Punished! Read Online Free PDF Page A

bag.
SWOOSH
.
    Then I went to my room. I had lots of old plastic toy animals, including a couple of horses. I dug through the box in my closet, looking for the right one. There was this book about a horse that lived near the ocean:
Misty of Chincoteague.
I had a model of her. Since she lived by the seashore, that made her a
shore horse.
    “Hay, I’ll sea ya, Misty,” I said as I held her over the top of the bag. “I’m a bit saddle see you go, but Mom’s been nagging me to get rid of my old stuff anyhow.”
    SWOOSH
.
    Made it. Seven anagrams.
    This sure had been easier than the oxymorons. Or maybe I was just getting better at it.
    At least I didn’t spend the next day in school all distracted because my mind was dancing through the dictionary. But I still tried not to talk in class.
    “What do you think, Logan?” Mr. Vernack asked me a couple of times during the day.
    I just shrugged. I wasn’t going to take a chance that the puns would get me in more trouble.
    Benedict ignored me. I realized he was angry, but I hoped he’d get over it.
    Ms. Glott, the student teacher, started to tell us how much she liked words. “Does anyone know what an oxymoron is?” she asked.
    My hand shot up. I yanked it back as quickly as I could. No way was I opening my mouth.
    She looked at me for a moment. “Did you raise your hand?” she asked.
    I shook my head and tried to look confused.
    “I know,” Benedict said. He smirked at me and gave the definition—the same one I’d told him just the other day. He even mentioned the part about it being Greek. That was fine—if he needed to show off, I wasn’t going to stop him.
    “Impressive,” Mr. Vernack said. “
Very
impressive.” He almost never repeated himself. I could see he was suddenly thinking about Benedict as perfect student-of-the-month material. Maybe Benedict would finally win that pizza he wanted so badly.
    Ms. Glott went on to tell the class about oxymorons and anagrams and a couple other things. The coolest one was redundancies. Those were words you didn’t need. Like when people talked about a
free gift.
Since a gift is always free, you don’t need the extra word. Another redundancy was
unexpected surprise.
A surprise is always unexpected. Also,
pre-recorded.
Anything that’s been recorded has obviously been pre-recorded. She pointed out that
pre-
and
previous
were often redundant. I hoped my next task was redundancies, because now I’d have a head start. Or a pre-start.
    Then Ms. Glott told us some of her favorite words, including
serendipity
. That was what you call it when you find something you aren’t looking for—kind of like being at the right place at the right time. I thought about the Argentine tangerine. Talk about serendipity. Of course, right now, I couldn’t talk about anything.
    After class, I went across town to the library.
What if he’s not there?
I wondered as I hurried downstairs to the reference section. Was there a word for when you don’t find the thing you’re desperately looking for?
Neresdipity? Dipitsereny?
    But he was right at the table.
    “Seven anagrams,” I said as I handed him the bag.
    He bounced the bag up and down in his palm for a second, as if weighing it, then nodded and said, “Very good.”
    “What’s next?” I asked. “Redundancies?”
    “No. Nothing that easy.” He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a handful of rubber bands, and dropped them on the table.They lay there looking like exhausted worms. “Seven palindromes,” he said.
    “What’s—” I caught myself as I picked up the rubber bands.
That should be a snap.
I grinned, and then groaned as I realized I was even making puns in my mind now.
    I headed for the dictionary and looked up
palindromes.
It turned out they were very cool. But the more I thought about them, the more I realized they might not be that easy.

CHAPTER EIGHT
Either Way, It’s the Same

    T he definition was simple. A palindrome is a word or sentence that is spelled