“Ouch! That hit me!” shouted this girl named Annette. She was rubbing her leg like she had been hit by a train or something. It was just a tennis ball! Annette is such a crybaby.

“Hey, A.J.!” Michael hollered. “That counts as a goal!”

“How come?” I asked. “I missed the tree.”

“Well, you did hit the puck into Annette. Get it? Annette? A net? Annette?” Well, after me and Ryan got it, we thought that was just about the funniest joke in the history of the world.

Miss Daisy didn’t think it was very funny, though. She was already mad at me because I had forgotten to bring in a current-event article for the third week in a row.

That’s when she said it was the last straw and I had to go to Mr. Klutz’s office.

3

The Principal Is Your Pal

The principal is like the king of the school. He gets to tell everybody what to do and where to go. That is cool! If I can’t be a professional hockey player when I grow up, I want to be a principal so I can boss teachers around.

My friend Billy from around the corner, who was in second grade last year, told me that principals have a dungeon down in the basement of the school where they torture kids who misbehave. I don’t know if Billy’s telling the truth or not. But one time we had gym class and we passed by this open door in the basement and there were all kinds of scary-looking things in there. Michael said he saw chains hanging from the ceiling over a chair with straps on the arms and legs, so I guess that’s what Mr. Klutz uses to torture bad kids.

I was scared. I had never been to the principal’s office before. On the way there, I stopped into the boy’s bathroom. Maybe I could dig a tunnel out of the school and escape, I thought. My friend Billy told me he saw that in a war movie once. These guys dug their way out of prison camp with a spoon. But I didn’t have a spoon. And I didn’t want to touch the floor of the bathroom anyway. Yuck!

When I got to Mr. Klutz’s office, his secretary made me sit in a chair for about a million hours. Mr. Klutz’s door was closed the whole time. I wondered if he was torturing some other kid. I didn’t hear any screams or anything.

Finally the secretary said I could go inside. I opened the door and was surprised to see Mr. Klutz was hanging upside down from a bar near the ceiling. He had on boots that were attached to the bar.

“What are you doing up there?” I asked.