That’s one balloon that got popped, Sam thought. It was fun popping balloon problems, at least when they weren’t your balloon problems. Other people’s problems were always easier, especially if those other people were waffles.
Or, Sam thought, if those other people were Gavin.
When Jackson Grubbs had shown up in Mr. Pell’s window that afternoon, he wasn’t just shooting mean looks at Sam, he was shooting them at Gavin, too. Maybe Sam should think about solving Gavin’s problem instead of solving Sam’s problem.
Sam felt a lot braver when he thought about helping his friend instead of worrying about himself.
Okay then, Sam thought, standing up. What was Gavin’s problem? What was his balloon? Was it that Jackson might punch him in the mouth and make his teeth fall out?
No, Sam thought. Gavin’s problem was the same as Sam’s. Gavin’s problem was that he had to walk around being afraid all the time.
So how could Sam help Gavin stop being afraid?
How could he pop the balloon of afraidness?
He could punch Jackson Grubb in the mouth and make him afraid all the time, Sam thought. He sort of liked that idea, except for the fact that Jackson Grubb was a lot bigger than him. And also, Sam didn’t want to make somebody afraid all the time. It seemed mean to him, and also exhausting.
So maybe Sam and Gavin could do something that would make Jackson Grubb exhausted. Maybe instead of being afraid of Jackson following them around all the time, maybe they could follow Jackson around all the time.
They should probably take their bodyguard with them, Sam thought, just in case it took Jackson a while to get tired of being mean.
Sam went back to his desk and took out his message notebook. He would write a message to Gavin about his new plan and give it to him first thing in the morning. 3-4-0-17 6-0-21-8-13, he began, and then he stopped. He’d had a lot of good plans lately, but he was starting to wonder if writing all his messages in code was one of them. Maybe sometimes writing in code was a good idea, Sam decided. But other times writing fast was better.
Dear Gavin, he started again. From now on, wherever Jackson Grubb goes, we go too. Deal? Signed, Sam Graham.
Sam closed his notebook and smiled. It felt good to help a friend out.
* * *
Chapter Ten
* * *
The Annoying Pipsqueaks Strike Again
Janie Kramer was waiting for Sam and Gavin at the school entrance the next morning. When she saw them, she held up a little notebook, the kind with the wire on top.
“This phone thing is taking off,” she said. “I told my friends about what you were doing, and they totally loved the idea. I think we bought all the notebooks in the school store.”
“How many notebooks do you have?” Sam asked as they started walking down the hallway. “I’ve got four.”
“Four?” Janie’s eyes grew wide. “Holy moly! Where do you keep them all?”
“I’ve got four pockets in my pants,” Sam told her. “I keep a notebook in each one. The front ones sort of hurt when I sit down, but that’s okay.”
“They also get bent up,” Gavin pointed out. “I noticed that about your message notebook.” He turned to Sam. “Should we tell her about our new plan?”
“You’ve got a plan?” Janie asked. “Lay it on me, little brother.”
Sam liked the idea of being Janie’s little brother, at least at school. In his experience, big sisters did a good job of helping little brothers out, and Sam could use all the help he could get.
“Do you know where Jackson Grubb is right now?” he asked Janie. “Because we want to go stare at him.”
“You want to stare at Jackson?” Janie gave Sam a funny look. “I thought you were trying to avoid him.”
“We were,” Sam said. “But we decided to pop the balloon instead.”
“You realize that nothing you’re saying makes any sense right now,” Janie said. “But what the hey, you’re a kid with good ideas. Let’s go.”
So instead of walking to the second-grade hallway, Sam, Gavin, and Janie went over to the fourth- and fifth-grade hallway. “Jackson’s in Mrs. Hu’s homeroom,” Janie said. “I saw him earlier in the hallway, so he’s probably inside already.”
The door to Mrs. Hu’s classroom was open. Sure enough, there was Jackson Grubb over by the window, talking to two other boys.
Sam turned to Gavin. “Are you ready to stare?”
“Ready, Eddie,” Gavin said, coming over so he and Sam were standing side by side. “Should we make mean faces too?”
“I think staring is good enough,” Sam said.
It took a minute before anyone noticed Sam and Gavin standing at the classroom door. Once one person noticed, everybody noticed, including Jackson Grubb.
“What are you pipsqueaks doing here?” he called from across the classroom. “Why aren’t you over in Babyville?”
“Don’t say anything,” Sam whispered to Gavin. “Just let him talk.”
“Why are those kids staring at you?” another kid in the classroom asked Jackson. “Do you owe them money?”
“They’re idiots,” Jackson said. “Just ignore them.”
“The bell’s about to ring,” Janie said from behind Sam and Gavin. “You guys better head to your classroom.”
Sam nodded. “Okay,” he said. He turned back to Jackson. “See you at recess,” he called.
“I thought we weren’t going to say anything,” Gavin said as he and Sam headed for Mr. Pell’s room. “So why’d you say anything?”
“Because it’s Jackson’s turn to worry for a change,” Sam said. “We might not be as big as fifth graders, and we might not be as fast as fifth graders, but we can be as annoying as fifth graders.”
“So you think Jackson’s going to be worried about us annoying him all day?”
Sam shrugged. “He might be. And when he gets tired of being annoyed, he’ll leave us alone.”
“Maybe,” Gavin said as they reached their classroom. “Or maybe he’ll just want to punch us even more.”
The bell rang before Sam had a chance to worry about that. He hurried inside to his desk, where he found four little notebooks waiting for him.
“Text messages!” Gavin said. “What do they say?”
“I don’t know yet,” Sam said. “I’ll read them later.”
Sam put the four notebooks in a pile and set the pile on the top left-hand corner of his desk. He really wanted to read the messages now, but the rule was that you had to look at the whiteboard as soon as you sat down. Sam checked the schedule and saw they were doing science first, so he pulled out his science notebook and his pencil from the front of his desk. Mr. Pell liked his students to be ready to learn.
Sam’s favorite part of science was when they did projects, especially projects where they went outside, like when they were studying clouds. Sam also liked it when Mr. Pell set up tables in the back of the classroom to do experiments. A few weeks ago they had made batteries out of lemons, which had been fun until a few people started squirting lemon juice at one another.
Today, though, they were doing the most boring science thing in the world: science vocabulary. Every time they started a new unit, Mr. Pell made them learn new scientific terms. He read out a vocabulary list and everyone had to write down the words and what they thought the words meant. Sam thought this would be okay if you could write funny things down when you didn’t know the answers, but Mr. Pell wanted you to be serious and make good guesses when you didn’t know for sure what a word meant.
“Okay, today’s first word is energy,” Mr. Pell told them. “So write down your definition for energy.”
Energy. That was easy, Sam thought. Energy was . . . was . . . what was it? Sam felt like he knew what energy was, but he didn’t know how to say it. He decided to write down Energy is what makes things move, even though he wasn’t sure if that was exactly right.
The next word was motion. Sam wrote Motion is things moving, which he also thought
was sort of right if not exactly right. But he had no idea what to write down for the third word. Vibrations? He’d heard the word before, but he didn’t know what it meant at all.
It was almost like Mr. Pell had read Sam’s mind. “Remember, even if you don’t know the definition, you can still guess. You can even draw a picture.”
Sam didn’t know how he could draw a picture of something when he had no idea what it was. He’d rather draw a picture of a chicken coop. Speaking of which . . . Sam pulled his camera notebook out of his back pocket so he could see what he’d drawn the day before. His chicken coop picture still needed a lot of hexagons, Sam thought, but it was going to look super cool when he—
Mr. Pell was suddenly standing next to Sam’s desk. “Sam? What are you doing?”
“I’m—I’m just—uh . . .”
Gavin turned around. “Sam’s looking at his camera,” he explained to Mr. Pell in a helpful tone of voice. “Maybe he’s got a picture of a vibration in there.”
“His camera?” Mr. Pell looked at Sam. “Are you hiding a phone in your desk, Sam?”
Sam held up his camera notebook to Mr. Pell. “He means my notebook. I use it like a camera.”
“Okay, well, why don’t you let me keep your camera for you for the rest of the morning,” Mr. Pell said, and a bunch of people giggled. Mr. Pell pointed to the pile of notebooks on the corner of Sam’s desk. “Are those cameras too?”
“Those are texts,” Sam explained. “I’m not sure who they’re from. Probably Emily and Will.”
“And me,” Marja said. “I sent you a text too, Sam.”
“So you all are texting one another in class?” Mr. Pell said.
“Sort of?” Sam said. Mr. Pell knew the notebooks weren’t phones, didn’t he? Sam was surprised by how many grown-ups found his notebooks confusing.
Mr. Pell scooped up the notebooks and took them over to the front of the room, where he dropped them all in his desk drawer. “You all can have these back when school is over,” he said.
“But we might need them before then!” Marja said. “What are we supposed to do if Jackson decides to beat up Sam and Gavin and punch their teeth out?”
“What?” Mr. Pell turned to Sam and Gavin. “Guys? Care to explain?”
Sam shook his head. He did not care to explain. He’d come up with a great plan for not getting beat up, and now Marja had ruined it.
When Gavin didn’t say anything either, Mr. Pell said, “You two stay in for recess. I think we need to have a talk.”
* * *
Chapter Eleven
* * *
The Latest, Greatest Notebook Fad
You don’t need to worry, Mr. Pell,” Gavin said later that morning, when the rest of the class had gone to the playground for recess. “Sam has a really good plan.”
Mr. Pell looked at Sam. “I assume this has something to do with the note Mr. Cameron sent the other day?”
“Kind of,” Sam said. “It’s because Jackson Grubb got in trouble and we didn’t.”
“And now we’re in trouble with Jackson Grubb,” Gavin added.
“But now we know how to get out of it,” Sam said. “I’ve got a plan, just like Gavin said.”
Sam explained to Mr. Pell about what happened at the school store and how they were going to annoy Jackson until he left them alone. When he was finished explaining, Mr. Pell smiled, which was good. But he also shook his head, which wasn’t so good.
“You always come up with great plans, Sam,” Mr. Pell said. “And this one might work, it’s true. But I can’t let somebody threaten you and not do anything about it.”
“He didn’t actually say he was going to punch us in the mouth,” Sam said. “That’s just what Gavin thinks he might do.”
“Maybe not,” Mr. Pell said. “But he did threaten to make trouble for you. He’s being a bully, Sam, and we don’t allow that in our school.”
“Did I mention we have a bodyguard?” Sam asked his teacher.
“The fact that you think you need a bodyguard doesn’t make me feel any better about this situation,” Mr. Pell said. “No, we need to sit down with Mr. Cameron and Jackson and talk this out.”
Sam sighed. “I guess that’s one way to pop the balloon,” he said. “But it’s not my favorite way.”
“Why do you keep talking about balloons?” Gavin asked him. “Is it your birthday or something?”
“Why don’t you guys head out to the playground and I’ll go talk to Mr. Cameron?” Mr. Pell said. “Maybe we can set up a meeting for later this afternoon.”
“I still think we should do your plan,” Gavin whispered as they headed for the door. “If Jackson gets in more trouble, he’ll just find sneakier ways to get us.”
Why couldn’t grown-ups understand that? Sam wondered as he followed Gavin into the hallway. They always wanted to talk about everything. They thought talking about things solved every single problem. Talking about things might solve some problems, Sam guessed, but it could also make some problems worse. Like this problem, for instance.
As Sam and Gavin got closer to the big field, Sam noticed something strange. Instead of running around and kicking a soccer ball, the members of the Barracudas were standing on the sideline, looking down at their hands. People on the other fifth-grade soccer team were yelling, “Are you guys going to play or what?”
“What are they doing?” Gavin asked, but Sam couldn’t tell. All he knew is that it looked weird to see Janie Kramer and her friends standing still when they should be playing soccer.
Emily came over to where Sam and Gavin were standing. She was followed by Marja and Will. “They stole your idea, Sam,” Emily said. “They’re all texting.”
“But Janie said she didn’t have a—Oh.” Sam looked closer at the Barracudas. They were all writing in little notebooks just like Sam’s and passing them around. “That looks sort of weird.”
“You started a fad, Sam!” Marja exclaimed. “I heard a bunch of kids say they were going to the school store first thing during lunch period to buy little notebooks like ours.”
“I heard the school store was sold out of notebooks,” Will said. “I also heard that somebody’s mom is going to go to the mall, buy notebooks, and then bring them to school this afternoon.”
“A mom is going to come to our school and sell notebooks?” Gavin asked. “Are moms allowed to do that? Could my mom come and sell pencils and erasers?”
“What I heard is that this mom is going to drop the notebooks off so her kid can sell them,” Will said. “For a dollar.”
“But the notebooks are only supposed to cost fifty cents,” Sam said. “A dollar’s too much.”
Will shrugged. “I guess some people don’t mind as long as they can get a notebook. Now I wish I’d bought ten notebooks. I could make a fortune selling them to other people.”
The recess monitors’ whistles blew, but Sam noticed that hardly any of the Barracudas moved to go back inside. They were still busy writing messages in their notebooks and passing their notebooks around.
“The fifth graders are copying us!” Gavin said. “That’s so cool!”
Sam wondered if the fifth graders knew they were copying his idea to use a notebook for a phone? Did they know they really needed at least three notebooks, four if they wanted to write stories they could read later? Maybe he could charge people a dollar to teach them the right way to make phones.
“I wonder when Mr. Pell is going to give our notebooks back,” Emily said as they started walking toward the school entrance. “Because I just saw a red-crested woodpecker, and I wanted to send you guys a message about it.”
“Aren’t you telling us about it now?” Gavin said.
“Yes,” Emily said. “But I’d still like to send you a message. Although maybe not in code—writing in code takes a really long time.”
“It takes forever,” Marja complained. “I’m only going to use secret codes when I have supersecret stuff.”
When they got back to their
classroom, Mr. Pell told everyone to take their writing notebooks out so they could work on their stories. Sam wanted to take his story notebook out of his back pocket so he could write some more about Frozen Fred, but he was afraid Mr. Pell might take it and put it in his drawer with the other notebooks. Sam took out his regular writing notebook instead and opened it to the first blank page. Maybe he could start a new story, one about a chicken that was really good at flying. As far as Sam could tell, chickens were terrible flyers. They could fly, but they just couldn’t get very far off the ground.
He could call his main character Chester. Sam decided that Chester was the sort of chicken who watched other kinds of birds fly and wished he could fly as high as they did. This is going to be good, Sam thought as he leaned over his notebook to start writing his story. Maybe Chester practiced flying by jumping off the roof of his coop, which made his mom mad because she thought he was going to hurt himself.
Chester was the bravest chicken in his coop, Sam wrote. The other chickens liked to stay on the ground, but not Chester. Chester always—
“Sam and Gavin?”
Sam looked up. Mr. Pell was standing by the classroom door and motioning at him and Gavin to come over.
“Mr. Cameron just texted me,” Mr. Pell told them when they reached the door. “He’s ready to talk to you now.”
“Will Jackson Grubb be there?” Sam asked, and Mr. Pell nodded.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Mr. Pell said as they walked out into the hallway. “You guys are going to get everything worked out.”
“I wish we could take Janie with us to this meeting,” Gavin said as he and Sam started down the hallway. “I’d feel better if she were there.”
Sam nodded. He wished they could take Janie, Annabelle, and Mr. Stockfish too. And all the chickens and his mom and dad.
Sam the Man & the Cell Phone Plan Page 5