by Peter Hannan
Wrong.
It was Edwin. He clutched the microphone to his chest, until he realized that everyone could hear his heart pounding. Then he lifted it to his mouth.
“There’s no point in killing Delaware,” he said, turning to me. “First of all, I should probably tell you that I’m the one who scratched ‘Dead Dweeb’ on your locker.”
What?
“I told you I didn’t do it,” snapped the Butcher, crossing his arms.
“But Edwin,” I asked, struggling to my feet. “Why would you do that?”
“Fair question,” he said, “and that brings up my second point.” He cleared his throat. Then a tidal wave of words gushed out. “I’ve loved Molly for a lot longer than either of you. She’s been trying to break up with the Butcher since last summer. Then you came along, Davis, with your whole new-guy mystique. And your so-called brilliant poems. They’re not even that good, you know. I could write better ones in my sleep. Anyway, I just wanted to scare you.”
Dead silence.
Molly and the Butcher looked as shocked as I felt.
“Molly and I were born one day apart, in the same hospital,” Edwin continued. “My mom says we cooed and gurgled at each other, making a very deep baby connection.”
Wait a minute. Deep baby connection? New-guy mystique?
I waited for “April Fool’s,” but none came. Edwin was serious.
“All those years, Molly never knew,” he said, still looking at me. “She didn’t know that I saved every single thing she gave me. Anything she touched. Old birthday cards. Those candy hearts with the sayings on them. The bandage from that time she banged her knee on the volleyball court. Remember, Molly? Sixth-grade girls’ intramural championships?”
Good god, this was getting a little creepy. And once again, it seemed like Edwin would never stop talking.
“Old book reports, used lollipop sticks, her retainer. I have a piece of Juicy Fruit she chewed last year in my pocket right now.”
“Ewww,” everyone said, all at once.
Except for Ivan Brink, who said, “Cool.”
Molly was stunned.
We all stood like statues. Edwin had clearly established himself as a major Molly freak.
The Butcher breathed heavily and snorted like a bull. I saw where this was going and it was not going to be pretty. He grunted a couple of times, put his head down, and charged at Edwin. His hands were in the I’m-going-to-strangle-you position that I was so familiar with.
Edwin screamed like a little girl. Molly screamed like a regular-sized girl.
I had to do something.
I tore off after the Butcher and leaped onto his back, wrapping my arms around his thick neck. I thought he’d fall over, but he didn’t. I was just a minor inconvenience as he barreled toward Edwin.
Then I did what anyone would do in that situation. Especially anyone who recently enrolled in karate, but, you know, hadn’t learned diddly yet. I held on tight with one arm still hooked around his neck, and karate chopped him in the nose with the other.
“KA-POW!” I yelled.
“ARRRRRGGGGHHHH!” screamed Gerald. He elbowed my ribs and twisted and bucked, trying to throw me off. My legs slammed into one of the goons.
“WATCH IT!” Karl Kidder cried and slurped. (n.: 3. the Niagara Falls of droolers.)
I karate-chopped the Butcher anywhere I could reach. I yelled out to him in rhythm with the chops: “Don’t! You! Ever! Get! Tired! Of! Being! Such! A! Cliché!?”
“SHUT UP!” he howled, followed by, “OUCH! OUCH! OUCH!” He whipped me around in the other direction. This time, my foot popped Willard Gourdinski in the jaw.
“OWWW!”
“Butcher,” I hollered. “Remember your karate ethics. You’re not exactly ‘honoring the principles of etiquette,’ here!”
“SHUT! UP!” he cried.
Finally, like a bronco being worn down by a champion buckaroo, the Butcher staggered … and went down. Hard. My landing was slightly softer. I landed on him.
We found ourselves at Molly’s feet. We both looked up and tried to catch her eye, but she was looking past us, like we weren’t even there.
“Eddie,” she said, “I never knew you cared.”
I couldn’t believe my ears.
Edwin looked the most surprised of all.
“Hey, wait a minute!” I said. “What about how he also never told you he loved you? Only for him, it went on for your entire life.”
“Yeah,” said Molly, slowly moving toward Edwin, “but we did make that deep baby connection. Plus, he’s the smartest kid in school. I do wish he’d returned that retainer, though. I sifted through an entire dumpster looking for that thing.”
And then she kissed Edwin. I’m not talking about a peck on the cheek or a fake TV kiss. This was deep, passionate … and horrifying. They really went at it, like they were alone, not in front of a crowd of spectators whose minds had just been blown to smithereens. It went on forever.
I helped Gerald to his feet. Maybe we could bond over our mutual pain. After all, not only were we both Molly rejects, we also both had humiliating urine-leakage incidents in our past. Who knew?
He peered down at me. “What do you say, Delaware? Let’s let bygones be bygones.”
“Really?” I said, holding my hand out to shake. I couldn’t believe it. Maybe he really wasn’t so bad.
Gerald grinned and whispered, “April Fool’s.” His Clint Eastwood was better than mine.
He poked me hard in the chest with one finger. That was all it took.
I flapped my arms a bit — the way cartoon characters do when they’re trying to catch their balance — and fell into the canal.
I hit the cold water hard and sank like a stone, in an explosion of bubbles. But I wasn’t scared. In a weird way, it was good just to be off that barge. No more being threatened or laughed at or hated or rejected. A little alone time.
I almost didn’t want to come up.
Then I remembered — your private parts fall off, you slowly bleed to death — and I panicked. I kicked and thrashed my way to the surface. I swallowed about a gallon of canal scum along the way.
But of course, I didn’t die. And of course, there were no sharks down there. The sharks were on the barge and the dock.
I doggy-paddled to the dock ladder and dragged myself up the first rung. Willard Gourdinski, who had apparently raced across the gangplank to greet me, leaned over the edge, vibrated for a moment, and spit. He got me right in my black eye.
That’s when I realized that Dad’s sunglasses were at the bottom of the canal.
But I kept climbing. Mr. Shettle grabbed my hand and pulled me up the rest of the way. I flopped onto the dock like a flounder. Everyone in the crowd shook their heads and sneered as I picked myself up and sloshed among them, hocking toxic canal loogies.
Charlotte Carlotta, the snobby poetry girl, was standing there with her arms crossed, rolling her eyes at me. “I looked through every single New Yorker for the past three years, and you’re nowhere to be found, liar. And that was not the state song of Delaware!”
A group of cheerleader types — the same ones who, only days before, were desperate to know me — looked at me like I had cooties, which I probably did (if not something much worse).
“Why don’t you just go back to Delaware, where you belong?” said the alpha cheerleader.
Ivan Brink appeared at my side. “That was cool,” he said. “Did your private parts fall off?”
I felt nauseous. The weight of the water in my clothes felt like the weight of the entire world.
Danderbook walked up to me, looking concerned. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“Never better,” I said, hacking and clearing my throat of flotsam and jetsam, like a seriously ancient mariner.
Then the mystery girl from the crowd approached. What now?
“Hi, Davis Delaware,” she said. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Umm, no …” Spit, hack, blechh. �
��… actually, I don’t.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Oh, really? Maybe this will jog your memory: Back in the second grade, you wet your pants on me, and I beat you up.”
No. Way.
Sally Bean? This was not Sally Bean. How did she get so beautiful? No longer large. Completely un-mustachioed.
“Remember? We called you Pee Boy.”
I heard a few giggles from the crowd.
Oh, please, not again. Deny, deny, deny.
“Nope, I don’t remember.”
“How could you not remember? What about Urine Trouble? The Slip Slide Kid?”
I shrugged. “No and no.”
She grinned. “Oh, come on. How about my personal favorite: the Wee-Wee Wuss?”
Oh, man. I hadn’t remembered that one.
Suddenly, I realized that everyone on the dock was listening … and laughing again. At me.
But I mostly noticed Sparky. He laughed the hardest. Now he looked like an insane munchkin. Or a demented ventriloquist dummy from a horror movie. I half expected smoke to start coming out of his eyes or ears or both.
I felt a rush of humiliation. I don’t know if your life really flashes before your eyes when you die, but it definitely does when you’re dying of embarrassment: Molly, the Butcher, Edwin, Sparky, Sally, Dad, Mom, Mom’s heart, new life, old problems — they were all right there, bubbling up in me. All boiling like some kind of nasty Life Sucks soup.
My face got hot and I cried. A little.
I pulled my T-shirt up over my head and pressed it against my face, hiding like that same wimpy turtle. I pretended to wipe off the canal scum, even though the shirt was totally soaked in it. I could see Mad Manny the Monkey through the fabric. Good old Manny. He always crashed, but he always came back.
I took a few deep breaths and poked my head out of the shirt again. I realized it might be hard to see someone’s tears, anyway, if that someone also had toxic slime running down his cheeks.
The crowd was losing interest and moving away.
I looked at Sally Bean and thought of that day, way back when: the slide, the pee, the fist, the bloody nose, and the sand-caked crotch. I remembered my mom kissing me later and washing my pants and never talking about what happened, even though I knew she knew. She knew everything.
I thought about the years that followed, and how no one would let me live it down, even though Sally moved away not long after The Incident. And that now, after starting over at a new school, the nightmare had come screaming back, worse than ever. It was like a bad sci-fi movie. Sally Bean was some kind of cruel time-traveling-and-transforming beauty, sent on a mission from my past to screw up my future.
No matter what I did, Davis Delaware would be forever known as the Wee-Wee Wuss, the pathetic putz who had fallen into the pukiest canal ever, the doofus who was in love with Molly — a too-beautiful, too-smart girl who ended up hating him.
The Butchers had taken to the stage, and the amps were popping and squealing as they tuned up.
“How about some real music for a change?” Gerald laughed.
With that, they began blasting the kind of song that really gets a crowd revved up. Within minutes, everyone climbed aboard the barge and started dancing. Stephen Jablowski was right up front, howling like a happy coyote. Gerald would get back to the business of making everyone’s life completely miserable as soon as break was over. But for now, he was a rock star.
Sally Bean and I were alone on the dock. “Sorry I let that little secret out,” she said.
I sighed. “Yeah, was that really necessary?”
“I think so. You never even apologized for the slide incident,” she said.
“I was supposed to apologize to you?”
“You didn’t get peed on.”
She had a point. “I’m sorry. I guess it was as bad for you as it was for me.”
“Worse,” she said. “Plus, I had a serious puppy-love crush on you.”
What the what?
“Wow,” I said, pausing for a minute while it all sank in. “Punching me in the nose was a funny way of showing it.”
“I wasn’t going to. My plan changed after you did what you did. Getting peed on will change a girl’s mind.”
“Oh,” I said. Maybe this actually made sense. What I’d remembered as an unprovoked attack was really just an act of self-defense. Who would have thought? “Okay, okay. So what are you doing here?”
Sally smiled. “Just transferred in. It was all about when my mom’s new job started.”
How on Earth had she changed so much? I could barely see her old face in this face. Blue eyes and dark hair, my favorite combination. Deepest dimples ever. She untangled a gloppy mess of canal gunk from the collar of my shirt. I noticed a big black earring dangling from her ear. It was shaped like a guitar pick.
“Wanna go for a walk?” she asked.
“Promise you won’t punch me?”
“Promise you won’t pee on me?”
That made me laugh. It’s amazing what a cute girl can get away with saying to you.
It also sort of closed the book on the whole horrible slide episode. When something bad happens, people always say that someday you’ll look back at it and laugh. All of a sudden, someday was here. We were both laughing, and that terrible shared memory not only seemed funny, it almost seemed good.
The Butchers were playing a famous band’s famous song, the kind that every high school rock band plays. I had to admit, they sounded better than the Dweebs. A lot better. But everyone was cheering and dancing and freaking out, like somehow playing this same old song was a huge deal.
Sally rolled her eyes. “Lame,” she said, walking away and gesturing for me to follow.
“Just a minute,” I said.
I walked over and untied the barge from its moorings. One by one, I dropped the lines into the water. Nobody noticed at first. They were too wrapped up in the party atmosphere. I sat down on the edge of the dock and put my feet on the side of the boat. I leaned back, took a deep breath, and strained against it with all my might. It moved a bit, but something was holding it back. Sally noticed some thick extension cords and unplugged them with a yank. The Butchers fell silent. The gangplank splashed into the water, and the barge drifted slowly away.
It took a second for the Butcher and all the others to figure out what had happened. Everyone shook their fists and yelled at us. Well, everyone except Edwin and Molly, who were both smiling and waving. I was glad about that. Molly even started blowing kisses, and I thought they were for me, but then I noticed Furry — old, bald Furry — sitting on a bench with Miss Danderbrook, blowing kisses back. He had a saxophone on his lap.
I gathered up what I could find of my notebooks as Sally and I walked over to the bench.
“One heck of a fundraiser,” said Danderbrook. “We made way more money than last year.”
“Oh, good,” I said wiping some canal muck off my face. “Hey, I’m sorry about that horrible drawing. I did it before I even knew you.”
“That’s okay.” Danderbrook smiled. “Art isn’t always pretty.” Then she gave me a look. “Liberating that barge is a whole other question, though. You might be in deep bleep, if you know what I mean.”
“Bleep yeah, I do,” I said. “I hope Rigo goes easy on Edwin about defacing the locker, though. He was operating under the influence of a full-blown Molly obsession at the time.”
Just then, my dad ran toward us from the parking lot. He was out of breath. “For heaven’s sake, Davis, didn’t I tell you to stay in bed? Why are you all wet? What happened to your face? Where’s your guitar?”
“Oh, it’s on that thing,” I said, pointing to the barge. “Edwin’ll bring it over. Which reminds me, I’m almost positive your sunglasses are at the bottom of the canal. I’ll figure out a way to pay for them.” I watched Dad’s eyes get wide, and I continued before he had a chance to say anything. “Hey, Dad, meet Sally, Furry, and Miss Danderbrook.”
“Nice to meet you all,” said Dad. T
hen he turned to me. “Let’s go. You really need to sleep. I mean it.”
“I know,” I said. “But Sally and I are going to walk. I’ll be home soon.”
Dad gave me a look and sighed. Then he sat down on the bench between Furry and Miss Danderbrook. “How do you two know Davis?”
“We’re old cronies from the barbershop,” said Furry.
“Barbershop?” asked Dad.
“Davis is my poetry star,” said Danderbrook.
“Poetry?”
I had a feeling Dad would have a lot of questions for me when I got home.
For now, Sally and I walked away.
“So, you’re a poet,” she said.
“Not really. I think I’m over that. Pretty much everyone hates me now, anyway. Except for maybe Molly and Edwin.” Molly and Edwin sounded so wrong. But also kind of right. I was happy for them, but I knew my crush on Molly wouldn’t instantly evaporate. Walking along with Sally helped. The fact that I was pretty sure she wasn’t dating an ex-bed-wetting psycho-bully nut job like Gerald helped even more.
“Well, I for one don’t hate you,” she said with a smile. “At least not as much as I used to.”
What a girl.
Turn the page for madness, mayhem, and animals gone wild in a sneak peak of Peter Hannan’s next book, Petlandia!
Madame Wigglesworth didn’t always hate the humans.
She actually almost tolerated the Finkleblurts when they treated her properly: like the queen she knew she was.
They worshipped her from afar.
Just the way a queen likes it.
But one day the unthinkable occurred. She got dethroned.
The dethroner was a lovable, dim, and totally insane little pup named Grub.
The very first thing Grub did was eat Madame Wigglesworth’s crown. But did he get punished? Hardly.
He grew up fast. Every single day, the humans showered him with love, something Madame Wigglesworth found painful to watch. Grub slobbered, they cooed. He messed, they cheered. He did the most basic stuff, like sitting, rolling over, or fetching a spit-soaked ball, and they danced around the room like wacky windup toys.