For Paige, Weston, and Rand
May you always embrace your unique gifts
Also by Jennifer Brown
Life on Mars
How Lunchbox Jones Saved Me from Robots, Traitors, and Missy the Cruel
Pennybaker School Is Headed for Disaster
CONTENTS
Trick #1: The Pantyhose Pull
Trick #2: The Dance Ditch
Trick #3: A Teacher Appears
Trick #4: The Hidden Granny Trick
Trick #5: Loaded Levitation
Trick #6: Poof! Popularity!
Trick #7: The Friend Force
Trick #8: Sleight of Sister
Trick #9: The Mutiny Manifestation
Trick #10: The Web of Textbook
Trick #11: Camp Confusion
Trick #12: Dealing Detention
Trick #13: The Party Pinch
Trick #14: I Shall Now Put on These Shackles
Trick #15: The Cannonball Crimp
Trick #16: I Shall Now Hatch This Plan
Trick #17: The Abandonment Angle
Trick #18: The Prairieball Pass
Trick #19: The Racing Bouquet Wand
Trick #20: Pick a Dress, Any Dress
Trick #21: The Embarrassment Effect
Trick #22: The Time Machine Proposal
Trick #23: The Smelly Earplug
Trick #24: An Explosive Illusion
Trick #25: The Stink Bomb
Trick #26: Ta-da! A Teacher Appears!
Trick #27: The Plan Patter
Trick #28: A Riveting Quick Change
Trick #29: The Friendship Flourish
Trick #30: The Roosevelt Run
Trick #31: The Big Reveal
The Finale Trick
Acknowledgments
TRICK #1
THE PANTYHOSE PULL
I used to hate bow ties. That was before the pantyhose.
Mom insisted that they weren’t pantyhose. She called them “stockings” and said that all the men in colonial times wore them.
But we were standing in the ladies’ underwear section at the store when she said it, and she pulled the stockings off a shelf marked “Pantyhose” while we were surrounded by a bunch of old ladies all wearing pantyhose, and the plastic package had a picture of a woman wearing pantyhose right on the front.
So, yeah. Pantyhose.
The problem with pantyhose was they were impossible to get on. If I didn’t pull hard enough, they fell down. If I pulled too hard, they ripped. And they were hot and itchy, and I wasn’t sure Philadelphus Philadelphia even wore them. It was impossible to find a picture of Philadelphus Philadelphia anywhere.
I was still wrestling with my so-called stockings when Chip Mason came into my room. “Good day to you, Thomas Fallgrout!” he said, taking off his tricornered hat and bending low at the waist in a bow. “I bring glad tidings from Newburyport, Massachusetts.”
Chip was my across-the-street neighbor, and my friend, too, even though he was weird and kind of annoying sometimes and I pretty much never understood what he was saying—especially when he was wearing his King’s English socks. Chip had socks for every occasion. And I don’t just mean Santa socks for Christmas and candy-corn socks for Halloween—Chip had socks for everything from movie night to geological studies.
Today, for the most part, Chip was dressed like me: coat, ruffled shirt, hat, pantyhose, shoes that made noise when you walked. Only his pantyhose weren’t sagging around his ankles and didn’t have holes in them.
“Who are you supposed to be?” I asked, giving mine another tug.
“John Pearson, of course,” he said, bringing his heels together with a snap and saluting me.
“Soldier?”
“No, sir.”
“Then why are you saluting me?”
He lowered his hand and clasped it behind his back with the other one. “I don’t know. Seemed the right thing to do.”
“Okay. So who was Pierce Johnson?”
“I don’t know, who?”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t know! You’re the one who decided to be him, not me!”
“My dear lad,” Chip said, “the way you’ve worded your declaration makes it sound as if I might have chosen to represent you for our assignment—which, of course, I could not do, as you are not a colonial figure of any sort. I believe your sentence structure would be clearer if you’d said something along the lines of I didn’t dress as Pierce Johnson; you did. I have found that rewording things in my head a few times before saying them aloud helps to avoid confusion.”
I opened my mouth to tell him how he could avoid the confusion of me putting him in a headlock, but he held up his hand to stop me.
“However. Given the context of our sentences previous, I imagine you meant to ask who ‘John Pearson’ was, for that is whose style of dress I’m meant to emulate. ‘Pierce Johnson’ is just some random gentleman who I’m sure is nice enough, but who is not a member of colonial society—although, without proper research, I cannot definitively make the claim that there were no Pierce Johnsons in colonial America. But going off the assumption that I am correct, and Pierce Johnson did not, indeed, exist in colonial society, he would not be appropriate for our assignment.”
Our assignment. For Facts After the Fact class, otherwise known as History in a normal school. But Pennybaker School for the Uniquely Gifted was definitely not normal, and we didn’t get normal assignments. The current non-normal assignment, called Act After the Fact, was to research and pretend to be a real-life but unknown colonial American citizen for one month.
One month of hot, itchy leg-stranglers.
Chip paced across my room, his hand tucked into his lapel. “It was quite the difficult decision, paring down the vast field of unsung heroes,” he said. “Should I go for a humanitarian? A brave battlefield commander? A doctor? A scholar? There were just so many citizens to choose from.”
There were? It had taken me three days to find a single one. That was the problem with unknown people—they were unknown. Then again, I wasn’t Chip Mason. He was probably wearing his unknown colonial American citizen socks at the time.
“In the end, though,” he said, “I chose inventor John Pearson.”
“What did he invent?” I asked.
“Pearson’s Pilot Bread!” he proclaimed proudly.
“Huh?”
“Sea biscuits?” he tried.
“I think your research might be wrong, Chip. Seabiscuit was a horse. Nobody invented a horse.”
“Not true. The Greeks very much invented a horse when they wished to invade Troy.”
I blinked. “Wait—this assignment is about Greece? And who is Troy?” More important question: Did Ancient Greek guys wear pantyhose?
Chip chose to ignore my questions. “Perhaps you’ve heard of it referred to as hardtack.”
“What? The Greek horse?”
“No, not the—” He sighed and adjusted his proud posture again. “John Pearson was none other than the inventor of the fine and ever-enduring popular snack food …” He raised his arms dramatically. Chip did everything dramatically—almost as dramatically as my friend Wesley, the thespian. Chip would make a pretty good thespian, actually. He undoubtedly had thespian socks. “The cracker!”
“The cracker,” I repeated. He nodded excitedly. “Out of all the colonial people in the world, you chose the dude who invented saltines?”
“Well, no. The inventor of saltines was actually—”
“Never mind. I don’t want to know.” I tugged on the pantyhose, and my big toe popped through the end. “Oh, come on,” I said, pulling them off and wadding them up. I tossed them into the corner with the other nine hundred pairs I’
d ruined. “Why do we have to wear all this, anyway?”
“The proper male colonial attire was a coat, breeches, a cravat—”
I pointed at him. “Nope. No way. I know what a cravat is. It’s a tie. And if I have to wear pantyhose, I am not wearing a tie. Pick one end or the other.”
“Spatterdashes,” Chip said. I figured he meant something like “balderdash,” a word Grandma Jo sometimes said when she thought something was ridiculous. But he stuck out one leg, swept his hand over it, and repeated, “Spatterdashes. Or leggings, if you prefer.”
“Pantyhose,” I grumbled, opening a new package.
“Not pantyhose.” He thought about it. “Although possibly a predecessor to them. I must follow up with some research this evening during my post-school academic reflection.”
I pulled the spatterdashes over my boxers, grabbed the breeches Mom had made for me, and yanked them up quickly. I haphazardly tucked in my usual white button-down school uniform shirt and covered it with a vest that Mom had made to match the breeches. I didn’t look nearly as fancy as Chip did, and I certainly was not going to wear a cravat, but it would do.
There were three knocks on my door, and then Dad poked his head through. He was carrying his coffee, just like always, and his neck was red from shaving, also just like always.
“Hey, pal, you about ready to go?”
I shook one leg to make it stop itching. “No.”
“Good. See you in ten minutes.” He started to pull his head out of the doorway, and then stuck it back in. “Who are you supposed to be, Chip?”
“John Pearson.”
Dad’s face lit up. “Ah! The inventor of the illustrious cracker!”
“Indeed, my good man.” Chip took off his hat and bowed low to the floor. “Indeed.”
TRICK #2
THE DANCE DITCH
“It’s about time, Thomas Fallgrout!” a pair of feet said to me.
I looked down to where normal feet should have been and saw Clover Prentice’s scowling face. She dropped out of her handstand and into a forward roll, then stood up. Her forehead was kind of sweaty and red, probably from having been upside down for so long. Or maybe inside out. You never really knew with Clover. Her unique gift was contortionism. As Grandma Jo liked to say, she could tie herself up like a pretzel and dip herself in cheese. I wasn’t sure what the cheese part was about. Probably Grandma Jo was just hungry when she said it.
“Sorry I’m late, Clover.”
“Late?” She wound an arm around her neck and looked at her watch. “How about very, very late?” As if to agree with her, the warning bell rang, and everyone started climbing the giant staircase to their classrooms. “This is the third time this week you didn’t get here early enough to polish her, and now her nostrils look dusty.” She waved at the giant bust of Helen Heirmauser, revered math teacher from days of Pennybaker past. I had a love-hate relationship with that statue, after everything that happened when I first transferred to Pennybaker School. I also had a love-hate relationship with my polishing duty. On one hand, it was an honor to be the school hero appointed to such an important task. On the other hand, it was a chore that involved getting to school early to spend up-close-and-personal time with the creepiest human head in all of human-head history. “It’s my job as hall monitor to make sure the school is presenting its best face at all times,” Clover continued.
“Well, if that’s our best face, I’d hate to see our worst,” I said, pointing at the goggle-eyed, openmouthed, wild-haired statue. I cracked myself up, but Clover simply stared at me.
“She’s not shiny,” she said. “And if you’re not going to keep her polished, we’ll just have to find someone else who will.”
“Excuse me, my lady.” Off with the hat again. If Chip wasn’t careful, he was going to break himself in half from bowing so much. “I would be honored to take care of this glorious icon here. Cleanliness, after all, is next to Heirmauseriness.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
He looked at me. “I never kid about hygiene, Thomas. You should know that.”
Clover looked half-angry—at me—and half in love with Chip. Gross. She batted her eyes, clutching her hands in front of her and releasing her shoulders so she looked like a balloon with a slow leak. “You’ll be late to class, though.”
Chip waved her off. “It’s the least I can do to save the reputation of my school. I am a colonial hero, as you can see.”
“You made a cracker!” I said. “It was probably by accident!”
They both ignored me.
“Please, fine madam, lead me to your polishing tools.” Chip crooked one arm out toward Clover.
“Of course,” she said sweetly. She snaked her hand through his arm, then gave me a glare. “As hall monitor, I’m afraid I must tell you to get to class, Thomas, or I’ll have to write you up.” She turned back to Chip and smiled again, and the two of them sashayed into the janitor’s closet to find the polishing rags.
“Oh, brother,” I mumbled as I started up the stairs.
I itched all through Biofeedback—my legs keeping me from directing my energy toward an inward calm, as my teacher Mrs. Breeze liked to say—and sagged all through Active Numbering. By the time I got to Four Square class—Pennybaker School’s name for PE—I was ready to take off my spatterdashes, even if it meant having to do push-ups or pull-ups or getting my nose smashed by Buster Tallwell in football … again. I just wanted to be free from the pantyhose prison.
I had just gotten one leg out when I was shoved from behind, knocking me into my locker. “Who are you supposed to be, nerd?”
Buster Tallwell’s unique gift was feats of strength and extreme heightness. There was a rumor that Buster had already been scouted by the NBA and the NFL and the NHL and the FBI, but I think that last one was added just because people had already used up all the other letters and still wanted the rumor to sound important. But nobody could confirm any of it, because anyone who asked Buster Tallwell a question about his height mysteriously ended up duct-taped to the mats on the gym wall. Chip had been duct-taped five times. He even started carrying his own duct tape. He called it his Tallwell Tape, because Chip Mason was a good sport about everything.
Questions That Could Get You Tallwell-Taped to the Gym Wall, in No Particular Order
How’s the weather up there?
Can you see my house from here?
Does it hurt when meteorites hit you in the head?
Do you have to duck when airplanes fly by?
Have you ever put a flashlight in your mouth and stood by the ocean on a stormy night?
Can I borrow your eraser? (Apparently Buster Tallwell wasn’t a big fan of sharing, either.)
I shimmied out of my dress shirt, and my skin sighed with relief. I crammed it into my locker and pulled out my gym clothes, which hadn’t been washed in sixty-six days, making me the current record-holder in the unofficial Pennybaker School Smelly Shirt Contest. Wesley had been ahead of me until parent-teacher conferences, when his mom pulled his yellow shirt out of his gym locker and screamed in disgust. Apparently it had been white when she’d sent it in at the beginning of the year.
“I asked you a question, nerd,” Buster said, leaning over me menacingly, blocking out the light. (7. Does your head get hot from light bulbs?)
“Oh, this?” I asked, plucking the spatterdashes off the floor and dropping them in my locker. “Philadelphus Philadelphia.”
“Who?”
“Philadelphus Philadelphia.”
“You’re making that up.”
I shimmied into my shorts, my legs feeling wonderfully breezy and free. “Nope.”
“Nobody is named Philawhatever.”
“Well, maybe not anymore, but this guy sure was.”
He rolled his eyes. “Let me guess. He had a brother named New Jersius New Jersey.”
“No, he—”
“And a sister named Californius California. A whole family named after cities.�
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“Um, those are states, and—”
“Oh! I know another. Francius Francey.”
“That’s a country. And you added a Y.”
“Fine. Australius Australia.”
“Continent.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Are you saying I don’t know what I’m talking about?”
I held my arms up in surrender. “No. I swear. I was just … His name was actually Jacob Meyer, but he went by Philadelphus Philadelphia. And, trust me, I think it’s stupid, too. I just had to pick someone.”
The truth was, I kind of related to Jacob Meyer. He was the first American-born magician. He was kind of a big deal, made a ton of money, performed for royalty across Europe, and even got banished from Prussia for freaking out the king. Freaking out kings sounded like a pretty cool skill to put on your job applications.
But, even better, Jacob Meyer, aka Philadelphus Philadelphia, used science in his magic. Specifically, he used alchemy, which Chip explained to me was mostly about trying to turn lead into gold. That sounded like exactly the reason I was at Pennybaker in the first place.
As much as I hated dressing up, learning about people like Jacob Meyer was pretty cool. And Mr. Faboo, our Facts After the Fact teacher, was awesome at teaching us interesting stuff about regular people, because he believed regular people were just as important in history as wars and treaties, which made regular guys like me feel kind of important. Plus, he didn’t believe in memorizing dates or taking tests, which made thirty days of suffocated calves totally worth it.
Buster continued. “You should have picked someone cool, like … like … like the guy who built Plymouth Rock.”
I waited for him to say Just kidding or something, but he didn’t. In fact, he seemed pretty pleased with himself for having had such a great idea. “It wasn’t built,” I said. “It’s a rock.”
“What are you saying? That I don’t know about rock-building?” He leaned even farther over me. I was starting to understand why Chip spent so much time on the wall. There was no way he would be able to resist giving a lecture on the history of rock formation. He would probably even ask to go home so he could don his geology socks.
Pennybaker School Is Revolting Page 1