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Dad said that the kids in the neighborhood told their parents about Billy and they all went to Billy's house to confront his mom and dad. Mr. Staples made Billy promise to never pick on anyone ever again, and Dad said Billy burst into tears and might have even wet his pants. Well, after hearing that story, I don't think Billy Staples would've been any match for Nasty Pants. But I told Dad I liked the idea of complaining to the bully's parents. I called up Rowley and told him to

come over and to bring his dad, because we needed as much backup as we could get. Dad knocked on Nasty Pants's door, and we waited for one of his parents to open it. But Nasty Pants HIMSELF came to the door, and me and Rowley took off.

I guess I should've described Nasty Pants to Dad, because it took him a while to understand that the kid who came to the door was the one who was causing us all that trouble. Dad talked to Mrs. Pants, and she told Dad her son was only five and that he just gets a little wound up sometimes. On the way home, Dad was pretty mad at me for letting myself get bullied by a kid who was still in

kindergarten. But let me just say in my defense that when some kid is chasing you with a stick, you don't stop to ask him how old he is. Tuesday They took the last piece of playground equipment away at school today. We started off the year with all sorts of things, like monkey bars and swings and stuff, but now the playground is an empty sawdust pit. So recess is basically like a prison yard. I heard the school was having trouble paying the insurance for the playground, so every time there was some kind of accident or injury on a piece of equipment, the easiest thing to do was just remove

it. In October, Francis Knott went flying off the swing set and landed on the seesaw, so that took out two big items right there. We lost the monkey bars when a girl named Christine Higgins climbed to the top and then got too scared to come down. The teachers aren't allowed to touch kids, so they had to call Christine's parents to come and get her.

Eventually the only piece of equipment left was the balance beam, and I figured nobody could get hurt on THAT thing. But believe it or not, some idiot wasn't looking where he was going the other day, so now that's gone, too. Without any playground equipment, there's really nothing for us to do. But the teachers won't even let us sit down, because they say we have to stay