Free The Worst Class Trip Ever by Dave Barry Page B

it?” I said.
    “It’s a jammer. It uses a laser to jam laser-guided missiles so they miss their targets. My dad says it’s super high-tech and restricted, and only the U.S. military is supposed
to have it. They use it over in Afghanistan and around there.”
    “Those guys aren’t U.S. military,” I said.
    “No,” said Suzana.
    “Why would they want to jam missiles?” said Cameron.
    My stomach turned over.
    “I know why,” I said.
    They all looked at me.
    “Matt was right,” I said. “They’re targeting the White House. That’s why they were looking at aerial photos on the plane. And that’s why they were hanging
around the White House.”
    “But that doesn’t make sense,” said Suzana. “The box doesn’t
shoot
missiles. It
jams
missiles. How can it attack the White House?”
    “It can’t,” said Victor, seeing it now. “But it can jam missiles coming
from
the White House.”
    “Why would missiles be coming from the White House?” said Cameron.
    “To defend it,” said Victor.
    “From what?” said Cameron.
    “From another missile,” said Victor. “Or a plane. Or whatever those guys are planning to attack it with.”
    “Ohhh,” said Cameron.
    “This is bad,” I said. “This is really, really bad. We have to tell somebody now.”
    “What about Matt?” said Suzana.
    I pictured his face, when he was in the weird guys’ van. Scared to death. I shook my head, trying to make the picture go away. “We have to do
something
.”
    “Okay,” said Suzana. “Here’s what we do.”
    We looked at her. I could tell that she—or at least part of her—was absolutely loving this. It almost made me mad, except I was glad that
somebody
had a plan.
    “We have two days,” she said. “So we use them to try to find Matt and rescue him. If we can’t, we have to tell the police. But we do everything we can to find Matt
first.” She looked around at the three of us. “Everybody okay with that?”
    We nodded. We had a plan:
    Rescue Matt in two days.
    Or…
    I didn’t want to think about it.

W e didn’t have much time when we got back to the hotel, because we had to get ready to walk to dinner, which was at an allegedly Italian
restaurant near the hotel. We had pizza. Usually, this is a good thing. Most kids like pizza because it’s always pretty much the same and not weird, so you’re usually safe ordering it.
But this “Italian” restaurant made the worst pizza in the history of the universe. I’m pretty sure that the tomato sauce was actually ketchup, and I am almost positive that the
cheese—I bet if you tried this in Italy they would put you in jail—was Kraft Singles. The worst part was the pizza dough, which I think they got from Home Depot. It was a weird
combination of rubbery and hard. It was like biting into a Frisbee. I gave mine to Cameron. I wasn’t really hungry anyway.
    After dinner it was dark and we went on our evening activity, which was a Historic Ghost Walk, led by Gene. He took us through a bunch of neighborhoods, and every now and then he’d stop in
front of some random old building and tell us about some spooky thing that supposedly happened there a long time ago. He did his best to sound scary, but I couldn’t really get into it. First
of all, I had a lot of stuff on my mind. Second, people my age grow up playing video games where we fight these really gory battles against realistic monsters that squirt green blood when you
decapitate them, and we watch movies where people’s eyeballs explode or they get eaten by giant alien insects or they’re captured by a lunatic with a basement dungeon laboratory where
he surgically turns them into human lobsters or whatever. So we’re not going to get too scared about some house where the ghost of President Zachary Taylor’s daughter allegedly
sometimes closes a door.
    The Historic Ghost Walk lasted a long time, so we didn’t get back to the hotel until almost ten p.m. Maybe a minute after we walked into our