STAR Academy: Dark Secrets - Softcover
A charming, funny middle-grade novel that combines action, adventure, science, and a big dose of satire from a talented voice in children's literature.
It takes a lot to get four kid geniuses together, even when they're all alumni of the now-shuttered Superior Thinking and Advanced Research Academy. Eleven-year-old leader-of-the-pack, Amanda Forsythe, needs to escape the cluthes of her manicacally entrepreneurial father, determined as he is to captialize on Amanda's fame for outsmarting a pair of aliens posing as teachers at the Academy. And Derek, Evelyn, and Sanjay are separately pursuing their own research projects in different schools around the world, desperate to continue the technological advances they began at the STAR Academy. Only the world's richest man could bring them all together--and that's exactly what George Snootman offers to do. But can they really trust the father of Eugenia, their nemesis at the STAR Academy? Probably not--but his offer is just too tempting. Besides, Amanda is pretty confident she and her friends can outfox him, even if he does seem as ruthlessly determined as the aliens before him to misuse their work
for his own means....
It takes a lot to get four kid geniuses together, even when they're all alumni of the now-shuttered Superior Thinking and Advanced Research Academy. Eleven-year-old leader-of-the-pack, Amanda Forsythe, needs to escape the cluthes of her manicacally entrepreneurial father, determined as he is to captialize on Amanda's fame for outsmarting a pair of aliens posing as teachers at the Academy. And Derek, Evelyn, and Sanjay are separately pursuing their own research projects in different schools around the world, desperate to continue the technological advances they began at the STAR Academy. Only the world's richest man could bring them all together--and that's exactly what George Snootman offers to do. But can they really trust the father of Eugenia, their nemesis at the STAR Academy? Probably not--but his offer is just too tempting. Besides, Amanda is pretty confident she and her friends can outfox him, even if he does seem as ruthlessly determined as the aliens before him to misuse their work
for his own means....
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
EDWARD KAY is the author of Star Academy as well as a writer and producer on CBC's "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" for four seasons. He was also producer and head writer of "The Itch," a darkly humorous Canadian cult TV classic and a contributing writer to Rick Mercer's "Talking To Americans." He is the co-creator of the award-winning kids' animated comedy series "Olliver's Adventures."
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Amanda gazed upward , her eyes following the rocket’s progress as it climbed higher and higher into the evening sky. She mentally calculated the angle of its trajectory and the speed an object of that size, weight and shape would have to reach to achieve escape velocity from Earth’s gravitational pull. Amanda had to squint to follow its trail as the vanishing projectile rose into the darkening heavens. Just as the rocket became too small for her to see anymore, the sky was wrenched open by a blinding flash. Fiery orange and yellow tendrils shot out in every direction from where it had been, solid and resolutely on course only an instant before. But now the missile was blown to smithereens by the explosive force of the very material that had given it its power and upward momentum. A sonic boom like a cannon blast followed a moment later. Amanda felt the thump of the shock wave in her chest, and her eardrums popped. Backlit by the fading burst of light, tiny burned fragments of the rocket’s casing began floating down toward Earth, giving them, thought Amanda, the ironic appearance of blackened snowflakes.
On cue, a slightly out-of-tune marching band began to play “Hail to the Victors.” It was a type of music known as a “war song” and was performed at games where the Downview Danes, her school’s football team, were competing. The aggressively energetic nature of the rhythm and melody was designed to rouse both fans and players. However, Amanda didn’t have much interest in surrogate gladiatorial combats, so the music did not have the intended effect on her. Instead, its frenzied tempo and roller-coaster melody made her think not of champions but rather of an old slapstick silent movie. The type where some unfortunate man on a railway handcar was pumping frantically to avoid being mowed down by a speeding steam locomotive. Or perhaps he was running around a circus ring with the seat of his pants on fire, frantically trying to extinguish the flames by flapping his hands over his posterior while being chased by a tiger that had escaped from its cage.
Meanwhile, awed by the finale of the fireworks display, the large crowd of Downview residents who had gathered for the occasion cheered and applauded heartily. The roar of their approval reverberated around the square in front of Downview city hall, mingling with the discordant strains of the music and the last echoes of the fireworks explosion as the acrid odour of burnt gunpowder wafted down onto the assembled throng.
The marching band then lurched into action, high-stepping through the square in a choreographed routine so carefully rehearsed for this celebration that the movements of the players were very nearly in sync. Each one knew that the eyes of the world were upon them, because tonight they were performing to celebrate something far more momentous than a victory by the Downview Danes. They were here to honour the girl who had saved them from becoming mindless slaves to alien invaders from a distant planet. Some of the sousaphone players, overcome by the magnitude of the occasion, began to blow harder and play faster. The fluctuation in tempo gave the music the characteristic of a sonic rubber band, stretching and contracting as if it existed in some parallel universe where the rules of space and time no longer applied. The increasingly wobbly music made Amanda think even more of the man in the circus ring, looking for a water bucket in which to dunk his flaming derrière while he ran away from the escaped tiger. She began to giggle.
“Honey,” said her mother, Wendy Forsythe, “don’t laugh like that. Everyone will think there’s something wrong with you. For once, nobody thinks you’re some kind of . . . you know, weirdo. So don’t blow it. Just wave to the crowd. They’ve all come out to honour you, after all.”
Amanda was used to her mother worrying that other people would think there was something wrong with her. She had known this ever since the age of two, when she had begun laying out her coloured building blocks in sequences that her mother recognized as patterns, though she could not break the code. In fact, Amanda was so accustomed to her mother’s insecurities about her that despite having saved the world from alien invasion, all she said now, as she stood in the place of honour, was “Yes, Mom.”
Besides, Amanda was genuinely honoured by this outpouring of thanks from the people of her hometown, even if their way of expressing it was unintentionally comical. So, not wanting to insult anyone, she did as her mother suggested. She waved to the crowd, tried to ignore the ridiculous music and did her best to put the slapstick image out of her mind so her smile wouldn’t break into a belly laugh. But the more she tried to block out the picture she saw in her mind’s eye, the more the marching band’s music seemed to speed up and slow down. Soon, she could hardly see anything but a mental image of the wild-eyed man in the silent movie, running around in circles and flapping his hands to try to put out the fire on his butt, all while avoiding getting eaten by the tiger. Standing there on the raised platform—exposed to the crowd and surrounded by her family, the mayor of Downview and a gaggle of local dignitaries—Amanda felt a nearly uncontrollable burst of laughter building inside her.
Her mother gave her the evil eye. “Don’t you dare, Amanda. Do you hear me? No laughing. I mean it.”
Finally, Amanda was able to force the movie image out of her mind. But that was only because it had been replaced by a real-life image that was even stranger than the one she was picturing. As the marching band tottered like a drunken centipede toward the reviewing stand, she could see that two of the majorettes were proudly holding up a banner. The banner was intended to represent the event that had made Amanda famous all over planet Earth (and no doubt beyond it as well). However, it was possible to guess this only because it read “Thank you, Amanda Forsythe!” Nothing else depicted on the banner, mused Amanda, bore any resemblance to either her or the astonishing events that had changed her life— and allowed everyone else’s lives to stay the same.
“Look, sweetie, there’s even a picture of you on the banner,” exclaimed her father, Jack Forsythe, gesturing toward a crudely if enthusiastically painted portrait of Amanda.
Amanda wasn’t vain by any stretch of the imagination, but she couldn’t help noticing that on the banner, her nose was needle-like and pointed inexplicably to the right, and her eyes were lopsided.
“How come your eyes are crooked?” asked Amanda’s younger brother, Daniel. “You look like that type of fish with the two eyes that move from one side of its body to the other.”
“You mean a flounder,” replied Amanda. “But actually, only one of the flounder’s eyes moves. When the fish matures and starts swimming on its flat side, one eye migrates over to the other side of its body. Not both eyes. The other one is already there.”
“Whatever,” replied Daniel.
At nine, Daniel was two years younger than Amanda and had yet to acquire social graces or exhibit any evidence of his sister’s intelligence.
“Anyways,” he continued, “that’s the kind of fish you look like on that banner. Except that it doesn’t have a pointy, crooked nose like you do in that picture. Did the aliens do something to you to make your eyes move across your face like a halibut’s? Did they make your nose all pointy and crooked like that so it would be harder for you to fight them?”
“You mean flounder, not halibut,” replied Amanda. “And no, I don’t think that making my eyes look like a flounder’s or my nose look pointy was part of their plan for world conquest. It’s just a bad portrait of me, okay?”
Daniel’s comment was particularly annoying because a mutating flounder is exactly what Amanda thought she looked like in the banner that was now being paraded before the in - habitants of her hometown and camera crews from around the world.
“Well, it must be a bad portrait, then,” said Daniel, “because you’ve never looked much like a fish in real life. Except for when I jumped out of your equipment cabinet last week dressed like one of those spidery aliens and scared you. You should have seen your face!” Daniel laughed so hard he lost his breath and almost choked. “Your mouth opened wide and your eyes went all giant and bugged out, sort of like a surprised codfish that had been goosed or something! Like this!”
Daniel made his eyes bulge out and his mouth gape open in a pantomimed expression of fright.
“Well, if you’d gone through what I’ve gone through,” said Amanda, “you’d be a little jumpy about having people leap out at you too.”
Amanda still had nightmares about being chased through the basement of the STAR Academy by her professors after they had reverted to their alien forms. She could see the exoskeletal bodies bearing down on her as they tried to catch her and stop her from escaping and alerting the authorities to their plan to conquer Earth. So Daniel’s little “practical joke” of jumping out of her equipment cabinet dressed as a spider was not one that she appreciated.
“If you ever pull a boneheaded stunt like that again,” continued Amanda, “I will formulate some terrifying way to surprise you in retaliation. It will be something entirely non-violent. Yet it will be the most unimaginably frightening thing that can be done to someone of your specific psychological type—which, by the way, I have analyzed using state-of-the-art techniques.”
“What psychological type am I?” asked Daniel, not so cocky now, voice registering alarm.
“I’m not telling,” replied Amanda. “But I’ve studied you closely, and I know precisely what it is and what your deepest fears are.”
“Maw-mm!” bleated Daniel like a frightened sheep.
“Amanda says she knows my precise psychological type, but she won’t tell me what it is. And she says she’s going to use it to think up something to scare me if I try to scare her again!”
“Well, then, don’t try to scare her,” said Wendy Forsythe, attempting to ignore her son and enjoy the festivities. Her head bobbed uncertainly as she tried to keep time to the erratic rhythm of the music.
“So,” continued Amanda, “no more of your dumb stunts, okay, Daniel? Because if you force me to devise a means to scare you, whatever I create will make you jump out of your skin so far that you’ll look a lot sillier than a surprised cod. And I’ll record your reaction on a webcam and post it on the Internet so your classmates can all see it and have a good laugh.”
“Maww-mmm!” whined Daniel.
Amanda smiled slightly.
“Oh, Amanda,” interjected her mother, “just ignore your brother. He’s only trying to get you going. As for you, Daniel, don’t upset your sister. This is her big night, and I won’t have you spoiling it. It doesn’t matter how bad her picture on that banner is, or how much you think she looks like a tuna. It’s the thought that counts.”
“Not a tuna, a flounder, Mom,” said Amanda. “And anyway, the ‘thought’ is the most disturbing part. Nothing at the STAR Academy happened anything like the way they’re showing it. They’re making it look so stupid!”
In the rest of the scene on the banner, the Amanda with the lopsided, mutating flounder eyes was firing two laser pistols like a gunslinger at some evil-looking aliens. Their plans of Earthly conquest thwarted, the once-smug invaders cringed. Their bugged-out eyes now looked fearful as they beat a retreat back to their spaceship, dodging Amanda’s laser blasts, which burned gaping holes through their unluckier accomplices and incinerated others altogether.
“I like the way you zapped a hole right through that one’s back!” said Daniel. “Think you could teach me to shoot like that?”
“No,” replied Amanda, “because I’ve never shot anyone, with a laser or anything else. I didn’t defeat the aliens by blasting them with laser beams! It’s like I told the reporters—we never had to harm any of the aliens. We just outsmarted them. And the one named George actually helped me stop the other ones.”
“Sweetheart,” said Amanda’s mother, “people don’t really care about the details. They’re just thrilled that you saved them from alien invaders.”
At this, Amanda’s father, who had been preoccupied with entering numbers into a calculator, spoke up. “Your mother’s right. And besides, I’m in the middle of negotiating a very lucrative deal for those Amanda-blasting-the-aliens banners. For every one that is printed after this parade, we get twenty cents. So if we sell a million of them . . . well, you’re the genius, you do the math.”
“If there are a million of those banners with my face on them, looking like a flounder with a crooked nose, I’ll kill myself,” said Amanda.
“Honey, don’t talk like that,” said her mother. “People will think you’re serious.”
“I am serious,” said Amanda. “I don’t want you to sell any of those banners, Dad. Not a single one.”
“You just don’t understand business,” said Jack Forsythe.
“We’ve got to make hay while the sun shines. People might be dying to spend money on a banner with your picture on it this week. But by next month or the month after that, there will be someone more famous than you—a boy who survived an accidental ride in a balloon, a kid who can make a dummy talk while standing on his head and drinking a glass of water. The money from this banner would be really good. For all of us.”
“Sorry, Dad, but it makes me look like I’m insane. I don’t want you to sell them.”
“I’ll cut you in for 10 percent of the profits—after expenses, that is,” said Jack Forsythe.
“No,” said Amanda.
“You drive a hard bargain,” said her father. “Okay, 10 percent of the gross. That means 10 percent of all the money I take in before expenses.”
“I know what gross profit means,” replied Amanda.
“So do we have a deal or do we have a deal?” he asked.
“Jack, can we talk about this some other time?” said Wendy Forsythe. “Can’t we just try to enjoy the music and the fact that Amanda is being honoured, and not being thought of as an oddball anymore?”
Jack Forsythe nodded glumly as he mentally calculated how much money he wouldn’t make if he didn’t sell a million banners bearing the laser-slinging, flounder-eyed likeness of his daughter.
The marching band concluded its rendition of “Hail to the Victors” with an off-key flourish. The crowd applauded wildly. News crews moved in and aimed their cameras at Amanda. Principal Murkly, who just months earlier had mocked Amanda’s science fair project in front of the entire school, stepped up to the microphone. He beamed at the crowd.
“And now,” he proudly announced “the Downview Public School kindergarten class would like to present a play that Mrs. Wheedlbum and I wrote ourselves in honour of that special student whom we nurtured into what she is today....
On cue, a slightly out-of-tune marching band began to play “Hail to the Victors.” It was a type of music known as a “war song” and was performed at games where the Downview Danes, her school’s football team, were competing. The aggressively energetic nature of the rhythm and melody was designed to rouse both fans and players. However, Amanda didn’t have much interest in surrogate gladiatorial combats, so the music did not have the intended effect on her. Instead, its frenzied tempo and roller-coaster melody made her think not of champions but rather of an old slapstick silent movie. The type where some unfortunate man on a railway handcar was pumping frantically to avoid being mowed down by a speeding steam locomotive. Or perhaps he was running around a circus ring with the seat of his pants on fire, frantically trying to extinguish the flames by flapping his hands over his posterior while being chased by a tiger that had escaped from its cage.
Meanwhile, awed by the finale of the fireworks display, the large crowd of Downview residents who had gathered for the occasion cheered and applauded heartily. The roar of their approval reverberated around the square in front of Downview city hall, mingling with the discordant strains of the music and the last echoes of the fireworks explosion as the acrid odour of burnt gunpowder wafted down onto the assembled throng.
The marching band then lurched into action, high-stepping through the square in a choreographed routine so carefully rehearsed for this celebration that the movements of the players were very nearly in sync. Each one knew that the eyes of the world were upon them, because tonight they were performing to celebrate something far more momentous than a victory by the Downview Danes. They were here to honour the girl who had saved them from becoming mindless slaves to alien invaders from a distant planet. Some of the sousaphone players, overcome by the magnitude of the occasion, began to blow harder and play faster. The fluctuation in tempo gave the music the characteristic of a sonic rubber band, stretching and contracting as if it existed in some parallel universe where the rules of space and time no longer applied. The increasingly wobbly music made Amanda think even more of the man in the circus ring, looking for a water bucket in which to dunk his flaming derrière while he ran away from the escaped tiger. She began to giggle.
“Honey,” said her mother, Wendy Forsythe, “don’t laugh like that. Everyone will think there’s something wrong with you. For once, nobody thinks you’re some kind of . . . you know, weirdo. So don’t blow it. Just wave to the crowd. They’ve all come out to honour you, after all.”
Amanda was used to her mother worrying that other people would think there was something wrong with her. She had known this ever since the age of two, when she had begun laying out her coloured building blocks in sequences that her mother recognized as patterns, though she could not break the code. In fact, Amanda was so accustomed to her mother’s insecurities about her that despite having saved the world from alien invasion, all she said now, as she stood in the place of honour, was “Yes, Mom.”
Besides, Amanda was genuinely honoured by this outpouring of thanks from the people of her hometown, even if their way of expressing it was unintentionally comical. So, not wanting to insult anyone, she did as her mother suggested. She waved to the crowd, tried to ignore the ridiculous music and did her best to put the slapstick image out of her mind so her smile wouldn’t break into a belly laugh. But the more she tried to block out the picture she saw in her mind’s eye, the more the marching band’s music seemed to speed up and slow down. Soon, she could hardly see anything but a mental image of the wild-eyed man in the silent movie, running around in circles and flapping his hands to try to put out the fire on his butt, all while avoiding getting eaten by the tiger. Standing there on the raised platform—exposed to the crowd and surrounded by her family, the mayor of Downview and a gaggle of local dignitaries—Amanda felt a nearly uncontrollable burst of laughter building inside her.
Her mother gave her the evil eye. “Don’t you dare, Amanda. Do you hear me? No laughing. I mean it.”
Finally, Amanda was able to force the movie image out of her mind. But that was only because it had been replaced by a real-life image that was even stranger than the one she was picturing. As the marching band tottered like a drunken centipede toward the reviewing stand, she could see that two of the majorettes were proudly holding up a banner. The banner was intended to represent the event that had made Amanda famous all over planet Earth (and no doubt beyond it as well). However, it was possible to guess this only because it read “Thank you, Amanda Forsythe!” Nothing else depicted on the banner, mused Amanda, bore any resemblance to either her or the astonishing events that had changed her life— and allowed everyone else’s lives to stay the same.
“Look, sweetie, there’s even a picture of you on the banner,” exclaimed her father, Jack Forsythe, gesturing toward a crudely if enthusiastically painted portrait of Amanda.
Amanda wasn’t vain by any stretch of the imagination, but she couldn’t help noticing that on the banner, her nose was needle-like and pointed inexplicably to the right, and her eyes were lopsided.
“How come your eyes are crooked?” asked Amanda’s younger brother, Daniel. “You look like that type of fish with the two eyes that move from one side of its body to the other.”
“You mean a flounder,” replied Amanda. “But actually, only one of the flounder’s eyes moves. When the fish matures and starts swimming on its flat side, one eye migrates over to the other side of its body. Not both eyes. The other one is already there.”
“Whatever,” replied Daniel.
At nine, Daniel was two years younger than Amanda and had yet to acquire social graces or exhibit any evidence of his sister’s intelligence.
“Anyways,” he continued, “that’s the kind of fish you look like on that banner. Except that it doesn’t have a pointy, crooked nose like you do in that picture. Did the aliens do something to you to make your eyes move across your face like a halibut’s? Did they make your nose all pointy and crooked like that so it would be harder for you to fight them?”
“You mean flounder, not halibut,” replied Amanda. “And no, I don’t think that making my eyes look like a flounder’s or my nose look pointy was part of their plan for world conquest. It’s just a bad portrait of me, okay?”
Daniel’s comment was particularly annoying because a mutating flounder is exactly what Amanda thought she looked like in the banner that was now being paraded before the in - habitants of her hometown and camera crews from around the world.
“Well, it must be a bad portrait, then,” said Daniel, “because you’ve never looked much like a fish in real life. Except for when I jumped out of your equipment cabinet last week dressed like one of those spidery aliens and scared you. You should have seen your face!” Daniel laughed so hard he lost his breath and almost choked. “Your mouth opened wide and your eyes went all giant and bugged out, sort of like a surprised codfish that had been goosed or something! Like this!”
Daniel made his eyes bulge out and his mouth gape open in a pantomimed expression of fright.
“Well, if you’d gone through what I’ve gone through,” said Amanda, “you’d be a little jumpy about having people leap out at you too.”
Amanda still had nightmares about being chased through the basement of the STAR Academy by her professors after they had reverted to their alien forms. She could see the exoskeletal bodies bearing down on her as they tried to catch her and stop her from escaping and alerting the authorities to their plan to conquer Earth. So Daniel’s little “practical joke” of jumping out of her equipment cabinet dressed as a spider was not one that she appreciated.
“If you ever pull a boneheaded stunt like that again,” continued Amanda, “I will formulate some terrifying way to surprise you in retaliation. It will be something entirely non-violent. Yet it will be the most unimaginably frightening thing that can be done to someone of your specific psychological type—which, by the way, I have analyzed using state-of-the-art techniques.”
“What psychological type am I?” asked Daniel, not so cocky now, voice registering alarm.
“I’m not telling,” replied Amanda. “But I’ve studied you closely, and I know precisely what it is and what your deepest fears are.”
“Maw-mm!” bleated Daniel like a frightened sheep.
“Amanda says she knows my precise psychological type, but she won’t tell me what it is. And she says she’s going to use it to think up something to scare me if I try to scare her again!”
“Well, then, don’t try to scare her,” said Wendy Forsythe, attempting to ignore her son and enjoy the festivities. Her head bobbed uncertainly as she tried to keep time to the erratic rhythm of the music.
“So,” continued Amanda, “no more of your dumb stunts, okay, Daniel? Because if you force me to devise a means to scare you, whatever I create will make you jump out of your skin so far that you’ll look a lot sillier than a surprised cod. And I’ll record your reaction on a webcam and post it on the Internet so your classmates can all see it and have a good laugh.”
“Maww-mmm!” whined Daniel.
Amanda smiled slightly.
“Oh, Amanda,” interjected her mother, “just ignore your brother. He’s only trying to get you going. As for you, Daniel, don’t upset your sister. This is her big night, and I won’t have you spoiling it. It doesn’t matter how bad her picture on that banner is, or how much you think she looks like a tuna. It’s the thought that counts.”
“Not a tuna, a flounder, Mom,” said Amanda. “And anyway, the ‘thought’ is the most disturbing part. Nothing at the STAR Academy happened anything like the way they’re showing it. They’re making it look so stupid!”
In the rest of the scene on the banner, the Amanda with the lopsided, mutating flounder eyes was firing two laser pistols like a gunslinger at some evil-looking aliens. Their plans of Earthly conquest thwarted, the once-smug invaders cringed. Their bugged-out eyes now looked fearful as they beat a retreat back to their spaceship, dodging Amanda’s laser blasts, which burned gaping holes through their unluckier accomplices and incinerated others altogether.
“I like the way you zapped a hole right through that one’s back!” said Daniel. “Think you could teach me to shoot like that?”
“No,” replied Amanda, “because I’ve never shot anyone, with a laser or anything else. I didn’t defeat the aliens by blasting them with laser beams! It’s like I told the reporters—we never had to harm any of the aliens. We just outsmarted them. And the one named George actually helped me stop the other ones.”
“Sweetheart,” said Amanda’s mother, “people don’t really care about the details. They’re just thrilled that you saved them from alien invaders.”
At this, Amanda’s father, who had been preoccupied with entering numbers into a calculator, spoke up. “Your mother’s right. And besides, I’m in the middle of negotiating a very lucrative deal for those Amanda-blasting-the-aliens banners. For every one that is printed after this parade, we get twenty cents. So if we sell a million of them . . . well, you’re the genius, you do the math.”
“If there are a million of those banners with my face on them, looking like a flounder with a crooked nose, I’ll kill myself,” said Amanda.
“Honey, don’t talk like that,” said her mother. “People will think you’re serious.”
“I am serious,” said Amanda. “I don’t want you to sell any of those banners, Dad. Not a single one.”
“You just don’t understand business,” said Jack Forsythe.
“We’ve got to make hay while the sun shines. People might be dying to spend money on a banner with your picture on it this week. But by next month or the month after that, there will be someone more famous than you—a boy who survived an accidental ride in a balloon, a kid who can make a dummy talk while standing on his head and drinking a glass of water. The money from this banner would be really good. For all of us.”
“Sorry, Dad, but it makes me look like I’m insane. I don’t want you to sell them.”
“I’ll cut you in for 10 percent of the profits—after expenses, that is,” said Jack Forsythe.
“No,” said Amanda.
“You drive a hard bargain,” said her father. “Okay, 10 percent of the gross. That means 10 percent of all the money I take in before expenses.”
“I know what gross profit means,” replied Amanda.
“So do we have a deal or do we have a deal?” he asked.
“Jack, can we talk about this some other time?” said Wendy Forsythe. “Can’t we just try to enjoy the music and the fact that Amanda is being honoured, and not being thought of as an oddball anymore?”
Jack Forsythe nodded glumly as he mentally calculated how much money he wouldn’t make if he didn’t sell a million banners bearing the laser-slinging, flounder-eyed likeness of his daughter.
The marching band concluded its rendition of “Hail to the Victors” with an off-key flourish. The crowd applauded wildly. News crews moved in and aimed their cameras at Amanda. Principal Murkly, who just months earlier had mocked Amanda’s science fair project in front of the entire school, stepped up to the microphone. He beamed at the crowd.
“And now,” he proudly announced “the Downview Public School kindergarten class would like to present a play that Mrs. Wheedlbum and I wrote ourselves in honour of that special student whom we nurtured into what she is today....
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherDoubleday Canada
- Publication date2011
- ISBN 10 0385667078
- ISBN 13 9780385667074
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages288
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