The brown gloppy stuff they serve for hot lunch:
a. smells like what would happen if you set garbage on fire.
b. tastes like it was made out of monkey fur, glue, and fish guts.
c. provides the perfect way for me to get revenge.
d. all of the above. (Although I didn’t actually taste it, I’m guessing what it tasted like based on how it looked and smelled.)
I only had hot lunch on the days when they had cheese pizza. The other days my mom packed my lunch.
“Are those carrots?” Katie asked.
My mom had used magic to make my carrots into the shape of penguins. She liked to make my lunch interesting. She didn’t seem to understand that the humdrum idea of an interesting lunch was to cut peanut butter sandwiches on the diagonal instead of down the middle. “Um. My mom likes to carve stuff,” I mumbled.
Katie took one out of my hand and looked it over, her eyes wide. “This is so cool. You can see where it has individual feathers. You don’t see these every day.”
I took it back and bit into it. “My mom’s really into crafts.” I peeked in my bag and realized my mom had toasted the bread on my sandwich in a complicated checkerboard pattern. I quickly tore it into pieces so that the pattern wasn’t obvious.
“Maybe some time I could come over after school and your mom can show me how to make my carrots like that.”
“I don’t know.” I stalled. “I think it would be more fun to go to your place. We could make a new book about Crackers in space. He’d look pretty funny in a helmet.” Katie liked to write her own books, and then we would draw the pictures for them. She was going to have a whole library of them someday. Katie wanted to be an author. And an astronaut. And a famous soccer player. Katie was going to be a very busy grown-up.
“We never go to your house,” Katie said.
“My sister is always there. She’d yell at us to be quiet so she could work on her homework.” This was true. My older sister, Lucinda, was a know-it-all. She never let me play with her stuff, and she was always bragging about how she could fly. Although my sister was a pain, she wasn’t the real reason I never invited Katie over. I didn’t invite her over because I knew there was nothing about our house that was normal. Katie would figure out there was something funny about our family for sure. Even more funny than penguin-shaped carrots.
A French fry plopped down on our table making both Katie and me jump. I spun around. Nathan threw another fry, and it hit me in the center of my forehead.
“Here’s a snack for your wedding buffet,” Nathan said, and everyone at his table laughed.
“He’s lucky that fry didn’t have ketchup on it,” Katie said.
“Why is he being so mean?” I asked.
Katie shrugged. “Who knows? He’s a boy.”
Nathan was one of the most popular boys in our class. He was really good at sports. In gym he was always picked first for everything. This could explain why he was so good at throwing fries. He had blond hair that sort of flopped over one eye. He was cute, but he knew it.
I knew I wasn’t supposed to do any magic at school, but he threw a fry at me. People should never throw vegetables at another person. That should be a rule. I called out to Theodore.
Theodore was the mouse that lived in the walls of the school cafeteria. I don’t want to brag or anything, but my magical ability as a fairy is that I can talk to animals. This is pretty special. I don’t know any other fairies who can do this. It’s a pretty handy skill. For example, my dog Winston can tell me exactly what he wants for dinner. It’s almost never kibble. He’d rather have pork chops.
Theodore stuck his pink nose out of the tiny hole in the wall. His whiskers flicked back and forth. He was pretty chunky, so his behind was still stuck in the wall. He lived off the scraps from the cafeteria, and there are a lot of leftovers in a school cafeteria. I quickly explained to him what Nathan had done.
“How dare he throw food! Gentlemen should never accost a lady.” Theodore shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he heard. He was a very old-fashioned type of mouse. “That boy needs to be taught a lesson. Stand aside, fair maiden, and allow me to teach this rogue proper manners.”
Theodore grunted and his bottom popped out of the hole like a cork coming out of a bottle. He waddled along the wall until he was in the middle of the cafeteria. He took several deep breaths to ready himself for the challenge.
“Revenge!” Theodore yelled as he ran full speed toward Nathan’s table. No one saw him until he ran up the table leg. Then one of the fifth-grade girls spotted him and began to scream.
Theodore shoved all the lunch trays on the table, grunting with the effort. The trays slid along the slick tabletop and fell straight into Nathan’s lap. The beef stew splashed down, covering him in thick brown goo. His mouth was open in shock. I couldn’t tell if that was from the hot stew soaking through his shirt and pants or the fact that a mouse was the one that dumped the food on him.
“Now let that be a lesson to you,” Theodore said, brushing his front paws off before he jumped down. “A gentleman conducts himself with honor and treats women with respect.”
The fifth-grade girls were all standing on their chairs screaming and pointing. “Easy ladies, no need to get all riled up. I only use my might on those that deserve it.” Theodore headed back toward his hole, the kids parting to make a path for him. One of the lunch ladies came skidding out of the kitchen with giant metal cookie tray over her head. When Theodore saw her, he took off running. He hit the hole at full speed. He was stuck for a second. I held my breath, terrified the lunch lady would catch up with him and whack him with the tray, but his back legs kept pushing and he popped back in the hole.
Bethany rushed over to Nathan with a stack of napkins. “Are you okay?”
“Did you see that?” Nathan stammered. “That mouse attacked me. It was like it was rabid or something. He stared right at me, and I swear he looked mad.”
I coughed to cover up the fact that I wanted to laugh. There were gravy-covered noodles in his shirt pocket. He even had some peas in his hair. When I turned back around Katie was staring at me with one eyebrow raised.
“Wow. That sure was weird, huh?” I asked, shoving a carrot in my mouth. I didn’t meet her eyes in case she could tell I was somehow involved.
“Yeah. Sure was weird. I guess it was another one of those things that you just don’t see every day.”