Fiendish Deeds Read Free Page B

first day of school by the sharp elbows of the other children.
    Joy yawned—the teacher was late. She looked up at the familiar poster of an old, crazy-haired man with his tongue sticking out. “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” it said underneath. The man was Albert Einstein, Joy knew, the big genius, who even Mrs. Wells reluctantly acknowledged was smarter than your average logical positivist.
    The teacher came in, laying her coat on her desk. “Sorry I’m late! Children, how are we today?”
    “GREAT, MISS KEENER!” answered the class in a single exuberant voice.
    Except for Joy, that is, who pretended to cough, like she did every morning. Coughed, or sneezed, or fetched a pencil that just happened to roll onto the floor….
    “Terrific! Is everyone excited to continue with the book reports today?”
    “YEAH!” shouted the class.
    “Wow! You sound like you all had a great breakfast!” she remarked, laughing.
    Miss Keener had a thing about breakfasts. If you didn’t eat a proper one, not only were you unable to concentrate in class but you were also much more likely to end up in prison later, possibly on death row. An unbalanced lunch, meanwhile, foreshadowed not only brittle-bone syndrome but a career in the toilet-cleaning trade, Joy had been informed.
    “Okay, let me pull a name….” Miss Keener picked up a large top hat and stirred the contents. “I do hope Mr. Fluffs didn’t get in and eat any of them!”
    Mr. Fluffs was the class rabbit. Using the hat, Miss Keener was able to make him vanish into thin air. It was a good trick but hardly the equal of Mr. Fluffs’s own magic act, wherein he disappeared into the shredded newspaper of his cage for an entire week before reappearing with yet another disgusting eye infection.
    “Abracadabra! Abracadoo! Who’s going next? Who is it? Who?”
    Please don’t pick my name , thought Joy. Please.
    Joy knew such a pathetic attempt to alter the course of fate was pointless—her name was in there somewhere, and Miss Keener wouldn’t stop fishing for it until the hat was empty of everything save a few crusty flakes from Mr. Fluff’s eye. But she couldn’t help herself.
    Miss Keener read from a small piece of paper. “Tyler!” A couple of chimpanzee-like whoops came from the back of class.
    “I’m ready, Miss,” said Tyler, swaggering up to the blackboard, where he cleared his throat theatrically. “For this report, I decided to choose a really famous story that most everybody knows.”
    “Great,” purred Miss Keener. “Let’s hear about it.”
    “It’s based on the TV show Ultradroids .” Upon hearing the title, a few boys started humming something that Joy guessed was the Ultradroids theme song. “ Take out the trash, Ultradroid captains! ” yelled Tyler, striking an action pose. The class erupted into laughter.
    “Now settle down, everyone,” said Miss Keener mildly. “Okay, Ultradroids —cool,” she said, snapping her fingers and bobbing her head to show she was down with it. Joy cringed. “Go on, Tyler.”
    “Yeah, so it’s a wicked show as everybody who lives on this planet knows. And this is the book version.” Tyler held a copy up. The cover featured a gigantic robot bristling with missiles in a similar pose to the one Tyler had struck moments before. “Well, actually, there’s like twenty-eight books or something. But this one is Number 7: The Destruction of Homeworld. ”
    Tyler looked at his sheet. “There’s no author listed, so I left that part blank. What’s next? Oh yeah, the story.
    “So the Ultradroids are returning from fighting the Legion of the Overlord again, but instead of their home planet, they see this cloud of broken-up rocks….”
    Tyler began outlining the major plot points. They involved his crawling around on all fours while firing barrage after barrage of imaginary missiles from his hands, feet, back, and even his eyes in one dramatic instance. The resulting explosions left a fine mist