Pencil of Doom! Read Free

hit you
really
hard.’
    The bell for the end of lunch rang and the crowd dispersed. Fred and Clive walked away laughing.
    Jack stood up, still rubbing his arm. ‘ThoseDurkin brothers are going to be sorry they messed with me,’ he said.
    â€˜What are you going to do?’ said Gretel, chuckling at Jack’s bravado. ‘Let Fred punch you again?’
    Jack scowled at her. ‘You’ll see,’ he said.

7
Jack’s cartoon

    Jack stomped up the steps and down the corridor towards our classroom.
    He was mad. Madder than I’d ever seen him.
    He went straight to his desk, took out a piece of paper and started drawing. I knew what this meant. Jack was going to draw one of his ‘Fred and Clive’ cartoons. Whenever the Durkin brothers annoyed him, he always drew a cartoon of something bad happening to them.
    He divided the page into a strip of eight squares and began attacking it with the pencil. He wasn’t so much drawing as slashing and stabbing the page. In fact, he was being so violent that he broke his pencil in half.
    â€˜Can I borrow your pencil, Henry?’ he asked.
    Normally I would have said yes. But I only had one pencil on me . . . and the last time I had lent it to someone, Mr Brainfright had endedup flying out the window.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea. You seem, well, a little
agitated
.’
    â€˜I’ll get a little more agitated if you don’t lend me your pencil,’ said Jack, his eyes flashing angrily. ‘I share all my stuff with you, don’t I?’
    â€˜Yeah, I guess so,’ I said, reluctantly getting the pencil out of my pencil case and giving it to Jack. ‘Just . . . you know . . . be careful.’
    Jack nodded. ‘Okay, Henry,’ he said. ‘I won’t break this one, I promise.’
    â€˜That’s not what I meant,’ I said.
    â€˜What did you mean?’
    â€˜I don’t really know.’
    Jack shrugged and went back to his cartoon.
    The skull eraser seemed to grin wider than ever as he worked.
    Clive entered the classroom. ‘Who’s the dumb one now then, Jack?’ he said as he passed our desks. ‘You don’t even know the difference between no and yes.’
    Jack ignored Clive and kept drawing.
    Clive stopped. ‘I thought your arm would have been too sore to draw!’
    â€˜No, it’s fine,’ said Jack, hunching over his drawing so Clive couldn’t see it. ‘Takes more than a girl’s punch to hurt me.’
    â€˜Hey!’ yelled Gretel. ‘I heard that.’
    â€˜So did I,’ said Clive. ‘And I’m going to tell my brother.’
    â€˜Don’t you ever get sick of running to your brother and telling him what everybody said?’
    â€˜No,’ said Clive. ‘And I’m going to tell him you said that too!’
    Jack didn’t say anything.
    He didn’t say anything for the rest of the afternoon.
    Not even when Clive started flicking chewed-up bits of paper at the back of his neck.
    Not even when Penny and Gina, the horse-mad twins in our class, went for a canter around the room on their imaginary horses and bumped into his desk, knocking his cartoon to the floor.
    Instead of getting mad, Jack just picked up his paper, placed it back on his desk and kept drawing.
    I’d never seen him so engrossed.
    He drew all through our free reading period and it was only when the bell rang that he looked up, blinking.
    He picked up his cartoon, stood up and walked over to my desk.
    â€˜Wow!’ he said. ‘That’s some pencil, Henry!’
    â€˜Really?’ I said. ‘Why?’
    â€˜Well, it’s going to sound a bit weird,’ said Jack,‘but it was like the pencil was doing all the work. Check it out!’ Jack passed the cartoon to me. It was called ‘Flying with Fred and Clive’.

8
Flying with Fred and