ird School #8 My We Dan Gutman Pictures by Jim Paillot To Emma Contents 1 A Pretty Normal Lunch 1 2 A Special Guest 9 3 The New Lunch Lady 22 4 Chicken Klutz 29 5 France Talk and Frogs’ Legs 38 6 Welcome to Café LaGrange 45 7 Secret Agents 56 8 The Most Horrible, Terrible, Awful Thing in the History of the World 64 9 Give Peas a Chance 68 10 Andrea’s Birthday Party 77 11 Silent Lunch 86 About the Author and the Illustrator Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher 1 1 A Pretty Normal Lunch My name is A.J. and I hate school. “Which do you hate more,” my friend Ryan asked me, “school or vegetables?” “Hmmm, that’s a hard one,” I said. “I really hate them both.” “I hate school more than vegetables,” said our friend Michael, who never ties 1 his shoes, “because we don’t have to sit inside a vegetable all day and learn stuff.” “Good point,” I agreed. “I hate vegetables more than school,” Ryan said, “because we don’t have to eat the school.” That made perfect sense too. I couldn’t make up my mind. We were in the vomitorium. It was a pretty normal lunch at Ella Mentry School. Ryan stuck carrot sticks in his mouth and said, “Look, I’m a walrus!” Michael put a spoon on his nose, and it hung there. I dared Ryan to put pickle chips on his Tater Tots and eat them. Ryan will eat anything. 2 Michael dared me to shoot a straw wrapper at Andrea Young, this girl at the next table who is really annoying. The wrapper hit Andrea in the head. She screamed and knocked her apple juice on the floor. Just at that moment, Andrea’s annoying friend Emily was walking by with her tray. Emily slipped on the juice and fell on her butt. As she was falling, she knocked over a whole rack of lunch trays. Crash! “Ouch!” Emily shouted. “I bumped my mouth. My tooth is loose!” I don’t know why, but when people fall on their butt, it’s hilarious. Me and Ryan 3 and Michael just about exploded trying not to laugh. Emily started crying. That big crybaby. She wasn’t even hurt,