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Curt Stevens hates phys ed. He and his friend Oscar Peterson trudge around and around the track while Coach Joe Stubbs bellows at them to put a little hustle into it, and Curt is certain he is not learning one useful thing out there. He has tried to escape before, and Oscar remembers every attempt. There was the rare tropical disease Curt claimed to have, complete with spots drawn on in magic marker, which got him sent from the coach to the nurse to the principal to his parents and finally to his room for a week. There was the day he announced he was boycotting what he called the fascist left-wing competitions, which got his mouth washed out with soap. Curt still has no idea what fascist means. It just sounded good at the time.

Jogging past the bleachers, the two boys stop to talk with Lucy Cunningham-Schultz, who has been writing for the school newspaper, the Odyssey Owl, for a couple of weeks now. Her big cover story is the litter piling up under the bleachers. Curt cannot resist teasing her about her trash journalism, and he lists all the dull things school reporters write about, like what the basketball captain's favorite food is. Real news, he insists, means big, important events. Then Lucy mentions one small detail that changes everything: the newspaper staff meets during phys ed. Suddenly Curt has a secret passion for journalism.

Coach Stubbs signs the transfer form, but not without a warning. If this turns out to be another trick to skip his class, Curt will be running track for the rest of the year. Curt promises he has never been more sincere about anything in his life.

At the newspaper meeting, Mrs. Medloff asks the new transfers what experience they have. Curt's only qualification is that he once read an award-winning article about embezzling at the Acmetron Corporation, and when that does not impress her, he launches into a wobbly speech about great writers who got their start on school papers, mixing up Samuel Clemens with Mark Twain, inventing books called David Coppertone and Oliver Twister, and blending Shakespeare with Rapunzel. Mrs. Medloff gives the boys exactly one chance, on the condition that they work hard, turn things in on time, and act responsibly. Their assignment is the paper's weekly in-depth teacher profile, and this week the subject is Coach Joe Stubbs, who has just won an award for catching kids who try to get out of phys ed. They have two days.

The interview is a disaster in slow motion. Neither boy has prepared a single question, and when the coach sits down and cheerfully invites them to ask him anything, the best Curt can manage is to ask what his favorite food is - the very question he had mocked. What the boys do learn is that the coach collects famous sweat socks from the 1960s and can make duck noises with his forearm. Back at the newspaper room, they discover something worse. Oscar pushed the wrong button, and the tape holds nothing but his own singing of When the Saints Come Marching In. There is no interview at all.

After hours at the typewriter, all they have is the title. Curt decides the answer is to make the rest up, insisting that reporters invent things all the time and calling it journalistic license. Oscar argues that they should simply tell the truth and admit they only joined to get out of gym, but Curt will not hear of it, and the invented profile goes in.

Mrs. Medloff is not fooled for a second. She tells the boys she made two terrible mistakes, the first being that she read their article while she was eating and the second being that she asked them to write it. Coach Stubbs, according to their story, was born on a gypsy tuna barge in the Persian Gulf and raised by a family of sumo wrestlers in Okinawa. When she asks for the truth, Curt admits everything and apologizes. His punishment is an interview with the principal, who has already arranged an interview with Curt's parents. The funniest part, Mrs. Medloff adds, is that the article was almost believable until it got to the sweat socks and the duck noises. Those, of course, were the only true things in it, and Curt decides she would never believe him if he tried to explain.

The boys end up right back on the track, sore and out of breath, with Coach Stubbs shouting at them to get moving. Oscar tells Curt never to include him in one of his schemes again, because lying to people to get out of work is simply wrong. Lucy is at the bleachers again, writing the profile of Coach Stubbs that Curt and Oscar failed to deliver, and she wants nothing to do with either of them. Curt jogs off with one last piece of advice for her: if the coach mentions his sweat sock collection and his duck noises, leave it out of the article.