Mississippi River Blues
(The Adventures of Tom Sawyer)
Chapter 1
“Devin Bundy!”
No answer.
“Frankie Lang!”
No answer.
Well, no answer except maybe a stifled giggle.
You see, our English teacher, Mr. Wexler, was huffing down the halls of Palmdale Middle School looking for me and my best-friend-forever-even-though-she’s-a-girl, Frankie (Francine) Lang. And by the growly tone of Mr. Wexler’s voice—a tone we had definitely heard before—he was roaring mad.
“When I find you two, I’ll …”
But he wouldn’t find us. Frankie and I were hiding out in the janitor’s tiny supply closet among the smelliest cleaning fluids and stalest work shirts that ever burned your nostrils.
It stank in there, but that’s what made it the best hiding place. Nobody ever wanted to open that door. It could cause instant brain death to anyone who ever sniffed the air in there.
But brain death didn’t bother Frankie and me.
“Wherever you are,” Mr. Wexler said, “I hope you’re studying for my test!”
“Studying?” I whispered to Frankie. “I don’t think so. I studied for a test last year. I’m still getting over the shock to my system!”
“Tell me about it,” Frankie said, nodding in agreement. “It was a one-way ticket to Headache City.”
I had to laugh. I mean, everybody knows that Frankie and I aren’t the best students in our class. In fact, we happen to know the best student in our class. He reads thick books all the time, and he wears pants so short you can see his socks.
“I’ll find you-ou-ou!” Mr. Wexler said, finally. Then, rattling the lockers and pounding on the lavatory doors, he plodded away down the hall.
“Hurry, Dev,” said Frankie, whipping a large square book out of her backpack and handing it to me. “We’ve got twelve minutes before Mr. Wexler tests us on this book. So crack it open and start reading. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life in summer school.”
I shivered. “Summer … school. Two words that definitely don’t go together! Okay, I’m reading.”
I turned to the first page of the book.
On it was a picture of a smiling teddy bear wearing a cute sailor suit. He sat in a tiny boat in shallow water at the beach. “Are you sure this is the book Mr. Wexler is going to test us on?” I asked.
Frankie nodded. “The Adventures of Timmy the Sailor. He said it’s a classic that he read five times as a kid. Now, read. We have to pass this test.”
“One classic coming up,” I said. I began to read.
Timmy the Sailor was in his boat.
Timmy was happy in his boat.
“Boats are fun, fun, fun!” said Timmy.
A sudden pain shot into my head. “So many words! The story’s too complicated. I can’t read anymore!”
Frankie sighed. “But, Devin, what about the test?”
“If we’re not there, we can’t take it,” I said. “I suggest we just wait here until it’s over. In the meantime, I’ve got a neat jumbo paper clip in my pocket. We could twist it into weird shapes. What do you have?”
It was cool how I won her over.
“Well, I’ve got some kite string. We can play miniature rodeo!”
“Frankie, you are the best!” I said. “Ya—hoo!”
But at the exact moment I shouted the “hoo” part of “yahoo,” I flung my arms up in joy. This action dislodged one of the janitor’s smelly work shirts from its hook. This is the reason no one sets foot, let alone other parts of themselves, in this closet. When the shirt fell from its hook, it settled directly onto my nose.
“Ackkkk!”
I accidentally breathed in the maximum amount of horrifying stink of the janitor’s crusty armpit that it’s possible for a human kid to breathe in.
“Ackkkkk!” I screamed again.
To keep the odor from burning my face, I ripped the shirt off and flung it away.
Right onto Frankie’s nose. She let out a howl like a puppy whose paw had just been stepped on.
“EEEEOOOOOWWWW!”
She flung herself back against the door—blam! It suddenly opened, and hallway light flooded over us.
And a face was staring at us.
“Gotcha!” boomed the voice of Mr. Wexler.
We were caught.
Again.
“So!” said our teacher, a slow grin working its way across his face. “Devin Bundy and Francine Lang. Hiding out, eh? I should send you to the office right now.”
A glimmer of hope stirred in my brain. We couldn’t take the test in the office. “You definitely should.”
“But I won’t,” he stated. “Our test starts in nine minutes, and you are going to take it.” Then he sighed. “Did you even bother to read the book?”
“We did read it!” I said. I held up the book proudly. “And I know what you’re thinking.”
He glanced at the book. “Oh, really?”
“You’re thinking, how do kids who are so overwhelmed with activities—nachos, pizza, CDs, music, homework, pony rides, church, temple, school, shopping, sleeping, and, of course, more than four hundred cable stations—find time in their busy day to read a book?”
He stared at the book. “That’s not what I’m thinking.”
“Well, it’s not easy,” I went on. “True, we are completely swamped by life. Overbooked, you might say.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“But the reason we read this book, Mr. Wexler, is because Frankie and I … believe in books?”
“That’s not the book I assigned,” Mr. Wexler said.
My heart did a little fluttering thing. I tapped the cover of the book and spoke words. “The Adventures of Timmy the Sailor. It’s what you said in class.”
The man breathed out loudly through his nose. “Why would I assign a twelve-page picture book with a kindergarten reading level?”
Frankie shrugged. “To make it tough on us?”
“I did not ask you to read The Adventures of Timmy the Sailor,” our teacher insisted. “I asked you to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer! It’s a three-hundred-page classic novel written by the great American author Mark Twain over a hundred and twenty-five years ago.”
I looked at Frankie. She looked at me.
“Tom Sawyer?” she said.
“Yes,” said the teacher.
“Not Timmy the Sailor?” I asked.
“No,” said the teacher.
When he said that, my mind returned to its usual state. It went blank.
At this point, Mr. Wexler sucked in such a huge breath that if Frankie hadn’t held on to me, I think I would have gotten sucked right up his nose.
“You—you—you—” he sputtered.
Frankie cringed. “We—we—we—what?”
“You are just not applying yourselves!” Mr. Wexler responded. “It’s so—so—disappointing! If you two worked more—if you worked at all!—you really could become good students!”
Frankie jumped. “What a great idea. How about we take the test when we become good students?”
The teacher shook his head slowly, then pointed down the hall. “To class. Both of you. Now.”
There was no reasoning with the guy. I had to act fast. I clutched my chest. “My heart is having appendicitis! Get me to the ER!”
I staggered down the hall to the front doors.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” said Mr. Wexler, thrusting himself between me and freedom. “The only ‘getting’ you’ll do is to be ‘getting’ to class, where—in eight minutes—you’ll be taking my test on Tom Sawyer!”
“But we’re not prepared!” cried Frankie.
“Be creative,” the teacher said. “Stretch your minds. Dare I say it, think!”
Frankie scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous, Mr. Wexler. It’s Devin and me you’re talking to—”
He only grinned at that. “Come along, now. It’s test time!”
Then, just when things looked darkest for us, there came a tremendous crashing sound from the end of the hallway.
Boom-da-boom!
And someone cried out.
“Help! Help me!”
Chapter 2
At the end of the hall was a walking pile of books. A huge pile. A teetering, wobbling, wiggling skyscraper of books! Not only that, but the books were sliding off the pile one by one, and one by one they crashed to the floor.
Boom-da-boom-boom!
“It’s Mrs. Figglehopper!” cried Mr. Wexler. “Frankie, Devin, hurry and help her!”
We screeched over just as the last of the heavy books slammed to the floor. Boom!
“Oh, dear-dear-dear,” said Mrs. Figglehopper, staring at the scattered books. “Dear-dear!”
Mrs. Figglehopper is our school’s librarian. She always wears the sort of glasses that you look over or under, but never actually look through. And she always—always—talks about books. I decided to beat her to it.
“You dropped your books,” I said.
“It certainly seems I did!” she said, shaking her head.
“We’ll help you restack your books, Mrs. Figglehopper,” said Mr. Wexler, “then it’s off to class for these two. We’re having a test!”
“Oh, but Mr. Wexler, wait!” Mrs. Figglehopper said. “I think it’s obvious I can’t carry these books all by myself. Can you spare Frankie and Devin for a few minutes while they help me take these to the library?”
Our teacher arched his thick eyebrows. Then, glancing up at the clock on the wall, he grinned.
“Ordinarily, I wouldn’t let these two out of my sight. But even a few seconds in a library will do them good. Maybe if they are near all those books, some of the ink will rub off. Ink? Rub off? Ha! That’s a good one, don’t you think?”
We didn’t laugh. But Mr. Wexler did, all the way down the hall. Then, just as he rounded the corner, he said, “Please have them in their seats and taking my test in … oh! … seven minutes!”
“They’ll be there!” the librarian said, smiling as she handed books to us. “Now, you two follow me.”
With stacks of books in our arms we wormed our way through the various hallways to the school library.
“You know what I hate?” mumbled Frankie. “That we strained our brains on some book we didn’t even have to read. How cruel is that?”
“Oh, flibbertigibbet!” said Mrs. Figglehopper, holding open the library doors for us. “Any reading is like exercise for you. Reading turns the light on in your mind.”
“But what if your mind really wants to sleep?” Frankie asked, yawning.
“Then books can wake you up!” the library lady said. “And speaking of books—which I always do!—I think you’d enjoy the real story of Tom Sawyer much more than that little picture book you’re holding. Reading classics is not as terrible or as difficult as you think.”
I peered at Frankie beyond my pile of books. Because we’ve been friends forever, just one glance told me she felt as bad as I did. It was a bad, sad time for us.
Then we passed the clock on the wall over the checkout counter and we felt even sadder.
Our seven minutes had shrunk to six.
“I can’t believe it!” said Frankie as Mrs. Figglehopper led us to the library workroom. “Just taking a wild number, let’s say there are a total of maybe five hundred books in the whole world. Okay, so how many do we actually have to read? I mean, how many good grades do we have to get? Shouldn’t we leave some for other people? Sharing is good, right?”
“Frankie speaks true words,” I added. “I say we already did the reading-a-book thing. Now we move on.”
Mrs. Figglehopper chuckled as she opened the door to the workroom. “Oh, but there are thousands of good books in the world, and everyone can learn to have fun reading. All you have to do is open the book. It gets easier every time.”
“Time?” said Frankie. “We have no time. We’ve only got five minutes to read that book!”
“Four, actually,” the librarian said calmly. “But you can’t read Tom Sawyer quickly. Oh, no, that’s no good.”
As we pushed into the workroom, my eyes instantly spotted an old broken set of library security gates standing against the back wall of the room. They looked like two sides of a doorway with no top.
“Zapper gates,” Mrs. Figglehopper calls them. Busted, she says they are. Not true, say Frankie and I. Frankie and me. I. Me. Whatever. The point is, those zapper gates aren’t exactly as busted as Mrs. Figglehopper says they are.
How do I know?
I know, because Frankie and I were in the library workroom once before. And we found out the extra-hard way that those gates can do something very weird.
And very impossible.
“Before you go, let me show you something,” the librarian said. She pulled an old green book from one of the many shelves. “This is one of the very first copies ever published of the book you should have read. It’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.”
“It’s too thick,” said Frankie, shaking her head sadly. “We never could have finished it, anyway.”
“This book is over a hundred and twenty-five years old,” the woman said. “And every bit as fresh now as the day it was written.”
I sniffed. “Doesn’t smell so fresh.”
“True, and the covers are slightly cracked,” said Mrs. Figglehopper. “But look here!” She opened the book gently and turned to the very last page. On it someone had written something in thick black ink.
“Hey, even I know not to scribble in books,” I said.
Mrs. Figglehopper chuckled. “This is no ordinary scribble. It is the autograph of the author, Mark Twain. Having Twain’s autograph in the book makes this one of the most valuable in our whole collection. I consider it a priceless treasure!”
The phone at the front desk began to ring.
“Go ahead, read the first page,” she said. “But be careful, some of the pages are loose. You have a few minutes before your test. Let me answer the phone, and then I’ll be right back.” She left the room, trotting for the front desk.
The moment I turned to the first page, Frankie raised her head. She was looking at the zapper gates.
Her expression told me that she was remembering the weird thing that had happened the last time we were in the library workroom. I remembered it, too.
It had happened a couple of weeks before, in this very room.
One minute, Frankie and I are fighting over a book; the next minute the book falls between the gates, and—blammo!—the gates go all fizzy and sparkly and there’s this huge blue light and a weird crack opens in the wall—in the wall!—and of course we go into it and—shazzam!—we are not in the library anymore.
We are in the book.
In the book!
That’s right. Somehow we got dropped right into the story, with all the characters and everything! The worst part was that we couldn’t escape the book until we read all the way to the last page.
Talk about brutal. Talk about exhausting. It’s enough to make your head explode!
“Dev,” Frankie whispered, still staring at the zapper gates. “I’ve been thinking.…”
I looked at the gates, too. “Well, stop it,” I told her. “Thinking just gets kids like us into trouble. Besides, if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, you can think of something else.”
“It worked once.”
“Don’t go there, Frankie!” I protested. “Okay, sure, maybe the gates worked once, but remember how we almost got totally deep-fried? I’d rather take a test.”
Frankie chuckled. “That’s not a line you say often.”
“We’re not going anywhere near the gates, Frankie.”
“Okay.”
“Because it’ll probably turn out way bad.”
“I said okay.”