Mudshark Read Free Page B

should go look.”
    So Betty found her paper on the ledge, where it had fallen out of her notebook when she washed her hands after science the day before. Betty had become compulsive about washing her hands after working in the lab following the Episode with the Itching Scabs.
    As curious as it was that a parrot should speak logically and not just mimic what he'd heard a person say, and that a mere bird could help somebody find something, the incident passed largely unnoticed by everyone other than Mudshark. He spent a good deal of the rest of the day gazing thoughtfully at the parrot. Later that same week, Clyde Damper was in the library and whispered that he'd lost a book. Before anyone could say, before anyone could even think
Ask Mudshark
, the parrot belched, squawked and said:
    “On the bench, by the coach's office.”
    Clyde, surprised, turned to Mudshark, who was observing the bird. Mudshark looked at Clyde, shrugged and said, “He's right.”
    Clyde found the book sitting right where the parrot, and Mudshark, had said it would be. Clyde had collected the previous day's attendance sheets from each teacher and taken them to the office earlier that morning and had dropped them all outside Coach's office, setting the book down while he gathered the papers from the floor.
    Twice now the bird had known where to find something even though it never left the library.
    “I think,” Clyde said to his friends, “that bird is special. He has powers. Maybe … he's psychic.”
    By the end of the day the word was all over school.
    First: the parrot in the library was psychic.
    And second: the parrot could out-think Mudshark.

This is the principal . Would the custodian please report to the faculty restroom with a long plank? And whoever took the erasers from room two oh eight, please return them. Seriously, a lot of erasers are missing. Please return them. Also please refrain from forming hunting parties to hunt the gerbil. He simply gets frightened and panics and I don't think any of us want to revisit the sound we heard when he ran up Mr. Patterson's pants leg, do we? Luckily the gerbil was not injured, although he escaped again, and Mr. Patterson will return to school day after tomorrow once he has regained his … composure. Thank you .
    It shouldn't have bothered Mudshark, shouldn't have rattled his cool, this parrot.
    Life, after all, wasn't about out-thinking birds. But it annoyed him a little. Mudshark had gotten used to being the go-to guy in school, and he didn't want to share that position with a bird. Especially a burping bird.
    He had a bigger issue than the parrot, though: Something was going on at school, something strange, and he couldn't put his finger on just what felt … wrong. As he did with any new thing he wanted to understand, he settled back and waited for his thoughts to become clear.
    While waiting, he went to school, watched the season-ending Death Ball play-offs, ate dinner with his parents and broke up a food fight among his sisters.
    The girls were separated from each other at the dinner table—Mom, Dad and Mudshark each took charge of one, playing one-on-one defense with the triplets, much like the Death Ball championship team. The physical separation kept the girls fromgrabbing each other, eating off each other's plates or complaining about the fairness of portion sizes. But instead they used the distance between them to toss food at each other. Mudshark never missed a bite as he raised a hand to snag a dinner roll that Tara had hurled at Sara or to right the glass of milk that Kara had tipped when she flung a pork chop at Tara.
    His mother and father didn't seem to notice the food flying across the table—they were engrossed in a discussion of library funding. So Mudshark was left to contain the damage.
    After dinner, he rested up by working on his bicycle. Mudshark had learned that a bike is the most efficient way to use human energy to move the body forward. He spent many hours improving