by Pete Hautman
I try to distract myself by rereading my Walking Dead comics, but I’m not in the mood. Eventually I slip into a fitful sleep. When I wake up, Mom is yelling for me to get Mal and come down to breakfast. I wake up my computer and sign on to BuyBuy.
Nothing. Not even one single bid.
I help Mal get dressed and escort him downstairs. Dad is sitting at the table, eating his usual breakfast of poached eggs, wheat toast, and orange juice. I didn’t even hear him come home last night.
“Hey champ,” he says, looking from me to Mal. “How’s my boy doing this morning?”
“Mal’s fine,” I say.
Mal sits in his usual place. A bowl of Cheerios is waiting for him. As always, Mom has put out a carton of milk and a spoon. Mal, as always, ignores them. He prefers to eat his Cheerios dry, one at a time, with his fingers.
“I hear Bridgette stopped by last night with her young man,” Dad says.
“Yeah. We got a lesson in water-buffalo cheese.”
Dad gives me a questioning look, but does not ask me to elaborate. He rarely does.
“Where’s Mom?” I ask.
“She left just a moment ago. Your sister forgot her pen kit here last night, so Mom’s driving it over to her.”
Bridgette is crazy about her pens. Fountain pens, felt-tips, and rollerballs in every color you could imagine. She’s been pen crazy ever since I can remember. Also crazy in other ways.
“Mom’s driving thirty miles just to bring her a box full of pens?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s nuts.”
“You know how your sister gets.” He eats the rest of his breakfast as I root through the fridge. I find a foil-wrapped slice of pizza balanced on top of a pickle jar. I pop it in the toaster and eat pickles while I’m waiting for it to heat up.
“Really, champ?” Dad says. “Pickles for breakfast?”
“And pizza,” I say through a mouthful of pickle.
He shakes his head, drinks the last of his orange juice, and looks at his watch. “I have to run to the office to meet a client.” He stands up. “You’re on.”
By “You’re on,” he means that I’m responsible for babysitting Mal until Mom gets back from her oh-so-important pen-delivery mission.
“I have plans,” I say, although the only plan I have is to sit in front of my computer and wait for somebody to bid on the Jooky dog.
“Mom will be back in less than an hour,” he says as he lifts the top half of his suit from the hanger by the door. “I’m sure whatever you have going can wait.”
“Right,” I say. “Because nothing I do could possibly be important.”
He stops moving for a moment, then slowly slips into his suit coat.
“I did not mean to imply that your time is not valuable,” he says. “But my meeting is important. I’m sorry if it inconveniences you.” There is more than a hint of sarcasm there. I brace myself for a lecture about how hard he works, and how important his job is, and how I’m not paying any of the bills in this household, but he lets me off easy. “Are we good?” he says.
For a fraction of a second, I almost tell him that I just charged two thousand dollars on Mom’s credit card for half a hot dog. But I hold my tongue.
“We’re okay,” I say.
“Okay,” Mal says, smiling, his cheeks distended with dry Cheerios.
After Dad leaves I tell Mal about the hot dog, and the two grand I put on Mom’s card.
“I’ll be grounded for eternity,” I say.
Mal stares out through the patio doors leading to the backyard. He won’t look at me when I’m looking at him. He never does.
“Okay,” he says.
“So we’ll get to spend lots of time together.” I don’t know if he understands me. I never do.
“Okay.”
“Or maybe they’ll send me off to military school and I won’t see you for years.”
“Okay.”
“Not okay, Mal.”
Mal pushes out his lower lip and looks down. He understands Not okay.
“But don’t worry. I’m going to figure something out.”
“Okay,” he mutters at his lap. Now I feel bad because I’ve made him unhappy.
“You want to go out back and look for Things?”
He perks up at that.
“First you have to brush your teeth and stuff.”
Mal’s morning bathroom routine takes him about half an hour. It took a few years, but Mal is now a master of personal hygiene. He hasn’t had to wear a diaper since he was seven.
It’s been a windy morning, so lots of new leaves have blown in over our six-foot privacy fence. I leave Mal in the backyard to hunt for treasures while I go back to my room to check my BuyBuy page. No bids. Just to get things started, I try to bid ten dollars, but the system won’t let me bid on my own item.
I can sit there miserably and try to imagine the conversation I will eventually have with my parents. Or I can try to figure out a way out of this mess. Dad likes to say, For every problem there is a solution. Usually he says it when he can’t figure something out.
One time I tried to argue with him.
“Aren’t some problems unsolvable?” I asked. “What if I get run over by a truck and die?”
“Then you’re dead, and you have no problem,” he said.
“You should seriously grow a beard,” I say to HeyMan.
We’re sitting in his room eating gummy worms and looking at my BuyBuy page on his laptop. I don’t know why, but whenever I do something massively stupid I just have to tell somebody. I told Mal what I did, but I don’t get a lot back from Mal, so I needed to tell somebody who would understand just how monumentally stupid the stupid thing I did was. That’s what best friends are for.
“I tried,” HeyMan says. “My mom says she doesn’t want to live with a Sasquatch.”
“Maybe she’d be okay with a beard if you, like, shaved your head.”
“Why would she be okay with that?”
“It’s a trade-off, same as when she said you could get your ear pierced if you got an A in History.”
HeyMan’s hand goes to his earring, a little silver loop. He’s ridiculously proud of it. But I think he’s more proud of his A in History.
“I don’t think she’ll go for it.”
“Why not? It’s the same amount of hair, just on a different part of your head.”
“I think she’s anti-beard.”
“But it’s the principle,” I say.
HeyMan shakes his head and gestures toward the screen. “So what are you gonna do about the Jooky dog? It’s kind of looking like you own it.”
“If I can’t sell it — and it’s not looking good — I have to come up with the money before my mom gets her Visa bill. I was hoping you might lend it to me.”
HeyMan laughs. “Like I’d do that even if I had two grand.”
“Thanks a lot,” I say.
“You’re welcome.”
“Okay, how about you get the bidding started. Bid fifteen bucks. I’ll pay you back.”
“I’d need a credit card for that.”
“You can’t borrow your mom’s?”
“I’d rather not. I mean, look how that worked out for you.”
We both stare at the screen.
“What about Cyn?” he says.
“Cyn has a credit card?”
“No. But maybe she can hack one off the Web.”
“Yeah, right.” Cyn probably could, but there’s no way I’d ask her to do that. “I don’t think I want her to know about this.”
“Why not?”
“She’ll think I’m stupid.”
“You’ve known her forever,” HeyMan says. “You think she doesn’t know how stupid we are?”
“True,” I say. Compared to Cyn, we’re both morons. I don’t know why she hangs out with us.
HeyMan says, “She’s gonna find out sooner or later.”
“Let’s make it later.”
“So what ar
e you gonna do?”
“If nobody buys the half dog I’ll have to come up with the two grand.”
“Yeah, right. How?”
“I have twenty bucks. I could invest in lottery tickets.”
HeyMan regards me doubtfully. “And when you don’t win? You got a backup plan?”
“Get hit by a truck?”
I’m not really thinking about stepping in front of a truck. Although it would solve my problem. I wasn’t serious about the lottery, either. I need a better plan.
For every problem there is a solution. It’s just a matter of finding it.
I walk home. Mom is in the front yard working on her peonies. She asks me to go check on Mal. It’s automatic. She says it a hundred times a day. I check on Mal. He’s attaching a new feather to his wall. I go back to my computer and check my BuyBuy page again. No bids. I do a search for “How can I make $2,000 quick?”
There are a lot of ideas online for making fast money. Most of them are sarcastic, illegal, or disgusting. One of the more reasonable suggestions is “Make big money! Sell your old junk on BuyBuy.”
I look around at my old junk. My computer is four years old and worth maybe two hundred dollars. I have a ten-year-old copy of X-Men that might be worth five bucks, and I could probably get thirty bucks for my Walking Dead comics. I have an MP3 player worth twenty or thirty, and a hand-me-down phone worth nothing. My bike might bring fifty. I continue my old-junk inventory and come up with $419.92. My total worth.
I’m thinking about pretending I’ve gone insane. I mean, even insaner than bidding on half of a hot dog. Like kidnapped-by-aliens insane, or believing-in-fairies insane. What can they do? Put me in an asylum for a few weeks?
I’m considering this when the house phone rings. I answer it automatically, even though I don’t want to talk to anyone. I immediately wish I’d checked the caller ID. It’s Derek.
“Dude,” he says. Like we’re friends.
“Bridgette’s not here,” I tell him.
“I know! I called to talk to you.”
Like I should be ecstatic about that. But I am curious.
“What’s up?” I say.
“Was that true what you said? About eating a pizza in four minutes?”
“Four minutes and thirty-six seconds,” I say.
“How are you on SooperSliders?” he asks.
“Why?”
“How many SooperSliders do you think you can eat in five minutes?” he asks.
“I don’t know . . . a lot?”
“How many could you eat for two hundred dollars?”
I think for a moment.
“Really a lot,” I say.
Derek, in addition to all his other irritating qualities, is a member of the Kappa Alpha Delta fraternity at Simpson College. A fraternity, as near as I can tell, is just a bunch of college guys living in a big messy house having parties, and Derek’s summer job is to stay at the frat house as a caretaker and fix the place up: repairing holes in the walls, painting, taking care of the landscaping, and making sure the rooms are ready for next year. Anyway, Derek tells me that his fraternity is having a summer fund-raiser for the Childhood Leukemia Center. It’s an annual event, and most of the frat boys return to campus for the occasion. The main event is a slider-eating contest with a first prize of two hundred dollars. Last year the winner was a guy named Hoover who ate twenty SooperSliders in five minutes. The runner-up only managed to eat fifteen.
“You think you could down more than twenty?” Derek asks.
“Easy,” I say, with considerably more confidence than I feel.
“Are you sure? ’Cause here’s the thing — it costs twenty bucks to enter, and there’ll be a lot of big eaters in the running, including Hoover.”
“I can do it.”
“How about we do a trial run? I’ll bring over some sliders tonight and we’ll time you.”
“Fine with me,” I say. I like SooperSliders. “You buying?”
“I’ll buy. But you have to pay your own way into the contest, okay?”
“Deal,” I say. Twenty bucks to win two hundred sounds like a good deal.
“I’ll be over at seven with the sliders. You might want to skip dinner.”
“Right,” I say.
Mom makes grilled cheese sandwiches and a salad for dinner. I am not big on salads, but I eat two sandwiches, some of Mal’s potato chips, and a few lettuce leaves to make my mom happy. I almost ask her to make me another grilled cheese, but then I remember Derek and the sliders.
I’m glad I ate, because Derek doesn’t show up until almost nine. He is carrying a bag emblazoned with the SooperSlider logo: a toothy, disembodied mouth biting into a juicy, dripping slider.
Mom answers the door. She looks past him, puzzled.
“Where’s Bridgette?” she asks.
“She’s studying. I came to see David.” He holds up the bag.
“What on earth is that?”
“SooperSliders,” Derek says.
“Those little hamburgers? That’s very thoughtful of you, Derek, but we’ve already eaten.”
“They’re for David.”
“We’re doing an experiment,” I say, coming up behind her.
Mom looks from Derek to me, then shakes her head.
“I don’t know where you put it,” she says.
We set up at the kitchen table: four rows of five sliders. I lift the top bun off one of them and look at it. SooperSliders are not grilled like a normal hamburger, they are steamed. The meat isn’t crispy and dark; it’s more of a pallid gray and only about a quarter of an inch thick. I put the top of the bun back in place.
“I hope you’re hungry,” Derek says.
“I’m always hungry.” Looking at the rows of sliders on the table, I wish I hadn’t eaten that second grilled cheese.
Out of the corner of my eye I see Mal peeking into the kitchen. I don’t say anything. Mal likes to pretend he is invisible.
Derek takes out his phone and brings up the stopwatch app. “Let me know when you’re ready.”
I grab the biggest glass in the cupboard and fill it with water.
“How many did that guy Hoover eat?”
“Twenty.”
“In five minutes?”
“Yeah.”
I take a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“I can do this.”
“Go!”
The first slider goes down in three bites. I’m chomping into the second one before it reaches my stomach. I demolish number three in two bites and follow it with a quick gulp of water. I’m on number five when Derek says, “One minute.”
That’s a good pace, but I can do better. I smash the next five burgers flat to get the air out of them and start shoving them in one after another, a train of smooshed sliders. I drink more water and start on the next row.
“Two minutes,” Derek says.
The slider train is slowing — there’s a traffic jam just south of my breastbone. I see Mal standing just behind my right shoulder. Every time I get a burger down, he is silently mouthing the word “Okay.”
I stand and jump up and down — that’s called the Joey Jump, Joey Chestnut’s trademark move. The traffic jam loosens. I grab a slider and eat it while I’m jumping.
I hear Mal’s voice: “Okay, okay, okay.”
I sit and keep shoveling, going to a two-handed technique. Squish, bite, swallow, squish, bite, swallow, squish, bite, gulp water, squish, bite, gulp . . . In the background I hear Mal going “Okay, okay, okay” over my shoulder to the sounds of me biting and breathing and gulping.
“Okay,” Mal says.
I am in the zone. The next minute is a blur, and suddenly I am holding the last burger in my right hand, and it is moving toward my mouth in what feels like slow motion. I open wide; the slider enters the gate; my jaws close. Bite. Bite. Bite. I move the pulverized slider back in my mouth and open my throat and feel it ooze down my gullet to join its friends.
“Okay,” Mal says. He turns
and walks away.
I look at Derek. “How’d I do?” My voice sounds weird, like I’m talking from inside a barrel.
“Twenty sliders in three minutes and thirty-nine seconds,” he says. “Pretty good. You think you could eat more?”
My belly is as taut as an overinflated basketball.
“Easy,” I say.
“Dude, we are golden!”
I don’t feel golden. “’Scuse me,” I say. I stand up — not quite straight up. I’m not sure what is about to happen, but I figure the best place to find out is the bathroom.
I make it, just in time.
The day of the fund-raiser, I tell my mom that I won’t be home for dinner because I’m going over to Simpson with Derek.
“He’s going to give me a tour of the campus. I graduate high school in four years, you know.”
She gives me a long, searching look. “I’m glad you’re thinking about college so early, David, but . . . a tour? At night?”
“Well, it’s not a tour, exactly. They’re having a fund-raiser at his fraternity. It’s twenty dollars for all you can eat.”
“Hmm,” she says, making her concerned face. “I don’t suppose it’s all the beer you can drink, too?”
“Don’t worry. I’m not gonna drink.”
“What about Derek? I don’t want him driving you home if he’s drinking.”
“I’ll make sure he doesn’t.”
I can tell she’s looking for a reason to tell me not to go.
She fails. “Well, I guess you’re old enough to not do anything stupid.”
We both know that’s not true.
During the drive to the college, Derek expounds upon his philosophy of life.
“Everybody is good at something,” he says. “Take me, for example. I am good at recognizing opportunities and capitalizing on them.”
“Such as?” I am already bored.
“Such as today. If I hadn’t taken the opportunity to give you the opportunity to enter this contest, you’d never have had the opportunity to win it.”
“That’s a lot of opportunities.”
“It’s what I’m good at,” he says. “You’re good at eating. Did you know you’re basically a tube?”