Free The Night I Flunked My Field Trip #5 by Henry Winkler Page A

are the two cleats he wants us to tie the boat onto,” Collin said. “What do you think, Hank?”
    â€œI think that I’m in total agreement.”
    Hank, you ding-dong! Can’t you say anything other than ‘I agree’? You’re sounding stupid even to yourself.
    â€œDo you know how to tie any knots?” Collin asked me.
    â€œNope, but we have this book. One Hundred Most Useful Nautical Knots. Sounds like a thriller.”
    â€œLet’s get started,” Collin said. “How hard can it be to learn how to tie a knot?”
    I flipped open the book. When I looked inside, it was my worst nightmare. No, worse than my worst nightmare. It was my worst nightmare having a nightmare. It was ugly—page after page of diagrams and instructions. There were drawings of right hands and left hands pulling pieces of rope inside and outside of loops. I couldn’t tell what was what. The letters and pictures started to move around on the page, just like always. Tadpoles swimming in a pond.
    How hard can it be to learn how to tie a knot?
    Try impossible.

CHAPTER 18
    FRANKIE, ASHLEY, AND I HAVE a magic act called Magik 3. Frankie is the magician, and we’re the assistants. There’s this one trick Frankie does where he cuts a rope in two pieces and drops it into a top hat. He waves a magic wand over the hat and says, “Zengawii,” which is his magic word he learned in Zimbabwe. When he pulls the rope out of the hat, it’s back in one piece!
    As I sat there with the book One Hundred Most Useful Nautical Knots in front of me, I wished I knew a magic word that would make the stupid rope I was staring at tie itself into a knot.
    â€œZengawii!” I muttered, giving the coiled rope a kick. Nothing happened.
    â€œWhat’d you say?” asked Collin.
    â€œI said Zengawii, which in Zimbabwe means why did they make these dumb directions so complicated?”
    Collin laughed. “We’ll get it, buddy. Just read me the steps.”
    We were trying to tie a hitch, which is the kind of knot you use to tie a boat to the dock. You’d think that would be easy enough. But noooooo! Turns out there are cleat hitches and clove hitches and rolling hitches and half hitches and other kinds of hitches you never even dreamed of.
    We decided to try a cleat hitch. It sounded so right. I looked it up in the table of contents and opened the book to page 97. So far, so good. There were about twenty little complicated diagrams. They were mostly hands with arrows that showed how the hands would move if they could move. Next to each diagram was a sentence describing what the picture was supposed to be showing you.
    I tried to read the first few sentences to myself before I read them out loud to Collin. Every other word was one I couldn’t read or pronounce. Like tension and taut and counterclockwise. I knew if I tried to read those directions out loud, I would stumble all over myself and sound totally dumb. I had two choices. I could either confess to Collin that I had a reading problem or I could talk my way out of this.
    Guess which one I chose?
    â€œTell you what,” I said to Collin, trying to make it seem like a gigantic light had just gone on in my head. “You read the directions and I’ll do the rope-tying.”
    â€œWhy?” he asked. That was a good question.
    â€œBecause,” I answered. That was a stupid answer.
    I didn’t wait for him to tell me that, though. I just handed the book to him really fast. He shrugged and took the book.
    From the corner of my eye, I could see Katie Sperling and Kim Paulson looking at us. They were on watch at the stern of the ship, but the person they were watching was Collin. He kept his face in the book, concentrating on the diagrams. I thought it was amazing that he never seemed to notice that girls looked at him all the time.
    Mr. Lingg strolled by and smiled at us.
    â€œYou boys need any help?” he asked.