“We want to turn it into a video-game arcade,” I told her.

  “What a great idea!” She beamed. “I love video games. There are so many schools and so few video-game arcades. It makes perfect sense to turn some of those schools into video-game arcades. I’ll arrange a meeting with Mr. Klutz tomorrow so we can ask him if we can buy the school. But right now, we have to go to Mrs. Cooney’s office.”

  Mrs. Cooney’s office is down the hall from our class. She says she’s the school nurse, but personally I think she’s a spy. I’ll tell you why. There’s this big poster on her wall that says this:

  I tried to read it, and it didn’t make any sense at all. Even Andrea Young didn’t know how to read the poster, and she knows everything. I think Mrs. Cooney has created a secret code, and she’s using the poster to send mystery spy messages. I will have to keep an eye on her.

  When we walked into Mrs. Cooney’s office, she had us all line up in size order. I was one of the shortest kids, so I had to stand in the front of the line. Then Mrs. Cooney told us to take off our shoes. At first I thought she didn’t want us to track mud all over her office. But then she told us that she was going to weigh and measure us. Obviously she is trying to gather information about us, because that is what spies do.

  My friend Billy says that the heavier you are, the smarter you are, because heavy people have bigger brains. But I think Billy just says that because he is overweight. I weighed fifty-two pounds.

  Mrs. Cooney showed us this awesome ruler she has. It is made of metal and stretches out six feet long. When she presses a button, the whole thing shoots into her hand and disappears like magic. That is cool! I’ll bet she has lots of other spy tools too.

  She wouldn’t let us play with her magic ruler, but Mrs. Cooney ran around measuring everything. She showed us that the bench we were sitting on was seventeen inches high. The door to her office was thirty inches across. And her foot was twelve inches long.

  “Hey, my foot is a foot!” Mrs. Cooney exclaimed.

  “Aren’t all feet feet?” I asked.

  “Some feet are less than a foot, and some feet are more than a foot,” she replied. “But my foot is exactly a foot.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  Mrs. Cooney wrapped the measuring tape around her forehead and announced, “Look! My head is almost two feet in circumference!”

  I knew that circumference was the distance all the way around a circle and diameter was the distance through the middle of a circle.

  “What’s the diameter of your head, Mrs. Cooney?” I asked. Everybody laughed, even though I didn’t say anything funny.

  “That would be hard to measure. But isn’t measuring things fun?” Mrs. Cooney asked. “I wonder how much the scale weighs.”

  Mrs. Cooney started to measure and weigh more things, but Miss Daisy said we had to go back to class.

  6

  What Do You Want to Be?

  At the end of the day, Miss Daisy sat on the floor and we all sat around her. She told us to talk about what we want to be when we grow up.

  “I want to be a veterinarian,” said Andrea Young.

  “Does anyone know what the word veterinarian means?” asked Miss Daisy.

  “That’s somebody who doesn’t eat meat,” said Michael Robinson.

  “It is not!” I said. “That’s a vegetarian. A veterinarian is somebody who fought in a war.”

  “That’s a veteran,” Miss Daisy said. “Andrea, would you like to tell the class what a veterinarian does?”

  “A veterinarian is an animal doctor.”

  That Andrea Young thinks she knows everything. But for once, I knew she was wrong.

  “Animals can’t be doctors,” I said.

  Everybody laughed, even though I didn’t say anything funny. Miss Daisy said a veterinarian is a doctor who takes care of animals. That made a lot more sense than that dumb thing Andrea said.

  Emily was next and she said she wanted to grow up and become a nurse in a hospital.

  “Why do you want to do that?” I asked. “People come into hospitals all sick and injured, their arms falling off, their guts hanging out….”

  “A.J.!” Miss Daisy said in her serious voice.

  Emily got all upset and ran out of the room crying.

  “What did I say?” I asked.

  “What do you want to be when you grow up, A.J.?” Miss Daisy asked.

  “I’m going to be a famous football player,” I said.

  “Really? And why did you choose that field?”

  “Because I love football,” I said, “and if I was a football player, I wouldn’t have to read or write or do arithmetic or go to school. My friend Billy told me that football players are really dumb.”

  “Your friend told you that?” said Miss Daisy.

  “Yeah, Billy is really smart. He also told me that if you dig a hole deep enough, you can dig all the way to China. And if you fall into that hole, you’d fall all the way through the Earth and pop right out the other side. And you’d be moving so fast that you’d shoot all the way into outer space.”

  Michael Robinson said that sounded cool. He decided that instead of becoming a firefighter, he wanted to become one of those hole-digging astronauts.

  Emily came back into the room with a tissue. Everybody else went around in a circle saying what they wanted to be. This girl named Lindsay said she wanted to be a singer. Ryan said he wanted to be a businessman like his dad.

  Andrea Young said that if she couldn’t be a veterinarian, she wanted to be a teacher like Miss Daisy. Then she gave Miss Daisy a big smile.

  I hate her.

  7

  Bonbons and Footballs

  The next day, Miss Daisy brought in a box with ribbons on it and told us she had a surprise.

  “What’s in the box?” we pleaded.

  “It’s a secret.”

  “Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?”

  “Well, okay,” she said, opening the box. “It’s bonbons!”

  Miss Daisy said she thought we might be able to use them for arithmetic problems so we could learn together. She put the bonbons on the table in the front of the room. There must have been twenty or thirty of them. “Can somebody think up an arithmetic problem using bonbons?” she asked. “Andrea?”

  “If you had three bonbons in a box,” said Andrea as she put three bonbons into her pencil box, “and you had three boxes just like that, how many bonbons would you have all together?”

  Miss Daisy looked at Andrea’s pencil box for a long time, counting in her head and on her fingers. Any dummy would know that three boxes with three bonbons in each box would equal nine bonbons. Three times three is nine. But Miss Daisy didn’t seem to know that. Finally she just opened up Andrea’s pencil box and popped the three bonbons into her mouth.

  “Who cares how many bonbons I would have?” she asked. “As long as I get to eat some of them!”

  Miss Daisy really needs a lot of help with arithmetic.

  After she had eaten her bonbons, Miss Daisy passed out bonbons for all of us and we had a bonbon party. Then she said that was enough arithmetic for the day and asked what we wanted to talk about for the rest of our math time. “Football!” I shouted.

  Miss Daisy didn’t like that I talked without raising my hand first. Personally, I don’t see what raising my hand has to do with talking. I don’t talk with my hands.

  But she did let me talk, and I told her that football is just about my favoritest thing in the world and I know all about it. My dad takes me to every game of the Chargers, a professional football team.

  “Maybe you can help me,” Miss Daisy said. “I always wondered how long is a football field?”

  “A hundred yards,” I told her. “Anybody knows that.”

  “Wow! That’s a big field. With a field that big, how can you and your father see what’s going on?”

  “My dad always tries to get us seats near the fifty-yard line,” I said. “They’re the best tickets.”

  “Why?” Miss Daisy asked.

  “Because the fifty-yard line is right in the middle of the field.”

  “Does that mean that half of a hundred yards would be fifty yards?” she asked.

  “Yup.”

  “I see,” Miss Daisy said. “So if you know there are a hundred yards on a football field, do you know how many pennies there are in a dollar? Andrea?”

  “A hundred!” hollered Andrea Young. “Just like a football field!”

  “Really?” said Miss Daisy. “So if half the football field is fifty yards, how many pennies are in half a dollar?”

  “Fifty!” Michael Robinson shouted. “Because fifty is half of a hundred and fifty plus fifty makes a hundred!”

  “And half of fifty must be twenty-five because two quarters is fifty cents!” added Emily.

  “And four quarters makes a dollar!” Ryan exclaimed.

  “And four quarters makes a football game, too!” Miss Daisy shouted, jumping up and down with excitement.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought you told us we were finished with arithmetic.”

  “This wasn’t arithmetic,” she told us. “It was football.”

  “Well, okay,” I said. “Just as long as you weren’t trying to sneak arithmetic into our conversation about football.”

  “Would I do that?” Miss Daisy asked, and then she winked at me.

  Sometimes it’s hard to tell if Miss Daisy is serious or not.

  8

  A Lot of Books!

  On Thursday Principal Klutz came into our class. He was wearing a hat, which almost made him look like a regular person who had hair on his head.

  “I have to go to a meeting,” Principal Klutz told us, “but I heard that some of you second graders had something important you wanted to discuss with me.”

  Miss Daisy said that I could ask my question.

  “Can we buy the school?”

  “Hmmm,” Principal Klutz said. “Hmmm” is what grown-ups say instead of “er” or “um” or “uh” when they don’t know what to say.

  “Why do you want to buy the school?” Principal Klutz asked.

  “Because we want to turn it into a video-game arcade,” I told him.

  “I see,” the principal said. “Schools cost a lot of money.”

  “How much?” I asked. “If you tell us how much it will cost, we’ll raise the money.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Principal Klutz said. “I can’t sell you the school, but I can rent it to you for a night. Do you know the difference between buying and renting?”

  Andrea Young got her hand up first, as usual.

  “When you buy a video, you get to keep it forever,” she said. “If you rent it, you have to return it to the video store in a couple of days.”

  “That’s right,” the principal said. “Would you be interested in renting the school for a night?”

  “How much would that cost?” I asked.

  “One million pages,” Principal Klutz replied.

  “Huh?”

  “If you kids read a million pages in books, you can turn the school into a video-game arcade for one night.”

  A million pages! That sounded like a lot of books.

  “How about a thousand pages?” I suggested.

  “A million,” said Principal Klutz. “That’s my final offer. Take it or leave it.”

  “Would it be okay if some of the other classes helped us out?” Miss Daisy asked.

  “Certainly,” Principal Klutz said. “The more the merrier. And I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. If the kids in this school read a million pages, I will come to the big video-game night dressed in a gorilla suit.”

  “You’ve got a deal!” I said, rushing forward to shake Principal Klutz’s hand.

  In my head I was already hatching a plan.

  9

  Put Those Books Away

  As soon as I got home from school, I went up to my big sister Amy’s room.

  Amy is in fifth grade, so she knows lots of things.

  “You’ve got to help me!” I said. “If the school reads a million pages in books, Principal Klutz will put on a gorilla suit and let us turn the school into a video-game arcade!”

  “I would do anything to see that,” Amy said.

  Amy knows how to work the computer really well. She helped me make posters that said LET’S TURN OUR SCHOOL IN TO A VIDEO-GAME ARCADE! and LET’S TURN PRINCIPAL KLUTZ INTO A GORILLA!

  We tacked the posters up all over Main Street. Amy sent e-mails and instant messages to all the kids in the fifth grade. The next morning we tacked the posters up all over school. I passed them out to the kids I saw. Mrs. Roopy, the school librarian, said we could put up some posters in the library. Mr. Sacco, the custodian, said we could put some up in the lunchroom and the bathrooms. Ms. Hynde, the music teacher, said we could put some up in the music room.

  By the middle of the day, everyone in the school was reading like crazy! Kids were reading during lunch. Kids were reading during recess! Kids were plowing their way through books and then running to the school library to ask Mrs. Roopy if they could check out more. I read a book about frogs, and I don’t even care anything about frogs.

  Some of the teachers were starting to get mad, because kids were reading books when they were supposed to be doing other things.

  “Please put those books away,” Miss Daisy had to tell us. “It’s time for reading.”

  Miss Daisy said she was sorry that she wouldn’t be able to help us very much because she didn’t know how to read. But she was nice enough to draw a big mural in the hallway with a giant thermometer on it. Every time we read a lot of pages, she would make the temperature line on the thermometer go up. At the top of the thermometer were the words One million.

  Soon kids were bursting into our room and yelling, “Mrs. Biggs’s class has read another five hundred pages!” and “Miss Hasenfratz says to add another six hundred pages!” It was fun watching the temperature go up.

  At the end of a week, our school had read almost a half a million pages!

  10

  Football Players Are Really Dumb

  “Boys and girls, today we have a very special and famous guest,” Miss Daisy said. “His name is Boomer Wiggins.”

  “Wow!” was the first thing everybody said.

  “Who’s he?” was the second thing everybody said.

  But I knew who Boomer Wiggins was. Because Boomer Wiggins was my hero. He was the quarterback of my favorite football team, the Chargers! Wow! A real football player right in our classroom! Miss Daisy told us that Boomer Wiggins had a daughter in fourth grade, and that’s why he was spending the day at our school.

  When Boomer Wiggins walked into the class, everybody gasped. He was really big and had so many muscles that they poked right against his shirt! We all crowded around him, and Boomer let us feel his arm muscles. I couldn’t even get my hands around them! Then Boomer picked up Emily with one hand!

  He was amazing. Then he gave each of us a little plastic football, and he signed his name on each one.

  “Does anybody have any questions?” Boomer asked.

  “Do you like knocking guys on their butts?” I asked.

  Everybody laughed, even though I didn’t say anything that was funny. Miss Daisy said it was “butt,” not “butts,” because a person only has one butt. But I said a butt was divided into two halves, so really it could be “butts.” Miss Daisy said that was enough of that talk. I said she shouldn’t be complaining because she was the one who started it.

  “I don’t like knocking people down,” Boomer told us, “but sometimes we have to because it’s part of the game.”

  “Mr. Wiggins,” asked Miss Daisy, “is it true that football players are really dumb?”

  We all gasped. I was afraid Boomer Wiggins might knock Miss Daisy on her butt.

  “Excuse me?” Boomer said, like he wasn’t sure if he had heard the question.

  “Well, somebody once told me that if you play football, you don’t have to know how to read or write or do arithmetic or go to school.”

  “Who told you that?” Boomer asked Miss Daisy.

  Everybody looked at me. I slid down so that my head was almost under my desk, and I hid behind my notebook.

  “Oh, a good friend of mine told me,” Miss Daisy said. “Is it true?”

  “If I didn’t go to school, I never could have become a football player,” Boomer told us. “I have to read and study my playbook very carefully. I have to write letters to my fans. Every week I have to study very hard to get ready for the next game.”

  “Did you go to college?” asked Miss Daisy.

  “Yes,” Boomer said, “and when my football career is over, I plan to go back to school so I can become a doctor.”

  “Wow!” I said. “I want to go to college someday so I can become a doctor and knock guys on their butts. I mean butt.”

  Everybody laughed, even though I didn’t say anything funny. Then, to prove how smart he was, Boomer Wiggins read us a book and passed out bookmarks that said “Achieve Your Goal by Reading” on them.

  Miss Daisy said that even though Boomer read the book to us, we could still add fifty-two pages to the total number of pages we’ve read.

  The temperature level on the thermometer in the hallway kept getting higher and higher.

  11

  We Rule the School!

  Finally the big moment arrived. It was Andrea Young (of course!) who read the one-millionth page. We all cheered when Miss Daisy went out in the hallway and filled in the top of the thermometer all the way up to the words One million.

  That Friday night, everybody in the whole school showed up at school. Can you believe it? I actually couldn’t wait to get to school…on the weekend! When we got there, a big banner was hanging over the front door that said WE READ A MILLION PAGES! on it. Principal Klutz was waiting for us. He was wearing a gorilla suit, just like he promised. Inside there was a table of snacks and treats and juice. Miss Daisy had brought in bonbons.