Pennybaker School Is Revolting, стр. 29
Mom squinted one eye at me in her best I’m Getting to the Bottom of This Adventure look. “You don’t know anything about what she might be up to, do you, Thomas?”
I remembered the figure I’d seen in the middle of the night, hurrying away from my window and hopping into the race car. That person was definitely wearing shoes. Boots, actually. But I didn’t think it was a good time to share that with Mom. Mostly because I was having fun trying to catch Grandma Jo in the act, and if Mom shut Grandma Jo down, she would be shutting me down, too.
“Nope.”
She sagged a little, then bent back into the closet. “Have a good time at the game. And be careful. And eat something before you go!”
I threw on my jacket, raced into the kitchen, and stuck a hot dog in the microwave. Grandma Jo was sitting in front of the TV playing solitaire again. While my hot dog cooked, I crept into the living room.
“Well, hello, Thomas,” Grandma Jo said, laying down a two of clubs. “Going out tonight?”
I locked my eyes on hers. “Are you?”
She gathered the cards together and shuffled them, then began laying them out again. “Nope, can’t say that I am. Just watching a little TV here.” She gestured to the television. I leaned forward to see what she was watching. Tiny cars roared around a racetrack.
“Car races?” I said, more to myself than to her, but before she could respond, Erma bounced into the room.
“There you are! Don’t go anywhere,” she said.
The microwave beeped, and I went to it. “I’m going to a basketball game with Chip,” I said over my shoulder.
“But you can’t,” she said, following me.
“Mom said I could.”
“But you can’t,” she repeated. “Sissy’s coming over.”
I grabbed a slice of bread and quickly wrapped it around my hot dog. I definitely needed to get out of there before Sissy arrived. “Sorry,” I said. I took a huge bite out of my hot dog and hurried toward the front door. “Gotta go.” Only my mouth was full, so it sounded like, “Gorra gor.”
“You haven’t even learned your dance at all yet. Thomas! Mom!”
I didn’t look back; I just lunged out the front door before my stomach started in again.
Chip was standing at the top of his steps, looking way too uneasy for everything to be okay.
“What?” I asked, slowing with every step. With Chip, you never knew whether he looked uneasy because he had accidentally tromped on an anthill and was feeling guilty for decimating an entire ant universe or because something was really wrong.
“Don’t get mad,” he said.
So something was really wrong.
“What?” I asked again, swallowing the last of my hot dog, which suddenly didn’t want to go down. “Are we not going? Because if we aren’t, I have to lay low over here for a little while. I’ll teach you how to burn a dollar bill without actually burning it.” Chip was always bribe-able with the promise of learning a magic trick.
“No, no, we’re going,” he said. “It’s just … Follow me.”
It was never good when Chip was talking like a normal kid. I didn’t want to, but I followed him inside his house and up to his bedroom, where a mess of clothes was scattered on his bed. Nothing really looked that out of the ordinary. Of course, that was mostly because Chip didn’t do ordinary, so everything looked out of the ordinary. It made sense in a converse sort of way.
“Okay, so what’s the deal?” I asked.
He went to the bed, picked up a wad of clothes, and held it up, letting it unfurl in front of him. It was a long pink dress with little white flowers on it.
“A dress?” I still didn’t understand what the problem was, until he dropped it and shook out a second, blue, dress. That one had ruffles on the shoulders. “Oh no.” I shook my head. “No, no, no.”
“Just bear with me,” he said, dropping the blue dress and coming toward me, arms outstretched as if to stop me from running.
“No way, Chip. When you said pioneer clothes, I thought you meant man clothes.”
“I did,” he said. “But unfortunately, the only garb I was able to secure on such short notice is of the feminine variety.”
I pointed in his face. “That means you want us to dress like girls.”
“No, I don’t want us to. It just happens that we have no choice in the matter.”
“Correction. You have no choice in the matter. I’m not putting that on.” I kicked at the pink dress.
“Of course not, of course not!” he said, bending to pick up the two dresses. “I never expected you to.” He pressed the blue dress against my chest. “Pink is a much more suitable match to my skin color than to yours.”
“I’ll just wear this,” I said, pointing at my jeans, refusing to take the dress.
“And get turned away by security. You will never pass as a pioneer in that ridiculous getup.”
I glanced down at my “ridiculous getup,” which just happened to be my normal clothes. This from the guy holding a Laura Ingalls Wilder outfit.
“Come on, Thomas. It’s for an hour at most. Don’t you want to solve the Great Faboo Mystery?”
“The what?”
“The Mystery of the Disappearance of Faboo.”
“No. Chip. Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Title our … whatever this is.”
“It’s a mystery. You said so yourself.”
“I meant more of a … curiosity.”
“The Mystery of the Lost Professor.”
“No.”
“The Skedaddled Scholar?”
“Absolutely not.”
He held the dress toward me again. I stared at it. “It’s just fabric,” he said. “We have to do this if we want to get onto that court.”
I stared at the blue dress for a few seconds longer and then sighed and snatched the garment out of his hands. “Fine. But there better be a hat in there somewhere, because we are never going to pass for girls.”
“Fear not!” he said, poking one finger to the