Free Gotcha! Gotcha Back! by Nancy Krulik Page B

Nobody does. How am I supposed to edit a newspaper when no one wants to write for it?”
    Katie felt bad for Mandy. She remembered when Jeremy Fox, one of her two best friends, had been the editor of their third-grade newspaper, the 3A Times. It had been a huge job. Jeremy had spent a lot of time writing articles on his computer.
    Being editor of a class newspaper was a big responsibility. Mandy really could use some help from the rest of the class.
    Still, it wasn’t really the other kids’ fault that there wasn’t much to write about. “There really hasn’t been a whole lot of news here at school lately,” Katie reminded Mandy.
    “AAAAHHHHHHH!”
    Before Mandy could answer her, somebody screamed. Everybody turned around to see Emma Stavros standing on top of her beanbag chair, pointing toward the floor.
    Mr. Guthrie raced over to Emma S. The kids ran over, too.
    “What’s wrong?” Mr. G. asked Emma S.
    Emma S. gulped. “It’s a M-m-mouse!” she stammered nervously.
    Katie looked down at the floor. Sure enough, there was a little gray mouse on the ground next to Emma S.’s beanbag chair.
    Katie stared at the furry little creature for a minute. There was something strange about it. “It’s not moving,” she told Emma S. “Usually mice are so afraid of people, they run away as soon as they see them.”
    “Maybe it’s a dead mouse,” Kevin Camilleri suggested.
    “AAAAAAHHHHHHH!” Emma S. shouted even louder this time.

    “I don’t think so,” Mr. G. told Kevin. The teacher reached down and picked up the ball of gray fluff.
    “Ooh, gross!” Emma S. gasped.
    “Relax, Emma,” Mr. G. told her. “This mouse isn’t real. Someone was playing a joke on you.”
    Emma S. opened her eyes wide. She looked like she was going to cry.
    “Whose mouse is this?” Mr. Guthrie asked.
    Nobody answered.
    “Come on, dudes, ‘fess up,” Mr. G. urged.
    Still no one answered.
    “Okay,” Mr. G. said finally. “Well, whoever you are, I hope you learned that practical jokes like this aren’t always funny.”
    Katie was pretty sure she knew who had planted the fake mouse in the classroom. George’s Funny Friday had begun.
    Of course Katie would never tell on George. Only a rat told on her friends. And Katie wasn’t a rat.
    Katie looked over to see if George was laughing. But he had his face turned away. He was pretending to look into Slinky’s cage.
    “Slinky sure looks disappointed,” George said as he stared at the class snake. “He sure would have liked to eat a mouse.”
    “Well, I’m not disappointed that the mouse is fake,” Emma S. said.
    “Me either,” Emma Weber agreed. “Whoever put that mouse there was really mean. It’s not nice to scare someone like that.”
    “Man, Emma S., you really freaked out!” Kevin said with a chuckle.
    “That was the loudest scream I ever heard,” Kadeem added. “I’ll bet they heard you all the way in China.”
    Soon all the boys were laughing at how scared Emma S. had been of the fake mouse.
    “Okay, dudes, let’s settle down,” Mr. G. urged the class. “It’s time for social studies.”
    Kadeem leaned over toward Katie’s beanbag. “Can I borrow a pencil?” he asked her.
    Katie thought about the bendy rubber pencil in her bookbag. But she couldn’t give it to him. It was just too mean.
    “Sure,” Katie said as she pulled a regular pencil out of her bag.
    “Thanks,” Kadeem said. “I’ll give it back to you at the end of class,” he added.
    Katie watched as Kadeem placed the pencil in his mouth and chewed on the eraser.
    “Keep it,” she told him with a sigh.

Chapter 4
    “I have definitely learned how to walk like a model,” Katie’s best friend Suzanne Lock told a few of the fourth-graders as they waited in the lunch line that afternoon. “You have to keep your chin up. Like this.”
    Suzanne raised her head high and began walking over to one of the tables.
    “You look like a real model,” Jessica Haynes told Suzanne. “Is that hard