Homeroom Headhunters by Clay McLeod Chapman Read Free Book Online Page A

like marble. White marble with the faintest trace of blue veins.
    She suddenly looked familiar to me.
    Where have I seen her before?
    â€œWhy do you have a bag of spaghetti taped to your stomach?” she asked.
    Whoops.
    So those weren’t my guts hanging everywhere. Maybe this girl wasn’t a cannibal after all.
    â€œI brought these for you.” She nodded to the stockpile of inhalers.
    It was then that I noticed all the other piles stowed around the room. Stashes of school supplies, each type categorized and stacked in its own mountain. I was up to my knees in the world’s most meticulous lost-and-found collection.
    Textbooks
    Old library books
    Whistles
    Cafeteria trays
    Money
    Plastic cutlery
    And my personal weapon of choice—staplers. Lots of staplers.
    You name it. All here in nice little heaps.
    â€œWho are you?” I finally mustered.
    â€œSully.”
    In an instant, a million little black dots formed into a perfect constellation of her face.
    â€œSully Tulliver?”
    â€œYou…you know who I am?”
    I was about to nod yes, when guess who got whacked on the back of his head?
    Just when I’d found her, somebody had to sneak up from behind and bludgeon me with what felt like the world’s biggest math textbook. Knocked out cold.
    That’s one way to cram for class.

could feel the blood rushing to my head before I opened my eyes.
    Sure enough, I came to—hanging upside down.
    I’d been strung up to a basketball hoop in our gymnasium. There was a jump rope wrapped around the lower half of my legs and tied to the rim. Another jump rope, looped around my torso, held my arms in place.
    I felt like a carcass hanging from a butcher’s meat hook.
    A meat piñata.
    Not a pretty picture, I know.
    I spotted the clock on the gym wall. It was only—10:30 a.m.? Wait . Hold up. That would mean it was still third period. Where was the Halloween assembly?
    But I was upside down. It was really 6:50 p.m. School had been over for nearly four hours! The only sign that the costume competition had come and gone were candy corns littering the gym floor, looking like the lost fangs of a few dozen werekids. Just one more mess for Mr. Simms to pick up.
    I tried to yell for help, but there was something stuffed inside my mouth.
    All I could do was wriggle my hands at my waist. I started to panic. None of this hypothetical maybe-this-is-all-just-a-dream kind of panic, but the oh-I-think-I-just-pooped-in-my-pants kind.
    Remain calm, Spencer, I said to myself. Think. How are you going to get out of this one?
    I heard a door open behind me, which sent an echo through the empty gym. I tried to turn my head around to see who was coming, but I was dangling in the wrong direction.
    I saw bare feet first.
    They were hovering just above— below —me, five sets, each attached to people wearing safety-pinned gym uniforms. Even though their feet were planted firmly on the floor, they looked like a row of wax-skinned bats hanging from the three-point line.
    I had to tilt my head to the side just to get a good look at them—and when I did, I realized there was writing all over their bodies. I got lost reading the scribbled bits of graffiti wrapped around their arms and legs.
    LOST BOY
    WHITE FANG
    ADVERTISE HERE
    The one with the paper clip nose-piercing stepped forward.
    â€œ I blacken the name of our fair city… ” he recited. “ I beat up people .… I am a menace to society. Man, do I have fun! ”
    Say— what?
    â€œCall me Peashooter.”
    The tall one with the yardsticks stepped up next. He had measured and marked a column of perpendicular lines across the length of his legs to correspond with the metric system—inches, centimeters, and millimeters. His legs looked like a pair of rulers.
    He murmured something I couldn’t quite make out.
    â€œYou’re lard sick?” I managed to ask through my gag.
    â€œYardstick.” He raised