19

Monday Things have really fallen apart for me ever since I dropped my Magic 8 Ball in Mrs. Merritt's class. After Vice Principle Roy gave it back to me, I noticed it seemed a lot lighter. It turned out when it hit the floor, it cracked and the blue liquid behind the little window leaked out. So that meant it was totally USELESS. I ended up tossing it over Gramma's fence on the way home from school that day. But lately I've missed having it, because I've had some REALLY tricky decisions to make. I finally caught up on my missing homework assignments, but my Science Fair project is due on Thursday, and I still don't even have an IDEA for it yet. So I thought of Eric Glick. I've always heard he could hook you up with an old assignment if you were in a

pinch, and I figured maybe he could even get his hands on a Science Fair project. But still, I didn't know if I wanted to get involved with a shady character like Eric. This was just the kind of decision I'd ordinarily leave up to the Magic 8 Ball, but today I was totally on my own. I was pretty desperate, though, so at recess I found Eric hanging out behind the school and told him about my situation. Erick said he could take care of me. He did some kind of secret knock on the door a few feet away that had no handle on it. Then the door opened from the inside.

It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. The room was apparently some kind of storage area, and there were half a dozen kids crowded around a desk with a pile of papers on it. There were old book reports and history papers, and a bunch of other stuff, too. The person who seemed to be in charge was Denny's Denard, who's in eighth grade but got held back twice. I'm guessing he stayed in middle school on PURPOSE because he's got such a good racket going

on. Eric told Dennis I needed a Science Fair project, and he took me to a separate area in the back where there were SHELVES of old ones. As far as I could tell, the better the project, the more it cost.

One of the projects seemed kind of familiar, and when I took a closer look I knew why. It was RODRICK'S Science Fair project from when HE was in middle school. I remember Rodrick working on that one. His idea was to see if different types of music have an effect on how fast flowers grow. So he put a potted flower in every place in the house where there was music.

The flowers all died within two weeks, and Rodrick thought the music killed them. But Mom told him the reason the plants died was because he never WATERED them. I guess the school just dumps all the old Science Fair projects in the storage room, whether they got a decent grade or not.