What a Trip!

What a Trip!

(Around the World in Eighty Days)

Tony Abbott

Chapter 1

“Everyone ready for our field trip?” my English teacher, Mr. Wexler, chirped. “All right, then. Let's go!”

“This is a field trip?” a voice hissed in my ear. “I don't call this a field trip. Devin, do you call this a field trip? Because, if you ask me, I don't call this a field trip!”

I'm Devin Bundy. The person hissing in my ear was my-very-best-friend-despite-the-fact-that-she's-a-girl, Frankie Lang. We're in the sixth grade at Palmdale Middle School, and at the moment we were following Mr. Wexler and the rest of our class on a field trip.

Down the hall and around the corner.

To the school library.

“This is definitely stretching the definition of field trip,” I replied to Frankie as we tramped past the main office. “I see no fields, because we are totally inside. And I usually reserve the word ‘trip' for something that involves a bus with a bathroom. But then, I didn't hear Mr. Wexler even talking about a trip because I was working on another project.”

Frankie frowned at me. “What other project?”

“A dream I was having. I dreamed that I was sleeping in class and having a dream about sleeping in class.”

She nodded. “Devin, you've had that dream before.”

“It's one of my favorites,” I said.

Now, there's something you need to know about Frankie and me. People say that the only way to succeed in life is to develop your talents. So we have.

Frankie is really amazing at staring into space.

My own specialty is dozing in class.

Hey, it's what we do well.

What we don't do well is read. We test pretty low on the whole book-reading thing. Of course, Mr. Wexler wants to help us do better. He's sure we have great potential.

“Everyone—here we are!” Mr. Wexler said excitedly as we reached the library entrance.

Frankie was so disappointed, her hair drooped.

“I bet Mrs. Figglehopper is behind this whole field-trip thing,” she said. “She'll probably pop out from behind a book and make us read something!”

Mrs. Figglehopper is the not-too-ordinary librarian of Palmdale Middle School. She always wears long, flowery dresses. Her gray hair is tied up in a tight knob at the back of her head. And she's severely nutty about old books. You know the kind of books I mean. People call them classics.

Mrs. Figglehopper and Mr. Wexler are like the one-two punch of reading. He assigns fat old books, and her library has loads of copies of them.

But that isn't the only thing about our teacher and our librarian. Because of stuff we've done, and some stuff we haven't done, Mr. Wexler has sentenced us to work in Mrs. Figglehopper's library workroom a couple of times.

And let me tell you something. The weirdest things happen in that library workroom.

As we stood outside the library, Frankie and I glanced at each other. I could tell from the look in her eye that we were both remembering some of those weird things.

“Zapper gates,” whispered Frankie.

“Zapper gates,” I whispered back to her.

The zapper gates are what Mrs. Figglehopper calls an old set of security gates that she keeps in the workroom. They're the kind of gates that are supposed to go
zzzt-zzzt
! when you take a book through them that hasn't been checked out right.

The librarian has told us, like, a thousand times that those gates are broken and that someday she'll get them repaired to work right again.

Except that the gates aren't exactly broken.

One day, Frankie and I found out that those gates can sizzle and fizzle and spark and flicker and drop you right into a book.

Yes! Into a book! Right there with all the characters and places and story and everything!

The first time it happened, Frankie and I were fighting over a book. It fell through the gates, light exploded everywhere, and the wall behind the gates cracked open.

When we went through, we ended up right smack at the beginning of the book. Our only way home was to follow the characters all the way to the end of the story.

We almost didn't believe it had actually happened. Except that we got our best grades ever when we got tested on the books we fell into. And you can't take our grades away. They're part of our permanent record.

Mr. Wexler snapped his fingers, said, “Enter!” and we pushed through the library's double doors into the main room. It was filled with study carrels and tables and lots and lots of bookshelves, each one jammed with—guess what?—books.

I felt an uncontrollable urge to yawn.

“Devin,” said Mr. Wexler, “if you can get your head out of that
fog
you're in, you might learn something fun!”

I stifled the yawn, but I knew it would come back.

“Good,” said our teacher. “Mrs. Figglehopper has prepared for us a special display of beautiful books from many different countries around the world—England, India, China, Japan, France … ah!”

Just as my yawn made a return visit, Mr. Wexler's eyes lit up with excitement. He scampered over to a small display in the center of the room.

On the display were two things: a book and a watch. The book had a crusty green cover and looked old. The watch was one of those ancient pocket types that people used to have before they invented wrists or something. Right now, the top of the watch was flipped open, but the watch wasn't ticking.

“Class, this great classic adventure is one of the centerpieces of the display,” Mr. Wexler said, picking up the book carefully. “It is called
Around the World in Eighty Days
. It's a fabulous story published in 1873 by the French author Jules Verne. Few of us get to go on a journey around the world, but we can get a sense of what it's like by reading this classic book.”

“Why is there a watch on display, too?” I asked.

“Good question,” said Mr. Wexler. “To find out the answer, all you have to do is …”

“What?” said Frankie.

“Read the book!”

“Not fair,” I grumbled.

Mr. Wexler put the book down. “Now, please follow me. We have only about an hour and twenty minutes—oh! That's funny! Eighty minutes. Let's take our tour around the world of books in eighty minutes! Eighty days, eighty minutes? Get it?”

We got it. It wasn't all that amazing.

“And … here we go!” he said. He marched off to the first display table. The other kids followed him.

The pain was too much for my head. I turned to my friend. “Eighty whole minutes? I can't do booky things for that long. My head starts to explode. I say we head straight for the food.”

“What food?” asked Frankie.

I pointed to a table outside the workroom in the corner. On it was a big pink box. “Doughnuts, my friend, doughnuts. My nose can spot them a mile away.”

Frankie grinned, glanced at Mr. Wexler, then stepped slyly up to the book display. “Devin, I'll pretend to examine this old busted watch while you pretend to read this old book. With Mr. Wexler thinking we're working, we'll take our own little field trip to Doughnutville.”

“Frankie, I love how you think. Let's do it!”

I picked up the book and held it as if I were reading. Frankie took the watch, and pretended to be amazed at the cool oldness of it. We headed for the pink box.

When we got near, we heard low voices coming from the workroom. Peeking in, we saw Mrs. Figglehopper and a guy in blue overalls standing in front of the zapper gates.

“What's going on?” Frankie asked.

“Mrs. F and some work guy,” I whispered.

Then, before our shocked eyeballs, the work guy pulled a screwdriver from his tool belt, knelt down, and began to take the zapper gates apart!

Chapter 2

Frankie gasped. “Who is he, and what is he doing?”

“He's wrecking our zapper gates!” I hissed. “Frankie, we owe our only good grades to those gates! Can we let him do this?”

“Shhh,” she said. “Mrs. Figglehopper is saying something—”

We snuck through the open door, hid behind a crowded bookshelf, and listened closely.

“There's something wrong with the gates,” Mrs. Figglehopper said. She placed a sheet of blue paper on the table next to the guy. “It's all in the work order.”

“I'll check them out right away,” he said. “Give me about an hour and twenty minutes. I'll be done then.”

She glanced at the clock on the wall. “Good. Eighty minutes is perfect,” she said. Giving a cheery nod to the guy, she left the room.

I nudged Frankie. “She never even saw us—”

But Frankie was watching the repairman unscrew a panel on the side of one gate. He tugged out a bunch of colored wires and began to untangle them.

Frankie clutched my arm tightly. “Devin, he's going to wreck the gates forever. That means no more dropping into books. We need to stop this guy—”

Suddenly, my head lit up with an idea. “If I know work guys, he won't be able to resist the call of the cruller.” Stepping out from behind the shelf, I walked over to him. “Um, excuse me, sir?”

The guy didn't look up. “Yeah?”

“I know you're busy, but did you know there's a box of doughnuts just outside this room?”

He stopped working. “Powdered?”

“Oh, yes. Lots of them. Right outside this door.”

Plink
! His screwdriver hit the floor.
Fwit
! He shot out of the room.
Slam
! Frankie shut the door behind him.

We scrambled over and read the blue work order.

“‘Complete overhaul?'” Frankie read with a gasp. “‘Something funny going on? Fix blue light? Short circuits! Rewiring!' Devin, according to this, the repair guy is going to turn our incredible zapper gates into nothing more than a set of dumb old security gates!”

“He'll mess up the gates forever!” I said. “No more falling into books. No more good grades. All those books we'll have to read! What should we do?”

“You hide the work order!” she said.

“And you hide the tools!” I said.

But the moment I reached for the work order was the same moment Frankie reached for the tools. We collided, and the book, the special copy of
Around the World in Eighty Days
that I had been holding, went flying out of my hand. And right between the zapper gates.

KKKKK
! The whole room lit up like fireworks. A sizzling, crackling, flaming burst of blue light shot out from between the gates and bounced around the room.

“I can't believe it's happening again!” cried Frankie.

“It's different this time!” I said. “The guy already messed with the wires. The gates are acting funny. We shouldn't go near them—”

“Too late,” she said. “Something's—got—me!”

Even as we tried to back away, the zapper gates sparked more wildly and hummed more loudly, and we found ourselves being pulled toward them.

“What's going on?” Frankie cried, holding on to the file cabinet.

It was only too clear what was going on.

Frankie and I were being sucked into the blue light coming from the crack in the wall! It pulled and yanked and dragged us toward it. The light flooded over us. It flooded
through
us, too.

“I'm electric!” I cried, almost entirely blue now.

“And … I'm … I'm …” cried Frankie.

Everything went dark. And there were no more bookshelves. No more zapper gates. No more workroom. No more library.

Frankie and I found ourselves outside rolling over and over a bunch of knobby cobblestones on some old street somewhere.

We bounced and tumbled and tumbled and bounced—“Ouch! Oof! Hey!”—until we stopped at the feet of a little man in a tight, little suit.

He bowed sharply to us.

“Good day!” he chirped. “Are you Fogg?”

Chapter 3