The Stupendous Dodgeball Fiasco

by Janice Repka

  “Maybe that’s what I was doing,” Phillip said finally. “When I wanted to get away from the circus. Trying to run away from myself.”

  Leo smiled. “I thought maybe you were trying to run away from me.” He slapped his hand against his rump protector and gave off a loud toot. Then he got serious again. “All those years I wasted trying to find a circus act you could do to make you great,” Leo said. “I was a fool. You’ve been stupendous since the day you were born.”

  Phillip grabbed Leo and hugged him with all his might. Leo squeezed him back, ferociously, more like a lion tamer than a clown. They didn’t stop hugging until they heard Aunt Veola’s horn.

  “One more thing,” said Leo right before they got in the car. He motioned for Phillip to lean in close. Then he squirted him in the nose with his water-flower pin.

  “Gotcha!” his dad said. He hit the button on his neck strap, and his bow tie spun.

  Most people have heard the expression “Elephants never forget,” but exactly what is it that an elephant needs to remember?

  The next morning, when Phillip rolled over in his bed at Aunt Veola’s house, he was awakened to the sound of his cheek hitting a whoopee cushion. A note on it said, “Come down for a breakfast surprise.” Phillip crept down the stairs slowly, listening carefully for the low growl of bears or tigers. The smell of fried bacon drifted from the kitchen.

  “He’s going to be late for school if he doesn’t get up soon,” he heard Aunt Veola say.

  “Give him five more minutes,” said a softer voice.

  Phillip tripped down the last three steps and landed in a heap at the bottom. That voice! Could it be?

  “Mom?” asked Phillip.

  A figure filled the kitchen doorway so fully it dimmed the light to the hall.

  “Surprise!” yelled Matilda. She pulled him up and squeezed him against her giant polka-dot dress. It felt so good to see his mom again, he didn’t even care if he suffocated.

  “Did you hear about the lawsuit?” he asked when she finally released him.

  “I’m so proud of you,” she said.

  That’s when he remembered.

  “Wait,” he said. He rushed to the front door, scooped up the morning newspaper, and raced back. “I have something for you.”

  Matilda slid the paper out of its plastic cover and removed the rubber band. She unrolled it and read the headline: FACTORY TO RETOOL FOR SOFTER BALL PRODUCTION.

  “No,” said Phillip excitedly. He grabbed the paper and shuffled the pages, searching. “Down there.”

  In the lower right corner was a boxed article that had a copy of a handwritten letter. At the top of the article it said, in extra-large, bold black letters: STINKY TELLS ALL.

  “I think I’m going to faint,” Matilda said. Phillip helped her to the kitchen and pulled out two chairs so she could sit. The table was covered with plates full of fluffy pancakes, maple sausages, and curly tangles of bacon. Aunt Veola was buttering a warm stack of toast. Uncle Felix and Leo were shoveling scoops of slippery scrambled eggs into their mouths. When they saw Matilda’s stunned expression, they all stopped.

  “What is it?” asked Leo.

  Phillip cleared a space and set the newspaper in front of her. “Go ahead,” he said. Matilda picked the paper up by its edges. It shook softly as she read.

  Dear Matilda,

  I am sorry for hitting you with a dodgeball on the day of the Regional High School Championship game fourteen years ago. It was my fault you dropped the cheerleaders. I promise to never bully anyone ever again.

  Yours truly,

  Ernest P. (“Stinky”) Race

  The newspaper drifted to the table. “How did you…How could you…” Her eyes got drippy and her voice got squeaky and she couldn’t get all the words out. Aunt Veola reached over and held her sister’s hand.

  “It was the last part of the settlement,” said Phillip. “I asked the judge to make Mr. Race write a letter of apology as soon as he came out of shock. I said to give the letter to Shawn so he could give it to his grandfather’s dentist’s brother. He’s a reporter.”

  “After all these years,” said Matilda. “I can hardly believe it.” Even Uncle Felix was speechless.

  Matilda picked the paper back up and reread the article. “Hold on, there’s more. I missed a line.” She read the final sentence, the one underneath Stinky’s signature:” ‘P.S. Could we keep this apology our little secret?’”

  “Oops,” said Leo.

  Dong Ding, announced Aunt Veola’s doorbell, which Uncle Felix had installed himself.

  “It better not be that pesky vacuum-cleaner salesman,” said Aunt Veola.

  “I’ll get it,” said Phillip.

  He grabbed the knob and threw the door open.

  “Hey,” said B.B. A backpack was slung over her gray wool jacket. “Are you going to school, or what? I usually ride with my dad, but we just live a couple of blocks from you, so I figured maybe I’d try walking today.”

  “With me?”

  “You got a problem with that?”

  “No,” said Phillip. “Want to come in while I get dressed?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Tell him I already have a vacuum cleaner,” Aunt Veola yelled.

  “It’s not a salesman, it’s…a friend.”

  “Was that your mom?” asked B.B.

  “No,” said Phillip. “That was my aunt. My mom is…” He almost said the fat lady. “Matilda. She’s in the kitchen.” Phillip led B.B. to the kitchen.

  “This is my mother,” he said.

  “Hello,” said Matilda.

  “Nice to meet you,” said B.B.

  “She can juggle flaming arrows,” Phillip said.

  “Wow,” said B.B. “That’s really cool.”

  Phillip slipped upstairs and threw his school clothes on while his parents entertained B.B. with circus stories. As he was coming downstairs, he heard the doorbell again.

  “I’ll get it,” he yelled. It was Shawn.

  “Did you see the letter?” Shawn asked as he let himself in.

  Phillip nodded. “Thanks for your help.”

  “No problem, buddy. Can you believe it? They used to call him Stinky. He’s gonna have to transfer to a different district. I mean, who’s gonna be afraid of a vice-principal named Stinky?”

  Phillip took Shawn into the kitchen and introduced him. “Shawn is the one who warned me about the kids who wanted to put me out of commission during the dodgeball game,” he said.

  “Don’t give me all the credit,” said Shawn as he accepted a pancake and sausage from Matilda. “I was just passing along what B.B. told me.” Phillip saw a vision of B.B. in the gym trying to retreat as the kids whose parents worked at the factory began their four-ball assault.

  “That’s why they were after you,” Phillip said. “They found out you warned me. Since they couldn’t get me, they went after you.”

  B.B. shrugged. “It was no big deal.”

  “Can I get more pancakes and sausage?” Shawn asked.

  Matilda put two sausages in a jumbo-size pancake, rolled it up, and handed it to him. “Better take it to go,” she said.

  “And tell your parents you’re invited here tomorrow for Thanksgiving dinner,” added Aunt Veola. “We’ll be having a big turkey.”

  The air outside was brisk. It made their breath pour out like steam. As they walked, they talked about ordinary things, like why school cafeteria food is so bad and why dividing fractions is so hard.

  They walked past the smokestack to Mr. Nerp’s factory, where the neon letters proudly announced it was still the American Dodgeball Company. They strolled past Friendly’s Gas-’n-Go, where the old couple, snuggled on the bench with a thick blanket across their laps, waved to them. They stopped at the window of Newman’s Trophy shop to argue about how tall the giant silver statue in the window really was. They laughed at the hopelessly mangled, red-taped eyeglasses that were displayed in a special case in the front window of the optical
shop under a sign that asked: TIME FOR A REPLACEMENT PAIR? Finally, they turned the corner and passed the Hardingtown County Courthouse, where an eleven-year-old boy had made dodgeball history.

  As they approached the Hardingtown Middle School, Shawn said, “Maybe someday I’ll join the circus.”

  “You?” asked B.B. “What could you do?”

  “I could be the fat boy.”

  “There’s no such thing as a fat boy,” said B.B. “Just a fat man and a fat lady.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair,” said Shawn. “Maybe I’ll have to change that. I could be the world’s first circus fat boy.”

  Phillip smiled. “Why not?” he said.

  “What about you?” B.B. asked Phillip. “Are you going to stay in Hardingtown, or do you have to go back to the circus?”

  “My parents said I could stay if I want to,” said Phillip.

  “Do you want to?” asked Shawn.

  In his mind’s eye, Phillip could see a circus boy shoveling horse poop, a hunk of popcorn-covered caramel apple stuck in his hair, yearning for something more out of life.

  “Yes,” he said, “I’d like to stay.” His answer came out effortlessly and formed a little cloud that looked like it could hang in the air forever.

  As they were about to enter the school, B.B. stopped them. “I still have one question,” she said. “Why did those dodgeballs fall out of the sky?” The three looked to the heavens, as if the answer would appear there. But it didn’t.

  All through the school day, Phillip thought about it. Maybe Judge Monn was right. Maybe it was some higher power that made the airplane suddenly lose its shipment of dodgeballs. What else could it have been?

  When they arrived home that night, Uncle Felix was sitting on the front porch.

  He had gotten fired from his job as a cargo loader at the airport for forgetting to latch the airplane’s cargo door.

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  Janice Repka’s next book:

  1 Aphrodite Wigglesmith Gets It Started

  Here’s something fun you can do. First, get out of your chair. (I’m trusting you on that.) Next, stand in an open space. (Trusting you again.) Now spin like a quantum mechanical particle. (Or a top or tornado, whatever.) Faster. Faster. STOP. Did you feel it? That slip-in-time moment when your brain hadn’t caught up with your body and it felt like you were still spinning? I love that. It’s like my body has outsmarted my brain, which is not easy to do. Excuse the pun, but my brain kind of has a mind of its own. If you put a math problem, no matter how hard, in front of my eyes it sets off this switch and I have to try to solve it. So my life’s been a little weird, I guess you could say.

  The weirdness started the day someone flushed a firecracker down a toilet in the boys’ bathroom on the second floor of Carnegie Middle School. The potty shattered, a weak pipe burst, and sewage water rained into the school office below.

  “Holy crap!” Principal DeGuy yelled to his secretary. “Get someone here fast.”

  My mother, Cecelia Wigglesmith, was the “plumber on call” that day. She loaded crescent wrenches and extra piping into her truck while I climbed into my car seat. Although only four years old, I was already a mini-version of my mother physically—petite, with pale skin and black hair. But intellectually, I was bored silly and hungering for stimulation. To keep busy on the way to the plumbing job, I counted each church we passed on the left and each bar we passed on the right and kept a working ratio.

  A few miles later, a sign announced we had reached Carnegie Middle School, “home to the division champion wrestling team, the Carnegie Spiders.” The school was ten times as long as my house and five times as wide. Inside the office, Mother set me down on a desk.

  “You stay here while I find the shutoff valve,” she said. She turned to the secretary. “I hope you don’t mind keeping an eye on my daughter. I’ll be back as soon as things are under control.”

  The secretary was also perched on top of a desk. She was wearing a flamingo pink dress and held up her right foot. Her right shoe, which must have dropped when she hopped up, was floating out the door. The smell alone would have reduced most four-year-olds to tears, but to me, it just smelled like Mother had come home from work.

  After Mother left, a piece of soaked ceiling tile fell and splattered us with sewage water. The secretary screamed and I jumped. The office phones began to ring. I counted the number of rings. I counted the number of ceiling chunks that fell and the number of times we screamed and jumped. I found that: 5 rings + 1 splash = 1 scream + 1 jump.

  “You’ve got a shattered toilet and a burst pipe in the boys’ bathroom,” Mother said when she returned.

  “Can you fix it?” asked Principal DeGuy, following her. He was middle-aged, but most of his hair hadn’t made it that far. What was left covered his lower head in a U-shape. “We’re scheduled for state testing in the morning, so I can’t cancel school tomorrow.”

  “Once the pipe’s repaired, I’ll have to bail,” said Mother. “Pumps will only pull so many gallons per hour. You’ve got four inches of water on the first floor, eighteen in the basement. Goodness knows how long that could take.”

  “Three hours and twenty-five minutes,” I said.

  Despite his ample ears, Principal DeGuy did not seem to hear. “I’m not interested in what goodness knows,” he told Mother. “How long will you need to get this water out?”

  “Three hours and twenty-five minutes,” I repeated.

  “Whose child is this?”

  Mother picked me up and held me against her hip. “She’s mine. Do you have a calculator?” Principal DeGuy pulled out his computerized planner. Mother told him the formula to figure out how long it would take.

  “Three hours and twenty-five minutes,” he said.

  They stared at me.

  “How did you do that?” Mother asked.

  I shrugged and counted the number of teeth in the principal’s open mouth.

  “You gave her the answer,” he said.

  “I’m sure it was just a coincidence,” Mother replied. “Aphrodite is usually so quiet you don’t know she’s in the room.”

  A chunk of ceiling tile fell and splashed Principal DeGuy with water. The secretary screamed again.

  “I’d better get those pumps started. Would you mind?” Mother handed me to the principal and splashed her way out. He set me on a desk.

  “How many polka dots are on my tie?” he asked.

  I used my method for counting cereal boxes at the supermarket, the number up multiplied by the number sideways. Then I took some away because of the funny shape at the bottom of the necktie. “One hundred and fifty seven,” I answered.

  Principal DeGuy hopped onto the desk with me and emptied the water from his shoes. “Who is the queen of England?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What is 157 multiplied by 23?”

  I pushed the bangs out of my eyes. “3,611.”

  He ran the numbers. “Holy human calculator!”

  The secretary handed him a telephone, and he dialed the number for the Office of Special and Gifted Testing. “Little lady,” he told me, “if you are what I think you are, your whole world is about to change.”

  And, boy, did it ever. Not that I’m complaining. Once they found out my IQ was 204, they let me start school early. It was like a game to see how quickly I could pass each grade (fifth took only eight weeks and I skipped second, sixth, and tenth grades completely). But then, when I was eleven, they ran out of grades, so I had to go away to college. Now I’m a thirteen-year-old graduate student at Harvard University.

  At Harvard, everybody’s brain is in overdrive all the time. So sometimes, when my brain is full of numbers and feels like it’s going to explode, I slip away to an empty field on the edge of campus. Then I stretch out my arms and I spin.

  2 Mindy Loft Tells It Like It Was

  The reason I ramble is that I don’t stay focused when I talk; at least that’s what my eighth-grade English tea
cher told me at the beginning of this school year. So if I get a little off track, try not to get your poodle in a fluff. Anyway, if I had to pick, I’d say it all began the day that Miss Brenda shared her awful secret. I hadn’t even met Aphrodite yet. I was thirteen years old and living with my mom in the apartment above her beauty shop, Tiffany’s House of Beauty & Nails. We had a sign that Mom changed each week with stupid sayings like “Come on in and be a beauty, from your head to your patootie.”

  Mom made me help at the shop, doing gross stuff like sweeping piles of severed hair, boring stuff like refilling the spray bottles, and a little bit of cool stuff like trying out the new nail polish. At least I got an allowance. But no matter how much I got paid, there was no way I was going to be a hairstylist for the rest of my life. My dream was to be a famous baton twirler.

  When she was nineteen, my mom had been first runner-up for Miss Majorette of the Greater Allegheny Valley. My dad, John Loft (God rest his soul), had been one of the judges, and they had eloped before her trophy was back from the engraver. He became her manager, and they toured all over the country in a baby blue RV with a bumper sticker that said TWIRL TILL YOUR ARMS FALL OFF.

  “With my panache and your talent, we’re gonna set the world on fire,” he told her, and they did.

  Not the whole world, maybe, but at least part of the small town of Hermanfly, Nebraska. You see, there was this stupid Hermanfly Fourth of July Spectacular Parade. Dad was in a giant firecracker costume marching next to Mom, who was twirling a fire baton. They got too close and his fuse caught fire. Mom dropped the baton and screamed for help, and some woman in the crowd pulled a pair of scissors from her purse and clipped Dad’s fuse just in time. That was the good news. The bad news was that by that time Mom’s flaming baton had rolled over to a storefront, which was where they were storing the fireworks for the big show.