eird School #12 My W Pictures by Dan Gutman Jim Paillot To Emma Contents 1 The Free Stuff Room 1 2 Something Going Around 9 3 If You Don’t Have Something Nice to Say, Say Something Mean 23 4 My Head Almost Exploded 31 5 Indoor Recess Is No Fun at All 38 6 Good News? 46 7 Circle of Friends 53 8 Getting the Goods on Ms. Todd 64 9 The Truth About Ms. Todd 81 10 Our Best Behavior 87 11 Playing Dumb 91 About the Author and the Illustrator Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher 1 The Free Stuff Room My name is A.J. and I hate school. There’s only one room in Ella Mentry School that I really like. It’s the lost and found room! The lost and found room is right near the office. It is the coolest room in the history of the world because there is 1 lots of free stuff in there. Me and my friends Michael and Ryan call it “the free stuff room.” You can get just about anything you want, and you don’t even have to pay for it. So if I feel like getting a new baseball cap or a pair of sunglasses, I don’t have to go to a store. I just go to the free stuff room at school. It’s awesome! So this one morning the bus got to school a little early, and I went to kill some time in the free stuff room. I saw a really cool black T-shirt with a lightning bolt across the back. It was way cooler than the shirt I was wearing, so I took my shirt off and put the cool one on. It 2 fit perfectly. I stuffed my old, boring shirt in my backpack. It was almost time to pledge the allegiance, so I went to class. The kids were putting their backpacks and lunch boxes in their cubbies. Our teacher, Miss Daisy, wasn’t there yet. That was weird. She usually gets to school before any of us. “Where’s Miss Daisy?” asked Neil, who everybody calls “the nude kid.” He actually wears clothes, but we call him “the nude kid” anyway. It’s a long story. “Maybe she got lost,” Michael said. Suddenly the door opened. We all looked up. But it wasn’t Miss Daisy. It was Andrea Young, this rea