The Colossal Camera Calamity

by Theo Baker

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  My dentist is insane. I’m pretty sure all dentists are. If I had to spend all day with my hand in strangers’ mouths, I’d probably lose my mind, too. For one thing, he hums “Ring Around the Rosie” all the time. Odd, yes, but the crazy part is that he’s been humming it ever since I was three. That means he’s had the same nursery rhyme worming through his brain for nine years. Nine years! That should tell you quite a lot about him.

  There’s also his obsession with ducks.

  His office is packed with ducks. Paintings and posters of ducks cover the walls, hundreds of duck figurines stand on every available surface — even his surgical mask has a duck’s bill. This means that while he’s scraping my teeth, what I experience is a duck-man mutant humming “Ring Around the Rosie” — or worse, a duck-man lecturing me on proper oral hygiene.

  In my dentist’s strange and frightening world, I should brush my teeth three times every day, and each one should last fifteen minutes. Whenever I eat so much as a grain of rice, I’m supposed to dash to the bathroom and gargle mouthwash, brush my teeth front and back, brush my tongue top and bottom, scrape my tongue top and bottom, floss thoroughly, and gargle a little more mouthwash, and then, when I’ve finished all that, I should spend another ninety seconds closely inspecting my teeth in the mirror.

  It goes without saying that my brushing technique doesn’t live up to his crazy standards. I’d say I spend about four minutes a day on it, which isn’t bad, considering I have a life. Four minutes of teeth brushing is good enough for most days.

  But it wasn’t good enough for that day three weeks ago.

  That day I had to look perfect.

  That morning, I dedicated twenty-one precious minutes to cleaning my teeth. I also spent thirty-seven minutes washing my face, applying moisturizers, cleaning my ears, and combing my hair, and for twelve excruciating minutes, I tweezed the seven hairs from my unibrow. (My unibrow hairs are so faint, you need a microscope to see them, by the way.) And, oh yeah, I’d spent an hour the night before ironing my school clothes. And, double oh yeah, I’d slept all night in my bike helmet so my hair would be nice and flat.

  What was special about that day?

  Was I a contestant in a beauty contest?

  Nope.

  Was the queen coming to my school, Westbrook Academy, to open the new maintenance closet?

  Nope. Guess again.

  Nothing?

  OK, I’ll tell you. They were taking our school photos.

  Wait! Don’t leave.

  I’m not really that superficial. I’ll prove it to you. Come with me to the bookcase in the living room and I’ll show you why I needed to look perfect for that school photo.

  This is no ordinary bookcase. This is where my parents display my framed school photos for all the world to see.

  Welcome to my shelf of shame.

  Last year’s photo is probably my best, and that’s not saying much. I look very frightened, like I’ve just seen Miss Adolf dancing. I’ve seen Miss Adolf dancing, so I know what I’m talking about.

  Excuse me while I shudder. Ughhhh.

  So here’s the story behind the first photo. . . .

  As I sat in the chair, waiting for my picture to be taken, a spider dropped down on a thread of silk from the ceiling and stopped right in front of my nose. It was so close I could see its hairy spider legs. So close I could look into its beady spider eyes, where I saw its spidery soul. I froze in fear, my eyes crossed, and . . . FLASH.

  Moving on.

  Here’s my photo from two years ago. You’ll notice that not much of my actual face made it into this one. Apart from a bit of my forehead, it’s entirely of the top of my head. I’ve always wondered what the top of my head looks like. Now I know. You want to know what happened with this one?

  Well, again, I was in the chair, waiting for my photo, when Frankie told me that my shoe was untied and I fell for a trick that was invented a week after they invented shoelaces. (My guess is they invented shoelaces in 1684.) Basically, I was stupid for a fraction of a second and . . . FLASH. I guess I should be grateful I’m not bald.

  And this one here, from three years ago, is everyone’s favorite. It’s an oldie but goodie. This one will never go out of style.

  No, I’m not picking my nose. Really, I’m not. It just looks that way. I don’t pick my nose — at least not when anyone’s looking and certainly not when someone is taking my picture. This one was the photographer’s fault. He told me to “look smart,” so I struck a smart-guy pose.

  I put my hand on my chin, like I was thinking about black holes or something, and I guess my index finger decided it would point toward my brain . . . by way of my right nostril. With this photo, you get the impression that I’m thinking really hard about boogers.

  I could take you through the rest of the shelf, but it’s pointless.

  Year in, year out, I take a ridiculous photo. My parents then frame it and put it on the shelf. My family laughs at me. Everyone who comes over laughs at me. And every day, as I leave for school, the last thing I see is a shelf of reminders that I can’t do anything right.

  In eight hundred years, when they’re studying what I was like as a kid — because I plan to be the first man to live on Mars and also to hold most major Martian sporting records — they’ll find these pictures and the future will laugh at me, too.

  Then they’ll find Emily’s perfect pictures, and they’ll think she was the really significant one in the Zipzer family. And then they’ll form a religion based on Emily and her teachings, and they’ll worship the lizard, and the future will be ruined forever.

  I didn’t want that to happen this year. Do you hear that, ghosts of school photos past?

  Three weeks earlier . . .

  “Hank, stop ogling your photos and come for breakfast,” my mom yelled.

  I took one final look at the top of my head, then flashed my camera-ready smile at the family as I headed over to the table.

  “Who is this child?” my mom asked.

  “No idea,” my dad said. “He must have broken in during the night.”

  Emily also piped up. “Your photo’s not going to look anything like you.”

  “Good,” I said, sitting down.

  Mom had gone all out for breakfast: fried eggs, fried bread, beans, sausages, and mushrooms. It looked very tasty . . . and very drippy. This breakfast was a full-body stain waiting to happen. I stared at the heaped plate of food, scanning for just one tasty morsel I could nibble safely.

  “Aren’t you eating?” Mom asked.

  I scooched my chair back a few feet from the table, leaned all the way forward, and puckered my lips, trying to reach just a tiny bite of the egg on my fork with my elastic lips. It was a very awkward position, and all my muscles were shaking, but I couldn’t risk dropping anything on my uniform. My lips could feel the heat of the eggs, and then —

  Emily kicked my leg.

  I dropped the fork, nearly falling backward to avoid it hitting my leg.

  “I was so close.” I sighed.

  “Just try to eat like a human being and you’ll get some egg next time,” my dad s
aid.

  “I think he was trying out his new pose for this year’s photo,” Emily said.

  “He looked like a monkey,” my mom said, laughing. “Like a baboon.”

  “Baboons aren’t monkeys. They belong to the ape family, Mom,” Emily said. “Which reminds me. I’ve been short-listed for a summer course at the Institute for Scientific Excellence. My final interview is today.”

  “That’s brilliant,” my mom said. “I’ll test you on some science thingies. Hmmm.” She drummed her fingers. “OK, got a good one for you. What does H2O stand for?”

  Emily dabbed her lips with her napkin. “The covalent bond between hydrogen and oxygen.”

  “Er . . . wrong answer.” My mom winked at me. “But here’s a hint: it comes out of a tap. This is fun!”

  Emily just stared at my mom with her beady eyes.

  “Emily knows it’s water,” my dad said. “She was explaining the molecular structure.”

  “Of course she was,” my mom said. “I was . . . er . . . testing her. Well done, sweetie. Now for a real challenge. What’s that table called, you know, that table thingy with all the elements?”

  “Oh, come on, Mom,” I blurted out, “even I know that one. It’s the table of —”

  “Eat your breakfast, Hank,” Mom said. “And eat it properly, not like a baboon ape. And don’t roll your eyes at me, young lady. Hank, why aren’t you eating? You need your vitamins and . . . claven bonds.”

  “You mean covalent bonds,” Emily said.

  “Don’t correct your mother,” Mom said.

  Emily sighed. “May I be excused?”

  “Not until you can ask without rolling your eyes.”

  As Mom and Emily were engaged in a stare-down that had the potential to last all day, I popped up, ran around the table, gave Mom a kiss, ducked my dad’s hand as he tried to ruffle my hair, and shouted “Bye!” as the door to our apartment closed behind me.

  I’d made it through breakfast still spotless, with my gorgeous hair intact. I was flying high!

  “How do I look?” I asked my best friends, Frankie and Ashley, as we rode down in the elevator.

  “Weird,” Ashley said. “Is that a toupee?”

  “Hey, Hank, can I touch it?” Frankie asked.

  “Bad idea,” Ashley told him. “We don’t know what that thing’s made of. It could be rat hair.”

  “Nah,” Frankie said. “Looks more like goat hair.”

  As they bleated and sniggered, I struck a pose. “You guys don’t think my hair looks amazing?”

  “It looks fake,” Frankie said. “And ruggish.”

  “Did you say rugged?” I asked.

  “He said ruggish,” Ashley said. “Like it belongs on the floor. Why is it all flat and helmety?”

  “Because I slept in my bike helmet.”

  “I’m no expert on hair,” Frankie said, “but I always thought having helmet hair is, like, a bad thing.”

  “It is,” Ashley said. “Hank, if you wanted to look like Clark Kent, you should have asked me for some hair products.”

  “I think you should have left the helmet on for the picture,” Frankie said.

  “Come on, guys,” I said as we got out of the elevator. “I just need this photo to be perfect.”

  “Hank, can I tell you something?” Frankie asked. He put his hand on my shoulder and looked at me like he wanted to have a best-friend moment. “You know you’re a good-looking guy — I’m not ashamed to say it: Hank, you are a good-looking guy — and so you shouldn’t worry about how other people see you. Also, your shoelace is untied.”

  I looked down, and they laughed.

  I swung a best-friend punch at Frankie’s arm, missed by miles, lost my balance, and would have stumbled hair-first into a trash can had Frankie not caught me.

  “Easy there, Super-Rug,” he said.

  Ashley stopped us. “Hank, you will never make it to the photo shoot without getting messed up. We should go back inside. It’s too risky out here.”

  “It’s OK,” I said. “We’re up after first period. I can stay clean till then, unless Frankie pulls any more dirty tricks on me.”

  “Hank,” he said, “can I tell you something?”

  “No.”

  “Dude, you know what we’ve got for first period, don’t you?”

  I shrugged. “Frankie, I don’t know what I’ve got for any of my classes. I just follow you guys around. What have we got?”

  “A problem,” Ashley said.

  “Why?”

  “Because, Hank,” Frankie said, “the first class is art.”

  “Oh boy.”

  “And also, dude,” Frankie said, “you’re flying low.” He gestured at the zipper of my pants.

  And once again I looked down. But this time, Frankie wasn’t kidding. I really was flying low.

  Most days I can’t wait to get to art class. I can breathe easy in art class. As soon as I step through that door, it’s like I’m no longer carrying a giant baboon on my back. I don’t have to worry about concentrating hard on words and numbers or feeling bad about not being able to concentrate hard on words and numbers.

  My art teacher, Miss Mesmer, is super cool. Sure, she’s a little nutty — not like my insane dentist, but nutty in a super-cool way. She has wild, frizzy hair, and all of her clothes are rumpled and stained with cat food and paint. She’s usually playing relaxing music with bells and people chanting really slowly when we come in, and before we start painting, she leads us through stretches and breathing exercises while telling us how gifted and brilliant we are.

  She likes me a lot, too, even though I’m not a good painter. And even though I’m not a good painter, I like painting. I like the way the paint smells, and I like mixing all the colors and the way it feels when you paint, and the way you can get lost in stuff like colors.

  Miss Mesmer doesn’t even make us paint anything that looks real. She just tells us to get messy and paint whatever comes naturally. So I make these giant doodles with different-colored blobs that look like clouds of gas, and while I’m painting I’m not even thinking in words. I’m just concentrating on the way the colors feel and the way the brush feels and the way the painting makes me feel.

  And I can totally concentrate the whole lesson. I don’t even look up. It must be the freaky bell music Miss Mesmer always plays.

  So it was a major bummer that we had art class right before the school photo because it meant I couldn’t get into the lesson like I usually did. I didn’t want to risk messing up my special school-photo outfit. And it was a double-bummer bonus round when I arrived not to the sound of bell music, but the swoosh of a fencing sword.

  Miss Adolf!

  “Find your places, students,” she barked. “Miss Mesmer is out today with emotional fatigue, and I can’t blame her now that I see what she has to look at all day.”

  She slashed her sword at all the paintings in the classroom, stopping at one of my paintings of giant gas clouds. “This one here is especially poor. No technique, no content, no recognizable forms.

  “Today, students, we will be concentrating on the basics. You will make an accurate rendering of the still life I have prepared.” She flicked her sword at a pedestal with three gray balls and one gray pyramid on it. “I want you all to concentrate on your shading techniques.”

  As everyone else continued filing in, I started backing out the door.

  “Hey! Where’s Captain Haircut going?” McKelty cried.

  Miss Adolf swooped around. “Yes, Henry, where are you off to?”

  “To the nurse, Miss.”

  “Yes, you do seem to have a bad case of helmet hair.”

  “No, it’s because I’m feeling, uh, emotionally . . . I’m feeling emotionally flatulent —”

  That got a big chuckle from the class. I like to make people laugh, so for one fraction of a second — as long as it takes to snap a picture — I felt all right and easy. But laughter makes Miss Adolf emotionally flustered. She silenced the class with a
slash of her sword.

  “Even if you are emotionally fatigued, Henry, I see no need to visit the school nurse. No emotion whatsoever is required of you during this lesson. Now, start rendering geometric solids.”

  “Certainly, Miss. I’ll just replace the trash bag for you first. I noticed the can was full.”

  “Lovely, Henry. I think that’s a far better use of your time than painting.”

  I was keen to empty the trash can because I’d had an idea. A few nights previously I’d been watching this movie about an out-of-control killer virus. All the doctors wore these full-body hazmat suits when they were working with the virus in the clean room. I figured I could create my own suit from trash bags to protect my clothes from paint splashes.

  The trash can was actually almost totally empty, but what was in there — plenty of paint-splattered rags and old plastic bags of decomposing fruit — looked pretty nasty. So instead of hauling out the trash, I just placed a new bag on top and then I got to work on a DIY hazmat suit.

  I used five garbage bags and a lot of tape, but when I was done, I was covered from head to toe.

  Now that I was covered up, I could get on with my painting. I had just put a red circle in the middle of my paper when I felt ice-cold breath over my shoulder. I turned around to find Miss Adolf behind me.

  “Explain,” she said. She’d been patrolling the art room, telling people to make their spheres more “spherical” and their shading more “shaded.”

  “Well, Miss, I was trying to capture the inner truth of a sphere.”

  “No, Henry, I meant your outfit.” Miss Adolf looked me up and down while tapping her chin with the handle of her sword.

  “Trying to stay clean so I’ll look smart for my school photo, Miss.”

  “What outrageous vanity,” she said. “If you showed as much dedication to your schoolwork, or your shading technique, as you do to your looks, you could be a perfectly average student.”

  She used the tip of the sword to slice through a piece of tape, and my whole suit fell to the floor.

  “Now, Henry, get into your standard-issue apron,” she said, and turned away to tear into the next kid’s geometric rendering.