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Authors: Nancy Krulik

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BOOK: Gotcha! Gotcha Back!
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“You should see your face!” George exclaimed, laughing. “I’ve got to get a picture of you.” He pulled his camera out of the box, pointed it toward Katie and...
“Oh!” Katie shouted angrily. She looked down at her shirt. It was all wet.
“Gotcha!” George exclaimed. “It’s a water-gun camera!”
Katie shook her head. “That’s not funny,” she said.
“Sure it is,” George said, laughing. “But not as funny as this gum that stains your teeth black.” He picked up the other pack of gum. “Imagine how freaked out Miriam Chan would be if you gave her a piece of this!”
Katie frowned. “That would be mean, George,” she told him.
“Nah,” George disagreed. “It would be funny. And we need a few laughs at our school.”
Katie shook her head. She wasn’t so sure that practical jokes were a good way to make things
un-
boring
.
“I don’t want to play jokes on people, George,” Katie told him.
“You don’t have to,” George said. “
I
will.” He stopped and thought for a moment. “Hey, didn’t you get a whoopee cushion and fake throw-up from your Secret Santa last Christmas?”
Katie sighed, remembering how disappointed she had been when she had opened those gifts. They weren’t the kinds of things she liked at all.
But they sure were the kinds of things George liked. Fake throw-up and a whoopee cushion would have been the perfect presents for him.
“Tell you what, Katie Kazoo,” George continued. “I’ll trade you a rubber pencil for them.” He held up the wiggly yellow pencil. “Next time Kadeem asks to borrow a pencil from you, you can give him this one. It doesn’t write!”
Katie thought about that. It
was
kind of annoying the way Kadeem Carter always seemed to have to borrow her pencils. Especially because he chewed them up before giving them back.
“I guess that would serve him right,” she said slowly.
“Sure it would,” George agreed. “So what do you say? We could start tomorrow. We’ll call it Funny Friday!”
“Okay,” Katie said, taking the pencil from George. “I’ll bring the whoopee cushion and the plastic throw-up to school tomorrow. Just promise not to be too mean, okay?”
“I promise,” George assured her.
Chapter 3
“Do you want to write an article for this week’s 4A Express?” Mandy Banks asked Katie on Friday morning as they walked into their classroom.
Katie shook her head. “Not this week. I don’t have any ideas for an article.”
Mandy frowned. “That’s the problem. Nobody does. How am I supposed to edit a newspaper when no one wants to write for it?”
Katie felt bad for Mandy. She remembered when Jeremy Fox, one of her two best friends, had been the editor of their third-grade newspaper, the
3A Times.
It had been a huge job. Jeremy had spent a lot of time writing articles on his computer.
Being editor of a class newspaper was a big responsibility. Mandy really could use some help from the rest of the class.
Still, it wasn’t really the other kids’ fault that there wasn’t much to write about. “There really hasn’t been a whole lot of news here at school lately,” Katie reminded Mandy.
“AAAAHHHHHHH!”
Before Mandy could answer her, somebody screamed. Everybody turned around to see Emma Stavros standing on top of her beanbag chair, pointing toward the floor.
Mr. Guthrie raced over to Emma S. The kids ran over, too.
“What’s wrong?” Mr. G. asked Emma S.
Emma S. gulped. “It’s a M-m-mouse!” she stammered nervously.
Katie looked down at the floor. Sure enough, there was a little gray mouse on the ground next to Emma S.’s beanbag chair.
Katie stared at the furry little creature for a minute. There was something strange about it. “It’s not moving,” she told Emma S. “Usually mice are so afraid of people, they run away as soon as they see them.”
“Maybe it’s a
dead
mouse,” Kevin Camilleri suggested.
“AAAAAAHHHHHHH!” Emma S. shouted even louder this time.
“I don’t think so,” Mr. G. told Kevin. The teacher reached down and picked up the ball of gray fluff.
“Ooh, gross!” Emma S. gasped.
“Relax, Emma,” Mr. G. told her. “This mouse isn’t real. Someone was playing a joke on you.”
Emma S. opened her eyes wide. She looked like she was going to cry.
“Whose mouse is this?” Mr. Guthrie asked.
Nobody answered.
“Come on, dudes, ‘fess up,” Mr. G. urged.
Still no one answered.
“Okay,” Mr. G. said finally. “Well, whoever you are, I hope you learned that practical jokes like this aren’t always funny.”
Katie was pretty sure she knew who had planted the fake mouse in the classroom. George’s Funny Friday had begun.
Of course Katie would never tell on George. Only a rat told on her friends. And Katie wasn’t a rat.
Katie looked over to see if George was laughing. But he had his face turned away. He was pretending to look into Slinky’s cage.
“Slinky sure looks disappointed,” George said as he stared at the class snake. “He sure would have liked to eat a mouse.”
“Well, I’m not disappointed that the mouse is fake,” Emma S. said.
“Me either,” Emma Weber agreed. “Whoever put that mouse there was really mean. It’s not nice to scare someone like that.”
“Man, Emma S., you really freaked out!” Kevin said with a chuckle.
“That was the loudest scream I ever heard,” Kadeem added. “I’ll bet they heard you all the way in China.”
Soon all the boys were laughing at how scared Emma S. had been of the fake mouse.
“Okay, dudes, let’s settle down,” Mr. G. urged the class. “It’s time for social studies.”
Kadeem leaned over toward Katie’s beanbag. “Can I borrow a pencil?” he asked her.
Katie thought about the bendy rubber pencil in her bookbag. But she couldn’t give it to him. It was just too mean.
“Sure,” Katie said as she pulled a regular pencil out of her bag.
“Thanks,” Kadeem said. “I’ll give it back to you at the end of class,” he added.
Katie watched as Kadeem placed the pencil in his mouth and chewed on the eraser.
“Keep it,” she told him with a sigh.
Chapter 4
“I have definitely learned how to walk like a model,” Katie’s best friend Suzanne Lock told a few of the fourth-graders as they waited in the lunch line that afternoon. “You have to keep your chin up. Like this.”
Suzanne raised her head high and began walking over to one of the tables.
“You look like a real model,” Jessica Haynes told Suzanne. “Is that hard to do?”
“It’s
very
difficult,” Suzanne told her. “I’ve been taking modeling classes for months to learn how to do it.”
“It’s not so hard,” Kevin Camilleri argued. He raised his chin way up and began to wiggle his hips really hard. “Look at me. I’m a model,” he said in a high, squeaky voice.
“Me too,” Kadeem said. He sucked in his cheeks really hard and pretended to throw kisses to an imaginary audience.
“Boys!” Suzanne huffed as she began to sit down in one of the cafeteria chairs. “They don’t know anything about modeling. It’s really very hard. You have to be really graceful to—”
Before she could finish her sentence, a loud, gassy noise came from her rear end.
“Whoa!” Kadeem laughed.
“Check it out!” Andrew Epstein added, “The great model cut the cheese!”
Suzanne stood up right away. “I did not!” she shouted.
“Ooh, stinky!” Manny Gonzalez said, moving his chair far away from Suzanne’s.
“Who put this here?” Suzanne demanded. She picked up a pink rubber whoopee cushion that had been left on her seat.
Katie looked around. All the boys were laughing, but George was laughing the hardest.
Suzanne turned to George, and threw the whoopee cushion right at him. “I hate you, George Brennan!” she exclaimed.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” George insisted. But the smile on his face proved he did.
BOOK: Gotcha! Gotcha Back!
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