Tabloidology (10 page)

Ms. Baumgartner never finished her sentence. The office door blew open. It was the duty teacher, Mrs. O'Reilly. “Ms. Baumgartner, you've got to come quickly! Out on the front field! It's an emergency!”

NINE

T
rixi had never seen “Frozen Face” O'Reilly quite like this before. Kids called her that because, from September to June, the expression on her face never changed. Her eyebrows didn't rise when there was a fire in the garbage can. Her lips didn't even twitch the time Trixi cracked a joke that was so funny, five kids fell out of their desks laughing. Her eyes didn't so much as blink when she sat on a whoopee cushion on the bus during a field trip to the game farm.

But today Mrs. O'Reilly's face was twisted into a look of wild, heart-popping panic. Trixi couldn't imagine what it would take to get Mrs. O'Reilly's face to stretch and twist and scrunch like this. Had there been some sort of accident? Maybe someone had been hit by a car! Maybe an airplane had crashed in the soccer field! Maybe an escaped convict was holding a student at gunpoint, demanding a car, a million dollars in unmarked bills and clear passage to the border! Trixi's mind crackled with endless possibilities.

Mrs. O'Reilly grabbed Ms. Baumgartner by the wrist and pulled her out of the office. On her way out, Ms. Baumgartner said, “You two—stay right where you are. I'll be back shortly.”

As soon as Mrs. O'Reilly and Ms. Baumgartner were out of the office, Trixi sprang from her chair.

“Hey! Didn't you hear what Ms. Baumgartner just told us?” Martin said. “We're supposed to stay put.”

“I am a newspaper reporter. And newspaper reporters must always be on the lookout for new material.” Trixi crossed the office to the window and pulled open the blinds. “Oh my goodness! This looks good!” she said. “Really good!” Undoing the latch on the window, she pulled it open and stuck out her head.

Martin couldn't help himself. He slunk across the office to join Trixi at the window. The first thing he saw was Mrs. O'Reilly pulling Ms. Baumgartner across the field toward the maple trees and a great crowd of gasping, shrieking, screaming kids and adults. As Ms. Baumgartner drew closer to the trees, she suddenly took off in a wild sprint, leaving Mrs.

O'Reilly behind.

“Can you figure out what's going on?” Trixi said.

“I don't know. I can't really see from here,” Martin replied.

“Well, whatever it is, it's too good to miss.” Trixi slung her leg up on the windowsill.

“Hey! What are you doing?” Martin took a step back. “We're in enough trouble already!”

“Don't worry, Marty. Ms. Baumgartner's a little busy right now. She won't notice if I'm gone for a few minutes.” Trixi slung her other leg over the windowsill, hopped down to the ground and was off across the field.

A few seconds later, Trixi heard Martin shout, “Hey! Wait up!”

When they reached the crowd, Trixi pushed her way through, with Martin close behind. “School newspaper! Let me through!” Trixi said. “Step aside! School newspaper! Let me through!” Once Trixi and Martin had fought their way through the tangle of jostling elbows and shoving hands, they stopped and looked up at a scene that could only be described as bizarre.

There were no injured children, no crumpled airplanes and no escaped convicts. What Trixi and Martin did find was Vice-principal Quigley jumping up and down under the branch of a maple tree. With each frantic jump, he tried to reach a small black clump of hair stuck in a branch about three meters off the ground. Each time he jumped, there was a great flash as the sun glinted off the top of his bald head.

Standing beside Trixi in the crowd was her classmate, Lonnie Blackwell. “Hey, Lonnie. What in the name of Jumping Jack Horner is going on here?”

Lonnie Blackwell had been Citizen of the Year for the last three years. She sang in the church choir, volunteered at the hospital and scraped gum off the bottoms of chairs in her spare time. Lonnie had never told a lie or stretched the truth in her life.

“When Mr. Quigley stepped under the branch, it swooped down like a giant claw and grabbed the hair on the top of his head. But the hair turned out to be a hairpiece!” Lonnie said. “It was just awful! The hairpiece must have been held on by glue or something, because Mr. Quigley was a little way off the ground before the hairpiece popped off his head and he fell back down. Then the branch just stayed there, holding the hairpiece out of Mr. Quigley's reach.”

“You're not serious!” Martin said. “That's the most ridiculous story I've ever heard in my life!”

“But it's true!” Lonnie said.

Martin shook his head and turned to one of his own classmates, Garth Horton. Garth was a member of the Young Astronomers League who liked to spend his Saturdays helping little old ladies cross the street.

“Hey, Garth. I'm hearing some wild stories about what happened here,” Martin said. “It looks to me like Mr. Quigley was climbing the tree to rescue a cat and his hairpiece got caught as he was jumping down. That's probably what happened, right?”

“No, it was nothing like that at all,” Garth said. “That tree just reached down like it was really angry and yanked Mr. Quigley's hair right off his head! I saw it with my very own eyes!”

“That's ridiculous!” Martin said. “That's impossible! Maple trees are…are…trees! And trees don't do things like that!”

“I guess they do if you read the latest edition of the
Upland
Green Gossiper
,” Trixi said. She pulled a crumpled edition out of her pocket, held it up and said, “Just take a look at the headline:
THE REVENJ OF THE MAPEL TREES!!! Maple Trees Fite
Back After Being Trimed!
And it's actually happening!”

“Don't be ridiculous!” Martin said. “How could some article in that paper have anything to do with this? It's all just a coincidence.”

“I wouldn't be so sure about that, Marty. You just never know…,” Trixi said with a mischievous grin.

They watched as Ms. Baumgartner wrapped her arms around Mr. Quigley's waist and tried to lift him high enough to reach his hairpiece.

“Maybe we should get back to the office,” Martin said.

“Not yet,” Trixi said. “Here comes Mrs. Sledge. I figure we're in for a little more action. Let's just wait around to hear what she has to say.”

“Excuse me, Ms. Baumgartner!” The school secretary pushed through the crowd and tapped the principal on her shoulder. “There's an urgent telephone call for you.”

“Not now, Mrs. Sledge. Can't you see I'm busy?” the principal replied. Mrs. Sledge must have realized that the principal wasn't about to let go of Mr. Quigley, so she wrapped her arms around Mr. Quigley's legs and said, “One, two, three, lift!” The extra boost from Mrs. Sledge was just enough for Mr. Quigley's fingertips to grab his hairpiece.

The crowd cheered as Ms. Baumgartner and Mrs. Sledge let go of the vice-principal. By the time Mr. Quigley hit the ground, Ms. Baumgartner and Mrs. Sledge were already on their way back to the school. Following a few meters behind were Trixi and Martin.

When they reached the window of the principal's office, they climbed back in and returned to their chairs. With the door to the outer office still open, they had a clear view of Ms. Baumgartner as she picked up the phone.

“Oh, hello, Mrs. Reynolds. What can I do for you?” Ms. Baumgartner said.

Trixi could see a puzzled expression come over the principal's face. She pulled the phone away from her ear and rubbed the earpiece with her finger. “I'm sorry, Mrs. Reynolds. We seem to have a bad phone connection. You'll have to speak a little more slowly. I can't understand you.”

The puzzled expression remained on Ms. Baumgartner's face. “Did you say
sword swallowing
?” Ms. Baumgartner started rubbing her forehead, a sure sign she didn't quite know what to make of this.

“Are you sure he's our crossing guard, Mrs. Reynolds? I've never heard of such a thing in all my days as a principal.”

“Yes, she has heard of such a thing,” Trixi whispered to Martin. “She already read about it in the latest edition of the
Upland Green Gossiper
.”

“Very well, Mrs. Reynolds. I'll look into it as soon as I can,” Ms. Baumgartner said. As soon as she put down the phone, Mrs. Sledge said, “A call for you on line two. It's the police.”

“Wow! The police!” Trixi whispered. “Now things are getting really good!”

Martin and Trixi could see Ms. Baumgartner's eyebrows jump as she picked up the phone. “Yes, Constable Jones… I see…I understand your concerns…Yes, a sword swallower would be a traffic hazard. I'll look into it right away…Thank you, Constable Jones.”

Trixi giggled as she flipped through her copy of the
Upland
Green Gossiper
. “I wonder what's going to happen next?”

Martin sat in his chair, his hands tightly gripping the sides of his head. “It just doesn't make any sense. No sense at all.”

“I don't care if it makes sense or not, Marty, but look outside!” Trixi said. “It's snowing!”

Martin pressed his hands over his eyes. “It doesn't snow here in September, Trixi,” he said. “I should know. I've studied the weather, and in the history of this town, there's never been a recorded snowfall in the month of September. It must be ashes from a fire or seedpods from some trees or something. It can't be snow.”

“Well, it's sticking to the ground, and kids are starting to make snowballs. It looks an awful lot like snow to me,” Trixi said.

Martin heard Ms. Baumgartner shouting, “Mr. Barnes! Could you please get the snow shovels out of storage?” He lifted his head and looked out. “This is crazy,” he mumbled. A thick blanket of snow covered the ground and was getting deeper by the second.

Students with blue lips staggered about in the blizzard. Cars and school buses were spinning their tires in the parking lot.

Martin and Trixi could hear Ms. Baumgartner on the phone once again, her voice louder than before. “Hello? I need the maintenance department! I need a snowplow to clear our parking lot…Yes, I know it's September!…Yes, I'm sure it's snowing! You can come over and have a look if you don't believe me!”

“I have to say,” Trixi said, “the weather forecast in the
Upland Green Gossiper
was pretty accurate.”

Martin shook his head. How could his own weather forecast be so wrong? And how could Trixi's weather forecast be so right?

As quickly as the snowstorm started, it stopped. The clouds parted, and once again, skies were blue. Unfortunately, there were now twenty centimeters of snow covering the ground. Cars and buses slid and spun in the wet sloppy snow, and kids who tried to wade through it quickly turned back to the school with cold wet feet.

“Even though it's stopped snowing, no one's going to be able to get home through all that snow,” Trixi said. “Ms. Baumgartner's going to have to hold the world's biggest sleep-over party. Three hundred kids stuck at school for the night.”

“Look!” Martin said. “It's the snowplow!”

But the longer they watched the snowplow, the more Trixi and Martin wondered if this was the snowplow Ms. Baumgartner had requested. Rather than driving in a straight line down the road, it weaved and swerved. It zigzagged across the parking lot, barely missing the teachers' cars. Then it bumped up over the curb, onto the soccer field and around behind the softball backstop, before looping around the swings. Finally, the snowplow began to drive in a straight line. Unfortunately, it was heading straight toward the front door of the school.

With the snowplow only thirty meters from the door, Trixi shouted, “Look! It's Terry Springate's dog, Sparky! He's driving the snowplow!”

Martin couldn't deny what his eyes could clearly see. Behind the windshield of the snowplow, resting on the steering wheel, were the two front paws of a cocker spaniel. The snowplow rumbled across the field in a perfectly straight line, and it didn't look as if Sparky was about to change course.

Trixi and Martin could hear the principal shout, “Clear the front of the school! Everyone out of the way!”

“First a flood in the library, and now a dog driving a snowplow through the front doors of the school. Ms. Baumgartner is having one bad week and a half,” Trixi said.

“She wouldn't blame us for this, would she?” Martin said, chewing the fingernails of both hands at once.

But Trixi never gave Martin an answer. A quick glance at Ms. Baumgartner's uneaten bologna sandwich on the principal's desk had given her an idea. She grabbed the sandwich, ran from the office and out the front door.

When Ms. Baumgartner saw Trixi run past her and out into the snow toward the approaching snowplow, she shouted, “Trixi! What are you doing? Get back in the school this instant!”

“It's okay, Ms. Baumgartner,” Trixi said. She stopped, knee-deep in the snow, and began waving the bologna sandwich above her head. “Hey, Sparky! Bologna sandwich! Yum! Yum!” Sparky may have been able to drive a snowplow, but Trixi knew he was a dog at heart. When he spotted the sandwich, his eyes opened wide and a wet sloppy tongue flopped out of his mouth. Trixi threw the sandwich as far as she could toward the parking lot. Immediately, Sparky cranked the wheel and turned the snowplow in the direction of the sandwich. He leaped through the window, scooped up the sandwich in his mouth and chomped it down in two bites. The snowplow slowly came to a stop, its front bumper nudging the school's flagpole.

Ms. Baumgartner slapped her hand against her forehead and shook her head. Then she turned to Trixi and whispered in a hoarse voice, “I suppose I should thank you.”

“You're welcome, Ms. Baumgartner,” Trixi replied as she headed back to the office.

Even though Sparky had cleared some of the snow away, Ms. Baumgartner's troubles were far from over. The temperature rose, and the snow began to melt. Rivers of water rushed to fill the gutters, flood the fields and swamp the storm drains. Within a few minutes, all that was left of the great September snowfall were a few puddles and some sopping, soaking, drenched-to-the-bone students and teachers.