One of those silent students was Trixi Wilder. She just grinned, leaned back in her chair and waited for her grand plan to unfold.
Martin Wettmore didn’t know a thing about Trixi’s special edition of the Upland Green Gossiper. The day after his meeting with Ms. Baumgartner Martin stayed in bed, pretending he had the flu. He spent his whole miserable day with an image of Ms. Baumgartner in his head; swirling around her were words like unreasonable, thoughtless, mean and unfair.
Martin didn’t care that the electricity in the house was off all day or that Razor and five of his friends had skipped school to play floor hockey in the hall outside his room. He didn’t flinch when three of Sissy’s dogs jumped up on his bed and had a fight. He didn’t open his eyes when one of Razor’s friends let off a firecracker in the upstairs bathroom or when his mother came home early from work and played her Barry Manilow cd full blast seven times in a row. Martin was a bag of misery.
At Upland Green School, every student in every classroom held their breath and waited. At the sound of the recess bell, a herd of kids stampeded out to the parking lot. There was great disappointment when they saw that no chunks of metal had been bitten off Ms. Baumgartner’s car. There weren’t even any scratches on the paint, and not one tooth mark could be found on the bumpers. Not one single sign of angry gophers whatsoever.
“Hey, Trixi!” Paul Smirl shouted. “I thought your paper said some angry gophers would—”
“I know, I know, I know,” Trixi said. “Just be patient. Have any of my newspapers ever let you down?”
A line of kids stood around the edge of the field looking up, keeping their eyes peeled for flying outhouses. All they saw were a crow and two chickadees.
Another crowd cupped their hands against the glass of the staffroom window. The closest thing to a mummy they saw was Mrs. Kensington, the grade-seven teacher, in a wraparound dress she’d brought back from her trip to Thailand.
“Hey, Trixi! Are you trying to make us look like a bunch of idiots?” Megan Tomlinson said. “Where’s the mummy?”
“These things take time,” Trixi replied. “You’ve got to wait and watch. But I guarantee, it’ll be worth it!”
No one dared go into the washrooms. Everyone was too terrified of coming face to face with a sopping wet, cat-sized, sewer rat running from a toilet bowl to the principal’s office. There were plenty of kids standing around crossing their legs and making strange faces, but no one went inside. No one, that is, except for Sally Sweeny.
On her way to school that morning, Sally had guzzled three extra-large Slushies-in-a-Barrel from the convenience store down the street. As she stood outside the girls’ washroom at recess, Sally knew she could either wet her pants or confront the sewer rats. The crowd around the girls’ washroom gasped when Sally charged through the door and disappeared inside.
“Sally! Watch out!” Laura Birken yelled. “You’d better come out, ’cause no one’s coming in to save you!”
There was no reply. The door remained closed. Standing in complete silence, everyone listened. They were expecting to hear Sally howling as the gigantic sewer rats leaped out of the toilets and surrounded her. They were expecting to hear Sally shriek and scream when the rats sank their massive teeth into her leg. But they heard neither howling nor shrieking nor even one solitary scream. Moments later, Sally casually strolled out the door.
“What about the sewer rats?” Laura said. “How big were they? How many were there?”
“The only thing I saw was a crumpled paper towel on the floor,” Sally said.
“That’s it?” Laura said. “No bloodthirsty foot-long rats with razor-sharp teeth and really bad personalities?”
“Nope,” was all Sally said.
Recess passed. Lunch went by. When the end of the school day arrived, not one single story written in the pages of Trixi’s special edition had come true. You could smell the disappointment in the school.
As everyone filed past her in the hall on their way home, Trixi shouted, “By Monday morning, everything will have happened! I promise! Just you wait! You’ll see!” But no one said a word to Trixi. They didn’t have to. Their dirty looks told her exactly what they were thinking.
When everyone was gone, Trixi plodded out the door and headed home to an empty house. As she walked, she racked her brains, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Why hadn’t the stories in her special edition come true?
FOURTEEN
At home that night, Trixi sat under the pink canopy on her pink bed and flipped through the channels on her bedroom tv. But her mind was not on the images flashing by on the giant screen. Her mind was busy trying to figure out what had gone wrong with her special edition of the Upland Green Gossiper.
She had tried to phone her parents, but all she got was her mother’s recorded voice telling her to leave a message. Then Trixi had called Alyssa and Megan and Marcie and Jenny and Brianne. But each of them hung up as soon as they heard her voice.
Then she knocked on Mrs. Primrose’s door, but the housekeeper was watching the finale of Juggling with the Stars, so she couldn’t be disturbed for the next two hours.
Trixi even tried to phone Martin, but no one answered. With no one to talk to, Trixi decided to get her mind off her horrible day by watching tv. The things that had happened that day—or the things that hadn’t happened—kept replaying in her mind.
Why hadn’t the gophers come through for her? Where was that flying outhouse when she needed it?
At 11:00 pm, Mrs. Primrose pounded on her door. “Shut that television off and turn out the lights. And I mean now!”
As Trixi lay in the darkness, she stared up at the glowing stars and planets stuck to her ceiling, trying to forget everything and get to sleep. But in a clump of stars right above her bed, she could see the shape of a rat. It was the exact shape of the sewer rats that were supposed to climb out of the toilets at school. But they never showed up.
To the right of the rat, another group of stars took on the shape of a mummy. The longer she looked, the more it looked like the mummy was holding up a coffee cup to its mouth. She’d seen this mummy before in her imagination as she was writing the latest edition of the paper. But where was that mummy when she really needed it?
Trixi turned on her side. Instead of facing up at the stars on the ceiling, she was staring straight at her clock radio. She watched the minutes slowly tick by, crawling into hours.
At 7:00 am, Mrs. Primrose banged on her door and shouted, “Time to wake up!” But Trixi had never fallen asleep.
That evening, Martin received five anonymous phone calls.
“What kind of newspaper are you and Wilder printing, huh?” a voice screamed over the phone. “We didn’t see one single coffee-drinking mummy! And where were the flying outhouses? And what about the car-eating gophers? Nothing happened! Nothing!”
The four other phone calls were much the same. All angry, all talking about things Martin knew nothing about. But after the fifth phone call, he had a pretty good idea of what had happened at school that day. He yanked the phone cord hard enough for the phone jack to pop out of the wall. Now, no one could remind him of school and of the newspaper which no longer existed.
Just before he went to bed, Martin’s mother called him into the kitchen. Mountains of miniature cucumbers and piles of dill weed covered the counters. “Martin,” she said over a bubbling pot, “all this moping around the house pretending to be sick will end tomorrow. No matter what, you are going to school. I’m not leaving you at home alone, and I don’t want to miss work a second day in a row.”
Martin didn’t bother telling his mother that tomorrow was Saturday. He trudged up to his room and flopped onto the bed. He didn’t brush his teeth or change into his pajamas. He just lay there, awake…wide-awake, staring at the streetlight outside his window. The only sound in the room was the bubbling of Razor’s piranha tank. He listened for the whistle of the 11:07 freight train, but it never arrived. Razor stumbled into the room at 11:45,
dove onto his bed and fell asleep instantly. He didn’t even snore. The 1:42 freight train that usually made the windows rattle and the floor vibrate never came by. There were no fires and no sirens that night.
In all of this silence, Martin lay wide-awake, his eyes closed, but his mind wide-open. How could Ms. Baumgartner even think of shutting his newspaper down? How could she be so unfair? These two questions cycled through his mind over and over, with no answer to stop them.
At 7:00 am, his mother banged on his door and shouted, “Martin! Time to get up for school!” But he was already wide-awake.
Just like any weekday morning, he washed, ate breakfast, grabbed his backpack and headed out the door. He still hadn’t bothered telling his mother it was Saturday. It didn’t matter. As long as he was out of the house, she’d be happy. As Martin closed the back door and walked down the creaky steps, he thought about where he could spend the day.
When Trixi turned up at the bus yard at exactly 8:00 am, someone was already hosing down one of the school buses. She could hear the thrum of a power washer and the rumble of a jet of water hitting the side of the bus. As she walked around the edge of the fence and through the gate, she stopped and shouted, “Hey! Did Baumgartner make you come and wash school buses too?”
Martin cut the spray from the hose and picked up a bucket of sudsy water, moving to the rear of the bus. “Ms. Baumgartner told me to look for a new hobby. This is it.”
“You call this a hobby? I call it punishment. Why don’t you take up something more fun like picking up litter or writing lines?”
Martin picked up the power-washer nozzle and fingered the trigger. It was so tempting. Instead he said, “How do you know I don’t enjoy washing school buses? Maybe I like blasting hunks of mud with powerful jets of water.”
“Sure. Maybe you do, but it’s not my idea of a good time,” Trixi said. “Still, it’s not like I’ve got a choice. I’m stuck doing this stupid job.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t put any stories in your paper yesterday about automatic bus-washing machines,” Martin said.
“You heard about the paper, huh?”
“Indirectly,” Martin said. “I had a few phone calls from some of your friends. They thought I was involved in your last edition. I gather things didn’t turn out all that well.”
“I’ll say. The special edition was about as special as a moldy sock. Not one thing happened the way it was supposed to. Not a single one.”
“This must be the first time a prank of yours has backfired.”
“You got that right,” Trixi said. “And the worst part is that Baumgartner really deserved everything I wrote in that paper.”
“I’ll say. I’ve never met a principal who was so unfair,” Martin said. He pointed the power washer at the school bus and pulled the trigger, blasting the back window.
“You know what’s really weird?” Trixi said. “You and I finally agree on something.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty strange,” Martin said.
“Well, I guess I’d better start work. If I’m late, Baumgartner’ll probably add another week to my sentence,” Trixi said, taking the power-washer nozzle from Martin.
As she began to spray down the tires, Martin said, “So, after the flop of your last paper, are you having second thoughts about the first two papers?”
“What do you mean?” Trixi said.
“Do you still think all the weird stuff that happened at school was caused by the newspapers?”
“Yeah. Of course it was.” Trixi stopped the spray and looked at Martin. “Don’t tell me you still think it was a coincidence.”
Martin took the soppy sponge out of the bucket of soapy water and squeezed it hard with both hands. “I’m thinking… I’m thinking that something very weird was going on,” he said.
“So you actually admit that the newspaper caused all that craziness?” Trixi said.
“I didn’t want to believe it at first. But after the second time it happened, even I have to admit there must be some sort of connection,” Martin said.
“But I can’t figure out why none of the stories came true yesterday,” Trixi said. She gunned the power washer and sprayed it back and forth over the windows. “I tried to do everything the same with the newspaper, but something went wrong along the way.”
Martin dunked the sponge in the bucket and began to wash the taillights. “Did you use the same computer?”
Martin said.
“Yep. Same computer.”
Martin paused and plunged the sponge back in the bucket.
“Maybe you used a different type of paper or different fonts or something.”
“Nope. I tried to make sure everything was the exactly same.”
“Hmm. That is strange,” Martin said. He picked up his bucket and moved to the front of the bus. “Maybe it had something to do with when you copied it. What time of day was it?”
“Early in the morning. I did it in my mom’s office before our housekeeper brought me to school.”
“You copied it in your mom’s office?” Martin squeezed the sponge, the soapy water dribbling onto his shoes.
“Yeah.” Trixi let the spray of water arc over the roof of the bus.
“You didn’t use the school photocopier?”
“Well, duh! Do you think Baumgartner would let me copy my own paper on the school’s photocopier?”
Trixi cut the sprayer and stared at Martin.
“It’s got to be the photocopier!” Martin shouted as he threw the sponge against the windshield, leaving a soapy smudge in the middle of the glass.
“Yeah! The photocopier!” Trixi said. “It’s the only thing that’s different!”
“I hate to say this,” Martin said, “but in a weird sort of way, it makes sense. After folding origami animals, filling in test answers and translating everything into Japanese, this sort of thing shouldn’t be a surprise.”
“Of course, it’s the photocopier!” Trixi said, spraying a jet of water straight up in the air. “Why didn’t I think of it earlier? If I could just reprint that special edition of the Gossiper, then Baumgartner would finally get what she deserves! But she’s probably got that photocopy room locked up tighter than Fort Knox.”
A huge grin blossomed across Martin’s face as water rained down from above.
“Why the idiotic grin?” Trixi said.
“When I used to copy the newspaper, I would go early in the morning before all the teachers arrived. That way, I wouldn’t be printing the school newspaper when all the teachers wanted to use the photocopier.”
“Yeah? So? What are you getting at?”
“To get into the photocopy room, Ms. Baumgartner gave me this…” Martin reached into his soaked shirt and pulled at a string tied around his neck. On the end of the string dangled a key. “She didn’t ask for it back when she shut down the newspaper.”
“You have a key to the photocopy room?” Trixi said. She let the power-washer nozzle clatter to the ground. “Let me have it, and I’ll sneak in and—”
“Not so fast,” Martin said, shoving the key back into his shirt. “Before any more copies of the school newspaper get printed, I want to have a say in what stories are in it.”
“Ah, come on, Marty! The Gossiper isn’t your kind of paper,” Trixi said, throwing her hands up. “There’s none of that factual mumbo jumbo. The Gossiper’s all about having some fun and stirring things up in the school. You know, give Baumgartner a headache or two.”
“I know exactly what kind of a paper the Gossiper is,”
Martin said.
“Marty, listen. If we’re going to take the chance of sneaking into the photocopy room, we’ve got to write a paper that’s really good. I mean REALLY good, like sewer rats and mummies and flying outhouses. Stuff like that!”
“I’ll admit that the stories in my newspapers weren’t all that exciting. That’s why we have to work together.”
“What do you mean work together? You’re beginning to sound like Baum
gartner!”
“So what? The point is you want your newspaper to cause all kinds of trouble in the school. But I’m the one with the key to the photocopy room. If you want to use my key, you have to let me work on the next edition of the paper.”
Trixi sighed. “Why would we bother to write another paper when I have a perfectly fantastic edition ready to copy?”
“Because instead of using the next edition of the school newspaper to make problems for Ms. Baumgartner, we could use it to solve her problems.”
“That doesn’t sound like any fun at all. Why would we want to do something like that?”
“Why, Trixi? Because you’re washing school buses on Saturday mornings, and I don’t have my school newspaper anymore. That’s why.”
“But those are the very reasons why we should make a bunch of trouble. It’s called revenge, Marty.”
“All revenge will do is get you washing more school buses, and it certainly won’t bring my newspaper back. Instead we’ll use the paper to get ourselves out of trouble,” Martin said.
“How are we supposed to do that?”
“You’re the ideas person, Trixi. Just think about it for a second. Other than us, what’s the biggest problem Ms. Baumgartner has right now? The library, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“So, you and I use the paper to help rebuild the library. We’ll become instant heroes! And when we’re school heroes, Ms. Baumgartner will have to take you off bus-washing duty, and she’ll have to let me run my newspaper again!”
“But causing trouble’s way more fun,” Trixi said.
“Maybe so, but where will it get you? If you cause any more trouble around here, Ms. Baumgartner will probably have you washing every car in town six days a week.”
“You may have a point there,” Trixi said. “But before I agree to anything, I’ve got to hear every detail of your little scheme.”
“Okay, here’s what I’m thinking. Next week is the Fall Fair Fundraiser…”
Tabloidology Page 10