Free Mrs. Lilly Is Silly! by Dan Gutman Page B

“To what do we owe the pleasure of your company now ?”
    (That’s grown-up talk for “What are you doing here?”)
    â€œI did have to go,” Mrs. Lilly replied. “And I went. Now I’m back.”
    â€œI’m glad a tree didn’t fall on you,” I told her.
    â€œBut I thought you were going to come back another day ,” said Mr. Granite. “We’re starting our math lesson now.”
    â€œMath, eh?” Mrs. Lilly said. “Well, if we print up a newspaper with ten pages in it and there are five articles on each page, how many articles can we fit into the newspaper?”
    Some kids raised their hands. Mrs. Lilly called on Little Miss I-Know-Everything, of course.
    â€œFifty!” said Andrea. “Because five tens make fifty.”
    â€œCorrect!” said Mrs. Lilly. “See, we just did a math lesson. Now let’s write some of those articles for our newspaper.”
    â€œYay!” we all shouted.
    â€œI give up,” said Mr. Granite. “If you need me, I’ll be in the teachers’ lounge.”
    He went to the teachers’ lounge, which is a secret room where the teachers go to have hot tub parties.
    Mrs. Lilly took off her trench coat, and we all gathered around her on the floor.
    â€œWhat should we write about?” asked Emily.
    â€œWrite about what you know,” said Mrs. Lilly. “You know a lot about your school. How about we make a school newspaper? We can call it… The Ella Mentry Sentry . You can all write articles for it.”
    â€œYay!” everybody yelled.
    Little Miss Annoying was all excited, and she was waving her hand around like it was on fire.
    â€œI already wrote something at home,” Andrea announced, pulling some papers out of her desk. “Maybe we can use it in our newspaper.”
    Ugh. Could she possibly be more boring? Only Andrea would write an article for a newspaper before she even knew we were going to make a newspaper. She held up her dumb article so we could all see it. The first page said:
    I LOVE ELLA MENTRY SCHOOL
    By Brenda Myers
    â€œWho’s Brenda Myers?” asked Alexia.
    â€œThat’s my pen name,” said Andrea.
    â€œYou name your pens?” I said. “That’s weird.”
    Andrea rolled her eyes and then she read her article out loud. It was all about how our school was built in 1961, and it was named after a teacher named Ella Mentry. Then it went on to talk about a bunch of other really boring stuff, like the history of the school. I thought I was gonna die from boredom.

    When the torture was over, Andrea looked up at Mrs. Lilly and waited for her to say how wonderful that dumb article was. What a brownnoser! But that’s when the most amazing thing in the history of the world happened.
    Mrs. Lilly dropped Andrea’s article into the garbage can!
    â€œThat was terrible,” she said.
    â€œOh, snap!” said Ryan.
    Well, Andrea looked like she was going to explode ! I don’t think a grown-up ever said anything like that to her. Ha-ha! Nah-nah-nah boo-boo on Andrea! In her face! It was the greatest moment of my life.

    â€œ The Ella Mentry Sentry needs to reach out and grab the reader’s eyeballs,” Mrs. Lilly told us.
    â€œOuch!” I said. “I don’t want anybody touching my eyeballs.”
    â€œWhat I mean is that newspapers have to compete with the internet, TV, and video games,” Mrs. Lilly told us. “Our paper needs to have exciting stories.”
    â€œI thought your article was wonderful, Andrea,” whispered Emily, who loves everything Andrea does.
    â€œBut our school is really boring,” said Michael. “I don’t think we can make an exciting newspaper that will grab people’s eyeballs.”
    â€œNothing interesting ever happens here,” said Ryan.
    â€œYeah,” said Neil the nude kid, “this school is boring. We don’t have any good stories to