Miss Daisy Is Crazy!

said we needed to burn off energy.
    “Now this is more my style,” I announced when we got outside. I made a beeline for the monkey bars. Then me and some other kids hit the swings.

    After that all the boys had a contest to see who could spin around in circles the longest without throwing up. Michael Robinson won.
    Then we all sat down on the grass.
    Even though Miss Daisy was pretty cool, we all agreed that we hated school. We made a promise to one another that we would hate school forever, even if we changed our minds and decided that we liked school.
    That’s when Ryan came up with the most genius idea in the history of the world.
    This was his idea: We should buy the school.
    Ryan told us that his father worked for this big company and that once his father’s company bought some other company just like you would go into a store and buy a candy bar. Ryan said it happens all the time. He said he didn’t see any reason why we couldn’t buy the school just like that.
    “If we bought the school, what would we do with it?” Michael Robinson asked.
    “We could do anything we want with it.
    We’d own it.”
    “Could we turn it into a video-game arcade?” I asked.
    “Sure, why not? Instead of teaching reading and writing and arithmetic, we could teach kids how to play video games.”
    “And we could ride skateboards in the hallways?” asked Michael Robinson.
    “Sure we could,” Ryan said, “if we owned it.”
    I got all excited, because if there’s one thing that I like to do almost as much as playing football, it’s playing video games.

    Oh, and riding skateboards. I started emptying out my pockets. I had a nickel, three pennies, and a LifeSaver. The other boys emptied their pockets too. We sepa-rated all the pennies, nickels, and dimes into little piles. Then we added up all the money. We had one dollar and thirty-two cents.
    “Wow!” Michael Robinson said. “That’s a lot of money!”
    “I don’t think it’s enough to buy a school,” said Ryan, who knew a thing or two about financial matters because his father worked for this big company.
    “Well, how much do you need to buy a school?” I asked.
    “Beats me,” said Ryan. “We’d better ask Miss Daisy.”
    We all rushed inside after recess and asked Miss Daisy how much it would cost to buy the school.
    “Gee, I don’t know,” said Miss Daisy, who didn’t seem to know much of anything.
    “Why do you want to buy the school?”
    “We want to turn it into a video-game arcade,” I told her.
    “What a great idea!” She beamed. “I love video games. There are so many schools and so few video-game arcades. It makes perfect sense to turn some of those schools into video-game arcades.
    I’ll arrange a meeting with Mr. Klutz tomorrow so we can ask him if we can buy the school. But right now, we have to go to Mrs. Cooney’s office.”
    Mrs. Cooney’s office is down the hall from our class. She says she’s the school nurse, but personally I think she’s a spy.
    I’ll tell you why. There’s this big poster on her wall that says this:

    I tried to read it, and it didn’t make any sense at all. Even Andrea Young didn’t know how to read the poster, and she knows everything. I think Mrs. Cooney has created a secret code, and she’s using the poster to send mystery spy messages.
    I will have to keep an eye on her.
    When we walked into Mrs. Cooney’s office, she had us all line up in size order.
    I was one of the shortest kids, so I had to stand in the front of the line. Then Mrs. Cooney told us to take off our shoes. At first I thought she didn’t want us to track mud all over her office. But then she told us that she was going to weigh and measure us. Obviously she is trying to gather information about us, because that is what spies do.
    My friend Billy says that the heavier you are, the smarter you are, because heavy people have bigger brains. But I think Billy just says that because he is overweight. I weighed fifty-two pounds.
    Mrs. Cooney showed us this awesome ruler she has. It is made of metal and stretches out six feet long. When she presses a button, the whole thing shoots into her hand and disappears like magic.
    That is cool! I’ll bet she has lots of other spy tools too.
    She wouldn’t let us play with her magic ruler, but Mrs. Cooney ran around measuring everything. She showed us that the bench we were sitting on was seven-teen inches high. The door to her office was thirty inches across. And her foot