Alvin Ho: Allergic to Birthday Parties, Science Projects, and Other Man-made Catastrophes

CHAPTER ONE
One Foot in the Grave
my name is Alvin Ho. I was born scared, and I am still scared. I never thought I’d live to see myself in another book, on account I could’ve very well died camping in that last one. The good news is that I had the secret powers of my Batman ring and my rolls of toilet paper with me. They saved my life.
The bad news is, there’s still a lot of other things that could kill me, just like that:
Giant octopus.
Giant trees.
Giant anything.
Monsters.
Recess.
Field trips.
Karate chops.
Pork chops (if they’re not well-done).
Chopsticks (if you fall on them).
The kiss of death.
The safest place for me to be is home, if you don’t count the fact that my home is in Concord, Massachusetts, which is hard to spell. It’s where the American Revolutionary War began, with lots of explosions and bad language and dead bodies all over the place. There aren’t any dead bodies out there anymore, but there sure are a lot of creepy dead authors who still live inside their homes, giving tours, instead of lying around at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where they belong. Normally, this isn’t a big problem, like setting fire to the woods, it’s just an average problem, like having the match.
But today was not normal.
When I got to school this morning—surprise, surprise—we hopped right back on the bus after A&A (attendance and announcements).
“Hey, it’s time for handwriting class!” I screamed as the bus rolled down the street, away from school. I love hand- writing class.
“Hooray, no handwriting today!” yelled Pinky, whose handwriting looks like hair floating in the ocean. “Yippie!”
“Did you forget?” asked Flea, who was sitting next to me. “It’s our field trip day.” Flea’s a girl. Otherwise, she’s okay. She wears a patch over a genuine pirate eye, and one of her legs is longer than the other, like a real peg leg. But she’s still a girl.
Field trip? What field trip?
“I’ve been looking forward to this all week!” shrieked Esha.
“Me too!” said Sara Jane.
I love field trips. I’m just not good at remembering them.
The wheels on the bus went round and round.
Scooter and Jules’s thumbs went up and down in a thumb-wrestling match.
Then their fists went left-hook, right-hook in a boxing match.
Then Nhia, who is a ninja from Cambodia, slipped a head-hold on Pinky, who has the biggest head in the class on account of he’s the biggest boy, and Pinky screamed into Nhia’s armpit, which made Hobson whack Eli on the head, which made Sam karate-chop Scooter with a loud “Aiyah!”, which made our teacher, Miss P, who was sitting at the front of the bus, turn around and yell, “SIMMER DOWN, BOYS, OR YOU’LL GET A NOTE SENT HOME!” How she knew who was doing what, all the way from the front of the bus and facing the other way, I’ll never know. But she’s very smart and smells like fresh laundry every day. Maybe she has eyes in the back of her head, just like my mom.
The noise on the bus simmered down.
When mouths close, something else is supposed to open, it’s one of the rules of school.
In this case, it was Scooter’s lunch box. Scooter’s dad is a cook in a restaurant and Scooter gets restaurant leftovers for lunch. And when Scooter opens his lunch box, people sniff.
It smelled like cold fried chicken. It was cold fried chicken!
Heads turned.
Mouths watered.
Scooter’s teeth sank into the chicken.
Juice dribbled down his chin.
This made Hobson, who’s a little roly-poly, yelp that he was hungry too, and rip open his lunch bag—just as the bus went around Monument Square, which isn’t a square at all, it’s a circle—and something went flying. I think it was raisins. Yes, it was raining raisins!
Then it rained sea- weed crackers! Then potato chips! Then my favorite—Goldfish crackers! Oh, I love field trips!