Big Mouth

by Deborah Halverson

  “Hey, quit pushing.” Kenny didn’t appreciate being shoved aside, but that’s what he got for squeezing himself in there to begin with. It was a table, not a clown car.

  Tugging and twisting at my shoelace, I stayed down there for a while, considering my options. I could sit there and act like everything was normal, just go about my business and hope I’d fly under Shane’s radar. Or I could hightail it out of there. That second idea sounded like a winner. Too bad the exit was on the other side of Shane’s section. I’d have to be sly about reaching it, waiting for just the right moment, some kind of distraction, maybe….

  The cafeteria chatter was picking up again. Maybe the Plums had forgotten about me? I peeked under my armpit. King Shane and his jesters were now seated.

  Kenny nudged me in the ribs. “You done yet, Thuff Enuff? My back is cramping. I need to sit straight.”

  Tommy nudged me on my other side. “Me, too, man.”

  “All right already.” I elbowed both of them back, then twisted and shoved my way to sitting again.

  Tommy nudged me again. “There’s Shane, man. See him?”

  “Will you stop with the poking? I see him.” Even as I said that, Shane turned his head and saw me right back. Crap.

  He started to stand, but Queen Gabriella stayed him with a hand on his arm. Maybe she didn’t want her royal “coming out” ruined; I didn’t know. But whatever her motive, I was thankful for it. Shane looked at me, then at her, then at me again. Eventually he relaxed back onto his bench.

  “What are you waiting for, Thuff Enuff?” Kenny asked. Ketchup dripped off of his Tot, right onto his stupid pickle-colored overalls. “Go kick his butt.”

  “Yeah, man,” Tater urged, “go show him who’s Thuff Enuff.”

  Gardo set down what was left of his hamburger. “I don’t know, guys…”

  “Kick whose butt?” Lucy followed Kenny’s pointing finger. The cafeteria was crowded, but it was obvious who he was pointing at. “Shane’s?”

  “The one and only.” Kenny rubbed his hands together, the green vulture. “This’ll be great. Shane’s had this coming for a long time. We’ve been betting on who’d do it. My money was on Tater.” He laughed as Tater pegged him with a Tot. “I wish I brought my video camera. The great Shane is going down.”

  Lucy stared at me for a second like I was crazy, then she sized up Kenny, then Gardo, and then the rest of the guys at our table. Finally she picked up her mangled lemon again, inspected it, and said, real calmly, “You are not kicking anyone’s butt, Shermie.” She licked the yellow rind and made a sour face. “You’re training tonight. You need those hands for stuffing food into your mouth. They cannot be broken from pounding in someone’s face.”

  Oh man, I love Lucy. “Well, okay…if that’s the way it has to be.” I tried to sound resigned as I shrugged helplessly. “Sorry, guys, an athlete has to do what his coach tells him.”

  “Aw, man.” Runji muttered something about girls and sports, but part of it was in another language, so I didn’t quite follow it. And I probably didn’t want to.

  Eventually the guys started talking about Gardo’s canceled meet again. Then Tater shoved a Tot up his nose, and Runji and Roshon laughed at him hysterically. They seemed to forget all about Shane.

  Across from me, Lucy worked on her salad, trying to spear the soft leaves with her spork. When she finally gave up and just picked some up with her fingers, her eyes caught mine. I winked to let her know we were friends again. I wasn’t in a bad mood anymore, with the Thuff Enuff rep on the rise and all, and she did have my back when I was in need.

  She lowered the leaves. “Something in your eye?”

  “No. Nothing’s in my eye.” Jeez, can I just do my thing without her always calling me out?

  She picked up her lemon again and dug into it with her fingernail. A blast of lemon juice squirted across the table at me.

  “Ow!” I grabbed the left side of my face. Now I did have something in my eye—and it stung!

  “Sorry.” She smiled and licked the lemon again.

  “You did that on purpose!”

  “I did not. There, go over to that water fountain and wash out your eye. When you come back, we’ll talk about refocusing your training. And your attitude.”

  Refocus? Who needs to refocus? I don’t want to refocus… I hustled to the fountain, one hand over my stinging eye. Halfway there, my good eye caught sight of Principal Culwicki running into the cafeteria wearing his green college wrestling singlet.

  “Surprise!” he shouted. Plums exploded in shrieks and whistles. “Happy Halloween!” He dropped down into some freakish wrestling lunge and growled.

  I slapped my hand over my other eye and spun away. Ah! There had to be a law against what I’d just seen! At the very least, several hundred Plums were now in need of serious psychological counseling.

  I hunched over the fountain and splashed water in both eyes, as desperate to wash away that image as the lemon juice.

  It took a while—not that I was completely sad about it with Culwicki’s singlet running free—but eventually my eyes stopped burning. By then, lunch was pretty much over. Dracula, Jabba, Doughboy, and all the other creatures and Yellow Shirts were trickling out of the cafeteria and down the halls to class. With no showdown at the OK Corral on today’s menu, there was no reason to hang around.

  Shoot. In all the lunchtime excitement, I’d eaten only a few Tots. I’d have to eat my corn dogs on the way to class. At least the fizzies would be bubbled out of my soda by then, so I’d be able to chug that quickly.

  The bell rang as I headed back to grab the food from my tray, officially ending this round of lunch with my new rep—and my face—intact.

  * * *

  IT’S INTERMISSION TIME, FOLKS!

  Let’s all go to the Lunch Room,

  let’s all go to the Lunch Room,

  let’s all go to the Lunch Room

  to get Ourselves a Treat.

  De-li-cious things to eat.

  The Corn Dogs can’t be beat.

  The bubbly drinks are just daaaandy,

  the Tater Tots and the caaaandy.

  So, let’s all go to the Lunch Room

  to get Ourselves a Treat.

  Let’s all go to the Luuuunch Rooooom,

  to get Ourselves a Treeeeeeeeat…

  * * *

  CHAPTER 9

  Halloween used to be one of my favorite holidays. I’d buy a cool sci-fi costume and be on the sidewalks by sunset, whisking my pillowcase door to door, charming and coaxing my way to the pick of everyone’s candy bowls. Then, sometime around ten o’clock, I’d drag my bulging bag home and spend another blissful hour sorting the booty: Sour Worms, SweeTarts, Milky Way, Sugar Daddy, more SweeTarts, Milk Duds, Snickers, Twizzlers, Twizzlers again, Circus Peanuts—yuck, trash those—more SweeTarts, Snickers, Snickers again, Pop Rocks… Just a few hours of work scored me a candy stash that lasted for weeks. What a brilliant holiday.

  Then my stupid body went and got too tall for Halloween, ruining everything. The candy-givers cut me off. “You’re too old for this, sonny” “Give it up, kid” “No way, dude. Buy your own stinkin’ candy.” Oh, the agony.

  I even tried draping a sheet over my head and slunching down so people wouldn’t know my age. Mrs. Mortimer next door was the only one who fell for that. She gave me a box of raisins. What planet did that woman come from? That was a good way to get your house egged.

  This year, I’d just resigned myself to doling out candy to other kids. After last night’s inventory and post–ice cream agony, I was pretty wiped, anyway. A big candy-collecting mission would have been tough. And really, it wasn’t so bad passing out the loot. Kids had to beg and charm me.

  As far as my parents knew, Grampy was supposed to be there supervising me as I doled, but of course he wasn’t. He and I struck a deal on that a long time ago. As long as I promised not to set the house on fire, I could take care of myself when my parents were gone. So when he was home, he mos
tly just hung out in his room watching TV. Tonight, though, he and Arthur were at Scoops together.

  Gardo was with me instead. Lucy probably would have been there, too, only I kind of forgot to invite her. That is, I was going to tell her about it, but then we had that fight before school and then lunch was over before I could say anything about it and then she didn’t show up for the bus ride home and then it was just too late to call her. Anyway, she probably would’ve given me grief about the ice cream thing if she had come, so maybe I was kind of glad she wasn’t there.

  Gardo hadn’t even asked about Lucy. But his memory went south when he started all this no-eating-cutting-weight business last week. Not that the guy was starving right now, though. At lunch he’d wolfed down all that food after hearing about the canceled wrestling meet, and now he was going to town on my candy bars. Not that I could blame him—it was hard to resist my Halloween choice: Three Musketeers.

  Sure, Snickers was supposed to be the most popular candy bar, but I only bought the kind of candy I’d want to get as a trick-or-treater, and Three Musketeers was hands down my favorite. It had the perfect balance of densely fluffed chocolate center to delicately thick chocolate shell. There were no nuts or crispies or caramel or anything else to throw off its pure harmony. It was the Yin-Yang Zen King of candy bars. The brilliance of that bar was lost on Gardo, though. He was on the couch in our living room, kicked back in jeans and his red team shirt instead of his Marilyn drag, stuffing his face and hollering at a wrestling marathon on TV. I didn’t sweat his bingeing, though, because I’d bought ten bags of the minibars, so there was more than enough for him to chow down and me to still meet trick-or-treater demand. Besides, it was cheap payment for his launching of the Thuff Enuff legend. When I started raking in prize money, Gardo would get his rightful cut.

  Gardo was a good guest. He never arrived empty-handed. He’d showed up at my door tonight with a six-pack of Pepsi. Add that to my mini Three Musketeers bars, and we had one finger-lickin’ Halloween feast. Without his contribution, we’d have had to chase our Three Musketeers down with milk. Two years ago my mom banned soda from the house after Uncle Therman, Jr., Dad’s brother and a total soda freak, got squashed by a soda vending machine. He’d put his change in the coin slot, but when no soda came out, he got ticked off and tried to shake a can lose. Only he shook the machine too hard and it toppled, crushing him like an empty can.

  “Woo-hoo!” Gardo shouted at the TV. “Shermie, you gotta watch this, man. The Undertaker just beaned the ref with a tombstone, then tossed him into a coffin. That’s what you gotta do, man, be totally over the top.”

  “I don’t know….” I stopped filling the candy bowl in the front entryway and took a few steps toward the living room to see the TV. A guy in a black hat and trench coat was cracking some clown-wigged meathead in the skull with a big rock. “Lucy says I have to perfect my eating skills first. She says an act is nothing without the skill to back it up.”

  “Au contraire, my misguided friend. In the sports world, a skill is nothing without the act to back it up. Bury him, Undertaker!”

  The doorbell rang, so I rushed back to the door. No one was there. “I see you, you little punks!” I shouted into the darkness. I hadn’t, actually, but word spread fast if you let doorbell ditchers think they had the upper hand on Halloween. I’d DD’d enough times myself to know that.

  I fielded some legitimate doorbell dings while Gardo finished watching his match. When it switched to lady wrestlers, he met me at the breakfast bar with two cans of Pepsi. Bellied up to the bar, we toasted Halloween over a silver bag of Three Musketeers minis. My jaw was stiff thanks to last night’s ice cream-a-thon, but the minibars were pretty much bite-sized, so it loosened up quickly.

  “I wonder why they call these Three Musketeers bars?” Gardo reached into the bag for another bar. “There’s nothing ‘three’ about them. They don’t even have three parts, just chocolate and nougat.”

  “The bar used to come in three different flavors.”

  “Really? Which ones?”

  “Strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate.” My mom hid books about candy under her mattress. Thanks to my snooping, I knew the history of every candy made in America for the last one hundred years. Even Necco wafers. Gross. “They used to sell them in a box with three soldiers on the label. Those were the musketeers.”

  “Strawberry nougat? Nasty.”

  I bit the bottom off a mini and scooped the nougat out with my pinkie. I liked taking my time with those bars. Something about their mininess called for dainty eating. “I don’t know, it might be fun to taste it.”

  “You’d have to pay me a lot to try strawberry nougat.”

  “I’ll try any food once.”

  “What about strawberry nog?”

  “Instead of egg nog?” I had no idea there were other nogs. My mom didn’t have any books about that. Not that I’d found yet, anyway.

  “It’s seriously gross,” Gardo said, making a face. “Nana makes it every Christmas.”

  “I’d try it.”

  “Not if you saw it, you wouldn’t. How about escargot?”

  “Already did. They were slimy.”

  “Gross! How about chocolate-covered termites?”

  “Bugs?” I shuddered. “Bugs are not a food.”

  “They are in some countries.”

  “True.” I tried to imagine a spoonful of tiny termites dipped in milk chocolate. It would probably look like chocolate rice. Only it would be bugs. In my mouth. Gross! I felt butyric acid bubble. “Uh-uh, no way. No termites. Here and now, I draw the line at bugs. Raw, cooked, or candy-covered, it doesn’t matter.” In the Sherman T. Thuff Book of Good and Tasty Things, bugs were now an official no-no.

  “You’ll have to eat stuff like that when you start competing.” He spun his stool back and forth, back and forth, smudging his chocolatey fingers on the white countertop. “They make you eat cow brains and sticks of butter and gross things like that, right?”

  “That’s just for headlines. Hot dogs aren’t gross. Ice cream sure isn’t gross. Who knows, maybe there’s a Three Musketeers competition?” I bit the end off another mini, then pinkie-scooped the nougat. “That would be cool.”

  “How many do you think you’d have to eat? A couple dozen?”

  I considered the bag of minis we were finishing off. “I don’t know….”

  Gardo was quiet a moment; then he smiled slowly. “We could try it, you know, to find out.”

  “Oh no, no. Lucy won’t like that.”

  “Who’s going to tell her? Not me. I can keep my big mouth shut. I didn’t say a word to her about the ice cream.”

  “But she’s got all those graphs….” He was right, though, she wouldn’t find out. It was just me and Gardo this time, no customers or stupid Leonard to rat me out. And anyway, it didn’t really matter what I ate, eating was eating. Ultimately it was the volume that mattered. Lucy said so herself, I needed to work on my capacity. Besides, I loved Three Musketeers. “Okay. But we can’t eat all the Halloween candy. I don’t want my house egged for running out. We’ll make it a speed-eating competition. Two minutes to eat all the Three Musketeers you can.”

  “What do I get when I win?”

  “When you win? I don’t think so, little man.”

  He crossed his arms. “Life is ninety-nine percent attitude, Shermie. If I teach you nothing else, remember that. Now let’s put up or shut up. Winner gets bragging rights, loser has to…oh, what should you do…”

  “When you lose, Mr. Attitude,” I said, knowing exactly how to humiliate the guy, “you will properly bow to my excellence. To you, I will soon and forever more be Grand Master of All Things Edible and Great. And I expect a lot of genuflecting. You know how to bow to your betters, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Fine. How about when you lose?”

  I scanned the kitchen and then the living room, my gaze running over my Galactic Warriors fan club magazines in the bookcase, the Pepsis on the table, the c
andy bar wrappers on the couch and coffee table, the TV screen with some long-haired blond woman twisting another long-haired blond woman’s leg over her head—

  That’s it! “If I lose, I’ll let you practice your Cripple Crossface takedowns on me for a whole fifteen minutes.”

  “Done!” He popped off his stool and ran to fetch more candy from the living room.

  Gardo did have attitude; I’d give him that. What he didn’t have was a clue about what he’d just gotten himself into. Attitude wouldn’t beat natural talent. With all he knew about eating, he’d probably take the traditional route, eating bar by bar, one at a time. I planned to apply the Solomon Method. Lucy said that technique had the shortest bite-to-swallow duration. I just hoped my jaw wasn’t too sore. I really didn’t want Gardo twisting my legs around my head for fifteen minutes.

  Gardo brought over two full silver bags from the coffee table. Ripping both open, he set one in front of me and one in front of himself. Then he kicked his stool away so that he could compete from a standing position. “Okay, there are sixty-three candy bars in each bag. Ready, set—”

  “Wait! I need to stretch first.”

  “Aw, Shermie.”

  I put up my hand in a stop gesture to shut him up, then started stretching. I let my head sag back, then forward, then to the side, then to the other side. I dangled my arms straight, then shook them. My First Contact medals jangled on my chest. I’d put my Galactic Warrior uniform back on for the trick-or-treaters. Actually, I could probably wear it every night and be happy. Slowly, I rolled my shoulders backward and forward, backward and forward.

  Gardo stood there with his arms crossed, looking like he was picking his teeth with his tongue.

  I pointed to the stove. “Make yourself useful. Go set the timer.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” He saluted. After setting the timer for two minutes, he remained next to the stove with his finger hovering millimeters from the start button. “Are you done?”

  “Done.” I climbed back onto my barstool and dumped my bag of Three Musketeers onto the counter. Carefully, I spread the pile of minibars flat with my hands so that I could grab the bars quickly. “Okay, on my mark. Ready…set…GO!”