The Homework Thief

         The Homework Thief was at it again.

         I wrote down my assignments. I know I wrote down my assignments. I know I even started them. Then I got distracted by my little brother. He needed my help with his homework. His Math homework, I'm not even good at Math! After that I had finally gotten done with one of my assignments.

         After I had put away that assignment in my backpack, my mother called my brother and me down for dinner. We raced down the stairs into the dinning room to eat. It was meatloaf. I don’t like meatloaf. I’ve never liked meatloaf, but the rest of the family loves it. And instead of mashed potatoes or French fries, it was broccoli. It didn’t even have cheese on it! Yuck!

         Then it was my turn to do the dishes. They were greasy, sticky, stinky, and gross. It seemed to me that my mother had used every dish and pan in the house!

         Finally, I went back upstairs to finish my homework. When I got there, my backpack was gone and everything on my desk was missing. I yelled at brother, "Give back my homework," but he claimed no knowledge of where mine had gone. Then he told me his was missing too.

         We went downstairs to tackle our uncle so we could have our homework back. He had come over for dinner. He likes meatloaf and broccoli. Gag. After we tackled and wrestled for awhile, he claimed he hadn’t been upstairs since last week.

         Now we had a real mystery on our hands. Where had our homework gone? We asked mother and father if they had seen our homework. But neither had. We looked in our dogs’ favorite hiding spots. Nothing. Not even a speck of paper.

         We start to panic. If we didn’t have our homework by tomorrow, we were dead meat. It was the end of the term! Our teachers would kill us and so would our parents. We had looked everywhere. In the closets, under the beds, in the refrigerator, in the dryer, under the couch, in the fireplace, and in the piano.

         Finally, mother told us to go to bed. She said she would keep looking, and would wake us up earlier if she found it so we could finish our homework. I sighed, went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth, changed into my pajamas and crawled into bed. I couldn’t even read my favorite book, because it was in my backpack.

         Mother had gotten us up at 5 o’clock the next morning. She was laughing. Father was snickering and Uncle Ted was sitting on the couch with a very sheepish look on his face.

         It seemed that Uncle Ted went out to his car to get his duffle bag so he could go to bed. He found a clue. It said, “Look in the trunk.”This had confused him but he followed it anyway.

         He rummaging through all his junk he found another clue. “Look in the washing machine.”

         Taking his time, he made his bed on the couch. He watched TV for a couple hours but something on the news reminded him about the note. He went to the washing machine and looked inside. There was a third clue. “Look in the doghouse.”

         Highly confused he unlocked the backdoor and went outside in his barefeet. The ground was wet and very cold, but he braved it through. Inside the doghouse, were two dark lumps, but they weren’t the dogs. Attached to one of the backpack straps was a note that read: “Ha. Ha. Ha. The Homework Thief has done it again!”