Dr. Brad Has Gone Mad!

 
1
Little Miss Perfect

 
2
The Genius

 
3
Dork School

 
4
Dr. Brad Is Weird

 
5
The Boys Against the Girls

 
6
The War to End All Wars

 
7
Love and Hate

 
8
Take Me to Your Leader

 
9
The Greatest Moment of My Life

10
Little Miss Not-So-Perfect

11
A Very Dangerous Situation

12
The Moment of Truth

About the Author and the Illustrator

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

My name is A.J. and I hate school.

It was Monday morning. I had just walked into Mr. Granite’s third-grade class. Everybody was putting stuff into their cubbies. My friends Ryan and Michael were talking about a football game they watched over the weekend.
Andrea Young, this annoying girl with curly brown hair, was talking with her friend Emily about jewelry.

“Do you like my new necklace?” Andrea asked Emily. “It says ‘LOVE’ on the back.”

“It’s really shiny,” Emily said, “and it goes so nicely with your skirt.”

“I love to accessorize!” Andrea said.

Ugh. Girls are so annoying. I didn’t even know what “accessorize” meant, but it was obviously some girly thing that girls do.

“G’day, mates!” said Mr. Granite. “Take out your reading log.”

Reading log?

I don’t have a reading log. Who wants to read a log? How would you write on a log,
anyway? I guess you’d have to carve into it with a knife. But how would I carry a log to school? My backpack is heavy enough without having to put a log in there.

“I don’t have a—” I started to say.

“He means your notebook, dumbhead,” Andrea whispered to me, rolling her eyes.

“I knew that,” I lied.

The Human Homework Machine thinks she is
sooooooo
smart. Me and the guys call her Little Miss Perfect. For fun, Andrea reads the dictionary.

What is her problem? Why can’t a reading log fall on her head?

Actually, I didn’t have to take out my reading log after all. Because at that
moment, the most amazing thing in the history of the world happened. There was a knock on the door.

Well, that’s not the amazing part, because doors get knocked on all the time. The amazing part was what happened next.

“A.J.,” Mr. Granite said, “will you please answer the door?”

“How can I answer the door?” I asked. “Doors don’t talk.”

“
I’ll
do it,” said Andrea, rolling her eyes again.

Little Miss Perfect opened the door. The school secretary, Mrs. Patty, was standing there.

“Mr. Granite,” she said, “will you please send A.J. to Mr. Klutz’s office?”

“Oooooooooooooooooooooh!”
everybody oooooohed.

“A.J.’s in
trouble
!” said Michael, who never ties his shoes.

“What did you do
this
time, A.J.?” asked Ryan, who will eat anything, even stuff that isn’t food.

“Did you rob a bank?” asked Neil, who
we call the nude kid even though he wears clothes.

“Maybe you’ll finally get kicked out of school, Arlo,” said Andrea, rubbing her hands together.
^*

Andrea calls me by my real name because she knows I don’t like it.

“Your
face
should get kicked out of school,” I told her.

I thought about all the bad things I had done recently. Maybe it was the time I put a worm in Emily’s sneaker during recess. Maybe it was the time I wrote
KICK ME
on a piece of paper and taped it to Andrea’s
back when she wasn’t paying attention. I must have done something really horrible to be sent to Mr. Klutz’s office.

Bummer in the summer! I wanted to run away to Antarctica and go live with the penguins. Penguins are cool. They never get sent to the principal’s office.

I walked really slowly down the hall. The slower you walk, the longer it takes to get anywhere. If you walk slow enough, by the time you get to the principal’s office, he might forget the bad thing that you did. So always walk to the principal’s office
really
slowly. That’s the first rule of being a kid.

Finally, after about a million hundred
hours, I reached Mr. Klutz’s office.

I put my hand on the doorknob.

I turned the doorknob.

I pulled open the door.

And you’ll never believe the amazing thing I saw in there.

I’m not gonna tell you what it was.

Okay, okay, I’ll tell you. But you have to read the next chapter first. So nah-nah-nah boo-boo on you!

I knew you’d keep reading!

When I opened the door to Mr. Klutz’s office, Mr. Klutz was in there. Well, duh! Who else would be in Mr. Klutz’s office?

But that’s not the amazing part. The amazing part is what Mr. Klutz was doing in his office.

He was playing Ping-Pong with himself!

Mr. Klutz had a Ping-Pong table in his office. He would hit the ball, and then he would run around the table to the other side and hit it back. Then he would run around the table and hit it back again to himself.

Mr. Klutz is nuts.

“Hello A.J.!” Mr. Klutz said when he noticed I was standing there. “Ping-Pong is great for getting rid of stress. Have a seat.”

“Where did you get a Ping-Pong table?” I asked.

“From Rent-A-Ping-Pong-Table,” Mr.
Klutz replied. “You can rent anything.”

Mr. Klutz was all out of breath from running around the Ping-Pong table. He sat down and asked me about the weather and what I ate for breakfast and other stuff that nobody would ever care about. Principals always make chitchat before they tell you the horrible thing that you did. Nobody knows why.

There was a knock on the door, and Ms. Coco came in. She’s in charge of the gifted and talented program at Ella Mentry School. I didn’t want to be in the G and T program, but she forced me. Ms. Coco made some chitchat with Mr. Klutz before she sat down.

“A.J., we need to talk to you about something,” said Mr. Klutz.

Uh-oh. Here it comes.

“I’m sorry I put the worm in Emily’s sneaker,” I told them.

“You put a worm in Emily’s sneaker?!” asked Mr. Klutz.

“Of course not!” I replied. “Whatever gave you
that
idea?”

“A.J., I called you down here because Ms. Coco showed me some of the poems you wrote,” Mr. Klutz said. “They are
very
interesting.”

“Interesting” is an interesting word. It could mean something is really good, or it could mean something is really bad.
You never know. So if you’re not sure if something is good or bad, just say it’s interesting.

Ms. Coco handed Mr. Klutz a sheet of paper. He read it out loud.

When he finished reading, the weirdest thing in the history of the world happened. Mr. Klutz and Ms. Coco started crying! I mean, tears were running down their faces. What a pair of crybabies. They’re worse than Emily!

“That’s the most beautiful thing I ever heard!” Ms. Coco said.

The two of them were sobbing and blowing their noses into tissues. Well, they blew the
snot
from their noses into the tissues, not the noses themselves. If they blew their noses into tissues, their noses would fall off. That would be weird.

The truth is, I didn’t even write that dumb poem. My grandma got me some
flash cards so I could practice spelling words. We had an assignment to write poetry, and I didn’t know what to write. So I threw the flash cards up in the air, scooped them up, and wrote down the words. It was a lot easier than writing
real
poems.

“We think your poetry is
brilliant
, A.J.,” Mr. Klutz said.

“We want to have you tested,” said Ms. Coco.

What?! Tested?

“Do I have to pee into a cup?” I asked.

“No, nothing like that,” Ms. Coco said. “A.J., we always knew you were gifted. That’s why we put you in the gifted and talented program. We want to have you tested to see if you might be a
genius
.”

What?! A genius? I’m not a genius! I’m just a regular kid!

“What kind of test are you gonna give me?” I asked.

“Oh, we’re not going to give it to you,”
Mr. Klutz said.

“Who will?” I asked.

And you’ll never believe who walked into the door at that moment.

Nobody. Because if you walked into a door it would hurt. But you’ll never believe who walked into the
doorway
.

It was Dr. Brad, our school counselor!