Free Horsing Around by Nancy Krulik Page A

of human trees.
    Katie smiled and raised her hand. She knew the answer to this one. Her grandmother had told her all about it during a trip to the mountains.
    “How about you, Katie Kazoo?” Mr. G. used the way-cool nickname George had given her back in third grade.
    “It’s because the days are getting shorter, so there’s less sun. Without sun, the trees make less chlorophyll. That’s the stuff that makes the leaves green,” Katie explained. “Without the green chlorophyll, you can see the other colors in the leaves.”
    “Good job,” Mr. G. praised Katie.
    “Hey, look at George!” Kevin exclaimed suddenly.
    The whole class began to laugh. George had taped leaves to his head and his rear end.
    “You look more like a turkey than a tree,” Kadeem told him.
    A big smile crossed George’s face. It was George’s joke-telling smile. Katie knew what that meant . . .
    “Speaking of trees,” George said. “Do you know what month trees are scared of ?”
    “No, what one?” Emma Weber asked.
    “Sep- timber !” George told her.
    Everyone in the class laughed. Everyone but Kadeem, that is. He was thinking up a joke of his own to tell.
    “How do trees get on the Internet?” Kadeem asked.
    “How?” Andrew piped up.
    “They log on!” Kadeem answered. He laughed really hard at his own joke.
    “Cool! We’ve got a tree joke-off going on,” Mr. G. exclaimed. “Your turn, George.”
    “Okay,” George replied. He was up for the challenge. “What did the beaver say to the tree?”
    “What?” Mr. G. asked.
    “Nice gnawing you,” George told him.
    The class laughed even harder.
    Katie looked around at all the other kid-trees in the forest-like classroom. Life in class 4A was definitely colorful. It was fun, too.
    So much fun that Katie never wanted to leaf !

Chapter 2
    “Go, Kevin! Go, Kevin!”
    The kids at the lunch table were all cheering as Kevin popped another cherry tomato in his mouth. Kevin loved tomatoes more than anything. Today he was trying to break the cherry-tomato-eating record. He was up to sixteen already!
    “Man, he’s going to puke,” Jeremy Fox said. “He just ate three tomatoes at once!”
    “Go, Kevin! Go, Kevin! Go, Kevin!” The fourth-graders cheered even louder.
    Kevin popped tomatoes seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen in his mouth and began to chew. Red tomato juice shot out of his mouth and across the table.
    Now Mr. G. saw what was going on and put a stop to it. “Kevin, that’s disgusting and you could choke,” he scolded.
    “Yes! Kevin, that’s super-disgusting!” Suzanne Lock shouted at him. “You almost got tomato gunk all over my new cowboy boots.”
    Katie wasn’t sure how tomato juice could have flown over the table and landed on her best friend’s boots—which were under the table. She had a feeling Suzanne just wanted everyone in the fourth grade to notice she had new cowboy boots. That was kind of the way Suzanne worked.
    “You got new boots?” Miriam Chan asked Suzanne.
    “Let me see,” Emma W. said.
    Suzanne smiled. She had managed to take the attention away from Kevin.
    “These boots are just like the ones cowboys wear when they ride horses,” she said, sticking out her feet. “Well, cow girls , anyway. See all the fancy jewels on the sides?”

    “Those are really cool,” Mandy said.
    “Mega-cool,” Jessica Haynes agreed.
    “They’re nice boots,” Becky Stern said in her slow, southern accent. “But they’re not the kind of boots I wear when I go horseback riding.”
    All the girls’ attention switched to Becky.
    “You go horseback riding?” Emma W. asked. “I always wanted to do that!”
    Becky nodded. “I take lessons at the Cherrydale Stables.”
    “I thought you took gymnastics classes,” Suzanne said in a not very nice tone.
    “I do,” Becky told Suzanne. “But now I take horseback riding, too. A person can take more than one kind of class.”
    Katie knew that was true. She took cooking classes at the community center.