Mr klutz is nuts, p.3
Mr. Klutz Is Nuts!,
p.3
“She means we can’t take this anymore,” Ryan told me.
“Is that what the last straw means?” I asked. “I always wondered what the last straw meant.”
“At first I thought Mr. Klutz was just a funny guy,” Andrea said seriously. “And he is. But he’s also a deeply disturbed man. We’ve got to do something. If he keeps going like this, he might hurt himself again. Or even worse. If we don’t stop him and something terrible happens, it would be our fault.”
“I never thought of it that way,” I said.
“What can we do?” Emily asked. “We’re just kids.”
“We have to have an intervention,” Andrea said.
“What’s that?” Ryan asked.
“It’s when you sit down and tell somebody they have a problem,” Andrea explained. “You force them to do something about it. My mother has to do interventions all the time.”
“I’m not telling Mr. Klutz he has a problem,” Ryan said.
“Me neither,” agreed Michael.
“A.J., you started this whole thing,” Andrea told me.
“I did not!”
“Sure you did. You were the one who gave him the idea to give out incentives for learning in the first place.”
“That’s true,” the others agreed, looking at me like I was a criminal or something.
“All I did was hit a puck into Annette,” I said.
“A.J., you’ve got to tell Mr. Klutz that if he bungee-jumps off the roof, we’re not going to read one minute with our parents,” Andrea said. “Two can play at this game. If he’s going to do crazy things, we won’t read any more books. We won’t spell any more words. We won’t do any more math problems. We won’t learn anything.”
I couldn’t believe I was hearing this from Andrea. Her idea of having fun is to read the dictionary during recess. If she was willing to give up learning, she must be really serious about Mr. Klutz and his problems.
“But if we stop learning stuff,” I protested, “we’ll get dumber.”
“In your case,” Andrea told me, “that would be impossible.”
12
A Hard Bargain
That afternoon we talked Miss Daisy into letting us go to Mr. Klutz’s office for a meeting.
“We need to speak with Mr. Klutz,” Andrea told the school secretary. “It’s very important.”
“It’s a matter of life and death,” Ryan said.
The secretary let us in. Mr. Klutz wasn’t hanging from the ceiling or anything. He had on boxing gloves and he was punching his punching bag.
“May I help you kids?” he asked.
“Go ahead, A.J.,” Andrea said, giving me a shove from behind.
“Mr. Klutz,” I told him, “we have come to make a deal with you.”
“Really? What kind of deal?”
“We decided that we will read a million minutes with our parents, but only if you don’t jump off the roof.”
“Only if I don’t jump off the roof?” he said, looking puzzled. “But I was going to jump off the roof as an incentive to encourage you to read with your parents at night.”
“Well, we’re going to read with our parents at night as an incentive to make you not jump off the roof.”
“This is highly unusual,” Mr. Klutz said. “I thought the principal should offer the students incentives, not the other way around.”
“Your incentives have been getting more and more dangerous,” Andrea told him. “We’re afraid that you might get killed trying to help us learn.”
“Yeah, and if you die, we’ll feel guilty,” I added.
“Now, let me get this straight,” Mr. Klutz said. “I offered to jump off the roof if you read a million minutes at night with your parents. But you are saying you will only read a million minutes with your parents if I don’t jump off the roof. Correct?”
“That’s right,” we said.
“What if I jumped off the basketball backboard in the gym into a swimming pool filled with foam blocks?” Mr. Klutz asked. “Would that be okay?”
“No!” we all said.
“Can I wear a suit made of bubble wrap and jump off the stage in the auditorium?”
“No!”
“No jumping off anything,” Andrea insisted. “Not if you want us to read or write or do math. That’s our final offer. Take it or leave it.”
“You drive a hard bargain.” Mr. Klutz sighed. “Okay, I won’t jump.”
“Have a nice day!” we all said.
13
Poor Mr. Klutz
The kids in the other grades were disappointed when they heard that Mr. Klutz had changed his mind about bungee-jumping off the roof of the school. Some of them were even mad at us for stopping him.
But when it was announced that there would be a field trip to Water World if we reached our goal instead, they stopped being mad. Water World is probably the coolest water park in California.
A few days before vacation, the school still hadn’t reached our goal of a million minutes of reading with our parents. It looked like we were not going to make it in time.
Then Mr. Klutz got on the loudspeaker during morning announcements. “Students, there are three more nights to go before vacation,” he told us. “I hate to do this, but if you don’t reach your goal by Friday, the field trip to Water World will be called off and I will have no choice but to jump off the roof. Have a nice day.”
After hearing that, everybody started reading with their parents like crazy. Even the sixth graders, who say that reading isn’t cool. Everybody wanted to go to Water World. We reached a million minutes the day before school let out for vacation.
The field trip to Water World was awesome! They had about a hundred giant water slides, and in some of them you slid in the dark with laser beams shooting all over the place. We got to eat as much pizza and ice cream as we wanted.
They also had one of those giant, inflatable moon bounce thingies where you jump around like crazy inside it. After water sliding, eating all that junk food, and bouncing in the moon bounce, I thought I was going to throw up. It was the greatest day of my life.
Me and Ryan and Emily and Andrea and Michael went looking for Mr. Klutz to thank him. We found him standing next to the moon bounce thingy.
“Great party!” I told Mr. Klutz, and we all gave him a big hug. “If you ask me, you’re the greatest principal in the history of the world.”
“Thanks, A.J.!”
“See, you didn’t need to bungee-jump off the school to make us learn,” Andrea said.
“I guess not,” Mr. Klutz said. He was looking up at the moon bounce. “But I was just thinking, if we brought one of these moon bounce things out to the front of the school, and I went up on the roof—”
“No!” we all yelled.
“I wouldn’t even need a bungee cord—”
“No!”
“It’s pretty soft—”
“No!”
I think it’s going to be very hard work helping Mr. Klutz get over this need he has to do nutty things. Maybe by June, if the whole school works together, we might be able to cure him.
But it won’t be easy.
About the Author and the Illustrator
DAN GUTMAN has written many weird books for kids. Dan lives in New Jersey (a very weird place) with his weird wife and two weird children. You can visit him on his weird website at www.dangutman.com
JIM PAILLOT is a talented but weird illustrator who lives in Arizona. He also has a weird wife and two weird children. Isn’t that weird? You can visit him on his weird website at www.jimpaillot.com
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Credits
Cover art © 2004 by Jim Paillot
Cover art © 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Copyright
Mr. Klutz Is Nuts!. Illustrations Copyright © 2004 by Jim Paillot. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition SEPTEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780061973406
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Dan Gutman, Mr. Klutz Is Nuts!
