by Jon Scieszka
“All right, then. We’ll bet thirty bucks,” Dwight said.
“Forty,” I whispered to him.
“Forty,” he said.
“You’ve got a bet,” Zeke said. “This is going to be awesome. A trip to Splashtastic Park and lots of spending money. I can’t wait to beat you losers.”
He barked out his annoying laugh again and walked off.
“We’d better win,” I said.
“We can’t lose,” Dwight said. “We have a plan. We just need to work out the details.”
He was right. It wouldn’t be that hard to come up with something now that we had a strategy.
“Ready to get to work?” I asked Dwight when we left school at the end of the day.
“Absolutely. We are totally going to make an awesome project.”
We headed toward my house. A block later, Dwight stopped walking and spun toward Main Street. “Wait. We need to go into town first.”
“Why?”
“The new issue of Zombie Ghost Pirates comes out today.”
“The one where they fight the werewolf motorcycle gang?” I asked.
“That’s the one.”
“Then we definitely have to go into town.” I couldn’t believe a whole month had passed since the last issue had come out.
We headed off for the comic book store. There was a lot of other cool stuff to look at. “We still have tons of time for the project,” I said when we finally left the store.
“For sure,” Dwight said. “Tons.”
The comic was awesome. So was the movie we stumbled across the next day.
“It shouldn’t be this hard,” Dwight said on Wednesday.
“Maybe we’re making it hard,” I said as I fiddled with the thermostat again. No matter how long we’d spent thinking and talking, we’d totally failed to come up with something that all three judges would like. That’s when it hit me. “Hey—we don’t need to get all three judges to like us. Just two of them would be enough for us to win.”
Dwight stared at me. “But there are three judges.”
“Trust me,” I said. “If we get two votes, we win.”
“Which two?” he asked.
“Doesn’t matter. Whichever are the easiest. Let’s see….” I thought about the combinations. “There’s meat and chocolate, meat and sports, or sports and chocolate.”
“And we just need two?” Dwight asked.
“Yup.”
“That won’t be hard.”
“Not at all.” We sat there, thinking. And thinking. And thinking.
“Maybe something on TV will give us an idea,” Dwight said.
“No movies,” I said. “We can’t get distracted.”
“Definitely no movies.” Dwight flipped past the movie channels. “Hey, they’re reshowing the video game awards.”
“I missed them this year.”
“Me, too.” Dwight put the remote down.
It was an excellent show. So was the program after it that reviewed a bunch of new games.
“We have to go with one judge,” I said on Thursday. “Meat, chocolate, or sports. We’ll just have to hope one of the other judges likes our project, too.”
“I vote for chocolate,” Dwight said.
“Me, too. Everyone likes that. Let’s see what we have around here.” I went to the kitchen cabinet. “Score!” Mom had gone shopping the other day, and she’d bought a huge sack of chocolate bars.
I pulled them out. “We can make something. How about Joshua Stirling’s cabin?”
“That would work,” Dwight said. “But let me build it. You’re not really good with your hands.”
I didn’t argue. Dwight might be an idiot, but he was great with tools and stuff. I could program all the electronics in the house and find stuff on the internet, but I pretty much stank at anything that required coordination. My drawings in art class looked like they were done during an earthquake, and I’m the only student in the history of our school who got banned from the woodshop.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go online and find a picture.”
We got to work. I found a drawing that was pretty detailed, and Dwight did an amazing job with the construction. He cut out windows and stuff, and even made some smoke for the chimney with a cotton ball.
“This looks awesome,” I said when he was finished. It was a perfect model of the cabin, made out of chocolate bars.
“I told you I do my best work the day before something is due.” Dwight stepped back and stared at the cabin. “How do we explain why we made it out of chocolate?”
“We don’t,” I said. “Nobody is going to ask. Come on, let’s put this somewhere safe.”
Dwight and I picked up the cabin. He’d built it on a board we’d found in the basement. We carried it to the spare room. “It’ll be safe here,” I said as I closed the door.
“Think we’ll win?” Dwight asked.
“We’ve got at least one vote,” I said. “I’ll see you in the morning. You can help me carry it to school.”
I went back to the kitchen. The table was covered with leftover pieces of chocolate. There was no way I was going to throw any of that out, and I couldn’t put it back in the bag, so I ate it all. That was a mistake. I gave myself a pretty bad stomachache.
Mom got all concerned when I didn’t eat dinner and crawled up to bed early. But I told her I was fine. I was going to be even finer a week from now when I jumped into the wave pool at Splashtastic Park.
I woke up in the middle of the night, freezing. I really had to figure out a way to keep Dad from ever touching the thermostat. My stomach still hurt but not as badly. I staggered downstairs and switched on some heat, then hurried back upstairs because I had to go to the bathroom.
Friday morning, my first thought was I’m sick. I was burning hot. My pajamas were all soaked with sweat. But when I got out of bed, I felt fine. It was the room that was hot. I guess I’d set the temperature a bit too high. I’d been sort of in a rush last night.
There was a note from Mom taped to the bathroom mirror. “I hope you’re feeling better. Call me at work if you’re still sick and I’ll come home.”
Right after I got dressed, the doorbell rang. It was Dwight.
“You’re kind of early,” I said.
“I couldn’t wait. This is going to be the best day ever.” He grinned and held up a video camera.
“What’s that for?”
“I want to get a shot of Zeke’s face when he loses. Maybe I’ll add music and put it on the internet. I have software that makes it all real easy.”
“Perfect.” I could just imagine Zeke’s expression when the judges gave us first place.
I opened the door to the spare room and staggered back as a blast of warm air hit my face. Really warm air. Oh no…. The spare room was right above the furnace. I looked at the table. Joshua Stirling’s cabin was now Lake Stirling.
“It melted,” Dwight said.
“We lost,” I said.
“No way. We can’t let Zeke win.”
I stared at the puddle of chocolate. We’d never be able to fix it.
“We gotta go with my first idea,” Dwight said.
“We don’t have time to make a cannon,” I said.
“No. Not that. The mummy,” he said. “Remember? It’s perfect. We’ll turn you into a mummy.”
“Forget it. It’s stupid. And it won’t help us with any of the judges.”
“No, it’s not stupid. It’s totally awesome. All the judges will love it,” Dwight said. “Think about it. Everyone else will have boring stuff. We’ll have a living, walking mummy.”
“Yeah, and a living, walking loss to Zeke, or one of the other kids who had a week to do a project.”
We argued about it for a while longer. Finally, I had to admit that it was our best idea. Mostly because it was our only idea. “But why me? Why don’t we make you the mummy?” I asked.
“It was my idea,” he said. “And I’m better with stuff like that than you are. I
f you wrapped me, I’d look like a Father’s Day present from a five-year-old.”
He was probably right. Besides, I guess it would be sort of cool to stagger around school like a mummy.
“Come on,” Dwight said. “Let’s find some sheets.”
I was glad that Mom had already left for work. I figured she’d have a problem with Dwight and me cutting up her sheets, but if I won a contest, she’d be so shocked I was betting she’d forgive me. I didn’t exactly have a lot of victories in my past. That became real obvious last year when Mom decided to make one of those scrapbooks where you brag about all the stuff your family has done. After a couple days of finding nothing to scrap about, she gave up and decided it would be more fun to make flowerpots.
I went to the closet in the upstairs hallway where Mom kept the sheets, towels, and blankets.
“They’re green,” Dwight said as he leaned over my shoulder.
“Yeah. That’s not gonna work.” It looked like we were losers for sure.
“Mummies get old, right? So we could say it’s moldy.”
“That’s completely stupid.” I thought as hard as I could, and actually came up with a solution. “Hey—I know. We could paint them.”
“Got any paint?”
“I’m not sure.” I started looking through all the closets in the house. Finally, I found a shelf under the bathroom counter with first-aid stuff. “Bandages!” I shouted when I saw the boxes. My mom didn’t just buy food at the warehouse store. We had big boxes of everything from garbage bags to detergent. So we had plenty of bandages. Each box had something ridiculous, like two hundred yards.
“We don’t need sheets. We have real bandages.” I dragged a box from the shelf and handed it to Dwight. “Wrap me up.”
Dwight opened the box. He stared at the bandages for a moment, then stared at me. “I think you need to take off your shirt and pants.”
“Why?”
“It’ll look weird if you have clothes on under the bandages. Come on, take ’em off.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You have to. We’re going to be late.”
“Okay. But I’m keeping my underwear.” I pulled off my shirt and dropped my pants.
Dwight had trouble getting the first part of the bandage off the roll. But once he got started, he wrapped me real quickly. After he finished my right leg, he said, “This stuff is hard to tear. Got scissors?”
“No time for that. Just do it in one piece.”
“Sure. There’s plenty.”
Dwight left slits for my eyes and nose. But he taped over my mouth. He ended up using the whole box. Mom wouldn’t miss it. There were several more boxes of bandages on the shelf.
Before we left, Dwight grabbed another box. “Just in case we need to patch you up or anything.”
We headed out. I walked like a mummy, which was pretty easy since the bandages made it hard to bend any of my joints. I had to admit, I was starting to feel like we could actually win the contest.
Halfway down the block, Dwight handed me the extra box of bandages. “Here, hold this so I can get a good shot of you.”
I took the box and Dwight held up the video camera. Then he took his right hand off of it and rubbed his thumb against his fingers. “Man, that stuff is really sticky.”
“Sticky?” I glanced down at the box through the slits. According to the label, they were STAY-STUCK BRAND ADHESIVE BANDAGES.
Adhesive?
Below, a bit smaller, it read: WITH SUPER HOLDING POWER THAT NEVER LETS GO. And below that, even smaller: CAUTION: REMOVE SLOWLY.
I thought about what it felt like when I ripped even a small Band-Aid off my arm.
“You idiot!” I screamed at Dwight. It didn’t come out as any real words, since my lips were taped over. I threw the box at him.
He ducked. “Hey! Watch out. You’ll hit the camera.”
I tugged at the end of the bandage, where it dangled from my hand. “It’s all stuck to me!” I gave him a shove.
“Knock it off!” He shoved me back. “Dummy mummy.”
I staggered and stepped off the curb, which made me stagger a couple more steps on my stiff legs. A car whizzed toward me. I looked right at the driver. He looked right at his cell phone.
I’m going to die.
I tried to spin out of the way. Luckily I didn’t get hit. The car just nicked my finger as it shot past.
I’m going to live.
Before I could sigh in relief, I was yanked off my feet.
I’m flying?
The rear bumper had snagged the end of the bandage from the tip of my finger. I guess the driver was still on the phone, because he didn’t seem to realize he was pulling me down the road. I managed to stay on my feet, but I felt like I was waterskiing. I yanked my hand back, hard.
That worked. The bandage started to unwind. My relief didn’t last more than a second, though. After my arm got unwrapped, my body started to unwind. That made me spin. I was having a hard time staying on my feet. Everything was happening too fast. I was spinning, staggering, and skittering across the hard asphalt.
Oh yeah—and screaming. Especially when the unwinding reached my head and I felt my eyebrows get ripped off.
The bandage reached my left leg. I had to lift it in the air as it unwound, or my other leg would get tangled and I’d go down for sure. I was balancing on one foot now. I could smell burning rubber as my sneaker started to melt.
When the bandage reached my other leg, I realized I had an even bigger problem. The car made a right turn. The bandage pulled around the streetlight on the corner. I was getting yanked toward the pole. A lucky leap kept me from smacking right into it, but I was whipped around the corner and flung through the air. Now I really was flying. Finally, the end of the bandage was yanked from my leg, taking my sneaker with it.
I sailed across the street and thudded to a facedown landing. I was too dizzy to move. I hurt all over. And from the smell of it, I’d landed in the yard of someone who owned several enormous dogs. Which helped explain why I slid so far after I hit. But at least I’d survived. Dwight caught up with me, still carrying the camera.
“Oh no,” he gasped.
“What?”
“Nothing.” His voice sounded weird, and his face got as green as Mom’s sheets.
“Tell me.”
“I guess the adhesive kind of took a tiny little bit of skin with it.”
And my shorts, I discovered as I glanced over my shoulder. They were gone. Ripped right off me. They’d saved my skin. At least, a little bit of skin where the shorts had been. As for the rest of me, above my waist and below my thighs, my body looked like I’d been peeled. It took a moment for that fact to sink into my numbed and dizzy brain. I stared at my hands and then down at my arms and legs.
I’d been peeled like an apple. No, more like a tomato. I looked like I had the worst case of sunburn the world had ever seen. The whole top layer of my skin was gone. It was a thin layer, but I had been kind of attached to it.
Then the pain kicked in. That’s when I passed out.
I woke up in the hospital. It was Saturday. I was covered in real bandages this time. My parents were so happy I was alive that they didn’t yell at me too much.
Dwight came to visit me that afternoon. “How you doing?” he asked.
“How does it look like I’m doing?”
“It looks really cool. Too bad it’s nowhere near Halloween.”
I sighed. “I guess Zeke won.”
“No way. Check this out.” He held up the video camera and started playing a clip.
I saw a title on the screen.
NEW CAIRO
From Mummies to Medicine
150 Years in 150 Seconds
Then I saw myself walking along in my original mummy outfit. I winced as I watched my unwinding body spin and tumble like a really bad gymnast’s. I cringed as the camera zoomed in on my peeled body. In the middle of all that red flesh, my white butt looked like a blob of mayonnaise o
n a boiled hot dog.
My own screams were replaced by those of sirens. The paramedics showed up. Dwight had recorded the whole trip to the emergency room and all the action of the doctors and nurses working on my damaged body. Then he’d edited everything down to the highlights.
“You showed this at school?” I couldn’t believe all the kids had seen me sprawled out on the ground, barer than naked. I’d have to move to another town. No, another planet. Even that might not be far enough. “Everyone saw it?”
“Yeah. Sure. Nobody else did a video, so they let me play it on the big screen in the auditorium.”
“And the judges liked it?”
“Well, the chocolate lady and the sports guy both threw up and ran out of the room right after you got peeled. But the butcher loved the whole thing. So, like you said, you appealed to one judge.” Dwight paused, frowned, then said, “Wait…peeled…appealed. I think there’s some kind of connection.”
“Drop it,” I said. “What happened after that?”
“Since the butcher was the only one left to vote, we won first prize. I’m going to Splashtastic Park. And here’s your half of the bet.” He put a twenty-dollar bill on my chest.
As I looked down at the money, I thought about his words. I’m going to Splashtastic Park. “You mean we’re going to Splashtastic Park.”
“You really want to wade into salt water next week?” Dwight asked.
I imagined how that would feel on my peeled body. It would definitely sting. “I guess not.”
“That’s what I thought. So I asked Zeke.”
“Zeke!” I bolted up. That was a huge mistake. I felt like someone had just swiped my whole body with an enormous piece of sandpaper.
I let out a scream and slumped back down.
“Yeah, Zeke,” Dwight said. “I’ve been thinking about things, and even if you got out of here in time, I’m pretty sure it’s a better idea if I go to Splashtastic Park with someone smarter. You’d probably get us kicked out five minutes after we got there. No offense. You’re a good friend and all. You’re loyal. You’re courageous. But you have to admit, you’re sort of an idiot.”