Sam Wu is NOT Afraid of Sharks!. Katie Tsang
chapter 13:
CHAPTER 1
MY hIsTORy AS A
CeRTIfIeD, DefInIteLY nOT
AfraID
GhoST
-HUNTeR
My name is Sam Wu and I am NOT afraid of sharks. Or ghosts. Or anything else, no matter what a certain someone – that someone being Ralph Philip Zinkerman
the Third – might tell you. And whatever anyone tells you, I am NOT Scaredy-Cat Sam.
You might have heard about my
adventures with some ghosts. They started
1
in the
Space Museum
and then everything snowballed from there.1
Anyway, I’ve established that I’m NOT
afraid of ghosts. NOT even the Ghost
King, who is the number one bad guy in
the entire universe. I know this from my
favourite show,
There was a ghost in my house and we –
that’s me and my friends Zoe and Bernard –
had to find it and chase it out of my house.
1 I recently realized that when people say ‘snowballed’ they don’t
really mean an actual snowball like you’d throw at an enemy. They
mean an AVALANCHE. Which sounds terrifying. NOT that I’m
afraid of avalanches.
See,
totally
NOT
scared!
True story.2 We even have the
ghost-hunter certificates to
prove it.
Back to me being brave.
2 This story might NOT be 100 per cent true, but don’t tell Ralph
Philip Zinkerman that. Or his twin sister Regina.
I’m so brave that my sidekick is an actual,
genuine, man-eating snake named Fang.3
I thought that by proving I
wasn’t afraid of ghosts nobody
would call me Scaredy-Cat Sam
any more. I was wrong.
It was just the beginning of
proving how NOT afraid I am.
3 Fang doesn’t actually have fangs, and I’ve also
never seen him eat a man, but that isn’t important.
The important thing is that Fang is an actual snake
and he’s my very scary sidekick. NOT scary to me,
scary to everyone else. Except to my little sister
Lucy, who is apparently not afraid of anything.
Because aftEr tHe
GHOsTs...
CAme tHe
SHArkS!
5
CHAPTER 2
one FISH, Two FISH
After the INCIDENT at the Space Museum,
which won’t be spoken of (it involved me, an
Astro Blast Simulator
and a change of
trousers), I had to
prove my bravery
by getting a snake
sidekick and
becoming a certified
ghost-hunter.
7
It’s kind of a long story. All you need to
know is that I proved how BRAVE I am.
But apparently, bravery is something you
have to prove over and over again.
I thought everything would go back to
normal and I’d never have to hear the words
‘Scaredy-Cat Sam’
again. But then we had a school trip to
the aquarium. And that was when things
really went wrong.4
It should have been a perfect day. I wasn’t
100 per cent sure what to expect at the
aquarium, but my best friend Bernard swore
it was going to be
4 But not quite as wrong as they went at the Space Museum.
Maybe I should stop going on school trips.
8
AMAZING.
Up until this point I’d had exactly three
experiences with the deep sea:
1. On my favourite show,
there was once an episode where they flew
to a water planet and met a flying space
sea turtle named Stephanie. There was
also an Evil Shark Lord
who was in cahoots with the
Ghost King5. It was a great episode. Most people would have found it TERRIFYING, but I was only a little bit scared.
5 He’s the number one-enemy in the universe, according to Captain Jane, Spaceman Jack and ME. But Evil Shark Lord is probably enemy number two.
9
,
2. The beaches in Hong Kong (where my family
is from) very sensibly have shark nets. To
keep