Pennybaker School Is Revolting
For Paige, Weston, and Rand
May you always embrace your unique gifts
Also by Jennifer Brown
Life on Mars
How Lunchbox Jones Saved Me from Robots, Traitors, and Missy the Cruel
Pennybaker School Is Headed for Disaster
CONTENTS
Trick #1: The Pantyhose Pull
Trick #2: The Dance Ditch
Trick #3: A Teacher Appears
Trick #4: The Hidden Granny Trick
Trick #5: Loaded Levitation
Trick #6: Poof! Popularity!
Trick #7: The Friend Force
Trick #8: Sleight of Sister
Trick #9: The Mutiny Manifestation
Trick #10: The Web of Textbook
Trick #11: Camp Confusion
Trick #12: Dealing Detention
Trick #13: The Party Pinch
Trick #14: I Shall Now Put on These Shackles
Trick #15: The Cannonball Crimp
Trick #16: I Shall Now Hatch This Plan
Trick #17: The Abandonment Angle
Trick #18: The Prairieball Pass
Trick #19: The Racing Bouquet Wand
Trick #20: Pick a Dress, Any Dress
Trick #21: The Embarrassment Effect
Trick #22: The Time Machine Proposal
Trick #23: The Smelly Earplug
Trick #24: An Explosive Illusion
Trick #25: The Stink Bomb
Trick #26: Ta-da! A Teacher Appears!
Trick #27: The Plan Patter
Trick #28: A Riveting Quick Change
Trick #29: The Friendship Flourish
Trick #30: The Roosevelt Run
Trick #31: The Big Reveal
The Finale Trick
Acknowledgments
TRICK #1
THE PANTYHOSE PULL
I used to hate bow ties. That was before the pantyhose.
Mom insisted that they weren’t pantyhose. She called them “stockings” and said that all the men in colonial times wore them.
But we were standing in the ladies’ underwear section at the store when she said it, and she pulled the stockings off a shelf marked “Pantyhose” while we were surrounded by a bunch of old ladies all wearing pantyhose, and the plastic package had a picture of a woman wearing pantyhose right on the front.
So, yeah. Pantyhose.
The problem with pantyhose was they were impossible to get on. If I didn’t pull hard enough, they fell down. If I pulled too hard, they ripped. And they were hot and itchy, and I wasn’t sure Philadelphus Philadelphia even wore them. It was impossible to find a picture of Philadelphus Philadelphia anywhere.
I was still wrestling with my so-called stockings when Chip Mason came into my room. “Good day to you, Thomas Fallgrout!” he said, taking off his tricornered hat and bending low at the waist in a bow. “I bring glad tidings from Newburyport, Massachusetts.”
Chip was my across-the-street neighbor, and my friend, too, even though he was weird and kind of annoying sometimes and I pretty much never understood what he was saying—especially when he was wearing his King’s English socks. Chip had socks for every occasion. And I don’t just mean Santa socks for Christmas and candy-corn socks for Halloween—Chip had socks for everything from movie night to geological studies.
Today, for the most part, Chip was dressed like me: coat, ruffled shirt, hat, pantyhose, shoes that made noise when you walked. Only his pantyhose weren’t sagging around his ankles and didn’t have holes in them.
“Who are you supposed to be?” I asked, giving mine another tug.
“John Pearson, of course,” he said, bringing his heels together with a snap and saluting me.
“Soldier?”
“No, sir.”
“Then why are you saluting me?”
He lowered his hand and clasped it behind his back with the other one. “I don’t know. Seemed the right thing to do.”
“Okay. So who was Pierce Johnson?”
“I don’t know, who?”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t know! You’re the one who decided to be him, not me!”
“My dear lad,” Chip said, “the way you’ve worded your declaration makes it sound as if I might have chosen to represent you for our assignment—which, of course, I could not do, as you are not a colonial figure of any sort. I believe your sentence structure would be clearer if you’d said something along the lines of I didn’t dress as Pierce Johnson; you did. I have found that rewording things in my head a few times before saying them aloud helps to avoid confusion.”
I opened my mouth to tell him how he could avoid the confusion of me putting him in a headlock, but he held up his hand to stop me.
“However. Given the context of our sentences previous, I imagine you meant to ask who ‘John Pearson’ was, for that is whose style of dress I’m meant to emulate. ‘Pierce Johnson’ is just some random gentleman who I’m sure is nice enough, but who is not a member of colonial society—although, without proper research, I cannot definitively make the claim that there were no Pierce Johnsons in colonial America. But going off the assumption that I am correct, and Pierce Johnson did not, indeed, exist in colonial society, he would not be appropriate for our assignment.”
Our assignment. For Facts After the Fact class, otherwise known as History in a normal school. But Pennybaker School for the Uniquely Gifted was definitely not normal, and we didn’t get normal assignments. The current non-normal assignment, called Act After the Fact, was to research and pretend to be a real-life but unknown colonial American citizen for one month.
One month of hot, itchy leg-stranglers.
Chip paced across my room, his hand tucked into his lapel. “It was quite the difficult decision, paring down the vast field of unsung heroes,” he said. “Should I go for a humanitarian? A brave battlefield commander? A doctor? A scholar? There were just so many citizens to choose from.”
There were? It had taken me three days to find a single one. That was the problem with unknown people—they were unknown. Then again, I wasn’t Chip Mason. He was probably wearing his unknown colonial American citizen socks at the time.
“In the end, though,” he said, “I chose inventor John Pearson.”
“What did he invent?” I asked.
“Pearson’s Pilot Bread!” he proclaimed proudly.
“Huh?”
“Sea biscuits?” he tried.
“I think your research might be wrong, Chip. Seabiscuit was a horse. Nobody invented a horse.”
“Not true. The Greeks very much invented a horse when they wished to invade Troy.”
I blinked. “Wait—this assignment is about Greece? And who is Troy?” More important question: Did Ancient Greek guys wear pantyhose?
Chip chose to ignore my questions. “Perhaps you’ve heard of it referred to as hardtack.”
“What? The Greek horse?”
“No, not the—” He sighed and adjusted his proud posture again.