Punished! (4 page)

I
t sounded simple once I checked the definition in the dictionary. Take a word. Use all the same letters to make another word, and that’s an anagram. Like
slow
and
owls,
or
teach
and
cheat.
Some words had a bunch of anagrams.
React, trace, crate,
and
cater
were all anagrams of each other. And it could be done with more than one word.
New York
could be anagrammed into
worn key
.

But how, I wondered as I walked out of the library, was I supposed to put an anagram in the bag? I stared at the bag, trying to figure out how it worked.

“What in the world are you doing?”

I looked up when I heard Benedict’s voice and jammed the bag into my pocket.

“I just have an errand to ruin,” I said. “I’ll ketchup with you later. I mean, I’ll sketch up with shoe later. No, I’ll scratch pup with who. I mean—oh, fur jet about it.” The more I talked, the worse it seemed to get.

Benedict groaned and shook his head. “You won’t get rid of me just by making stinky jokes. If I can survive my Uncle Horace, I can handle anything. Besides, I know what’s going on.”

“You do?” I felt a flash of guilt, like when Mom caught me trying to hide the vase I broke.

Benedict nodded. “You’re looking for words again, right?”

“Anagrams,” I admitted, feeling relieved that he didn’t know more than that. I explained what they were.

“What do you need them for?”

“Same project.” I started to walk down the street.

“Look, I’m in school with you all day. I’ve never heard of any project like this.” He stepped in front of me.

“Not for school.”I said,stepping around him. It was rough trying to keep all my answers short.

“Want help?” he asked, stepping back in front of me. “I was going to work on my report, but this would be more fun.”

“No, thanks,” I said. It would have been great, but the professor had warned me not to get any more help.

“Some friend you are,” Benedict said. He turned away and stomped up the library steps.

“Wait!” I called.

He just kept walking.

Great. Now he was mad at me. But there was nothing I could do about it right now. I had to find seven anagrams. I started thinking up all the short words I could and seeing if they had any anagrams.
Place?
No anagrams I could find.
Table?
There was
bleat.
That’s what they call the sound a lamb or a kid makes. I knew that because my grampa had a farm with sheep and goats. But I didn’t think there was any such thing as a
table bleat
or a
bleat table.
I kept thinking.
Scale laces, west stew, lemon melon, rat art.

“Rat art!” I said.That could be a picture of a rat. I just hoped it didn’t mean a picture that a rat drew. I’d never have a chance of finding something like that. But where could I find a picture of a rat?

Kaylee liked to draw. And she loved animals. I ran home, went up to her room, and asked her if she had any drawings of rats.

Kaylee nodded. “Yup. I love to draw them. They’re so cute.” After digging around for a minute, she pulled out a nice picture of a white rat eating a hunk of Swiss cheese.

“You art so talented. Can I burrow the rat?” I asked.

“Sure. You can have it.” She handed me the picture and ran off.

I pulled the bag out of my pocket. As I started to put the picture near the opening at the top, I felt a tugging, like the bag was a giant magnet and the drawing was a paper clip. I let go of the drawing and—
SWOOSH
—it got sucked inside the bag.

One down. Six to go.

I had a great idea. I went downstairs and dug through the box of games in the living room. We had one game called Scrabble that used wooden tiles with letters on them. Mom and Dad played it all the time. I started pushing the tiles around, looking for anagrams.

Hey,
tile
and
lite
were anagrams. I picked up one of the tiles. It didn’t weigh much. I tried to put it in the bag, but it wouldn’t go.

“Duh,” I said as I realized my mistake. I’d done the same thing last year on a spelling test. No matter what it might say on food boxes and menus, the word wasn’t spelled
l-i-t-e
—it was
l-i-g-h-t
.

But I kept playing around with the letters and came up with a bunch of ideas.Whenever I got one, I wrote it down on a piece of paper. Speaking of which,
piece
didn’t have any anagrams that I could find. Neither did
paper.
I figured I’d never find some of the things on my list, like a
rock cork,
since that didn’t make much sense. Neither did
door odor, shoe hose,
or
glass slags.
I figured a
taco coat
would be hilarious, but I knew there wasn’t any chance I’d find one.And if I tried to make one, I was sure I’d mess up the whole kitchen. But I wrote down every single anagram I thought of, just in case.

A couple of times I got so close to good ones, it drove me crazy. Like with
apple.
You can use most of the letters to spell
peal.
But then I realized I had two problems. I had a letter left over, and I’d spelled the wrong kind of
peel.

After I had a long list, I ran around looking for things that would fit the ideas. My quest took me from the basement to the attic.

There was a box of old dishes in the basement. I remembered we used them when I was little, but Dad kept complaining that they were too ugly to eat off of. So Mom put them away. I hoped I remembered right. I searched around until I found the box. Yup—I was in luck. And yuck—I had to agree with Dad about them being ugly. The plates were decorated with roses. Lots of roses.
Petal plate,
I thought. Flowers were made of petals. I picked up a saucer and held it near the bag.
SWOOSH
. That made two. Five to go.

I ran through the rest of my list. The easiest one was
cat act.
When I first thought of it, I wasn’t sure I could find anything. But Dad had taken me to the circus last year, and he bought me a souvenir program. There was a picture of the lion tamer. That was definitely a cat act. I tore the page out of the program and let it get sucked into the bag.
SWOOSH
.

In the fruit basket, I found a
cheap peach.
The price sticker was still on it.
SWOOSH
.

I figured that was it for the fruit bowl, but then my eyes fell on something else. Mom had bought some tangerines. And, according to the sticker, they were from Argentina. “Wow,” I said out loud as the letters clicked together in my head. “An
Argentine tangerine.
” I had to admit I was really proud of that one.

That made five. Just two to go. I was on an anagram roll. And I knew exactly where I’d get the last two. I went to the freezer and pulled out the bag of French fries. Mom always bought the same brand: ’Tater Treats. Not quite an anagram if you use the whole bag. There was an extra
s
. But, take just one, and you had a ’
tater treat
. Perfect. I pulled out one of the stiff, frozen pieces of potato and fed it to the 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.

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

“If you’re not mad, we could anger round together this weekend.”

Benedict turned his back toward me.

I decided to shut up before I drove him from the room. This was awful. If my best friend hated me, how would strangers treat me? I thought about what my life would be like if I didn’t find the final palindrome. I’d never be able to talk to anyone again. People would just groan at me and stop listening. Everyone would hate me. They wouldn’t take anything I said seriously. I’d have to live someplace where nobody spoke English. They wouldn’t understand me, but at least they wouldn’t hate me.

The day dragged on. As it got close to three-thirty, I decided all I could do was go to the library and give Professor Wordsworth what I had. Maybe he’d give me more time, or a different task. Either way, it was my only hope.

I glanced at the clock again. One minute to go.

“Well, Logan,” Mr. Vernack said, walking over to my desk. “You’ve been extremely quiet these last few days. I’d like you to join the discussion. We don’t want Ms. Glott to think you don’t like our lessons.” He pointed to the chalkboard. “Please pick one of those words and use it in a sentence.”

I stared at the list on the board.
Device, conduct, example, satellite, protest.
It didn’t matter which word I picked. Any one of them would doom me when it turned into a pun. Whatever I said, Mr. Vernack would get angry. My best chance was to keep my mouth shut.

“I want an answer from you right now,” he said. “Or you can stay after class.”

After class! Oh no!
If he kept me after, I’d never get to the library on time. I had to say something. But Mr. Vernack was so angry now that I knew he’d make me stay if I said a pun.

I was doomed either way. I sat there with my mouth open.

“MY PANTS!” Benedict screamed. “My pants are on fire.” He leaped from his desk and ran toward the front of the room.Then he started jumping up and down and slapping at his legs with both hands.

Everyone stared at him.

He kept slapping for a moment, then glanced down and said, “Wait. My mistake. Never mind.”

As Benedict walked back toward his seat, he grinned at me. Right then, the bell rang. Everyone started to rush out.

“Okay, okay, class dismissed,” Mr. Vernack said. “Except for . . .”

I held my breath.

“Benedict,” he said.

I guess imaginary burning pants were a lot worse than not answering a teacher. I slipped away and ran out of the building. “Thanks, Benedict,” I said to myself as I raced down the school steps and headed for the sidewalk. What a pal I had. I owed him a lot.

But I was still in trouble. I reached the library and went down to the reference section.

The professor was sitting there, reading.

“I have a problem,” I said. I pulled the rubber bands from my pocket, one brown and the other six bright yellow, and held out my hand to show him.

“So I see,” he said.

“Can I get more time?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No. Sorry.”

“I’ve looked everywhere,” I said. “It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.”

He stared at me calmly, and then said, “You still have a few minutes. Maybe the answer is right under your nose.”

“Lip?” I asked. “
Lip pil
?” I said, trying to make a palindrome out of it.

“That was just a figure of speech,” he said. He leaned forward until his face was only inches from mine. “Maybe the answer is right in front of you.” He reached out with one finger and touched the end of my nose.

I took a step away. Then I froze as the answer sank in. Of course.

“Professor Robert Wordsworth,” I said, remembering the day he’d told me his name.

He smiled.

I stretched out the rubber band. “And I’ll bet your friends call you . . . ,” I said as I slipped the rubber band over his hand.

“Bob!”
we said together.

What a simply wonderful palindrome.

The rubber band on his wrist glowed yellow.

Behind me, the clock ticked. I glanced at it. Five minutes after four.

“Am I cured?” I asked.

“Find out for yourself,”he told me as the sound of running footsteps announced Benedict’s arrival.

“I figured I’d find you here,” he said, sliding to halt next to me. “The way you rushed out the other day when I saw you on the steps, I knew something important was going on. Even if you wouldn’t tell me about it.”

I took a deep breath and spoke. “Thanks for saving me back there in school. Did you get in much trouble?”Wow. Not a single pun. I wasn’t being punished anymore!

“Nah,” Benedict said. “Mr.Vernack just gave me a lecture about civic responsibility and made me clean the chalkboards. But I guess I can forget about being student-of-the-month for a while.”

“Would you settle for being friend of the century?” I asked.

“I guess that’s pretty good, even if it doesn’t come with a pizza.”

I grinned at him. “Who said it doesn’t? Let’s get one right now.I have that coupon,remember?”

“I thought you were saving it for a special day,” Benedict said.

“You have no idea how special today is. So how about we go stuff our faces?”

“Sounds great,” Benedict said. “Now, are you going to tell me what all of this was about?”

“Sure,” I said. I glanced at the professor. He nodded, so I figured it was okay. “It’s a long story.”

“Best told someplace else,” the professor said. “This is a library, not a meeting room.”

Benedict glanced over at the professor. “Who asked you?”

Oh no.

The professor raised his dusty old book and took a deep breath.

Here we go again,
I thought, expecting Benedict to get punished. I wondered if he’d get the same three quests or have to find something completely different.

Instead of blowing the dust, the professor winked at me, put the book down, and went back to reading.

“Come on,” I said, tugging Benedict by the arm. “I’ll tell you all about it on the way to the pizzeria.”

We walked out of the library, back into the warm weather.

“I’ll share mine with you when I win it,” Benedict said.

“Thanks.”

“I know I messed up for May. But June’s a short month. It’ll be easy. Especially when I turn in a great paper.”

“Did you figure out a topic?” I asked.

Benedict nodded. “I’ve got something Mr. Vernack will love. Ms. Glott, too. I’m going to write about words and stuff.”

“Oxymorons and anagrams?”

“Those are okay. But I really want to write about puns. I know they make people groan, but there’s also something sort of cool about them.”

“Yeah.They are kind of cool,” I said. “Ready for pizza?”

“Sure,
Pete’s-a
great guy,” Benedict said.

“Yeah,
Pete’s-a
great guy.” I groaned. And then I laughed. And then I said, “Since we have a coupon, we don’t
knead
any
dough.
” I didn’t have to make the pun, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t want to. It was nice having the choice.

“I never
sausage
a nice pizza,” Benedict said when we reached the window outside the pizzeria.

“I read about one in the
news-pepper,
” I said as I opened the door.

And we walked inside—two groan boys.