The Worst Class Trip Ever Read Online Free PDF Page A

traffic. The weird guys
started to chase us, but they ran into a cop directing traffic. We saw him block their way, holding up his hands for them to stop. They were arguing with him and pointing at us. The last thing I
saw before we got out of sight was the little guy’s face. He looked really, really,
really
mad.
    Mr. Barto and Miss Rector, at the front of the bus, missed all of this. The kids around us saw it, and they were asking us what was going on. I said I didn’t know, that maybe the guys were
still mad about what happened on the plane.
    Matt still didn’t say anything. Which, if you know anything about Matt, is very unusual. Suddenly I had a bad feeling.
    “Wait a minute,” I said to Matt, keeping it quiet. “
You
know what that was about, don’t you.”
    “Um, maybe.”
    I grabbed his arm. “What?
What?
”
    “Okay! Let go!” He yanked his arm away. He looked around to make sure nobody was looking our way, then reached into his pocket and pulled something out. He kept it low and showed it
to me. It was some kind of electronic thing, a greenish-brown box with a little Plexiglas dome on the top and some switches and buttons on the side.
    “Where’d you get that?” I said, even though I pretty much knew.
    “From the weird guy’s backpack. It was in the outside pocket.”
    “Why’d you take it?”
    “I thought it was maybe a detonator. I thought he was gonna blow something up with it.”
    “Blow up
what?
His dragon head?”
    “I didn’t know he had a dragon head in there.”
    I looked at the box. “Why didn’t you tell the marshal about it?”
    “I was gonna. But you told me to shut up. Then I decided it was better to just keep quiet about it. I didn’t want to get in any more trouble.”
    We both looked at the box for a few seconds.
    “Maybe I should just throw it away,” he said.
    I shook my head. “He seemed really upset about losing it. It might be valuable. We should give it back.”
    “How?”
    “I dunno.”
    “How would we even find those guys?”
    “I dunno.”
    “Do we even
want
to find those guys?”
    I looked out the window. The bus was out of the airport now, on a highway. I thought about the two weird guys back there, probably still arguing with the cop. I pictured the little guy’s
face, the way he looked at us as the bus pulled away.
    “Not really,” I said. “I hope we never see those guys again.”

P retty soon we crossed a bridge into Washington. Up ahead we could see the Capitol and a bunch of other Washington-y stuff. Mr. Barto got on the
bus P.A. microphone and started pointing out historic things, but since he’s Mr. Barto he kept getting them wrong. Like he’d say, “Over here to the left you can see the Lincoln
Memorial,” and Miss Rector would whisper something to him, and he’d say, “I mean the Jefferson Memorial.”
    Our hotel was a big grayish building called the Warren G. Harding Hotel. It was really old. I think it was the official hotel of every Washington class trip since the Civil War. The lobby
had saggy sofas that looked like some kind of farm animals gave birth on them. One kid claimed he saw a rat heading into the coffee shop. But nobody really cared, because we were in a hotel and our
parents weren’t.
    Mr. Barto gathered us all together to tell us he was expecting everybody to behave in a manner blah blah blah. Meanwhile Miss Rector got the room key cards from the guy at the front desk and
handed them out. I was in room 313 with three roommates: Matt, Cameron (of course), and a kid named Victor Lopez, who was new to Culver, so he didn’t have a lot of friends, which is why he
ended up with us. He was in my science class and didn’t say much, but he seemed pretty smart.
    We got into an elevator that made clunking noises and moved really slow, like it was tired of being an elevator and wanted to retire and just be a closet or something. We got off on the third
floor and found room 313, which smelled like a small animal once