Ellie Engle Saves Herself by Leah Johnson

Author:Leah Johnson [Johnson, Leah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Disney Book Group
Published: 2023-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Nothing is worse than a roomful of know-it-alls

getting ready to do an experiment where they have to cut open a thing that used to be alive. The minute we put on our lab goggles and plastic aprons, every seventh grader in Advanced Science becomes Bruce Banner Junior.

“You’re not doing it right!”

“No, this is how the pins go into the arm. See?”

“You’re gonna puke all over everything—move!”

The kids in this science class are the ones who were on the “advanced track” in elementary. That’s a fancy way of saying our class is full of honor-roll goody-goodies. People like Marley Keilor, who get straight As but are mostly smart about terrible things. Like how you can make people cry the fastest when something embarrassing happens to them. For example, when someone bleeds through their pants during tug-of-war at summer camp because they got their period for the first time and you call them the Creature from the Blood Lagoon in front of your entire cabin.

Not that I know anyone that happened to or anything. Obviously.

Advanced also means we get to do cool stuff earlier than the rest of the kids in our grade. Stuff like dissecting frogs. It’s kind of disgusting to think about—poking around inside an innocent amphibian—but it’s also pretty cool. We spent all last year studying cells and organs to prepare for this experiment. The worksheets and the homework were the boring part, but this is the bright light at the end of the tunnel.

Everyone in the room is all hopped up on the experiment, in good ways and bad, with some reviewing their textbooks, some rubbing their hands together like evil villains, and others pretending to throw up from the smell of the stuff they use to keep the frogs from looking even more gross than they already do. Even Sammy Spencer is into it.

I know I saw him just yesterday at Wrigley’s, and it wasn’t totally awful. But there’s something about being back in school and knowing that Marley is staring in our direction like a hawk just to get a better view of Sammy’s sparkly eyes or whatever, that makes it hard to talk to him like I would anybody else. In a comic, a character who has no allegiance to either the good guys or the bad guys is called true neutral. Wrigley’s is kind of like that. There are no sides in a comic book store. Just people and our imaginations.

School isn’t like that, though. There are sides, and people like Marley and Sammy are on one end, and people like me and Bree are on the other. Even now, Sammy somehow still manages to look like he belongs on TV in the big, goofy lab goggles that we’re required to wear for the dissection. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure I look like a supremely uncool version of Cyclops.

“I’m not really sure where to start.” Sammy squints at the instructions printout we got when we came in and takes notes on the back of it.

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