She moved Bird to the front of the room and left me at the back. She didn’t say a word, but I knew we were in trouble. When she stood back up, she looked at me and raised her eyebrows, and then she looked at Bird. As she reached down to pick it up, it was like she was moving in slow motion, like when I flip a flipbook’s pages reeaaallllly slowly. She said, ‘Phin! Are you even listening to me? Why are you staring off into space?’ Just as I opened my mouth to say something that wasn’t the truth, I saw her see the list. My brain blinked, and then I understood what that meant. Then, just as I was thinking about how my grandmother always says, ‘If you wish to live and thrive, let a spider run alive,’ my eyes were pulled away from the spider and made to focus on something quite a bit bigger but not so interesting: Mrs. If Lyle caught him, he’d rip his legs off one by one. I was thinking about how I sure hoped nobody mean spotted him. Gordon, it’s time for your medication.Īll I can figure is that the list must have slid off my desk while I was watching a spider by the window. Wardman said to Ryan, who was spinning his X-Men eraser.)ģ. (Beside this, Bird had drawn a picture of a tongue in a hand. At the point our covert operation was blown wide open, this was our list:ġ. So, to figure it all out, we were keeping track of Mrs. We were sure she had some undercover allies, but we weren’t sure who they were. In our Grade 4 classroom, Prime Enemy Number One is Mrs. Our job was to decipher our enemies’ cryptic messages. LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program. Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. The facts and opinions in this novel belong to the narrator, the fictional Phineas William Walsh, and are not necessarily entirely accurate or a reflection of the opinions of the author or publisher.

Amphibian by carla gunn