TJ and the Quiz Kids

  TJ and the Quiz Kids

  Hazel Hutchins

  Copyright © 2007 Hazel Hutchins

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hutchins, H. J. (Hazel J.)

  TJ and the quiz kids / written by Hazel Hutchins.

  (Orca young readers)

  Electronic Monograph

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 9781551437330(pdf) -- ISBN 9781554697625 (epub)

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PS8565.U826T3282007 jC813’.54 C2007-903647-3

  First published in the United States in 2007

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2007929833

  Summary: When master fact-gatherers TJ and Seymour are asked to join the school Quiz Kids team, TJ once again downplays his own abilities.

  Free teachers’ guide available at www.orcabook.com

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council.

  Cover design by Teresa Bubela

  Cover illustration by Blair Drawson

  In Canada:

  Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 5626, Station B

  Victoria, BC Canada

  V8R 6S4

  In the United States:

  Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 468

  Custer, WA USA

  98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  09 08 07 • 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CHAPTER 1

  My name is TJ Barnes, and I can’t name the capital of Peru. I don’t know what year the Wright brothers flew the first airplane. I can’t instantly tell you how many dozen hot dogs you’ll need if forty-two football players eat two each. When Mr. Phelps asked me to be on the school Quiz Kids team, I knew I had to straighten him out right away.

  “You don’t want me,” I said. “You want Amanda Baker.”

  Amanda is so smart it’s scary. She’s also the nicest kid in our class, so you can’t even hate her for being smart.

  “Amanda is the team captain,” said Mr. Phelps. “Please sit down, TJ.”

  I sat. I was trying to act cool, but my heart was thumping away as if I were a small frightened rodent. Being called to the vice-principal’s office makes me feel guilty even if I haven’t done anything wrong.

  “You still really don’t want me,” I said. “You need super-smart kids. Try the other classes.”

  “Maria and Rashid are on the team already,” said Mr. Phelps. “And although your brain power is perfectly solid, it’s not your IQ I’m after.”

  IQ stands for intelligence quotient— that’s something I do know. I’ve done the pop-up tests on the Internet. The tests show my IQ is—ta-da!—incredibly average.

  “But isn’t that what Quiz Kids is all about?” I asked. “The smartest kids in our school go against the smartest kids in Fairview school, and the brainiest team takes the prize.”

  “We’ve done that three years in a row, and we’ve lost three years in a row,” said Mr. Phelps.

  It was true. I’d seen it happen in our gym with the entire school, hundreds of parents, and reporters from the community newspaper watching. This year the local TV station was coming to broadcast Quiz Kids live on cable. I was pretty sure Fairview had invited them. Why would our school want everyone to watch us lose again?

  Mr. Phelps straightened some papers on his desk.

  “In school subjects, we’ve always done as well as the Fairview team. It’s in the extra information area that we fall down. It will help that Maria, Rashid and Amanda all have different interests, but that still leaves us with the oddball questions.”

  The word “oddball” gave me a hint of where our talk was headed.

  “Our team needs someone who knows quirky, out-of-the ordinary facts,” said Mr. Phelps. “Someone who’s done projects with unusual information about cats, for instance, or inventions or rockets or sports.”

  He still had the wrong person.

  “You want Seymour,” I said as I stood up. “I’ll go get him for you.”

  Seymour is my best friend. He attracts strange facts the way the glowing lure on the head of an anglerfish attracts lunch. I only knew about anglerfish because Seymour told me. He even demonstrated by taping a flashlight to his head and wiggling his peanut butter sandwich closer and closer to the light until, snap, the sandwich was devoured.

  Mr. Phelps, however, was waving me back to my chair.

  “Wait, TJ. You worked on those projects with Seymour. And as much as I like Seymour, as much as I like his enthusiasm, his energy…”

  Okay, it didn’t take an IQ of a zillion to figure it out. Even I know that Seymour goes overboard in the excitement department. I could already picture the enthusiasm he’d bring to Quiz Kids, especially since the TV station was going to provide official podiums and answer buzzers. The moment he had an answer—any answer, including a wild guess—he’d be pushing the buzzer like crazy. He might even push the buzzers for the other team. Maybe he wasn’t the best person for that kind of situation, but it would sure make things more interesting. Quiz Kids can get very, very boring when your team is losing.

  “You’re my choice, TJ,” said Mr. Phelps. “Agreed?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Seymour was the one who came up with most of the amazing facts for our projects. How was he going to feel if I was on the team and he wasn’t?

  “Of course, Seymour can still work on research with you,” said Mr. Phelps. “He could be your ‘oddball fact’ trainer. He could be trainer for the whole team.”

  It was when he added the last bit that I really understood. Mr. Phelps wanted Seymour’s brain, but not his buzzer finger.

  “You’re only asking me so you can get Seymour’s help without having to put up with him being on the team!” I said.

  “I’m being practical, TJ,” said Mr. Phelps. “This school can win. It deserves to win.”

  “I won’t do it,” I said. “Seymour’s my best friend. He’s the one who’d love being on Quiz Kids. Not me.”

  Mr. Phelps considered this for a moment.

  “Please wait here,” he said. He stood up and walked out the door.

  Oh joy, now I was alone in the vice-principal’s office. What if the phone rang—was I supposed to answer? What if a parent came in—would they think I’d been bullying some defenseless little kid?

  Luckily, it wasn’t long before Mr. Phelps returned with Seymour. As they came into the office, I heard Mr. Phelps talking about Amanda, Maria and Rashid, so I knew they’d already covered that part.

  “Hey, TJ,” said Seymour. “I thought you were in big trouble and you hadn’t let me in on it! But Mr. Phelps says it’s about Quiz Kids. Have you ever noticed the way our team always misses the easy stuff?”

  Which pretty much proved Mr. Phelps’s point. Seymour thinks of it as “easy stuff” because short, fast, amazing facts—the quirkier the better—are the kind that Seymour notices and remembers. He isn’t so good with the actual dates dinosaurs lived, but he’ll talk for half an hour about all sorts of bizarre things, like dinosaurs that had holes in their skulls and the ones that swallowed rocks.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” said Mr. Phelps, sitting down behind his desk. “There is one regular spot and one backup spot on the Quiz Kids team
. I would like the two of you to fill the spots and work together to cover the unusual information we might miss. A few days before the competition, I’ll decide who will be on the team.”

  Talk about sneaky! Mr. Phelps and I both knew that he’d already decided, but since Seymour didn’t know, he got sucked into the plan right before my very eyes.

  “This is super!” said Seymour. “TJ and I are great at finding all sorts of neat facts. What kind do you want? Hair balls? Scabs? Hurricanes? Fortune-telling? Vomit?”

  “I’m not going to tell you what to research,” said Mr. Phelps. “All the questions that I think of fall into schoolwork categories. But the weird stuff…I don’t even know where to start.”

  “You mean like what does a jellyfish have in common with cat pee?” asked Seymour.

  “Definitely a question I wouldn’t think of asking,” said Mr. Phelps.

  “And how many times do you have to pet a cat to generate enough energy to run a lightbulb?” asked Seymour.

  “Has someone really figured that out?” asked Mr. Phelps.

  “And if you suffer from doraphobia, what are you afraid of?” asked Seymour.

  “Being squished between elevator doors,” guessed Mr. Phelps.

  “Neeerk,” said Seymour, which is the sound he makes for a no buzzer. “We’ll do it. Right, TJ?”

  My mind was going a million miles a minute. I couldn’t ruin things for Seymour, but I couldn’t let Mr. Phelps get away with everything either.

  “We should be allowed to decide for ourselves,” I said. “When the time comes, Seymour and I should get to decide who goes on the team.”

  Mr. Phelps, however, was already shaking his head.

  “No, I can’t agree to that,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what. As of right now, the slate is clean. I’m going into this with an open mind. I promise to be fair. I mean that, TJ.”

  I thought of asking him to put it in writing and sign it, like the contracts Mom and Dad draw up for our business, but I didn’t want to push my luck.

  The PA system was crackling, which meant it was almost the end of the day. Seymour and I hurried back to class so we’d be ready to leave when the bell rang. When we hit the street, however, Seymour stopped at the corner to look back at the building.

  “One of us is going to be a Quiz Kid for our school,” he said. “Amazing!”

  Seymour was even more excited than I’d expected. That reminded me of the questions he’d asked Mr. Phelps. I was pretty sure I knew some of the answers.

  “Jellyfish and cat pee both glow under black light,” I said.

  “Bing,” said Seymour, which is his yes sound.

  “A doraphobic is someone who is afraid of fur,” I said.

  “Bing,” said Seymour again.

  “But I’ve got no idea how many times you have to pet a cat in order to turn on a lightbulb,” I said.

  “Some university student figured it out, but I forget the answer,” said Seymour. “But that’s okay—bluffing can be part of Quiz Kids. Cats are a good subject for us to bluff about. We’ll have to remember that.”

  It was my Gran’s four crazy cats that started us collecting amazing facts in the first place. These days I had two cats of my own. They were young and energetic and caused all kinds of trouble. We were still learning about cats.

  Just then a white cube van pulled up beside us. The driver’s hat was covered in paint spatters, his shirt collar was torn, he hadn’t shaved for a day or two and his glasses were taped together over the bridge of his nose. Dad was definitely in the middle of a job.

  “Hey, guys, do you have some time?” He had to shout because our truck goes blup, blup, blup, plus there seemed to be a new sort of howling noise in the back. “I’ve got some paint and flooring that I could use a hand unloading.”

  Seymour and I jumped in beside him. We like going out on jobs with Dad, and he usually treats us to a slushie after we finish helping him.

  “Where to?” asked Seymour.

  “Fairview Heights,” said Dad, wheeling the truck around a corner toward the big hill above town.

  “Perfect,” said Seymour. “Time to check out the competition.”

  Dad was coaxing the truck into a lower gear so he didn’t hear Seymour, which was good because I didn’t feel like explaining Quiz Kids to my parents. And as for checking out the competition, I figured that was just one of Seymour’s crazy ideas.

  If I ever tell you I can see into the future, don’t believe a word I say.

  CHAPTER 2

  When my parents owned a hardware store, Seymour and I liked making wild guesses about our customers based on the kinds of tools, toys and gadgets they purchased. Now that my parents had switched to renovations and home decorating, the guessing game had taken on a different twist.

  “Give us a hint,” said Seymour. “Do they want the place painted Pickle?”

  Pickle is a color on the paint charts. We hadn’t seen anyone use it, but Seymour kept hoping.

  “Nope,” said Dad. “Oyster Bay, Malted Milk and Full Moon.”

  “Beachcomber,” I guessed. The higher up the hill we drove, the fancier the houses became. “Rich beachcomber.”

  “My guess is a world traveler who saves money by living on his favorite malted milk chocolate bars that he buys on sale at home,” said Seymour. “And he’s boring too. No zip in those colors. I think your mom should have thrown in some Gecko Green. Or Knockout Orange. Or…Pyromaniac.”

  “You made up the last one,” I told Seymour.

  “Do you think it would sell?” he asked.

  “Might increase the cost of fire insurance…,” said Dad. He stopped in mid-sentence to listen. “Do you hear that?”

  “That howling noise?” I asked.

  Dad nodded. “It started after I went down our back alley to pick up some things from the house. I’ve been hoping it’s just dust in the brakes, but it should have worked its way out by now. The last thing we need is a big truck repair.”

  We were on top of the hill now. Thick hedges curtained both sides of the road. Dad turned at a rock cairn marked with a brass number. At the end of the lane stood a huge house in a grove of trees all its own.

  “Talk about cheap,” said Seymour. “A house this size and they still travel with suitcases of chocolate bars from home!”

  “That’s because they own the chocolate bar factory,” said Dad.

  Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether Dad is joking or telling the truth.

  He cut the engine and the blup, blup, blup stopped but the howling didn’t. Without the engine noise, it didn’t sound as mechanical as it had before.

  Seymour looked at me. One eyebrow went up, and one eyebrow went down.

  “Sounds like the time T-Rex fell into the laundry hamper and couldn’t get out,” he said.

  “Only louder,” I added.

  Dad laid his forehead against the steering wheel.

  “Please tell me it’s not,” he said.

  Seymour and I were already scrambling out the door.

  “T-Rex?” called Seymour, pressing his face up against the side of the box. “Is that you?”

  T-Rex is one of my cats. We’d named him after Seymour’s favorite dinosaur.

  Meoooooooow !

  “You okay in there, buddy?” called Seymour.

  Dad came around to the back of the van.

  “Did you bring the laundry basket with the overalls in it?” I asked.

  I’d seen the cats sleeping there that morning.

  “I was in a hurry,” said Dad, nodding. “I didn’t turn on the light. I dropped the rags on top and headed out. I thought it was heavy, but I was carrying all kinds of stuff.”

  Dad worked the lever and rolled the door upward. The full force of T-Rex’s misery came flowing out.

  MEOOOOOOW !

  T-Rex is long, lean and lanky. He has golden eyes, gray stripes and two white paws that look like those old-time shoe covers Gran says are called spats. He was sitting on the highest s
pot he could find, an old-fashioned desk that Mom had rescued and was hoping to sell, and he was howling his loudest. When he finally realized the door was open, he stopped howling and stared at us—two great round eyes in a furry striped face.

  Seymour and I laughed.

  “There’s Alaska,” I said.

  Bits of black, orange and white fur showed through the holes of the basket. A pair of emerald green eyes squinted from the top. Alaska looked like she’d just woken up.

  T-Rex took two steps toward us. Seymour climbed inside and scooped him up.

  “No escaping,” said Seymour. “But you can look out if you like.”

  “Good plan,” said Dad. “Seymour, you cat-sit while TJ and I unload.”

  Seymour and T-Rex settled just inside the back door of the truck. Dad handed me two paint cans and took some of the flooring himself. As we started up the steps, the front door opened and Mr. G. came out. He used to work for us at the store and now he helps Dad out on renovation jobs. He’s also an awesome football coach. I like Mr. G. a lot.

  “Hey, TJ!” he said.

  “Seymour’s here too, but he’s got to look after the cats,” I said.

  Seymour waved one of T-Rex’s paws from the back of the truck.

  “Stowaways,” said Dad.

  Mr. G. laughed as I followed Dad through the front door. Yup, the place was huge. The entrance was about three times the size of our living room, with a wide staircase curving up to the landing above. It was also a mess. The floor had been torn up. There were piles of old wallpaper. Next to the stairs were drop sheets, a roller, a paint tray and a tin of paint with the lid resting lightly on top.

  “Are they redoing the whole house?” I asked.

  “Just the entrance and the den,” said Mr. G., pointing to the wall he’d just begun to paint. “Malted Milk looks pretty much like its name.”

  It did too—smooth, creamy and just the right shade next to the wood of the stair rails. Mom’s great at decorating. That’s why our business is called Rooms by Rita.

  It took us a few more trips to bring everything in. I was headed back to the truck to hang out with Seymour and the cats when Dad handed me a water bottle.

  “TJ, slip off your shoes and see if you can find the kitchen and fill this up. It’s too tall for the washroom sink.”