by Matthew Ward
The event itself, of course, is conducted on a large spiraling track, with the starting line on the outside of the spiral and wide enough to accommodate the entire row of competitors, while the finish line is at the center of the spiral and only three riders wide. Arthur had always thought the word “track” was used rather loosely here. Once it was filled with boulders, logs, pits, and swamps, it looked hardly like a track at all but more like a massive rock garden—in hell.
As Arthur stepped under the banner marking the Pogo Pavilion’s entrance, he could no longer ignore the colony of killer butterflies that had begun to swarm in his stomach.
He had trained all year for this single race. Having competed in the event the previous two years with little success, he had much to prove that day—to himself, to his family, and to the world of unsafe sports.
In his first year of entry, Arthur had failed to complete the race at all, due to a nasty crash and a resulting equipment malfunction. The next year, he had not fared much better, ranking thirty-eighth out of thirty-nine participants—the only entrant behind him being Bonnie Prince Bobo, the pogo-sticking chimpanzee (who had subsequently vowed revenge on the boy for sending him to last place).
But this year would be different. Arthur had come a long way since his last defeat. He was another year older (a respectable 9 percent age increase over the prior year) and many of the top junior competitors had now graduated to the next division. Furthermore, he had since acquired new equipment (Henry’s old HopRocket RDX), and in one of his latest trial runs, he had only been two seconds away from matching the current world record.
“Good luck, lad!” Uncle Mervyn called as the boy emerged from the equipment locker with his rocket stick. “I’ve got a feeling about this one; Arthur Whipple will not be a name these spectators soon forget!”
“Thanks, Uncle Mervyn,” Arthur said with a nervous smile.
“Yes, Arthur,” added Mr. Whipple, trying his best to be encouraging, “I am confident in the possibility of you finishing this race without severe bodily harm!”
“Thanks, Father,” Arthur smiled again. Then, donning a beat-up crash helmet, he turned and headed toward the warm-up area.
As the competitors arranged themselves along the starting line, Arthur reached into his pocket and felt the corners of his magical domino. Rubbing the ebony tile for luck, the boy said a short prayer and promptly joined the others.
Looking about him, Arthur recognized many of his fellow contenders from previous years. Five riders to his left, at the center of the lineup, stood “Jump” Johnston—once the junior division’s biggest star, until last year’s race, when he had fractured his spine and been told he would never walk again. Fortunately, the prognosis hadn’t mentioned anything about his ability to rocket-stick, and—by some miracle—though still unable to walk on his own, Jump had re-taught himself to ride just in time for this year’s competition. Of course, he was only ranked thirty-second overall, but just to see him standing there on the starting line was truly an inspiring sight.
Six entrants to his right, Arthur spotted Andy Gravity—the rocket-stick prodigy poised to capture the crown from his debilitated predecessor. According to rocket-stick racing analysts, Andy was the one to beat.
Arthur looked at the next competitor—and shuddered. It was none other than his own simian nemesis: Bonnie Prince Bobo. Ever since he had bested the chimp in the previous year’s race, Arthur had been receiving boxes of rotten banana peels through the post, with only a muddy monkey handprint for the return address. (Apparently, the Whipples’ address had been filled in by Bobo’s trainer, but it was hard to be too cross at him; if Arthur had managed to teach a chimpanzee to send things through the post, he’d probably not have been all that selective about what he sent out either.) Upon catching Arthur’s glance, Bobo flashed a freaky set of chimpanzee teeth at the boy, as if to say, “This year, you’re mine, chump!”
Arthur quickly looked past the primate toward the end of the line—at which point he noticed a girl who, though somehow familiar, he had not seen at any previous rocket-stick race. Recalling his own first experience in the event, Arthur couldn’t help but pity her. She really had no idea what she was in for.
Arthur then realized why the girl looked familiar. She was one of the Goldwin children who had introduced themselves at the Birthday Extravaganza—one of the ghost girl’s older sisters.
Suddenly struck by a related thought, Arthur shifted his gaze into the stands.
It took a few moments of scanning the crowd before he spotted her, but sure enough, there, leaning on the guard rail at the front of the steps, stood Ruby Goldwin. Her appearance, it seemed, had altered somehow since he’d last seen her—but as usual, she was already looking straight at him.
Even though he had almost expected to see her there, it proved no less of a shock. The last time he had seen Ruby Goldwin at one of his record attempts, it had caused him to spontaneously choke—though, to be fair, he had thought her a bloodthirsty poltergeist at the time. Since then, he had learned otherwise, and the two had actually shared some rather memorable moments together—but he still did not know exactly what to make of her. One thing was certain, however: this time, he would not let the Goldwin girl come between him and the finish line.
And so, as Arthur stood staring blankly back at Ruby—one foot on his rocket stick, one foot on the ground, unsure whether he was glad to see her or terrified, yet above all, determined not to be distracted by her once again—he was more than a bit dismayed to find himself the only entrant left at the starting line, suddenly engulfed in a cloud of dust.
Snapping his head to face forward, Arthur could just make out the flash of a green flag through a host of airborne rocket-stick riders before him. Wasting no time, the boy planted both feet on the pegs of his HopRocket RDX and sprang into action, already half a bounce behind his competitors.
His lack of readiness offset by a flood of adrenaline, Arthur sailed through the air for several seconds before touching down on a large, craggy boulder that many of his opponents had wisely avoided. Fortunately, the boy managed to hit the rock at just the right angle, so that the resulting launch carried him over the heads of half a dozen riders at the rear of the pack and safely out of last place. Unfortunately, it also landed him within an arm’s length of his arch rival, the dreaded Bonnie Prince Bobo.
Immediately sensing Arthur’s presence, the chimp curled his lips into a menacing sneer, then burst into a flurry of unnerving grunts and shrieks. Arthur tried to remain calm—but he soon found himself under more than just a verbal attack.
As the two flew side by side through the air, the primate released the right side of his rocket-stick handle—and began swinging his free arm at the boy’s head.
“Ahhh!” Arthur cried as the chimp’s fingernails scraped against his helmet. (Hard as it was to accept at that moment, of course, Arthur knew the chimp’s tactics were well within the rules of rocket-stick racing, as they did not involve firearms or blades over two inches in length.)
The assault persisted for nearly a hundred yards—until the chimp veered inexplicably to the right, leaving Arthur alone and unbothered for the first time.
Relieved to find that Bobo’s battery attempts had finally ceased, the boy launched off a fallen tree—only to have the chimp pass directly in front of him a moment later, clipping his rocket stick and nearly wrenching it from his grasp.
The chimp, it seemed, was now determined to collide with him.
Touching down shakily on a thin slab of rock, the boy shot into the air once again—and found himself under the bitterest attack so far. Flying at him from the other side now, Bonnie Prince Bobo managed to unseat Arthur’s left foot from its peg, filling the boy’s ears with piercing shrieks as he hurtled past.
Scarcely managing to get his foot halfway onto the peg before touching down, Arthur took another precarious bounce, knowing full well it might be his last.
The chimp was waiting for him. Having honed his aim over
the first two passes, Bobo did not fly past his target this time—but met the boy perfectly in midair.
Perhaps a bit too perfectly, as it turned out.
Instead of barreling into Arthur and knocking him out of the sky, the chimp matched the boy’s trajectory so that both riders fell at the same rate and angle, with only a matter of inches between them. For a moment, their flight appeared almost synchronized, as if chimp and boy were in fact partners, performing some specialized stunt—but the illusion did not last long.
When Bobo realized his navigational error, he quickly resorted to his original strategy—namely, punching—and proceeded to wallop the boy.
Arthur did what he could to dodge the chimp’s jabs, but at such close range, he had little choice but to brace himself and take the punches. After a thump to the ribcage, the boy suffered a crack to the back of his head, which rattled his brains and left his helmet dangerously cockeyed. He barely had time to breathe before another blow struck him square in the stomach.
Robbed of breath and racked with pain, Arthur clenched the handle of his rocket stick and prayed for some sort of safe landing as he plummeted toward a disconcertingly jagged boulder.
In this disoriented state, Arthur was not entirely sure what happened next. All he knew was that a moment after he touched down, the attack abruptly ceased—and he was shooting through the air, faster and higher than ever before.
What had happened was this:
Moments earlier, as Arthur approached the rocky plateau beneath him, the chimp’s abuse and proximity had grown so severe that by the time they touched down, the two rivals were practically occupying the same space. Reaching the rock a millisecond ahead of Arthur, Bobo prepared to deliver the knockout punch—just as the foot of Arthur’s rocket-stick landed squarely on the exposed outer tip of the chimp’s left peg.
Before either rider knew what was happening, the independent feet of their rocket sticks were compressing in tandem, one on top of the other, so that both pistons fired at precisely the same moment. The resulting burst of energy catapulted Arthur forward at nearly twice the velocity of a normal launch, while Bonnie Prince Bobo—deprived of thrust—smacked into the wall of rock ahead of him and slid into the greasy swamp below.
Barely detecting the sickening plop of his fallen nemesis, Arthur soared higher and higher, his chest growing increasingly hollow the further away the ground became. Then, for the first time since the race began, he noticed the roar of the crowd. Strangely, its intensity seemed to grow in proportion to his altitude. And then he realized: they were cheering for him.
Glancing downward, Arthur could see the tops of dozens of his competitors’ helmets as he hurtled past them. He was no longer in the rear of the herd—in fact, he was swiftly advancing to its front.
Arthur found it difficult, however, to get too excited about this. For, as all things that go up must eventually do, he had begun to come down. Powerless to alter his dwindling momentum, the boy gripped his handlebars for dear life, his stomach floating toward his ribcage as the ground rushed up to meet him.
And yet, somehow, as the foot of his rocket stick struck the earth from that impossible height, Arthur did not splatter against the rocks, nor spontaneously combust, nor die in any way. Indeed, he managed to stay on his rocket-stick, and—despite a rather rough landing—merely bounced back into the race, as if he had planned the entire stunt all along.
Arthur allowed himself a moment to soak up the crowd’s approval. It was slightly disconcerting that he had never received anywhere near as much applause for anything he’d actually planned, but he wasn’t about to hush them now.
As Arthur surveyed the field, he found—to his astonishment—that there were only three riders ahead of him.
Leading the pack by several yards was none other than Jump Johnston—the partially paralyzed rocket-sticking pioneer who required assistance just to walk, yet had managed not only to re-teach himself to ride, but apparently to win. If it had been inspiring to see him standing at the starting line, it was positively electrifying to see him now, a mere hundred yards from the gold medal.
The two competitors behind Jump were neck and neck in second place. Predictably, one of them was Andy Gravity, the up-and-coming hotshot who had been favored to win the entire race. The other rider’s identity, however, took Arthur completely by surprise. It was Roxy Goldwin—the ghost girl’s older sister—who, as far as Arthur knew, had never been in a rocket-stick race in her life.
Arthur then realized something even more surprising about the three frontrunners: he was gaining on them. The momentum from his last jump, it seemed, was carrying him forward at a faster rate than any of his competitors. As the gap closed between him and the second-place riders, a glimmer of hope arose in Arthur’s mind.
I might actually win this thing, he thought.
And yet, before Arthur or the others could make any sort of dent in Jump’s ten-yard lead, the finish line emerged around the spiral’s last bend. As the track wound down, so too did Arthur’s hopes of breaking away.
But then, it happened.
As Jump touched down on a rather unremarkable section of rock, his feet slipped from their pegs. In an instant, Jump’s body crumpled and disappeared behind the boulder.
It was an unsettling sight—and yet, it provided Arthur just the opportunity he needed. Launching perfectly off a ridge of earth, the boy quickly found himself shoulder to shoulder with Andy Gravity and Roxy Goldwin. With the residual momentum Arthur still possessed, there was little doubt he would take the lead on the next bounce. He had as good as won.
If only as-good-as-winning was actually as good as winning.
Sailing over the boulder that had concealed Jump Johnston’s fate, Arthur suddenly caught sight of the fallen frontrunner—and the first glimpse of his own undoing.
There, splayed out in the rocky gap below, a battered Jump Johnston strained to climb out of the crevice, dragging himself inch by inch toward his rocket stick, which had landed on the ledge above him. It was only five feet up, but in Jump’s impaired condition it may as well have been Mount Everest.
In the midst of his struggling, Jump glanced upward, and for a split second, Arthur caught his gaze. It was the most helpless, achingly tragic expression Arthur had ever seen—and in an instant, all the joy was sapped from his pending victory.
And then he realized: as important as the race was to himself, finishing first would never mean as much to him as merely finishing would mean to Jump. It was a bitter truth, but there was no denying it. He knew what he had to do.
Touching down alongside Andy Gravity and Roxy Goldwin, not twenty yards from the finish line, Arthur shifted his weight to his rear. As his competitors shot ahead toward the finish line, he shot away from it. The crowd gasped.
Pulling a backflip in midair, Arthur landed on the boulder that held Jump’s rocket stick and quickly dismounted. His legs felt a bit like the World’s Largest Spaghetti Noodles now that he was on solid ground, but he managed to steady himself. Grabbing a rocket stick in either hand, he scrambled into the cleft where Jump lay hopelessly inching forward on his belly. Arthur set the rocket sticks aside and crouched down beside him.
“Come on, Jump,” he said, getting a shoulder underneath the other boy’s arm. “Let’s get out of here.”
Jump looked dazed. “Who—who are you?”
“I’m Arthur Whipple. I’m a big fan….”
Three riders zoomed past overhead, taking with them any chance of a medal for Arthur.
“Can you stand?”
“I think so.”
Another rider shot past.
Jump leaned his back against the wall while Arthur fetched the veteran’s rocket stick and stood it before him. Clutching the handles, Jump agonizingly hoisted his feet onto the pegs—then leaned away from the rock. Balancing himself unaided on the idling rocket stick, Jump turned to Arthur, who clambered onto his own HopRocket. “Thank you,” he said, his eyes watering unexpectedly.
Arthur nodded.
Composing himself, Jump added, “All right, Arthur—let’s go.”
With that, the two boys shot upward, touching down side by side on the boulder’s crest as they sprang back into the race.
“Unbelievable! Newcomer Roxy Goldwin has taken the gold and set a new speed record in the process! What an upset! And what a crushing blow to Andy Gravity! First, to be outpaced for most of the race by a debilitated Jump Johnston—who wasn’t even expected to crack the top thirty—and then to be edged out at the last second by a total novice…. What do you say, Chuck, do you think he still has a shot at replacing Jump as the new face of rocket-stick racing?”
“I don’t know, Ted—not if this Goldwin girl continues to perform anything like she has today…. And I’ve got to say it doesn’t seem Jump is willing to give up that role just yet anyhow. His performance today was nothing short of amazing. Leading the race until the very end, and then finishing eighth when he was only ranked thirty-second—after all he’s been through, he’s proved today he truly has the heart of a champion.”
“Absolutely, Chuck. But let’s not forget about Arthur Whipple! What an incredible race he had today.”
“That he did, Ted. You know, it’s one thing to be bested by fierce competition as Andy Gravity was, but to willingly throw away a guaranteed medal—possibly even the gold—in some misguided outburst of compassion…well, it’s more than I can comprehend.”