KING OF THE MOLE PEOPLE PAUL GILLIGAN CHRISTY OTTAVIANO BOOKS HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY NEW YORK Henry Holt and Company, Publishers since 1866 Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271 mackids.com Copyright © 2019 by Paul Gilligan. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN 978-1-250-17134-4 Our books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact your local bookseller or the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945 ext. 5442 or by email at
[email protected]. First edition, 2019 Printed in the United States of America by LSC Communications, Harrisonburg, Virginia 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Eleni, Evan, and Rosa, who I love from the bottom of the earth. PROLOGUE t’s not fair. You do everything you can to be a normal, average kid. I You do sports (ugh). You eat normal, average things for lunch. You try to keep your clothes relatively free of mud and make sure you don’t smell too much like mushrooms. You get a small part in the school play, but somehow, through a series of suspicious events, you get stuck playing the lead role, which is way more than you bargained for. And you’re standing on the stage, toe to toe with Becky Binkey, the most popular girl in the school, delivering your lines, and everybody’s watching. And you start to fool yourself. You ix start to think, Hey, maybe this isn’t so bad.