Punished! Read Online Free PDF

the same forward and backward. The names
Otto
and
Hannah
were each palindromes. I didn’t know any Ottos or Hannahs. I guess a palindrome was actually a special kind of anagram. But this was the cool part—a whole sentence could be a palindrome, too. Like
Madam, I’m Adam.
    This might be tough.
    “Think small,” I told myself as I walked home. I started running small words through my mind. I’d already used
rat art
for an anagram. I wondered if there was anything called
rat tar.
Yuck—if there was, it sounded pretty disgusting.
    When I got home, I flipped through my dictionary, looking for short words. That’s how I came up with my first palindrome. As soon as it hit me, I jumped up and ran to the kitchen.
    This isn’t going to be hard at all
, I thought, feeling pretty pleased with myself.
    There were plenty of pots. And plenty of tops.
Pot top.
If you spelled it backwards, it was still
pot top.
I grabbed the smallest pot top and slipped one of the rubber bands over it. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. I hoped the top wouldn’t disappear. Mom wouldn’t like that. But I shouldn’t have worried. Instead of making anything vanish, the rubber band started to glow. Then the glow faded. And when the glow was all gone, the rubber band had changed from brown to yellow. I slipped it off and put it in my pocket.
    This was great. One down and just six to go. All that stood between me and a normal life was a half dozen more palindromes. I thought about slipping another rubber band over a different pot top, but I was so close to ending my punishment, I didn’t want to take any chances doing something that might be cheating.
    I realized I had two palindromes living at home with me. Mom and Dad. Mom was easy.
    “Want to see a magic trick?” I asked.
    “Sure.” She was in the middle of balancing the checkbook.
    “First it’s brown.” I slipped the rubber band over her wrist. “Now it’s yellow.”
    “Very nice.” She smiled at me and went back to what she was doing.
    Dad would be tougher. If I showed him the trick, he’d want to know how it was done. Luckily, he always took a nap after dinner. As soon as he had drifted off on the couch, I sneaked over with a rubber band and put it on his finger. Yellow!
    That made three. I thought about all sorts of short words. I started playing with the Scrabble tiles again.
Bed deb, tin nit, pen nep.
None of them worked.There wasn’t anything like a
car rac
or a
rac car
either. But as I stared at the letters, I realized there was something even better. I went back to my closet, searched through the old toys, and pulled out a model racecar. I slipped a rubber band around it and smiled as the band changed color.
    Four down, three to go. In less than half an hour, I found two more. Dad had a level in his toolbox.
Level
was a palindrome all by itself.And then I realized my sister Kaylee could be called
Sis
for short.And she loved magic tricks. So I did the rubber band trick for her.
    That made six. But as easy as it had been to find the first six, I had no luck at all finding the seventh. I felt like a home-run king in a batting slump. I’d knocked a bunch of pitches out of the park, and then I couldn’t hit another ball. I flipped through the dictionary. I played with the letter tiles. I closed my eyes and ran words through my head until my brain felt like it was turning into alphabet soup.
    “I’m doomed,” I told Buster when I went to bed.
    “Woof,” he answered.
    “Woof foow,” I said, checking it to see if it was a palindrome. Nope. “Bark krab.” Nope again. “Roof foor.” Nowhere near close enough.
    The next morning, I felt like I hadn’t gotten any sleep at all.
Sleep,
I thought. I turned it around.
Peels.
Was there such a thing as
sleep peels?
Nope. It was just another useless phrase to add to the endless list of things that didn’t work.
    I trudged off to school and took my seat.
    “Still mad?” I asked Benedict when he sat down.
    He didn’t