Miss Nogard sadly shook her head. “I am very disappointed in you,” she said. “Not only did you vandalize the dictionary. But then you lied about it. I thought I could trust you, Maurecia. I guess I was wrong.”
“I’m a horrible person,” Maurecia agreed. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” said Miss Nogard. “It’s not my dictionary. It belongs to the class.”
Maurecia had to stand in front of the class and tell them she was sorry. Then, since nobody would ever be able to use that page again, she had to read it aloud to the class.
She struggled through the difficult words like “journalism” and “judicious.”
“Speak up,” Miss Nogard had to keep reminding her. “And everyone needs to pay close attention because there will be a test on it when Maurecia is finished.”
“Hey, that’s not fair!” complained Jason. “We didn’t rip the dictionary. Why should we be punished?”
“It’s not punishment,” said Miss Nogard. “It is for your own good. Since you can no longer use that page, you need to memorize it.”
“Thanks a lot, Maurecia!” griped Jenny.
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When Maurecia finished reading it, Miss Nogard made her turn the page over and read the back side of it too.
“But I only ripped the front,” said Maurecia. “Not the back.”
She finished, then returned to her seat, angry and upset. She wasn’t angry at Miss Nogard. Miss Nogard was just being fair, she thought.
But there was only one way Miss Nogard could have known about the torn page, she realized. Somebody in the class must have seen her tear it and then tattled on her.
She looked around the room, from Deedee to Todd to Terrence to Joy. She didn’t trust any of them.
One of her friends was a no-good-dirty-double-crossing-snake-in-the-grass!
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Chapter 26
Never Laugh at a Shoelace
“This is a shoelace,” said Mac.
Everybody laughed.
Mac was standing at the front of the room, holding his shoelace in his hand. He felt like a fool.
“What a fool!” said Allison.
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It all started a minute earlier, when Miss Nogard asked, “Who has something to share for show-and-tell?”
But first you should know something about Mac.
Mac’s favorite subject in the whole world was show-and-tell. He loved it. Especially when he was the one doing the showing and telling.
He often looked through garbage cans on his way to school, in search of stuff to show and tell about. Once he found a real gushy love letter. It was covered with something that looked like peach slime. But that wasn’t what made it gushy. The gushy part was what was written in the letter. Mac read it to the class with lots of feeling.
So when Miss Nogard said, “Who has something to share for show-and-tell?” Mac reacted without thinking. His arm shot up like a rocket as he almost jumped out of his seat. “Ooooh! Ooooh!” he groaned.