eird School Daze # Dan Gutman Pictures by Jim Paillot To Emma Contents 1 The Boringest Store in the World 1 2 We Want Chocolate Cake 9 3 Pedal Power 14 4 Going Green 22 5 Goo-Goo Gah-Gah 30 6 English Is Weird 37 7 Mr. Granite Goes Overboard 44 8 The World’s Biggest iPod 55 9 Tattletales 63 10 The Truth About Mr. Granite 70 11 My Teacher Is an Alien 77 12 Sad, Sad News 83 13 Saying Good-bye to Mr. Granite 91 About the Authors Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher 1 The Boringest Store in the World My name is A.J. and I hate school. Do you know which months are the best months of the year? July and August, of course! Because there’s no school over the summer. YAY! The only problem is that now it’s September. 1 BOO! Bummer after the summer! School starts tomorrow. So my mom said we had to go to this store called Staples to buy back-to-school supplies. Ugh! Staples is the boringest store in the history of the world. They don’t sell video games or toys or any cool stuff. They just sell pens and pencils and ultraboring junk like that. My mom had a list of things I had to get for third grade. After we found the boring book covers, boring binders, boring colored pencils, and boring glue sticks, I wanted to get a pen with a laser beam in it. Laser beams are cool. I saw this movie where they used a laser beam to kill aliens 2 from outer space. But they don’t sell pens like that at Staples. They do have one cool thing—a copy machine. Copy machines are cool because you can put your head on the glass and make a funny picture of your face. It only costs eight cents! But you have to be sure to close your eyes or you’ll go blind. I stuck my head in the copy machine and closed my eyes. I was reaching for the START button when I heard the most horrible sound in the history of the world. . . . “Hi, Arlo!” Ugh! It was Andrea Young, this annoying girl in my class with curly brown hair. I hate her. Andrea calls me by my real 3 name because she