Weather’s Here, Wish You Were Great

Don’t get stranded.

Read all the books in the Castaways trilogy:

#1 Worst Class Trip Ever

#2 Weather’s Here, Wish You Were Great

Coming soon:

#3 Isle Be Seeing You

From Aladdin Paperbacks

Published by Simon & Schuster

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as unsold and destroyed to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this stripped book.

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ALADDIN PAPERBACKS

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

www.simonspeakers.com

Text copyright © 2005 by Catherine Hapka

Illustrations copyright © 2005 by Jimmy Holder

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

ALADDIN PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Designed by Tom Daly

The text of this book was set in Golden Cockerel.

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Aladdin Paperbacks edition July 2005

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Library of Congress Control Number 2004109006

ISBN: 0-689-87597-5

eISBN: 978-1-4391-1359-2

ISBN: 978-0-6898-7597-7

Weather’s Here, Wish You Were Great

Some people spend their whole lives dreaming of a long visit to a remote tropical island. They yearn to forget the hour on the clock and the date on the calendar, to live only by the timeless native rhythms of sand and sea.

Yeah, right. Talk about a nightmare!

I think we could eat it Ned Campbell said hopefully. The it in question was a many-legged sea creature my little brother, Kenny, had just dropped on the sand near the fire pit. It was crawling around in circles, obviously confused by the strange forest of sunburned legs surrounding it.

Ryan Rodriguez leaned in for a better view. It looks almost like a regular crab, but smaller!

Ned nodded and licked his lips. Actually, I think it looks more like a crawfish or something—those are awesome, especially if you have some melted butter…. He swallowed hard, probably choking back the drool building up in his mouth. Ned loves food. Any kind of food.

I wiped the sweat out of my eyes with the back of my hand and stared at the wriggling creature, which Kenny was calling a sand crab. About the size of an extra-large garden spider, the crab was the pale, watery beigy-yellow color of dried snot. It also seemed to have a few too many legs, though I couldn’t be sure since it never held still long enough for me to get an accurate count.

I don’t know, I said dubiously. I mean, I like a nice seafood meal as much as the next girl, but that thing looks like an extra in a horror movie.

I glanced at the others gathered around Kenny and the crab. It was midday, which meant the beach was hotter than a gorillas armpit. Most of the group had disappeared right after lunch, probably to wander about in the shady, relatively cool jungle interior or take a nap in one of the rocky caves in the cliffs along the beach. Only Ned, Ryan, and Brooke Hubbard had come wandering over in response to Kenny’s triumphant cry of discovery a few minutes earlier. And me, of course. Don’t ask me why. I should have known from experience that he’d just found some new kind of creepy crawly creature. Collecting bugs and reptiles—the uglier the better—is Kennys third-favorite hobby. In case you’re interested, number two would be watching cartoons on TV Number one? Embarrassing me. It’s practically his calling in life.

I think it’s totally gross, Brooke declared, staring at the sand crab with disgust on her strangely mottled face. Have you ever seen a dark-skinned African American with, like, fifth-degree sunburn? Its not a pretty sight. You guys can eat it if you want, Brooke added, scratching a weltlike mosquito bite on her leg. I’ll stick to papayas, thank you.

Kenny shrugged. That’s okay. If you all don’t want to eat these guys, I can add them to my zoo. He smiled eagerly at us, his eyes lighting up in his grubby face. Did I tell you guys I’m building a zoo? It’s in this clearing up on the mountain, and—

A zoo, I muttered, cutting him off. Yeah, brilliant use of energy, Junior Einstein. A zoo is exactly what we need.

By the way, my name is Dani McFeeney. I used to be a pretty typical sixth grader. Popular, but not too popular. Smart, but not too smart. My grades have never been exactly perfect or anything, but I’m a reporter for the school paper, and the only sixth grader on the varsity basketball team. If you asked my two best friends, Michelle and Tina, to describe me in three words, Tina would probably say something like loyal, talkative, and competitive. Michelle might choose smart, fun-loving, and athletic. See what I mean? Typical girl, typical friends, typical life.

That was before my science teacher, Mr. Truskey, announced that he was taking ten of us Tweedale Middle School kids on a trip to clean up an old trash dump on some obscure island near the equator. Helping the environment while scoring a free tropical vacation on school time? It seemed like a great idea at first, and I was quick to volunteer. Too quick. It wasn’t until I was committed that I realized Michelle and Tina had no interest in going … and that the most evil, repulsive, and snooty person in the sixth grade—or possibly the entire world—had already signed up.

Saying that Angela Barnes and I don’t get along is like saying the Hatfields and the McCoys weren’t the best of pals. We’ve been mortal enemies pretty much since the first time we laid eyes on each other in first grade. Once we hit about fourth or fifth grade, we stopped most of the immature pranks—the garter snakes in her desk, the embarrassing pictures of me posted on the school bulletin board—and started just keeping out of each others way as much as possible.

That’s why, as soon as I found out Angela was going on the island trip, I did my best to get out of it. Unfortunately my parents decided it was the perfect time to teach me an Important Life Lesson about the value of following through on my commitments. Or something like that. I couldn’t hear their lectures too well over my own wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Before I knew it I was sweating like a pig, scratching about a million mosquito bites, and trying to hold my breath a little longer each time I used the disgusting communal latrine. Oh, and spending ten hours a day lugging moldy old trash alongside Evil Angela. Talk about disgusting …

Does all that sound like the bad part? No way. Compared to what came next, that part was like some kind of kittens-and-puppies-and-chocolate-sundaes paradise.

But to understand why, first you have to know about the choo-choo bug. That’s the common name of an insect called the lesser equatorial beachwalker beetle, which is some kind of superendangered species. At least it’s endangered in most of the world. On that particular island, choo-choo bugs were as common as pigeons in New York City. And almost as large.

The local choo-choo bug population was the main reason Mr. Truskey and his enviro-pals wanted to turn the island into a wildlife refuge in the first place. When we all got our first close-up look at a choo-choo bug, most of us wondered why anyone would want to save them at all. The critters are big, ugly, and active—sort of like a palmetto bug that got struck by the laser beam from a science-fiction movie and grew to three times its usual size. They also bite. A lot. By the time I’d been on the island an hour, I already had a huge, itchy welt on my ankle and two on my arm. They didn’t exactly seem all that endangered to me, either—in the four days we spent cleaning up the island I became personally acquainted with, oh, about half a million of them.

But according to Mr. Truskey, the bugs would be in danger if the island didn’t get cleaned up, and that would be bad because they’re an important part of the ecosystem, not to mention a big part of the local culture in the Esparcir Islands, the huge island chain where Trash Dump Island is located. Some of the native tribes even eat them. On the last evening of our cleanup trip, some tribe members from a neighboring island came to thank us with a big bonfire and cookout. The fish and vegetables they made us were pretty tasty, but when they offered up a final course of barbecued choo-choo bug, everyone said thanks, but no thanks … except Mr. Truskey. For some reason he decided that popping a huge, charbroiled insect into his mouth—legs, pincers and all—was a good idea.

But it wasn’t a good idea. It was a bad idea. Very, very bad. Not only did it cause him to barf up everything north of his knees the next morning on the boat back to the mainland, it also sent his sanity lever swinging over from mildly nuts to frothing-fruit-bat crazy. I guess you could call it Montechoochoo’s Revenge.

Before any of the rest of us realized quite how bad it was, Mr. Truskey managed to steer our boat in the exact wrong direction before finally collapsing, puking all over the place, and passing out. We tried to take over and find our way back to the mainland, but instead wound up impaling our boat on the coral reef of a whole new island. The boat sank, we did our best to get ourselves and everything we could carry to shore, and that was it: We were stranded.

At first it didn’t seem like a huge deal. Our other science teacher, Ms. Watson, had gone back to the mainland early with a sick kid, but we figured she’d come