Free Attack of the Tagger by Wendelin Van Draanen

“Those ugly overgrown elves with sharp teeth and dirty fingernails?”
    “Friendly trolls,” he told her. “In a forest scene with ferns and trees and oversized mushrooms. Or maybe I’ll paint the whole van dark blue and have a comet streaking across the sky.”
    “Cool!” everyone said, so I think maybe he’ll go with the comet.
    Mom and Dad were very interested in hearing about the van. They used to kind of say, Uh-huh, uh-huh, whenever I talked about Mr. Green, but now that they know he’s the Bouncer, they really sit up and listen. Especially since the four of us had a powwow about Shredderman and the site and what we should do to keep it a secret.
    Mr. Green said, “We have to keep a lid on it, or I’ll need to look for a new job.”
    “Why?” I asked him. “They can’t fire you for being my sidekick!”
    My dad said, “That’s right! You haven’t done anything illegal or even wrong.”
    Mr. Green shook his head. “Dr. Voss was pretty fried over the way you exposed her son.” He chuckled. “And that little link to her? Oh, she was fit to be tied.”
    “But I already took her phone number off the site! Mom made me.”
    “Yeah, but before you did, she got calls from all over. I heard a woman from Australia called to scold her!”
    From Australia? That was halfway around the world!
    “Really?” my mom said.
    “Cool!” my dad said.
    Mr. Green flexed an arm. “Here’s to truth!”
    We all put our arms up and pumped. “And justice!”
    I went to bed that night feeling great. The Shredderman site counter was up to ten thousand! Ten thousand visitors! Sure, all I’d really done with the site was collar a bully and trap a tagger, but inside it felt… bigger than that. Inside it felt like there was still more to do.
    Maybe the way I was searching for truth and justice had started out small, but I could feel it growing. Spreading. From my little bedroom, through my school, and now my town!
    So maybe I can’t fly through the air like Superman, but my
ideas
can fly across a web bigger than anything even Spider-Man could make—the World Wide Web!
    So whatever’s next, in the name of truth and justice, I’ll be there!



Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
a division of Random House, Inc., New York
    Text copyright © 2004 by Wendelin Van Draanen Parsons
Illustrations copyright © 2004 by Brian Biggs
    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher,
except where permitted by law. For information address Alfred A. Knopf
Books for Young Readers.
    Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/kids and www.shredderman.com
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    eISBN: 978-0-307-55965-4
    v3.0_r1