Nightmare at the Book Fair (11 page)

Wait a minute! I can’t believe I’m actually writing out a recipe!

Sue gathered all the ingredients on the counter. Maria cracked the eggs into a bowl and beat them. Then Sharon added sugar, milk, flour, salt, butter and baking powder. Midori added more flour until the batter was smooth. It smelled delicious, and we hadn’t even cooked it yet.

Sue took out a big pan, put it on the stove, and got a flame going under it. I poured some vegetable oil into the pan. Sharon poured the batter into the special pitcher that had the funnel thing on it. She held her finger on the bottom so the batter wouldn’t drain out yet. Then Sue held the pitcher over the pan and Sharon took her finger off. The batter started dripping out of the bottom. It sizzled as soon as it hit the oil. Sue moved the pitcher over the pan, criss-crossing back and forth to make a big circular pattern, sort of like the head of a tennis racquet.

After a minute or so, Midori picked up the funnel cake with a pair of tongs to check it. When it was golden brown on the bottom, she flipped it over and let it fry for about a minute on the other side. Then Midori pulled it out of the pan with the tongs and let the extra oil drip onto a paper towel.

The whole time we were working on the funnel cake, the girls talked about how much they weigh, how fattening funnel cakes are, who was skinnier, what size clothes they wore, which stores they shopped at, and how they were not going to eat funnel cake for a year after they finished eating this one.

Finally, Sharon sprinkled powdered sugar on top of the funnel cake. My mouth was watering. It was worth it to be a girl for a while, I decided, if I could eat funnel cake as part of the deal. Sue passed out plates for all of us. I could almost taste the funnel cake.

“I’ll get napkins for everybody,” Sue said.

Napkins? I had heard of such things, but I had never actually touched one before. Sue handed me a napkin. It felt sort of papery.

I wanted to just grab a piece of that delicious funnel cake and stuff it into my mouth with both hands, but everybody else was being neat and waiting her turn. It was okay. I had waited a long time to have my first piece of homemade funnel cake. I could wait a minute longer.

“Do you want a big piece or a little piece, Jenn?” Sue asked me.

“Oh, I’d better have a little one,” I heard myself saying. “I don’t want to put on too much weight.”

“You can always have another piece later,” she said.

Sue put a piece on my plate. The smell of it was overwhelming. This is what it smells like in heaven all day long, I decided. I would bet that in heaven, even the bathrooms smell like funnel cake.

I picked it up.

I closed my eyes.

I put it into my mouth.

I put it into my mouth.

Ugh! It tasted bad. That had to be the worst funnel cake ever! It tasted like paper.

“Oh man, check it out,” I heard somebody say. “Dinkleman is chewing on a
book
!”

I opened my eyes to see a bunch of people gathered around, staring at me. Lionel was there and a bunch of other kids and teachers.

“Are you okay, Trip?” asked our media specialist, Miss Durkin.

“Huh? What?” I said groggily. “Where’s the funnel cake?”

“Funnel cake?” Miss Durkin said, laughing. “Trip, that’s a
book
you’re eating!”

She was right! I removed the book from my mouth and looked around. There were books scattered on the floor around me. Horror books and sports books, and fantasies and mysteries and adventure stories. I was sitting on the floor of the media center, behind one of the book-fair crates.

“You’ve been in this corner for
hours
, Trip,” Miss Durkin told me. “It’s time to close up the book fair, but I didn’t want to disturb you. You were just so immersed in all these books that you must have lost track of the time.”

“I missed lacrosse tryouts!” I shouted. “Now I won’t make the team!”

“It’s pouring out, Dink,” Lionel said. “That’s why we’re all in here. They rescheduled the tryouts for tomorrow.”

The door opened and the school nurse, Mrs. Robinson, came in, with Principal Miller.

“Hello there! Anybody home?” Principal Miller said. “I just dropped by because I heard the boy—well, he seems all right now.”

“You’re
alive
?” I asked him.

“Of course I’m alive!” Principal Miller replied.

“Trip got quite a bump on the head,” Mrs. Robinson told Principal Miller. “We kind of thought for a moment he was going to leave us.”

“I
did
leave you, Mrs. Robinson!” I told her. “I was in a haunted house, and I saw an alien in Washington! I was on a quest for a gold-plated knick-knack! I was even trapped in a dictionary! And all of you were accused of murdering Principal Miller!”

“There, there,” she said, putting a hand on my forehead. “Lie quietly now.”

A bunch of other people came over.

“Remember me, your old pal Mrs. Babcock?”

“And me, Mrs. Pontoon of the PTA?”

“You couldn’t forget my face, could you?” said the custodian, Mr. Dunn.

Ahh! He looked just like Professor Psycho!

“It wasn’t just books,” I said. “It felt like I was
at
all these places. And you, and you, and you, and you were there. But you couldn’t have been, could you?”

“We imagine lots of things when we read a good book,” Miss Durkin said.

“I remember that some of it wasn’t very nice,” I told them. “Like when that guy tried to steal my face and when I was a cat. But most of it was awesome, like when I was in the Super Bowl and walking on the moon. Just the same, all I kept saying to everybody was I want to go home. And they sent me home!”

All the grown-ups chuckled.

“Doesn’t anybody believe me?” I asked.

“Of course we believe you, Trip,” Miss Durkin said.

“But anyway I’m home,” I said, “and this is my school and you’re all here, and I’m not going to leave here ever again.”

At that point, my mom came running into the media center.

“Carrie!” I shouted. “Mom, you look just like Carrie!”

“Is he okay?” my mom asked, as she put her hand on my forehead. “I heard he had an accident.”

“He’ll be fine,” said Principal Miller. “He just got a little bump, that’s all.”

“Trip, I’ll bet your mother would buy you some books,” said Miss Durkin, “and you can come back to the media center anytime and check out any book you’d like.”

“I can?”

“Sure,” said my mom, who I swear looked just like Carrie.

“We’ve got lots of other great books I think you’ll enjoy,” said Miss Durkin. “You might like reading about all these adventures from the safety of your bedroom better than being stuck inside them.”

“I will!” I told her.

“Just don’t eat ’em, Dink,” said Lionel. “That’s just weird, man.”

Everybody laughed.

Somebody said the rain was tapering off, and people started to file out of the media center. Lionel helped me up and walked to the car with me and my mom. I didn’t say much during the drive. There was so much to think about. It had been really cool going to all those places, traveling through time, meeting all those crazy people, and having all those exciting adventures.

But I’ll say one thing. There’s no place like home!