Poached (FunJungle) - Hardcover

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Stuart Gibbs is the author of five New York Times bestselling series: Spy School, FunJungle, Moon Base Alpha, Charlie Thorne, and Once Upon a Tim—as well as the new nonfiction series Spy School Secret Files. He has written screenplays, worked on a whole bunch of animated films, developed TV shows, been a newspaper columnist, and researched capybaras. Stuart lives with his family in Los Angeles. You can learn more about what he’s up to at StuartGibbs.com.

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Poached

THE PRANK

I would never have been accused of stealing the koala if Vance Jessup hadn’t made me drop a human arm in the shark tank.

It wasn’t a real human arm. It was a plastic one Vance had stolen from a department-store mannequin. But it looked real enough through the glass of the tank, which was how all the trouble started.

Vance was the toughest, meanest kid at my middle school. He was in the eighth grade, but he’d been held back. Twice. Which made him a fifteen-year-old eighth grader. Plus, he was big for his age, nearly six feet tall with biceps as thick as Burmese pythons. Every other kid looked like a dwarf next to him.

There was a very long list of things I didn’t like about Lyndon B. Johnson Middle School, but Vance was at the top of it. He’d been bullying me since my first day of seventh grade—and it was now mid-December. I didn’t know what he had against me. Maybe it was because I was new at the school and thus fresh meat. Or maybe it was that, having spent most of my childhood in the Congo, I was different from all the other kids. Whatever the case, Vance homed in on me like he was a lion and I was the weakest wildebeest in the herd.

Vance stole my lunch. He gave me wedgies. He flushed my homework down the toilet. I reported these incidents to my parents, who angrily informed the school principal, Mr. Dillnut. Unfortunately, Mr. Dillnut was afraid of Vance himself. So he merely threatened Vance with detention—and then ratted me out as the kid who’d squealed. If anything, this made Vance even more determined to harass me. And now he warned that if I ever got him sent to the principal again, he’d hurt me.

So I fought back the only way I knew how: I played pranks on him. Covertly, of course. I filled his locker with aerosol cheese. I submerged a dead roach in his chocolate pudding. I caught a king snake and hid it in his gym bag. That one worked out the best. Vance was changing in the boys’ locker room when the snake popped out and scared him silly. Vance shrieked like a girl and fled into the gym, forgetting that he was only in his underwear until he found himself face-to-face with the entire cheerleading squad.

Unfortunately, the snake tipped my hand. I’d kept my identity as the prankster secret until that point, but I was well-known at school for being good with animals. My mother was a world-famous primatologist, my father was a world-famous wildlife photographer, and I lived with both of them at FunJungle, the world’s largest zoo. Vance quickly deduced that I’d planted the snake and came looking for payback.



He found me in the cafeteria on Monday, having lunch with Xavier Gonzalez. Xavier was my best friend at school. In fact he was my only friend at school. He was an outsider too, a smart kid who’d once made the terrible social error of admitting that he actually enjoyed his classes. Before I’d come along, Xavier had been Vance’s favorite target.

There was a distinct hierarchy to the seating in the school cafeteria. The coolest kids, known as the Royals, sat in the center, where they could be seen and admired. These were the eighth-grade jocks and cheerleaders, plus a few rich kids. They were surrounded by the Lower Royals: the younger jocks, cheerleaders, and rich kids who would assume the throne someday. Then came almost everyone else: the normal kids who hoped to be popular, but knew it would probably never happen. At the very corners sat the lowest of the low, whom even the normal kids looked down on: the losers, loners, and freaks who hadn’t mastered how to fit in.

I had spent every lunch so far in one of the corners with Xavier. So it wasn’t hard for Vance to find me.

As usual, Xavier and I were talking about FunJungle. Most of my fellow students liked FunJungle—after all, it was the biggest tourist attraction in all of Central Texas—but Xavier was a FunJungle fanatic. He had more than twenty different FunJungle T-shirts (not to mention sweatshirts, caps, pins, and other assorted merchandise) and claimed that the day the park had opened was the greatest day of his life. He wanted to be a field biologist when he grew up and idolized my mother the way other kids revered rock stars. He’d read everything he could find about her, so he knew all about me before I’d even set foot in the school. He’d sought me out on my first day at Lyndon B. Johnson, wanting to know if I could introduce him to Mom.

Xavier generally spent every lunch peppering me with questions about FunJungle. The day that Vance came after me, we happened to be talking about Shark Odyssey, which was one of the more popular exhibits. It was a huge aquarium with a glass tunnel running through it, from which guests could watch sharks swimming all around them.

“Doesn’t that drive the sharks crazy?” Xavier wanted to know. “It must be like waving red meat in front of a bear.”

“Sharks don’t really eat humans,” I told him. “In fact, most attacks seem to be accidents. The sharks usually spit the humans back out after biting them.”

“I know,” Xavier said. “But still, they’re hunters, right? And now all these humans are moving right through their habitat. It must trigger some sort of primal instinct.”

I shook my head. “No. In the first place, the glass tunnel is lined with some kind of reflective surface, so the sharks can’t see the humans from inside. And even if they could, sharks don’t really hunt by sight. They hunt by smell—and by sensing vibrations in the water. You could drop a whole mannequin in the shark tank and the sharks probably wouldn’t even give it a second look.”

“I bet it’d freak the guests out, though,” Xavier laughed.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It would be pretty funny.”

Xavier stopped laughing at that point, which I should have taken as a sign that something was wrong, but I was too caught up thinking about the prank. I kept rambling on, unaware that Vance Jessup was bearing down on me. “Know what would really freak the guests out? If you only put part of a mannequin in the tank. Like just an arm. So it’d look like the sharks had already eaten the rest. That would be hilarious.”

Now, Vance decided to make his presence known. He grabbed my chair and spun me around to face him. “What would be hilarious?” he demanded. “Are you planning another prank on me?”

I gulped, terrified, and did my best to lie to Vance’s face. “What are you talking about? I’ve never played any pranks on you.”

“I know you put that snake in my gym bag, Monkey Boy. And you’re gonna pay for it.” Vance held up a clenched fist the size of a grapefruit.

I recoiled, aware this wasn’t an idle threat. Vance got in fights almost every day—and usually won. He was covered with bruises, scratches, and scrapes, though his opponents generally looked far worse. He was currently sporting a half dozen Band-Aids dappled with blood that was probably someone else’s.

Meanwhile, I’d never been in a fight in my life. I wouldn’t stand a chance against Vance.

“Teddy wasn’t talking about playing a prank on you,” Xavier said...