Enter at Your Own Risk

by Henry Winkler

  “So you’re just going to let McKelty pull a fast one like that?”

  He stopped and looked hard at me.

  “Listen, Zip, the one thing I’ve learned about sports is that you get all kinds of calls. Some are good calls. Some are bad calls. And the deal is, you can’t complain about them or you just look like a chump. So let’s forget about this, okay?”

  “No, not okay. Listen, Frankie . . . I need you to tell Zoe that I wasn’t making this up. She thinks I’m lying about it.”

  “You have to admit, Zip, you’re getting a little confused about what’s true and what isn’t these days. Like the deal with not telling your dad about Reading Gym. Come on, dude. You should tell him.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to live with him.”

  “Yeah, but you do, and lying to him isn’t going to make it any easier.”

  “So you’re not going to back me up with Zoe?”

  “I’m done with covering for you, dude.”

  I turned to Ashley.

  “Did you see the Ding Dong?” I asked her. “Even a little tiny piece of it? One or two crumbs, maybe?”

  “I didn’t, Hank. I’m really sorry,” she said.

  As Ashley hurried to catch up with Frankie, I just stood there fuming. To make matters worse, Nick the Tick picked that very moment to walk out of the gym.

  “Told you I’d take your pal down,” he said with a grin.

  “You cheated,” I said to him.

  “You got no proof, Sherlock. So it looks like I’m the winner and you and your pal are the losers.”

  Call me immature, but I actually growled at McKelty. I didn’t plan to do it, but it just sort of fell out of my mouth before I could stop it. A real growl, like a lion or a tiger.

  “Yeah, like you scare me,” McKelty laughed as he walked off. “So long, Zipper Boy.”

  As if to prove that the day couldn’t have gotten any worse, Principal Love grabbed me on his way out and asked me to help him carry his stuff back to his office. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Zoe leaving the library with Chelsea. But me, I was stuck squeaking down the hall next to Principal Love, toting his gym bag in one hand and his snowman scarf in the other.

  Now if that’s not a terrible way to end a terrible day, I don’t know what is.

  CHAPTER 25

  I tried calling Zoe the minute I got home, but her mom said she wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t come to the phone.

  I tried calling her the next day when I got home, but I just got their voice mail. It was her voice saying, “Leave your name, message, and favorite song after the beep.”

  “Name: Hank Improvement Zipzer,” I said. “Message: I’d like to talk to Zoe. Favorite Song:

  ‘Wheels on the Bus.’”

  I hoped she’d be impressed by my cute message and call back.

  But she didn’t call back.

  I waited for her in our booth at McKelty’s Roll ’N’ Bowl on Thursday after school.

  She didn’t show up.

  But Nick the Tick did. With Joelle “The Phone Fanatic” Atkins by his side.

  “If you’re waiting for Zoe, you’re going to be waiting a long time,” McKelty said. “Like forever.”

  “How would you know, McKelty?”

  “Well, she told us she thinks you acted like a bad sport and a poor loser,” Joelle said.

  “And then she told me she doesn’t like you anymore, not even a little bit,” McKelty added.

  “She didn’t really say that part, did she?” I asked, trying to stop my voice from quivering.

  “Text her yourself,” Joelle said, offering me her cell phone. “Ask her.”

  I think you know by now that I’m not a big spelling guy, which also means I’m not a big texting guy. I see all those letters on that little keypad, and my eyes just start to spin in their sockets.

  “That’s okay,” I said to Joelle. “I’ll text her later.”

  “He probably doesn’t know how,” McKelty said, which may have been the first true thing he’s ever said.

  “I’ll text her for you,” Joelle said.

  That was the last thing I wanted, to have Joelle in the middle of my private conversation with Zoe. She’d be announcing what we said from the top of the Empire State Building.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I’m not really in the mood to text right now. I’m an after-dinner texting kind of guy, not an afternoon texting kind of guy.”

  “Wow,” said Joelle. “You have special times of the day when you text?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” I answered. “I instant message in the morning, e-mail in the afternoon, text after dinner. If I don’t keep them separate, I’m just communicating nonstop all day long, and you know what that does.”

  “What?” asked Joelle, looking alarmed.

  “Rots the brain,” I whispered to her. “Next thing you know, you’re wearing a bracelet with penguins on it and thinking that’s okay.”

  I saw Joelle gasp, then fold up her phone and put it in her pocket.

  At dinner that night, I was so sad I could hardly eat. Cheerio could tell something was wrong. He sprawled out on top of my feet and nuzzled my ankles. It’s his little dachshund way of showing support.

  “What’s wrong, honey?” my mom asked. “You look like you lost your best friend.”

  “I did,” I said. “Zoe and I had a fight.”

  “It must be in the air,” Emily said. “Robert and I had a fight, too. We’re not speaking.”

  “What was your fight about?” I asked her.

  “Robert said that chickens can’t fly, and I told him that’s not entirely true because the longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds. Then he said that’s not really flying, and I said, tell that to the chicken who stayed in the air for thirteen seconds.”

  “Wow,” I said. “You guys get pretty upset over poultry.”

  “It wasn’t about the chickens. He was acting like a know-it-all,” my know-it-all sister said. “What did you and Zoe fight about?”

  I didn’t want to go into it with Emily. I mean, there are some things a fourth-grader can’t understand. They’re still fighting about flying chickens and stuff. Not like us fifth-graders who fight about real human-type things.

  “We fought about ducks,” I said. “I said that a duck’s quack doesn’t echo, and she said it does.”

  “Well, she’s right,” my dad piped up, putting his glasses on top of his head and taking a break from our beet and mushroom casserole. “Many people believe that a duck’s quack does not echo. In reality, the quack has a particular sound quality that makes it difficult to hear the echo, but it actually does echo.”

  “Wow, Dad. That’s really . . . um . . . interesting.”

  “All knowledge is interesting, Hank. That’s what I keep trying to tell you. You should call Zoe and apologize.”

  Like the way I should apologize to you for not telling the truth, I thought to myself.

  Ever since Frankie had that talk with me, I had tried to find the right moment to tell my dad the truth about the Reading Gym. But trust me, that is not an easy thing to do, and I was still working on getting up the courage.

  Fortunately, the doorbell rang, taking my mind off everything. I got up to answer it. It was Robert, standing at the door holding a bunch of half-wilted flowers.

  “It’s Robert,” I called out. “Should I let him in?”

  Emily jumped up and ran to the door.

  “I came to apologize,” Robert said, handing Emily the bunch of flowers. “I wasn’t being a good listener. You know a great deal about chicken flight, and I respect that about you.”

  “Oh, Robert.” Emily sighed.

  “Here, you better take these fast,” Robert said, offering Emily the flowers. “The pollen makes my allergies flare up. I can feel my nose starting to drip already.”

  Robert sneezed a big wet sneeze. Any normal person would have slammed the door in his face. But not our Emily. She opened the door
wider, grabbed the flowers, and smiled a dopey little smile.

  “Do you want to come in?” she asked Robert. “I have some reptile drawings we can color. And a new box of fruit-scented markers.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Robert said.

  I watched them skip off to the kitchen table, take the caps off Emily’s new markers, and start sniffing them.

  Boy, oh boy, did I ever wish Zoe and I were back in the fourth grade, when a couple of pineapple- and grape-scented markers and some reptile drawings could solve everything.

  CHAPTER 26

  That weekend, the only thing that interested me even a little bit was working on my life-story scrapbook. Not to be all goopy or anything, I think I liked working on it because the scrapbook reminded me of Zoe and the fun we had working on our autobiographies together.

  On Sunday, while waiting for Zoe to call (which she didn’t), I practiced my presentation in the clubhouse for Ashley and Frankie. At first, Frankie didn’t want to come, because he was still mad at me. Well, not so much mad as frustrated. He said he just wanted me to set things right. But Ashley talked him into coming, and I’m so glad she did. We had a good time remembering all the things I put in there—like our first day of preschool when Alan Kaufman tried to run me over with a toy fire truck and Frankie had to defend me, or the day Ashley and I tried to make egg rolls by rolling eggs on the kitchen floor. Boy, did we make a mess!

  By the time I was done presenting my scrapbook, we were all laughing like always. We’ve had too much fun to let anything serious ever come between us.

  The amazing thing was that I was very comfortable reading the scrapbook out loud. I didn’t stumble over very many words at all, and I was able to read with real expression. That was a first for me.

  “I want to come see your presentation,” Ashley said.

  “We should be there, Ash,” Frankie said. “We’re the costars.”

  “It’s on Tuesday,” I told them, “which means you’ll have to miss Tae Kwon Do.”

  “I’ll take it up with Principal Love,” Frankie said. “Got anything to offer him, Ashweena?”

  “I could offer to put rhinestones on one of his snowman scarves,” she suggested.

  “Outstanding idea,” Frankie said with a nod. “The way to Principal Love’s heart is through his snowmen.”

  It turns out it was easy for Frankie and Ashley to get out of going to Tae Kwon Do. On that Tuesday, Mrs. Crock came on the loudspeaker after lunch to announce that Principal Love had slipped on the cafeteria floor when one of the Velcro straps of his tennis shoes came loose. He had gone home to sit on a heating pad. Anyone in his Tae Kwon Do class could either have their parents pick them up early, or go to Mr. Rock’s Reading Gym or Ms. Woolsey’s knitting club.

  After school, we all went to the Reading Gym together. As we walked in, I saw Zoe sitting in the front row, next to Chelsea Byrd.

  “Hi, Zoe,” we all said almost in unison.

  “Hi, Frankie. Hi, Ashley,” she said.

  Wow. It was so bad I couldn’t even get a “hi.”

  Poor Chelsea. She looked like she was going to throw up.

  “Hi, Chelsea,” I said. “You look nice today.”

  “Thanks, Hank.” She gave me a nervous smile. I glanced over at Zoe, as if to say, “At least somebody is being nice to me.”

  Frankie, Ashley, and I took our seats in the second row, behind Chelsea and Zoe, just as Mr. Rock came to the front of the class.

  “Hi, kids,” he said. “Big day today. I’m really looking forward to each of you sharing your life story. I’ve put all your names in this fine New York Mets hat I happen to have. Chelsea, why don’t you come up and help me draw the names to establish what order we’ll go in.”

  Let me just point out two things here about what a cool guy Mr. Rock is. First of all, he’s a Mets fan, like I always knew he would be. And second of all, he knew Chelsea was nervous so he picked her to come up and draw the names. That’s what I call being a decent dude.

  As Chelsea picked the names from the hat, Mr. Rock read each one out loud.

  “Okay, first at bat will be Zoe McKelty,” he said. “Then Chelsea Byrd, followed by Hank Zipzer, with Luke Whitman batting cleanup.” (Now if Luke would just clean up his nose, everything would be great.)

  I could see Chelsea swallowing hard. She really didn’t want to do this.

  “The bottom of the lineup,” Mr. Rock went on, “features none other than Kacey Wilson, followed by Felipe Aguilar, Sloane Wilson, and Brandon Clarke. Did I leave anyone out?”

  “Yeah, the coolest guy here,” came a voice from the door.

  There was only one voice that loud and obnoxious, and you guessed it, it belonged to Nick the Tick McKelty.

  “Are you joining us, Nick?” Mr. Rock asked.

  “Yeah,” Nick answered, coming in and taking the seat next to me. “My dad can’t get here . . . I think he’s in Washington, D.C., visiting the president. Anyway, I’m stuck here until Mr. Love recovers from his sore rump.”

  “Well, sit down and put your backpack under your chair,” Mr. Rock told him. “We’re about to get started with our presentations and we need the utmost courtesy from our visitors.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” McKelty said. “I am Mr. Courtesy.”

  Right, and I am Mr. Brainiac.

  McKelty sprawled out in the seat next to me.

  “How you doing, Zipper Dork?” he whispered.

  By that time, Zoe had taken her place at the front of the room. She was setting up a mini boom box that had her music recorded. She had taken the drumsticks out of her back pocket and put them on the table in front of her. When everything was ready, she took a deep breath, picked up her paper, and pressed play on her boombox.

  The sound of her singing “The Wheels on the Bus” filled the room.

  “Even as a baby, I always loved music,” she read. “The first song I can remember hearing was ‘The Wheels on the Bus.’” As the song played, she picked up her drumsticks and tapped out a rhythm on the table. It sounded great, like people’s footsteps marching in time to the turning of the wheels.

  She continued reading her paper, alternating her words with her favorite songs. She accompanied each song on the drumsticks. A few times when she was reading, she lost her place and had to stop, but she didn’t let that fluster her.

  “Give me a minute to find my place, guys,” she said the first time it happened. “I have tracking problems and sometimes I can’t follow the words and I mess up totally.”

  I looked over at Mr. Rock and could see him smile at that. He’s always telling us that we should let people know if we’re having difficulty reading something, that there’s nothing to be ashamed of. I can tell you from personal experience, that sounds easy but it’s really hard to do. You just keep waiting for someone to make fun of you.

  My eyes stayed glued on Zoe, just like they did the very first time I ever saw her. I was so sorry that she didn’t like me anymore, because I sure liked her. She was interesting through and through.

  “So now I’m in fifth grade,” she said, coming to the end of her presentation. “I love music, dancing, my family, my cat Bill, wearing hats, and playing the drums. I’ll end now with a little drum solo I made up myself.”

  Then she turned her newsboy cap around so the front was in the back and played a really rocking beat on the tabletop, ending with a rat-a-tat-tat on the bottom of the metal wastebasket.

  Everyone applauded. Mr. Rock put his fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly. I clapped so hard I thought my hands were going to fall off.

  Zoe smiled, and even glanced over at me. That felt good.

  “That’s the way us McKeltys do it!” Nick cheered as though he had ever done anything half as well as that.

  Zoe slid into her seat in front of me.

  “You did great,” I whispered to her. “I knew you would.”

  Zoe didn’t answer. Her eyes looked a little sad, though, as if to say, “I’m really
sorry we’re not friends anymore, Hank.”

  “Next up is Chelsea Byrd,” Mr. Rock was saying.

  Chelsea stood up and went to the front of the class. She took out a bottle of water she had brought from home, opened it, and put it next to her on the table.

  “I’m pretty nervous,” she said in a small voice for such a tall girl. She’s only in the fifth grade, but she towers over all the boys in our class. I hope she’s got a sky hook, because she could do some serious damage on the basketball court.

  You could just feel the tension pouring out of Chelsea. Her hands were even shaking a little as she took a sip from her water bottle, picked up her scrapbook, and faced the group.

  “Begin whenever you’re ready,” Mr. Rock said to her. “There’s nothing to worry about. We’re all here to make this easy for you, aren’t we?”

  Everyone nodded yes. Everyone but one person.

  And I think we all know who that one person was.

  CHAPTER 27

  Chelsea cleared her throat, took another swig from her water bottle, and began.

  “This is a picture of me the day I was born,” she said, pointing to a photo on the first page of her scrapbook. “The caption I wrote says, ‘Hi World! I’m here and I’m bald.’”

  Everyone laughed. First of all, that was a pretty funny thing to say. And second of all, we were trying to make Chelsea comfortable.

  I didn’t hear McKelty laughing, which is unusual, because when he laughs it sounds like a foghorn going off. I glanced over at him and saw him reaching down and fumbling in his backpack for something. It was just like him not to pay attention.

  Chelsea turned the page and held up her scrapbook so we could all see.

  “This is a picture of my first birthday party,” she said. “I’m the one with chocolate cake all over my face. The caption says, ‘There really is a face behind all the chocolate frosting, I promise.’”

  The picture made me think of my first birthday party. I don’t remember it, of course, but we have a picture of it in our family album. Papa Pete is holding out a dill pickle and I’m sitting in a high chair, taking a lick of it and looking like I’m going to cry. Things change, because I’m a huge dill pickle fan now. Next to pepperoni pizza and black-and-white cookies, they’re my favorite food.