Chapter One
Charles, the New Kid

It’s not often that a new kid arrives at Scary School, but when one does, no one wants to bother learning yet another name, so they just call him or her “new kid.”

Everyone knows that the human brain can only hold so many names. About fifty is all there’s room for. So every time you meet someone and learn a new name, someone else’s name gets pushed out to make room for the new one. Whenever you see someone you haven’t seen in a long time and you can’t remember their name, that’s what happened.

If you can remember more than fifty names, that means you have a superbrain and there’s no excuse for not getting straight As.

Charles, a new kid, stood outside on the front lawn of Scary School. It looks like a perfectly normal school to me, he thought to himself. Nicely painted brown and yellow, two stories tall, a waving flag . . . nothing seems scary about this place at all.

They say not to judge a book by its cover. Charles shouldn’t have judged Scary School by its exterior.

As Charles walked toward the front entrance of the school, he couldn’t have been happier. He had heard Scary School was the hardest school in the world, and he liked a challenge. Charles didn’t usually have a whole lot to be happy about. He was so skinny, the kids at his last school called him Toothpick. That was because his arms looked like two toothpicks and his legs looked like two toothpicks. Then, those four toothpicks were attached to a fifth toothpick called his body.

To make matters worse, his head was large and egg-shaped. Nobody understood how his toothpick of a neck managed to hold it upright. Imagine trying to balance an egg on its narrow end—it should have just plopped over and cracked open.

At the school’s front entrance, Charles came to a large, dark moat separating the school from the vast front lawn. There didn’t seem to be any way across the moat, and since Charles had arrived more than a half hour early, there weren’t any other kids around to show him how to get into the school.

Am I supposed to swim across? Charles thought to himself, scratching the shell of his perfectly combed hair, that didn’t have a single strand out of place. He looked at his watch. 7:29 a.m. He was determined to be the first student to enter the school and made a hasty decision he would very soon regret.

Charles dipped his toe into the moat and a giant, slimy tentacle shot out of the murky water and wrapped itself around Charles’s leg. The tentacle began pulling him into the moat. Charles grabbed on to the grassy edge of the moat with all his strength.

Unfortunately, Charles was the furthest thing from strong and he was quickly yanked off the ground, flipped into the air, and deftly caught by another tentacle high above the water.

A towering pink figure that had a giant eye at least ten feet across rose from the moat.

“Oh my gosh!” screamed Charles. “An Architeuthis!”

Charles knew the scientific name for giant squid because nature programs were the only television programs his zoologist parents let him watch.

The giant squid squinted at Charles, squeezing him in his giant tentacle, licking his giant beak.

“You are going to taste sooo good,” said the creature, drooling. “I am so sick of eating crab.”

Then there was a loud roar, but not from the squid. A twenty-foot Tyrannosaurus rex wearing a blue dress and a blue bonnet stomped toward the moat.

“Archie! It’s seven thirty,” roared the dinosaur. “Scary School is now open.”

“Uh-oh,” said Archie the giant squid, and a great drawbridge dropped down from the front wall and clonked Archie right on his giant pink head.

The impact knocked Charles loose from the squid’s grip, and he flew through the air, landing on the snout of the Tyrannosaurus rex in a blue dress.

It seemed Charles was out of the frying pan and into the fire. “Are you going to eat me?” he nervously asked the T. rex.

“Luckily for you I already had breakfast,” said the T. rex, in a nice old lady’s voice. “And from the looks of you, you’re going to have to keep getting lucky to survive here.”

“I don’t believe in luck,” said Charles.

The T. rex lowered Charles to the ground and Charles quickly put every strand of hair back into place that had gone awry. Then a wave of students (that seemed to arrive out of nowhere) rushed past him and filled the entry hall of Scary School.

“Move along,” said the T. rex in a blue dress. “If you’re late you’ll end up in my detention room, and I might get hungry again.”

The locker hallway looked like a twisted, spooky maze with high rows of lockers that arched menacingly over the students below. Crevices, secret passageways, and trapdoors made navigating the hallway a particularly difficult task, but Charles followed a map that had been mailed to him in advance. He didn’t know it, but he barely avoided getting eaten by Locker 39, the meanest locker of them all. There will be much more about Locker 39 in the next book.

As Charles walked down the hall, everyone was saying, “Hey, new kid,” “Hey, new kid,” “Hey, new kid,” and he thought they were all being very friendly and calling him by his name, which happened to be Charles Nukid. He didn’t realize that all the kids were making fun of him and not being friendly at all.

The reason everyone knew Charles Nukid was a new kid was because he wasn’t wearing the school uniform—or rather, he was wearing the school uniform.

Scary School has a very strict uniform policy that states, “The school uniform must be worn by all students at all times.” The uniform consists of gray shorts, a white dress shirt, and a polka-dot tie.

The problem was, whenever a kid put on the uniform and looked in the mirror, they immediately saw how stupid they looked and refused to wear it. Every kid just went to school wearing whatever they wanted, but never wore gray shorts, a white dress shirt, or a polka-dot tie.

Because no one ever wore the Scary School uniform to school, none of the teachers even knew what it looked like, so they assumed that not wearing the school uniform was the school uniform. If a kid showed up wearing the school uniform (usually a new kid) the teachers all thought that kid must be out of uniform, and he got detention.

Because he was a new kid, Charles Nukid didn’t know that not wearing the school uniform was the school uniform, and he showed up wearing the gray shorts, white dress shirt, and polka-dot tie.

The hallway monitor, Mr. Spider-Eyes, was the first to see Charles. Mr. Spider-Eyes has one hundred tiny eyes where most people have just one eye. Using normal math, that’s two hundred eyes on his head, but using Monster Math that’s over six thousand eyes. More about that later.

Mr. Spider-Eyes uses each one of his eyes to spy on every kid in the hallway at the same time. Having spotted Charles out of uniform, he shouted, “Hey, you! Get over here!”

Charles pointed to himself. “Me?”

“Yeah, you! Come here!”

Charles stepped nervously toward Mr. Spider-Eyes, not knowing what he was in trouble for before his first class even started.

“Just what do you think you’re doing not wearing the school uniform?” Mr. Spider-Eyes inquired.

“But I am wearing the school uniform. Every bit of it,” replied Charles.

“Oh, really? Do you see anyone else around here wearing gray shorts, a white dress shirt, and a polka-dot tie?”

Charles looked at all the kids in the hall, and of course no one was dressed like him.

“No,” said Charles.

“Well then, how can it be the school uniform if no one is wearing it?”

“I don’t know. It’s my first day here.”

“Oh, it’s your first day! Well, that’s no excuse. I suppose you wanted to make an impression and show everyone what a rule-breaking rebel you are, eh?”

“Me? No! I never break the rules. I like following the rules.”

That was true. Nothing pleased Charles more than following the rules, no matter what they were. In fact, he always went to bed an hour early each night at 8:00 p.m., just to make sure he’d be asleep by his 9:00 p.m. bedtime. He thought if he was still awake after 9:00 p.m., that would be breaking the rules. He’d feel so guilty that he wouldn’t sleep for a week, which would make him feel even guiltier, and he wouldn’t be able to sleep for two more weeks, thus starting a horrible, sleepless cycle. Once when he was seven, Charles missed his bedtime, the cycle began, and he didn’t sleep for a whole year.

“Oh, you like following rules, huh?” Mr. Spider-Eyes grunted. “Well, the rule at Scary School is that you can’t go to class if you’re not in uniform. You’ll have to go straight to the detention hall and stay there until you’re wearing the school uniform.”

“Okay, I guess I made a mistake,” said Charles, bewildered. “I’m happy to follow the rules and will go straight to the detention hall.”

So instead of going to his fifth-grade class with Dr. Dragonbreath, Charles Nukid marched straight to the detention hall. He opened the door and was greeted by the same Tyrannosaurus rex wearing the blue dress and cute matching bonnet.

“Hello again, dear,” said the dinosaur in her very sweet, old lady’s voice. “Looks like you didn’t get very lucky after all. I’m Mrs. T, the detention monitor. I see you’re not wearing the school uniform.”

“I know. I thought this was the uniform.”

“No. That, my dear, is the furthest thing from the uniform.”

“Well, what is the uniform?”

“I’m not sure. Anything but gray shorts, a white dress shirt, and a polka-dot tie, I suppose. Nobody ever wears that.”

“But this is all I have with me.”

“That’s too bad. The rule is, you have to stay in detention until you are wearing the proper uniform.”

“Okay, then that’s what I’ll do.”

“Of course,” continued Mrs. T, “if you were to leave and go get the right uniform from your house, I would certainly understand.”

“But that would be breaking the rules,” said Charles.

“Yes, but I sympathize with your situation, and I certainly wouldn’t do anything to stop you.”

“No,” said Charles. “I can’t break the rules. I will stay here until I am wearing the correct uniform.”

“Very well,” said Mrs. T, “but just to warn you, I get very hungry around lunchtime. I may not be able to control myself and I will most likely eat you at noon.”

“But, isn’t eating students against the rules?” Charles asked hopefully.

“Yes, indeed. But I’m a dinosaur, my dear. Breaking the rules doesn’t bother me.”

I know things seem hopeless for Charles, but in Chapter Six you’ll see how he manages a very lucky escape!