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over Crunch and into the house. “Was he trying to make an entrance?”
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “He tried to do that at my house last week,” Korie said.
    “Did it work?” I asked.
    Korie laughed. “No, he tried to do it with the sliding glass door and forgot it was closed.”
    I laughed. “Ouch!”
    “It wasn’t pretty,” Korie said.
    “Come on in,” I said. “Now that everybody’s here, we can get started.”
    I ran up the stairs with the others thundering up behind me. At the top of the landing, we cut to the right and squashed through the door into my room.
    “Okay, everybody. Get comfortable,” I said. “We may be here for a while.”
    “Dibs!” Mouth yelled as he dove toward a hammock I had set up in the corner and landed with an oooomph. By the time we all turned around, he was rocking back and forth with his eyes half-closed and the ropes of the hammock wrapped around him.
    “You don’t have to keep calling dibs all the time,” Korie said.
    “Leave him.” Tank sighed. “At least that should shut him up for a while.”
    “I’m glad something could,” I agreed.
    “Hey, guys. Thanks so much for helping me with this,” Crunch said.
    “It’s no problem at all,” Mouth said, “considering we’re going to make you do all the work. Tank and I are here to do some brainstorming …”
    “Yeah, brainstorming …” Tank repeated.
    “Do you even know what brainstorming is?” Korie asked Tank.
    “Of course, I do.” Tank seemed a little offended. “Brainstorming is like when you get a really bad head cold and all this stuff is swirling and storming in your brain.”
    Mouth sat there with his face in both hands.
    “Brainstorming.” Tank smiled once he was finished. I thought he was going to bow.
    “I’m not really sure how it’s going to help us figure out what stuff to get for Bartholomew’s display, but I sure as heck know what it is.”
    Korie’s head was about to explode as she tried to hold her laughter in.
    “Okay,” I said, trying to get things back on track. “Does anybody want to start?”
    Mouth put his hand up.
    Oh, gosh, I thought while smiling the entire time. Here we go again.
    “Mouth?”
    “We need some really cool things to give to Bartholomew so we can get Crunch out of having to take summer school,” Mouth said. “How about we say the first word that comes into our head when we hear a fairy tale on the list? Then figure out where to get one?”
    I was shocked.
    “That’s an amazingly well-thought out idea,” I said, surprised it came out of Mouth.
    “Anybody want to go first?”
    “I’ll go,” Korie said. “ Little Red Riding Hood .”
    “The Wolf!”Mouth yelled.
    “A dentist!” Crunch yelled.
    Everybody stopped. It was like they were frozen in time, waiting for Crunch to explain.
    “What?” Crunch asked. “When Little Red Riding Hood was about to be eaten by the Wolf, a dentist who was strolling through the woods heard her yelling and pulled out all its teeth. The dentist saved the day, married the grandma, and Little Red Riding Hood now had a pet wolf and doesn’t have to worry about cavities for the rest of her life.”
    I shot a look at Korie. “Crunch, everything you just said except wolf, grandma, Little Red, and the Wolf is wrong.”
    Crunch looked around. “What do you mean?”
    “It was a huntsman in the forest,” Tank explained. “He killed the Wolf with his ax!”
    “Wait! What?” Crunch covered his face with his hands. “Oh, no, not again.”
    “Not what again?” Korie asked.
    “You know my parents,” Crunch explained. “They’re anti-violence and anti-everything-else that’s normal. Along with the no cursing rules, they changed our bedtime stories to make it easier on us.” Crunch’s face fell. “I had no idea.”
    “Was that the same dentist from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer who pulled the teeth out of the Bumbles?” Mouth asked.
    “You do understand how crazy that sounds?” I asked.
    Crunch shrugged and then