You Will Call Me Drog by Sue Cowing

Author:Sue Cowing [Cowing, Sue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780761379447
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group

chapter nineteen

“Well, well, looky who’s here,” Drog said.

Notebook Man was back on the playground on Monday, but this time he was going up to the sixth-graders one by one, bending over to ask them questions and jotting down their answers. The weird thing was, the kids he talked to didn’t report to the rest of us, they just tried to pretend nothing happened.

Talk about energy coming out of people! The whole schoolyard felt like a wind-up toy cranked as far as it would go. Or maybe it was just me. I guessed I’d have to wait until it was my turn.

It never was my turn, because Wren went over to Mrs. Belcher and said something, and Mrs. Belcher stormed over to Notebook Man with her porcupine quills out.

“Mister Masterson!” she said.

He stopped writing, straightened up, and tried to smooth a few hairs over his forehead with the heel of his hand. Mrs. Belcher shooed away the kids around them and said some more stuff to him that no one else could hear, and when she was finished he snapped his notebook shut and left. She kept her hands on her hips until he was out of sight.

When the bell rang for the end of recess, I felt like it went off in my brain.

“Don’t ask me, I’ll tell you,” Wren said when we got back in the room. “That man who’s been writing—”

“Notebook Man?” I said.

Her eyes smiled for a second.

“Well, he wanted to know all about the puppet. And he asked a lot of other questions. About you.”

“About me? Like what?”

“Like how long you’ve been acting this way and what we thought it was all about and whether you have any friends.”

One-point one-point one-point. “What did you say?”

“I said I was your friend.”

I closed my eyes.

“And I said I thought you were normal.”

I opened my eyes again. “Do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, thanks for saying that anyway.”

“He said not to tell, but I don’t like secrets like that.”

“Thanks, Wren. Thanks for telling me.”

Great. Nobody’s talking to me, they’re just talking about me. And they think I’m crazy.

I expected Wren to go to her seat then, but she hung around, turning her pocket stone over and over in one hand. “Parker, you know what my mom says?”

“What?”

“She says it’s natural for boys and girls our age to go their own ways, even if they’ve been friends before. She thinks that’s all that’s happening.”

Natural? Natural? How could anything be more unnatural than Drog? “That’s not what’s happening, Wren.”

“I know. But I think I’ve got it figured out.” She sounded half-sad, half-teasing.

“Uh oh,” I said, trying to tease back. “Again?”

“Yep. You’re not really Parker at all. They’ve taken him away, and you’re an alien that replaced him.”

I had to smile. “Well, I’ve got the green hand, anyway.”

She started to smile back and then stopped. “Whoever you are, I want you to bring Parker back.”

My eyes stung and I turned away. I said something dumb like “I’ll see what I can do.”

An alien. Well, that was one I hadn’t thought of.

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