“Something wrong, Thomas?” Mrs. Mason asked.
“N-no,” I said, although I couldn’t get my fingers to wrap around the door handle.
“I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” she said cheerfully. Too cheerfully. I still didn’t move. “So …”
“Yeah,” I said. “Actually, I think I hear my mom call—”
I didn’t get to finish, because Chip had come to my side and whipped open the door. He curtsied, and three girls burst into giggles.
“Go on, boys,” Mrs. Mason said, and I could see Chip was about to curtsy again, so I swallowed and slid out of the car to stop him. It didn’t work. He waited until I was standing next to him, shut the door, curtsied again, and said in a high-pitched girl voice, “Let’s go, Mabel.”
“No,” I said through clenched teeth. “Don’t do that, or I will get back in that car and go home.”
Mrs. Mason pulled away from the curb. I watched as she drove out of the parking lot, leaving Chip and me and our fancy dresses behind.
“Do you prefer Martha?” he asked. I started walking. “Minnie?” he asked to my back. I continued forward, eyes pointed straight ahead so I wouldn’t see the amused looks on the faces of the teenagers we passed. “Wait. Thomas,” Chip said when we reached the front door.
“What?”
“I have a title for our mission.”
“I told you not to title it.”
He spread his hands out, as if he were reading from a sign. “The Perplexing Case of the Teacher Who Is History. Get it? He’s a history teacher, and … You get it, right?”
Without a word, I pulled open the door and walked into the school.
TRICK #21
THE EMBARRASSMENT EFFECT
Inside, the school was a bustle of noise and movement. Every time I heard a laugh, I was convinced it was directed at me. I never thought I would wish for breeches and suspenders, but I did.
I pulled Chip into a dark hallway, slipping past the accordion gate blocking it off for the night. I could hear the echo of a whistle blowing in the distance, along with the thud of a bouncing basketball.
“Where are we supposed to go?” I hissed.
“How would I know?” Chip asked, scratching beneath his bonnet.
“It was your plan,” I said. “I figured you had it all mapped out.”
He shook his head. “Part of the fun of a mission is learning things along the way with and about your partner. For example, while perusing the halls of Prairie High, I might discover that you are allergic to asparagus but eat it anyway, and you might discover that I have a toothpick collection.”
“You have a toothpick collection?”
“No, but if I did, you might discover that during our mission here tonight. See?”
No, I totally didn’t see, but how does someone argue with that kind of logic? “Come on,” I said. I grabbed his sleeve and pulled him behind me as I plunged down a shadowy stairwell, the sounds of the gym getting farther away.
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know, but anywhere is better than standing around in flowery dresses in front of a bunch of high schoolers. Come on.”
We got to the bottom of the staircase and turned right. The hallway was even darker than the stairwell, but I had a hunch that if we followed it, we would come up on the other side of the field house. Maybe there would be fewer people on that side.
Sure enough, there was another stairwell at the other end of the hall, and we raced up, both of us hiking our skirts so we didn’t trip over them. I was starting to understand why Grandma Jo almost never wore dresses: it was really hard to accomplish anything in one. The crowd noise got louder again as we neared the top of the stairs, but it wasn’t as loud as before. We craned our necks, straining to look left and right. A custodian at the far end of the hallway was pushing a trash can away from us, toward a door.
“It’s clear,” I whispered. We crept the rest of the way up and peered through the small windows on the field house doors. The game was in full swing; it was only a minute or so before halftime. “Do you see him?” I asked.
“No,” Chip said. “Oh, wait. There he is!” He pointed. Up in the stands, about four rows from the top, a man in brown pants and a vest, very much like the Pennybaker uniform, danced in the aisle, shaking his hips wildly. He had a huge fuzzy beard and a wide-brimmed hat. “He’s awfully far away,” Chip said.
“Yeah. Maybe we can wait for him in the locker room.”
“Good idea.”
We each went separate ways, looking for a locker room door. I was just about to give up and turn around when Chip whistled at me. I turned back to see him holding open a door and pointing inside.
“Good work, Chip,” I said, jogging to catch up with him. We slipped through.
“Thank goodness,” Chip said. “I’ve had to go since we left the house.” He disappeared into a stall.
But something was weird about this locker room. I couldn’t quite pinpoint it.
“Hurry up,” I said. “We don’t want to miss him if he comes in after halftime.”
“Okay, okay, hold your horses,” Chip said. He sounded like he was wrestling with a feisty bear in there. “Corsets aren’t easy to undo, you know.”
“You’re wearing a corset?” I knew exactly what a corset was. Grandma Jo had one, and she called it a girdle.
“You’re not?” He sighed. “I told you, Thomas, I wanted to be as authentic as possible. I laid yours out on the bed next to your dress. We need to go home now and get it.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, but the words came out soft and slow as I scanned the room. It was gradually dawning on me what was weird about this locker room. “Hey, Chip?”
“Huh?”
“Is there a urinal inside that stall, by chance?”
He laughed. “Why would there be a urinal inside a stall?”
My eyes landed on a little sparkly pink bag someone had left on the edge of the sink. I picked it up. “Because there isn’t one out here.” The bag was open a little bit, and inside I could see a bunch of little tubes and bottles and brushes. A makeup bag.
The toilet flushed, and there was more fumbling and bumping inside the stall, and then the door opened and Chip came out. “What?”
I held the bag toward him. “Chip, I think we’re in the—”
Voices roared into the room as the door flew open and a whole bunch of girls poured into the locker room. They were giggling and talking all at the same time, just like girls always did, and they were wearing much shorter versions of the dresses we were wearing.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Hide.”
I reached for Chip’s arm, but I was too late. One of the cheerleaders had spotted us. “Hey,” she said. “What are you doing in here?”
“It was a mistake,” I said, or at least I thought I said, but my voice was really small and scared, because I was pretty sure I was about to get creamed by a whole bunch of girl pioneers.
“You missed the entire first half,” she said, paying no attention to what I’d said. I ducked my head so she couldn’t see my face under the bonnet. I elbowed Chip, and he did the same.
“Sorry,” I said, raising the pitch of my voice, hoping I sounded like a girl. While also hating it a little that it was so easy for me to sound like a girl.
She thrust her hand into the glittery bag and pulled out a tube of lipstick. She smeared it on her lips, gave her hair a quick fluff, and said to her reflection in the mirror, “Ready? Okay. The least you can do is get out there for the halftime show. We go on in thirty seconds.”
Sure enough, all the other girls were rushing around, grabbing new pom-poms out of their lockers and retying their bootlaces.
“Why are their dresses so long?” one of them asked when we walked by.
“New girls,” someone answered her. “I think they’re from private school.”
Well, at least they had that much right.
“They look ridiculous,” the first girl said. She di
dn’t know how right she really was. “We need to get them real uniforms.”
“No time,” said the girl ushering us out of the locker room.
“Well, at least put them in the back row,” another girl said.
“Fine, whatever. I assume you two know the routine? Coach Danner has caught you up?” She thrust pom-poms at us.
I was frantically searching my brain for an answer that would get us out of having to go on, when Chip said, “Sure we do!” I tried to shoot him a death glare, but my bonnet was flopping too low to catch his eye.
There was a muffled boom of music starting, and the girls all jumped into frantic motion.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” one of them chanted while pushing past us.
“New girls! Just try to keep up!” shouted the one shoving us toward the door.
“Ready? Okay!” they screamed in unison, and then yanked open the door and flooded out, spitting us into the bright lights of the field house.
They rushed into four neat lines. I tripped forward as each one raced past me, pom-poms on hips, bonnet ties bouncing on their backs.
“Get in line,” one spat through clenched teeth and a forced smile.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, turning to Chip—only Chip wasn’t there. I spun in a circle. There he was, lined up with the girls, holding his pom-poms proudly.
I barely had time to register what he was doing when the line shifted, and I got shoved forward.
“Step ball change,” the clenched-teeth girl growled. “Kick, kick, kick, drop.”
I stood awkwardly as all the girls—and Chip, who was a surprisingly fast learner—step-ball-changed and kicked and dropped around me. The music changed, and so did the formation, the lines closing in to form three big circles. The lights dimmed as I stutter-stepped, trying to keep up, certain that I would actually drop dead of embarrassment.
“Chip,” I tried every time I passed him, but he didn’t seem to hear me. “Chip!”
“This way,” the clenched-teeth girl said, pushing my shoulder toward the middle of a circle. “You’re the smallest, so you’re going to cupie.”
“I’m going to what?”
“Cupie,” she repeated, but I didn’t even have time to ask what that was before I was grabbed and lifted up by the waist. Two girls palmed the soles of my feet and hoisted me to shoulder height.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I shouted, grabbing at their shoulders with my hands.
“Just relax. You’re messing it up,” the girl shouted into my ear. “Straighten your legs.”
“No way.”
“Let. Go. Of. Them. And. Straighten.”
I whimpered.
“Look. Your friend is doing it.”
I looked to my right and, sure enough, there was Chip, standing high and proud atop his cluster of cheerleaders, his arms in the air victoriously. Seriously, did the kid even have cupie socks?
“Do it!” the girl growled, and moved her hands from my waist to my ankles. She counted—“Five, six, seven, eight”—and the next thing I knew, I was teetering so high above the hard field house floor I might as well have been in an airplane. My arms wheeled out to my sides as I desperately tried to keep upright.
“Smile,” the girl shouted.
Nope. No way. Who smiles on their way to certain death?
“Okay, five, six, seven, eight!” she cried, and the next thing I knew, I was being launched into the air. “Pike, pike!” she was shouting.
But I didn’t pike. Instead, I flailed. And screamed. And apparently, flailing and screaming throws off a cupie formation. In fact, when you flail and scream the specific words “I’m gonna puke!” it causes all the other girls in your formation to take two steps back. And instead of landing safely cradled in their arms—as I saw Chip do out of the corner of my eye—you land on the floor, on your back and on your bruised tailbone, so hard it knocks the wind out of you. Again. And you’re so busy rolling around on the floor in agony, you don’t even realize your dress has billowed up over your head, showing off your rolled-up boy jeans and your sweat socks poking out of a pair of old-fashioned lace-up boots.
When I finally got my breath back, I realized that the entire gym had gone quiet. I clawed my way out from under my dress and opened my eyes to find a circle of angry cheerleaders standing above me. And Chip. He leaned down so his face was sort of close to mine and whispered, “Technically, a pike is—”
“I know what a pike is,” I snapped, sitting up. My back felt like it had been slapped. By a floor.
“You’re a boy,” one of the cheerleaders said, pointing out the obvious. I ripped off my bonnet and tossed it to the side. There was an audible gasp from the crowd. “You’re both boys.”
“They were in the girls’ locker room,” another cheerleader said, her voice coming way too close to a shriek for my comfort.
“We weren’t trying to be,” I said. “We were looking for someone.”
A referee parted the circle and crouched over me. “You all right, son?” he asked. I nodded. He picked me up by my elbow. “Good. It’s time for you to leave. You, too, Little Red Riding Hood.”
“Technically, I’m wearing a bonnet, not a hood. And also my dress is pink, not red. And I’m not on my way to deliver baked goods to my grandmother. You should possibly consider brushing up on your fairy tales.”
“Okay, Little Pink Riding Bonnet, how about you take your baked goods on out of here,” the referee said, leading us across the field house floor.
“I don’t have any baked goods,” Chip said, and the referee might have thought he was being smart with him, but that was the kind of thing that really did mess with Chip. You were accurate or you were inaccurate. There wasn’t a lot of in between.
We were deposited on the front walk of the school. I shrugged out of my dress and bonnet and tossed them on the ground next to my feet. Chip stayed in his, primly smoothing his skirt over his knees.
“Dresses are quite comfortable, don’t you agree, Thomas?”
I stared at him.
“What?” he asked.
“Seriously? You have to ask what? We were just kicked out of a high school basketball game, but not before making sure we completely humiliated ourselves. And we didn’t even get anywhere close to Mr. Faboo.”
“Oh. That.” He thought for a moment, and then brightened. “I know what we can do.”
“What?”
“Well, my mom won’t be here until after the game is over. And the referee said we had to leave the game, but he didn’t say we had to leave the school grounds. I propose we wait here for the game to be over and for Mr. Faboo to come out.”
It was a pretty reasonable plan. So reasonable, in fact, some might say we should have started with it and forgotten all about the costumes and the spirit-leader thing. So we waited. And we waited. And we waited. Chip sang the periodic table song. And then sang it again backward. And again in French. And just when he asked if I’d like to hear him sing it in pig Latin while doing a handstand, the doors opened, and Prairie High fans began to stream out. I could tell by the way their heads hung low that the team hadn’t won the game.
Chip and I slid around to the side of the building and peeked around the corner, watching for Mr. Faboo. Just when we thought he wouldn’t be coming at all, the door opened and out he came, walking with the same referee who’d kicked us out.
“In three,” Chip whispered. “One—”
But I didn’t wait for him to finish. I darted out from behind the school and made a beeline for the pioneer.
“Caught you!” I yelled as I reached up to grab Mr. Faboo’s fake beard. Only it didn’t come off. And it wasn’t fake. And the pioneer who yelled “Ouch!” and jumped back, rubbing his cheek, wasn’t Mr. Faboo at all.
“What was that for?” he asked.
“I thought I told you two to leave,” the referee said.
“Technically,” Chip said, pointing one finger in the air as he slowly sauntered toward us, “you told u
s to leave the game. But there was no game going on out here.”
“I should call the police,” the referee said.
“Please don’t,” I said. “We didn’t mean to hurt anyone. We were just looking for Mr. Faboo, and we thought the pioneer was him.”
“Who?” the pioneer asked. He was still rubbing his cheek.
“Mr. Faboo. Our history teacher.” I pointed to Chip. “He said Mr. Faboo is a mascot here.”
The referee and the pioneer exchanged glances. “Oh,” they said in unison. “Francis.”
“Who?” Chip asked, at the same time that I said, “His name is Francis Faboo?”
“He’s the football mascot,” the pioneer said. “Football season’s over. We won’t see him again until August.”
I gave Chip a death glare. “Football mascot?” I repeated.
Chip shrugged. “I thought every sport was the same.” The one thing Chip wasn’t smart about was sports—so why had I trusted him to lead us to Prairie High? Because I wasn’t smart at remembering what going on adventures with Chip was like.
“So do you know where he is?” I asked.
The pioneer shook his head.
I could feel my shoulders sag. Mrs. Mason pulled up to the curb and gave a short honk. “Sorry I pulled your beard,” I said. “And sorry I messed up the cupie,” I said to the ref.
“Let’s go, Thomas,” Chip said.
I turned away from the pioneer and the referee. “And I’m sorry I ever listened to you,” I said. But Chip either didn’t hear me or didn’t care.
TRICK #22
THE TIME MACHINE PROPOSAL
Thanks to Boone County being a pretty small town, by the time we got to school the next day, pretty much everyone knew all about the Prairie High basketball game. Kids snickered when we walked by, and a couple of guys asked if their sisters could borrow some clothes from us.
It was humiliating, sure, but I was too busy trying to figure out a quick-change trick to worry about it.
Pennybaker School Is Revolting Page 11