hortensia Birdwhistle
Principal
That put a stop to potato chip math problems, but it did not put a stop to Leon. He expanded his campaign to include English class, where the fifth graders were studying haikus, a seventeen-syllable poem invented in Japan. Leon stood up and recited the following original haiku:
“A hypothesis.
Potato chips can teach us
All science matters.”
P.W. stood up next and performed a hip-hop haiku:
“Yo! Don’t spill that bag!
Wasting potato chips is
Not a good idea.”
Lily-Matisse went third, offering a more gentle recitation:
“Be considerate.
Potato chip littering
Makes our world crummy.”
After that, everyone wanted to get into the act—even Lumpkin:
“Crunch! Crunch! Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!
Are those chips you hear? Or just
Me, Henry Lumpkin?”
Probably the most heartfelt potato chip haiku came from Flossy Parmigiano:
“Dad sniffs my fingers.
They smell like potato chips.
I am so busted!”
Unfortunately Flossy Parmigiano wasn’t the only one who got busted. When Principal Birdwhistle learned about the single-subject verse, she used the PA system to broadcast a haiku of her own:
“No more chip poems.
They make fifth graders forget
The important stuff.”
Leon disagreed. He called another maple tree powwow to figure out what to do next.
“Birdwhistle is totally against potato chips,” Thomas Warchowski complained.
“Birdwhistle’s not the real problem,” said Flossy Parmigiano. “The real problem is the parents. Trust me, I know. You should hear my dad going on about dental time bombs.”
“Then we’ll have to work on the parents,” said Leon.
“How?” said Antoinette Brede.
“Glad you asked,” said Leon. “I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. The science fair is one month away, right? Since tons of parents will be there, it makes sense to use the fair to prove, once and for all, that Sparks is a first-rate teacher and that potato chips rule.”
Leon spelled out the scheme to his classmates. All those present, including Antoinette, agreed to join in.
“Remember,” said Leon. “No one can talk about this.”
“Yeah,” said Thomas Warchowski. “Anyone who rats gets sliced up and deep-fried in boiling hot peanut oil. Agreed?”
“Agreed!” everyone pledged.
Pffut! P.W. was the first to seal the oath of silence by spitting on the ground. And all the others followed suit with differing degrees of enthusiasm: Pffut! Pffut! Pffut!.….Pffut!.………Pffut!
Editor’s note: Answers to word problems on page 288. Question 1) 360 billion chips. Question 2) 60 billion feet. Question 3) Yes. A yellow chip road could travel from the earth to the moon and back nearly twenty-three times.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Crunch Time!
The oath held. No one did rat. During the weeks that followed, the fifth graders who had entered the potato chip pact all kept their mouths shut—except, of course, when research required munching.
The science fair was scheduled to start at one P.M. in the school gym. Exhibitors were given the morning to set up their projects. Leon arrived early and distributed Trimore Towers bedsheets to each of his co-conspirators.
“What’s the sheet for?” asked Thomas Warchowski.
“To hide your project,” said Leon. “We don’t want Birdwhistle or Sparks or the parents seeing anything before we make our presentations.”
Mr. Hankey, the janitor, had prepped the gym by lining up folding tables around the edge of the basketball court. He dispensed a stern warning before he left the fifth graders to their own devices. “You pests better keep things neat and tidy,” he grumbled. “That means no explosions, no spills, no stains, no bubblegum, and no crumbs. You read me?”
“Loud and clear,” said P.W.
When one o’clock arrived, the doors opened and visitors entered a gymnasium filled with glassware, plant life, poster board, and six experiments covered by bedsheets bearing the Trimore Towers logo.
Attendance was better than expected. In addition to parents, siblings, and grandparents (and stepparents, step-siblings, and step-grandparents), countless friends showed up for the event. Leon’s supporters were particularly numerous. His mother and Maria came, as did Napoleon and Frau Haffenreffer. (The baker arrived with a very large pastry box.)
There was one other visitor in attendance because of Leon—a short, round man clutching an official-looking briefcase.
A whistle blast silenced the crowd.
“Okay, all you Edisons and Einsteins!” yelled Coach Kasperitis. “Settle down and listen up! And that goes for the rest of you, too. Principal Birdwhistle wants to say a few words.”
The visitors gathered around the principal, who stood at center court, nervously clutching an index card.
“Welcome to the Classical School science fair,” she read stiffly. “Before we begin, I wish to mention that it is my contention that this invention convention will prompt some reflection.”
A few guests chuckled.
Emma Zeisel leaned over to Regina Jasprow and whispered, “Someone deserves detention for that intervention.”
“So to avoid any more tension,” the principal continued, “please give your attention to Franklin W. Sparks.”
The fifth graders all cheered. The reception from their parents was more mixed.
“Hello, one and all,” said Mr. Sparks. “Thanks for coming. Here’s how the science fair will work. Exhibitors should stand next to their projects, while the rest of us make our way around the gym. Principal Birdwhistle and I will be looking for three things today. First of all, there’s the matter of scientific rigor. We will be asking ourselves—and the exhibitors—has the experiment been thoroughly researched, accurately undertaken, precisely performed, and clearly explained?
“Second, we will evaluate the elegance of the exhibit. Just because someone spends a ton of money on fancy gizmos doesn’t guarantee brilliance. Remember, all Isaac Newton needed was an apple.
“Finally—and this is a biggie—we’ll be assessing the Wow! Factor—the originality of the project and its broader contribution to the world in which we live. Well, enough squawking out of me. Let’s see what my co-researchers have cooked up.”
And with that, Mr. Sparks, accompanied by Principal Birdwhistle and the visitors, advanced to the first folding table.
“Tell everyone your name and what you’ve put together,” said Mr. Sparks.
“Antoinette Brede,” replied Antoinette Brede. “And what I’ve put together is an analysis of pH levels in various everyday foods.”
“Fascinating,” said Mr. Sparks. “Go on.”
“Okay. Well, as you’ve taught us, Mr. Sparks, pH levels tell us how acidy stuff is.” Antoinette held up a fat softcover book. “This government report lists the pHs of over three thousand foods,” she said. “Name a food, any food, Principal Birdwhistle.”
“Graham crackers,” the Principal said blandly.
Antoinette scan
ned the Gs. “It says here graham crackers have a pH level between seven-point-one and seven-point-nine-two. Anyone else?”
“Boiled tongue!” said Emma Zeisel. (She had a soft spot for tongue sandwiches.)
Antoinette flipped back to the Ts. “The pH of tongue is six-point-two.”
“What about caviar, darling?”
Antoinette rolled her eyes before turning to C. “Caviar has a pH of five-point-seven, Mother.”
“Well, perhaps the child has learned something useful after all,” said Mrs. Brede, a taut smile stretching from one diamond-studded ear to the other.
“How about potato chips?” asked the short, round man carrying the briefcase.
“Potahto chips?” sniffed Mrs. Brede. “Must we bring that up again?”
“Mother, please,” said Antoinette Brede. “I am perfectly happy to answer that question.” She flipped to the P’s. “Hey, what do you know,” she said. “The government forgot about potato chips!”
“Really?” said Mr. Sparks.
“Really,” said Antoinette. “Here, take a look.”
Mr. Sparks scanned the Ps. “You’re right,” he said. “No potato chips.”
“Which is why,” said Antoinette Brede, “I took matters into my own hands.”
She pulled off the bedsheet to reveal a poster that said THE PH OF POTATO CHIPS and dishes of test samples.
“Oh, good grief!” exclaimed Mrs. Brede before shooting a stern look at Mr. Sparks.
“Hey, Teach, did you put the kid up to this?”
“I assure you, Mr. Lumpkin, I did not.”
“It’s true,” said Antoinette. “Mr. Sparks had nothing to do with my project.”
“Perhaps we should all quiet down and allow the girl to make her presentation,” said the short, round man standing off to the side. “I, for one, would like to learn about the pH of potato chips.”
Leon and the Champion Chip Page 19