Beware the Fisj by Gordon Korman Read Free Book Online

days. Not even Perry could get that upset.”
    “Read us some,” Pete suggested, “and we’ll see if they can be done.”
    Boots handed the book back to Bruno, who thumbed the pages. “Let’s see — gold panning, grape catching, grave digging, guitar playing …”
    “Boots could do that,” said Sidney.
    “I don’t think so,” answered Bruno glumly. “He’d have to play for more than a hundred and eleven hours and fifteen minutes to beat the record. I don’t think The Fish would be too thrilled with that. And the teachers wouldn’t be so happy about having their classes set to music either.” He turned a few pages. “Let’s see. What else is there? Piano smashing, plate spinning, pogo stick jumping …”
    “I could do that,” offered Sidney. “I’m really good with a pogo stick.”
    There was general laughter, punctuated by Larry’s snort of disgust.
    “If you can beat forty-two thousand hops in six hours and six minutes, speak up,” said Bruno. “Hmmm — pole sitting. Let’s see … Forget it. The record is two hundred and seventy-three days.”
    He flipped another couple of pages. “Hey, look at this! The biggest ball of string is four metres in diameter — no, we haven’t got enough time to collect something like that. How about talking? No, a hundred and thirty-eight hours is a little too long. The Fish wouldn’t allow it. If it weren’t for The Fish, you know, we could set all kinds of wonderful records!”
    He glanced down the page. “Hot gazoobies, this is it! Tin can pyramid! The record is a pyramid with a base almost two and a half metres square. It was four and a half metres high and used twenty-two thousand one hundred and forty pop cans. The base was forty cans by forty cans.” He whistled. “That’s pretty good, but we can beat it. We’ll make one with a base forty-five cans square. Elmer?”
    Elmer chewed thoughtfully on a dried fig. “Such a structure,” he said, “would be 5.38 metres high with a base 2.97 metres square, based on the dimensions of an average soda-pop can. We would require thirty-one thousand three hundred and ninety-five cans.”
    “No sweat!” exclaimed Bruno. “Everywhere you look there’s a pop can lying around.”
    “The Chutney recycling centre must be full of them,” added Wilbur.
    “Forget the recycling centre,” said Boots. “That place is locked and guarded at night. But don’t worry. The town dump will have plenty of cans too. And if we can’t find enough there, there must be millions around Toronto.”
    “In this case,” said Sidney, “the litterbug is our best friend.”
    “If we can get everyone in the school scavenging for pop cans, and all the girls at Scrimmage’s too, we can get enough.”
    “We’d have to go off campus,” warned Boots. “And we can’t have everybody requesting leave on the same day. I take it we don’t want The Fish to know about this.”
    “You take it right,” agreed Bruno. “He’d probably tell us to stop our foolishness and concentrate on our studies. The way I see it, we can all walk to Chutney Friday night and from there we’ll catch buses all over the place — Gormley, Stouffville, Uxbridge — and a lot of us can even go into Toronto. We’ll all trickle back sometime Saturday.”
    There was a wild babble of protest.
    Bruno stood up and pounded the table. “All right, you guys, I know it’s risky, but there’s safety in numbers. The Fish won’t be able to expel all six hundred of us. And if we don’t do it, then we might as well go home anyway because pretty soon there won’t be any Macdonald Hall.”
    The protest died.
    “How about this?” challenged Boots. “Where are we going to keep thirty thousand pop cans?”
    “I thought of that already,” replied Bruno smugly. “We can hide them in Dormitory 3. Nobody even goes near there since they closed it up. It’s the perfect place.” He paused. “Well, what do you think?”
    “Let’s do it,” said Pete.