Trouble at Table 5 #4 Read online

  Dedication

  Dedicated to MEJ

  (TFLAMSJ)

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 I Can’t Feel My Feet

  Chapter 2 Rosie Twirls, Simon Digs

  Chapter 3 Here Comes Trouble

  Chapter 4 Rosie’s Got It

  Chapter 5 Marshmallows and Friction

  Chapter 6 The First Step

  Chapter 7 Simon’s Search

  Chapter 8 Time to Start

  Chapter 9 Rosie-Dozy-Ding-Dong

  Chapter 10 Puffing Up

  Chapter 11 Heading to School

  Chapter 12 Clapping and Honking

  Fun and Games!

  About the Author and Illustrator

  Books by Tom Watson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  IT WAS FRIDAY. It was cold. Super cold.

  The sidewalk was covered in cold, gray slush as Rosie, Simon, and I walked to school. It had snowed the past couple of days and now it was all melty and clumpy.

  There were 412 sidewalk squares from the end of my driveway to the front door of school.

  I had counted them, like, a million times.

  I couldn’t count them that morning though, because of the slush. It was fine. I already knew there were 412. And it was an even number—I like things that are even numbers.

  So instead of counting the sidewalk squares as we walked and talked, I stayed busy being cold.

  “It’s cold,” I said.

  “It’s freezing,” Simon confirmed and shivered his shoulders. “I checked the thermometer on our garage. It said twenty-eight degrees. And Mom said it’s going to get even colder the next few days. The high on Monday is supposed to be thirteen degrees.”

  “Thirteen will be the high temperature?!” I asked.

  Simon nodded. His nose and cheeks were already bright pink and we weren’t even halfway to school yet.

  “What’s the low going to be?” Rosie asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” Simon said, shoving his hands deep in his pockets. He found a dime, pulled it out, and looked at it for a second. He seemed really excited about it for some reason. Then he pushed his hands back into his pockets to get warm.

  “You can tell us,” Rosie said. “How cold?”

  “Eight degrees.”

  “Maybe it will snow more,” I said hopefully. “Maybe we’ll have a snow day and not have to walk to school when it’s freezing.”

  “I thought of that too, Molly,” Simon told me. We could see the school in the distance now. “But Mom said there wasn’t any snow in the forecast. Just cold. Then colder. Then on Monday, coldest.”

  Rosie groaned and pulled her knitted hat down over her ears. Her hat had one of those fuzzy balls on top that jiggled as she pulled it down. She said, “I can’t feel my feet.”

  “Me neither,” Simon agreed.

  We quickened our pace. By the time we got to school, we were practically running. It wasn’t a fun kind of running. It was more like a we-don’t-want-to-be-outside-one-more-second kind of running.

  WE GOT TO class early because we hustled on the walk to school. We took our regular seats at Table 5 and Rosie started twirling her hair right away. I knew that meant she was thinking hard about something.

  Simon and I both wondered why. I didn’t ask her. I didn’t want to interrupt. But Simon doesn’t care about things like that. He just says whatever he wants—whenever he wants. That’s the way he operates.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asked as he dug around in the bottom of his backpack.

  Rosie turned to him. She stopped twirling her hair.

  “It will be eight degrees on Monday,” Rosie whispered. Her face turned kind of stern and serious-looking. “I don’t want to be cold walking to school. We have to figure out a way to stay warm.”

  “We can’t control the weather,” Simon said, still digging.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “Money,” he answered. “Sometimes coins fall to the bottom of my backpack.”

  “Did you forget your lunch money?” Rosie asked.

  “No, I packed today,” Simon said. “My dad’s birthday is coming up and I have a cool idea for a gift. But it’s expensive.”

  “What’s your idea?” I asked.

  “Tickets to a monster truck show,” he answered as he pulled his hand out of the backpack. “Bad news—no coins. But I have good news for you, Rosie.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I have some ideas for how to stay warm on the way to school.”

  “Really?” Rosie asked. She sounded a little excited. She definitely didn’t want to be cold on Monday morning.

  “Let’s hear them.”

  We were glad class hadn’t started. Mr. Willow was writing the day’s schedule and other stuff on the whiteboard. That usually took a few minutes. When he was done, that’s when class officially started and we had to get totally quiet.

  Simon had plenty of ideas. And once he got going, he really got going.

  “First, we could just move,” Simon suggested. “You know, closer to the equator. Maybe to the rain forest. Or a desert or something. I mean, if we want to be warmer in the winter, we should just go to a place that doesn’t have winter.”

  “Umm,” Rosie said and paused. “I don’t think our parents will move just because we’re cold walking to school.”

  Simon nodded. He seemed to have already thought of this.

  “Okay, I have a couple of other ideas,” Simon said. He started to talk faster. “I was thinking about the warmest place in our house. It’s by the fireplace. And I thought we could use that.”

  “Use your fireplace?” I asked as I looked toward the front of the classroom. Mr. Willow was halfway done with the schedule.

  “No, just the fire part,” Simon explained. “We could each get a log and light one end on fire. As we walk to school, we poke the fire end at each other. Wave it around real close! Toasty!”

  “Simon, I don’t want to wave fire at my two best friends,” I said.

  “And wouldn’t the fire spread to the other end of the log pretty quickly?” Rosie asked. “Wouldn’t it burn our hands?”

  Simon scrunched up his face as he considered our points.

  “Okay,” he said, moving on. “I like my third idea the best anyway.”

  And that meant trouble at Table 5.

  “WHAT’S YOUR THIRD idea?” Rosie asked.

  “Do you remember my Halloween costume last year?”

  Rosie and I both nodded. Simon had been a muscleman in a big rubber inflatable suit. It was super fun watching him bounce into trees and mailboxes and stuff without getting hurt.

  “We should all get muscleman suits,” he said quickly. His voice got louder, his words came out faster, and he sort of bounced up and down as he talked.

  “We’ll inflate the costumes with hair dryers. They trap the hot air inside.

  I got pretty warm when I was trick-or-treating—and that was a really cold night.”

  Mr. Willow finished writing the schedule. He stood in front of his desk waiting for everyone to get quiet.

  Rosie and I noticed.

  Simon did not.

  “We keep the hair dryers going all the way to school,” Simon said, continuing with his idea. “It will be totally warm. I mean, we might be sweating by the time we get here! I bet we could wear shorts inside the muscleman suits!”

  Mr. Willow clicked his tongue behind his teeth. Everybody got quiet—except Simon.

  Rosie and I nodded toward the front of class. But Simon misunderstood us.

  “I’m glad you both like my idea!” Simon said. The
n he just did what he always does—he kept talking. “We have to keep the hair dryers going and it’s almost a mile to school. So we’ll need lots of extension cords. We’ll plug them into each other—like Christmas lights!”

  Rosie wanted to tell Simon his idea was crazy—you can’t drag electrical cords through snow and slush.

  We wanted to tell him everybody else was quiet. And class was starting. And Mr. Willow was staring at him.

  But we weren’t allowed to talk.

  Only Mr. Willow could talk.

  “Simon!” Mr. Willow said loudly.

  “Ee-ack!” Simon squealed and jumped in his seat. His chair jerked backward. Lots of people laughed. It wasn’t mean. They just saw Simon being Simon.

  “Yes?! Yes, Mr. Willow?”

  “Why are you talking about Christmas lights?”

  “You heard that?”

  “We all heard it,” Mr. Willow said. He sighed and shook his head. “The classes at the end of the hall heard it.”

  “Sorry,” Simon said. “I was jus—”

  “I don’t need to know,” Mr. Willow said and raised his hand toward Simon. “I’d rather get our day going. Before we get started, does anyone have questions about what we worked on yesterday?”

  Rosie shot her left hand up in the air.

  “Yes, Rosie?” Mr. Willow said and smiled. He didn’t like Simon talking when he shouldn’t. But he did like it when Rosie had a good, smart question.

  “It’s not from yesterday though,” Rosie admitted. “Is that okay?”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Mr. Willow,” she said, “what are some different ways to generate heat?”

  THREE CHAPTERS DOWN! HOW WOULD YOU ANSWER ROSIE’S QUESTION?

  WE DIDN’T WANT to go outside at the end of the school day, but we had to walk home.

  It already felt colder.

  As we trudged through the slush, we talked about the different heat-generating ideas that Mr. Willow told us about. Would any of them help us on the super cold walk to school Monday morning?

  “We need to go nuclear!” Simon exclaimed. “We can dig up some uranium. Mr. Willow said uranium gets hot if you break it up or something.”

  Rosie said, “It’s called nuclear fission.”

  “Yeah, we’ll do some fission-y stuff,” Simon said. “We can get some chunks of uranium and just stick them in our pockets or whatever.”

  “Umm, I don’t think we should expose ourselves to nuclear energy,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s totally dangerous,” Rosie answered. “We’d be radioactive! We’d be sick! We’d glow in the dark!”

  “Sounds kind of fun, doesn’t it?”

  “No!” Rosie and I yelled and laughed.

  “All right, all right,” Simon said. “What else did Mr. Willow say?”

  “Electromagnetic radiation,” Rosie said. “Like from a microwave oven.”

  “Why don’t we just get a huge microwave oven?” Simon suggested. “Get inside, turn it on, and travel to school in it somehow. We can use the wagon in my garage.”

  Even though it was really cold and we wanted to get home, Rosie stopped on the sidewalk. Simon and I stopped too.

  “You want us to cook ourselves?” Rosie asked.

  Simon nodded. “We’d be warm.”

  “We’d be dinner!” she screamed.

  “I bet I’d taste the best,” Simon replied.

  We started walking again. I could see my house. Mom was all bundled up and in the front yard. She was covering her rosebushes like she does every winter.

  “Mr. Willow also said friction makes heat,” Rosie reminded us. “Like rubbing two sticks together to make fire.”

  “You know what makes great fire?” Simon asked, getting excited. “The Raging Inferno monster truck! It shoots fire out of its exhaust pipe! It’s awesome!”

  “I don’t mean actually making fire,” Rosie responded quickly. She wanted to stay on the subject. We both knew Simon could talk a loooong time about monster trucks. “I mean just rubbing something together to create heat.”

  Rosie stopped again when we got to my driveway. Simon and I did too.

  She raised her hands and rubbed them together as she said, “Friction.”

  Simon and I watched her. I could tell she was working something out. She stretched the mitten on her left hand. Rosie then took the mitten off and brought it up close to her eyes. She examined it.

  “Umm, nice mitten,” Simon said. “But I’m freezing my butt off. Can we go now?”

  “The cotton has holes in it,” Rosie said, ignoring him. “But it still traps the heat from my hand.”

  She put her mitten back on and looked toward my house. I think she was looking at my mom.

  “Just a reminder,” Simon said. He wanted to get moving. “Butt. Freezing. Off.”

  Rosie smiled and said, “I figured it out.”

  “Awesome!” I said and shivered. “Tell us inside. We’ll make hot chocolate.”

  WE DIDN’T USE the hot chocolate mix that comes in an envelope and you just add hot water. We made the good hot chocolate—with real milk. Mom poured the milk into a pot and set it on the stove.

  “You guys can take it from here,” Mom said after she turned on the burner. “I need to get back to my rosebushes.”

  “Why do you cover them up?” Simon asked.

  “To protect them from the wind and the cold,” Mom answered as she pulled her gloves back on. “They’ll bloom better in the spring if they’re covered with burlap in the winter. And I have to get it done—it’s going to be so cold on Monday.”

  Mom went to work on her rosebushes, and we worked on the hot chocolate.

  Rosie squirted the chocolate syrup into the pot. Simon did the stirring. And I got a bag of marshmallows from the cabinet. They were the little ones, not the big giant ones.

  “So how are we going to stay warm on Monday?” Simon asked Rosie.

  “We’re going to use friction—and trap the heat,” Rosie said.

  Simon and I had no idea what Rosie’s plan was, but we totally trusted her.

  After the chocolate milk got hot, we poured it into three mugs and sat at the kitchen table. Rosie put a few marshmallows into her mug. Simon grabbed a big handful and dropped them in his mug. A couple overflowed, but he just ate them straightaway.

  I used six marshmallows (an even number). But they got melty pretty fast, so I needed to scoop them out two (another even number) at a time to eat them. I didn’t want them to melt into one (an odd number) big marshmallowy blob.

  “What’s your plan?” Simon asked, taking a slow, careful sip of hot chocolate. After that sip, there was a little more room in his mug, so he dropped in some more marshmallows.

  “We’re going to make our own heat on the way to school,” Rosie started to explain. She rubbed her hands together to remind us what friction means. “And we’re going to trap it like inside a mitten.”

  “What are we going to rub together?” I asked.

  “We need to figure that out after we drink our hot chocolate,” Rosie said.

  That was enough explanation for Simon and me. We were confident Rosie knew what to do.

  The hot chocolate was cool enough to drink instead of sip now. Simon gulped half of his down in two big swallows. Then he filled his mug to the top with marshmallows.

  “Simon!” Rosie exclaimed.

  “What?”

  “You have more marshmallows than hot chocolate!”

  He brought the mug up and tilted his head back, and lots of marshmallows and a little hot chocolate flowed into his mouth. He looked at us—his mouth was so full that he couldn’t close it.

  He said, “I wuv marf-ma-woes!”

  YOU’VE ALREADY READ 2,428 WORDS! THINK SIMON COULD EAT THAT MANY MARSHMALLOWS?

  WE FINISHED OUR hot chocolate and Rosie got all sciencey.

  “First, we need to find out what material will get the hottest when we rub it,” Rosie explained. “We ne
ed to test paper, wood, metal, and plastic.”

  We got a pencil (wood), a paper towel tube (paper), a coat hanger (metal), and my Hula-Hoop (plastic). We put them all on the kitchen table.

  “This isn’t quite right for our experiment,” Rosie said as she held the pencil up and looked at it. She scratched at its surface with her fingernail. “It’s painted. We need to get to the wood underneath.”

  “Let me try,” Simon said.

  Rosie handed it to him. Then Simon put the pencil in his mouth and started to scrape it against his teeth.

  “Don’t do that!” Rosie exclaimed and held her hand out to get the pencil back.

  “Why not?” Simon asked, giving it back to her.

  “You might swallow some paint!”

  Simon just shrugged.

  Rosie shook her head at him. It wasn’t mean. She just thought he was crazy.

  “I’ll get some sandpaper,” I said. “We have some in the basement.”

  We took turns rubbing the paint off the pencil with the sandpaper. It came off fast.

  “Okay,” I said when all the paint was rubbed off the pencil. “What now?”

  Rosie showed us what we needed to do.

  We each took turns rubbing the objects—the pencil, Hula-Hoop, hanger, and paper towel tube—between our thumbs and pointer fingers. We rubbed them real fast for about fifteen seconds. We wanted to find out which one got the hottest.

  Rosie asked us not to share our answers. She said that could influence the results.

  “Okay,” Rosie said after we tested each one. “Which one got hottest?”

  “It wasn’t even close,” Simon said. “It was the coat hanger.”

  “Totally,” I said. “It almost burned my finger.”

  Rosie nodded and smiled. I could tell that was her result too. And I think she already knew the metal hanger would get hottest. She just wanted to confirm it with a scientific test.