Mr. Macky Is Wacky! (5 page)

Just when it was my turn to give my oral report, Mr. Macky came into our class.
Good
, I thought. I wanted him to see me blow the doors off Andrea.

I took my report and went to the front of the room with my cane and glasses and fur hat.

“My name is Benjamin Franklin,” I read from my report. “I'm on the hundred-dollar bill, and I lived a very interesting life.”

I told the class all the cool stuff I learned about Benjamin Franklin. Like how he ran away from home when he was a teenager. And how he became a famous printer and
writer. And how he became a famous inventor and discovered that lightning was electricity. And how he helped to write the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And how he turned three hundred years old in 2006.

Everybody was totally silent while I read my awesome oral report, so I knew it must have been really good. I was blowing Andrea's doors off! Nah-nah-nah boo-boo on her!

Finally I came to the last line of my report. I looked up. Everybody was staring at me. They had weird looks on their faces.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

Andrea was the only one who said anything.

“Benjamin Franklin wasn't even a president, dumbhead.”

“Huh?” I said.

I looked at Mr. Macky. I was sure he was going to tell little Miss Smarty Pants that she was wrong and that she should keep her big mouth shut. She doesn't know everything.

But he didn't.

“A.J.,” Mr. Macky said, “Benjamin Franklin was a great man, but he was never president of the United States.”

He
wasn't
? I read a lot of stuff about Benjamin Franklin. It never said he
wasn't
president. I just figured he
had
to be a president. Why would they put him on a hundred-dollar bill if he wasn't even a president?

I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to do. I had to think fast.

So I said the only thing I could say.

“I knew that!”

Then I did the only thing I could do.

I ran out of the room. And I'm never going back.

I'm going to Antarctica to live with the penguins. Penguins are cool. And it won't matter to them that I did my Presidents' Day oral report on a guy who wasn't even a president.

 

Maybe Neil the nude kid will catch President Wiggles. Maybe Mr. Macky will become a full-time big-screen TV sales
man. Maybe Abraham Lincoln will beat up George Washington. Maybe Mr. Klutz will grow some hair on his head so I can write a Dr. Seuss poem about it. Maybe I'll come back in time for Presidents' Day next year, when everybody will have forgotten my dumb report. Or maybe I can find a way to get Benjamin Franklin elected president of the United States even though he's been dead since 1790.

But it won't be easy!

Cover art © 2007 by Jim Paillot