by Mary Amato
Our street is the best street for sledding because it’s very steep. And our house is the best house because it’s at the top of the street on a hill of its own. From our front yard, we can see the universe. And today, a glittering blanket of thick snow sparkled all around us. “Do you know what this means, Orville?”
“Our Secret Snow Day Ceremony worked?”
“Yes! Do you know what else this means?”
“We didn’t have to tape paper on all the windows?”
“Yes. Do you know what else this means?”
“We could have been playing in the snow all morning?”
“Yes. Do you know what else—”
I didn’t get to finish my sentence because . . .
BAM! Something hard hit me right on the back.
A familiar voice bellowed. “WHO AM I?”
Goliath Hyke, the boss of the neighborhood, stood in the street. All the other kids were out, too. Even Tiffany, Jonathan Kemp’s two-year-old sister, was toddling around in her pink snowsuit. Orville and I were the only ones who had been inside.
“WHO AM I?” Goliath bellowed again.
“The Snowball King,” everybody mumbled. It sounded as if he had already made them say it fifty times.
He grabbed a snowball from his sled, which was piled with snowballs. He threw it at a bird perched on the telephone pole.
BAM! The bird squawked and flew away.
“WHO AM I?”
“The Snowball King.”
He grabbed an armful and pitched them at Doom, the beastly brown dog fenced in on the corner. Doom howled and threw himself at the fence. Goliath laughed, grabbed another, and threw it at Tiffany. BAM! She fell into a snowbank and disappeared. All you could see were her shining pink boots.
“Hey!” Jonathan yelled.
“Hey what?” Goliath sneered.
“Nothing.” Jonathan helped his sister out of the snowbank.
“Hey Kemp?” Goliath yelled.
Jonathan looked up.
Goliath got him right in the face with a snowball. “Sorry, I forgot to tell you to duck!” He laughed. “The Snowball King rules supreme!”
My blood started to boil. “Come on, Orville! Let’s put snowballs on this thing and see if it can fling.”
I stepped toward a big pile of snow, forgetting about my Doodie Dude Wipe-Out Boots. “Whoa!” I slid and landed on my rear.
Goliath laughed. “Check out the Riot Brothers! Their mom makes them wear Doodie Wipes!”
“Our mom didn’t make us do anything!” Orville shouted. “We invented them.”
Goliath laughed harder.
We piled snowballs in the throne.
“You’re history!” I called out.
I stood on the top doorstep and jumped onto the end of The Flinger. This time I ducked.
Snowballs flew.
It is a beautiful thing when snowballs seem to want to land on Goliath Hyke’s head. They knocked off his pointy hat.
Everybody clapped.
Now his blood was boiling. “I’m using that machine!” He came running and sliding up our steep driveway.
“No way!” Orville started to say, but I elbowed him.
“Sure, Goliath!” I said. “But it’s not really for throwing snowballs.”
Goliath looked at me suspiciously. “What’s it for?”
“It’s a throne,” I whispered.
Orville grinned at me. “For a king!” he added.
I gestured to the chair. “If you sit in the throne, we’ll raise you up. From that height, you can really throw snowballs far.”
Goliath tugged on his hat. “Why would you help me?”
I looked at Orville. Why would we help Goliath Hyke?
“We have to help you,” Orville said quickly. “You’re the King.”
Goliath couldn’t argue with that. He grinned, grabbed a few snowballs, and hopped into the chair.
“Royal feet need royal boots, Your Majesty!” Orville said and shoved his diaper wipe boxes on Goliath’s feet.
The kids in the street were nervous. “Hey, what’s going on?” Margaret called.
“This is my throne!” Goliath yelled happily. “They’re going to raise me up.”
Orville and I both stood on the top step.
The kids couldn’t believe what was happening. The Riot Brothers were actually helping Goliath Hyke?
“We’ll have to both jump hard,” I whispered to Orville. “Don’t forget to duck.”
“Your Majesty, fareweeeeelllllll!” We linked arms and jumped.
“Wwwwwhhhoooooooaaaaa!” Goliath flew over our heads like a wild pig flipped out of a frying pan. He landed on his Wipe-Out Boots and sailed down our hill into the street. The kids screamed and scattered. “Help!” he yelled as he slid through the crowd and began to slide down the steep road. “I can’t stop!” He was waving his arms like crazy and yelling his brains out. Orville and I scampered down our hill and stood with the others in the street. We watched him go and go and go and go until he was just a tiny bit of scrapple in the distance.
I felt a pull on my jacket and there was Tiffany Kemp, staring up at me with red cheeks and a runny nose. “Goyiath go bye bye?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said and waved at the disappearing speck. “Bye bye, Goyiath!”
“Where he go?” Tiffany asked.
“All the way to Mexico!” Orville said.
Everybody laughed and crowded around us.
“That was great!”
“You guys are awesome!”
“Those boots are cool!”
Jonathan Kemp’s voice raised above the others. “The Riot Brothers are the real Snowball Kings!”
“Did you hear that, Orville? We did it! We overthrew a king!”
“And now we’re the new king brothers!”
I turned to face our adoring crowd. “We promise to be good kings!”
Orville grinned. “We will give everyone free candy!”
Everybody cheered.
I pulled off Orville’s hat. “Are you crazy? We can’t afford to give everybody free candy.”
“What can we afford to do?”
A thought came to me like a snowball out of the blue. “We can give everybody free Doodie Dude Wipe-Out Boots!”
Orville and I ran downstairs and got all the diaper wipe boxes we could find. While the kids squashed their feet into them, we loaded the throne with snowballs and sent them flying through the air like fireworks.
A van turned the corner and stopped at our house. The driver unrolled his window. “Cool machine!” he said. Across the side of his van The Daily News was written.
“We invented it!” Orville said. “And the boots, too!”
“I’d like to take a photo of you for the newspaper. Can you ask your mom or dad if it’s all right?”
Mom came out and signed the release form.
“Will we be in the newspaper tomorrow?” Orville asked.
The man pulled a large camera out of his black bag. “Depends on how the pictures turn out.”
“We’re going to be famous!” Orville grinned as we stood on either side of the machine.
“That’s great! Just hold it!” The photographer positioned himself.
“Flare your nostrils,” I whispered to Orville.
We flared. The photographer snapped.
“The Snowball Kings!” shouted the kids. And we all started running around throwing snowballs at each other like maniacs.
Let me tell you, it is a beautiful thing to see a bunch of kids slip-sliding around on a Snow Day with diaper wipe boxes on their feet.
SIX
Hear Ye!
Hear Ye!
The next morning, Orville poked me awake. We ran downstairs.
Mom was already up, reading the paper.
“Are we in it?” we both asked.
“Sorry, boys,” she said. “You’re not in the paper . . . YOU’RE ON THE FRONT PAGE!” She smiled and held up the newspaper. There we were with nostrils fl
aring!
Although there was still lots of snow on the ground, the streets were clear, so we had to go to school. But that was okay because we were famous! Jonathan Kemp taped copies of the newspaper on our lockers. Everybody wanted our autographs.
Except Goliath Hyke, of course.
At lunch, Jonathan and Orville ran over to my table in the cafeteria. “You gotta see something.” Jonathan glanced nervously in the direction of Goliath.
They pulled me down the hall to my locker. Somebody had drawn mustaches on the picture of Orville and me.
“What do you bet it was Goliath!” Jonathan said. “What are you going to do about it?”
“We can’t let Goliath get away with this,” I said.
Orville looked closer at the photo. “Hey, I think I look cool with a mustache!”
“I’ve got it!” I said. I opened my locker and pulled out a black marker. “Give me your face, Orville!”
I drew mustaches fit for a king on my brother and on me.
We walked back into the cafeteria with our mustaches. “Flare your nostrils,” I whispered.
Everybody went crazy, laughing and clapping.
Orville bowed.
“Wait!” I said. A saying was coming to me.
Orville listened politely.
“It is better to make a fool out of yourself,” I whispered, “than to allow someone else to make a fool out of you.”
“Good one, O King Wilbur.”
“Thank you, King Mustachio!”
That night, Mom said we had had such an exciting day, we should go to bed early. Grown-ups don’t have a clue. If you have had an exciting day, you want to stay up especially late to make it last as long as possible. But you know that.
Anyway, a few minutes after Mom made us turn off the lights, Orville and I heard the sound of music coming from the living room downstairs.
We like it whenever our mom decides to play her cello at night, because whenever she plays her cello at night she seems to forget about checking up on us.
I turned on the lights.
“Okay, I got a good one,” Orville said. “Guess what I am.” He rolled himself into a ball and made a sizzling sound.
“A meatball?”
“No.”
“A potato?”
“Wrong-o.”
“An onion!”
“Nope. I’m a fried snowball.”
“You can’t fry a snowball.”
“Why not?”
“It would melt.”
“Well, what you’ve got when it melts is called Fried Snowball.”
“What you’ve got when it melts is called water.”
“Maybe not. Maybe there’s something in snowflakes that makes the water crusty if you cook it. Let’s get a snowball and try it right now!”
For an onion-head, Orville sometimes has fun ideas.
We snuck out of bed and tiptoed downstairs. Quietly, we slipped our bare feet into our regular boots, grabbed our mittens, and crept out the back door without our coats.
The night was black and cold and silent, except for the crunching of our boots on the snow and the singing of the cello behind us, which sounded very far away. We walked to the middle of our backyard and stopped. Yesterday, and after school today, we had played in the front, so the snow back here was untouched.
Orville made a kind of gasp in his throat. “This is the best kind of snow,” he whispered. “The no-footprint kind.”
I nodded, and we looked at the world stretched out, glistening in the moonlight.
Then Orville took a breath. “I feel like it’s all here . . . just for us.”
“For the Riot Brothers.” I plunged my boot into fresh snow. “For the Riot Brother Kings!”
“Look, Wilbur.”
Tiny new snowflakes were falling out of the black night. It was as if the sky were shaking loose its stars for us.
We held out our mittens to catch them.
“Hey Wilbur, what if we could have as many adventures as there are snowflakes falling right now?”
“I would be disappointed in us if we didn’t try, Orville.”
We scooped up handfuls of snow. Perfect snowball snow.
“Before we go inside and try our Fried Snowball experiment,” I suggested, “perhaps we should see what other uses we can find for these?” I held up two snowballs and flared my nostrils.
“Bingo bongo,” Orville cried.
What happened then, you ask?
Let’s just say that Orville does some fine, fine dancing when he has snow down his pants!
The End
P. S. Riot Brother Rule #10: If you draw a mustache on your face, make sure you don’t use permanent ink.
BONUS!
You have just finished reading three Riot Brother books rolled into one. In this bonus section, you will find the Riot Brother Games, Rules, and Sayings mentioned in this book all laid out for you like food on a picnic table. Whenever you’re hungry for a little Riot Brother fun or wisdom, you’ll know right where to turn. And as an extra, free bonus, I’m throwing in The Top Ten List of Important Things to Be Able to Do with Your Face.
You are really going to get your money’s worth out of this book. Of course, if you checked this book out of the library, then you are really, really going to get your money’s worth because you didn’t spend any money on it.
RIOT BROTHER GAMES
You can play these games with brothers, or sisters, or friends, if you’ve got them. Just don’t try to play with a grown-up who won’t laugh at a decent joke even if it comes flying out of his or her nose.
Snarf Attack
The object of the game is to make your opponent snarf. Before dinner starts, agree to play the game. During dinner, try to say or do something that will make your opponent laugh really hard while he or she is drinking milk. If the milk comes out his or her mouth, that’s just called dribbling and doesn’t count. If the milk comes out his or her nose, that’s a genuine snarf, and you win. Whoever loses has to slurp up the snarfed milk (just kidding—ha ha!).
Underfoodle
(Note: if you are playing this game with friends instead of your brother or sister, it is polite to use clean underwear.) The object of the game is to see who can get the most underwear on his or her head in exactly thirty seconds. This is a complex game, which requires skill and strategy. Not only must you put underpants on your own head and guard them against attack, but also you must try to pull underpants off your opponent’s head. The loser has to wear underpants on his or her head to school the next day (just kidding—ha ha ha!).
The Naked Mole-Rat Game
You and your opponent each get a cracker, a piece of toast, or something crunchy. Pick any number higher than three. This number is called the Bite Target. The object of the game is to reach the Bite Target by eating the crunchy thing in the exact number of bites as the Bite Target.
Why can’t you pick a number lower than three, you ask? There are two reasons. 1) The more bites you have to take, the funnier it is. 2) If you tried to eat a whole piece of toast in only one or two bites, you might choke and then barf up the pieces. (Orville used to do this all the time.) You automatically lose the game if you choke and barf. Loser has to clean up the barf (not kidding—ha ha!).
The Frying Pan Game
The object of the game is to do such a fine job of acting like some kind of fried food that your fellow player will guess what kind of food you are. To play, imagine that your bed is a giant frying pan. Get in and make it look like you are the food. Remember that food sizzles and flops around a lot in a hot pan, so use your whole body. You may also use your voice for sound effects. This is an excellent game to play while on vacation because hotel beds are so big and bouncy. But do not play this game in a tent, especially if your tent is small and the stakes have not been firmly hammered into the ground, because the tent will collapse (not kidding) and a grown-up will make you eat fried snot for breakfast (just kidding—ha ha ha ha ha!).
RIOT BROTHER RU
LES
1. Make something exciting happen every day.
2. Do not tell anyone your true mission.
3. If someone says, “Don’t look now!” make sure you look.
4. Run, do not walk, whenever possible.
5. Don’t change your mission in the middle of the day.
6. Talk softly even if you think you’re alone, because grown-ups have excellent hearing.
7. Stay awake as long as possible.
8. When you see something flinging toward your head, duck.
9. Every once in a while, let grown-ups think they’re right.
10. If you draw a mustache on your face, make sure you don’t use permanent ink.
RIOT BROTHER SAYINGS
—All you need is a butt to put underpants on your butt, but it takes a brain to put underpants on your head.
—Life is like the mail. You can’t count on something exciting to come through the slot.
—There is nothing quite as frightening as your mom chasing after you with kissy lips.
—Do not judge a person, until you have walked in his diaper wipe boxes for two moons.
—If you say something and nobody gets it, say something else.
—If you say something and nobody gets it, burp.
—It is better to make a fool out of yourself than to allow someone else to make a fool out of you.
THE RIOT
BROTHER TOP
TEN LIST OF
IMPORTANT THINGS
TO BE ABLE TO
DO WITH YOUR FACE
Face it. Your face is the most important part of your body. People stare at your face all the time. Who stares at your kneecaps?
You can say stuff with your face without using words. How cool. Learning how to do things with your face will also keep you from being bored. Even if you have to sit quietly in school, you can entertain yourself by practicing clever facial stunts. If your face is facing a friend, then you will also keep your friend from being bored. How very nice of you and your face!