Miss Switch Online Read online

  Miss Switch online

  Atheneum Books by Barbara Brooks Wallace

  Peppermints in the Parlor

  The Barrel in the Basement

  Perfect Acres, Inc.

  The Twin in the Tavern

  Cousins in the Castle

  Sparrows in the Scullery

  Ghosts in the Gallery

  Secret in St. Something

  Miss Switch Online

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2002 by Barbara Brooks Wallace

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Book design by Ann Sullivan

  The text of this book is set in Berkeley Oldstyle ITC.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wallace, Barbara Brooks, 1922-

  Miss Switch online / by Barbara Brooks Wallace.

  p. cm.

  Sequel to: Miss Switch to the rescue.

  Summary: Miss Switch the witch returns to save Rupert and the entire sixth grade from the evil Saturna, who is operating a sinister Web site and has installed her brother as principal of the school.

  ISBN 0-689-84376-3

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-3470-2

  ISBN-13: 978-0-6898-4376-1

  [1. Witches—Fiction. 2. Schools—Fiction. 3. Computers—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.W1547 Mf 2002

  [Fic]—dc21 00-063987

  Dedication

  To Bizzy and Boo (you know who you are) with lots of love and a couple of genuine magic spells, too

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Piper, without whose inspiration as a bird of many talents and interests, and as an accomplished shoulder rider, there might never have been a Fred in this book.

  CONTENTS

  1 Profound Thoughts from the Monkey Bars

  2 Suffering from Swooning

  3 Computowitch.com

  4 Miss Blossom

  5 Fred

  6 A Midnight Expedition

  7 The Stupidest Man Alive

  8 An Analysis of Tweet, Tweet, Tweet, Tweet

  9 Ominous Gobbledygook

  10 A Bunch of Eyewash

  11 No Clues to Anything

  12 Hocus Pocus in a Janitor’s Closet

  13 Not Your Usual Mode of Transportation

  14 Toadstools at Midnight

  15 The Shrinkage Solution

  16 Midnight Rendezvous

  17 Together at Last!

  18 Anything Is Possible

  Miss Switch online

  1

  Profound Thoughts from the Monkey Bars

  Nothing appeared to happen on the day I began sixth grade at Pepperdine Elementary School that pointed to the extraordinary and I have to add dangerous, events about to take place in my life. It’s as amazing that I’m still here to record them as it was for me to be around to record two similar events that happened earlier. Some of you may choose not to believe what I’m writing on these pages. But as a great and dedicated scientist, which I became in the summer following my year in the fourth grade, I feel I must make this report. I’ll be as accurate and truthful as I know how.

  The only noticeably different thing about the beginning of this first day of school from every other was the new sixth-grade cool-guy greetings my friends and I exchanged as I sauntered up to where they all sat hunched over on top of the monkey bars of the Pepperdine playground.

  “Hey, it’s the Broomster! Yay! Yay! Yay!”

  The Broomster—that was me, Rupert P. Brown III, also known as Broomstick.

  “Hey, it’s the Peatmeister! Hey, it’s the Creamer! Hey, it’s the Bananapeeler! Yay! Yay! Yay!” I said right back, losing no time in joining them.

  Peatmeister, of course, was Peatmouse, otherwise Wayne Partlow. Creamer was Creampuff, otherwise Tommy Conrad. Bananapeeler was plain Banana, otherwise Harvey Robert Fanna. Now, once we’d gotten all this cool-guy stuff over with, we’d go back to being good old Peatmouse, Creampuff, Banana, and Broomstick, which we’d called each other since about the third grade. I was just as long and skinny then as I am now, which is how I got my name. But who could have known back there in the third grade how prophetic that nickname would turn out to be!

  “Where’s the Spooks ter?” Peatmouse asked as soon as I’d settled myself down beside them all on the top rung.

  “She left,” I replied. “Her father got transferred. She’s about a thousand miles away from here now.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Creampuff.

  “Yeah,” I said, and let it go at that. I didn’t see any point in going into how “too bad” it was.

  Spookster was Spook, otherwise Amelia Matilda Daley. I’m the one who gave her the name Spook in the fifth grade because of the way she always breathed, “Boy, that’s spooky!” when she looked into a microscope. As you may gather, Spook is a fellow scientist as well as a friend. She is the only one who knows the true details of the two earlier events I’ve mentioned. In order for you to have a better understanding of the report I’m about to make, I’ll reveal the most important of those details here.

  In the first of the two events, I was introduced to a real, honest-to-goodness, card-carrying witch, Miss Switch. She arrived at Pepperdine Elementary School as our fifth-grade teacher, seeking the help of my great scientific brain to suggest some original witchcraft ideas that would satisfy the command of a goofy contraption called a computowitch. It belonged to a really nasty brand of witch named Saturna. Luckily, I came up with the idea of feeding it the information about what a great teacher Miss Switch was. The computowitch got so excited it practically blew itself up, and thus we got rid of Saturna. Or so I thought.

  But back she came, now determined to get rid of the one who had put her computowitch out of commission. That, of course, was me. Saturna tried to have me kidnapped, but it was Amelia who got kidnapped instead. Fortunately, Miss Switch came to the rescue. After some pretty scary events, all ended up well, and once again we got rid of Saturna. Or so I thought!

  At any rate, I now return to the conversation I was having with my friends on the top rung of the Pepperdine monkey bars. After the greetings were over with, the first topic of conversation, as it always had been, was noteworthy events of that summer. My contribution was that I got another pet, a cockatiel, named Fred. I said “another” because he was in addition to my turtle, Caruso, and my two guinea pigs, Hector and Guinevere. Fred was a consolation prize from my parents because I didn’t get to go to camp that summer. They had finally decided that camp was a waste of my time and their money, which I’d been telling them all along. But if they wanted to console me with Fred, I was not going to argue.

  After all this we were ready for the burning question of who our teacher was going to be that year.

  “Maybe we’ll just get Mrs. Fitzgerald again,” Peatmouse said.

  “She’s okay,” Creampuff said. “We liked her most of the time.”

  “Yeah,” we all agreed.

  “You know what the real problem is, don’t you?” I said. “It’s not Mrs. Fitzgerald. It’s just that once you’ve had the best, nothing else is ever going to seem that good.”

  It took them
all zero seconds to know exactly the person I was talking about.

  “Miss Switch!” Peatmouse said.

  “Yeah!” said Banana and Creampuff.

  “And the thing is,” said Peatmouse, “that we could never really explain why we were so nutty about her.”

  “The whole class was,” said Creampuff. “But looking at her, you’d think we were all just plain nutty.”

  I couldn’t argue with that one. I now refer you to some notes I made once regarding her looks:

  a. Sharp nose that could crack granite.

  b. Ridiculous little old-fashioned wire spectacles (resting on said nose) that instantly stop looking ridiculous when her eyes are drilling holes into some poor fifth-grade victim.

  c. Chin that could substitute for a pickax.

  d. Black hair rolled into a bun that looks as if it could not be dislodged with a sledgehammer.

  e. Ancient, musty gray dress that could have been rescued from somebody’s old attic trunk.

  f. General appearance as cuddly as a steel knitting needle.

  “She was strict, too,” said Banana. “Boy, was she strict! I mean, on a ‘strict’ scale of one to ten, try fifteen.”

  “Then why did we like her so much?” asked Peatmouse. “I mean besides her being the best teacher we’ve ever had?”

  We all looked at one another and said it at the same time: “Because she was so fair!”

  And that was probably the biggest reason. She wasn’t just the best teacher, but the fairest we’d ever had. When she had something unpleasant to say to you regarding your behavior in class, or your latest rotten English or arithmetic paper, and you watched her nose growing sharper, and felt her eyes turning your blood to ice, and you wondered if your life was about to end right there and then as her pickax chin chopped you to pieces, you always knew one thing: that you’d earned it!

  “On a ‘fair’ scale of one to ten, you’d have to pick a number so long, it fell off the blackboard,” said Banana.

  “Off the world,” said Creampuff.

  “Out of the universe,” said Peatmouse.

  “Yeah!” I said.

  “Does anyone think she might be back?” Banana asked.

  “Not a chance,” I said.

  “Why not, Broomstick?” asked Creampuff.

  “That’s just my opinion,” I said.

  Anyway, how could I tell them exactly “why not”? Spook was the only one I could discuss that with. After all, as 1 said, she was the only one who knew who Miss Switch really was, and that she would probably be back here only if trouble were brewing.

  As far as I could see, there was nothing in sight by way of trouble that could possibly need Miss Switch’s special talents. Therefore, we could not expect her to appear in the sixth-grade classroom.

  But then how was I to know my opinion was wrong? Dead wrong. For that very night when I sat down at my computer to e-mail Spook at [email protected], something sinister was already developing that was aimed right at me, Rupert P Brown III. And not only at me, but also at Peatmouse, Banana, Creampuff, and the whole Pepperdine Elementary School sixth grade!

  2

  Suffering from Swooning

  I don’t know what further discussions we might have had about Miss Switch if the school bell hadn’t rung. We all scrambled down from the monkey bars and headed across the blacktop toward the building. It was then a thought struck me. “Banana,” I said, “isn’t your mother some kind of a big wheel in the PTA?”

  “Yeah,” said Banana, looking uncomfortable. “President. Why?”

  “I’d think she’d know who our teacher is,” I said. “Didn’t she tell you?”

  “No,” said Banana. “If she did, wouldn’t I have said? I think she knows, but she says unless it’s a matter of life or death, I’m going to have to find things out just like everyone else whose mother is not PTA president.”

  We all shrugged. There went the pipeline to interesting advance information.

  “I did find out something, though,” Banana said quickly, as if he needed to make up for his mother’s unfortunate attitude. “I heard her talking to someone on the telephone about it. Mrs. Grimble had an accident and busted an arm and a leg. There’s going to be a substitute principal until she gets back.”

  Substitute? Wasn’t that what Miss Switch had been, a substitute? So what if it was as a substitute teacher? Wasn’t it just possible she could just as well come as a substitute principal? I was having difficulty breathing thinking about it.

  “Did you hear any name … er … mentioned, Banana?” I asked, digging for clues.

  “No,” said Banana, “but my mother was giggling, and her face was all pink.”

  “She must have changed the subject. I never heard of anyone giggling about a new principal,” said Peatmouse.

  You couldn’t argue with that. Anyway, first things first, and we were now about to find out who was going to be leading us through the perils of sixth grade. Hands in pockets, being cool-guy sixth graders, we slouched on down the old, familiar Pepperdine hallway, and entered the door of Room Twelve.

  Oh, no!

  Seated at the teacher’s desk was not our fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Fitzgerald. Instead it was very old Mrs. Potts, who had been our teacher in second grade! I thought she had retired the year before. Was she going to be able to remember that second grade had been replaced with sixth grade?

  She beamed at us as we all filed into the room.

  “My!” she said. “Almost all of my old second-grade class back with me again. Isn’t it wonderful? Why, there’s Rupert, and Wayne, and Tommy, and Harvey Oh, and there’s Melvin and Billy and … and oh, so many of you.”

  We smiled weakly at Mrs. Potts, found desks for ourselves, and fell into them. I didn’t mind about everyone else, but I couldn’t agree with Mrs. Potts about Melvin Bothwick and Billy Swanson being wonderful in anyone’s class. Melvin was a sneak and a tattletale, and Billy was an oversized bully who thought he could get away with just about anything. He had made every teacher’s life miserable, including Mrs. Potts, since the first grade. If she couldn’t remember, how was she going to remember we weren’t her little second graders anymore?

  The bell rang, and the school year officially began. But you wouldn’t have known it from the hubbub continuing in the classroom.

  “Now, children, children!” Mrs. Potts said helplessly.

  But the boys kept on shoving and punching each other in the ribs as books were passed out. The girls kept on talking to each other. And Billy Swanson was already at work tearing off bits of paper and making the spitballs for which he had been famous all through first, second, third, fourth, and fifth grade. I could see that things were not looking good for the sixth grade.

  Would this situation in Miss Switch’s former fifth grade be enough to bring her back as our substitute principal? How long was I going to have to wait to find out? As it turned out, no more than an hour later Mrs. Potts made the following announcement:

  “The new principal will be visiting each class this morning, starting with our class. Why, it should be about this very minute!” Sure enough, at that moment, voices were heard approaching Room Twelve. My eyes were nailed to the doorway. Soon all would be revealed.

  First through the door came Mrs. Fanna, Banana’s mother, president of the PTA. Now, 1 could understand why a mother who is president of the PTA might have to dress up a little to take the principal on a tour of the school. But Mrs. Fanna, who generally appeared at Pepperdine like most of the other mothers in whatever baggy old clothes she could find in her closet, was so dressed up it was ridiculous. Her cheeks were flushed, and she had a goofy smile on her face.

  Right behind Mrs. Fanna appeared a small woman approximately the shape of a rain barrel and not much taller. Her face, as round as a full moon, exactly matched the rest of her. She only looked at the class briefly, however, as she came through the door, because she was too busy trying to balance an enormous green notebook in one hand and scratch notes in it
with the other.

  Right behind her someone else came striding in. And my high hopes came crashing down. It was not Miss Switch. It was not Miss Anything. It was not even Mrs. Anything. It was Mr. Something! But this was not just any Mr. Something. This was the handsomest man I’d ever seen in my life!

  What I mean is, that on a scale of one to ten—oh well, forget it. I couldn’t come up with a scale long enough. All I can say is you had to be there to see the moony looks develop on the faces of every girl in the class as soon as they saw him. The same look even appeared on the face of old Mrs. Potts, not to mention the moony look on the moon-faced person whose pen began skittering all over her notebook as she gazed up at this fellow. As for Mrs. Fanna, she was so busy fluttering her eyelashes at him that for a few moments it seemed as if she had forgotten what the president of the PTA was supposed to be doing in front of the sixth-grade class. Banana slunk down into his desk, looking as if he would like to slide under it and never be seen again.

  But Mrs. Fanna finally managed to stop fluttering long enough to let us know that this was our acting principal, Mr. Dorking, and his assistant, Miss Tuna. Then Mrs. Fanna got even more flustered, and started clapping. I couldn’t see why this event called for applause, but like a bunch of sixth-grade sheep, we all clapped away.

  After that, Mr. Dorking made a speech of about two sentences. He told us how happy he was to be at Pepperdine Elementary School. He told us how happy he was to be talking to the sixth grade. And while he was telling us these exciting things, the girls were all swooning at their desks. Mrs. Potts, Mrs. Fanna, and Miss Tuna were likewise swooning. When Mr. Dorking had finished inspiring the sixth grade with his speech, he flashed us a gazillion-dollar smile and left the room with Mrs. Fanna and Miss Tuna practically fainting behind him. Banana finally slithered back up in his desk seat, trying to look as if he had no connection whatsoever to the whole event.

  The day didn’t get any better. Billy Swanson built up a big arsenal of spitballs, and they began whizzing around the room. Mrs. Potts finally gave up and sent him to the principal. That only improved the Billy Swanson situation slightly but it unfortunately gave the girls ideas. They started giggling and whispering and passing notes so busily that Mrs. Potts gave up on that as well and started sending them in relays to the principal. Which is just what they wanted! They came back looking moonier than ever after seeing Mr. Dorking, and by the end of the day they were calling him Adorable Dorry.