17. Monday

CHAPTER 17 MONDAY On Monday morning, the boys woke up early, gathered their supplies, and headed to school about fifteen minutes before the rest of the students started to arrive. George and Harold carried their stilts and supplies into the boys' restroom upstairs and placed them inside one of the empty stalls.

Finally, they closed the stall door and locked it. If you were standing outside the stall, looking underneath the door, it appeared as if somebody was sitting down in there taking care of business. George and Harold knew that nobody would dare go near this stall, so it was now the safest place in the school to hide stuff.

Soon the students began arriving and the day started pretty much like normal. Mr. Krupp marched up and down the hallways screaming and making children cry, Kipper and his creeps stole money and distributed wedgies to the kindergartners, and a general feeling of hopelessness and despair filled the morning air. At lunchtime, as usual, the downtrodden kindergartners sat at their table with no food at all. Mr. Krupp stomped up to the kindergarten table and started getting angry. "How come you kids never have any food at lunchtime?" he shouted. "Um..." said one kid, "we're on diets." "Oh," said Mr. Krupp, as he pulled his belt up over his giant stomach. "Well, good!" he said. "It's important to stay fit and healthy like me!"

In the afternoon, George and Harold asked to be excused so they could use the restroom. They only had about five minutes to set things up, so they had to hurry. Harold opened the locked door of their secret restroom stall, and George climbed up on the stilts. Quickly, they sneaked out into the hallway.

George stilt-walked over to Kipper's locker, and Harold handed him the long spool of shelf-lining paper. Carefully, George placed the paper on top of the lockers and rolled it down to the end. The paper flipped over the edge of the locker tops and rolled down the side. Harold caught it and taped it to the side of the lockers, marking off some measurements with a ruler.

George put the padlock that he and Harold had bought on the end of the paper, two lockers down from Kipper's. They were ready. Quickly, they put their supplies back into the restroom stall, locked the door, and hurried back to their classroom.