Officer Spence Makes No Sense by Dan Gutman

1
The Mystery of the Missing PB&J
    My name is A.J. and I hate school.
    I was in the vomitorium eating lunch with the guys. Our lunch lady, Ms. LaGrange, was walking around saying hello to everybody.
    “Bon appétit!” Ms. LaGrange said when she got to our table.
    Ms. LaGrange is from France, so she’s always saying weird stuff like “Bon appétit.” I know that “appetite” means “being hungry” and “bon” means “bone.” So when French people get hungry, I guess they eat bones.
    French people are weird.
    “I invented a new food!” Ms. LaGrange told us. “Would you like to try it?”
    I never try new foods. That’s the first rule of being a kid. New foods are yucky. We all looked in the bowl Ms. LaGrange was holding.
    “What is it?” asked Ryan, who will eat anything, even stuff that isn’t food.
    “Take a guess,” said Ms. LaGrange.
    “Is it noodles?” asked Michael, who never ties his shoes.
    “Not exactly,” said Ms. LaGrange.
    “Is it pasta?” asked Neil, who we call the nude kid even though he wears clothes.
    “Nope,” said Ms. LaGrange. “It’s a combination of noodles and pasta.”
    “What’s it called?” I asked.
    “Poodlenasta!” said Ms. LaGrange.
    Poodlenasta? Who names a food poodlenasta? Ms. LaGrange is strange.
    Ryan tried some poodlenasta, but the rest of us said it looked gross. Neil opened his bag of Crispy Chips. Michael took out a bag of Crunchy Cheezy Crackos. Mymom packed me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
    I love peanut butter. And I love jelly. So peanut butter and jelly together is the perfect combination. The guy who invented the PB&J sandwich was a genius. He should get the No Bell Prize. That’s a prize they give out to people who don’t have bells.
    This annoying girl named Andrea Young with curly brown hair was at the next table. * She was sitting with her crybaby friend Emily. Andrea thinks sheis so smart because she’s a member of P.A.C. That’s the Principal Advisory Committee—a group of nerds who get to boss around the principal. Andrea was talking really loud to make sure we all heard her.
    “Did you know that girls live longer than boys?” Andrea said.
    “Really?” asked Emily. “I didn’t know that.”
    “Yes, it’s true,” said Andrea. “I read it in my encyclopedia.”
    Andrea reads the encyclopedia for fun in her spare time. What is her problem? I slapped my head.
    “Girls do not live longer than boys,” I told her.
    “Do too.”
    “Do not.”
    We went back and forth like that for a while.
    “Boys would live longer if they ate healthy foods,” said Andrea. “You shouldn’t eat chips. They have a lot of fat in them.”
    “So does your face,” I said.
    “Oh, snap!” said Ryan.
    I hate Andrea. Why can’t a ton of chips fall on her head?
    “So what are you eating?” Michael asked Andrea. “Nuts and berries and veggies?”
    “My mom packed me some yummy tofu,” Andrea told us.
    “TOE FOOD?!” we all yelled.
    I’d rather die young than eat food made from toes.
    Andrea held up her fork with a piece of that toe food stuff on it. It was white. Ugh, disgusting! It looked like a big toe. I thought I was gonna throw up.
    “Not ‘toe food,’ dumbheads!” Andrea said. “It’s tofu !”
    It sounded a lot like “toe food” to me.
    That’s when the most amazing thing in the history of the world happened. I opened my lunch box.
    Well, that’s not the amazing part, because I open my lunch box every day. The amazing part was that when I openedmy lunch box, there was juice and a bag of chips in there, but nothing else !
    My peanut butter and jelly sandwich was… missing !

2
Officer Spence Is Weird
    My mom never forgets my peanut butter and jelly sandwich! I turned my lunch box upside down just to make sure the sandwich wasn’t stuck to the bottom.
    “Hey, which one of you stole my PB&J?” I asked the guys.
    “Not me,” said Ryan.
    “Wasn’t me,” said Michael.
    “Don’t look at me,” said Neil the nude