Me and Ryan and Emily and Andrea and Michael all looked at one another. “That’s the last straw!” Andrea said.

“There are plenty of straws,” I told her. “Do you want me to get you one?”

“She means we can’t take this anymore,” Ryan told me.

“Is that what the last straw means?” I asked. “I always wondered what the last straw meant.”

“At first I thought Mr. Klutz was just a funny guy,” Andrea said seriously. “And he is. But he’s also a deeply disturbed man. We’ve got to do something. If he keeps going like this, he might hurt himself again. Or even worse. If we don’t stop him and something terrible happens, it would be our fault.”

“I never thought of it that way,” I said.

“What can we do?” Emily asked. “We’re just kids.”

“We have to have an intervention,” Andrea said.

“What’s that?” Ryan asked.

“It’s when you sit down and tell somebody they have a problem,” Andrea explained. “You force them to do something about it. My mother has to do interventions all the time.”

“I’m not telling Mr. Klutz he has a problem,” Ryan said.

“Me neither,” agreed Michael.

“A.J., you started this whole thing,” Andrea told me.

“I did not!”

“Sure you did. You were the one who gave him the idea to give out incentives for learning in the first place.”

“That’s true,” the others agreed, looking at me like I was a criminal or something.

“All I did was hit a puck into Annette,” I said.

“A.J., you’ve got to tell Mr. Klutz that if he bungee-jumps off the roof, we’re not going to read one minute with our parents,” Andrea said. “Two can play at this game. If he’s going to do crazy things, we won’t read any more books. We won’t spell any more words. We won’t do any more math problems. We won’t learn anything.”

I couldn’t believe I was hearing this from Andrea. Her idea of having fun is to read the dictionary during recess. If she was willing to give up learning, she must be really serious about Mr. Klutz and his problems.

“But if we stop learning stuff,” I protested, “we’ll get dumber.”

“In your case,” Andrea told me, “that would be impossible.”

12

A Hard Bargain

That afternoon we talked Miss Daisy into letting us go to Mr. Klutz’s office for a meeting.

“We need to speak with Mr. Klutz,” Andrea told the school secretary. “It’s very important.”

“It’s a matter of life and death,” Ryan said.

The secretary let us in. Mr. Klutz wasn’t hanging from the ceiling or anything. He had on boxing gloves and he was punching his punching bag.

“May I help you kids?” he asked.

“Go ahead, A.J.,” Andrea said, giving me a shove from behind.