Terrible Two Go Wild , livre ebook

ABRAMS BOOKS - Mac Barnett

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132 pages

English

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Everyone's favorite pranksters are at it again! School's out, and Miles and Niles are running wild in the woods outside town: climbing trees, exploring caves, and, yes, pranking. But these leafy, lazy days of mischief darken when bully Josh Barkin and his cadets from a nearby kids' boot camp discover the merrymakers-and vow to destroy them. Are our heroes' sharp minds any match for these hooligans' hard fists? The latest installment of the witty, on-target illustrated series is another "fast paced, laugh-out-loud novel" (School Library Journal) that proves once again that, in the hands of the powerless, pranks can be tools of justice-plus, they're funny.

Informations

Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	09 janvier 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781613120941
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	7 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0332€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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FOR SUSAN
Prologue
Summer is different. Summer is strange. Time slows and drifts. Bees hover, suspended over flowers, their bellies brushed gold. School is out. Days are long. The sun lingers in the sky, and when it sets, the sky glows for hours. It s an in-between time. You are no longer in the grade you finished last spring; you are not yet in the grade you will start in the fall. There are no school days, no weekends. Monday is meaningless. One day slides gently into the next. It s hard to keep track. Days indoors. Days outdoors. Days down in your best friend s basement, searching for the seventh secret coin in the desert world of that one video game. Sprinkler days. Water balloon days. Days memorizing dance routines off the internet. The days trying all forty-three flavors of ice cream at the ice cream parlor, and the days figuring out the perfect combination of flavor and cone (sugar, cake, waffle; plain or chocolate dipped). Swimming days. Days looking up cheat codes for games you already beat. Days your best friend goes on vacation, and you watch TV shows you ve already seen because you don t want to do anything new till your best friend gets back. Days making secret potions with stuff from the pantry. Days your dad makes you go golfing. Days building a waterslide park for ants. Days at the movie theater, in air-conditioning, sucking soda through a licorice straw while things explode on-screen. In the fall, it will be dark and chilly, and you will look back and remember fifty different kinds of day, and it will be like you lived fifty different summers. This book is about a summer in the woods.
Chapter 1
Ah, summer in Yawnee Valley! Welcome, welcome. Smell the wildflowers blooming in the woods! Smell the cows, who bend down with hungry lips to tear those wildflowers from their stems, chewing them, swallowing them, and regurgitating them, up and down, to and fro, from mouth to stomach to mouth again, for hours and hours, till their petals, pistils, and stamens have degraded into cud, which the cows finally digest. Sorry! That was disgusting. But hey, the flowers have nice names! Peaseblossom and thistle, broom and leek. Cowslips, hawthorn, eglantine. And, of course, hearts-ease, known too as Johnny-jump-up, or love-in-idleness, or the field violet.

If you ve read the first two books in this series, The Terrible Two and The Terrible Two Get Worse , you know the field violet is a special kind of flower. The field violet is the state flower. And if you know that, then you probably know it s illegal to pick them. It s not like you d get sent to jail. Still, it s frowned upon. You could get in trouble.
Of course, trouble never stopped these two, and it probably never will.

That s a lot of violets!
One of us smells like a turkey, said Miles. (He s the one on the right.)
What? said Niles. (He s the other one, the one on the left.)
Like a turkey, said Miles. Like Thanksgiving dinner. One of us smells like Thanksgiving dinner.
Oh, said Niles. Yeah. That s you.
What? said Miles. How do you know it s me?
Niles pointed to a couple of places on Miles s outfit. You re wearing sage. And leeks. You rub that stuff on a turkey.
You could have warned me! said Miles.
I said just do violets.
It s true. Niles had said that. But early that morning, when they were scrounging flowers in the forest for camouflage, Miles had thought it d be cool to have some variety. A little white. A couple shades of purple. So he d picked some leeks and some sage and even some wild garlic. Now that he was belly down in a violet patch, breathing hard and baking in the midday sun, Miles was having regrets.
When Miles had regrets, he tended to act as if he had no regrets.
Well, I still think it looks good, said Miles.
I even think it smells good, said Niles. I like turkey.
Then what the heck are we arguing about?
I didn t think we were arguing.
You said I smelled like a turkey!
You said you smelled like a turkey, said Niles. I never said anything!
How can you say that, when you re saying something right now!
They continued to argue about whether they were arguing.
Nearby, a branch broke.
A boy cursed. Another boy laughed.
Miles and Niles both shut their mouths.
They buried their heads in the flowers so they blended in with the field, which was on a little hill that overlooked a circle of trees. Miles and Niles crawled forward and took up a post behind a big piece of granite. From there, they could spy on the grove.
There was trash in the grove-crushed cans and magazines torn in half, a crumpled sweatshirt sinking into a mud puddle. An old knife stuck out from a stump. Crudely painted signs were nailed into tree trunks.
The voices in the woods grew louder. Someone delivered the punch line to a bad joke. A rude song was sung badly. And then three boys burst into the clearing, cackling, shoving, and kicking.

Papa Company.
Two of the boys were hard to tell apart. They wore identical olive drab pants and identical olive drab T-shirts, with little identical olive side caps smashed onto their identical heads. (They were identical twins.)
Miles and Niles kept their eyes on the third boy: the tallest boy, the biggest boy, the boy who was swinging a rusty cage with his left arm.
This boy wore a bunch of heavy military medals pinned to his T-shirt. The decorations pulled his collar down from his neck and made the whole shirt sag. He looked ridiculous, but the rest of Papa Company (all two of them) didn t think so. His medals demanded respect. They were symbols of power. (They had been purchased, five for three bucks, at a thrift store in downtown Yawnee Valley.)

The leader of Papa Company hung the cage from a low branch at the edge of the clearing. It rattled and shook.
The cage had something inside it.
The thing inside it shrieked.
Up at the rock, Miles craned his head forward and squinted. He wanted to see what was in the cage.
A dark shape flitted around and banged against the metal. The members of Papa Company gathered around and laughed. One poked a stick through the bars. There was more shrieking, some chattering, and a few frantic clicks.
Niles put a hand on his friend s shoulder. What is it?
I think, whispered Miles, I think it s a squirrel.

Dumb squirrel, said a boy, down in the grove.
Yep, it s a squirrel, said Miles.
The leader of Papa Company got bored with the squirrel. He crossed the clearing, pulled the knife from the stump, then plunged it back into the stump.
This was some kind of signal.
The other two boys got quiet.
The leader pointed to one of them.
Raise the flag, Dugout.
Yes, sir, Major Barkin, sir, said Dugout, whose real name was Daniel.
Good, said Major Barkin, whose real name was Josh Barkin. (If you ve read the first two books in this series, you probably already figured that out.)
Dugout removed a folded flag from his backpack. Papa Company watched solemnly as he climbed a big oak tree, unfurled the flag, and draped it over a big bough.
The flag showed the white skeleton of a rattlesnake on an all-black field.

Up in his hiding place among the violets, Miles grinned at Niles and raised two fingers in the air.
Niles grinned back and touched his fingertips to his friend s.

Now. If you ve read the first two books in the series, you know what s going to happen next. And if you haven t, here s the deal: Josh Barkin and his crew are about to get pranked.
Chapter 2
Roll call! said Josh.
DUGOUT!

Sir!
MUDFLAP!

Sir!
(Mudflap s real name was Tommy.)
This was Papa Company.
The members of Papa Company were cadets at Yawnee Valley Yelling and Push-Ups Camp, a boot camp for troubled tweens that operated in these same woods, just a few klicks away.

(At Yawnee Valley Yelling and Push-Ups Camp, distance was measured in klicks. One klick equals .62 miles, which equals 1,091 yards, which equals about 7,900 imperial teaspoons laid end-to-end.)
Josh had been sent to Yawnee Valley Yelling and Push-Ups Camp last year as a punishment. After four weeks at camp, most kids reformed. They wrote letters begging to come home, promising to be good. But Josh Barkin wasn t like most kids. (He was much worse.) After four weeks, he had asked his parents if he could stay at camp for the rest of the summer. This year he was back. As the only camper in its history to willingly return, Josh was made a JUNECOW, or junior counselor, and given a special hat.
Yawnee Valley Yelling and Push-Ups Camp was an awful place, noisy and violent. But it was Josh Barkin s firmly held belief that even the most awful circumstances could be improved upon-that is, made noisier and more violent-and so he d recruited two lackeys and given them cool military nicknames in exchange for their total and unquestioning loyalty. This is how Josh became the commander of Papa Company, a renegade cell within the camp. Papa was for the letter P - Papa is one of the twenty-six code words for the twenty-six letters in the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet. (It starts with Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and goes through Papa all the way to Zero.) And the P also stood for Power, which is what Papa Company was all about. Papa Company had a nice military ring to it, plus Power Company sounded like an electric utility.
Almost daily, Papa Company snuck off to the grove, where Josh offered the twins what he called the real training. Today, as usual, the training topic was advanced weaponry.
Josh spit out some gum he d been chewing, because its flavor was all gone.
Sir, do you want me to pick up that gum and pack it out for you, sir? asked Mudflap.
Naw, leave it for the bugs and raccoons to chew on, said Josh.
Oh, OK, right, makes sense, yes, sir, said Mudflap.
Josh looked at his gum in the dirt. He imagined a beetle rolling the gum all the way back to his home, probably up a big hill, and then stuffing it down through the little hole he used as a front door. His whole beetle family w