Free Lizard Loopy by Ali Sparkes Page B

innocent fluffy face and narrowed his blue eyes accusingly—“trying to bite my legs off!”
    Piddle whined guiltily.
    â€œPoint made!” Josh said.
    â€œBut don’t you see? Yes—the main problem with being S.W.I.T.C.H.ed is the nearly getting eaten!” Danny said. “But
nothing
eats an alligator, does it? NOTHING!”
    â€œYou’re right,” came a voice from the other side of the fence. They both jumped, and Josh could see the top of Petty Potts’s tweedy old hat,while Danny could make out one of her eyes behind its thick glass spectacle lens, peering through a knothole in the wood. “NOTHING eats an alligator,” went on Petty. “Don’t you two think it’s time you came back to my lab? REPTOSWITCH is waiting.”
    There was a long silence in the garden, broken only by a soft whimper from Piddle. He was scared of Petty. With good reason. He got up and ran back into the house.

    â€œCome on,” went on Petty. “We’re all in this together now. You are part of the S.W.I.T.C.H. Project. If you hadn’t found all my missing REPTOSWITCH cubes with the secret code in them, I never would have gotten past insects, beetles, and arachnids. We’ve already done amphibians—and now REPTOSWITCH is perfected! It’s what you’ve been waiting for all summer! It’s finished. It works! It’s time to have your reward and try it out!”
    Still Josh and Danny said nothing. Petty Potts was amazing. But dangerous. She really couldn’t be trusted.
    â€œVery well,” sighed Petty. “I wouldn’t dream of
making
you try it. Let’s just forget it. I’ll go back to my lab.” Her voice took on a tragic tone. “And go on with the S.W.I.T.C.H. Project alone. Don’t you worry your little heads about me ever again. Maybe I’ll see you at the post office someday . . . Goodbye.” Petty waded across her garden, waist deep in weeds, and went into her shed. Through the door at the back. Down the secret passageway. And into her underground lab.
    Danny joined Josh on the top of the jungle gym, and for a long time they stared across the fence. Danny ran his fingers through his messy blond hair and frowned. “We
want
to be alligators!” he whimpered. “Why aren’t we jumping over the fence?”
    â€œBecause,” Josh said, scratching his own much shorter, neater blond hair. “Whenever Petty asks us into her lab, it’s like a spider inviting us into its web.”
    â€œSo. We don’t go,” Danny said, a few seconds later. “We just . . . forget about it all.”
    â€œThat would be the sensible thing,” Josh said.
    They stared over the fence some more.
    â€œLet’s go, then,” Danny said.
    They were in Petty’s lab fifty-seven seconds later.

“We start gently,” Petty said. “You’ve never been a reptile before, and it may be a bit of a shock.”
    Danny snorted. “What—like being turned into a spider wasn’t a bit of a shock?”
    â€œOh, do stop harping on about that,” snapped Petty, shaking a small plastic spray bottle in each hand. “You know the first time was an accident. I never intended to involve two nosy boys from next door in any of my work. If you and your dog hadn’t trespassed in my lab it never would have happened at all.” She beamed at them, and her gray eyes glittered behind her glasses. “And wouldn’t that be a shame?”
    â€œWhat kind of S.W.I.T.C.H. is in the bottles?” Josh asked, mesmerized by the green liquid sloshing around inside them.
    â€œIt’s lizard,” Petty said. “Two different native types. Like I said, we start gently.”
    â€œLizard?” breathed Josh, awestruck. He adored lizards. He liked to creep up on them while they were basking in the sun and watch them for ages until they moved away like quicksilver into the