The Adventures of Beanboy by Lisa Harkrader

Author:Lisa Harkrader
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

—and saw smoke curling up from our skillet. While we’d been watching Ms. Flanigan, the edges of our grilled cheese sandwiches had sizzled to a crispy black.

Noah closed his eyes, his face knotted in anguish and despair. “I can’t believe I let myself get distracted like that. I’m acing advanced Spanish, advanced English, and ninth grade chemistry. I can’t flunk grilled cheese sandwiches. How would that look on my permanent record?”

I glanced up. Ms. Flanigan was overseeing a boiledover soup disaster in Kitchen #4.

“She hasn’t noticed,” I said.

“She will. She can sense burnt from fifty paces. She’ll take off points in every category—Time Management, Equipment Maintenance, Ingredient Handling, Recipe Compliance. She’ll make up whole new categories just so she can take off points. We’re doomed.”

I stared at the burnt crusts. No way could I stay after school to redo the whole project. No way could I miss Art Club.

I slid our utensil drawer open and burrowed for what we needed. “I give you”—I held up a large metal cookie cutter—“extra credit.”

Noah eyed the cutter. His anguish and despair began to melt.

Because the one thing Ms. Flanigan loved more than anything, the one thing sure to make her give out extra credit points, was Food Presentation, or, as she put it, “arranging your meals in the most attractive and appealing manner possible.” According to Ms. Flanigan, good presentation could trick your brain into thinking the food tasted better than it actually did. She’d looked up a bunch of scientific studies that said so.

If anybody knew how to trick somebody into eating, it was yours truly, Tucker MacBean. It was probably my best talent. It was the one skill I possessed that came marginally close to a superpower.

It was the only thing keeping my brother alive.

And now it was going to save our sandwiches.

Noah scrubbed the black stuff off our skillet before Ms. Flanigan’s Spidey senses could kick in. I wielded our cookie cutter with skill and precision and buried the burnt-crust evidence in the trash. We fanned our sandwiches across a plate and stood back to admire our masterpiece.

“Gingerbread men!” Ms. Flanigan and her chef’s hat bobbed to our kitchen. “Or should I say, grilled-cheese men.” She held our plate up so seventh hour could see it. “Class, this is what I mean by food presentation.”

She set the plate down and bobbed off, scribbling stars in her grade book as she went.

Noah punched my arm. “Dude,” he whispered. “You saved us.”

Yep.

I did.

Me and my cookie cutter.

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