We Give a Squid a Wedgie Read Free Page A

Oliver looked around the room. Everyone was watching him. He swallowed hard. “On my underwear,” he said. “It’s giving me a wedgie.”
    “O-U-C-H, ouch,” said Corey Brandt.
    “This is going to hurt,” said Dr. Navel, and yanked Oliver one more time, extremely hard.
    “Ow!” yelled Oliver.
    Dr. Navel fell backward and Oliver fell onto him. The octopus still held a scrap of Oliver’s underpants, and its tentacles flailed in the air with it, as if it were waving a white flag of surrender.
    Corey grabbed the octopus by two of its ­tentaclesand swung it up through the air to toss it back into its tank.
    However, he overestimated the distance and the octopus flew right over its tank and hit the current Sumo Wrestling Champion of the World right in the chest with a loud wet slap. The octopus wrapped its tentacles around the Sumo Wrestling Champion of the World in a hug, and the Sumo Wrestling Champion of the World looked back at the teen superstar with an expression that could only be described as
nonplussed
.
Nonplussed
was a word that Oliver and Celia had learned by living at the Explorers Club and having famous explorers for parents.
    It meant confused to the point of bewilderment.
    Oliver and Celia spent a lot of their time nonplussed.­
    They were nonplussed when their mother showed up on a mountaintop in Tibet, after being missing for three years, to tell them that she was part of an ancient secret society and that the twins were destined to discover the Lost Library of Alexandria. Then she ran off again.
    They were nonplussed when she appeared another time in the Amazon to help them find thecity of El Dorado, where the Lost Library had been hidden, and they were nonplussed when they discovered that some mysterious explorer named P.F. had moved the whole Lost Library before they even got to El Dorado.
    They were really, really, really nonplussed when their mother sent them a copy of the complete works of Plato and two wet suits.
    They had to look up Plato using their universal remote control, which, aside from controlling the television, gave them access to the complete catalog of the Lost Library of Alexandria on any TV screen.
    That too had been a present from their mother.
    She never just got them a gift certificate to the mall.
    When they’d looked up Plato with the remote control, they saw that he was an ancient Greek philosopher, that he had once been kidnapped by pirates, and that he had written the earliest descriptions anyone had ever seen of the lost civilization of Atlantis.
    Plato said that Atlantis was a ten-thousand-year-old island kingdom that had become the center of wealth and power in ancient times. Whenthe Atlanteans—that’s what the citizens of Atlantis were called—grew too wealthy and too powerful and tried to conquer the whole world, they were punished. Their entire civilization was swallowed by the ocean in a single terrible day. At least, that’s what Plato said he’d heard. Scholars, mystics, and explorers had been searching for Atlantis ever since Plato told that story.
    Knowing all this made Oliver and Celia even more nervous about those wet suits their mother had sent. They preferred not to get wet.
    At this moment, however, they were very wet, although it was the Sumo Wrestling Champion of the World who was nonplussed. The octopus trying to wrap itself around his giant chest might have been a little confused and bewildered too.
    “Out!” cried the deep-sea diver whose party had been ruined. “All uf you, out uf my house!
Vite!
Quickly! Go! Out!”
    Within minutes, Corey Brandt, Oliver, Celia, and their father were in a taxi on their way back to the Explorers Club, wet and smelling like fish. As they left, no one noticed one of the fire dancers slip away from his group to hail a cab and follow them. In most places, a Rajasthani fire dancerhailing a cab would be a strange sight, but in New York City, even that wasn’t strange.
    “You got your wish,” said Celia as they