The World's Greatest Underachiever and the Soggy School Trip Read online

  For Esther Newberg. Thank you for

  making this your first children’s book.

  And Stacey, always – H.W.

  For Leslie King and Teresa Nathanson, precious

  friends and Pilgrim mothers forever – L.O.

  CHAPTER

  1

  “Zip, don’t tell me you forgot your permission slip,” my best friend Frankie Townsend whispered as we slid into our seats in Ms Adolf’s fourth-grade classroom.

  “I didn’t say I forgot it,” I whispered back. “I said I might have forgotten it.”

  “Dude, I am not liking the sound of this,” Frankie said, shaking his head.

  I pulled my rucksack on to the top of my desk and began a complete search for the permission slip.

  “It’s got to be here,” I told Frankie as I unzipped my bag and began looking through the main compartment.

  “Zip, this is the last day—”

  “I know,” I interrupted, “to bring it in. The field trip is tonight. Why would I forget my permission slip?”

  “Because you’re Hank Zipzer, king of the morons,” answered a voice from the row behind me. It was Nick McKelty, the true king of the morons, who never misses a chance to hurl an insult my way. He laughed really loudly and blasted some of his nasty dragon breath in my direction.

  I know I forget a lot. I mean a lot, a lot. But I really wanted to go on this trip. And I didn’t need McKelty on my case about it.

  “Listen up, McKelty,” I began. “I’m tired of you—”

  The bell rang before I could continue. Ms Adolf walked over to her desk and put her lunch box into her bottom drawer. I was sat close enough to her desk to smell that she was having something involving tuna fish. And a day-old banana. I can sniff out a day-old soft, turning-black banana a block away.

  “That will be quite enough, Henry,” Ms Adolf said to me, tapping on her desk with this pointer stick she has.

  Enough? I hadn’t even started. If she only knew.

  “But, Ms Adolf, I didn’t start this.”

  “Henry, if you keep talking, I’m going to send you to Mr Love’s office.”

  Why was I getting into trouble? McKelty called me a moron. And why was she still calling me Henry when I’ve been telling her since September my name is Hank? Come on, this was April already. That’s eight months of Henry and zero months of Hank. Even my orthodontist, Dr Gibbons, started calling me Hank four months after I had asked him to, and he’s deaf in one ear.

  Ms Adolf took the silver key she wears on a cord around her neck and unlocked the top drawer of her desk. She took out her register and carried it over to my desk. Opening the book, she ran her finger down the list of names, stopping at the very last one. I had a bad feeling about that, since my name is Zipzer, and it starts with the last letter of the alphabet.

  Sure enough, Ms Adolf looked at me over the top of her glasses and frowned. And I don’t mean just a regular frown, either. She looked at me like there were worms crawling all over my face. Brown, hairy worms.

  “Congratulations, Henry,” she said in a voice that matched her face. “You are the only pupil who has not returned his permission slip.”

  “I’m sure it’s in here, Ms Adolf,” I said, practically diving head first into my rucksack.

  Ms Adolf folded her arms across her grey cardigan. She tapped her foot impatiently. She was wearing grey shoes with a grey buckle on them. Grey is her favourite colour. That’s because it goes so nicely with her grey face.

  “I’m waiting,” Ms Adolf said. As if the whole class hadn’t noticed.

  Wow, this was a lot of pressure. Everyone in the class stared at me, except Luke Whitman, that is, who was scratching a rash on his arm with one of his vocabulary flash cards.

  I pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from the bottom of my rucksack. At first, I thought it was the permission slip. But when I uncrumpled it, I saw that it was last week’s maths test, the one with the big red C-minus at the top.

  Tap, tap, tap. Ms Adolf’s feet were going faster. She was getting pretty mad.

  The zipped pocket! That’s it. I bet I stuffed the permission slip in my zipped pocket.

  I pulled my head out of the bag and said, “I think I know where it is!” Then I dived back in.

  I dug around in the pocket and finally pulled out a half-eaten granola bar. It had a clump of greenish fluff from the bottom of my rucksack hanging off it. You’re probably thinking it’s gross to have a fluffy, old granola bar crammed in your rucksack, but if you saw the kind of granola bar my mum gives me for a snack, trust me, you’d stuff it in your zipped pocket too. My mum doesn’t believe in granola bars that have chocolate chips and marshmallows and fun stuff in them. That would be the kind that taste good. She gives me what she calls healthnola bars. That would be the kind that taste like brown paper.

  Tap, tap, tap. Ms Adolf’s feet were certainly getting a workout. Now she was getting those red splotches on her neck too. They start appearing when I’m late or if anybody laughs in class.

  “Mr Zipzer, all permission slips were due no later than this morning,” she said.

  Uh-oh. It’s bad enough that Ms Adolf calls me Henry. Now it was Mr Zipzer!

  This called for extreme action. I turned my entire rucksack upside down and dumped everything out on my desk. A whole bunch of crumbs and broken pencil stubs and Snapple tops and a pink bouncy ball came tumbling out. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Worst of all, there was no permission slip anywhere.

  Ms Adolf shook her head.

  “I told you yesterday, Henry, that if I did not have your signed permission slip this morning, you would not be allowed to go on the school trip tonight.”

  “NO!” I shouted. Whoops. I meant to say that to myself. She wouldn’t make me miss this school trip, would she?

  There are some school trips I wouldn’t mind missing. Like the one in second grade when we took the bus to the pumpkin patch and Luke Whitman got car sick and threw up all over my new Converse high-tops. I could’ve missed that.

  But tonight’s trip wasn’t just any old one. It was the coolest one ever. Our entire fourth-grade class was going to spend the night on the Pilgrim Spirit, a tall-masted sailing ship that was docked in New York Harbor. And that’s not all. We were going to sleep over on the ship and live just like the sailors of long ago did. That meant we were going to do neat things like stand watch and tie knots and sing sea songs with the captain and crew.

  And now Ms Adolf was telling me that I couldn’t go. No way.

  “Ms Adolf, this isn’t fair,” I said.

  “It’s a school rule, and we cannot just break it any old time we choose,” she said. “We cannot let you go on a school trip without your parents’ permission, Henry. That’s final.”

  “But my dad signed the permission slip this morning,” I said. “Just before he left for his crossword-puzzle convention. In green ink!”

  Another blast of bad breath came flying across the room and hit me in the face like a stinky ball of burning rubber.

  “A crossword-puzzle convention!” Nick the Tick hooted. “Could your family be any nerdier?”

  I have to confess, my family is what some people might call nerdy. Like my sister, Emily, has a pet iguana named Katherine and they both like to eat sardines. And my dad loves to do crossword puzzles in his boxer shorts at the end of the dining-room table we don’t eat on. He’s a crossword-puzzle nut. I mean, he’ll wake up in the middle of the night just to write down a seven-letter word for monkey fur. And as for my mum, all you need to know about her is that her favourite thing to cook is wheatgrass pasta cass
erole with blueberry flecks. And then there’s our dog, Cheerio. When he’s not spinning in circles, he likes to lick the bricks on the fireplace, just for fun.

  But me thinking my family is a little on the nerdy side is a whole lot different to Nick the Tick mouthing off about it. He wasn’t getting away with this.

  “For your information, McKelty,” I said, turning round to face him. “My dad once finished an entire New York Times crossword puzzle in four minutes and thirty-seven seconds. That’s a tri-county record.”

  “Big deal.” McKelty snorted. “My dad once shook hands with the king of Ethiopia.”

  “Like that has anything to do with anything,” piped up Ashley Wong, my other best friend, who was sitting across the aisle from me.

  Ashley hates it when McKelty brags, especially since most of what he says isn’t true, anyway. Like in this case, maybe Nick McKelty had seen a map of Ethiopia once. Suddenly, he makes it seem like his dad is best friends with the king. We call this The McKelty Factor – truth times a hundred.

  Ashley went over to McKelty’s desk. Even though he’s huge and she’s little and wears glasses, Ashley’s not afraid of McKelty. She says he’s all hot air. Rotting food, bad-smelling hot air, I might add. Don’t his parents encourage him to brush?

  I’m not sure exactly what Ashley was planning to do, but Ms Adolf didn’t like the look of things and hurried over to settle the argument. That gave Frankie a chance to talk to me.

  “Take a deep breath, Zip, and fill your brain with oxygen,” he said.

  Frankie’s mum is a yoga teacher. She’s so flexible, she can touch the back of her head with the tips of her toes.

  She’s been telling us since we were little that oxygen is brain food. I took a deep breath, in through my nose and out through my mouth, just like Frankie’s mum had taught us.

  “Now think, Zippola,” Frankie went on, “because your field trip future depends on this. What did you do with the permission slip?”

  I played back the morning in my mind, like rewinding a DVD.

  “I got out of bed and took a really long pee.”

  “Nix the yucky details,” said Frankie.

  “I got a pen. Got the permission slip from my ring binder.”

  “Now you’re talking.” Frankie nodded. “Then what?”

  “Took the permission slip to my dad. Had him sign it. Put it on the table in the hall under the Chinese vase. Got dressed. Put on my green coat. Kissed my mum goodbye. Grabbed my rucksack. Ran out of the house.”

  “And left the permission slip under the Chinese vase,” said Frankie.

  Bingo!

  There it was.

  At least I knew the location of the permission slip. Now all I had to do was get it – immediately, if not sooner!

  CHAPTER

  2

  TEN CREATIVE WAYS TO GET THE PERMISSION SLIP YOU LEFT UNDER THE CHINESE VASE AT HOME

  1. I could go to the office, get a new permission slip and sign my father’s name on the parent-signature line.

  2. Then I could go to jail for the rest of my life for doing that. I think maybe I’ll cancel number one.

  3. I’ll teleport myself right into my living room, get the permission slip and beam myself back to my seat before anyone knows I was gone.

  4. Before I do that, I’ll have to invent the Time Travel Teleportation Body Mover Machine.

  5. I’ll pretend to have a horrible stomach-ache so the school will call an ambulance to take me to the hospital. I’ll ask the driver to swing by my flat so I can pick up the slip.

  6. I could call Permission Slips R Us. Hey, maybe it exists. You never know.

  7. I could pretend to be Mr Sicilian, the other fourth-grade teacher, and walk right out of the teachers’ entrance. Oops, I’d have to grow a moustache first.

  8. I’ll learn to talk dog talk, call Cheerio and ask him to bring the permission slip to school. “Hey, boy, arf, arf, bow wow, ruff ruff.” Sounds right to me.

  9. Hank, face it, you’re not going. You’re going to miss the best school trip of your entire childhood.

  10. NO! I’m not giving up … not yet, anyway.

  CHAPTER

  3

  It took my very best talking, but I finally convinced Ms Adolf to give me another hour to get my signed permission slip to her. Since my dad was in New Jersey for most of the day, my only hope was to call my mum at work and ask her to bring the permission slip to school. A lot of mums would get really mad about having to leave work and come to school for something like that, but I knew my mum wouldn’t. She’s used to me forgetting things. She knows it’s not really my fault. It’s the way my brain works, or doesn’t work, in this case.

  Ms Adolf gave me permission to go to the office to use the phone. The office at PS 87 is down on the first floor, past the kindergarten rooms and all the way at the end of the corridor. Ms Adolf said I had to be back in five minutes because she had a surprise waiting for us. I had no choice but to run all the way to the office.

  As I ran down the corridor, I kept my ears open for the sound of Head Teacher Love’s footsteps. He walks around the school wearing these black Velcro tennis shoes, and you can hear them squeaking on the lino when he walks. If Mr Love sees you running in the corridor, he’ll either give you a detention or a big old lecture on safety like, “Running can lead to hurting or breaking your body.” I don’t know which is worse, detention or the lecture.

  Luckily, the only grown-up I saw on the way to the office was Mr Rock, who’s our music teacher and maybe the coolest teacher I know. When he saw me speeding down the corridor, all he said was, “Whoa, Hank, got a train to catch?”

  “No, but I’m going to miss my boat if I don’t hurry,” I said as I whizzed past him.

  Mr Rock looked a little confused, but I didn’t have time to explain.

  Finally, I reached the office. Mrs Crock, the attendance person, was at her desk eating a green salad. She always eats salad, even for breakfast. She says it’s because she’s on a diet, although I don’t know why. I think she looks nice just the way she is.

  “Hello, Hank,” she said. “Have you been sent to see Mr Love again?”

  “Not this time,” I answered proudly.

  It’s not like I get sent to the head teacher’s office every day. Let’s just say I get sent there often enough for Mrs Crock to know my parents’ phone number by heart. At the beginning of fourth grade, I was sent to Mr Love’s office so many times that the chair in his office was actually starting to take on the shape of my butt. But then our school psychologist Dr Berger figured out that I have learning difficulties and started giving me some special help. Now I don’t get sent to the head teacher’s office nearly as much.

  “How can I help you?” Mrs Crock asked with a smile.

  I noticed that there was a leafy green piece of lettuce stuck between her front teeth. It was hard not to notice, since it covered one whole tooth and half of the other one. It’s hard to decide whether you should tell a grown-up that they have something stuck in their teeth. Papa Pete, my grandfather, has a big, fluffy moustache that he calls his handlebars. We have a deal that I always have to tell him when there’s anything hanging off it. On Saturday mornings, he likes to have crumb doughnuts with his coffee and, boy, do those things leave a trail in his moustache. Trust me, crumb doughnuts aren’t called “crumb” for nothing.

  I decided I didn’t really know Mrs Crock well enough to bring up the lettuce in her teeth.

  “Can I use the telephone to call my mum?” I asked Mrs Crock.

  “Of course, honey,” she said, smiling again. I just couldn’t keep my eyes away from her lettuce … I mean … tooth. It was just smiling out at me, leafier and greener than before. I thought I saw it wave hello.

  She handed me the phone and I dialled my mum’s number. My mum runs The Crunchy Pickle, which is our deli on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Papa Pete started it a long time ago, and when he retired recently he handed it over to my mum. It has the best sandwiches
in New York City, except (and I mean this in the nicest way) for the food my mum makes. She’s always trying to invent a new kind of healthy deli food. Yummy treats like tofu-salami and chickenless chicken salad. Her food experiments may be healthy, but they have a long way to go in the taste department.

  “Buenas dias, The Crunchy Pickle,” said a voice on the other end of the phone. It was Carlos, my mum’s number one sandwich-maker. He’s my pal. Sometimes after work, we go to the park and he teaches me how to throw a curveball.

  “Hi, Carlos,” I said. “Is my mum there?”

  “Hankito,” he answered. “How’s my little man?”

  “I’m good,” I said, “but I need to talk to my mum in a hurry.”

  “Oh, Hankito, she’s not in the house.”

  “Carlos, I’ve got to talk to her. Can you find her?”

  “No can do, little man. She’s in Queens doing Mrs Gristediano’s birthday party. Three kinds of sandwiches. Roast beef, tuna and liverwurst. She’s trying to sneak in her potato-free potato salad made with mung beans, but I don’t think it’s going to fly.”

  “Excuse me, Carlos.” I hoped it wasn’t rude to interrupt him, but by the time he’d finished with the menu, Ms Adolf would have crossed me off the field trip list for ever. “This is an emergency,” I explained.

  “An emergency!” Carlos said, sounding concerned. “You stay right where you are. I’m there and I’m taking you to the doc.”

  “No, Carlos. It’s not a hospital kind of emergency. It’s a permission slip kind of emergency.”

  “Wow, that’s way better,” said Carlos. “Your mamacita, she can take care of that when she gets back. She’ll be here at three o’clock. Well, knowing her, maybe four.”

  This was bad news. I only had an hour to hand in my permission slip. After that, it was over. Finito, as Carlos would say.

  I couldn’t call my mum and ask her to leave the party. Why should Mrs Gristediano have her whole birthday messed up just because I’m the king of the forgetters?