Along the way, Larry has all sorts of adventures, including a run-in with these pirates named Pukin’ Bill, Thievin’ Sam, and Emily Knifethrower.
Pukin’ Bill gets severely seasick all the time, but pirating is basically the family business, so he had no choice.
Thievin’ Sam has never been able to hold a job because he can’t help stealing everything. Emily Knifethrower is pretty nice and doesn’t actually throw knives—that just happens to be her name, which has been very difficult for her and has led to all kinds of misunderstandings. She and Larry end up falling in love, but then the boat hits an iceberg and sinks, and some friendly dolphins carry them all to safety, except for Mittens, who’s a jerk to the dolphins, so they feed him to a polar bear.
Eventually Larry and Emily Knifethrower start a new life in Australia and even get a new cat who’s way cooler than Mittens, and at long last everybody is able to see Larry for who he is and stop wondering why he’s so short for a giant. And Emily Knifethrower decides what the heck, maybe she ought to learn how to throw knives after all, so she does and she gets so good that she wins the Olympic gold medal in knife throwing, which is the first time her adopted country of Australia has ever medaled in knife throwing, so she becomes a national hero. That ends up making Larry really jealous because he’s kind of a petty guy, so she leaves him. Then he gets attacked by this gang of rabid, radioactive kangaroos that’s been terrorizing the whole country, and they’re about to rip off his arms when out of nowhere, the dolphins from before show up in these special suits that allow them to walk and fight on land, and they totally destroy the kangaroos. And Larry learns his lesson and goes off to fight crime with them.
In conclusion, I can see why The Shortest Giant in the World is considered a classic because it’s a very exciting book. It’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen next, almost as if Calamari Bogdonovich had no idea what he was doing and just wrote down whatever nonsense came into his head. Also, the writing style is very beautiful and poetic, and even though the book is over nine hundred pages long, I got through it in no time. On the Liston Book Report Scale of one to seven million, I give this book my very highest rating of: five.
It’s hard to say when it happened, or how, but I am definitely feeling like I’ve been FOUND OUT. Not that Mr. Allen taped a sign on my back saying “FRAUD” or “NOT THAT TALENTED” or anything. He did tape a notecard to my forehead that said “AUSTRALIA” for a really weird geography lesson where we had to figure out what countries we were by asking each other questions like “Do I have kangaroos in me?” But that’s a whole different story.
Maybe I’m just being paranoid. I mean, I did get a purple Stegosaurus on my book report. Mr. Allen wouldn’t tell us what the different “grades” meant. We had to figure that out on our own, but everybody agreed, over a delicious lunch of butternut squash and lamb medallions, that a purple Stegosaurus was basically an A.
Forrest, on the other hand, got a blue-and-green-striped arctic fox inside a triangle, and almost cried into his hand-cranked lavender and sea salt ice cream.
The main thing that makes me think Mr. Allen is onto me is: I barely ever get to play the piano. We’re a month into school now, and he lets Zenobia play her oboe nearly every day. Klaus is always, always on the drums. Usually during music class, Mr. Allen has me water the classroom ferns, Betsy and Arnold, and sing. Or he gives me a kazoo.
A kazoo isn’t even a real instrument. It’s something you buy for twenty-nine cents at a hardware store.
“Maybe he has you confused with Lisa,” Evan suggested when I told him about it.
He and I were hanging out in my basement. It was Saturday night, and he was sleeping over. Usually, that would mean:
1) splitting a large sausage and onion pizza and a giant thing of soda
2) playing video games
3) prank-calling our friends Jason and Terry
4) getting prank-called by our friends Jason and Terry
5) planning to stay up until dawn
6) falling asleep way before that because of: way too much pizza
But tonight I wasn’t in the mood for any of those things. My dad had gotten us the usual pizza, but all that fancy food at school had changed my taste buds. I ate one slice and felt like that was all the grease and gloppy cheese and bland tomato sauce I could handle. I even found myself wondering why there was no chopped arugula or shaved pecorino cheese on this pizza, like there would have been at school. I didn’t say any of this to Evan because I didn’t want to sound like some kind of fussy gourmet lunatic. I just let my other three slices sit there congealing into a rock-hard blob while he wolfed his down.
Evan noticed right away that something was wrong, which is what a best friend is for. First, he tried to snap me out of it by challenging me to a game of Frisbee golf out in the backyard, but when I said no, he asked me what was going on.
Evan sat on a beanbag chair and listened patiently to all my fears about not being good enough or weird enough.
When I was finished, he asked if I was going to eat my slices.
I said no and watched him demolish slice number five. I could tell he was thinking. Evan does a lot of his best thinking while stuffing his face.
Finally, he wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and said, “You’re an idiot, dude.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s very helpful.”
“No,” Evan said. “Listen.”
He stood up fast, which caused the beanbag chair to make a loud farting sound.
After we stopped laughing at that, like the super-mature guys we are, Evan said something that blew my mind.
“You’ve got the sweetest deal in the world, and you don’t even see it,” he said, gesturing at me with the slice of pizza (number six) that he’d just picked up.
“How is being the dumbest kid at the smart school a sweet deal?” I asked.
“Because, Bro-bi-Wan Kenobi, it’s not a smart school. It’s an art school. And you know what that means?”
“Since when are you doing Pierre’s bro game?” I asked.
Evan crammed the last third of his slice into his mouth and spoke around it. He always eats his pizza backward, crust first, so the last third was basically all cheese.
“Focus, dude,” he said.
“What was the question again?”
Evan shook his head and reached for slice number seven.
“Let me spell it out for you, Jake.” He made a bullhorn with his hands and shouted through it.
“YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH ANYTHING!”
I didn’t really like being shouted at, so I made a bullhorn back and shouted, too. We must have looked crazy, standing two feet away from each other and screaming like that.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN?”
“I MEAN—”
Evan dropped his bullhorn and spoke in a normal voice. “I mean that as long as you say it’s artistic, they’ll let you do whatever you want. No matter how crazy it is. Right?”
I thought about that and nodded. He was right. Just yesterday, Azure had announced at the beginning of art class that she needed everybody’s chairs, then spent the entire hour piling them up into an enormous, rickety sculpture that reached almost to the ceiling. When it was finished, she tried to climb it, fell and busted open her lip. When the nurse carried her out on a stretcher, everyone cheered.
“I guess we do have a lot of freedom,” I said slowly.
Evan shook his head. “What’s happening to you, ancient fortune-teller Bro-stradamus? The Jake I know would be looking for ways to take advantage of that crazy place. To have as much fun with it as he possibly can.”
Evan was right. I saw it now. I’d been trying to do two things at Music and Art Academy:
▪ Fit in.
▪ Be normal.
The problem was, you couldn’t do both those things at once, because what was normal to me wasn’t normal there. In other words:
Fitting in ≠ normalness
“If I want to fit in, I ha
ve to be weird,” I said, feeling like I’d solved some kind of complicated math problem.
“Exactly!” Evan was so excited he was jumping up and down, which made his pizza flop like the tongue of a gross giant lizard. “You’ve got to outweirdo the weirdos, dude. Let your freak flag fly, like my old hippie aunt says.”
“I’ve got to be King Weirdo,” I said, beginning to get into the idea.
Then I realized I had a problem, and all the excitement wheezed out of me like air from a deflating balloon.
“I have no idea how to do that.”
Evan grinned and picked up slice number eight.
“That’s the fun part,” he said, crunching into the crust. “Get a pad and pen. We’re gonna make a list.”
Outweirdoing the Weirdos
A LIST OF IDEAS
by Jake “The Dentist” Liston
and
the Honorable Reverend Evan J. S. Healey, CPA
1. From now on, insist that everybody at school, including teachers, refer to you as The Dentist.
2. Refuse to explain why.
3. Only refer to yourself as The Dentist, and only talk in third person, as in “Mr. Allen, can The Dentist go to the bathroom?”
4. Start a school club.
5. The most ridiculous club you can think of.
6. Possible club ideas:
a) Parakeets for Peace: When people show up to join, tell them sorry, the club is only for parakeets, and turn them away.
b) Varsity Mice Hockey: Like ice hockey, except played by mice. Must bring your own mice. And equipment. And ice.
c) Debate Debate Club: The purpose of the club is to debate whether to have a debate club.
d) Roll-Playing Game Club: Not role, like Dungeons and Dragons, but roll. Basically we roll everywhere. Down hills, up hills, through the halls.
e) Anti-Napkin Club: A club for people who really dislike napkins, to engage in various types of anti-napkin activism.
f) Space Exploration Club: Not outer space, just regular, empty space. That’s what we explore.
g) Trout Wrestling Club: We don’t wrestle the trout. That would be ridiculous. The trout wrestle each other. We’re more like coaches.
7. Make your Identity As An Artist copying Cody exactly, but acting like you don’t realize it at all. Say you’re going to be a sculptor. Make a super-bad version of his chisel necklace, like out of clay, and wear it all the time. See how long you can do it before he goes insane, then say it was all a “project.”
8. Finger-paint. But with your butt.
9. Always look people directly in the mouth.
10. Wear pants as shirts and shirts as pants. And underwear as hats. But do not wear hats as underwear. That would be uncomfortable.
11. Start an Adopt a Senior Program, where kids in the sixth grade can adopt and care for a twelfth grader.
12. Walk up to random kids in the hall, thrust a rutabaga at them, and scream, “Just take it! You have to trust me! I’m from the future!”
The weirdos weren’t going to know what hit them.
On Monday, I woke up full of energy and ready to start Operation Outweirdo. Lisa had to go to school early to see her guidance counselor, so I snagged a ride with her and Pierre.
“Hop in, ancient Egyptian architect and doctor Im-Bro-tep,” he said, opening the back door for me. I checked the seat before I sat down this time—and good thing, too. A leaky tube of bright pink oil paint was lying right where I would have sat.
“From now on, call me The Dentist,” I said as he fired up the engine.
Lisa turned in her seat and arched her eyebrows at me. “The Dentist?” she repeated.
“That’s right,” I said, staring out the window like I was bored by the conversation already, even though secretly my heart was pounding against my ribs because I figured she’d say something like That’s stupid or I’m not calling you that.
Instead, though, she asked, “Why The Dentist?”
“Why not The Dentist?” I answered.
Pierre bobbed his head. “Right on. I like it, The Dentist.”
“Thanks, Bro-man Numeral,” I said, grinning ear to ear. Then I noticed that the tube of paint was still in my hand. Without realizing it, I’d been squeezing it like a stress ball.
I unscrewed the cap and dabbed a tiny bit of paint onto my fingertip. Then, looking at myself in the rearview mirror, I smeared it in a line under one eye so that it looked like the eye black baseball players use when it’s sunny out. Except pink.
Pierre watched me in the mirror and said, “You feeling all right today, The Dentist? You didn’t eat any bad shrimp last night or anything, did you?”
“I feel fantastic,” I said. “Why?”
Lisa turned, and her eyes got wide when she saw my pink streak. “Because you’re acting weird,” she said, and then added in a super snarky voice, “The Dentist.”
I shrugged. “Just being me.”
•••
By lunchtime, my whole class was calling me The Dentist. In fact, they were looking for excuses to—coming up to me and saying stuff like “Can I borrow a pen, The Dentist?”
The pink paint, nobody even mentioned except Azure, who said, “Rad,” then pressed her forehead hard against my cheek. When she pulled back, she had a matching stripe. Then she just walked away.
I couldn’t wait to do some more Outweirdoing, but nothing else on the list felt quite right. Plus, I could feel my philosophy of Outweirdoing changing and evolving—now that I was actually at school, it felt like the key was to go with the flow, make it up as I went along instead of plotting and planning. Maybe I couldn’t improvise on the piano, but I could do it in life. Put my fingers all over the Keys of Action, and play a Symphony of Randomness to delight and amaze, or whatever.
Inspiration hit me during lunch (quinoa-and-chickpea burgers, way more delicious than it sounds, and turkey stroganoff). Part of the deal with this whole organic local cuisine thing is that they compost every single scrap of food, which they call feeding the earth. There are huge compost bins set up everywhere, and we dump what’s on our plates and bowls into them when we finish. I was watching a custodian we call Cool Earl (because he’s cool and his name’s Earl) empty one of them, and suddenly it came to me.
“Wait!” I called, vaulting out of my seat. “I need that!”
Cool Earl turned to look at me, the bin in his hands.
“Need what, The Dentist?” he asked. Word had really gotten around fast.
“The garbage. I’m going to make a sculpture.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Cool Earl, and then added, “It’s garbage.”
“I know it’s garbage. But one man’s garbage is another man’s, uh, you know, another man’s…”
“Artistic medium?” Cool Earl finished for me.
“Yeah! Exactly!”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“You’re the one who said it,” I pointed out.
Cool Earl shook his head like he was tired of this conversation, or his job, or the whole world.
“Whatever,” he said, handing me the bin, which was full of compost and probably weighed twenty or thirty pounds. “Knock yourself out, The Dentist.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I could feel everybody’s eyes on me as I carried the bin back to my seat. They stayed on me as I stood up and walked out the cafeteria door. And they were still on me when I returned from Mr. Allen’s room a minute later, holding a giant tube of glue.
People actually came over from the other tables to watch as I squeezed a long, thick stream of white glue into the compost.
I could hear murmurs as I started kneading the whole mixture with my hands, like it was bread dough.
I was sweating, partly from the effort but mainly because I didn’t actually know what I was going to do next. “Garbage sculpture” as an idea seemed pretty cool, but the fact was, I had no idea how to sculpt anything.
I started mak
ing little sticky garbage balls, the size of eggs, and lining them up on the table. I figured I could make a few dozen of those while I figured out what to do next. Like maybe a giant garbage bird’s nest to put them in. Or some kind of weird garbage dinosaur laying them. Or maybe the trail of garbage eggs led to a big garbage TV, and this project was a comment on how trashy all the stuff we watch is, or something.
“This is highly inappropriate, young man.”
The voice that said it was deep and unfamiliar, and I almost threw up into my bin of gluey garbage when I heard it.
I turned and found myself staring at Mr. Briggs, the assistant principal.
He was a big hatchet-faced guy, and the rumor was that he’d been a college football star until he broke his leg. If anybody here seemed to fit in worse than me, it was him. He probably would have been happier assistant-principaling at a military school.
“I’m sorry,” I heard myself say in a weird, strangled voice.
“The lunchroom is not the proper place to sculpt.”
Mr. Briggs snapped his fingers. “Forrest. Cody. Help The Dentist carry his materials to the Sculpture Lab.”
Jake the Fake Keeps It Real Page 3