Accidental Hero (Jack Blank Adventure) Read Free Page A

screamed as broken glass rained down. “Jack, that’s enough! Whatever it is that you’re doing, stop it!”
    “But I didn’t do anything! Mrs. Theedwheck, please don’t burn up my comics,” Jack pleaded. “I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll do chores all day. All week, even!”
    “Oh, I know you will, but the comics are getting burned either way. Rex, gather up every last one and then get on the bus. Jack, you have chores to do, but first things first.” Mrs. Theedwheck took out her yardstick. Jack knew what would come next.
    When Mrs. Theedwheck was through with him, Jack was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to sit down for at least a week. That wasn’t the worst part of his punishment either. The worst was that there were so many comics that Rex couldn’t carry them all, and Jack had to help him takethem down to the incinerator. He had to help burn up his own comic book collection in the furnace. Watching those books go into the fire was the absolute worst.
    With the other kids finally off on their class trip, Jack was left alone in the basement, or what was currently the basement, bailing out water to stem the tide of the swamp. When he was younger, there used to be classrooms down there. Now the basement was surrendering to the marshlands, slowly sinking a little more each year.
    Jack hated the creepy, slanted basement, with its floor tilted on an angle. The basement was nothing more than a long, thin, warped hallway. The high end of the tilt was dry and the low end was wet. Jack thought of the low end as the “deep end,” because all the way down at that end of the hall was a pool of water around a stairwell leading to the floor below, a floor completely submerged in swamp water.
    The basement smelled of moisture, mold, and mildew. It was dark, too, since it wasn’t safe to use electricity on a floor that was almost halfway below swamp level. The only sunlight that crept through the windows was a combination of dim rays that either climbed above or dove below the swamp water outside. On a gray morning like this,there was almost no light at all, making the whole place look like a ghost school with empty desks scattered about each room, unsolved equations left on the chalkboard, and lonely art projects still taped to the walls.
    Jack navigated the puddle-ridden basement in squishy shoes. Splish, splash. Splish, splash. He had a bucket to carry water from the deep end of the floor up to the shallow end. Back and forth, he made his way across the basement, up the tilted floor to the dry side, where he would climb a rickety wooden staircase that led to a window by the ceiling. Once he got there, he’d dump a bucket of green water outside and go back to do it again. He was supposed to keep going until the floor was dry. Splish, splash. Splish, splash. It was no use. Swamp water seeped in everywhere. It was a never-ending job.
    One way or the other, Jack always ended up doing jobs like this as punishment for something. These days, it was usually punishment for something he did, in fact, do. There was a time when he used to keep his head down and try to follow the rules, but he found out that didn’t work at a place like St. Barnaby’s. Not for him, anyway. Even when he did what he was told and played the partof the model student, he always managed to get in trouble with the teachers for some new rule he had broken or was suspected of breaking. It was no wonder he started sidestepping the rules whenever he could, like hiding from Mrs. Theedwheck to dodge chores or stashing the comic books in the library. Sometimes it worked out and sometimes it didn’t. This time, it didn’t.
    While he worked, Jack thought about what had happened with the lights in the library. He had to admit, weird stuff like that did happen a lot—like the calculator incident Rex was talking about. Jack remembered it well. It was the day of a big math test and Rex had forgotten his calculator, so he stole Jack’s. Jack was so mad, and