Pottymouth and Stoopid

by James Patterson

  I said this after Michael and I had both scarfed down like a half a dozen of Grandpa’s chocolate chip cookies. We’d also guzzled two cups of hot cocoa. So maybe it was the chocolate talking, but we were pumped.

  “We need to show them that we’re not really Pottymouth and Stoopid.”

  “Yeah,” muttered Michael, “because that frizzlegristle school is nothing but a bunch of hoopiedoodle flufferknuckles.”

  “True. So true. But how do we prove that we’re not lamebrains?”

  “I dunno,” mumbled Michael.

  “Yeah. Me neither.”

  We thought for a few minutes.

  “Could we be good at sports instead?” Michael asked.

  “We tried that,” I reminded him. “It didn’t go so well.”

  “How about class presidents?”

  “People have to vote for you,” I said.

  “Sludgepuggle.”

  “Totally.”

  We kept thinking. We even tried Googling, but we didn’t find any good ideas. Google may have all the answers, but it doesn’t know what it’s really like to be a kid.

  Finally, after more thinking, we both had the same brainstorm at the same time.

  “Anna’s super-smart,” I said.

  “She’ll know what to do,” Michael said.

  So we biked over to her house, which was just around the corner from my house.

  We were right. Anna knew exactly what we should do.

  “The science fair,” she said. “It’s in two weeks. We could work together and do something amazingly cool.”

  “I could dunk a basketball off my skateboard,” I said.

  “Uh, it should probably be something a little more scientific,” said Anna.

  “With molecules and junk?” asked Michael.

  Anna nodded. “Yeah. Molecules.”

  “Sludgepuggle.”

  Anna snapped her fingers. “We could make a tornado in a bottle!”

  “Really?” I said. “What if it got out?”

  “It’s not a real tornado, David. But it does demonstrate the vortex principle. It’ll be absolutely fabulous. With swirling glitter and smoke…”

  “Cool,” I said. “Like a fireworks show.”

  “In a bottle,” added Michael. “Awesome.”

  Anna told us what supplies we needed; all of them were pretty simple to find. She already had the glitter because she liked doing paintings of unicorns and apparently you need a lot of glitter for those.

  Michael and I just had to dig up a good juice bottle, some safety matches, dishwasher liquid, and an air pump (like the one we used to inflate our basketball).

  This was going to be so amazing. In two weeks, the whole school would finally see us for who we were.

  No more Pottymouth, Stoopid, and Anna Britannica.

  After the science fair, we would be the three Tornado Masters!

  The Blame Game

  When you’re Pottymouth and Stoopid, you get blamed for all sorts of stuff you didn’t actually do.

  Remember that disgusting lunch in the cafeteria?

  The mystery meat in the mushy sauce on a bed of rice that might’ve been moving? The one everybody called “When You Find Out What It Is, Don’t Tell Me”?

  Well, somehow, that was our fault.

  “Stoopid gave them the recipe,” went the rumor. “And Pottymouth told them to pour schnizzleflick all over it.”

  When the basketball team lost its first game, everybody blamed Michael.

  “Pottymouth called the other team flufferknuckles. That’s why we lost. He fired up the enemy with his pottymouthing!”

  Not true, of course, but the truth seldom has anything to do with a good Pottymouth or Stoopid story.

  For instance, did you know that I’m the one who opened the hamster cage in the fifth-grade classroom and set Scruffy free? Yeah, I didn’t know it either. From what I heard, I saw the word ham on the cage. I thought there was a sandwich inside and I was hungry.

  Then there was that disastrous field trip to the natural history museum. The trip when the whole Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in the lobby toppled to the ground. They say I yanked out an anklebone so I could take it home to my dog.

  I don’t even have a dog, I told anybody who’d listen. Which would be nobody.

  When Anna started hanging out with us, she got blamed for stuff too.

  The power outage during the big vampire battle scene in the movie everybody was watching during study hall?

  “Anna Britannica pulled the plug on the extension cord,” proclaimed Kaya Kennecky. “She thought it was a bright orange Twizzler and tried to eat it.”

  And so it went. Day after day.

  Pottymouth did this. Stoopid did that. Anna Britannica did everything else.

  I realized that Michael and I had been Pottymouth and Stoopid for so long, most of the kids at school didn’t know our real names.

  That was okay, I guess.

  Because we didn’t want to know their names either.

  All Shapes and Sizes

  When you think about bullies in middle school, you probably picture a gnarly mouth-breather with a huge head and a tree-stump neck.

  Well, at our school, we have a pair of extremely vicious bullies: Kaya Kennecky (yep, she hasn’t changed a bit since pre-K) and Tiffany Blurke.

  That’s right. They’re both girls, not muscle-bound boys.

  Day in and day out, those two girls picked on Anna Brittoni without mercy. Most of the junk they pulled took place during gym class. They hid her school clothes so she had to go to class in stinky workout gear. They poured baby oil on the floor in front of her locker. They filled her backpack with shaving cream. They stole her Snickers bar and refilled the wrapper with wet newspaper.

  Then one day in the cafeteria, Kaya and Tiffany went too far.

  When Anna wasn’t looking, they snatched her most prized possession—her basketball scorebook—and sent it down the dirty-tray line. It was like running a paperback book through a car wash without a car. The thing was soaked, trashed, mangled, and mashed.

  Anna had spent hours recording every single shot of every single game in that book. Now the pages were all glued together and covered with smushed lima beans.

  Of course, Kaya and Tiffany denied everything.

  “She did it herself,” they whined to Mrs. Rattner, who was on cafeteria duty that day. “She left it on her tray accidentally on purpose just so she could blame us.”

  Anna was furious but she didn’t show it. She just went back to class and kept scoring 100s and getting A-pluses on everything the school threw at her.

  But Michael and I knew Anna was really hurt.

  We also knew that she’d just learned what we’d learned a long time ago: Fly under the radar. Keep a low profile. That way, you make yourself a smaller target.

  “If you stay invisible,” said Michael, “it’s harder for the snifflefliggly flufferknuckles to take shots at you.”

  Anna had a saying of her own: “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

  At first, I thought she was talking about the corn dogs in the cafeteria because they’re like fake-meat Popsicles wrapped in pre-chewed Fritos.

  But a few days after the “incident” with Anna’s scorebook, there was another “incident.” One that everybody talked about for weeks.

  Because it happened to two of the school’s prettiest, most popular people.

  Kaya and Tiffany.

  How to Get Even

  At first, Michael and I wondered why Anna would come to school with a roll of plastic wrap.

  Was it for some kind of science experiment about osmosis or nonporous surfaces?

  Was she wrapping sandwiches in one of her classes? If so, how lame was that class?

  “Maybe she’s just gone hyper-clean,” said Michael. “She wants to wrap all her pens, pencils, and junk in plastic to keep ’em sterile. Maybe, with enough plastic wrap, she can seal out the grizzlegoop germs that cause bad breath too.”


  Then we heard about the “unfortunate incident” in the girls’ locker room.

  It seems somebody stretched a sheet of clear plastic across both of the toilet seats right before Kaya and Tiffany went into the stalls. Of course Kaya and Tiffany were always the first ones to use the two toilets right after gym class. None of the other girls were allowed to relieve themselves until after the big two did number one.

  Funny thing about plastic wrap. If you stretch it tight enough across a toilet, it sort of becomes invisible. Especially when the toilet seat is down, and when it comes to bathrooms, girls always want the toilet seat down (or so my mom tells me on a regular basis).

  Anyway, there was, shall we say, a problem. Kaya and Tiffany both ended up with gym shorts that became used diapers. Within an hour, their accident in the girls’ locker room turned into the “unfortunate incident.”

  Anna confessed to the crime.

  “Call it revenge,” she told the vice principal.

  “Therefore, it was served cold.”

  She was sent home immediately—but not before she donated the rest of her plastic wrap to the cafeteria. “Use it for the leftover corn dogs,” she told them. “It’ll stop them from tasting like whatever you keep in your freezer that you probably shouldn’t.”

  Principal Ferguson and Vice Principal Driscoll gave Anna only a half-day suspension. She was instructed to report back to school the very next morning because that’s when we’d be taking some more state tests. If Anna didn’t take them, the average score at our school would probably drop by three points.

  Yeah, Anna Britannica is that smart.

  Anyway, after that we were treated to an afternoon filled with serious discussions.

  “We need to talk about this, kids,” said Ms. Funkleberger, our social studies teacher, who everybody said was a real-life hippie. “What Anna did was sooooo wrong.”

  Ms. Funkleberger was probably sixty-something years old with frizzy hair and granny glasses tinted pink. Most of her clothes were tie-dyed.

  “So let’s rap,” she said to the class. “Let it all hang out.”

  “Why did Anna have to be so mean to poor Kaya and Tiffany?” this one girl asked. “What’d they ever do to her?”

  Plenty, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. Because I fly under the radar, remember?

  “I don’t get it,” said a guy. “It’s crazy. She’s crazy.”

  “That Anna girl is weird,” said another girl, a friend of Kaya’s. “She writes a million numbers in a notebook during every single basketball game. I’m sorry, but that is a sign of a true wackadoodle weirdo.”

  Yeah, most of the other kids in Ms. Funkleberger’s class couldn’t understand why anybody would play such a mean trick on sweet Kaya and Tiffany.

  Michael and me?

  We totally got it.

  Science Fair–y Tale

  Let’s jump ahead to the science fair.

  You should know we scrapped the tornado-in-a-bottle dealio. We started playing with it, but the “tornado” just looked like a lot of stuff being swirled together, like we were making chocolate milk with glitter and water instead of, you know, chocolate and milk.

  We decided to do something that would make us middle-school heroes: we would totally fix the school cafeteria.

  The main problem was that the line to get food moved too slow. Our solution? Zip Trays!

  We yanked a few wheels off my old skateboards and bolted them to the bottom of a cafeteria tray. Okay, we probably should’ve told the cafeteria ladies we were borrowing a tray, but we were sure that when they saw our invention, they would be so happy they wouldn’t give us any grief.

  Since the science fair was being held in the cafetorium (which is this weird made-up name they have for the big room where we eat lunch because there’s a stage on one side and a chow line on the other), it’d be easy to show off our new invention.

  But speedy Zip Trays weren’t our only improvement. Everyone in the school agreed that the corn dogs in the cafeteria tasted like those frozen wieners wrapped in cold pancakes they sell at the supermarket. So Michael came up with the idea to serve low-cost and delicious gourmet corn dogs.

  Michael’s foster parents are too lazy to cook, so he fixes most of the food at his house. He’s really good at it too. His corn dogs are made with chili and cheese. And bacon.

  On the day of the science fair, we decided to dress up. Anna and I wore our best outfits. Michael wore a toque (that’s what French people call the tall white chef hat).

  We set up a card table right where the food counter starts. Anna stood next to our trifold board labeled The Middle-School Cafeteria of the Future. I was stationed at the tray rails to demonstrate the Zip Tray. Michael was down the line, behind the counter, ready to serve up samples of gourmet corn dogs.

  Unfortunately, all the other science fair exhibits were set up on tables all the way on the other side of the cafetorium. Nobody came over to visit our booth.

  But that all changed when Michael took the lid off his first tray of corn dogs!

  One whiff of that bacon-y, cheesy chili deliciousness and exhibitors abandoned their projects to form a line at Anna’s card table.

  “Welcome to the cafeteria of the future,” she said to like three dozen kids who were frantically sniffing the air like Rottweilers in a Snausages factory.

  “What’s that smell?” asked one.

  “New and improved chili-cheese corn dogs with bacon,” said Anna, tapping Michael’s recipe, which was displayed on one of our boards. “And now you don’t have to wait for speedy service.” She gestured toward me. “Introducing the Zip Tray!”

  I took a step forward.

  “Allow me to demonstrate,” I said, just like we’d rehearsed.

  But nobody was in the mood for a demonstration. Bacon drives kids crazy.

  They wanted Michael’s corn dogs…now!

  When a Good Idea Goes Bad

  “Get out of the way, Stoopid,” said Jason Cameron, this big guy who’d been calling me Stoopid ever since second grade.

  He’d been huge back then too. Everybody said he had a gland problem.

  “But this is our main invention,” I explained, showing the wheels on the tray. “In the cafeteria of the future, you use this Zip Tray to quickly slide your tray down the line to the delicious corn dogs.”

  “Well this ain’t the future, Stoopid!”

  And then Jason picked me up, sat me down on the tray, and gave me a good shove sideways.

  The good news was that my invention worked really well. I sped down the food line in like two seconds flat. The bad news was that there was nothing to stop the tray at the end of the counter. I flew off the tray rails and smashed onto the very hard, very sticky cafeteria floor.

  That wasn’t part of the plan.

  “Give me a corn dog, Pottymouth!” snarled Jason. “With extra bacon and double cheese.”

  “You were supposed to use the Zip Tray, you flufferknuckle,” Michael said. “That’s half of the whole hicklesnicklepox science project.”

  “What’d you call me?”

  “A flufferknuckle!”

  Jason frowned. “What’s that?”

  “What you are.”

  I was glad to see that Michael didn’t back down.

  But now, the crowd was five-deep for dogs. “Just give us our food, Pottymouth!” they were shouting.

  Michael stood behind the counter, unsure what to do next.

  This was when Kaya Kennecky stepped forward and, since she was a cheerleader, started leading a cheer.

  “Give me a C, give me an O, give me an R-N D-O-G! What’s that spell?”

  It took most of the kids like five seconds to figure that one out. “Um, corn dog!” the mob finally shouted. “Give me a corn dog!”

  Hands reached over the sneezeguards. Elbows flew. Some guys climbed on top of the tray rails and leaped over the glass partition so they could raid Michael’s tray.

  “Get your hoopiedoodle paws off my snifflepiggle
corn dogs, you hornswogglers!”

  The mob kept chanting and grabbing corn dogs and shoving one another.

  Michael had no choice but to retreat. The corn-dog tray clattered to the floor. Somebody knocked over our cardboard display. Somebody else started using my Zip Tray to skateboard around the kitchen equipment.

  And, of course, that’s exactly when the judges came in to grade our exhibit.

  Everybody just froze and acted innocent.

  “And what have we here?” asked Vice Principal Driscoll.

  “Something totally stupid for a science fair,” cracked Kaya. “Corn dogs aren’t exactly scientific.”

  “B-b-but…” sputtered Anna.

  Kaya propped her fists on her hips and pouted at one of the teachers, Mr. Stafford.

  “Mr. Stafford, you’re a science teacher. Are corn dogs even an invention?”

  “Well, I suppose they were, at one point, before the first cook skewered the first hot dog on a stick and dipped it into a vat of cornbread batter, but I fail to see…”

  Long story short?

  Our science project was a complete bust. I lost my Zip Tray (the skateboarding kid never came back). We were written up for unauthorized use of school property. Nobody read Anna’s display board about the cafeteria of the future even though there was all sorts of good stuff on it about healthier food choices and improving the speed of service.

  We didn’t win any ribbons. Everybody hated us even though they ate all of our corn dogs. Plus, we had to buy the school a new tray to replace the one that dude skated away on.

  Once again, the whole school was laughing at us. But we were used to that. Hey, it’s what we do.

  We’re Pottymouth, Stoopid, and Anna Britannica.

  We get laughed at.

  Living Up to Our Names