Game Over, Pete Watson

by Joe Schreiber

  Which means I can’t put it off any longer. This is the embarrassing part.

  Read the next chapter if you dare.

  Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  [CHAPTER EIGHT]

  The Embarrassing Chapter

  Okay, I’m going to tell this part fast to get it over with. You have to know it in order to understand the rest of the story, but I don’t want to drag it out any more than I absolutely have to. You’ll understand once you read it.

  Callie is seventeen. She used to be my babysitter back when I was in fourth grade, which is the last year I needed a babysitter. She has red hair and green eyes and drives a purple car and has this way of laughing that I can’t describe except it makes my heart beat faster every time she does it and my palms get sweaty and I kind of forget how to breathe.

  I don’t exactly know when I started having a crush on her, but when she used to come babysit, she’d read me the dumbest, most babyish books ever, and I’d sit there not even caring. Other times she’d sit at our kitchen table and do her math homework, and I’d try to help her with the story problems.

  I should have known it couldn’t last. The good times never do.

  This is how it all fell apart. One time when she was over babysitting, making popcorn for us, she caught me drawing a picture. I’ll show it to you once, and never again. This is what it looked like:

  I didn’t even realize that Callie was looking over my shoulder when I drew it. The next thing I knew, I heard her saying: “Is that supposed to be me?”

  I crumpled it up and ran upstairs to my room and didn’t come out for the rest of the night. In the morning I told my mom I didn’t want Callie to come and babysit anymore. Mom said that that was crazy, that Callie was the best babysitter I’d ever had. So finally I made up a story that she’d been on the phone with her boyfriend the whole time she was over and I didn’t feel like she was doing a very good job keeping me safe.

  That did the trick. Mom never hired Callie to come over again.

  Anyway, she must have found out why we never invited her back, because even from the back of the van, her glare didn’t look friendly.

  Wesley came back over with the x-ray specs in his hand. “My mom says I can’t buy these,” he said. “She said I had a pair just like them and I must have lost them somewhere.”

  “Huh,” I said. “That’s too bad.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You got anything else cool here?”

  I was trying to think of a polite way to ask him if he was actually going to buy anything when he saw the CommandRoid sitting on the table. “Hey, my dad’s got one of those too!”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. It’s really old and boring.”

  “I know,” I said. “I can’t believe they ever played those things.”

  “They have these controllers called joysticks,” Wesley said. “They’re super hard to use.”

  “No doubt,” I said, and I was starting to remember why I liked to hang out with Wesley before. Even though his sister had totally humiliated me, he was the only guy I could really talk to about video games.

  “Hey,” he said, “you know what comes out today?”

  “Brawl-A-Thon 3000 XL,” I said. “I’m going to go buy it as soon as I get some money.”

  His eyes got huge again. “Really?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “That’s so—”

  Wesley’s mom honked the horn and gestured over at him, and Wesley nodded. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I almost forgot why I came over.” He reached into his pocket and handed me a folded-up invitation. There was a picture of the Mario Brothers, and it said:

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “It’s my birthday,” Wesley said. “Mom said I could have a sleepover tonight in the basement! Think you can come?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking around at the garage sale. “I’m kind of busy.”

  “Nabeel Sarwani is going to be there, and Rashaad Strong and Squid Mancini. We’re going to have a cooler of two-liters and Doritos and pizza, and my mom says we can stay up all night watching scary movies and playing video games.”

  “Nabeel?” I looked at him. “And Squid?”

  “Squid can hypnotize people,” Wesley said. “And Nabeel can do human beatbox. He’s really good.” Wesley cupped his hands to his mouth and starting making beatbox noises into them. Mainly it sounded really spitty. “I can’t do it as good as he does, though.”

  I didn’t say anything. Maybe it was just because I hadn’t known Wesley was hanging out with anybody at school. I definitely wasn’t jealous, that’s for sure.

  “I can’t,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “Check with your mom,” Wesley said. “Maybe she’ll say yes.”

  “I doubt it.”

  Wesley twanged his rubber bands some more. “Can you at least ask?”

  “Probably not.” I had forgotten how annoying Wesley could be when he wanted something. “They’re at that company softball game all day. You know, the one that your dad is at too?” I was hoping to maybe make him feel a little guilty about the fact that my dad might actually be here if Wesley’s dad weren’t making him play softball, but Wesley didn’t seem to get that part, because he just stuck out his lip and started twanging his rubber bands again. Twang-twang-twang, blunka-blunka-blunka.

  “Okay, well . . .” He looked back at the van where his mom and his sister were waiting. “I guess I’ll see you later.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “See you at school.”

  Wesley walked away. And I felt a little bad about it, because we were still kind of friends, I guess, but there was no way I was going back to his house when Callie was there. I thought about the drawer in my dresser upstairs, where I’d stashed the drawing I did of us two years ago.

  As soon as I got the chance, I was definitely going to throw it out.

  [CHAPTER NINE]

  Never Trust a Guy with a Giant Bug on His Car

  It was almost noon, and I was getting ready to pack it in when the Bug Man pulled up.

  He drove a big red van with a huge cockroach on the roof and words on the side. It looked something like this:

  The driver’s door opened and a cheerful guy in an orange and white exterminator’s jumpsuit and a green cap got out and walked up the driveway toward me, whistling under his bushy mustache. He looked like the kind of guy who stops at garage sales all the time, just to see what they have.

  “Hey, there, sport,” the Bug Man said. “Selling off the old family heirlooms?”

  I just nodded.

  “Lots of great stuff here. Yes, sir.” His eyes were bright blue, and they skimmed across the tables of stuff I’d put out. “Real collector’s items, I bet, right? Nice.”

  Then he stopped, and I realized he was looking at the CommandRoid. He walked over to it slowly, like it was an animal that might run away. He reached down and picked it up. His voice was different now, softer.

  “Hey,” he said. “This belong to you, sport?”

  “My dad.”

  “Your old man know you’re selling it?”

  I took in a breath. “He doesn’t care. He never plays it anyway.” I almost told the Bug Man that I wasn’t even sure it worked, but he already looked too interested and I didn’t want to ruin a chance for my only sale. “It’s pretty old,” I said.

  “You bet it is,” the Bug Man said, but he wasn’t even looking at me anymore. His attention was totally fixed on the CommandRoid. “In fact, I haven’t seen one like this in a very long time.” He raised an eyebrow. “How much do you want for it?”

  I’d put a ten-dollar price tag on it, but either he must not have seen it or he was trying to bargain me down. I decided to take a chance. “Ten dollars.”

  “Ten bucks, huh?” the Bug Man said. “You firm on that?”

  “What?”

  “That means . . .” He smiled, but it was a strange, tight smile that didn’t really come up to his eyes. “Are you open to negoti
ation?”

  I was getting a little nervous, but something inside me wouldn’t give up. “Like you said, it’s a collector’s item.”

  “Good for you, sport,” the Bug Man said, and took out his wallet, slipping a twenty-dollar bill from inside. “You got change for a twenty?”

  “I . . .” I hadn’t even thought about making change for people. “I have to go inside and get it.”

  “Never mind. Keep the change.” He was back to staring at the CommandRoid again, and it was like everything else around him, including me, had just disappeared. “I’m the kind of guy who sees something he wants and has to have it, never mind the price.” Then he flashed me a quick smile again. “Pleasure doing business with you, sport.”

  “What? Oh yeah. You too.” Before I could even process the twenty dollars he’d put in my hand, he was already carrying the CommandRoid back down the driveway to his van and climbing inside. Then he was gone.

  [CHAPTER TEN]

  Hooray! Everything’s Great! Until It Isn’t.

  I didn’t waste any time. I scribbled a note down in case Mom and Dad came home before I got back and rode my bike over to Ready Player One as fast as I could.

  I’d expected a crowd, but the store didn’t even look busy. The game was right there at the counter. I paid for it and crumpled up the receipt, dropping it in the trash on the way out. That was when I saw the banner over the door:

  Ready Player One—A Proud Sponsor of the 14th Annual GameCon!

  March 19–21, City Convention Center

  I stared at it.

  GameCon is huge—the biggest video game convention in the country. According to the banner, it started today. I’d read all about it online—not only were there new games that nobody had played before, but there were these giant wall-size, hundred-foot plasma screens where you could play them. Plus, as if any further awesomeness were required, the guest of honor this year was none other than Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary creator of Zelda, Mario, Donkey Kong, and basically every good game that’s ever come out for the Wii or any other game system you can think of.

  Admission was something like fifty dollars a day, and it was one of those things that I knew my parents would never let me go to, so I had tried to blot it out of my memory. But now that it was here, I realized that my strategy hadn’t worked. Now I understood why there wasn’t anybody shopping at Ready Player One. Anybody with a car and half a brain was already at the City Convention Center, playing games that normal people probably wouldn’t see for years, if ever.

  Now I wished I hadn’t even seen the GameCon banner. My dad says sometimes ignorance is bliss, which I always thought was stupid, until now.

  When I stepped out of the store, a black car pulled up in front of me and a guy jumped out.

  It was my father.

  He didn’t look happy. I don’t remember his exact words, but they were something like:

  It looked bad, but I wasn’t worried. The way I saw it, there were a couple ways I could handle this:

  A) THE INNOCENT APPROACH

  Dad just stood there staring at me. His voice got very quiet. “Pete,” he said. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”

  It was obviously time to try another approach.

  B) THE HONEST APPROACH

  That was when I noticed Dad didn’t seem so angry anymore. He just looked at me.

  “Pete,” he said, “no matter what happens, there’s something you need to know.”

  In that moment a whole list of possibilities went through my mind:

  1) “You were adopted from a family of gypsies who are coming back to take you home.”

  2) “It will cost too much to send you to college, so we’re shipping you off to live in another country, where you can make cheap sneakers.”

  3) “Brushing your teeth doesn’t actually do anything for cavities. You’re really just smearing your teeth with a special kind of white mud—it says so right on the tube. We just made you do it to see how long you’d keep it up before you finally read the tube.”

  4) “Your mother and I thought it would be funny to teach you to talk wrong so that every time you thought you were ordering a Coke, you were really saying, ‘I made wet-wet in my nug-nugs!’”

  5) “Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy are all real, but they never liked you, so we’ve been covering for them all these years.”

  [CHAPTER ELEVEN]

  However . . .

  Dad didn’t actually say any of that stuff.

  He didn’t get a chance. Suddenly another black car swung up behind him, and two guys in suits yanked him into the back and drove away.

  In the digital version of this book, you’ll be able to click on the video and see it all happening, but right now this is the best I can do:

  [CHAPTER TWELVE]

  I Make Wet-Wet in My Nug-Nugs

  Okay. This is the hardest part to tell you about. And not just because I’d seen my dad get kidnapped by two guys right in front of me and drew a really lame picture of it.

  That’s the main reason. But also, when I ran back inside Ready Player One to talk to the guy behind the counter who’d just sold me my copy of Brawl-A-Thon 3000 XL, he was eating the biggest, grossest sandwich that I’d ever seen, and parts of it were falling out of the bun, and he just looked at me.

  “I need to use your phone!” I shouted.

  “I’m eating lunch,” he said.

  “It’s an emergency!”

  He shrugged. “So’s lunch.”

  “Look,” I said. “My dad just got kidnapped in front of your store!”

  “No personal calls,” the Ready Player One guy said, and took another bite of his sandwich.

  In the digital version of this book—never mind. I don’t have time for that now. I wish I did. That way you could actually smell the guy’s sandwich drippings and see my face turning red as I wanted to punch him in the nose. I was definitely never going to shop at Ready Player One again, unless they had a game that I absolutely couldn’t get anywhere else, or they had one of those exclusive character giveaways. But even then, I wasn’t going to like it.

  The guy went back to his sandwich. The phone was right there next to him. I reached across the counter to try to get it, but I must have misjudged the distance, because I accidentally knocked his soda over. It spilled everywhere, down the front of the counter and all over the front of my pants.

  “Dude, what is your problem?” the Ready Player One guy shouted.

  I took a step back and ran into something soft.

  That was when I heard the noise behind me.

  The noise that you’ll be able to hear in the digital version of this book.

  It sounded like this:

  Twang-twang-twang.

  Blunka-blunka-blunka.

  [CHAPTER THIRTEEN]

  the Return of the return of Wesley Midwood

  I turned around.

  Wesley Midwood was standing there behind me. Next to him were Nabeel Sarwani, Rashaad Strong, and Squid Mancini.

  “Hey, Pete!” Wesley said. “What’s up?” He was holding up a Ready Player One gift card. “Guess what my grandma sent me for my birthday? I’m going to buy Brawl-A-Thon 3000 XL with it. And if there’s anything left over—”

  “Some guys just kidnapped my dad!” I said.

  Wesley stared at me. His mouth was open and his tongue kept swirling around, twanging the rubber bands on his huge teeth. To be honest, it really wasn’t helping me figure out what I had to do next. Then his eyes got kind of narrow, and he didn’t look like he believed me.

  “I thought your dad was playing softball today,” Wesley said.

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Yo, man,” Rashaad said. “Did you just wet your pants?”

  All three of them were staring at me, where the wet soda stain was spreading over the front of my jeans. The first one to start laughing was Squid.

  “He totally did,” Nabeel said. “He wet himself!”

>   “That’s Coke,” I said. “You can smell it.”

  They took a big step back, holding their stomachs and whooping at the top of their lungs. Wesley was the only one not laughing. He was probably twanging his braces louder than ever, but I couldn’t hear him over the sounds of Nabeel, Squid, and Rasheed completely cracking up.

  I looked at the guy behind the counter. “Tell them what happened.”

  “What can I say?” the Ready Player One guy said, and grinned. “He had an accident.”

  They all just laughed harder. I turned around and ran outside to my bike. I figured if I could get back home and call Mom on her cell phone, that would probably be my best bet. Maybe there was an explanation behind all of this, like some kind of practical joke.

  I got on my bike and started home. Riding with soaking wet sticky jeans wasn’t very comfortable, but I tried to ignore it. I kept thinking of heroes from some of the books I’d had to read for school, guys like Johnny Tremain and other characters from history.

  I kept thinking about how angry Dad had been about the CommandRoid right before he got kidnapped.

  When I got back to the house, Mom’s car was parked out on the street. There were a bunch of other cars parked out there too. Mom was standing in the driveway holding my Garage Sale sign, with all kinds of people wandering around looking at the stuff that I’d left out. I realized that I’d forgotten about the whole garage sale thing when I’d gone to Ready Player One.