As Dave sat down at a lunch table with his friends, he couldn’t get the grin off his face. He was having so much fun he could hardly chew his first bite of grilled cheese. And he didn’t like chewing right now because chewing made noise, and when he munched he couldn’t hear the silence.
The silence—Dave thought it was amazing. And watching Mrs. Hiatt try to figure out what was going on? That was amazing too. It was like they had trapped her in a force field.And she couldn’t get out of it, because the silence filled the cafeteria.
Dave looked around, and he saw the same amazement on the faces of some other kids. They were all thinking about the same thing.Together.
Then suddenly:“Hey, give it back!”
There was a gasp as every boy and girl in the room sucked in a breath, and all heads turned to see where those words had come from.
And there at the ice cream freezer, Ed Kesey had one hand over his mouth while his other hand reached for a cherry Popsicle that Bryan DelGreco had grabbed.
Dave swung around and looked at Lynsey. Lynsey knew a lot of kids were watching her, but she pretended not to notice. She slowly reached into her back pocket, slowly pulled out a pen and a small red notebook, slowly opened the cover, and slowly made four little marks on the first page.
And as she flipped the notebook shut, Lynsey looked right at Dave and gave him a big smile.
Just like that, and the girls were ahead by four points.
But Dave wasn’t worried.The contest had barely begun.There were two whole days to go.
Dave was absolutely sure that the next forty-eight hours were going to be very . . . interesting.And he thought, Is that the right word? How about . . . fascinating? No, more like . . . exciting.Yeah—exciting!
Then Dave happened to glance at Mrs. Hiatt. And he could tell from the look on the principal’s face that she had been watching everything—the way Ed had shouted those words and then covered
his mouth, the way all the other kids had reacted, the way Lynsey had marked her notebook.
And at that exact moment the principal turned and locked eyes with Dave. She stared right at him, with her eyebrows all bunched up in a puzzled knot.
Dave quickly looked down at his lunch tray, and as he did, a new word popped into his mind.And he was pretty sure this one was also going to be a good word to describe the next few days: dangerous.