Ms. Krup Cracks Me Up! Read online

  People who sneak into zoos at night are weird.

  “You must be nocturnal,” Michael said.

  We looked around The Secret Room. There were heads and other parts of dead animals everywhere. It was creepy.

  “What is this place?” Emily asked.

  “This is where we prepare the animals,” Ms. Krup told us. “You see, I’m a part-time taxidermist. Do you know what a taxidermist does?”

  “You drive people to the airport?” I guessed.

  “That’s a taxi driver, dumbhead!” Andrea said. “Taxidermists mount animals for display.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I told Andrea. “Well, maybe she mounts animals for display and then she drives them to the airport.”

  Ha-ha-ha! In her face! That’s why I’m in the gifted and talented program. Nah-nah-nah boo-boo on Andrea.

  “So, you stuff stuff?” Michael asked Ms. Krup.

  “The animals aren’t stuffed,” she told us. “The skin is mounted on its original skeleton, which is covered with wire and plaster. I try to make dead animals come to life.”

  People who make dead animals come to life are weird.

  “Taxidermy is cool,” said Andrea, the big brownnoser.

  “Hey,” Ms. Krup said, “would you kids like to see a special exhibit I’m working on? It isn’t even open to the public yet.”

  “Sure!” we all said.

  “Follow me!”

  Ms. Krup led us down the hall to an unmarked door. She put a key in the lock. Then she turned the doorknob.

  “Don’t open that door!” I shouted.

  “Will you calm down, A.J.?” said Emily.

  Ms. Krup opened the door. There was a big sign on the wall. This is what it said: THE AMAZING WORLD OF POOP!

  12

  The Amazing World of Poop

  I looked around the room. It was a whole exhibit devoted to poop! Nothing but poop!*

  “I never thought I’d see poop in a museum,” Emily said.

  “Oh, poop is a fascinating part of natural history,” Ms. Krup told us.

  We all laughed, because whenever a grown-up says “poop,” you can’t help but laugh.

  Ms. Krup cracks me up!

  “Poop can reveal what an animal eats, how it digests food, and whether or not it’s sick,” Ms. Krup said. “Some animals use poop to tell enemies to stay away. Others use it like perfume to attract mates.”*

  “Ew!” we all said. “Gross!”

  Ms. Krup walked around and showed us the displays she made. I had never seen anyone who was so excited about poop.

  “Did you know that the most expensive coffee in the world comes from Palm Civet poop in Indonesia?” Ms. Krup asked us. “It costs a hundred and seventy-five dollars a pound.”

  “I’m glad my parents drink tea,” said Michael.

  “Really?” Ms. Krup said. “In China they make some tea from caterpillar poop.”

  “That’s the last time I go to a Chinese restaurant!” I exclaimed.

  Ms. Krup showed us a picture of a sloth. “It only poops once a week,” she said.

  “That happened to my dad once,” said Emily. “He had to go to the doctor.”

  “A week isn’t so long,” Ms. Krup told us. “Grizzly bears may go six months without pooping.”

  “No wonder they’re so mad!” I said.

  “African elephants can produce three hundred pounds of poop every day!” Ms. Krup said.

  “Wow!” said Andrea. “What do they do with all that poop?”

  “Well, in some parts of Africa and Asia, elephant poop is made into paper.”

  “I hope they don’t make it into toilet paper,” I said. “Because that would just be weird.”

  “Do you know what else is weird?” Ms. Krup said. “Rabbits eat their own poop!”

  “Ew, disgusting!” we all shouted.

  “And termites glue their houses together with poop.”

  “Hey, Andrea,” I said, “didn’t your dad do that to your house?”

  “Oh, snap!” said Michael.

  “That’s mean, Arlo!”

  “Dung beetles push balls of poop around and bury it,” Ms. Krup told us.

  “Sounds like one of Arlo’s playdates,” Andrea said.

  “Oh, snap!” said Michael.

  “Storks squirt poop on their legs in hot weather to cool off,” Ms. Krup said.

  “So does Andrea,” I said.

  We pushed buttons to watch cool videos of animals pooping. Did you know that a rhinoceros stomps on its poop and kicks it around? It’s hilarious. And some boy cranes fling buffalo poop up in the air to impress girl cranes.

  “Don’t even think about it, Arlo,” said Andrea.

  “People throw poop around, too,” Ms. Krup told us. “In Wisconsin they have cow chip–tossing contests. One man threw a cow chip more than half the length of a football field.”

  “Remind me not to play football on that field,” said Michael.

  “People in Wisconsin are weird,” I said.

  I had no idea that poop could be so interesting. We got to match poop samples with the animals that pooped them. Then we got to touch an eighty-million-year-old piece of dinosaur poop. Ms. Krup showed us some poop under a microscope too. And we got to push buttons on a map to learn the word for “poop” in different countries.

  “Poop is a palindrome,” Ms. Krup said. “Does anybody know what a palindrome is?”

  Andrea was waving her dumb hand in the air like she had to go to the bathroom really badly, which would have made perfect sense in “The Amazing World of Poop"! But Ms. Krup called on me instead. So nah-nah-nah boo-boo on Andrea.

  “A palindrome is when you make friends with bees,” I said. “My pal is a drone.”

  “Not exactly,” Ms. Krup said. “Andrea?”

  “A palindrome is a word that’s spelled the same way forward and backward,” she said.

  “That’s right!”

  Why can’t three hundred pounds of elephant poop fall on Andrea’s head forward and backward?

  “You sure know a lot about poop, Ms. Krup,” said Emily.

  “Poop is my life,” Ms. Krup replied.

  People who like poop that much are weird. But “The Amazing World of Poop” was really cool. We learned more than anybody would ever want to know about poop. And Ms. Krup said the word “poop” so many times, it didn’t even sound funny anymore.

  It was really late. Ms. Krup took us back to the Giganotosaurus, and we climbed into our sleeping bags.

  Finally, I fell asleep. I dreamed about a giant poop that was riding a bicycle. And it was making some weird sound. A buzzing sound. No, it was a swishing sound.

  No, no, I got it. It was a hissing sound.

  13

  Stuff Like This Happens Every Day

  What was that weird hissing sound?

  “Hey!” I whispered to Ryan, who was in the sleeping bag next to mine. “Stop that hissing!”

  “I’m not hissing,” he replied.

  “You are, too.”

  We went back and forth like that for a while, until suddenly there was an ear-piercing shriek.

  “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKKKK!”

  “There’s something in my sleeping bag!” screamed Emily.

  Instantly, everybody was awake and jumping out of their sleeping bags. Emily started running around, freaking out.

  “What is it?” Andrea asked.

  “Maybe it’s a blue-tongued skink!” I yelled.

  “It’s a bug!” Emily shrieked.

  “It must be that rare hissing cockroach from Madagascar!” screamed Andrea.

  “It’s General Muffin!” Michael yelled.

  “Run for your lives!” shouted Neil the nude kid.

  Ryan’s mom and Mr. Macky and the rest of the grown-ups tried to calm everybody down, but it was no use. Nobody wanted the cockroach to touch them. We were all screaming and jumping around. Finally, Ms. Krup came running over.

  “What’s the matter?” she yelled.

 
“That disgusting cockroach was in Emily’s sleeping bag!” Andrea shouted. “Now we can’t find it! I thought you said you captured it.”

  “I just said General Muffin was in a safe place,” Ms. Krup explained. “I didn’t want you kids to be scared.”

  “Well, we’re scared now!” Andrea shouted.

  “Poor General Muffin,” said Ms. Krup.

  “Who cares about General Muffin?” Andrea yelled. “It’s a cockroach!”

  Man, that was a first. Andrea actually yelled at a grown-up!

  “There it is!” Michael suddenly shouted. “There’s the cockroach!”

  “Where?”

  “There!”

  “Emily!” Andrea shouted. “It’s crawling on your back!”

  “EEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKKKKK!”

  “Let’s kill it!” all the boys yelled, and we started chasing after Emily.

  “Don’t kill General Muffin!” shouted Ms. Krup. “He’s very rare!”

  “Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!” we all chanted.

  Emily was running around like her pants were on fire, and me and all the other boys were chasing her. That’s when the most amazing thing in the history of the world happened. Do you remember that giant bear that was next to the Giganotosaurus? Well, while we were chasing Emily around, Neil the nude kid—he…uh…ran into it.

  “Watch out!” Ryan’s mom yelled.

  The giant bear started to topple over. And do you know where it landed? Right on Emily!

  It was hilarious. A real Kodak moment. You should have been there.

  “EEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKKKKK!” Emily screamed, freaking out on the floor. “There’s a dead bear on me! Get it off! Get it OFF!”

  Sheesh, what a crybaby! So there was a giant hissing cockroach in her sleeping bag and a dead bear fell on top of her. Big deal. Stuff like that happens all the time.

  Finally, Mr. Macky and Mr. Docker were able to pull the bear off Emily. Ms. Krup caught General Muffin with a net and put him in a cage.

  After all the excitement was over, the grown-ups brought us into a room for breakfast. They gave us cow chips and scrambled dinosaur eggs, but I don’t think they were real.

  “I hate natural history,” Emily said.

  “Natural history is cool,” said Michael.

  We were still eating when Ms. Krup came running into the room.

  “Hey, who ate all the candy that was next to the candy machine?” she asked.

  I looked at Michael. Michael looked at Andrea. Andrea looked at Emily. Emily looked at me.

  “It must have been General Muffin,” I lied.

  “Yeah,” Michael said. “You told us he likes candy.”

  We probably shouldn’t have lied about General Muffin eating the candy. But Ms. Krup shouldn’t have lied to us about capturing General Muffin. Lying isn’t a very nice thing to do. But I guess sometimes even grown-ups do it.

  “The museum will open in five minutes,” somebody announced.

  It was time for us to leave. We rolled up our sleeping bags. Ryan’s mom said we could look in the gift shop for a few minutes until Mrs. Kormel arrived with the bus. Andrea felt bad about what happened to Emily, so she bought her a glow-in-the-dark dinosaur bone toothbrush. Neil the nude kid bought a box of fake moose poop that was really just chocolate.

  As we were leaving the museum, Ms. Krup gave each of us a diploma that said we were Junior Nature Lovers. There was a picture of a dinosaur on it. I’m going to put mine up in my bedroom.

  All in all, the natural history museum was almost not boring.

  “Can we come back next week?” I asked Ms. Krup as we lined up at the door.

  “Uh, well,” said Ms. Krup, “now that you are official Junior Nature Lovers, you…uh…don’t have to EVER come back here again.”

  “Bingle boo,” said Mrs. Kormel as we piled on the bus to go home. “What did you learn about?”

  “Poop,” I told her.

  Well, that’s pretty much what happened on the field trip. Maybe Ms. Krup will never find out that we ate all the candy. Maybe General Muffin will stay in his cage from now on. Maybe someday Emily will forget that a giant hissing cockroach crawled into her sleeping bag and that a dead bear fell on her. Maybe Mr. Docker and Mr. Macky will cut their nose hair so they’ll stop snoring. Maybe Ms. Krup will stop dressing up like a wild yak and get interested in something besides poop. And maybe we’ll be able to talk Mrs. Daisy into taking us on another field trip.

  But it won’t be easy!

  About the Author and the Illustrator

  DAN GUTMAN has written many weird books for kids. He lives in New Jersey (a very weird place) with his weird wife and two weird children. You can visit him on his weird website at www.dangutman.com

  JIM PAILLOT lives in Arizona (another weird place) with his weird wife and two weird children. Isn’t that weird? You can visit him on his weird website at www.jimpaillot.com

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Copyright

  MY WEIRD SCHOOL #21: MS. KRUP CRACKS ME UP!. Text copyright © 2008 by Dan Gutman. Illustrations copyright © 2008 by Jim Paillot. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition DECEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780061973420

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  *Our parents had to sign permission forms before we could go. That way, if something dead came back to life and attacked one of us, it would just be too bad.

  *Not as cool as penguins, but still cool.

  *How are you enjoying the book so far? Good? Okay, keep reading.

  *Do you know what you get if you put poop in a toaster? Poop tarts!

  *That stuff must be called Chanel No. 2.