Wayside School Beneath the Cloud of Doom (Wayside School #4) - Louis Sachar Page 0,22
it was the other way around. Either way, it gave her an obvious advantage.
Louis, the yard teacher, stood next to the bottom step. “On your mark!” he called out. “Get set!”
Louis blew his whistle.
The children rushed past him, knees pumping and elbows flailing.
Deedee started way back in the pack, but besides her uneven legs, she had another advantage. She was skinny and short. She could squeeze past the slower kids ahead of her.
And they were all slower than Deedee.
As she neared the third floor, only Dameon remained ahead of her.
A man with a black mustache was waiting on the landing.
“How many quarts in a gallon?” he asked Dameon.
“Eight,” said Dameon.
Dameon was sent back down to the first floor.
“Name a city in England,” he said to Deedee.
“London!” Deedee shouted, then continued on up.
Dr. Pickle was waiting on the fourth floor. “Are dreams real?” he asked.
Deedee was stumped. She could hear other kids charging up the stairs behind her. She hated to have to go back down.
“They’re real dreams,” she said.
Dr. Pickle rubbed his beard. “Very interesting answer,” he said, and let her pass.
By the time she reached the ninth floor, she could only hear distant footsteps behind her.
“What do you call someone who writes books?” asked Mrs. Surlaw.
“You don’t call them,” said Deedee. “You must never interrupt a great author during her moment of inspiration.”
“I think you said the correct answer in there somewhere,” the librarian decided.
On the twelfth floor, the man with the mustache was waiting again. Deedee wondered how he had gotten ahead of her.
“Name the largest river in the United States.”
Deedee couldn’t remember its name, but she knew how to spell it. “M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i!”
Miss Mush asked the question on the fifteenth floor. “How many points on a fork?”
Deedee formed a picture of a fork in her mind, but when she tried to count the points, they blurred.
“Three?” she tried.
“I’m so sorry, Deedee,” said Miss Mush.
She didn’t have to go all the way back down to the bottom, just to the tenth.
Ron was coming up the other way. “Hi, Deedee,” he greeted her.
“Hi, Ron,” said Deedee. “Hope you studied your forks and spoons?”
She reached the tenth, answered another question there, then again on the eleventh and twelfth.
Ron was coming down.
“Hi, Ron.”
“Hi, Deedee.”
She reached Miss Mush a second time.
“What was Christopher Columbus’s favorite vegetable?” asked the lunch lady.
Deedee knew that one. “Cabbage!”
She had spent two whole nights studying the history of cabbage.
When she reached the eighteenth floor, the man with the mustache was there again.
“Are zebras black with white stripes, or white with black stripes?”
Deedee thought it was the same thing, but knew that had to be wrong. “The first one,” she guessed.
“Was that white with black stripes, or black with white stripes?”
“I don’t remember,” said Deedee.
“Me neither,” the man admitted, and let her pass.
A tall, thin woman asked the next question. She looked like a teacher, but Deedee had never seen her before. Strangely, the woman had one very long fingernail on her pinky.
“Please recite the alphabet backward.”
Deedee had to close her eyes to concentrate. “Z, Y, X . . .”
It took her a long time. In her mind, Deedee had to keep saying the alphabet forward, in order to figure out the next backward letter.
She could hear footsteps coming closer, and then Maurecia came up alongside her.
“What are you stopping for?” Maurecia asked.
Deedee looked around. The woman with the long fingernail was gone. “C, B A!” she finished, just in case.
Deedee and Maurecia continued up together, reaching the twentieth floor at the same time. The mustache man was back again.
“How many toes does a three-toed sloth have?” he asked.
That had to be the easiest question yet, thought Deedee. “Three,” she said.
“Twelve,” said Maurecia.
Deedee was sent back down to the fifteenth floor.
Now she really had to turn on the jets. She leaped around and over the other kids on her way down, and then, using her uneven legs, she practically flew back up the stairs, as she answered all the questions correctly.
She shot past Maurecia between the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth floors, answered a question about the different kinds of dirt, and then finally reached the top of the stairs where Mrs. Jewls was waiting.
“How many points on a fork?” Mrs. Jewls asked.
“I already had that question,” Deedee said as she took several long deep breaths. Her heart was pounding.
“Good, then you know the answer.”
Once again, Deedee tried to picture a fork in her mind. It was either three or four.
“Twelve!” she declared, still confused about the sloth, with its three