Agatha Parrot and the Thirteenth Chicken Read online

  I started back upstairs. Mom wasn’t going to be too happy with the wallpaper! It was all crooked with lots of sticky patches, and there was a weird lump under the paper by the top step. It was about the size of a sausage, or perhaps a potato . . . or an egg . . . or a baby chicken!

  PANIC PANIC!

  It was obvious what must have happened. When Dad was waving his wet paper around, Random had gotten stuck to it, and now he was glued to the wall!

  I stared at the lump to see if it was moving. It wasn’t. I put my ear to it and listened. No sound.

  “Random, are you in there?” I whispered.

  The lump didn’t answer. Then I remembered how Miss Bunn had gotten the chickens to respond to her when they were still in their eggs. I clicked my tongue a little then started to sing:

  “Chick chick chick chick

  CHICKEN!

  Lay a little egg for me.

  Chick chick chick chick

  CHICKEN!

  Lay one, lay two, lay three!”

  As I was singing, I started picking at the edge of the wallpaper to see if I could peel it back.

  “What are you doing?” asked James.

  Oh, rats! I looked up and saw James watching me over the banister.

  “I was just getting a drink of water,” I said.

  “Liar,” said James. “Your singing woke me up. And why are you trying to pull the wallpaper off?”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “You’re having a dream.”

  All I could do was get back into bed and hope that James would forget all about it.

  I plunked my head on the pillow and shut my eyes, but then I heard a scratching sound outside the door. I wasn’t going to get up, in case James was still around, but the scratching got louder and louder. Suddenly there was a giant ripping noise, and then I heard creaky footsteps coming into the bedroom.

  “Ag—ath—aaa!” a screechy voice called out. “Agathaaa, why didn’t you save meee?”

  “Who are you?” I said, only I didn’t say it, because when I talked I could only make chicken noises. “Eeeep peep zik!”

  “I am Ran-DOOOOM, the chicken ghost! Why didn’t you save meee?”

  EEEKY FREAK! I rolled up into a tiny ball under my covers.

  “It wasn’t my fault!” I said, but it came out like “Deek eeep wee!”

  I knew something very big was looking over the edge of the top bunk.

  “Answer me or I will peck through your tights.”

  Eh? I wasn’t wearing tights. I was in bed. But then I felt my legs. Oh, no, I WAS wearing tights! It was my horrible old woolly tights too. How did they get there?

  “I will peck through your tights and your LEG WILL FALL OFF . . . leg will fall off . . . leg will fall off . . .”

  And then I woke up.

  Bah! I felt like such a dolt. I’d been having Ellie’s dream about chickens. I sat up and pulled my hair to get my brain working. There was no giant chicken, I wasn’t wearing tights, and it was morning—I could tell because I could hear voices out on the landing.

  “It looks awful,” said Mom. “We’ll have to save up to hire a real decorator.”

  “If that’s what you want,” said Dad. “Or we could leave it and save up for concert tickets instead?”

  “Concert tickets? Really?” said Mom, sounding excited. “Okay, you’ve got a deal, but only if you get rid of that big lump.”

  A big lump? So the lump wasn’t part of the dream. Maybe Random was in there after all?

  By the time I was dressed, the others were down in the kitchen still having the wallpaper conversation.

  “You could try squashing that lump with your foot,” said Mom.

  “NO!” I said a bit too loudly.

  “Agatha’s right,” said Dad. “It might make a nasty mess.”

  EEEK! If that lump was what I thought it was, then it would be a lot nastier than Dad was expecting!

  “What do you think the lump is?” asked Mom.

  I was glad she was asking Dad and not me.

  “A big blob of wet glue,” said Dad. “I could stick a pin in it, then squeeze it so all the glue comes out.”

  “NO, NO, YOU CAN’T!” I screamed.

  “Are you all right?” Dad asked.

  “Ignore her,” said James, who was eating his cornflakes. “She was singing about chickens to that lump last night. She’s gone ’round the bend.”

  “I have NOT gone ’round the bend,” I said.

  And that’s when Dad looked out of the kitchen door and said: “Speaking of chickens, there’s a giant chicken coming down the stairs.”

  ARGHHH!

  I was about to dive under the table, when I suddenly realized—

  “This is another dream, isn’t it?” I said. “I’m not awake at all. There’s no giant chicken.”

  “Yes, there is,” said Dad.

  “He’s right, there is,” said Mom, who had gone to look.

  “No there ISN’T!” I said. “I know it’s a dream. None of this is real!”

  And just to show it was a dream and nothing really mattered and we’d all wake up, I got on the table, picked up the cornflake box, and tipped it out all over my head.

  “See?” I said. “I wouldn’t be doing this if it was real, would I?”

  Mom and Dad looked at me like I was an alien. Then Tilly came in through the door wearing her paper chicken head and some yellow tights and a yellow T-shirt and a set of fairy wings.

  “What’s Agatha doing?” asked Tilly.

  “Agatha thought you were a real chicken.” James laughed.

  “Tilly’s dressed up for the school chicken assembly,” explained Mom. “It’s a very good costume, Tilly!”

  “It certainly fooled Agatha,” said Dad.

  Don’t Count your Chickens Before They Hatch!

  On the way to school, I met up with the others. We had four shoeboxes with three chickens each.

  “Three times four makes twelve,” said Ellie, who’s our numbers expert.

  “Can’t it make thirteen sometimes?” asked Martha hopefully.

  “Never!” said Ellie strictly.

  It was all right for Ellie. She was the only one of us who KNEW she hadn’t lost a chicken. The rest of us were worried sick.

  Motley was waiting for us by the school entrance.

  “Mrs. Twelvetrees wants me to put the chickens in the brooding box so they’re ready for the assembly,” he said, holding his hands out.

  All we could do was hand the boxes over and hope that nobody else remembered how many chickens there were supposed to be.

  By the time we’d put our coats and bags away, we were the last people to arrive at the assembly. There was a great big sheet of cardboard in the middle of the floor, and all the kiddies were sitting around it wearing their chicken hats and any other costumes they had. The place was full of cowboy chickens, fairy chickens, alien chickens—and one little kiddie had put on his Halloween outfit and come as a chicken-headed pumpkin. EEEEK!

  Everybody else had to stand behind the kiddies. Me and Martha and Ivy and Bianca stayed close to the door in case we needed to make a quick escape. If the kiddies realized there was a chicken missing, it could get nasty. None of us wanted to face an angry pumpkin-headed chicken.

  Mrs. Twelvetrees was standing next to Motley’s brooding box, and right beside her was Miss Barking looking very serious. Miss B. had her mask and big gloves on, and she was holding a little fishing net on the end of a stick. Thank goodness! We could all relax knowing that if a chicken decided to go crazy and attack our beloved principal, then Miss Barking would dive in and save her. YAY! Give that woman a medal.

  Mrs. Twelvetrees clapped her hands, and we all got quiet.

  “What a thrilling day!” Mrs. Twelvetrees said. “We’re here to welcome our new visitors, the chickens!”

  “HOORAY!” cheered everybody.

  “Miss Bunn’s class gave all the chickens special names,” said Mrs. T. “Who can remember them all?”
/>   Over by the door we breathed a big sigh of relief. PHEW! We didn’t know what names the little kiddies had given the chickens, but there was no way they would remember thirteen different names, so nobody would realize there was one missing.

  Flozzie Slippin put her hand up. “I can remember the names,” she said.

  “What are they?” asked Mrs. Twelvetrees.

  “One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen!”

  “That’s right, Flozzie,” said Mrs. T. “The chickens are named after numbers!”

  Oh, no! That was NOT what we wanted to hear.

  “So how many chickens should we have in here?” asked Mrs. Twelvetrees, tapping the brooding box. She was really rubbing it in.

  “Thirteen!” cheered all the kiddies.

  “And who can count to thirteen?” asked Mrs. T.

  “We can!” The kiddies cheered again.

  We all felt really awful, and then Mrs. T. made it even worse.

  “Before we count the chickens, let’s have a big round of applause for our chicken monitors, who looked after them last night. Well done, Ivy, Martha, Agatha, and Bianca. Where are you, girls?”

  Mrs. Twelvetrees was peering around the hall. We sneaked toward the door, but Miss Pingle got in the way.

  “Here they are!” called out Miss Pingle helpfully.

  “HURRAH!” cheered all the kiddies, and everybody gave us a big round of applause.

  Normally I like getting applause, but all I could think about was the lump in the wallpaper. I felt totally rotten. It would have served me right if Ran-Doom the chicken ghost had pecked through my woolly tights after all.

  “Let’s have the first chicken, Miss Barking,” said Mrs. Twelvetrees. “Everybody get ready to count!”

  Miss Barking went up to the box and reached in, but then she stopped and made a puzzled face.

  “She’s noticed!” gasped Martha. “Stand by for big trouble.”

  “Come on, Miss Barking,” said Mrs. Twelvetrees. “Everyone’s waiting!”

  Miss Barking got a chicken out and carefully put it on the cardboard.

  “One!” counted the kiddies.

  “He’s lovely!” said Mrs. Twelvetrees.

  “That’s not Lovely, that’s Drain Pump,” whispered Ivy.

  Miss Barking kept going.

  “Two, three, four . . .” counted the kiddies as the chickens arrived and huddled together on the cardboard.

  “Five, six, seven, eight, nine . . .”

  “Isn’t this FUN?” said Mrs. T.

  “Ten, eleven . . .” chanted the kiddies.

  But then Miss Barking stopped. She was staring in the box again.

  “Come on, Miss Barking,” Mrs. T said again. “We want to see all thirteen chickens, then put them back before they get cold.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Miss Barking, and then she pulled out the twelfth chicken.

  “Twelve!” cheered the kiddies.

  Everybody was waiting for the thirteenth chicken.

  Miss Barking obviously didn’t know what to do. She was still staring into the box.

  “Something’s gone wrong,” said Miss Barking.

  “Oh!” said all the kiddies. Everybody sounded really worried.

  “They are so going to hate us,” I said.

  “I don’t blame them,” said Martha sadly.

  Miss Barking started fiddling with the red light over Motley’s box and prodded the control.

  “I said it wasn’t safe,” she said. “But they never listen.”

  Mrs. Twelvetrees went to take a look.

  “What is it?” she asked, then looked into the box. “GOOD GOLLY!”

  Very carefully she reached her hands in and pulled out . . . a purple chicken!

  “THIRTEEN!” shouted the kiddies.

  “Thirteen?” we gasped.

  Mrs. T. put the purple chicken on the floor, and it wasn’t any old purple chicken, either! He toddled straight over to where Gwendoline was standing and left a great big POOP!

  WAHOO!

  There was only one little fluffy person it could be . . . RANDOM!

  Who Did It and How?

  The rest of Friday was a complete blur. We must have had lessons and lunchtime and everything, but I couldn’t concentrate. All I could think about was the big mystery. How did Random come to be purple?

  At the very end of the day, we had a math quiz, and Miss Pingle handed out the sheets for us to fill in. Everybody else started writing, but I was too busy looking around the class for clues. Some purple chicken footprints next to a big pot of purple paint would have been helpful, but I couldn’t see anything like that. All I could see was Liam quietly slipping an old apple core into Matt’s reading bag—ha ha! Actually, you shouldn’t laugh at boys—it only encourages them.

  I started to doodle on the corner of the quiz. Big mistake! The next thing I knew, everybody was getting ready to go home, and Ivy was shaking my shoulder.

  “Come on, Agatha!” she said. “Haven’t you finished?”

  I looked down at my sheet. I’d drawn a fabulous chicken with thirty wings and beaks and teeth and a flower growing out of its tail.

  “Very nice!” Ivy laughed. “But you better write some answers in quickly. We’ll wait for you out by the gate.”

  Soon it was just me and Miss Pingle left in the classroom. I was desperately trying to fill the sheet in while she was packing up her bag.

  “Time to go, Agatha!” she said. “It’s the weekend. I’ve got plans, and I’m afraid they don’t include you.”

  She came to get the quiz from me, but as soon as she walked away from her bag, it fell over. Everything slid out onto the floor.

  “Oh, no!” she said. “It always does that.”

  She stood the bag up, but before she could put anything back in, it fell over again.

  “Why don’t you get another bag?” I asked.

  “I should,” she admitted. “But I just love the color too much.”

  The color?

  I found myself staring at the bag and then at Miss Pingle’s hair. I was getting a crazy idea, and I was probably making a crazy face to go with it.

  “Agatha?” said Miss Pingle. “Hello? Are you all right?”

  “Fine!” I said. “I just wanted to ask you something. Did you notice anything unusual about the thirteenth chicken today?”

  “Er . . . why?” asked Miss Pingle. She sounded a little nervous, and she had every reason to be!

  “What color would you say that chicken was?”

  “A sort of purple,” said Miss P.

  “Oh, really?” I said. “Because if you ask me, I’d say it was more like . . . Damson Dream!”

  Miss Pingle stared down at her bag and patted her hair at the same time.

  “Did you dye him to match your hair?” I asked.

  “NO!” exclaimed Miss P.

  She tried not to look at me, but I was giving her a HARD STARE. It was like slowly squishing a banana. There was nothing Miss Pingle could do to resist my awesome eyeball power!

  “Well, I didn’t do it on purpose,” she said. “Honest!”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “When the chickens were running around yesterday, your bag fell over, and he snuck in.”

  “He must have,” said Miss Pingle. “Then when I got home, my bag fell over again. He hopped out and ran to hide behind my trash can.”

  “And he found some of your hair dye.”

  Miss Pingle nodded. “There was a tissue on the floor with a big blob on it, and he got tangled up in it. I tried to wash the dye off with a bit of warm water, but he turned purple!”

  Poor Miss P. The only thing she could do after that was sneak him back into school and slip him into the brooding box before the assembly.

  “I felt bad, but he seemed happy enough. I’m just glad that none of you spent last night worrying about where he was,” said Miss P.

  “Oh, no, of course not,” I said.

  Well,
I was hardly going to say I thought Random was a giant chicken ghost that had come out of a lump in our wallpaper and made me tip cornflakes all over my head, was I?

  The Odd Street Miracle

  That’s the end of the main story, but there is one more thing to tell you, because it’s my favorite part!

  It happened just after I’d seen Miss Pingle. I met all the others out on the playground, and we walked slowly up Odd Street to our houses. They had a good laugh when I told them what had happened to Random.

  “Will he be purple forever?” asked Ellie.

  “Only until his guff flows,” said Bianca.

  “Until his guff flows?” said everybody.

  “His guff flows, and then he fets his gethers,” said Bianca.

  It took me a minute before I got it.

  “His fluff goes, and then he gets his feathers!” I said.

  By the time we’d figured out what Bianca was saying, we were standing outside number 1, where she lives.

  “Bye-bye, Bianca,” I said. “Sorry I blamed you for blowing a chicken out of your trombone!”

  “That’s okay,” said Bianca. “You were right to check it out, even if you were wrong.”

  “So Agatha was right and wrong at the same time?” asked Ivy. “That’s a neat trick!”

  We waved at Bianca, and in she went.

  Next was Martha’s house at number 3.

  “Sorry I blamed you for making Random explode,” I said.

  “Forget it,” said Martha. “We know Random’s your favorite, and at least he came back safe and sound. Overall, I’d say we did a pretty good job. YO!” Then she high-fived us all and went in too.

  When we got to number 5 where I live, there was just Ivy and Ellie left.