Big Mouth Read Online Free PDF Page B

walls. I recognized the first guy and the two girls who followed him. They were all Scoops regulars, so they smiled when we made eye contact. Maybe slaving for Grampy had some perks after all. I adjusted my Scoops shirt. Without it I was a
complete
nobody.
    The next five Plums were just faces from the halls. Several of them had on yellow T-shirts, which a lot of kids had started wearing last week after the Mustard Taggers called for a “Revolt Against Red.” The ninth guy, though, made me groan out loud. A monster in a GO, PLUM WRESTLING! T-shirt, the kid was unmistakable: He was a Finn twin, twenty feet tall, at least, and ugly as sin, with his nose bent to the left like his identical brother. The mark of the Devil.
    Science Concepts in Action just took a nosedive.
    Traipsing in behind the Devil’s spawn was Gardo, also wearing his Plum Tomato wrestling shirt. They were teammates on our junior varsity prep wrestling team. Man, my buddy looked like a dwarf next to the Finn. And since I was two inches shorter than Gardo, I’d probably be face level with the Finn’s armpits even if I stood my tallest. Not that I ever planned to stand next to the big oaf and measure. My only Finn contact was last week when their jock jerk captain Shane Hunt had one Finn grab my legs and the other grab my arms for a big swing into the trash can. I had no intention of getting that close again.
    So which Finn was this, the one who had my arms or the one who had my legs?
    As if hearing my thoughts, the Finn looked my way. I snapped my eyes back to Gardo, who grinned and winked as he slid into a desk seat. A girl sitting between us giggled softly and wiggled her fingers at him. She must have thought he was flirting with her—which he was now that she’d tootle-oo’d at him.
    “Chop, chop, people, take your seats!” ordered Max. Then she stopped and watched while the Finn squeezed himself into a desk. She was as mesmerized as we were. The top of the desk was attached to the seat by a curving metal arm, so he couldn’t push it out at all, he just had to slip into the seat from the side. It was like watching a bear climb onto a trike at the circus.
    When the big dumb bear was finally wedged in, Max stepped onto the box behind her podium and switched on her lecture voice. “As I survey the room today, I see that you are all familiar with the topic of today’s lecture—at least follically.” She smooshed down the hairs frizzing out of her blond bun and adjusted the chopsticks that held it in place. We all automatically smooshed down our own frizzies. Except baldy Tater, of course. He just sat there with his green marker poised over his notebook.
    Max stabbed her tibia bone at a huge picture of the bright yellow sun taped to her whiteboard. “The sun. Solar eclipses. Solar flashes. The reasons for our static-struck coiffures…”

    The cafeteria was in the very center of our round school, on the bottom floor, with an open sunroof three stories up. A few hundred Plums milled around, buying food from the shiny metal slop counters up front, carrying food trays up and down the aisles, and sitting at long rectangular tables throwing paper airplanes and shooting straw wrappers. The place was louder than the food court at the mall. It was heavier on the eyes, too. Except for the metal fixtures and the bleached white linoleum that reflected the sunlight above, everything in the cafeteria was dark Plum red. Red walls, red trays, red tables, red-aproned cafeteria ladies. To planes passing above, Del Heiny Junior 13 probably looked like a giant doughnut with ketchup icing and little ants scurrying in the center hole.
    I was sitting in the unofficial eighth grader section waiting for Lucy, who surely was back from the dentist by now. There was a Halloween pumpkin centerpiece in front of me, its goofy face drawn on with black marker. Tissue-wrapped lollipop “ghosts” lay around its base. The Associated Student Body’s spirit officer probably had to