Agatha Parrot and the Heart of Mud Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Gang!

  Frontispiece

  The Heart of . . . What?

  The Return of the Mud Creature

  The Best of Enemies

  Nice and Friendly and Boring

  Welcome to the Club

  What???

  Zogs and Debras

  Inside Information

  Ivy Malting and Her Secret-Message-Sending Leg

  Too Many Xs!

  The Lesson

  Martha’s Funny Mood

  Ellie Makes Me Jealous

  Miss Pingle to the Rescue

  Who?

  Don’t Talk About the Diaper

  The Surprise Substitute

  The Ending

  Bianca’s Facts About Zebras

  Coming Soon from Kjartan Poskitt

  Middle Grade Mania!

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  Clarion Books

  3 Park Avenue

  New York, New York 10016

  Copyright © 2013 by Kjartan Poskitt

  Illustrations copyright © 2016 by Wes Hargis

  First U.S. edition, 2016

  Text originally published in the United Kingdom by Egmont UK Ltd.

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.hmhco.com

  Cover design by Lisa Vega

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Names: Poskitt, Kjartan, author. | Hargis, Wes, illustrator.

  Title: Agatha Parrot and the heart of mud / neatly typed out by Kjartan Poskitt; art by Wes Hargis.

  Description: First U.S. edition. | Boston ; New York : Clarion Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. | “Originally published in the United Kingdom by Egmont UK Ltd.” | Summary: When Agatha Parrot joins the spelling club to support her friend Martha, she gets help from an unexpected source—her cousin, Bella, who thinks she is emailing Agatha’s brother.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015041138 | ISBN 9780544508767 (hardback)

  Subjects: | CYAC: English language—Spelling—Fiction. | Family life—Fiction. | Email—Fiction. | Humorous stories. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Humorous Stories. | JUVENILE FICTION / Sports & Recreation / Soccer. | JUVENILE FICTION / School & Education. | JUVENILE FICTION / Love & Romance. | JUVENILE FICTION / Holidays & Celebrations / Valentine’s Day. | JUVENILE FICTION / Girls & Women.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.P65 Ad 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2015041138

  eISBN 978-0-544-50908-5

  v1.1216

  This book is dedicated to Auntie Zoe, who is so nice, so cool, so stylish, and SO like me.

  The Heart of . . . What?

  Hiya! I’m Agatha Jane Parrot and THANKS for reading this book. It’s very nice of you, because the title is a bit strange!

  If you want to know why this book is called The Heart of Mud, it’s something that somebody says later on in the story. If you like, you can flip through the pages and see if you can spot who says it. Remember, you’re on page 2 now, so I’ll wait here and you can come back when you’ve found it.

  I’ll just hum some waiting music . . . Tum-tee-tiddly-tum!

  If you think the title is kind of silly, it could have been a LOT worse. There’s one part in the story where my friend Ivy sends secret messages with her leg! It’s true. She really does, so Ivy wanted this book to be called Ivy Malting and Her Secret-Message-Sending Leg. Ha ha! But it was too long to fit on the front, so we used that title for one of the chapters instead.

  Before we start, I should warn you that this book does have a bit of LOVE in it. (That’s why it has Heart in the title.)

  Don’t worry. There’s no long kissing or holding hands or anything gross like that. YUCK! We don’t do that sort of thing on Odd Street—except once. It was Dad’s birthday, so Mom had to give him a kiss, but they didn’t like it much because he’s bald and she’s got hairy legs. What a pity Mom couldn’t take the hairs off her legs and plant them on Dad’s head! That would have been an awesome birthday present for him. How very thoughtful.

  Anyway, Ivy’s leg is waiting for you, so we’d better get on with the story. WAHOO!

  The Return of the Mud Creature

  In our house, Wednesday’s dinner is the BEST dinner of the week.

  What makes Wednesday so good is that Mom cooks up “A Real Taste of Italy.” It’s made with fresh pasta and handpicked tomatoes with an exciting blend of herbs and covered with a rich cheese sauce. Each serving also contains 377 calories, 13 grams of fat, and 832 mg of sodium (whatever that means).

  How do I know all this? Because that’s what it says on the box. YUM!

  We love dinner from a box. Even Dad can’t cook it wrong, except for the time he forgot to poke holes in the top with a fork and it went BADDOOF in the microwave. The smell lasted for weeks! Mom went ballistic, but secretly she was happy, because when her friends came over they thought she’d been cooking fancy stuff like they do on TV.

  “What IS that lovely smell?” said the friends.

  “It’s my new secret recipe,” said Mom, the Big Fibber.

  Gosh, if I told whoppers like that, I’d be sent straight to bed with no arguing.

  The bad thing is that we can only have box dinner on Wednesdays, because Wednesday is the only day when there are four of us for dinner. The box says serves four and WE MUST OBEY the box.

  So anyway, one Wednesday we were all sitting around the table waiting for our exciting herbs and 13 grams of fat. The four of us were Mom, Dad, me, and my little sister, Tilly. As usual, Tilly was dressed as a fairy, and she was watching the numbers on the microwave count down so she could do her magic spell at the end.

  “Five, four, three, two, one . . .” said the fairy. Then she waved her wand.

  PING! went the microwave oven.

  Dad got the plastic box thing out and peeled the top back. Oh wow, smell that smell, love it love it. He was just dolloping it out onto four plates when we heard an evil scraping sound coming from outside.

  The front gate squeaked and the scraping sound got closer, and then the front door burst open. A hideous creature covered in mud staggered into the hallway, leaving a slimy trail all over the rug.

  “UM OME!” wailed the creature.

  “Oh, no!” said me and Tilly. The last thing we wanted to see was the Mud Creature from Planet Smelly, but there it was.

  The Mud Creature had been playing soccer. Usually he had dinner at his friend Matt’s house on Wednesdays, but obviously something had gone wrong.

  “UM OME!” he said again.

  “What’s he saying?” asked Dad.

  “He says ‘I’m home,’” said Mom. Then she shouted into the hallway, “Don’t come in the kitchen like that!”

  “Like what?” said the Creature.

  “Like THAT!” snapped Mom. “You’ll have to get undressed in the hall.”

  By now you’ve probably guessed that the Mud Creature from Planet Smelly was actually my big brother, James. This was not good news for me and Tilly. We started shoveling the pasta inside us as fast as we could, because we knew what was coming next.

  “Did you get dinner at Matt’s?” asked Dad.

  “No,” said the Creature. “He wasn’t playing toda
y.”

  Dad went to the cabinet to get another plate out.

  Shovel, shovel, shovel, went me and Tilly.

  “Wait, you two,” said Dad. “We’ll need to save a bit for James.”

  And sure enough, Dad spooned HUGE scoops off both of our plates and plunked them on a plate for the Mud Creature. UNFAIR. I just hope James got all my 13 grams of fat in his portion. It would serve him right.

  After we had eaten our SMALL HELPINGS of box dinner, Dad stood up and tried to look important.

  “I’ll leave you to clean up. I’ve got some work to do in my office.”

  Office? That sounds grand, doesn’t it? I bet you’re thinking that Dad’s office has a big desk with lots of telephones and a giant window with helicopters outside.

  Actually, it’s not quite like that—surprise surprise, gosh, faint in shock.

  There’s a cabinet in the corner of our living room, and one of the shelves has the computer on it. You have to get a kitchen chair and sit with your knees in the bottom of the cabinet and your bottom sticking out blocking the TV. That’s Dad’s office! No big desk and no helicopters. Aw, shame! Let’s all weep for Dad, boo hoo hoo.

  While Dad turned his computer on, Mom went to clean up the hallway. James fetched his soccer clothes and plunked them by the washing machine, but when he thought Mom wasn’t looking, he dumped a huge muddy rag in the trash. I couldn’t resist taking a look and giving it a poke.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Shhh!” James grinned. “It’s Martha’s soccer jersey.”

  “It’s ripped to pieces!” I said.

  “I know. She didn’t want her mom to see it.”

  I wasn’t surprised.

  Martha lives next door at number 3, and she’s awesome because she’s big and jolly. Martha’s mom is like an even bigger and jollier version of Martha, except for sometimes when she isn’t jolly, and that’s usually when Martha has been playing soccer. Martha likes a bit of pushing and shoving, so when the boys try to tackle her, it all gets pretty lively. I’ve seen her knock three boys over at once and then drag them along the ground while they cling to her shirt. WAHOO! GO, MARTHA!

  It was a nice little bit of excitement to have Martha’s old jersey secretly hiding in our trash, but another even MORE exciting bit of excitement happened next.

  Dad stuck his head in the doorway. “James, you’ve got an email,” he said.

  “Me?” said James. “Who from?”

  “Ho ho!” said Dad. “It’s a secret admirer.”

  WHAT?

  WOOO-HOOO!

  Whizz . . . rush . . . zoom!

  About half a second later, all five of us were jammed around the computer.

  This is what the message said:

  Dear James,

  How do you do? I am your cousin Bella. Granny and Granddad say that you are the same age as me, so I am just writing to say hello. I like theater and dancing. What are your hobbies?

  Please email me back.

  Love from Bella

  James made a face. “Who IS this?” he said.

  “Your cousin,” said Dad. “She’s your Auntie Zoe’s girl.”

  Oh, wow! Auntie Zoe is the coolest person in our family. I’ve never actually met her,* but I can tell you exactly what she looks like. She’s really tall and slim with big eyes and short black hair. How do I know? Because she models dresses in the Duchess Catalogue that Mom reads!

  (*Actually, Dad says I did meet Auntie Zoe once. I was very small and sitting on her knee, and she was wearing a light blue skirt, and my diaper was leaking a bit—EEEK! So we’ll ignore that one and just say that I’ve never met her. The point is that Auntie Z. is a model and I’m going to be a model too, so we’re soul mates. Yahoo, awesome!)

  Dad stood up and made us all shuffle around so that James could sit down at the computer.

  “What am I supposed to do?” moaned James.

  “You’ll send her a nice reply,” said Mom. “We never see Zoe’s family these days. It’s very kind of Bella to get in touch.”

  “But she put ‘Love from Bella’ at the end,” moaned James. “I won’t have anything to do with that!”

  “She was just being friendly,” said Dad. “Now get on with it.”

  We all stood around James waiting for him to type something, but all he did was blush bright red. Ha ha, love it!

  “Do you MIND?” snapped James. “This is private!”

  So we all had to move away and leave him to it, which was a little boring. Never mind. The fact was that James had gotten LOVE from a MYSTERY GIRL, so I had to rush out and tell all my friends.

  It’s one of those things that sisters have to do.

  The Best of Enemies

  I opened our front door and EEEK, there was Martha standing there about to whack me on the nose!

  Actually, she wasn’t. She was just reaching out to ring the doorbell, but you know what it’s like when you open the door and somebody’s already there. (Martha’s the one I told you about who lives next door at number 3.)

  “Hey, Martha,” I said. I couldn’t wait to tell her about James getting some LOVE from somebody. “You’ll never guess what’s happened!”

  “Mom won’t let me play soccer anymore,” said Martha.

  “No, that’s not it,” I said.

  “Yes, it IS it!” said Martha.

  Then I realized she wasn’t joking. She looked really fed up.

  “Is it because of your jersey?” I asked.

  Martha nodded. “Partly that. But mainly what SHE said.”

  Martha walked back out to the street and pointed at the little fence in front of her house. Ivy was balancing on the top, practicing tightrope walking. (Ivy is the wacky one who lives at number 7.)

  “I said I was sorry,” said Ivy. “It just came out.”

  “What came out?” I asked.

  Martha explained. Basically, when she got back from the soccer game, her mom had opened the door and saw that Martha was just wearing her undershirt beneath her coat. Her mom had gone nuts about the soccer jersey and gave her a BIG TALKING-TO like moms do from time to time. In the end she said that Martha could only have another soccer jersey if she got onto the school spelling team.

  “The spelling team?” I gasped. “What does that have to do with soccer?”

  “Mom said if I had to play a sport, why couldn’t I play something less messy?” said Martha.

  “And I just happened to be going past . . .” said Ivy.

  “No, you didn’t,” snapped Martha. “You came out to listen to me getting scolded!”

  “All I said was ‘What about the spelling team?’” said Ivy, who was still walking along the fence. “Mrs. Twelvetrees is starting a spelling club, and they’re going to have a school team.”

  “Spelling is NOT a real sport!” moaned Martha.

  “Why not?” said Ivy. “It’s a team, like a soccer team.”

  “But I’ll never get on the spelling team!” said Martha.

  “I was only being helpful,” said Ivy. “It’s not my fault you’re a rotten speller.”

  Martha grabbed the fence with both hands and wobbled it. Ivy fell off and skinned her knee on the pavement, which made it bleed. They both looked at me crossly to see whose side I was on.

  “There’s only one answer,” I said. “Why don’t you BOTH join the spelling club?”

  “BOTH?” they both said.

  “Martha will have to go anyway, but Ivy got you into it. The least Ivy can do is help you get on the team.”

  Ivy gave her knee a lick. “Okay,” she said.

  Martha looked at Ivy in surprise. “Do you mean it?”

  “Of course,” said Ivy. “If that’s what you want.”

  Martha reached down and helped Ivy up. “Nasty scrape on your knee,” she said. “Sorry about that.”

  “It’ll look great in the morning.” Ivy giggled.

  “Yeah, all blue and scabby!” Martha laughed. “Hey, look at what I did playing socc
er.”

  So Martha showed Ivy her knee and—DING—they were friends again.

  Then I remembered that I was going to tell them about James and the “Love from Bella” message, but they were having so much fun with their knees, I decided I’d tell them later.

  Instead I went in to see what kind of progress lover-boy had been making.

  Nice and Friendly and Boring

  When I got into the living room, James was at the computer, with Dad looking over his shoulder.

  “Come on, James,” said Dad. “You can do better than that!”

  “But I don’t want to write this stupid email,” said James crossly.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t even know this Bella and she put LOVE at the end!”

  “So?”

  “So, she’s a weirdo!” said James. “Why does she think she loves me? That’s gross! And now Agatha’s laughing at me.”

  “No, she isn’t,” said Dad, being very serious.

  Yes, she was, actually. I was trying to keep a straight face, but I couldn’t help it, and neither could Dad. In fact he was trying so hard not to laugh, his nose suddenly did a big squeaky squirt.

  HA HA HA HA HA!

  James ran out of the room and slammed the door.

  “Poor James.” Dad giggled. “But we can’t send this. Your mom will get mad. Look.”

  So I looked.

  hey bella, h8 theter and h8

  dansin. hobis = sokker i like the

  ROVERS 4 eva. J

  (If you can’t understand it, don’t worry. It took me a few tries, and in the end it wasn’t worth it.)

  Dad was right. Mom would be mad if that message got sent. What was worse is that maybe Auntie Zoe would be mad too, and I didn’t want that. When I finish school and start to be a model, I might need Auntie Zoe to give me a few tips, like what expression to use when I’m having my photo taken. But what if James’s message made Auntie Zoe mad at us? It could ruin all my plans for future greatness. EEEK!