Free Claudia and the Bad Joke by Ann M. Martin Page A

checked that closet twice! Were you in there all the time?”
          Betsy nodded. “Well, almost all the time. First I rang the bell, then I tiptoed back to the living room and pretended to answer the door. Then I hid. I’ll show you how I hid.” She ducked into the closet, stepped into a pair of her father’s galoshes, then wrapped an overcoat around her. The coat was still on its hanger. Betsy was disguised as raingear. She was nearly invisible.
          Mallory had to admit that the prank was original, but she was mad at Betsy for making her worry. However, she didn’t want to give Betsy the satisfaction of seeing that she was mad. Instead, she said, “Okay. Very funny. Come on out now. Oh, and if you do, I’ll show you this new powder I got yesterday.”
          That brought Betsy out in a hurry. Mal knows
    that most girls Betsy’s age like powder and perfume and makeup. Her sister Vanessa does.
    Mal opened her purse. She took out the sneezing powder. It was in a fancy little jar. “Here,” she said, and poured a small amount into Betsy’s hands..
          Betsy rubbed her hands together, then sniffed them, and. . “ACHOO!”
          “Bless you,” said Mallory politely.
          “Ah-ah-CHOO! ACHOO!. . . ACHOO!”
          Betsy began sneezing and laughing at the same time. “Is this sneezing — ACHOO! — powder?” she managed to ask.
          “Yup!” (Ma! was quite proud of herself.) “Oh, great joke. I knew that powder was going to be fake. I better — ACHOO! — get a Kleenex.”
          Betsy ran off and returned with a tissue. “Ah-ah-ACHOO-OO! . . Oh, no!” Betsy cried. She was holding something in her hand. “I sneezed my tooth out!” she exclaimed.
          Mallory was worried, until she realized it was the fake bloody tooth she had seen in Betsy’s room. She narrowed her eyes. Time to get even . . . again.
          During the rest of the afternoon, Mal scared Betsy with the slug, Betsy scared Ma! with a rubber snake. Mal scared Betsy with the rat,
    Betsy scared Mal with her cockroach. Just as Mal ran out of jokes, she heard Mrs. Sobak’s car pull into the garage.
          Betsy and Mal looked at each other. They smiled. Mallory was almost embarrassed to admit it, even to herself, but she and Betsy had actually had fun that afternoon. Well, not when Betsy had hidden from Mal. That wasn’t fun. But the other jokes, the harmless ones, were cause for an awful lot of giggling.
          And Ma! knew something just from looking at Betsy then. She knew that neither of them would mention the jokes to Betsy’s mother. As a baby-sitter, Mal shouldn’t have been playing them on one of her charges. But Betsy shouldn’t have been playing jokes after what had happened to me.
          A battle of the joke war had been fought, but nobody had won and nobody had lost.
    Chapter 12.
    Dawn left for Betsy’s house feeling less confident than Mallory had. She was prepared with some tricks, but by then she knew that Betsy hadn’t given up her practical joking, no matter what Mrs. Sobak said or thought.
          Dawn was carrying a rubber spider with her. It wasn’t the triplets’, since she didn’t want to have to rent anything. She knew it was probably too tame a trick for Betsy. (After all, Betsy had all sorts of rubber things of her own.) But Dawn thought the spider was worth a try. Under the right circumstances, anything could be scary. Dawn had borrowed the spider from Buddy Barrett.
          Also, she had polished up her acting skills. (Did she even have any acting skills to polish up? she wondered.) She was prepared to scream and jump up and down as if she had seen a mouse, she was prepared to pretend to faint, and she was prepared to be very dramatic about both things.
          Last but not least, Dawn had brought her Kid-Kit with her. She was hoping that maybe a good distraction was all Betsy needed.
          Dawn was sitting for