11 Ch11-The Last Straw

Chapter 11 The Last Straw I don't know if all that mumbo jumbo Andrea said was true or not. But I had to admit, Mr. Klutz was acting weirder and weirder. After we finished the list of a hundred thousand spelling words and he pogo sticked down Main Street in a turkey

costume, he offered to paint his bald head orange if our school got the highest reading score in the county. We did, and he came into school the next day with an orange head. Then he offered to let every kid in the school shoot a Ping-Pong ball at him if

we collected enough box tops to buy new computers for the school media center. We did that, too. It was fun shooting Ping-Pong balls at Mr. Klutz, but even I was beginning to worry that there was something trou- bling him. And then came the day when it was obvious to everybody that Mr. Klutz had gone off the deep end. It was at the end of morning announcements. Miss Daisy had stepped out of the room for a minute. "Boys and girls," Mr. Klutz said over the loudspeaker, "winter vacation is coming up. If the students at our school read with their parents for one million

minutes before school lets out, I will bungee-jump off the roof of the school dressed as Santa Claus!" Me and Ryan and Emily and Andrea and Michael all looked at one another.

"That's the last straw!" Andrea said. "There are plenty of straws," I told her. "Do you want me to get you one?" "She means we can't take this anymore," Ryan told me. "Is that what the last straw means?" I asked. "I always wondered what the last straw meant." "At first I thought Mr. Klutz was just a funny guy," Andrea said seriously. "And he is. But he's also a deeply disturbed man. We've got to do something. If he keeps going like this, he might hurt himself again. Or even worse. If we don't stop him and something terrible happens, it would be our fault."

"I never thought of it that way," I said. "What can we do?" Emily asked. "We're just kids." "We have to have an intervention: Andrea said. "What's that?" Ryan asked. "It's when you sit down and tell some- body they have a problem," Andrea explained. "You force them to do some- thing about it. My mother has to do inter- ventions all the time." "I'm not telling Mr. Klutz he has a prob- lem," Ryan said. "Me neither," agreed Michael. "A.J., you started this whole thing," Andrea told me.