The World's Greatest Underachiever and the Crazy Classroom Cascade

by Henry Winkler

  “But I promised Papa Pete,” said Ashley. “I shook on it.”

  “Fine,” said Frankie. “Then you’ve got to find me something live and furry.”

  “How about Robert?” I suggested.

  “No,” said Frankie. “His mother would freak out if we tried to stuff him in a hat.”

  Cheerio got tired of sniffing and started to chase his tail.

  “Cheerio’s at it again,” Ashley said. “Doesn’t he ever get dizzy?”

  I looked at Cheerio twirling around like a top. A flash of inspiration hit me. Cheerio! He was small. He was furry. He was alive.

  “Members of Magik 3,” I said as I sprang off the sofa. “I have the answer. We’re pulling Cheerio out of that hat.”

  When he heard his name, Cheerio stopped spinning for a minute and looked me right in the eye. Then he started spinning again.

  Frankie put his hand to his forehead, like he had a bad headache. “He does that inside a hat and I’m telling you right now, he’ll burn a hole in the fabric.”

  “Cheerio can be calm,” I said. “He’ll co-operate.”

  “Right, and my name is Bernice,” said Frankie. “By the way, here’s another question, guys. What top hat have you ever seen that this dog would fit in?”

  “He’s our best choice, Frankie. He’s also our only choice,” Ashley said. “So we’ll just have to figure out a way.” She pushed her glasses up on her nose and folded her arms in a way that meant business. Ashley can be tough when she wants to be.

  “I think we can build a hat big enough to hold Cheerio,” I suggested. “There’s stuff all over here that we could use.”

  “Yeah, like what?” Frankie asked.

  I looked around. On the shelf above the door, I saw a big, round hatbox kind of thing. We pulled it down, took off the lid and put Cheerio inside. He fitted perfectly.

  “Great, we’ll use this,” I said. “We’ll cover it in black felt.”

  “Like we happen to have a big pile of felt lying around,” Frankie said.

  “I know where they sell felt.” I had just seen some the week before in the ninety-nine-cent shop. It was in the school supplies section.

  “It’s still not going to look like a hat,” said Frankie.

  “Then we’ll get some cardboard and make a brim,” I answered.

  “That sounds hard,” said Ashley. “How will we get the brim to stick on?”

  “Trust me,” I said. “I’m a genius with super glue.”

  “OK, genius,” said Frankie, “tell me how we’re going to keep your nutcase dog inside the hat until it’s time to pull him out?”

  “I’ll build a pocket inside and put some biscuits there to keep Cheerio calm.” By now, Frankie and Ashley were pretty impressed with my ideas. I have to admit, I was too.

  “We can even put the whole hat on wheels,” I said. I don’t know where that idea came from. It just popped into my mind. One second there was nothing in my head, and the next second there was a hat on wheels. It was amazing.

  “Hank, you are covered in creativity,” Ashley said.

  “You’re the second person today who’s used that word,” I said to her. “Ms Adolf told me she was looking forward to seeing me use my creativity in my essay.”

  Then it struck me. Creativity. It was the answer to all my problems. Creativity had solved our hat problem. And creativity was going to get me through Ms Adolf’s essay. And not just get me through, either. My creativity was going to get me the best mark of my life.

  Let everyone else write their stupid five paragraphs. Not me. Right then and there, I decided I was going to build my essay. I’d bring Niagara Falls into the classroom, water and all.

  I could see it in my mind, just like I had seen the big hat for Cheerio. I’d build a living model of Niagara Falls, with cliffs and waterfalls and even a boat. Everyone would know first hand what I had done in my summer holidays. Mr Love would hear about how great it was and come to our classroom just to see it. He’d call my dad and say what a great job I had done.

  Papa Pete always says, “There are many roads to Rome.” I used to think he was talking about the traffic in Italy. But now it made sense to me. What he meant was, if you can’t get there one way, take another way. Like if you can’t pull a rabbit out of a hat, pull a dachsund out. And if you can’t write about Niagara Falls, build it.

  My brain was on fire, and it felt good.

  Do you know what lucky is? Lucky is having friends who understand that building a magic hat can wait when Niagara Falls needs to be built right away. Lucky is having friends who don’t make you feel stupid even though that’s how you think of yourself. Lucky is having friends who don’t make fun of you because some things – well, a lot of things – are hard.

  I am so lucky.

  As soon as I told Frankie and Ashley my idea about building Niagara Falls instead of writing the essay, they both volunteered to help.

  “This is a big project,” I said.

  “We’d better make a list of supplies we’ll need,” Ashley suggested. “Frankie, you get a pencil and write the list.”

  “No way,” he said. “I’m not a secretary. I’m a builder. A hammer-and-nails kind of guy.”

  “When was the last time you built anything?” Ashley asked him.

  “Kindergarten,” said Frankie. “Remember that awesome gingerbread house I made out of milk cartons and crackers?”

  “I remember that it collapsed and then you ate it,” I said.

  “OK, you win. Hand me the pencil,” Frankie said.

  “The first thing we’re going to need is water,” I said. “Lots and lots of water.”

  “Newspaper and flour to build the cliffs,” added Ashley.

  “Twigs to make trees out of,” I said.

  “And rhinestones for the stars in the sky,” said Ashley.

  Frankie stopped writing.

  “This isn’t a T-shirt, Ashweena. Bear in mind, we are building one of the natural wonders of the world. Rhinestones have no place here.”

  “Then how about rocks for the cliffs,” suggested Ashley.

  “Rocks are good,” said Frankie. He added “Rocks” to the list.

  “Let’s put a boat at the bottom of the falls,” I said. “I must have a toy boat somewhere. And maybe I can get a spare pump from one of Emily’s old fish tanks.”

  “What do you need a pump for?” asked Frankie.

  “Something’s got to push the water over the falls,” I said.

  “We better have a saucepan to collect the water,” said Ashley. “A big saucepan.”

  I asked everyone to gather as much stuff as they could and meet the next night to begin building. We were all pretty excited – until we turned to leave, that is. Then we saw the worst thing you could possibly find in the doorway. Robert.

  “Hi guys,” he said with a grin. “Good news. My mum says I can join the meeting.”

  I’ve got to remember to tell his mother he’s not invited.

  “What are you guys doing?” he asked.

  “Fourth-grade stuff,” answered Frankie. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “We’re building Niagara Falls,” I said.

  “More than six hundred thousand gallons of water flow over Niagara Falls every second,” Robert said.

  “How do you know that?” Ashley asked.

  “Actually, it’s all up here,” Robert said, pointing to his head.

  “Clear your throat, Robert,” said Frankie.

  Robert often gets this really annoying bubble in his throat when he talks, like he’s got a little ball of spit down there. He’ll just keep on talking if you don’t tell him to clear that thing out.

  “I bet you won’t be able to create the mist,” Robert went on. “Did you know that Niagara Falls produces enough mist to fill half the Grand Canyon every twenty minutes?”

  Ashley thought for a minute. “As much as I hate to admit it, the mist does sound important,” she whispered to me.r />
  This gave Robert all the encouragement he needed. “My mum has a fan she puts in the window on really hot days. We could use it to blow the water around to look like mist. I think she’d let us borrow it.”

  Oh great. Now it was us.

  The next morning, I waited until Emily was in the shower and then went into her room. In her wardrobe, I found an old pump left over from when she had her Japanese fighting fish. I put the pump in a paper bag, along with a Lego boat from my toy chest. Then I went into the kitchen to find a saucepan. As I was clanking around in the cupboard, my mum came in.

  “Hi honey. What are you looking for?”

  “That big roasting tin you cook turkey in at Thanksgiving.”

  “Oh, I lent it to Mrs Fink. She was making a turkey for her son-in-law’s birthday. Come to think of it, she never returned it.”

  “If it’s OK with you, I’m going to get it back from her. I need it for a school project.”

  “Be sure to ask her how the turkey turned out,” my mum said, as she put water on for tea. “I suggested she stuff it with wheatgrass and bean sprouts. I’m sure it was delicious.”

  I went next door to Flat 10B and knocked on the door. Mrs Fink answered. She isn’t a small woman, and in her pink dressing gown, she looked like one of those giant pink elephants in the cartoons.

  “Hankie!” she said. “Come in for a doughnut. I’ll put my teeth in.”

  “That’s OK, Mrs Fink,” I said. “I have to get to school. I was just wondering if I could get our turkey tin back.”

  “Of course, darling,” she said. She went to the kitchen and came back with the tin. As she handed it to me, Mrs Fink smiled and I thought I saw her gums. I took the tin and ran, without asking about the turkey.

  After school, I took all my stuff to our clubhouse. Frankie had brought a big stack of newspapers. Ashley had a box of rocks and pebbles she had collected at Riverside Park. Even good old Robert showed up with a fan.

  There’s a sink in the broom cupboard down the hall, and I half filled the turkey tin with water. We let Robert do most of the newspaper shredding. Ashley and I soaked the paper and mixed it with flour to make papier-mâché. As we built the cliffs, Ashley reminded me that we had to make a hole for the hose that was going to bring the water to the top of the falls.

  The next day, we made another batch of papier-mâché and added it to the cliffs. A couple of times, the cliffs got so high that the papier-mâché slid down to the bottom. I had to prop it up while Ashley held her hair dryer up to it. Even then, it took two whole days and nights for the cliffs to dry.

  Finally, the cliffs were ready for us to decorate. We put rocks and pebbles around to make them look real. Frankie had snipped some branches off the ficus tree in his living room when his mother wasn’t looking. We stuck those along the top of the cliffs to look like trees.

  On Saturday night, I decided it was time to add the water part. I had been collecting cardboard tubes from our flat. Three had come from rolls of paper towels and a couple of others from bathroom tissue. I love saying “bathroom tissue”. It rolls off your tongue. Not like “toilet paper”, which sounds too much like what it actually is.

  If I do say so myself, I had come up with a great plan to get the water to the falls. I was going to connect the tubes with waterproof tape. Then I’d wrap the outside of this cardboard snake with clingfilm. We’d hook one end up to the hole we’d made in the cliffs and the other end up to the tap in the sink in our classroom. Connect the pump, turn on the water and hey presto, Niagara Falls.

  “What are you doing?” asked Frankie, when he saw me wrapping the cardboard tubes in clingfilm.

  I told him my brilliant plan.

  “I don’t know, Zip,” he said, shaking his head. “Do you think that tube is going to be strong enough to hold water?

  “Hey, if you can cover a bowl of watermelon with clingfilm and turn it upside down, then this will hold too,” I assured him. “I tell you, water is going to sail through this baby.”

  On Sunday night, we had one final meeting to finish the project. I glued more trees on to the cliffs and put little Lego people into the boat. Ashley and I carefully attached the hose. We painted the cliffs brown – or, as Robert pointed out, burnt sienna. He’s a real pain about vocabulary, that guy, but I have to admit, he was very helpful.

  When Niagara Falls was finished, we all stood back to admire it.

  “Don’t move,” Frankie said. “I’ll be right back.”

  He disappeared. Two minutes later he was back, panting. He had run up six flights of stairs to his flat. When he’s on a mission, Frankie never waits for the lift. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a gleaming baby-blue stone that I recognized right away. It was his best piece of turquoise from his private rock and mineral collection. Frankie put a spot of glue on it and placed the turquoise on top of the cliff.

  “It’s got good karma,” he said.

  He gave me his classic Big Dimple smile, then put out his hand. We did our secret handshake.

  “You’re going to knock ’em dead, Zip.”

  Didn’t I tell you I was lucky?

  That night, it was hard to sleep because I was so excited. I couldn’t wait until morning when I’d take Niagara Falls to school and show everyone my living essay.

  I heard the door creak open. My mum stuck her head in.

  “All set for school tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Are you sure you’ve finished your essay?” she whispered.

  “It couldn’t be any more complete, Mum.”

  “Do you need me to proofread it?”

  “I’m telling you, Mum, it’s perfect.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Me too,” I said.

  And she closed the door.

  I stared up at the ceiling. All I could think about were the incredible things that were going to happen to me after I showed Niagara Falls. I made a list in my head.

  TEN INCREDIBLE THINGS THAT WILL HAPPEN AFTER EVERYONE SEES MY NIAGARA FALLS PROJECT

  BY HANK ZIPZER

  1. I won’t get just an A on it, I’ll get the highest A they’ve ever given in America.

  2. Ms Adolf will finally smile. (I wonder if her face will crack.)

  3. They’ll call an assembly for everyone in the school to see my project. Newspaper reporters will come. Television stations will bring their cameras.

  4. I’ll interview Frankie and Ashley on television. Maybe even Robert. Hmmm … no, not Robert.

  5. The mayor of Niagara Falls will come to shake my hand.

  6. Head Teacher Love will declare a school holiday in my honour.

  7. I’ll be called to the White House to show my project to the president.

  8. The president will be so impressed, he’ll pass a law that kids in the fourth grade no longer have to write essays.

  9. Every fourth-grade student in the country will break their number-two pencils in half.

  10. Just before they do, they will all write me letters to say thank you. I’ll have to get a secretary just to answer my fan mail.

  11. I will never have to clear the table again. Emily, on the other hand, will have to do it until she’s fifty-six.

  I fell asleep with a smile on my face.

  OK, about the list in the last chapter. You’re right. There are eleven things on it and I said there were only going to be ten. Well, you shouldn’t be surprised. It’s me, Hank Zipzer. I’m lucky that all my fingers and toes are attached. Otherwise, I’d lose count.

  When my alarm clock rang the next morning, I didn’t hear the buzzer. All I heard was, “Monday morning, Monday morning, Monday morning.” It was going to be tricky getting Niagara Falls to school, so we had to leave extra early. Ashley said her mum had to be at the hospital anyway, so she didn’t mind walking us to school.

  We met in the basement. Frankie and I each picked up one end of the tin. Since it was my project, I volunteered to be the one who walked backwards. Ashley he
ld the water pump, the clingfilm-wrapped hose and a plastic bag with my costume in it. (I haven’t mentioned the costume before, because I threw it in at the last minute. I thought it would add what Papa Pete calls “pizazz”.)

  When we got outside our building, Ashley cleared the people out of the way and kept watch for big cracks in the pavement so I wouldn’t trip. First we passed Mr Kim’s market. He was putting out buckets of fresh flowers for the day. When he saw Niagara Falls, he took a flower from one of the buckets and put it on the top of the cliffs.

  “Flowers grow on mountain top,” he said.

  “Thanks, Mr Kim,” I said.

  We reached the corner and waited for the lights to change. When they were red, we crossed Amsterdam Avenue. A couple of taxi drivers blew their horns as we walked by, probably because they were so amazed to see Niagara Falls passing by right in front of them. I felt good because a lot of them had probably never been to Niagara Falls, and at least now they were getting a chance to see it.

  “Please! Hold your honks!” I shouted, as I took a half bow. “And thank you, one and all.”

  Frankie started to laugh, and then I did too. Ashley knew we were heading into one of our marathon laughing fits. When we were little, she watched us get plenty of time-outs at school because of our uncontrollable laughter.

  “Stop it, boys!” she said. “Concentrate. You don’t want to drop it now.”

  “Children, don’t dawdle at the junction,” Ashley’s mum said. She had a good point. You can’t fool around at a New York junction. When the lights change, the cars go. If you’re in the way, it’s your problem.

  Dr Wong is very nice but very quiet. Ashley says she doesn’t talk much because most of the people she is around all day are asleep. She’s a surgeon.

  We made it to the school zebra crossing without falling, tripping or dropping the project. We only had a few more steps to go, but they were tricky ones. There are a couple of big potholes in front of our school. They’re always fixing them, but then other ones pop up. I heard once that potholes happen in the winter when there is ice and snow. Or maybe it’s the traffic. No, I think it’s the weather. When Emily was in kindergarten, I told her they were dragon footprints. Of course, it didn’t scare her because, as we all know, she likes reptiles.