Creature from the 7th Grade : Boy or Beast (9781101591833) Read online

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2012

  Text copyright © Balaban & Grossman, Inc., 2012

  Illustrations copyright © Andy Rash, 2012

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

  ISBN 978-1-101-59183-3

  Book design and student planner doodles by Jim Hoover

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  To Mariah and Hazel, my two favorite creatures

  —B. B.

  To Frank, my favorite seventh grader

  —A. R.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Monday, October 27

  Chapter 1

  The Journey Begins

  Chapter 2

  It’s Not That Easy Being Green

  Chapter 3

  Rock Around the Croc

  Chapter 4

  Home Sweet Home

  Chapter 5

  The Birds and the Bees and the Mutant Dinosaurs

  Chapter 6

  Guess What’s Coming To Dinner

  Chapter 7

  I’m Baaaaaaaaaaack!

  Tuesday, October 28

  Chapter 8

  Oh, Brother!

  Chapter 9

  Waiter, there’s A Dinosaur In My Soup . . .

  Chapter 10

  Food For Thought

  Chapter 11

  News and Clues

  Chapter 12

  Picture This

  Wednesday, October 29

  Chapter 13

  Add Three Billion Points To My Popularity Scorecard

  Chapter 14

  Guilt By Association

  Chapter 15

  What’s A Nice Mutant Dinosaur Like Me Doing In A Place Like This?

  Chapter 16

  Trouble In Paradise

  Thursday, October 30

  Chapter 17

  I Smell A Rat

  Chapter 18

  Winning Isn’t Everything

  Friday, October 31

  Chapter 19

  Trick Or Treat

  Chapter 20

  Big Deal

  Chapter 21

  Sugar Shock

  Acknowledgments

  About the author and illustrator

  THIS IS A STORY about how something truly extraordinary can happen to the most ordinary of people (which I happen to be). Even if you lived in Decatur, Illinois (where I actually live), and were twelve years old (which I am), and the craziest thing you had ever done in your life was watch Return of the Jedi five times in one day (which I actually did when I was nine)—even then, something truly extraordinary could happen to you.

  Everything I am about to tell you is true. It’s not “loosely based on,” or “suggested by,” or anything even remotely like that. I would swear on the lives of my seven turtles, but you probably wouldn’t believe me anyway. I am still having a hard time believing it myself, and it happened to me.

  Let me put it to you this way: if you suddenly became invisible and could fly and were able to teleport yourself to a planet inhabited by talking cheese balls over twelve trillion light-years away in less time than it takes to wash your hands, it wouldn’t even come close to what I am about to tell you.

  Before we go any further, here are a few things you should know about me: I am a seventh-grade student at Stevenson Middle School, grades five through eight. I am not exactly the most popular kid in my grade. Translation: if you rated my popularity on a scale of one to ten with one being the lowest and ten being the highest, it would be zero. Does that bother me? What do you think.

  My big brother, Dave, is a senior at Stevenson Upper School, grades nine through twelve. He is so popular it hurts. He is tall, gets invited to everything, and was recently voted Most Likely to Succeed in the annual yearbook poll.

  Dave is Chief Justice of the Student Court. He has three girlfriends. Plus he got early acceptance to his favorite college (Michigan State). And did I mention that he’s really nice, isn’t at all stuck-up, and is great at every sport known to man plus a few you have probably never even heard of like “Frisbee golf” and “water polo”?

  Well, I’m only twelve, so I’m not all that interested in three girlfriends and early acceptance to college at this point. But other than that, do I wish I could be more like Dave? Let me put it to you this way: duh.

  Craig Dieterly is my nemesis. His hobbies are burping, dropping water bombs, and making my life miserable. He is the president of the seventh grade (he ran on a platform of “Vote for Me or I’ll Hurt You”). He’s captain of everything. Football. Baseball. Soccer. The world. You name it. He is six feet three inches tall and weighs about thirty million pounds. If his brain were a state it would be Rhode Island.

  Craig Dieterly has been picking on me since the day I entered Stevenson Lower School in prekindergarten. He used to terrorize me on the playground. Once he wouldn’t let me get off the whirl-and-twirl and kept spinning me around until I threw up. Another time, in the sandbox, he stole my pail and shovel and refused to give them back until the head of the entire Stevenson Lower School, prekindergarten through grade four, threatened to call the police.

  In homeroom our desks are in alphabetical order. My last name happens to start with a “D.” It’s Drinkwater. Don’t laugh. So every morning I have to sit next to this Craig Dieterly guy. We have a deal: I sharpen his pencils and do his math homework, and he doesn’t steal my lunch money. Unless he feels like it. He refers to me as “Snow White’s little-known eighth dwarf, ‘Brainy,’” when he refers to me as anything.

  In case you were wondering, my full name is Charles Elmer Drinkwater. (What were my parents thinking?) I hate my middle name so much even my best friends don’t know what it is. PLEASE DO NOT TELL ANYONE. When I was eight I tried to have it legally removed from my birth certificate, but you’re not allowed to alter official records until you’re over eighteen. I checked. If Craig Dieterly ever finds out my middle name is Elmer, I will have to relocate to another solar
system.

  Did I mention that my voice hasn’t even begun to change, so when I answer the phone people still say, “Can I talk to your mother, little girl?” Embarrassing but true.

  Oh, and I don’t do sports. Call me crazy, but I try to avoid getting squished or maimed or humiliated whenever possible. Last year Principal Muchnick made a rule that all middle school boys had to join the middle-school football team. I told him it was my constitutional right to refuse to play a sport that could cause premature death.

  Principal Muchnick doesn’t like it when students disagree with him. He told me to quit bellyaching and join the team. He said it would make a man out of me. I told him I thought I was a little small to play football.

  That is a gross understatement. There are beagles I know that weigh more than I did. In fourth grade I nearly blew away in a strong wind. Both feet were off the ground and I was halfway down the block by the time I managed to grab hold of a fire hydrant. Alice Pincus, the littlest girl in my class? Last year Norm Swerling dared her to pick me up and carry me to the end of the hallway outside of language lab. She didn’t even break a sweat.

  Needless to say, Principal Muchnick prevailed and I joined the team. My father had to order custom-made shoulder pads for me because they didn’t come in my size. In the first quarter of my first and last game I caught the ball by mistake and three defensive linebackers the size of refrigerators came running after me. I was so scared I fainted before they could tackle me, and Nurse Nancy had to give me smelling salts and carry me to her office to recover. Try living that one down.

  Mom always said I should drink my milk, take my vitamins, and be patient. She promised me that I would eventually go through some kind of “magical transformation” and sprout like a weed and I wouldn’t have to get my clothes in the little boys’ department anymore. Guess what? Mom was right.

  My story begins at three o’clock in the morning one cold and windy Monday in October. It is not for the faint of heart. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  The Journey Begins

  IT'S THE MIDDLE of the night. I awake screaming in a sweaty, heart-stopping panic, gasping for breath, legs tangled in the sheets. I’ve had this nightmare before. Seven times in the past seven days, but who’s counting. Dave mumbles “shut up” from his bed on the other side of the room and goes back to sleep faster than you can say “little brothers are a serious pain in the butt.”

  The dream always begins the same way. First my face turns green. Then I get scales all over my body. Next my toes transform into hideous, long, webbed things that taper into razor-sharp toenails. By the time the gill slits begin to form at the base of my ever-lengthening neck, I scream and wake up. Just your plain old recurring “I’m turning into the Creature from the Black Lagoon” dream.

  Creature happens to be my favorite monster movie. The scene where the creature skulks around in his lagoon and watches mild-mannered Dr. Reed’s beautiful girlfriend, Kay Lawrence, swimming just above his head is a classic. I give it eleven goose bumps out of a possible ten on the fear-o-meter. It is an official “Monsterpiece” in my book.

  My dad says that if you have a vivid imagination and you go around watching scary movies before you go to bed, you have to be prepared for a certain number of bloodcurdling nightmares. It comes with the territory.

  But this isn’t my imagination. I know it. Just as sure as I know that E equals mc2. So I drag myself out of my nice warm bed, quietly tiptoe over to the bathroom, doing my best not to wake Dave again, and try to tell myself that the clammy sense of dread I’m experiencing is from staying up too late watching Poltergeist and Rosemary’s Baby.

  Still shaking, I peer into the mirror. The circles under my eyes are definitely darker. But then, if you woke up in the middle of the night for the last seven days in a row, the circles under your eyes would be pretty dark, too. And my skin has taken on an alarming greenish caste. After careful scrutiny, I chalk it up to the fluorescent bathroom lighting and shuffle back to bed.

  I remind myself that it was just a dream. But try as I might, I am unable to shake the feeling that life as I know it is about to come to an end.

  IT’S NOT THAT

  EASY BEING GREEN

  MY SCIENCE TEACHER, Mr. Arkady, stands in front of first-period science class and slowly writes the word HERPETOLOGY in big script letters across the blackboard. He looks and sounds exactly like a vampire. If I didn’t know for 100 percent certain that Bela Lugosi was dead (I saw his grave in a documentary on the SyFy channel once), I would swear he had returned as a Stevenson Middle School teacher and taken over Mr. Arkady’s body.

  I asked my mom to get me transferred out of his section when school started this year because I didn’t want to have a vampire for a teacher, but she just said I’d have to deal with it. I’m glad she made me, because he turned out to be one of my favorite teachers. (But I still wouldn’t want to run into him in a deserted alley on a dark and stormy night.)

  “Who knows vut that vurd means? Hands, please,” he says, gliding back to his desk, humming a haunting melody, and carrying an ancient leather-bound notebook in his long bony fingers. There is a rumor floating around that Mr. Arkady keeps a running total in there of all the people whose blood he has sucked and turned into vampires, along with their vital statistics—height, weight, hair color, and exact moment of death (or undeath).

  In my opinion, Mr. Arkady is a really great teacher. He has a good sense of humor, he encourages us to think on our own, and he always has time to talk to us about our problems. The fact that small children run screaming at the sight of him is not his fault.

  “Surely somebody knows the meaning of that vurd.”

  A sea of blank faces stares back at him.

  I know exactly what herpetology means (it’s sort of a hobby of mine, actually), but I am much too busy staring at my hand to raise it. It’s all dry and cracked looking. And it has the same dull greenish tinge that it had in my nightmare last night. Hmm.

  Lucille Strang, one of my best friends, raises her hand. Lucille knows the answer to just about any question you could think of asking and isn’t bothered one bit by the fact that the rest of the class thinks she’s a know-it-all. Because basically she does know it all.

  Lucille has an IQ of about forty million and a mouth so jam-packed with braces that it’s virtually impossible for her to get through a metal detector without an intervention from the National Guard. At six feet one and a half inches, she is the tallest girl in the entire Stevenson School District, grades prekindergarten through twelve, and, as far as I can see, the tallest girl in all of Decatur, Illinois, population 76,122.

  At Stevenson Middle School if you’re a boy and you’re really tall, you get three extra points on your popularity scorecard. If you’re a girl it’s at least ten points against you. If you’re Lucille and your hobbies are experimenting with fruit flies, playing with your ferrets, and learning about the space-time continuum, take off another fifteen.

  What’s up with my feet? They’re all puffy and swollen. They crowd the sides of my size-three sneakers like they’re trying to escape. This is not a good feeling.

  “Students, please, vair did you hide your brains today?” Mr. Arkady says, drawing himself up to his fullest height and hunching his shoulders like he’s adjusting his bat wings before swooping down on an unsuspecting victim. “Surely somevun besides Miss Strang knows vut a herpetologist is.”

  Sam Endervelt raises his hand. He’s my other best friend. It’s a small subset. He’s kind of round and really, really pale. He sort of looks like Gomez from The Addams Family except he’s too young to have a mustache. A lot of people are scared off by Sam’s freaky, ultralong dyed purple hair. He’s sort of pre-Goth. Like he’s not all the way there yet, but he paints his fingernails black and wears a fake nose ring. He also sings soprano in the school chorus because even though he’s six months older than I am
his voice hasn’t changed yet, either. He’s harmless. I swear.

  If I’m a geek, Sam’s an off-the-charts supergeek. He says the number on his popularity scorecard is so low it’s unlisted. Sam knows a lot about popularity scorecards. He should. He invented them. There’s no actual card or anything. As Sam is quick to explain to anyone who will listen, it’s a humorous way of demystifying popularity that makes it seem silly and unimportant. Guess what? It doesn’t work. Uh-oh. My calves are starting to tingle. Like when you’ve been sitting in one position for too long and your legs are about to fall asleep. Only I haven’t been sitting in one position for too long. Did I mention that my tongue is also up to something funny? It feels thick and lumpy and dry.

  Sam pokes me in the back. “What’s with your neck, pal?” he whispers. “It looks like it’s got mold growing all over it.”

  “I have no idea,” I whisper frantically.

  “I guess that’s what happens when you don’t wash behind your ears.” He chuckles. For a moment I wonder whether I’m getting some kind of weird cosmic payback for my inattention to personal hygiene. “You’re starting to look like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.”

  “If you ver a herpetologist . . .” Mr. Arkady continues as he scans the room for someone to call on. (He’s actually 35 percent less likely to call on you if you raise your hand. I keep track of stuff like that.) “Vut ting vood you know a lot about . . . uh . . . Amy?”

  Amy Armstrong, the most popular girl in Stevenson Middle School, grades five through eight, and possibly the universe, looks up distractedly. “Gee, I’m drawing a blank.”

  “Perhaps if you and Rachel Klempner paid as much attention to vut I am sayink as you do to the notes you are passing to each udder, maybe you vood know vut is goink on in this class.”

  Amy Armstrong gives Mr. Arkady a dirty look.

  Rachel Klempner, on the other hand, smiles cheerfully, like Mr. Arkady has just paid her a great compliment. She pretends to like everybody to their faces, and then she goes around behind their backs and says terrible things about them. In fifth grade she started a rumor that Lucille and Sam and I had a contagious disease that caused us all to have really bad hair. No one would sit next to us for weeks.