Take Two!

by John J. Bonk

  “Why the heck are you getting mail from NBC?” I asked, whipping my head around. “What’re you not telling me? Huh?”

  Brother Grimm tore the envelope away from me and took off with a knuckle-punch to my arm. Right on cue Cinnamon leaped out of nowhere, latching onto his back in an all-out attack. “Aaargh!” Gordy howled, flailing and twisting down the hall. “Get this mangy thing off me!”

  I used to think cats were minions of the Devil, but this one was beginning to grow on me. Back to the mail – and another stupid postcard from LMNOP.

  Hi, DustiN GRuBBS,

  WHAt’s up? ARE you GiViNG CiNNAmON lots oF SWEEt kiSSES? WENt WHAlE WAtcHiNG toDAy AND SAw A poD oF HumpBAcks! INcREDiBly AWESomE!!! I NEARly FRoZE to DEAtH tHOuGH, AND ENDED up “loSiNG my luNCH” iN StEllwAGEN BANK.

  Too much information!

  “All right, stop dillydallying and bring those wedding cards to your aunt.” Granny gave me an impatient push. “Get ’em outta my sight.”

  I was about to head back to flower central when my own words stopped me.

  “Gran, why are you acting like this?” She refused to look up – just kept smoothing out the lace doily on the credenza. Someone has to talk some sense into her before she drives us all up the wall. “Aunt Olive said she’d still send you money every month and come visit every chance she gets.”

  “Oh, you don’t know nothin’,” Granny groused, waving away my words. “You’re just a snot-nosed kid.”

  I dropped the mail and blew my nose on one of the tissue carnations that were peppered all around. “There ya go,” I said, tossing it over my shoulder. “Snot free. So why don’t you educate me then?” I grabbed her hand and led her to the “sweet spot” on the living room sofa, her favorite seat in the house. Granny zeroed in on peeling her banana, sniffing it and taking a careful first bite.

  “You want some?” she offered. “It’s good if you have the runs.”

  “I don’t have the – spill it, Gran.”

  “What do you want me to say? I didn’t expect your aunt to abandon us, running off with that bug killer…” She was beginning to open up, but somehow veered off track, going on and on about the noisy garbage trucks waking up the whole neighborhood.

  “Hello? Earth to Granny! We were talking about Aunt Olive.”

  “Yeah, yeah, use your indoor voice.” She closed up the peels on what was left of her banana and set it on her lap. “For your information I brought up all that wedding baloney in the confessional at St. Agatha’s yesterday – to that young Father Downing.”

  “And? What’d he say?”

  “Nothin’ worth a darn. He’s got this holier than thou attitude.”

  “I give up!” I hollered, springing to my feet. The heat of frustration was burning my face as I bolted to the credenza and grabbed the stack of mail. “You wanna know what I think?”

  “No.”

  “I think you’re just gonna miss Aunt Olive. A lot! And that’s all there is to it. I know I am.”

  “Looks like somebody’s gotten too big for his own britches.” She flung the banana across the coffee table, knocking off the pink poodle figurine. “Next, you’ll be moving away to the big city, just like your father. You think I don’t know where you’ve been this weekend? Well, I do.”

  I’d had it. I stomped back into the kitchen before we got into a bloody round of fisticuffs! Everyone had gone but Aunt Olive, who was stuffing carnations into huge plastic bags. “Oh, Dustin, would you be a love and go through those response cards and record the ‘accepts’ and ‘regrets’ in my wedding journal? I’m up to my elbows in flowers.”

  “No sweat.” She cleared a spot for me at the table, and I got to work. There weren’t many invited guests, just close family and friends, so things were sailing right along. It wasn’t until I’d gotten to Great-Aunt Iris’s RSVP that I’d actually stopped and read one of the things. It wasn’t until I’d gotten to Great-Aunt Iris’s RSVP that I couldn’t breathe.

  We look forward to celebrating with you on… Just like in some demented Disney cartoon, the swirly-curly wedding date jumped off the card, spun through the air, and singed my eyeballs:

  Saturday, the eighth of October

  Chapter 15

  The After Math

  Aftermath

  “You have reached the offices of McKenna Casting, Inc. If you know the party you wish to speak to, please say their name now.”

  “Nathan Weiss.”

  “Rachel White. If this is correct, press the pound key. If not, please repeat the name of the party you wish to speak to.”

  “Na-than Weiss.”

  “Donald Baumgartner. If this is correct…”

  Argh! I had no choice but to stay on the line to speak to a human operator, who finally connected me to Mr. Weiss. Naturally he wasn’t in, so I left a voice mail.

  “Oh, yeah, hi. This is Dustin Grubbs – the actor from Buttermilk Falls. Uh, I have a callback for the Stink-Zappers commercial at one-forty on October eighth, but that’s not good for me so I’d like to change that, please. To another day. Any day. Halloween even. I have to leave for school now, but I can be reached anytime after three-thirty. Okay, thanks. Bye.”

  I’d decided before the first school bell rang that I wasn’t going to let Aunt Olive know just yet that she went and picked the worst possible day of the year to get hitched. Didn’t want her getting all worried for nothing. This was just a minor glitch, and I knew I’d be able to work it all out – or die trying. In the meantime, I couldn’t wait to saturate the entire playground with my “True Hollywood Story.” Pepper was psyched when I told her and she insisted I autograph her sweatshirt with a Sharpie. My best friend, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found.

  Once we were trapped inside Lynch’s lair, my sense of celebrity quickly fizzled out. Culture shock, I guess. I’d gone from a whirlwind weekend of show-biz glamour and big city razzmatazz to a grueling morning of dividing compound fractions. Bleah. Mom must’ve dropped me on my head as a baby and damaged the math side of my brain because it never came easily. And slave-driver Lynch had six of us lined up elbow-to-elbow along the lengthy chalkboard at the back of the room, working out problems in a display of public humiliation. What was the point? Stars of TV commercials hired teams of accountants to divide their fractions for them.

  “Miss Wathom, this may well be the biggest cranberry muffin I’ve ever seen – and it smells heavenly.” Mr. Lynch was peeling back the plastic wrap and drooling over the thing as he paraded past me. It was hard enough to concentrate, being math impaired, without mouthwatering distractions. “I’ll exercise some restraint and wait until lunchtime,” he oozed on. “Tell your mother she’s outdone herself this time. But please get control of your hair, dear, so Mr. Ziggler can see the board.”

  Dear? Maggie’s suck-up routine seemed to be working. She had been smothering Lynch with baked goods ever since she discovered he had a major say in the casting of the musical. We’ll see if the kitchen closes after the cast list goes up.

  “Mr. Grubbs, everyone else appears to be finished,” Lynch said, setting the megamuffin on his desk with a thud. “Is there a problem?”

  “Not really.” I was staring at my denominator so hard the numbers disappeared. Focus, Grubbs. Divide and conquer. “I take that back. It’s kind of the problem that’s the problem. I just don’t get it.”

  “Well, let’s break it down. Why don’t you start out by refreshing the class’s memory on the rules for converting compound fractions to simple fractions?”

  “’Appy to oblige, gov-nah!” Cockney again. It just popped out of me when I least expected it. I faced the class and saw Maggie looking up at me, pulling her frizzy curls into a pony-tail the size of a tumbleweed. “Okay, the rules for converting compound fractions.” I cracked my knuckles. “Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m guessing it’s not ‘I before E except after C.’”

  Candy giggled. That was when I first noticed it. SLUDGE was printed across her hot pink T-shirt in gold
glitter. Hmm. Why is that word so familiar? I stood there twiddling a fat piece of chalk, trying to shift my thoughts back to fraction rules, but my eyes jumped to Pig. He was wearing the same shirt too, only in brown with white letters. And Tyler had an orange one with black letters. I scoured the room and realized half the class was wearing those shirts. Green, blue, yellow-SLUDGE, SLUDGE, SLUDGE. There was a sudden twinge in the pit of my stomach. I smelled something foul – and not just Stewy’s macrobiotic fish balls.

  “Well, Mr. Grubbs?” Lynch’s voice cut through my wandering thoughts. “Do you know the answer or not?”

  “Yes. No. Wait – what was the question again?”

  “Take your seat,” he said all disgusted. “You’re wasting our time with your tomfoolery.”

  Clearly I wasn’t racking up any brownie points with the Lynch-man – and after my disastrous Oliver! audition I needed all the help I could get. I mean how would it look if the star of a TV commercial with all kinds of natural-born charisma didn’t even get a decent part in his own school play? I’d be the laughingstock of the Screen Actors Guild. I was certainly feeling the pressure – what with that wedding-date conflict eating away at me all morning, and now the whole SLUDGE thing. I had to find out what the deal was with that before I’d completely cracked up.

  It wasn’t until around elevenish, when my class was independently working on our Shedd Aquarium reports and Lynch was noisily printing stuff out on his computer, that I had my chance. I was about to ask Candy “What’s with the shirts?” when she turned her head slightly and whispered, “Don’t hate me,” through a veil of hair.

  “Okay. But why would I –”

  “For telling Zack. That you called him sludge. Well, him and the Fireballs.” She was talking in camouflaged sound bites so Lynch wouldn’t catch on. “You remember. At the Shedd?”

  “Uh, kinda.”

  “It sorta just slipped out. Zack’s my boyfriend now, so…”

  Ouch! Pepper gave me a constipated look from two rows down. She was right – Candy really had been drooling over that boneheaded Neanderthal the whole time. Candy went back to working on her report, nervously twisting her tresses over one shoulder. The message that was suddenly revealed on the back of her shirt made the SLUDGE thing pretty clear:

  Sports

  Lovers

  Unite!

  Drama

  Geeks

  BitE!

  Seems like the jocks had taken my snide remark and practically turned it into an all-out battle cry. Lynch was making a racket rummaging through his supply closet and the printer was still coughing out page after page, so I took that opportunity to drag Candy through the mud.

  “Well, that was a chintzy thing to do, snitching on me like that,” I whispered. “You cheated on the acronym, by the way. ‘Drama Geeks Bite’? Pretty slack. More like a slack-ronym.”

  “Poetic license.”

  “Yeah? Yours should be revoked.”

  “C’mon, Dustin, don’t hate me.” She turned all the way around to face me. Her eyelids were hot pink to match her shirt. “Zack’s dad is on a rampage – it was his idea to have the shirts printed up. He thinks the athletes really need to take a stand before they all get swallowed up by the artsy-fartsy freaks. His words, not mine.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Hard to believe you got sucked in by that crowd.”

  “Is it? Don’t you remember my nickname last year?” I tried to think, but drew a blank. I’d barely noticed her back then. “Stale Candy. Well, look at me now. Suddenly I’m sitting at the cool girls’ table at lunch; suddenly I’m on the cheerleader squad and dating the captain of the Fireballs. Suddenly I’m cashews, pecans, and almonds dipped in chocolate with a creamy caramel center!”

  She’s nuts all right.

  The room got quiet again. Lynch was back at his desk stapling stuff and undressing his cranberry muffin with his eyes – so we had no choice but to get back to our aquarium reports. I made an executive decision right then to change my topic from “Penguins: Just the Facts in Black and White” to

  POISONOUS FROGS: THE PRETTIER,

  THE DEADLIER!

  Beware of the beautiful dart frogs! They may look real tasty, but looks can be decieving - deceiving. Their bright colors serve as a warning to potential predators

  The loudspeaker clicked on, derailing my train of thought, and Futterman’s voice came ringing through. “Sorry I’m late with my morning announcements – cough-cough – but I’m battling a nasty head cold today. I spent the entire weekend searching for my dog in the freezing rain. Thankfully, he’s home safe and sound.”

  Shatzi! I’m glad he’s okay.

  “Let’s see, the first item on the agenda… the Slam-Dunk Basketball Tournament we were subbosed to be hosting at our school this year will be held at Claymore Middle School in Lotustown again. Sorry, guys. No big explanation, except that our facilities didn’t beasure up.”

  “So it’s official!” Tyler blurted out through an eruption of moans and groans.

  “Also, Coach Mockler will be on a short leave of absence starting – abbarently, last Wednesday.” A few kids gasped. “In the beantime, Miss Blodget will be taking over his gym classes as well as the bractice sessions for the Fireballs.”

  “That cow?” someone yelled. “No way!”

  “We’re doomed!” Pig snarled, pounding his desk. The rest of the SLUDGE-wearers went ballistic. I’m talking booing, hissing, and gnashing of teeth.

  “People, people!” Lynch lurched. “I won’t have this behavior in my classroom!”

  “Settle down, everyone,” Futterman said, as if he could magically hear the uproar too. “I’m sure this will all be worked out. Eventually.” That brought things down to a simmering grumble. “Oh, just one bore thing. The Arts Committee has wrapped up their final auditions at Fenton High, and the cast list for Oliver! will be posted ASA” – gross, wet nose-blowing – “P.”

  Lynch was in a crabby mood for the rest of the day. And as if the war brewing around us wasn’t bad enough, he assigned us four Civil War chapters to read for homework, plus a five-page essay of our choice on the Battle of Gettysburg, the Battle of Fredericksburg, or the Battle of Shiloh. I guess that’s what they mean by picking your battles. Not very civil if you ask me. But I wasn’t about to let anything rain on my parade. Not Lynch, not Candy, not the clump of SLUDGE-wearing Fireballs tearing up the school grounds at three-fifteen.

  I hid behind the monkey bars until they dispersed, then sprinted all the way home. Perfect timing! I could hear our upstairs kitchen phone ringing as I rumbled up the porch steps.

  “Hello? Hello?” I was still panting like a choo-choo train when I answered it.

  “Justine Grubbs?”

  “Dustin Grubbs – yes, speaking!”

  “Oh, that’s a D? This is Sylvia LeRoy from McKenna Casting, Inc. I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  Chapter 16

  Pande-phone-ium

  WARNING: TITLE CHARACTER’S HEAD MAY EXPLODE DURING THE FOLLOWING TELEPHONE CONVERSATION. PLEASE PROCEED READING WITH EXTREME CAUTION!

  “Are you still there, Mr. Grubbs?”

  “I’m here. Sorry, I just had to grab onto something.”

  “Oh, uh-huh. I’m calling to acknowledge that we did receive your message earlier today about a scheduling conflict, but I’m afraid… only one day of callbacks… October eighth.”

  Shoot! It was that gray-haired lady whose voice always fades out.

  “Excuse me? Only one day did you say?”

  “Yes.”

  No!

  “The Stink-Zapper executives will be flying in… only going to be here for just that one Saturday… final decision on casting their commercial.”

  “Oh, man.” I could barely speak – but I had to. “Well, do you think – can I maybe get an earlier time slot? It’s super-important or I wouldn’t even ask. See, my aunt is getting married at two o’clock that day. I could still make it down to Chicago and back
in time – but the trip takes a couple hours, so any time before noon would work for me. Any time at all -ten, nine, eight, seven, six –”

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible. We’re booked solid.”

  “But – then – can’t I just switch times with someone?”

  “We make it a policy never to do that. These are professional… very busy lives… can’t just rearrange their schedules willy-nilly.”

  Freaking out on my end. Brain working a million miles a minute. Heart too.

  “Hello? Mr. Grubbs?”

  “Umm. I could get, like, a written excuse from my mom, if you want – or my doctor. Or my priest! Whatever it takes.”

  “We’re not running a grade school here, honey – although sometimes it seems like it. [BEEP]… the real world. Oh, I’m getting another call. Can you hold for a sec?”

  You’ve gotta be kidding me! It was the longest, gnarliest “sec” since the beginning of time. I kept pick-pick-picking at the loose corner of the apple wallpaper border until it looked more like apple brown Betty.

  “Sorry. It’s our busiest time of day… always happens. Now which agency did you say you were with again?”

  “Uh, I didn’t. No agency. Just me, Dustin Grubbs, remember?”

  “Oh, right, of course. Yes, we’re going to need a definite answer from you before the week is out. If you can’t make it… us know as soon as possible so we can arrange for another actor to fill your time slot, okay? [BEEP] Oh, I apologize, but I really have to take this other [BEEP]…”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said all polite. “Thank you very much for –”

  But she’d already hung up.

  I slammed down the phone and shook my fists at the heavens. “This is not happening! This is totally whacked out!”

  Why I started revving up the can opener on the kitchen counter after that is anybody’s guess – but I couldn’t stop. The grrrrr sound must’ve matched how I felt inside. Okay, easy, cowboy. Just calm down. Aunt Olive would definitely understand if I skipped out on her wedding for something this huge, right? Right. “Grrrrrrrr!” She’s a reasonable woman, right? Right. So just suck it up and lay it on the line. I backed away from the can opener, turned to the sink, and splashed some cold water on my face. You mean right now? I asked myself. The sooner the better.