Free Mr. Klutz Is Nuts! by Dan Gutman

The principal is like the king of the school.
    He gets to tell everybody what to do and where to go. That is cool! If I can’t be a professional hockey player when I grow up, I want to be a principal so I can boss teachers around.

    My friend Billy from around the corner, who was in second grade last year, told me that principals have a dungeon down in the basement of the school where they torture kids who misbehave. I don’t know if Billy’s telling the truth or not. But one time we had gym class and we passed by this open door in the basement and there were all kinds of scary-looking things in there. Michael said he saw chains hanging from the ceiling over a chair with straps on the arms and  legs, so I guess that’s what Mr. Klutz uses to torture bad kids.
    I was scared. I had never been to the principal’s office before. On the way there, I stopped into the boy’s bathroom.
    Maybe I could dig a tunnel out of the school and escape, I thought. My friend Billy told me he saw that in a war movie once. These guys dug their way out of prison camp with a spoon. But I didn’t have a spoon. And I didn’t want to touch the floor of the bathroom anyway. Yuck!
    When I got to Mr. Klutz’s office, his secretary made me sit in a chair for about a million hours. Mr. Klutz’s door was closed the whole time. I wondered if he was torturing some other kid. I didn’t hear any screams or anything.
    Finally the secretary said I could go inside. I opened the door and was surprised to see Mr. Klutz was hanging upside down from a bar near the ceiling. He had on boots that were attached to the bar.

    “What are you doing up there?” I asked.
    “Oh, just hanging around,” Mr. Klutz said as he pulled himself out of his boots and jumped down onto the floor. “When the blood rushes to my head, it helps me think.”
    Well, I know that blood rushing to your head doesn’t help you grow hair, because Mr. Klutz had no hair on his head at all. He was bald as a balloon. Mr. Klutz’s office looked pretty much like my dad’s office, except he had a big snowboarding poster on the wall and a foosball table in the corner. Oh, and he also had a punching bag with a face on it.
    Come to think of it, it didn’t look anything like my dad’s office.
    I kept my head down when he told me to take a seat, so he would feel sorry for me. When you get into trouble, always keep your head down, because if grown-ups feel sorry for you they won’t punish you as badly.
    “Miss Daisy told me why you’re here,” Mr. Klutz said, “but I’d like to hear your side of the story.”
    “Miss Daisy thinks I stole some straws,” I told him.
    “What makes you think that, A.J.?” 
    “Well, she was all mad at me and she said, ‘That’s the last straw!’ Then she told me to go to your office. I swear I didn’t take any straws. I don’t even know where she keeps the straws.”
    “I see,” Mr. Klutz said, rubbing his chin.
    “I thought it had something to do with a hockey game that got out of control. And there’s this little matter of forgetting to bring in current events.”
    “Well, that too.”
    Mr. Klutz didn’t look like he was going to torture me. In fact, he didn’t look mad at all.
    “You may not believe this,” he told me, “but I was a boy once.”
    “Just once?” I asked. “I’m a boy all the time.”
    “No, what I mean is, I used to be young like you.”
    “I’ll bet you were really good in school,” I said.
    “No, actually, it was just the opposite,” the principal told me. “I didn’t like school at all, and I wasn’t a very good student.”
    “Really?” I figured that anybody who grew up to be a principal must have loved school as a kid. Why else would you want to hang around a school all day as a grown-up? Except maybe to boss teachers around.
    “When I was a boy, I could never sit still,” Mr. Klutz said. “I wanted to run around all the time. I didn’t have the motivation to do my schoolwork. Do