The Big One-Oh
Page 4
With Boing Boing nipping at my heels, I ran faster than I have ever run. Across our lawn! Up on our porch! I blasted through our front door as if the Goblins of GlugGlug (Monsters & Maniacs, Issue 25) were at my back.
“Mom! Mom!” I ran from room to room, yelling my head off.
Mom rushed out of the laundry room, carrying a basket of clothes. “What, Charley? What?”
Lorena raced down from upstairs shouting, “He’d better be bleeding!”
I was practically wailing by this time: “MaaaaaaaaaahhM!”
Mom dropped her basket of laundry, fell to her knees and grabbed me by both shoulders.
“I’m right here, Charley!” she shouted. “What is it?”
I gulped a big ball of air, and I said it.
Yup. I actually said it.
“I gotta have a birthday party.”
8
That night in bed, there were about a hundred thoughts running around in my brain, all trying to get my attention. And one thought kept poking at the top of my skull. One thought kept shouting louder than all the rest.
And that one thought was this: I’m going to have a birthday party.
Me.
Charley Maplewood.
I’m going to invite kids to my party.
And they will come.
Why?
Because, I told myself, I am going to throw the best party—in the history—OF THE WORLD!
And as I thought that, I thrust my fists above my head in triumph. Unfortunately, there’s a wall there, so I cracked my knuckles pretty hard and made a loud BOOM! that caused Mom to poke her head in and say, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “Yeah. I’m great.”
THE BIRTHDAY NOTEBOOK
9
As I raced around getting ready for school the next morning, it hit me that I had a lot of work ahead. After all, with my birthday less than three weeks away, I had to get organized. I decided that the best way to keep all my ideas in order was to put them all in one place.
I have a super-special spiral notebook: my Monsters & Maniacs Official Record. In it I list every story in every issue, and after each entry I write a short description about the story and the characters in it. Then, using a rating system that I created, I give each story one, two, three or four daggers, four being the best rating a story can get.
I decided on rating with daggers because they’re actually pretty easy to draw.
But all of my Monsters & Maniacs stuff only takes up about half the notebook, so, while Mom yelled from downstairs, “You’re gonna be late!” I opened to the middle of the book, and across the top of the page I wrote: THINGS TO DO FOR MY PARTY. Down the left side of the page, I numbered the lines from 1 to 10.
I didn’t have anything to write on any of the lines yet, but it felt good to get started.
On our way out to the car, Mom saw our mangled bushes. She stopped suddenly and gasped, “Now what in the world?!” I guess that, in the excitement of my previous night’s announcement, I had completely forgotten to tell her how Pincushion had driven her car through our hedge. So when Mom looked to me and shook her head in confusion and dismay, I just shrugged and shook my head, too.
Before the first bell that day, I sat way off at one end of the playground and studied my Birthday Notebook.
THINGS TO DO FOR MY PARTY was all I had written so far.
But on my way to school that morning, I kept rerunning the memory of Pincushion’s screeching departure from Garry’s house the night before. And when I remembered how she had yelled, “You have no friends!” I realized what belonged on line 1. So I wrote it in:
1. MAKE FRIENDS
I stared at those words. How? I wondered. How how how how? And then it hit me!
So I wrote on line 2 . . .
2. WATCH PEOPLE WITH FRIENDS TO LEARN HOW
. . . but as I finished, Jennifer suddenly shoved an issue of Monsters & Maniacs between my face and my Birthday Plan.
“Check it out!” she said. “I went through this issue and counted every time they use the word ‘booger’ and the word ‘barf,’ and which one do you think won?”
I looked up at her. I could tell that Jennifer had eaten an apple for breakfast, because bits of its red skin were still in her braces. I didn’t answer, hoping that she would realize she had interrupted something very important and leave me alone. After a long pause she shrugged, still smiling.
“Okay. Think about it. Tell me later. I’ll just go stand over . . . there.”
She pointed to a patch of dead grass about twenty feet away.
“It’s a free country,” was all I said.
At lunch, I got my first chance to watch friendship at work.
Across the room, I saw Donna eating with Dina and Dana. Just as they finished their lunches, Donna reached into her shoulder bag and, with a little ta-da! move, pulled out two new unsharpened pencils. They were thick and pink and, from the end where the eraser should be, little colorful yarn balls dangled.
Donna presented one to Dina and one to Dana, and you would have thought that the two of them had just won a Jeep or something, the way they squealed and clapped and hugged Donna.
I opened my Birthday Notebook and, under WATCH PEOPLE WITH FRIENDS TO LEARN HOW, I wrote: You can buy friends with gifts.
I was excited to have discovered such an important fact, until I dug into my pocket and pulled out all the money I had.
A nickel and a dime. Fifteen cents. That wasn’t going to buy too many friends.
But there must be other ways to make friends, because not everybody has tons of money. I decided I needed to find one of those inexpensive ways.
That afternoon, I was at my locker when our Class President Leo hobbled by on crutches.
Oh, didn’t I tell you? The big news in school that morning was that Leo broke his foot.
From what I overheard in the halls and the classrooms, I was able to piece together the story: the previous afternoon, Leo was messing around with a bunch of guys, and he had jumped off the roof of his house. Everybody was saying how he had done it “millions of times before,” but this time he “landed wrong,” and all the guys who were there heard a “loud crunch.”
Ouch. The word “crunch” made me wince each time I overheard it.
So today Leo showed up on crutches with his foot in a white cast, which everybody started writing on so that, by lunchtime, it was covered with people’s signatures and drawings of lightning bolts.
Because Leo had to hold on to the crutches to walk, a bunch of guys were following him around—carrying his books, carrying his lunch tray, opening his locker and stuff. And they all kept asking Leo how he felt and patting him on his shoulder and saying how sorry they were.
And I thought: Wow.
I opened my Birthday Notebook and under You can buy friends with gifts, I wrote You can get friends with sympathy.
But later that afternoon, when I stood on the high brick wall at the far end of the school parking lot and looked down on the hard, black asphalt where I was planning to “land wrong” and suffer a minor injury—an injury that would attract my very own mob of friends—I had second thoughts.
Isn’t there some way, I wondered, to get friends without getting hurt and requiring medical attention?
I decided to keep looking.
As I was climbing down off the wall, I did scrape my elbow kinda badly, but I didn’t think that I could win any sympathy with a big scab, so I never showed it to anyone.
A few days later as I skateboarded home, I stopped to watch a baseball game in the playground, and, as I looked on from the sidelines, something amazing happened.
A baseball player raced from third plate and slid home in a cloud of dust. Well, the reaction he got was incredible! His teammates went berserk, pounding him on the back, patting him on the head and screaming things like, “Way to go, pal!” and “That was awesome, buddy!”
“Pal”?
“Buddy”?
Aha!
But I never got to finish.
That’s because the very next batter popped up a ball that flew out of bounds in a high arc and fell—BOINK!—right down on my head! The sudden and surprising impact made me drop my Birthday Notebook and sit down, stunned, right where I had been standing.
I rubbed my head, where a lump was starting to form.
None of the ballplayers made a move toward me. The school groundskeeper, Mr. Gavin, came over, knelt down and held two fingers up in front of my face.
“How many fingers?” he asked. When I answered correctly, he told me to go home and put ice on my bump, which was starting to hurt something fierce.
But not as much as it hurt to hear the ballplayers’ snorts and titters as I staggered away from the playground.
So much for being a sports hero.
I was going to erase that one from my Birthday Notebook. As a matter of fact, I vowed to go home and scratch out You can get friends with sympathy, too.
But before I could go home, I still had to go shopping for that night’s dinner.
And that’s when things got real strange.
10
As I walked the aisles of the Happy Giant Supermarket, my head kept throbbing where that baseball had crashed down on me.
But then I turned my cart into the bakery aisle.
Normally, I would roll right past that section of the store, because Mom and Lorena don’t eat a lot of desserts. But that day I slowed down and looked up, up, up at the shelves and shelves of cake mixes and cans of frosting that rose high above me. And in that moment, staring up at that Great Wall of Cake, my head stopped hurting and the discouraging thoughts of my unsuccessful hunt for a friend flew from my mind. One thought and one thought alone remained: “I’m going to have a birthday party,” I told myself, “so I will need a birthday cake.”
But what kind? Chocolate? Dark Swiss Chocolate? Angel Food? Devil’s Food? Lemon Mousse? Butterscotch Swirl? So many choices!
I pulled a box of Confetti Coconut Cake Mix off the shelf to look over the directions. I had just started reading: “In a large bowl, combine . . . ,” when the box was smacked upward, out of my hands, and a familiar voice whined, “Ooooh! Who’s gonna bake a cake?”
It was Cougar. And, of course, Scottie was right behind him. What they were doing in the store was probably illegal, but there they were.
I yelled, “Cougar! Scottie! Stop it!”
As the box fell from the air, Cougar snatched it and tossed it over my head to Scottie, who bleated, “Charley’s gonna bake a cake!”
“C’mon, give it back!” I said as they played keep-away with my cake mix.
I really should have known better, because they started to mimic my words, but in high, screechy voices: “C’mon! Give it back! Give it back!”
I finally grabbed the box at the same moment Scottie caught it. Then Cougar seized it, too, and the three of us wrestled for control while they continued to rag on me.
“You wear an apron when you cook?”
“I bet he’s got a really cute apron!”
“STOP IT!” I yelled, and I yanked at the box.
And it exploded.
Confetti Coconut Cake Mix flew up in the air and covered everything with a fine, white powder.
We all stopped and looked at each other. What had we done? We destroyed a box of cake mix that we hadn’t even paid for!
Cougar and Scottie suddenly heaved with laughter, stepped back from the scene of devastation and pointed at me!
“CLEANUP ON AISLE THREE!” Cougar yelled so the whole store could hear.
I wailed, “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!” but who was I kidding? I was holding the box. I was covered with powder. And it was their word against mine.
So I dropped the box and pushed my cart up to speeds that its little wheels were hardly designed for. I skidded around corners and veered around shoppers as Scottie and Cougar chased me, chanting, “Cleanup on aisle three! Cleanup on aisle three!”
But then I turned down an aisle and found that—oh, no!—I was headed straight for a cart that was blocking the aisle sideways! I couldn’t stop in time, and I smashed right into it.
Everything got quiet. And I immediately noticed something weird: the cart was filled to the top with about fifty bags of potato chips. And nothing else.
And the worst part?
That cart belonged to Garry Quarky, my neighbor. The freak.
He looked up. I looked up. He blinked when he recognized me.
“Oh,” he said, pointing at me. “You’re . . .” And then he stopped, because he didn’t know my name. So he simply said, “. . . you.”
I was so stunned that it took me a moment to remember I was being chased. I glanced back and there, ten paces behind me, Cougar and Scottie waited, smirking.
Garry cleared his throat. “Shopping,” he said. He pointed to his cart and explained, “Yup. That’s what I’m doing. Doing the shopping.”
He really talked like that.
I would gladly have left him at that moment, but I couldn’t. His cart still blocked the aisle, and I sure wasn’t going to turn around and get dragged by Cougar and Scottie back to the scene of our crime in aisle three. My thoughts were interrupted when Garry started stammering, “See, my girl . . . girlfr . . . girlfriend . . . y’know? Stacy?”
Stacy? I thought; Pincushion’s name was really Stacy?
“She . . . uh, Stacy used to shop. But now she’s . . .” and he flapped his hands like a bird winging off.
“She’s gone,” I suggested.
“Yeah,” he mumbled, and his voice cracked a little. He sniffed and dabbed what might have been a tear from his eye, and the little voice inside my head was screaming: “Oh, man! Is he crying? Please don’t let him cry in the supermarket! Not in front of Cougar and Scottie!”
But Garry wiped his nose, cleared his throat, and then, like he had just awakened from a terrible spell that had turned him temporarily stupid, he asked me in a clear, adult voice, “Can I ask you one thing?”
I was so startled by the change in his tone that I simply nodded.
Garry pointed at his cart full of fifty bags of potato chips and asked, “Is this enough?”
“For . . . ?”
“For . . . now? Is this enough for now?”
I tried to puzzle out what he was asking: Are you wondering if fifty bags of potato chips are enough to keep you alive for a while? But then that leads to the question: Are potato chips all you plan to eat?
He must have sensed the wheels whirring in my head, because he pointed at my cart and explained, “I mean, look at you. You. You really shop. You got your chicken . . . parts. Got your, uh . . . green vegetable . . .”
“Broccoli,” I offered.
“Right. Broccoli. Full of iron. Vitamin C. Good stuff, broccoli. Right?” He looked up and saw that I was staring at him strangely; he immediately dropped his head and turned his cart away.
“Y’know what? I’ve bothered you enough. ’Kay. Bye.”
And off he went. Leaving me at the mercy of Cougar and Scottie, who I could feel creeping up behind me. So I did something that I could never have imagined myself ever, ever doing in a million years.
I called after Garry.
“Where’s your protein?”
He stopped, turned around and squinted.
“Huh?”
“You really should have protein in every meal. Potato chips are not protein.”
I looked back at Cougar and Scottie. They were bored. Cougar nudged Scottie with a “C’mon,” and they were gone.
Behind me, Garry protested, “But I don’t cook.”
I turned back to him. “Can you reach the sink?” I asked.
He nodded a slow “Yes.”
“Then you can cook.”
11
Trying to explain cooking to Garry Quarky was
like trying to explain a computer to a cat. Garry didn’t understand how to peel vegetables, or why you simmer soups, or how to broil a hamburger. Heck, he didn’t know the difference between lettuce and cabbage.
Finally, after we cruised a bunch of aisles without adding anything to Garry’s cart, he turned to me.
“Where’s the stuff in boxes?”
And don’t ask me how, but I knew what he was talking about.
We stood before the big frozen TV dinners cases, and I thought Garry was going to cry again. One by one, he took boxes out of the cold and lovingly touched the pictures on the covers: photos of fried chicken and meat loaf and beef pot pies that looked just like the meal waiting for Garry inside the cardboard.
Garry put thirty-six TV dinners in his cart, and he would have taken more, but I told him that that was “enough.” For now.
I got the rest of my groceries, and then Garry followed me to the checkout lines, where he rolled his cart up right behind mine. There were a few large carts ahead of us, so we waited in silence until I finally got up the courage to say:
“Now can I ask you one thing?”
“Sure,” he nodded.
I took deep breath, not sure how he was going to handle my question. “Okay. Here goes. Remember that day you chased Boing Boing into the hedge cuz he stole something of yours?”
Garry looked confused. “ ‘Boing Boing’?”
“My dog. His name’s Boing Boing,” I explained.
“Oh,” he nodded. “So that’s the noise you’re making when you’re running around? I thought it was some kind of game you play. With an imaginary friend.”
An imaginary friend? Whoa! I thought. How old do you think I am?
“No. Just my dog,” I assured Garry. “Anyway, that day you were in the hedge on your knees? In your rubber apron, remember? And Boing Boing was chewing on something and . . . ?”
“Oh, yeah. Right, right.”