We Give a Squid a Wedgie by C. Alexander London Read Free Book Online Page A

desperately trying to remind their students of everything they had learned in the first half of the year and somehow totally forgotten during two weeks of winter break.
    “OMG!” Stephanie Sabol squealed at Celia in the hallway, before she could even put her books in her locker. “I read on Brandtblog.com that you’re going to sail across the ocean with Corey Brandt! Is that, like, for real?”
    “Like R-E-A-L, real?” Annie Hurwitz spelled loudly behind her.
    A gaggle of girls gathered around, asking questions and making suggestions and wondering if she’d get to be on TV. Celia tried to see where her brother had gone, but she couldn’t find him through the forest of friends that had sprouted around her.
    Their teachers agreed to let the twins make up their missed classwork after they got back, as long as they promised to give a report to the whole school about what they learned on their trip. Celia didn’t think it was fair that they were getting more homework. Oliver thought it was the greatest injustice in history. Although Celia didn’t see him, he glared at her down the hallway.
    In the gym locker room, Greg Angstura snuck up behind Oliver, grabbed the waistband of his underpants, and performed the universal ritual of the bully: he yanked upward, hard, and gave Oliver a wedgie almost as bad as the one that octopus had given him.
    “Don’t drown on your trip, weirdo.” Greg laughed. He didn’t care that Oliver knew Corey Brandt or had famous explorers for parents. He just liked being mean.
    The rest of the boys, however, were eager to hear about the trip.
    “Will you be the first mate? Or the bosun?” asked one of the Gomez brothers.
    “What’s a bosun?” asked the other Gomez brother.
    They were identical twins. Oliver didn’t know which was which. Talking to them reminded him that he missed talking to his sister.
    He just shrugged.
    “Dude,” one of the Gomezes said to Oliver as they were climbing neighboring ropes in gym class. “Do you think you’ll have to climb like this on the sailboat? Like a pirate? What if you meet pirates? Do you think they’ll make you walk the plank?”
    “I heard that pirates don’t do that,” said the other Gomez, climbing the rope on the other side of Oliver. “They just kill you and take your loot.”
    Oliver grunted. He had to focus on climbing the rope. Why did they make children climb ropes? It seemed like cruel and unusual punishment.
    “Do you think you’ll see sharks?” the Gomezes asked together.
    Oliver grunted again. But he wondered, whatabout pirates? What about sharks? And what if they found the island of sea monsters and the map? Would they also find their mother?
    The other kids were so excited about the voyage that Celia never even got a chance to talk to ­Oliver.
    “OMG!” Stephanie squealed. “I read on ­ Brandtblog.com that Corey Brandt is hiring the ­entire crew for your trip from fans on his website!”
    “Do you think he’ll hire us?” asked Annie. “We could totally go with you!”
    Celia didn’t answer.
    This was an unsettling idea.
    “I heard that you have to go to the bathroom in a bucket off the side of the boat,” one of the Gomezes told Oliver a half hour later, as they sat down in the lunchroom in front of heaping piles of Tater Tots.
    “I heard you don’t even get a bucket,” said the other Gomez, biting into his grilled cheese sandwich. “And you have to use old gum wrappers for toilet paper.”
    “No way!” said his brother as he drowned his lunch in ketchup. “They’re too small. Maybe you have to use, like, seaweed or something.”
    “Like when Corey Brandt got that rash on
The Celebrity Adventurist
?” the other one added. He gestured at Oliver with a Tater Tot. “Do you think you’ll get a rash?”
    The way he asked made a rash sound like a good thing.
    “Oliver is a rash,” Greg Angstura butted in, smashing his fist down on Oliver’s plate and squashing Oliver’s Tater Tots into a potatoey