03 Unicorns Don’t Wear Pants

Unicorns Don't Wear Pants The next day after school, Stink found Judy sitting crisscross applesauce on the floor of her room, flipping the pages of The Princess in Black lightning-fast. He was eating a slice of cold pepperoni pizza. "Want some?" Judy didn't look up. Flip, flip, flip. She kept turning pages. "Check this out," said Stink. He put down the pizza. He held out his new T-shirt for her to see. It said: I READ PAST MY BEDTIME. But Judy did not look up. He tried to get her attention with a fidget spinner. But Judy did not look up. He spun it in his hand. He spun it on his nose. She still did not look up. Not one fidget. Something was strange. Something was weird. Something was not right. Her eyes were going batty.

Her eyes were going bonkers. Her eyes were going cuckoo-crazy. Judy seemed to be reading, but her eyes were darting up and down like a googly-eyed pet rock. She kept flipping pages like a mad scientist. "What are you doing?" Stink asked. He took another bite of cold pizza. "I'm trying to read three-and-a-half times faster than I do now," said Judy. "Speed-reading?" said Stink. "You mean you can learn to read supersonic fast? Just like that?" "Yep. Speed-reading is a real thing, you know. Lots of presidents were speed-readers. John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter could both read more than one thousand words a minute!" "I know for a fact that George Washington was not a speed-reader." "Why not?" "He must have been a super-slow reader because he had a library book that was overdue for two hundred and twenty-one years."

Judy cracked up. "What!?" "They said the late fine would have added up to three hundred thousand dollars." "See? George Washington could have saved himself a ton of money if he had just taught himself to speed-read." "Yeah, then it wouldn't have taken him more than two hundred years to read the book." "Guess what," said Judy. "There's a for-real speed-reading champ named Anne Jones who read Harry Potter Book Seven in forty-seven minutes." "That sounds made up," said Stink. "For real. No lie!" "Yeah, but I bet she's a grown-up. No way a kid could do that." "I heard about a fourth-grader who can read forty

one pages in thirty seconds." "Whoa," said Stink. "Pretty soon, I'll be reading at the speed of light. Then I'm going to teach Grandma Lou. That way, she can finally read the longest Harry Potter book and cross it off her before-she-dies bucket list." "Sweet," said Stink. "Can you teach me, too?" "Sure," said Judy. "So, right now you probably read a book word by word, one sentence at a time, right?" "Uh-huh. How else would I do it? Putting a book under your pillow and hoping the words fly into your brain sure doesn't work." "Don't read word by word anymore." "Huh?" "Read in 'jumps.'" "How does jumping up and down make you read faster?" "No, jumps are like chunks of words. It lets your brain take in more words all at once." "I don't get it," said Stink. "Think of a tree. When you look at a tree, do you see every leaf or a whole tree?" "A whole tree," said Stink.

"Speed-reading is like that. You look at a whole page at once instead of looking at one word at a time. Here, I'll show you. Take your finger and run it down the middle of the page. Make your eyes go down the page at the same speed as your finger. Whatever you do, don't go back. That will slow you down." Judy handed Stink her book. He took his finger and ran it down the middle of the page. His finger left behind a bright-orange greasy streak. "Stink! You just got pizza all over a library book." "Oops," said Stink. "This is worse than the time Ramona scribbled in Beezus's library book. You're going to have to pay for a whole new book, you know." Stink shuddered. "Here, I can fix this." He grabbed Judy's pencil with a troll doll eraser on the end. He started to erase the orange streak.

"Stink! That's not an eraser. That's a troll pencil topper—" Rrrip! The page ripped. "Uh-oh," said Judy. "You just made it worse." "Uh-oh," said Stink. "There goes that two-dollar bill I just found. Unless... I could just never return the book and it would be overdue for like two hundred twenty-one years." Judy held her hand to her ear like a phone. "Hello, Jail," she said, "this is Stink."