The Curtain Went Up, My Pants Fell Down Read online

  by Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver

  HANK ZIPZER

  The World’s Greatest Underachiever

  The Curtain Went Up, My Pants Fell Down

  Grosset & Dunlap

  To Lin Oliver: A Writing Partner Sent from

  Heaven. And to Stacey always.—H.W.

  For my sister, Pamela—with happy

  memories of our past and great expectations

  for the future.—L.O.

  Cover illustration by Jesse Joshua Watson

  GROSSET & DUNLAP

  Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

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  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Illustrations copyright © 2007 by Grosset & Dunlap. All rights reserved.

  Published by Grosset & Dunlap, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  GROSSET & DUNLAP is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2006029450

  ISBN: 978-1-1010-4401-8

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  CHAPTER 1

  I FELL OUT OF MY CHAIR and rolled onto the linoleum floor. My ears felt like they were going to explode right off my head. They couldn’t have heard what they heard. Not the words that just came out of Dr. Berger’s mouth. No, those words couldn’t be true.

  “Hank,” Dr. Berger said, looking over the edge of her desk at the floor, where I was still flopping around like a fish with a stomachache. “I wish you’d get back into your chair.”

  “No way,” I answered. “Not until you tell me it’s not true.”

  “I can’t tell you that, Hank, because it is true. Would you want me to lie to you?”

  “Yes,” I said, without hesitation. “Yes until infinity.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” she said. “I’ve made my decision and it’s final. I’ve signed you up for math tutoring with a peer tutor. You start tomorrow.”

  Peer tutoring! Could anything be more embarrassing?

  “Did you say pear tutoring?” I asked hopefully, pulling myself to my knees and resting my chin on her desk. “Why would you want me to be tutored by a fruit?”

  “You know I said peer, not pear,” Dr. Berger answered, a smile curling up at the corners of her mouth.

  “Okay, I did know that,” I said. “I was just hoping it wasn’t true.”

  “Hank, we’ve had great success with our peer tutoring program, and I believe that being tutored by another student will make math easier for you. So I have assigned you to Heather Payne.”

  “Heather Payne! I’m double triple hoping that’s not true!”

  “Well, it is.”

  That did it! I flopped back down onto the floor again. This was too much information for me to take sitting up. Too much bad information.

  Heather Payne! Miss Perfect. Miss I’d-Love-To-Do-Homework-For-The-Rest-Of-My-Life. Miss How-Many-Extra-Credit-Problems-Can-I-Do? Miss I’ve-Never-Gotten-Anything-Lower-Than-An-A-With-Thirty-Three-Pluses. Oh, no, this wasn’t happening.

  “Dr. Berger, tell me you didn’t say Heather Payne,” I said, pulling myself up onto the speckled green plastic chair next to her desk.

  “Heather is an excellent math student, Hank, and she has expressed a desire to help tutor a fellow classmate.”

  “Trust me, I’m not that classmate.”

  Heather Payne hates me. Well, maybe she doesn’t hate me, but she looks at me like I’m some kind of rodent with bugs riding on my back. Once, when I had just gotten back a math test, she glanced at my paper and saw the C-minus written in red on the top. And do you know what she said? “I didn’t know they gave grades that low.” I had been thrilled out of my mind with that grade. A C-minus was a step up for me. I usually live in D-ville.

  Heather Payne is not only a perfect student herself, she’s never even hung out with someone who isn’t. She was the last person in the cosmos—or whatever is the farthest place from where you’re standing right now on planet Earth—that I would want tutoring me in math. Or spelling. Or anything, even sandwich making. I’ll bet her idea of making a sandwich is wearing plastic gloves so she doesn’t get peanut butter under her fingernails. She wouldn’t want to get her fingers sticky because that might reduce the speed at which they can fly across her calculator while she’s doing her fourth set of extra-credit math problems. Problems that look like a foreign language to me.

  “Hank, I know this is a lot to absorb,” Dr. Berger was saying. “Think it over and we’ll talk tomorrow to arrange a time you and Heather can work together.”

  “In other words, ‘think it over’ means I’m stuck whether I like it or not,” I said with a sigh. I can talk that way with Dr. Berger and she doesn’t get mad. She’s our school psychologist, and she believes kids should be able to express their real feelings as long as they’re not being rude.

  “I hear your frustration, Hank,” Dr. Berger said. “But as I said, we have found that peer tutoring works quite well.”

  “It won’t with me.”

  “Keep an open mind. It might turn out to be a great experience.”

  I’ve found that when adults, even a cool one like Dr. Berger, tell you to keep an open mind, there’s absolutely nothing more to say. Anything you say is going to sound like your mind is closed, gone fishing, boarded up. So I gave Dr. Berger my best Hank Zipzer smile, the one that says, “You win for now, but the real Hank will be back with an outstanding Plan B.” Then I left her pumpkin orange office, trying to put a bounce in my step. My grandfather Papa Pete says it’s important to put a bounce in your step when you’re feeling bounceless inside.

  Wouldn’t you know that the first person I saw when I went out into the hall was Heather Payne, who was delivering the attendance records to the office.

  Boy, if seeing her doesn’t de-bounce you, I don’t know what will.

  CHAPTER 2

  AT THE FIRST SIGHT of Heather, I flattened myself a
gainst the mint green wall, hoping my skin would turn the same green and I’d blend in like one of those chameleon lizards that camouflage themselves when snakes are chasing them.

  Please don’t see me, Heather Payne. Please don’t talk to me, either. Not now. Not later. Not ever.

  “Hello, Henry,” she said.

  Well, I guess that wish didn’t work.

  I have to tell you, only one other person in the world calls me Henry, and that person is my fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Adolf. No matter how many times I’ve asked her, begged her, pleaded with her to call me Hank, she refuses. She says she doesn’t believe in nicknames. They’re too personal. And since Heather Payne loves Ms. Adolf as much as I love Mets baseball and pepperoni pizza, she imitates everything that Ms. Adolf does. Like calling me Henry.

  “It’s Hank,” I snapped at Heather, trying to slither down the hall. But that girl is not only smart, she’s tall. She placed her five-foot-something body in front of my four-foot-something body to block me from taking another step.

  “So,” Heather went on, “I hear you’re going to be my little pet project. I enjoy accomplishing the impossible.”

  Well, there it was. Heather Payne’s first sentence to me, and already I had shrunk from four-feet-something to three-feet-something in a matter of ten words. Her pet project? I felt like a hamster.

  “Oh, Dr. Berger did mention we might work together on something, I don’t remember what,” I answered in my cool guy voice.

  “I’m going to be your peer tutor, if you know what I mean.”

  Peer tutor. The words sounded so horrible, she might as well have said, “I’m going to give you a booster shot,” or “You have doggy breath.”

  “Of course I know what you mean,” I snapped. “I happen to be excellent at knowing what people mean. But to tell you the truth, Heath,” I continued in the cool guy voice, “it just doesn’t work out with my schedule. I’ve got football games to watch, a Ping-Pong tournament to attend, an iguana to babysit while my sister has a sleepover with her Girl Scout troop. My schedule these days is chock-full. But hey, thanks, anyway.”

  I tried to pass her, but she took one giant step and was looming in front of me again.

  “But, Henry,” she said. “I’ve already committed to working with you. I even told Dr. Berger that I would step down as the vice president of the Future Physicists of America Club to make sure we have enough time together.”

  “Oh, wow, Heather, I couldn’t let you do that, so let’s just forget the whole thing. You go play with your calculator and I’ll be on my merry way.”

  I went left this time, trying to get around her from the other side. At least, I think it was left, since I’m not too good at telling left from right. But she put her arm up like a point guard on a championship basketball team and blocked me again.

  “I’m getting community service points for peer tutoring,” she said, “and you will look very good on my college résumé, if you know what I mean.”

  College! She wasn’t even eleven years old yet, and she was already thinking about college! Me, I’m just praying I make it to sixth grade.

  “I’m not your community service project,” I answered. “Try picking up some litter. Or painting the trash cans with happy faces. I hear they give triple points for that…if you know what I mean.”

  This time, I bolted for the stairs at the end of the hall. I was done with this conversation, and I wasn’t going to let her block me.

  I darted past the bulletin board, past the trophy cases, past the collection of the kindergarten classes’ fall leaf drawings that had been on display for the last month. I took the stairs to the second floor two at a time, pulling myself along by the red handrails. I didn’t stop until I reached the third door on the left. That’s Ms. Adolf’s class, better known to those of us who have been at PS 87 for quite a while as the Torture Chamber.

  I pushed open the door, which was decorated with…well…with nothing. Ms. Adolf doesn’t believe in decorations, just like she doesn’t believe in nicknames. According to her, they both fall under Adolf’s Rule Number One, which is “School is for learning, not for fun. If you want fun, go to a playground.”

  “Oh, Henry,” Ms. Adolf said. She looked at me from the top of her gray glasses. Everything she wears is gray, including her face, which unfortunately she wears every day. “Dawdle, did we?”

  “No, Ms. Adolf. I came directly here.”

  “Unfortunately for you, I have done my own research,” Ms. Adolf said, looking at her gray wristwatch. “And I know from personal experience that it takes two point three minutes to travel by foot from Dr. Berger’s office to my classroom.”

  “That’s providing you don’t meet Heather Payne in the hall,” I answered. “She insisted on having a long conversation.”

  “Hey, Zipperbutt, sounds like you and Heather got something going on,” a voice shouted from the back row. “That’s a laugh! The geek and the geekette.”

  It was Nick McKelty’s voice. He’s the school loudmouth who lives to make my life miserable.

  “What’s that stuck between your two front teeth, McKelty?” I fired back. “Is that already-been-chewed oatmeal or have you been gnawing on your math book again and page six got stuck there?”

  Everybody burst out laughing. Everybody, that is, but Ms. Adolf, who doesn’t believe laughter belongs in the fifth-grade classroom. That’s Adolf’s Rule Number Two.

  “That will be quite enough, Mr. Comedian,” Ms. Adolf snapped at me. “Have you forgotten my Rule Number Seven?”

  “Not at all,” I answered, full of confidence. “Always write your name and the date legibly in the upper right-hand corner of your paper.”

  “Typical, Henry,” she frowned. “That is Rule Number Six.”

  “You know me, Ms. Adolf. I’m not so great at getting things in the exact right order, but at least I knew the rule.”

  “Rule Number Seven is that we don’t make fun of fellow classmates.”

  “But McKelty started it. He called me Zipperbutt.”

  “Henry, if you spent more time on your studies and less time defending yourself…”

  Before she could finish her sentence, the door to the room swung open and Heather Payne rushed in. It was just like her to rush in after delivering the attendance to the office. Every other normal fifth-grader would take a water break, a bathroom break, and an apple or granola bar break, if they could fit it in. Good old Heather was in a hurry to get back to class, so she wouldn’t miss a single solitary minute of her time with Ms. Adolf.

  “My, my, my, Heather,” Ms. Adolf said. “You were gone longer than usual.”

  “I’m so sorry, Ms. Adolf,” Heather said. “But I ran into Hank, and we had to discuss the arrangements for his peer tutoring.”

  I thought my ears were going to explode off my head again, right then and there.

  Peer tutoring! She said it! In front of the whole class! As if me needing peer tutoring isn’t the most embarrassing thing you could say other than, “Oh, Hank, you’ve just wet your pants.”

  I think all the color drained out of my face. Well, something drained out of my face, because I felt like I was going to fall over onto the floor. Out of the corner of my eye, I glanced at Katie Sperling, only the second most beautiful girl in our class next to Kim Paulson. She put her hand over her mouth so I couldn’t see her giggling. But I could tell by the way her shoulders were shaking that there was a giggle under there. I noticed Kim Paulson’s shoulders were shaking, too.

  “Heather,” I whispered. “Pleeease. Could we talk about this somewhere else or at another time? Like, say a deserted cave in Central Park at midnight?”

  “There’s no shame in needing help, Henry,” Ms. Adolf said. Was her voice especially loud or were my ears just on fire? It sounded to me like she was speaking over the school public address system.

  “Shhhh,” I whispered to her. But there was no stopping her. She was on a roll.

  “Pupils,” she said. “Henry is going t
o be tutored in mathematics. Heather Payne, one of your classmates, will be his tutor. This is how we help one another. One extraordinary student reaching out to help another less fortunate student.”

  I mean, why doesn’t she just hold a big sign over my head that says HANK ZIPZER IS A LOSER!

  I had no idea what to do, so the old Hank Zipzer attitude kicked in. I took a deep bow, as if I had just won the biggest soccer trophy in the history of the sport. McKelty made a farting sound with his hand under his armpit.

  “Hank Zipzer has gas in his brain,” he shouted.

  Everyone burst out laughing. Kim Paulson and Katie Sperling’s shoulders shook again. Even more this time.

  Holy enchilada! Could this get any worse?

  CHAPTER 3

  TEN WAYS IT COULD GET WORSE

  My pants could fall down around my ankles.

  When they did, everyone would see that I have a rash on my inner thighs from the new laundry detergent my mom tried out.

  I could start foaming at the mouth for no apparent reason.

  The foam from my mouth could dribble down my shirt, past the rash on my thighs, and land in a puddle on the floor.

  I could slip on the saliva puddle on the floor and fall down, knocking myself unconscious in front of everyone.

  While I was unconscious, my tongue could fall out of my mouth, showing everyone the mushy cream-cheese-and-jelly-on-toast breakfast that had molded itself, McKelty-style, into every little crevice on my otherwise pink tongue.

  They could call the paramedics, who would come and refuse to give me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when they saw the cream cheese and jelly on toast.