Out to Lunch Read online

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Copyright Page

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 6

  Yummy Lunch Recipies!

  For The Breakfast Club:

  Rena, Patrice, Marcy and Vivian.

  —N.K.

  Text copyright © 2002 by Nancy Krulik. Illustrations copyright © 2002 by John & Wendy. All rights reserved. Published by Grosset & Dunlap, a division of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. GROSSET & DUNLAP is a trademark of

  Penguin Putnam Inc. Published simultaneously in Canada.

  S.A.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in-Publication Data is available

  eISBN : 978-1-101-10020-2

  A B C D E F G H I J

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Chapter 1

  “How many tomatoes are you going to eat?” Katie Carew asked her friend Kevin Camilleri as she plopped down into the seat across from him in the school cafeteria. Kevin had opened his lunch box. Inside were all sorts of tomatoes—tiny grape tomatoes; small, round cherry tomatoes; oval-shaped plum tomatoes; and a big plastic bag filled with sliced tomatoes. And for dessert, he had a bag of tomato-flavored chips.

  Kevin picked up one of the oval-shaped tomatoes and bit into it like an apple. “I could probably eat about a million of these. I love tomatoes!”

  All the kids at the table laughed. They knew that Kevin had been a tomato freak since kindergarten. Back then they had even nicknamed him Tomato Man.

  “You’ve never met a tomato you didn’t like, right, Kevin?” Katie teased.

  “That’s not true,” Kevin said. “I’d never eat a tomato from the school salad bar.”

  The kids at the table agreed. The vegetables at the salad bar were pretty gross.

  “Hey, how do you stop a rotten tomato from smelling?” George Brennan asked, dropping his tray down next to Katie. George loved jokes and riddles. He told them all the time.

  “How?” Kevin asked him.

  “Hold its nose!” George answered. He began laughing hysterically. He turned to Katie. “Good one, huh, Katie Kazoo?”

  Katie giggled. She loved George’s jokes. She didn’t even mind when he called her Katie Kazoo. She thought the nickname sounded sort of cool! She’d even tried signing Katie Kazoo on her schoolwork—until her teacher, Mrs. Derkman, made her write her real name on her papers.

  “Whoops,” Katie knocked her spoon off the table when she laughed. “Hold my place George,” she told him. “I’ll be right back.”

  Katie got up from the table and walked over to the lunch counter. “May I have a spoon?” she asked the lunch lady.

  “Didn’t you get one already?” the lunch lady answered in a very grouchy voice.

  “I dropped it,” Katie explained.

  “Tough toenails,” the lunch lady told her.

  “One spoon per customer.”

  “But how am I going to eat my pudding?”

  The lunch lady rolled her eyes. “Use your hands. Or better yet, don’t eat it at all. I wouldn’t.”

  The lunch lady hadn’t been very nice. But she was probably right. The pudding looked disgusting, and it smelled worse. Katie was better off not eating it.

  Katie went back to the lunch table. She sat down and looked at her apple. If she ate around the rotten spot, it might be okay.

  “Got room over here for me?” Suzanne Lock asked.

  Katie scooted over to make room for her best friend. Suzanne put down her cafeteria tray and sat beside Katie.

  “I thought you were sitting at the other table with Jeremy,” Katie said. She looked over at the long table in the corner, where Jeremy Fox sat with two boys from the other third grade class. Katie had known Jeremy and Suzanne practically since they were babies. Jeremy and Suzanne were pals, but they didn’t think of each other as best friends. Katie considered both of them her best friends, though.

  “Jeremy’s looking at some dumb baseball book,” Suzanne explained. “It’s soooo boring!”

  She placed her spoon into her bowl of

  alphabet soup and fished around. A moment later, she lifted the spoon and smiled.

  “Look! I spelled rat!”

  Katie looked onto Suzanne’s spoon. Sure enough, the letters R, A, and T were sitting in a sea of light orange water.

  Katie giggled.

  Suzanne put the spoon in her mouth and made a funny face. “Even a rat wouldn’t eat this stuff,” she said. “It’s terrible—just water with food coloring! It has no flavor at all.”

  Katie nodded. “I know what you mean. The food in this cafeteria is awful, and almost everything is made with some sort of meat. All I ever get to eat for lunch is a stale bagel and Jell-O.”

  “Oh, come on, Katie. Sometimes they serve gloppy, overcooked macaroni and cheese and old carrot sticks,” Suzanne teased. “You can eat that.”

  “Yuck!” Katie exclaimed.

  “That’s what you get for being a vegetarian.” Kevin told Katie.

  “Did you hear the one about the guy with carrot sticks stuck in his ears?” George interrupted.

  Katie shook her head. “No.”

  “That’s okay,” George shrugged. “He didn’t hear it either!”

  As George laughed at his own joke, Suzanne frowned. “That one was really bad, George,” she said. She turned back to Katie. “The fried chicken nuggets aren’t too bad, and they serve those a lot. I don’t know why you won’t even eat a piece of chicken once in a while.”

  “I told you, I won’t eat anything that had a face,” Katie explained.

  “But chickens have ugly faces,” Kevin pointed out.

  “I won’t eat any animals,” Katie insisted. “Of course, that doesn’t leave me with many choices in the cafeteria.”

  “Why don’t you ask your mom to pack your lunches?” Miriam Chan suggested as she took a bite of a turkey sandwich her mother had packed.

  “She doesn’t have time,” Katie explained. “On the days she opens the store, she leaves for work at the same time I leave for school. Our house is crazy in the mornings.” Katie’s mom worked part time at The Book Nook, a small bookstore in the Cherrydale Mall.

  “Well, I’m glad my mom packs my lunch,” Kevin said. “That way, I don’t ever have to face the Lunch Lady!” He made a scary face.

  “You know what happened to me today?” Suzanne said. “I asked the lunch lady if I could have a banana that wasn’t totally brown and mushy. You know what she told me? She said, ‘If you want fresh fruit, get it from home. Brown mushy bananas are what’s on the cafeteria menu today.’ ”

  “She’s such a grump!” Kevin said.

  “You’d be grumpy too if you had to dish out smelly, disgusting food all day,” Katie told him.

  “That’s true,” Suzanne agreed.

  “Speaking of disgusting, look at George!” Zoe Canter exclaimed. “I think I’m gonna throw up!”

  Katie looked over at George’s tray. It was totally gross. George had mixed his mashed potatoes and vegetable soup together. Then he’d poured his chocolate milk into the mix. Now he was busy stirring in some orange Jell-O.

  “Hey, Katie Kazoo, do you dare me to eat this?” he asked her.

  Katie made a face. “Yuck!” she exclaimed.

  Suzanne stood and picked up her tray. “Come on, Katie,” she said. “Let’s get out of here before George really does eat that mess.”

  As Katie and Suzanne headed toward the playground for recess, Suzanne looked back at George and sighed. “Boys can be so dumb,” she remarked.


  Katie shrugged. Some boys could be pretty dumb. But other boys were really cool. Like Jeremy. Katie was about to say that, but she stopped herself. Suzanne got mad whenever Katie talked about Jeremy. Suzanne didn’t like to think that Katie had two best friends.

  “Come on, hurry up!” Suzanne urged Katie. “Let’s see if we can get to the hopscotch game before the fourth-graders do!”

  Katie followed her friend out the door.

  Katie tossed her stone toward the hopscotch board. It landed in the middle of the three. Quickly Katie began jumping up and down the board. As she bent down to pick up her stone on the way back, she heard Jeremy’s voice over her head.

  “You guys want to throw the ball around a little bit?” he asked.

  Katie hopped off the board and smiled at Jeremy. “Maybe later,” she said. “We’re kind of in the middle of a game.”

  Suzanne gave a deep sigh. “He can see that, Katie.” She turned to Jeremy. “Can’t you?”

  Jeremy nodded. “I just thought maybe you two would want to play catch, that’s all. You said you wanted to work on your aim,” he reminded Katie.

  “I do,” Katie said kindly. “How about after we finish with hopscotch?”

  Jeremy shrugged and pushed his glasses further up on his nose. “Sure. See ya later.”

  As Jeremy walked off, Katie looked at Suzanne. “You sounded kind of angry. Are you mad at Jeremy or something?” she asked.

  Suzanne shook her head. “No. I just thought it was really rude of him to try to break up our game.”

  Katie nodded. “I guess we could have asked him if he wanted to play with us instead.”

  “He wouldn’t have wanted to play hopscotch,” Suzanne told Katie. “None of the boys play hopscotch anymore.”

  Katie shrugged. Suzanne was probably right. But they could have asked Jeremy to play anyway, just to be nice.

  Just then Mandy Banks came strolling over. Miriam and Zoe were right behind her. They were each carrying flat, smooth stones—perfect for hopscotch.

  “Can we play with you?” Mandy asked.

  Suzanne smiled brightly. “Sure. You’re right after Katie, Mandy. Then Zoe, then Miriam. This game is for third-grade girls only . . . right Katie?”

  Katie didn’t answer. She didn’t like it when games were just for girls or just for boys. She was much happier when everybody got to play. Katie tucked her red hair behind her ears. Then she reached out and tossed her stone toward the square with the four in it. The small rock soared right over the box, and landed on the eight instead.

  “Your turn, Mandy,” Suzanne called out cheerfully.

  Chapter 2

  Classroom 3A was a wild place after lunch.

  “Look out, incoming plane,” George shouted as he threw a paper airplane toward Kevin.

  Kevin laughed. “Back at ya!” He tossed the plane back to George.

  Suzanne ducked as the paper plane shot over her head. “Hey! Watch it!” she shouted at Kevin.

  “That’s enough now,” Mrs. Derkman told the class. “Recess is over. Please take out your writer’s notebooks. We’re going to work on our biographies.”

  Katie smiled. She loved writing biographies. Right now she was working on one about her dog, Pepper. Katie had taken care of him since he was a puppy. Pepper was like a brother to her—even better because Pepper didn’t argue or ask to share her toys.

  Squeak. Squeak. Squeak. Katie looked over toward the class hamster’s cage. Boy, did Speedy’s wheel need oiling.

  Mrs. Derkman must have heard the squeaking, too, because she said, “Oh, class, before I forget—the classroom floors are being cleaned this weekend. I will need someone to take Speedy home. If you’re interested, bring me a note from your parents saying it’s okay.”

  Katie knew she couldn’t even think about bringing Speedy home for the weekend—not with Pepper living there. Dogs and hamsters didn’t always get along so well.

  Still, Katie really wished she could take Speedy home. She cared about him more than anyone else in the whole class. Maybe that was because Katie was the only one in the class who had actually been Speedy.

  It was true! Katie had actually turned into the class hamster for a whole morning!

  It happened a few weeks ago. After a really, really bad day, Katie had made the mistake of wishing she could be anyone but herself.

  There must have been some sort of shooting star flying through the sky at the very moment Katie had made the wish, because it had come true. (And everyone knows when you make a wish on a shooting star, it comes true!) The only thing was, instead of turning into someone else, Katie had turned into something else—Speedy!

  Katie shivered a little as she remembered being a hamster. It was really scary. She thought she’d be stuck in that tiny, smelly glass cage forever. But eventually she’d gotten loose. And luckily, once she was free, Katie had somehow turned back into herself.

  Katie didn’t understand how any of it had happened. All she knew was that she was really glad to be an eight-year-old girl again.

  Ever since she’d spent time in Speedy’s body, Katie had taken great care of the little hamster. She always made sure his water bowl was full, gave him plenty of chew sticks, and brought him fresh carrots from home.

  Of course, Katie had never told anyone about turning into Speedy. She didn’t think they would believe her. She wouldn’t have believed it if it hadn’t happened to her.

  “Hey, Katie Kazoo, if I took Speedy home, you know what I would do with him?” George whispered from the desk next to Katie’s.

  “What?” Katie whispered back.

  “Keep him in the refrigerator,” George answered.

  Katie looked at George with surprise. “Why would you do that?”

  “To keep him from getting spoiled,” George told her. “Nobody likes a spoiled hamster!”

  Katie smiled and sighed. She knew George was only joking. George would never take Speedy home. He was afraid of hamsters!

  As soon as the school bell rang, Katie packed up her backpack and hurried toward the door. She couldn’t wait to get out of the school. It had been a very long afternoon.

  Jeremy and Katie met up on the school’s front steps. “I’m definitely asking my mother if I can take Speedy home,” he announced.

  Katie smiled. She knew how badly Jeremy wanted a pet. His mother kept saying she was waiting to see if he was responsible enough to care for one. “Great!” Katie exclaimed. “Once your mom sees how you feed Speedy, give him water, and change the dirty litter in his cage, she’ll get you your own pet for sure.”

  “I have to change the litter?” Jeremy asked, scrunching up his nose.

  “Of course,” Katie told him. “Otherwise, it starts to stink!”

  Before Jeremy could answer, Suzanne came bounding down the steps toward them. “I’m so excited!” she announced.

  “How come?” Katie asked her.

  “ ’Cause I’m going to ask my mom to let me bring Speedy home this weekend. It’ll be so much fun to have him there. I’m going to build him a whole hamster playground. I can use toilet paper tubes, egg cartons, and . . . ”

  “Wait a minute,” Jeremy interrupted her. “You’re not bringing Speedy home.”

  “Why not?” Suzanne asked.

  “Because I’m bringing him home,” he told her.

  “Are not!” Suzanne exclaimed.

  “Am, too!” Jeremy shouted back.

  “Yeah, who says?” Suzanne demanded.

  “I do!” Jeremy yelled.

  Suzanne looked straight at Katie. “Which one of us do you think Speedy should go home with?” she asked.

  Katie wasn’t sure what to say. As she looked from Jeremy to Suzanne, she wasn’t sure who Speedy would be happier with. Jeremy promised he would take good care of Speedy, but Katie knew Jeremy had a Little League game on Saturday. What if he was so busy thinking about baseball that he forgot to feed Speedy?

  On the other hand, Suzanne might not be able to take care of Speedy ve
ry well, either. Suzanne’s mom had just had a new baby. Now that little Heather had arrived, things were really crazy at Suzanne’s house. People were always stopping by to see the new baby, and everyone was busy running around, changing diapers and heating up bottles. What if someone knocked the lid off of Speedy’s cage by accident? The hamster would be long gone before anyone in her house even realized he’d escaped.

  “Come on, Katie, who do you think should get to take Speedy home?” Suzanne asked Katie again.

  Katie had a sick feeling in her stomach. No matter what she said, somebody would be mad at her. So, instead of making a decision, Katie walked away. “I have to get home and feed Pepper,” she told her friends quickly. “Talk to you later.”

  Chapter 3

  The next day there was trouble in room 3A. Jeremy and Suzanne both came to school with notes from their parents saying they could bring Speedy home for the weekend. Katie hoped that Mrs. Derkman would just pick one kid or the other to take the hamster. But that’s not what the teacher decided to do.

  “You two will have to work this out between you,” Mrs. Derkman told Jeremy and Suzanne. “You have until the end of the week to tell me what you decide.”

  Katie thought that was just about the most terrible thing her teacher could have done. Neither Jeremy nor Suzanne was going to give in. It didn’t seem like her friends even cared about taking care of Speedy anymore. All they cared about was winning.

  The whole class was caught up in the war between Suzanne and Jeremy. All the boys were siding with Jeremy. The girls were all on Suzanne’s side—except Katie. She didn’t know whose side to be on. Jeremy and Suzanne were both her best friends.

  Unfortunately, Jeremy and Suzanne weren’t friends with each other anymore.

  “You’re going to sit with me, aren’t you, Katie?” Suzanne asked as class 3A walked into the cafeteria.

  “Who says she’s gonna sit with you?” Jeremy interrupted. “She was my friend before she ever met you.”