Tabloidology (15 page)

“I guess they'll just scoot down the hall,” Melissa said.

Trixi's special edition of the
Upland Green Gossiper
was causing both panic and excitement. Excitement and panic for the kids, that is. None of the adults had seen it. They didn't have a clue what was in store for them that day, as copies of the paper were stuffed in knapsacks, crammed into pockets or crumpled into desks. Not one teacher in the school had seen the headline:

PRINCIPLE'S CAR SWORMED BY AINGRY GOFERS!

Nor had they read this:

ANSHENT MUMMY IN STAFF ROOM CLOZET COMES
ALIVE AND DRINKS ALL THE TEACHERS' COFEE!

The groundskeeper arrived right after the morning bell to mow the field. He might have had second thoughts if he'd seen a copy of Trixi's paper and read the headline:

TWISTER PICKS UP CAMPGROWND OUTHOWSE
DROPS IT ON UPLAND GREEN SCHOOL'S FRONT FEILD!

As for Ms. Baumgartner, she worked away in her office in spite of Trixi's headline:

SEEWER RATS CRAUL OUT OF WASHROOM TOILETS!
BUILD NESTS IN THE PRINCIPLE'S OFISE!

All that day, everyone kept their eyes and ears wide-open, watching and waiting for the school to be thrown into total chaos once again. For the teachers, it was a pleasant change from the normal buzz of chattering students. No one said a single word. It was that quiet.

One of those silent students was Trixi Wilder. She just grinned, leaned back in her chair and waited for her grand plan to unfold.

Martin Wettmore didn't know a thing about Trixi's special edition of the
Upland Green Gossiper
. The day after his meeting with Ms. Baumgartner Martin stayed in bed, pretending he had the flu. He spent his whole miserable day with an image of Ms. Baumgartner in his head; swirling around her were words like
unreasonable
,
thoughtless, mean
and
unfair
.

Martin didn't care that the electricity in the house was off all day or that Razor and five of his friends had skipped school to play floor hockey in the hall outside his room. He didn't flinch when three of Sissy's dogs jumped up on his bed and had a fight. He didn't open his eyes when one of Razor's friends let off a firecracker in the upstairs bathroom or when his mother came home early from work and played her Barry Manilow cd full blast seven times in a row. Martin was a bag of misery.

At Upland Green School, every student in every classroom held their breath and waited. At the sound of the recess bell, a herd of kids stampeded out to the parking lot. There was great disappointment when they saw that no chunks of metal had been bitten off Ms. Baumgartner's car. There weren't even any scratches on the paint, and not one tooth mark could be found on the bumpers. Not one single sign of angry gophers whatsoever.

“Hey, Trixi!” Paul Smirl shouted. “I thought your paper said some angry gophers would—”

“I know, I know, I know,” Trixi said. “Just be patient. Have any of my newspapers ever let you down?”

A line of kids stood around the edge of the field looking up, keeping their eyes peeled for flying outhouses. All they saw were a crow and two chickadees.

Another crowd cupped their hands against the glass of the staffroom window. The closest thing to a mummy they saw was Mrs. Kensington, the grade-seven teacher, in a wraparound dress she'd brought back from her trip to Thailand.

“Hey, Trixi! Are you trying to make us look like a bunch of idiots?” Megan Tomlinson said. “Where's the mummy?”

“These things take time,” Trixi replied. “You've got to wait and watch. But I guarantee, it'll be worth it!”

No one dared go into the washrooms. Everyone was too terrified of coming face to face with a sopping wet, cat-sized, sewer rat running from a toilet bowl to the principal's office. There were plenty of kids standing around crossing their legs and making strange faces, but no one went inside. No one, that is, except for Sally Sweeny.

On her way to school that morning, Sally had guzzled three extra-large Slushies-in-a-Barrel from the convenience store down the street. As she stood outside the girls' washroom at recess, Sally knew she could either wet her pants or confront the sewer rats. The crowd around the girls' washroom gasped when Sally charged through the door and disappeared inside.

“Sally! Watch out!” Laura Birken yelled. “You'd better come out, 'cause no one's coming in to save you!”

There was no reply. The door remained closed. Standing in complete silence, everyone listened. They were expecting to hear Sally howling as the gigantic sewer rats leaped out of the toilets and surrounded her. They were expecting to hear Sally shriek and scream when the rats sank their massive teeth into her leg. But they heard neither howling nor shrieking nor even one solitary scream. Moments later, Sally casually strolled out the door.

“What about the sewer rats?” Laura said. “How big were they? How many were there?”

“The only thing I saw was a crumpled paper towel on the floor,” Sally said.

“That's it?” Laura said. “No bloodthirsty foot-long rats with razor-sharp teeth and really bad personalities?”

“Nope,” was all Sally said.

Recess passed. Lunch went by. When the end of the school day arrived, not one single story written in the pages of Trixi's special edition had come true. You could smell the disappointment in the school.

As everyone filed past her in the hall on their way home, Trixi shouted, “By Monday morning, everything will have happened! I promise! Just you wait! You'll see!” But no one said a word to Trixi. They didn't have to. Their dirty looks told her exactly what they were thinking.

When everyone was gone, Trixi plodded out the door and headed home to an empty house. As she walked, she racked her brains, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Why hadn't the stories in her special edition come true?

FOURTEEN

A
t home that night, Trixi sat under the pink canopy on her pink bed and flipped through the channels on her bedroom tv. But her mind was not on the images flashing by on the giant screen. Her mind was busy trying to figure out what had gone wrong with her special edition of the
Upland
Green Gossiper
.

She had tried to phone her parents, but all she got was her mother's recorded voice telling her to leave a message. Then Trixi had called Alyssa and Megan and Marcie and Jenny and Brianne. But each of them hung up as soon as they heard her voice.

Then she knocked on Mrs. Primrose's door, but the housekeeper was watching the finale of
Juggling with the Stars
, so she couldn't be disturbed for the next two hours.

Trixi even tried to phone Martin, but no one answered. With no one to talk to, Trixi decided to get her mind off her horrible day by watching tv. The things that had happened that day—or the things that
hadn't
happened—kept replaying in her mind.

Why hadn't the gophers come through for her? Where was that flying outhouse when she needed it?

At 11:00 pm, Mrs. Primrose pounded on her door. “Shut that television off and turn out the lights. And I mean now!”

As Trixi lay in the darkness, she stared up at the glowing stars and planets stuck to her ceiling, trying to forget everything and get to sleep. But in a clump of stars right above her bed, she could see the shape of a rat. It was the exact shape of the sewer rats that were supposed to climb out of the toilets at school. But they never showed up.

To the right of the rat, another group of stars took on the shape of a mummy. The longer she looked, the more it looked like the mummy was holding up a coffee cup to its mouth. She'd seen this mummy before in her imagination as she was writing the latest edition of the paper. But where was that mummy when she really needed it?

Trixi turned on her side. Instead of facing up at the stars on the ceiling, she was staring straight at her clock radio. She watched the minutes slowly tick by, crawling into hours.

At 7:00 am, Mrs. Primrose banged on her door and shouted, “Time to wake up!” But Trixi had never fallen asleep.

That evening, Martin received five anonymous phone calls.

“What kind of newspaper are you and Wilder printing, huh?” a voice screamed over the phone. “We didn't see one single coffee-drinking mummy! And where were the flying outhouses? And what about the car-eating gophers? Nothing happened! Nothing!”

The four other phone calls were much the same. All angry, all talking about things Martin knew nothing about. But after the fifth phone call, he had a pretty good idea of what had happened at school that day. He yanked the phone cord hard enough for the phone jack to pop out of the wall. Now, no one could remind him of school and of the newspaper which no longer existed.

Just before he went to bed, Martin's mother called him into the kitchen. Mountains of miniature cucumbers and piles of dill weed covered the counters. “Martin,” she said over a bubbling pot, “all this moping around the house pretending to be sick will end tomorrow. No matter what, you are going to school. I'm not leaving you at home alone, and I don't want to miss work a second day in a row.”

Martin didn't bother telling his mother that tomorrow was Saturday. He trudged up to his room and flopped onto the bed. He didn't brush his teeth or change into his pajamas. He just lay there, awake…wide-awake, staring at the streetlight outside his window. The only sound in the room was the bubbling of Razor's piranha tank. He listened for the whistle of the 11:07 freight train, but it never arrived. Razor stumbled into the room at 11:45, dove onto his bed and fell asleep instantly. He didn't even snore. The 1:42 freight train that usually made the windows rattle and the floor vibrate never came by. There were no fires and no sirens that night.

In all of this silence, Martin lay wide-awake, his eyes closed, but his mind wide-open. How could Ms. Baumgartner even think of shutting his newspaper down? How could she be so unfair? These two questions cycled through his mind over and over, with no answer to stop them.