by John J. Bonk
Gordy said only four more words to me for the rest of the trip home: “Are you wearing makeup?” It was a good thing I’d changed back into my pants.
Thanks to a little spit, Kleenex, and elbow grease, the red circles on my cheeks were gone by the time we pulled up to our house. The whole school must’ve gotten dismissed early, ‘cause LMNOP was in her side yard, digging up dirt. (Yeah, us Buttermilk Fallians are a real classy bunch.) I pretended I didn’t see her and sprinted up the porch steps. Mom was home from work already, and naturally Gordy couldn’t wait to tell her what the nurse had said about my being examined by our physician - he knew I hated doctors. So Mom carted me off to the Claremont Clinic.
The doc was nice enough, but he kept saying stuff like “Did you get hit with a fastball, sport?” and “Take a nasty slide into home plate, slugger?” As if every boy my age was automatically a jock wannabe. Mom set him straight - sort of. “Dustin tripped on the playground and bonked his head on a flagpole.”
Okay, I’d had to lie to her. Otherwise she would’ve shown up at school, seeking justice, and the subject of the play would’ve come up for sure. The doc finally said that everything checked out okay, but that I should take the next day off to rest. First I got excited, but then I realized the next day was Saturday. What a gyp!
But that was all “water under my bridgework,” as Aunt Birdie would say. The next morning I was up at the crack of eleven. Just enough time to make a mad dash to the kitchen to grab some snacks before my favorite TV show came on.
“Uh-oh. Mom, what the heck are you doing?”
“What’s it look like I’m doing?” she said, planting herself midsofa with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the remote control in the other. “It’s time for my program.”
“But Double Take is on! Why can’t we have five televisions, like a normal family?”
Usually it was Gordy I had to fight with for control of the TV. Fortunately, he was already out with his psycho friends, probably plotting a rumble at the high-school hop. But in front of the TV set on Saturday morning was definitely a No-Mom Zone.
“Are you sure it’s on now?” I whined. “What’s the name of it?”
“I forget. It’s on the Home Sweet Home Network.”
“Not Trash to Trendy!” That’s the show where they teach you stuff like how to make a fancy serving tray out of an old garbage-can lid. But no matter how many coats of gold paint or angel decals they cover it with, it still ends up looking like a garbage-can lid.
“No, a new one,” Mom said. “A cooking show.”
“Well, that’s not gonna help - unless it’s on the Miracle Network.”
“Listen, it’s not easy being thrown into the dating pool at my age,” she said, searching through the channels. “And you know what they say: ‘The quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.’”
“No offense, Mom, but find another route.”
“Dustin!”
I felt bad about that as soon as I said it, but cooking wasn’t one of Mom’s strong points. And listening to her talk about dating made me itch. My aunts kept telling her to get on with her life, that it was high time. It did seem like Dad had been gone forever - but it had only been three years, if you’re counting. He left us to be a stand-up comic. No joke. One weekend he had an out-of-town gig and didn’t come back Sunday night. Or the night after that, or the night after that. He showed up a week later and things went back to normal, except with a lot more yelling between him and Mom. A few months after that he left for good. Whenever I get really angry about it, I force myself to think of the good times we had. I play those memories over and over again in my brain, like an old black-and-white movie.
“Your show’s not even on, Mom,” I said, lunging for the remote. “Turn it to channel twelve.”
“Stop it!” she said, and clobbered me with a pillow.
“Oww, my lump!”
“Oh, I forgot,” Mom said, “See what you made me do?” She gently pushed my hair back to examine my head. “So how’re you feeling this morning? Better?”
“I guess,” I said, looking up at her with hound-dog eyes.
“It looks like the lump has gone down. You have to stop being such a klutz.”
A shuffling noise came from the kitchen.
“Knock-knock. Dorothy?”
We turned to see Granny Grubbs wearing a robe, slippers, and a plastic bubble cap, huffing and puffing her way through the living-room archway.
“Do you mind if I use your tub?” Granny asked.
“Umm-not at all,” Mom said, sounding unsure. “Help yourself.”
“I’ve been waiting all morning for Birdie to give herself a home perm so I could get in the bathroom for my ginger soak,” Granny said. “You know, it helps when my arthritis flares up. Finally Miss America comes out and - whooey, I thought I’d pass out from the fumes! I don’t know what kind of crazy chemicals they put in that concoction, but I’m not breathing them in.”
As soon as the sound of running water was coming from the John, Mom whispered, “Now’s a good time for me to go downstairs and start planning your gran’s surprise birthday party with your aunts. So the TV is all yours, your highness.” She kissed my forehead, grabbed her coffee cup, and fled, saying, “Feet off the coffee table, mister.”
We lived upstairs in a two-family home but spent a lot of our time downstairs, with my aunt Olive and my aunt Birdie and Granny Grubbs. I was the man of the house. (Gordy didn’t count, ‘cause he was a big flake and was hardly ever around.) Even though Mom wasn’t a real Grubbs, my aunts and Granny had all pitched in to help her out since the divorce. Mom didn’t have any blood relatives to turn to - her folks passed away years before I was even born.
Anyway, I was alone at last - sort of. I did a test run to make sure everything was in grabbing distance from the couch: half a box of assorted Jack Sprat doughnuts, a full box of Dino-S’mores cereal, a carton of milk, the remote control. My morning would be back on track with a single click!
You’ll double over with laughter when Buddy uses his dad’s hair-growing ointment to try to grow a beard on today’s hair-larious episode of Double Take! Laugh-Fest Saturday Morning is brought to you by Keggler’s Crustacean Crunch cereal.
“Wow, there’s blueberry barnacles, chocolate clams, and marshmallow snails!”
“Turn that down,” Granny yelled from the bathroom. “I can’t hear myself think.”
“Well, close the door, Gran!”
I didn’t want to accidentally see her naked and be scarred for life.
Crustacean Crunch is fun to munch for breakfast, snacks, and even lunch. Arrrrgh!
I was singing along to the jingle with Pirate Pete when the phone rang. I picked it up and heard another “Arrrrgh!”
It was Wally, calling right on time. We were die-hard Double Take fans and had a pact to watch every episode together, even if we weren’t in the same room. Double Take was about these twin brothers who were total opposites. Buddy was the cool brother and Bailey was the dork. The best part was that they were both played by the same actor - Jeremy Jason Wilder. The luckiest kid on the planet.
In our class, on Friday afternoons we had open discussion periods where Miss Honeywell would ask, “Okay, what do y’all wanna talk about today?” Wally and I would give each other two quick looks and shout, “Double Take!” Miss Honeywell never took us up on it.
“Hey, Wal, before I forget - you wanna come to my gran’s birthday party? It’s three weeks from today, the seventeenth. It’s gonna be huge.”
“Any food?”
“Tons.”
“Do I have to bring a present?”
“Dunno. Probably.”
“I’ll get back to you on that,” Wally said. “Oh, crud! This show’s not another rerun, is it?”
“They’re all reruns now. When’s it gonna sink in?”
Double Take used to be on at eight o’clock on Thursday nights; then they stopped making new episodes and threw the reruns in wi
th the Saturday morning cartoons. Not a good sign.
“It’s the Follican one,” I said.
“The what?”
“That stuff for bald guys.” I chirped out another jingle. “’If your head can’t grow it, Folli-can!’”
That’s probably why I couldn’t remember things like who Lewis and Clark were or what the capital of Pennsylvania is -too many jingles and sitcom plots were taking up valuable brain space.
“Oh, yeah. Buddy’s head ends up looking like a giant eggplant,” Wally said. “So how’s your head?”
“Fine.”
“Quick, before it comes on, tell me again about the famous kid who’s transferring into our class! What did the nurse say, exactly?”
“I already told you.”
“Well, did she give you any hints, like -” Wally stopped talking and the sound got muffled. “Yeah, Ma? Okay, I’ll ask him.”
“Ask me what?” I said.
“My ma wants to know if you liked the costume she made you.”
“Tell her yeah,” I said. “And tell her not to mention it to my mom if she runs into her at the grocery store or anything. Tell her she’s real sensitive about not knowing how to sew. She’s probably better off not even knowing about the play at all.”
I heard phone-fumbling.
“Dustin? It’s Wallace’s mom. Don’t worry, I won’t tell your mother about the play. We certainly don’t want to hurt her feelings. I just hope I didn’t work my fingers to the bone making all those costumes for nothing. You know Principal Futterman. He’ll put the play off till kingdom come.”
“No, we’re definitely doing it, Mrs. Dorkin,” I said. “We’d better be doing it!”
“All I know is, if it doesn’t involve sports, that man can’t be bothered,” she said. “He postponed the PTA bake sale so long, we had to cancel it - and now I’ve got a pantry full of coconut-almond hockey pucks. Oh, he’d like that!”
“Ma, it’s your own fault,” I heard Wally say. “You know I can’t stand coconut.”
Just then, the front door flew open and Gordy oozed in, dragging Sheila - straight out of the 1950s and into our living room. She wasn’t the poodle-skirt, ponytail variety I’d hoped for. More like a skanky greaser chick, with big hair, a pink leather jacket, and too much makeup.
“Where’s Mom?” Gordy grunted.
“Downstairs,” I said, putting my hand over the receiver.
Sheila perched on the arm of the couch next to me, picking something out of her teeth, while Gordy dumped half a box of Dino-S’mores into his mouth.
I hope he chokes on a stegosaurus.
“Gimme the phone,” Gordy said.
“I’m using it!”
“I have to make a freakin’ phone call,” he said, ripping the receiver out of my hand. “It’s important!”
He actually hung up on Wally’s mom and started dialing. I grabbed the remote control and turned up the volume on the television.
“Turn that down,” Gordy said.
“No can do. I’m watching Double Take. It’s important.”
“I thought they took that off the air,” Sheila said.
“It’s on Saturday mornings now,” I told her.
“That show bites the big one,” Gordy said. “And this Freak-show’s got that Jeremy Jason Jerk’s face plastered all over his room. I’m tellin’ ya, there’s something wrong with this kid.” He thwacked my arm with the phone. “I said, turn it down!”
I turned up the volume as loud as it would go. Gordy dropped the phone, dived over the back of the couch, and torpedoed me.
“Hey, get off!” I yelled.
“Leave him alone, Gordo,” Sheila said. “Jeez, don’t be such a drag.”
“Yeah, Gordo!”
He was strangling my wrist to get the remote control when I pulled his T-shirt sleeve and saw a flash of orange on his upper arm. In the middle of our struggle I got a better look and made out some sort of burning skull.
“Is that - that’s not a tattoo, is it?” I said, surrendering the remote. “That better not be a real one, or Mom’ll kill you.”
He pushed me away and tossed the remote to Sheila, who clicked the TV on mute and started channel surfing.
“So what if it’s real?” Gordy said, picking up the phone. “It’s my body. I’m old enough to do what I want.”
While he was dialing, I edged in a little closer to him, trying to make out the scabby letters under the skull.
“Uh-huh,” he mumbled into the receiver, slicking back his greasy hair. “Partly cloudy… a high of sixty-seven… winds from the west-northwest gusting to - blah, blah, blah… humidity, thirty-nine percent. See, babe - no rain till tomorrow.”
“That was your important phone call?” I said, but he ignored me.
“Come on,” he said to Sheila, “let’s rock ‘n’ roll.”
“Hey,” I said, “what’s R-E-B-U-L stand for?”
“Rebel, you loser.”
“You’re the loser,” I said. “Rebel is spelled with an e, not a u.” All of a sudden it hit me and I burst out laughing. “Omigod! You have to walk around for the rest of your life with a typo on your arm!”
Gordy did an all-out attack on me, twisting my arm behind my back and yelling, “Take it back, take it back,” like it was my fault. Real mature.
“Aw, leave the kid alone,” Sheila muttered. “American Graffiti is on. I love this movie.”
When the pain outweighed the laughter, I “took it back” and curled up in the corner of the couch. I knew I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in h-e-double-hockey-sticks of getting back control of the TV set as long as Elvis and Priscilla were in the room. Luckily, it was the last twenty minutes of the movie.
When it ended, Gordy pointed his finger at my face and warned, “You’d better keep your big mouth shut about the tattoo, see? ‘Cause I’ve got some juicy dirt on you too.” Then he grabbed his main squeeze and my box of doughnuts and bolted.
I was stunned for a few seconds, wondering if Gordy really knew something - or if he was just being the usual Gordy. When I switched channels on the TV, the Double Take credits were already rolling.
See ya next week, kids. Same time, same place—brand-new show!
“New show?” I said back to the TV. “What about Double Take?”
You’ll slap yourself silly if you miss it when the Maniac Muldoon cartoon makes its hilarious debut on Laugh-Fest Saturday Morning!
Wally called again. Our conversation started out just like the one before.
“Arrrrgh!”
Chapter 5
Water Balloons
Wally’s mom had me all worried for nothing. Monday morning, after the Pledge of Allegiance, Futterman announced that The Castle of the Crooked Crowns would be performed in a special assembly at one o’clock that Thursday - April Fools’ Day! We rehearsed like crazy for three days, and I knew my lines (and everyone else’s) backward and forward. But come Wednesday night I was so wound up, I must’ve slept maybe five minutes. Tops.
When the big day finally arrived, Miss Honeywell was as dressed up as I’d ever seen her, in a silky yellow dress with a matching jacket. Maybe it was just the sun streaking in, but I swear she was glowing like an angel dropped from heaven -only in high heels and with a big hairdo.
“Good morning, class,” she said. “Well, we’ve certainly got an exciting day ahead of us!”
I’ll say. It felt as if water balloons were sloshing around in my stomach all morning.
“I have a bit of news,” Miss Honeywell said, sitting on the edge of her desk. She crossed her legs, with a shoe dangling off one foot. If I weren’t a nervous wreck I might’ve drooled. “I’m not exactly sure why the main office wanted to keep all the details hush-hush,” she said. “I mean, y’all were going to find out eventually. But that transfer student I told you about will not be joining our class next week, as expected.”
The famous kid? No way.
“He’s arriving today!” Miss Honeywell said, so excite
d that she kicked off her shoe.
Who starts at a new school in April, anyway? Why bother? And what are the odds that he’d get here on Play Day, of all days?
“I should explain that this young man is very - well, let’s say ‘special,’” she said, hopping down from the desk and stepping into her shoe. “Not to say that y’all aren’t special, because you know I think each one of you is finer than hair on a frog. But he’s special in - well, a very special way.”
Huh? If I didn’t know better, I’d swear she was drunk.
“Now I want you to treat him just like you’d treat anybody else,” she said. “The last thing in the world we want to do is to make him feel uncomfortable.”
Millicent Fleener raised her hand.
“Yes, Millicent?”
“Is he physically challenged? Like, in a wheelchair or something?”
“No, he’s not,” Miss Honeywell said.
Darlene Deluca’s hand went up, but she didn’t wait to get called on.
“Is he from another country and doesn’t speak English?”
“No.”
Wally’s desk was right next to mine. His hand shot up next. “Ooh, ooh, ooh!” he said, bouncing up and down like his seat was on fire and he was putting it out with his rear end.
“Yes?”
“Is he, like, forty-five years old and just now coming back to school to finish his education?”
The class groaned.
“It’s possible,” Wally said. “Stuff like that happens all the time.”
“It does not,” I whispered. “And I already told you he was somebody famous!“
“So? You could be forty-five and famous.”
“Y’all are getting carried away now,” Miss Honeywell said, fiddling with her charm bracelet. “You’ll find out, all in good time. Just remember to be yourselves. It’s no big deal.”
She was right. It wasn’t a big deal - it was a gi-normous deal! When Reggie MacPherson transferred into our class, Miss Honeywell barely mentioned anything about it. She just made sure there was an empty desk ready and waiting. But today our classroom was hospital clean: the windows and blackboards were washed, the papers on the bulletin boards were lined up perfectly, and there were even fresh flowers on her desk. Jeez, who is this kid? The heir to the throne of Bulgaria?