Free Zero to Hero by Lin Oliver

attached a note to it that said:
Dear Ruby. Here is a little piece of me. Want to join my tonsil and me for lunch? Love, Billy Broccoli.
    Quickly, Rod placed the tonsil jar and the note on the table in front of Ruby’s usual seat and rejoined his football friends.
    Ruby and the girls continued to chat with the boys for a few more minutes, then carried their trays to their own table and sat down. Billy turned back to the conversation with the baseball team, when suddenly —
    “Eeeuuuwwwwwwww!” It was Ruby, screaming at the top of her lungs. “What is that? Get it out of here!”
    Everyone in the lunch pavilion stopped what they were doing and looked at Ruby. She hopped up from the table and danced around like her feet were on fire.
    “Eeeuuwwwwww!” she screamed again. Then all the girls at her table joined in. “Eeeuuwww, eeeuuwww, triple eeeuuwwww!” they shrieked.
    Every pair of eyes in the lunch area was focused on Ruby. No one knew exactly what had happened, except that something extremely eeeuuuwww-y had transpired.
    “This is so not funny, Billy Broccoli,” she said, marching directly over to him. “I don’t want to have lunch with you or with that thing in the jar.”
    Billy just sat there with his mouth open, his peanut butter, jelly, and potato chip sandwich suspended in midair. He had no clue what had just happened. Meanwhile, at the football table, Rod Brownstone was having himself the laugh of the century.
    A bunch of kids had clustered around Ruby’s table to see what was in the jar that had her sofreaked out. Billy’s tonsil lay there at the bottom, suspended in its murky goo, looking in the daylight even more stringy and fleshy than usual.
    “Check it out!” Sammy Park hooted. “It’s even got a label. ‘Billy’s tonsil. Removed at Sherman Oaks Hospital, April 7, 10:00 a.m.’ ”
    “Ooohhhhhhhh, gross.”
    It seemed like everyone in the lunch area was saying it at once. Billy was humiliated, ashamed, and angry beyond words. He jumped to his feet and charged toward Ruby’s table, where Sammy Park was holding his tonsil up to the sun and shaking it to make it wiggle.
    “That’s mine!” he said, grabbing the jar.
    He immediately wished he could take that back. How could he have confessed in front of everyone that this was his tonsil?
    With a mighty rush of nervous energy, he tucked the tonsil jar under his arm and bolted out of the lunch area. He ran as fast as he could. But where could he go? There was nowhere hecould escape the awful embarrassment that filled his body from head to toe.
    The last thing he saw as he left the pavilion was Rod Brownstone, fist-bumping his friends, taking full credit for the worst moment of Billy’s life.

CHAPTER 10
    Hoover Porterhouse was actually doing homework, which was almost unheard of in all his ninety-nine years of ghostly existence. Hanging around Billy’s room, with all its baseball gear piled up in the corner, had made him remember how much he missed the game and how much he longed to see the baseball fields of America. He knew he was never going to get there unless he brought up his grades. And although he was a procrastinator of the first degree, he had managed to fire himself up enough to work on one subject … Invisibility.
    Hoover’s invisibility skills were inconsistent at best. To practice, he had forced himself to hang out at the Birthday Tree and whistle “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” for two solid hours. At first, he thought he saw improvement, but the last couple of times he tried it, only hisfeet appeared. Hoover had been told by an older ghost, Bernie Highwater, who haunted the hardware store next to the movie theater, that invisibility was a matter of concentration. According to Bernie, the very act of whistling cleared your mind enough so that you could fully concentrate on making yourself visible.
    It was that state of mind that Hoover was looking for.
    He had been whistling that same stupid song most of the