‘NO, ERIC! NO, ERIC! NO!’
Huh? What?
I looked across the pool. I was still the only one at the finish line. Wow. I didn’t think I’d win by that much. I spun round in the water. All the rest of the guys were at the other end. A couple had just climbed out of the pool. Three were still on the blocks. One of them was Martin. He was holding his stomach and doubled over laughing. A lot of people in the stands were doing the same thing. I spun back round to Chewy.
‘What happened?’
‘It was a false start.’
‘False start? What do you mean, false start? It couldn’t have been! I was the first one in the water and my feet were still on the block when Heatherington said Go.’
‘That’s the thing, Eric. Heatherington didn’t say Go.’
‘What do you mean, Heatherington didn’t say Go? Of course he did. I heard him. I heard him loud and clear.’
‘No – see that’s where you made your mistake.’
‘My mistake?’
‘Yeah. That was me you heard.’
‘YOU? YOU! What did you say Go for?’
‘Well, Mr Heatherington was taking such a long time, I thought he must’ve forgotten that bit. So … I just did it for him.’
‘You … did it … for him …’
I couldn’t believe it. My mouth was moving but no words were coming out.
‘Real shame too,’ Chewy said. ‘I reckon you would have won easily if you didn’t muck up the start.’
‘Wha …’
‘Okay, forget it! Just give me my towel.’
Chewy gazed down to his empty hands … then around his feet … and then back to the other end of the pool. He frowned. ‘Your towel? Oh, yeah … that’s right. I was supposed to bring that with me, wasn’t I?’
‘ERIC VALE!’
There was nothing else I could do. If I was going to save myself from a lifetime of Eric Vale – Epic Fails I just had to beat Martin now, no matter what I was wearing. I dragged myself out of the pool and stood up.
The stands were filled with people laughing, hooting, pointing, whistling and shouting out. Even some of the teachers were calling out to me. Some example they were setting! I tried to block it all from my mind.
‘Talk about childish!’
Chewy nodded.
‘Just because I happen to be wearing some stupid pyjamas.’
Chewy nodded again.
‘And because they happen to have a few stupid teddy bears on them.’
Chewy nodded for a third time and added, ‘And I guess because they are pretty see-through when they’re wet.’
I nodded this time.
‘Yeah, there’s that, I suppo …’
Wait a minute? WHAT? WHAT!
I glanced down.
NOOOOOOO!
I ripped Chewy’s swimming cap off his head and covered whatever bits of myself I could. The change rooms were down at the far end of the pool behind the starting blocks. I had to get there – FAST! I set off at warp speed. Straightaway Principal Porter’s voice blasted through the loudspeakers beside me.
I freaked out. I jammed on the brakes. Or tried to. But the side of the pool was wet and smooth and as slippery as ice, so instead of stopping, my feet kept right on going. They rocketed off the tiles and took off into the air like two jet fighters. (Hey, I bet that’s why they don’t like people running on the pool deck!) I landed with a thump on my back.
OOOMF!
My three layers of greasy sunscreen hit the super-slippery tiles and I zoomed along the pool deck like a human bowling ball!
The next person I saw was Mr Winter. He was running towards me waving a towel. When he realised we were on a collision course he leapt out of the way and accidentally shoulder-charged Mr Heatherington and his tall starter’s chair into the pool. I flashed past them. There was nothing I could do! I couldn’t stop! I was a human bowling ball with turbo thrust! A human bowling ball with turbo thrust that was now heading … right … for … THE OFFICIALS’ TABLE!
STRRRIIIIIKE!
I scored a direct hit on the legs of the long folding table where the judges were sitting. One end of the table crashed down and the other end shot up.
For a few seconds the table, along with assorted pens, pencils, sheets of paper, staplers, laptops, microphones, drinks, boxes of ribbons, sandwiches, salad rolls and a few teachers became airborne.
And then they came back down.
On top of me.
I ended up buried alive under a tangle of arms and legs – some human, some belonging to chairs and tables – and an avalanche of stationery, electrical equipment, food and ribbons! Mainly ribbons. A whole boxful must have landed on my head. They were stuck to every inch of my greasy triple-sunscreen-layered body. I’d been turned into a human piñata!
Then someone started pulling stuff off me. Three faces appeared. Which was weird, because all the faces belonged to William Rodriguez. They were all fuzzy around the edges and bobbing around everywhere. I closed my eyes and gave my head a shake. When I opened my eyes the three Chewy heads had melted into a single blurry one.
‘Wow, Eric. Far out. Are you all right?’
But before I could answer him, Chewy reached forward and peeled a ribbon from my forehead. An excited smile spread over his face.
‘Hey, Eric, look. You got a First Place! Cool!’
I was beginning to feel dizzy again when I heard a different voice.
‘Stand well back, everyone! Give me some room here! The boy needs first aid!’
Chewy’s blurry face disappeared and another one took its place. It floated closer.
‘Hmmmmm, doesn’t look good,’ said a giant mouth filled with wobbly, clicking teeth. ‘He might require resuscitation.’
SOMEBODY SAVE ME! I WAS ABOUT TO BE WINKLEBOTTOMED!
o•o•o•o•o•o•o•o•o•
It was supposed to be my epic win, but the swimming carnival turned into the epic-est of all my epic fails! I was doomed! The only good thing was that when I saw Mrs Winklebottom’s face in close-up, I got such a fright that my head cleared completely and I didn’t need the slobber of death after all. PHEW!
Afterwards when I was in the change room recovering, Mr Winter said, if I wanted to, I could sit out the rest of the carnival back in the classroom. I WANTED TO! A LOT! So when Chewy brought my bag in, I cut off the quadruple knot with scissors from the first aid kit and got changed. Then while everyone was busy cheering for some big relay race, I sneaked back up to our homeroom.
It was weird sitting in the classroom all alone. All I could think of was how bad it was going to be when everyone else came back from the carnival. For sure Martin and Tyrone would have these big, stupid grins on their faces and they’d be going on about ‘Eric Vale – Epic Fail’, and the rest of my class – except for my crazy best friend – would either be laughing at me or looking at me like I was a total loser.
I wanted to stop myself thinking about that so I opened my bag and dragged out my special Awesome Stories and Genius Thoughts Journal. I thought maybe that would help. I read over the last thing I’d written about Derek ‘Danger’ Dale. I had him in a heap of trouble again …
Agent Dale stared up at the fifty-tonne block of granite hanging right above him. The cable holding it was snapping one bit at a time.
Now it was down to its last thin strand! With his arms and legs staked to the hot sand and his body weakened by a deadly paralysing drug, it seemed to Derek that this time, there was no way out.
Making up Derek Dale adventures always took my mind off stuff and cheered me up. I found my pen and wrote some more …
And what do you know? Secret Agent Derek ‘Danger’ Dale was absolutely right. There was no way out.
The cable snapped and the giant granite block dropped and squished him totally to mush!
Yeah, well, that didn’t work!
I groaned and did a Mr Winter. I thumped my head three times on the desk. I was still groaning and moaning with my head on th
e desk when I heard someone else in the room. I thought it might be Mr Winter. I looked up. Someone else was in the room, all right. But it wasn’t Mr Winter.
It was Aasha Alsufi. Mr Winter let her miss the carnival because she was really frightened of water.
Her big, dark eyes were staring at me.
I stared back with my puny green ones. She was standing just inside the door holding a book. I figured she must have come from the library.
Our stare-a-thon had been going on for quite a while, so I thought I’d better say something. But then she beat me to it.
I sat up straight. I couldn’t believe it. The new girl was speaking! She was using actual words! But her voice was so soft. I didn’t hear her properly.
‘Sorry, what?’
She spoke again. This time I heard the words. They were plain and clear. And very familiar.
‘Epic fail,’ she said.
Well, that’s just great! Everyone’s been knocking themselves out, competing against each other for the grand prize of being the big hero who gets the new girl to talk, and then, when she finally opens her mouth for the first time, she’s calling me names! After my teddy bear pyjamas disaster, this was just too much!
‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I told her. ‘You absolutely got it in one. That’s me. Good old stupid Eric Vale, the good old stupid Epic Fail! Go on. Have a big belly laugh, why don’t you? Might as well. Everybody else has today. Wouldn’t want you to be the only one to miss out on all the fun.’
Aasha Alsufi frowned. Hard. She shook her head. A lot. Then her big brown eyes moved from me to the direction of the swimming pool and back again.
‘Epic fail?’ she said again.
That’s when I finally got it. She wasn’t calling me Epic Fail. She was asking me if I’d had an epic fail down at the carnival. Well, there was only one answer to that.
‘Totally! Completely! Absolutely!’ I told her. ‘The epic-est of all epic fails. The epic fail that makes all other epic fails look like wins. The Godzilla of epic fails! It’s quite a story. I’d tell you all about it, but you wouldn’t believe me.’
I thumped my head back down on the desk and stayed there. A moment or two later I heard a chair scrape. I looked up. Aasha Alsufi was sitting right in front of me. She was holding her library book on her lap. She raised her eyebrows at me and her big eyes got even bigger.
‘I like stories,’ she said.
And because there was nothing else I could do, and because Aasha Alsufi turned out to be a really, really good listener, I told her everything. I told her all about Big Bob and the big plan to beat Martin, about my super-cool new swimmers and my super-uncool teddy bear pyjamas, about the quadruple knot and all my other preparations for the carnival, about Chewy and the false start, and finally about how I climbed out of the pool in front of the whole school.
‘And when I get out of the water,’ I said, ‘everyone goes totally nutso. And you wanna know why everyone goes totally nutso?’
Aasha looked a bit unsure at first, but then her head bounced up and down.
So I reached into my bag and pulled out my teddy bear pyjama shorts. They were still wet.
I held them up in front of her.
Aasha Alsufi’s big eyes looked like they were about to explode. She clamped both hands over her mouth and kept them there while I told her about me running down the pool deck, turning into the human bowling ball and wiping out Mr Winter, Mr Heatherington and the entire Officials’ Table.
‘See what I mean? The Big Momma of Epic Fails!’
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to block it all out of my mind.
But then I started hearing a strange noise. A squeaky, sniffling, snorty kind of noise. I opened my eyes. Aasha’s hands were still clamped over her mouth. But she was looking kind of weird. Her eyes were all wrinkled up and I thought that maybe she was about to cry or even be sick. But then her shoulders started shaking and I worked it out. She was trying to stop herself from laughing!
She was doing a pretty good job, too, until a big burst of air squeezed between her lips and fingers.
It made a noise on its way through. A noise that sounded like a giant you-know-what.
Aasha Alsufi dropped her hands from her mouth and laughed out loud. She laughed and laughed till she had little tears in her eyes.
I laughed too. I couldn’t help myself.
‘I don’t know what you think is so funny,’ I told her when we’d both calmed down a bit and we were trying to suck in some deep breaths. ‘You wait. I bet you see-through teddy bear pyjamas will be all the rage at the beach this summer!’
And that started us both off all over again. We were laughing so much we didn’t even notice that Mr Winter and the rest of the class had arrived back from the carnival and were crowded in at the front of the room gawking at us.
When Aasha saw them, she got a huge fright and her face changed. It looked the same as it did that first day when she came into our classroom. Then her head dropped and she stared down hard at her library book. She was holding on to it like it was a lifejacket. But it didn’t look like it was ever going to be enough to save her.
I really wanted to help. But what could I do? Where was Secret Agent Derek ‘Danger’ Dale when you needed him? In the end, I just said the first thing that came into my head.
‘Aasha really likes stories,’ I told them. ‘Especially weird ones about epic fails and see-through teddy bear pyjamas.’
Mr Winter and the rest of the class stopped gawking when I said that. Then they started grinning and laughing. Even Martin and Tyrone had stupid smiles on their faces – but in a good way.
The noise made Aasha look up. At first when she saw everyone smiling at her, she froze. But then, slowly, bit by bit, she began to smile back. As we watched, Aasha Alsufi’s smile just kept growing and growing.
And it didn’t stop growing till it looked big enough to swallow the entire room.
That night I added two more entries to my Awesome Stories and Genius Thoughts Journal.
One was this:
A big cloud of dust rose around the fifty-tonne block of granite.
‘Aha! At last I have finally destroyed that slimy pest, Secret Agent Derek “Danger” Dale, forever! He’s been flattened into a pancake of squishy mush. The world is mine! Mine, I tell you!’
‘Not so fast, evil Doctor Evil MacEvilness.’
Agent Dale strolled out from behind the concrete block brushing dirt from his chest and straightening a stray hair on his forehead.
MacEvilness’s face turned purple with anger.
‘But … but how did you escape? You were paralysed and pinned to the ground and a fifty-tonne block of granite landed RIGHT ON TOP OF YOU! I saw it with my own eyes! No one could find a way to escape that! It’s impossible! COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE!’
Secret Agent Derek ‘Danger’ Dale just smiled and twirled something between his fingers.
‘Impossible, MacEvilness?’ he said. ‘I think you’ll find that nothing is impossible with a wad of bellybutton fluff and a bit of POSITIVE THINKING!’
And the other entry? Well, that was my first ever Genius Thought. It went like this:
‘Just because you have some epic fails in your life, it doesn’t mean you are one.’
I reckon Chewy’s mum and dad should put that in their next book!
(What’s next for Eric Vale? Will he be up for sale, on the trail or something even more off the scale? Wait and see. Coming soon.)
Published by Scholastic Australia
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SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
First edition published by Omnibus Books in 2012.
This electronic edition published by Scholastic Australia Pty Limited, 2015.
E-PUB/MOBI eISBN: 978-1-760271-07-7
Text copyright © Michael Gerard Bauer, 2012
Illustrations copyright © Joe Bauer, 2012
Cover design copyright © Steve Wells, 2012
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