The New Champion

by Jody Feldman

  Dedication

  In memory of

  the best guide in the world,

  my mom,

  the original Carol

  Contents

  Dedication

  One Week After the Gollywhopper Games

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  The Night After the Regionals

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  After the Stadium Round

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Lunch Following the Team Competition

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Immediately After the Games

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from The Gollywhopper Games: Friend or Foe

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One Week After

  THE GOLLYWHOPPER GAMES

  Bert Golliwop had reached a decision. He strode the width of his office—back, forth, back, forth—feeling the eyes of his executive team follow him from their seats around his pool table–sized desk. On his next pass, he grabbed a red file folder, then turned to face the five others. “I don’t know whether to curse him or kiss him,” he finally said. “That Gil Goodson’s going to cost me.”

  “But he’s making us money already,” said the chief financial officer. She offered him an accounting spreadsheet. “He was the Gollywhopper Games underdog. The people love him.”

  “That’s the problem,” said Bert Golliwop. “They want to see him. They want to be him. They want to eat him for breakfast. These Games have made him a star, and the kids want more.” He slammed the inch-thick file folder to his desk. “Feedback from Fans,” its label read.

  The Human Resources vice president pointed toward the folder. “Sir? This is . . . ?”

  “If you can’t read a file label, Jenkins, you’re fired.”

  Jenkins shrank back in her chair.

  Bert Golliwop stared at the folder until Jenkins pulled out a few sheets and started reading. The four other vice presidents—Larraine from Finance, Morrison from Legal, Plago from Toy and Game Creation, and Tawkler from Marketing—all followed her lead.

  Bert watched from his leather chair, but within minutes he’d had enough. “Well?”

  “I don’t understand, sir.” Jenkins waved the papers. “These kids don’t want more.”

  “Which kids?”

  “Here. Jon Inge, eleven-point-five years old. ‘To Golly Toy and Game Company.’ Subject line: ‘Unfair.’ Message: ‘Why did you pick a cheater like Rocky Titus and not a fair person like me? I had the exact right answer on the field or close enough. I think you picked people you know. Why should I buy any more of your toys and games? I don’t know you personally.’”

  “Exactly! I’ve read that, read ’em all. Read another,” said Bert Golliwop.

  Jenkins shook her head but shuffled to the next paper. “Subject line: ‘Too far.’ Message: ‘I wanted to play your Games, but my parents couldn’t afford the gas to drive me one thousand three hundred and forty-seven miles to get there. I don’t think it was fair. Your friend, Meghan Mehadavan, thirteen years old.’”

  And the next. “Subject: ‘Too Easy.’ Message: ‘I can’t believe you picked stupid people. The puzzles were too easy. Any joker could solve those.’ This from sixteen-year-old Kurtis Frenke.”

  “He was too old to participate,” said Larraine.

  “He’s not too old to buy toys and games. No one is,” said Bert Golliwop. “Go on.”

  Jenkins nodded. “From another eleven-year-old. Subject: ‘Too Hard.’ Message: ‘The stunts were good, but the puzzles were too hard. How could any kid solve those?’” Jenkins looked toward Bert Golliwop with that should-I-go-on? glaze in her eyes.

  “Don’t you get it, people?” said Bert Golliwop.

  “They’re not happy, sir,” said Jenkins. “Too hard, too easy, too far, unfair, unfair, unfair.”

  “They may not be happy, but they’re jealous, they’re talking. They loved it!” Bert nodded at Tawkler.

  She tapped at her cell phone, and in came Danny, the new intern, pushing a three-shelf cart jammed with green file folders.

  “What’s this?” said Jenkins.

  Tawkler faced her. “This is gold. And I can summarize all these,” she said, running her fingers along the top shelf of folders, “in twenty-five words or less.” She read from a note card: “‘OMG. I love Gil! Bianca! Lavinia! Thorn! Rocky was fierce! Can Gil visit my school? Be my brother? Be my best friend? Gollywhopper forever!’”

  Bert Golliwop crossed his arms over his chest. “Here’s the best part. I have it on good authority these Games have that lunkhead Harvey Flummox and his Flummox Corporation reeling. Their toy and game sales, down.” It took Bert everything he had to wipe the smile off his face. He cleared his throat. “But that doesn’t change what’s important. Gil Goodson is going to cost me—you know that, right?—because there’s only one thing we can do.”

  “About what, sir?” said Jenkins.

  “About what? About these kids who wrote these emails, good and bad. About making them all happy. Just one thing to do.”

  They responded with murmurs and mumbles.

  Bert Golliwop kicked his chair aside, leaned on his desk, the full weight of his body on his hands. “What? What do we have to do?”

  Silence.

  “People. Are you idiots?” He stared them each in the eye. “We have to give the kids what they want. We need to fix the glitches. We need to go bigger, braver, bolder! We need to hold the Gollywhopper Games! Again!”

  Cameron may have been the only one in his family with an actual ticket for their area’s Gollywhopper Regional, but his brothers still shoved him to the middle of the backseat like some old forgotten gym bag. At least he smelled better than an old gym bag. He took a quick whiff of his pits to make sure.

  “Mom,” said Spencer, “he’s smelling himself again.”

  “I’m not doing it in public.” Cameron would have turned to stare out his window, but the middle didn’t have one and he couldn’t keep twisting his neck to look out the back. So he picked at the knee of his jeans, half wishing that his older brother, Spencer, had won the ticket.

  It was Spencer who had signed Cameron up—their little brother, Walker, too—in hopes of tripling his own chance to get in. But leave it to Spencer to overlook the rules, especially the one about needing an official ID for arena entry. No normal person would believe that Spencer, who’d been shaving for two years and was nearly six feet tall, was twelve-year-old Cameron. And if Walker had scored the ticket? Nine-year-olds were too young to compete anyway.

  Cameron wanted to believe that he was Spencer’s oasis in the desert of Golly, his rope in the Whopper of quicksand, his very last lifeline to the Games, that without Cameron’s ticket, they wouldn’t be driving two hundred miles to his assigned regional. This was Spencer, though, and if he wanted his chance to score a walk-in spot, their parents would drive him anywhere.

  “Gil was a walk-in,” Spencer had droned on for
months. He’d failed to mention that Golly had guaranteed thousands of spots for walk-in contestants last time. This time it guaranteed zero. If one kid with a real ticket didn’t show up, though, Spencer had a chance. And if he got in, Cameron, even with a ticket in his pocket, might be left out.

  It was simple math: two parents, three kids. No kid could go into the Games without an adult, and their parents wouldn’t exactly leave Walker wandering alone in a strange city.

  Their mom’s old aunt Marilyn lived close enough to the arena to come take care of Walker, but last Cameron had heard, they were still waiting for her to call back.

  Maybe Cameron was worrying over nothing. Maybe Aunt Marilyn was available, and they had forgotten to tell him. All he had to do was ask, but why waste his breath? If she couldn’t come, it was possible that Spencer would be in and Cameron would be out. He could hear it now.

  “You wouldn’t have a ticket if it weren’t for Spencer,” his mom might say.

  “It’s been Spencer’s dream,” his dad might add. “It hasn’t been yours.”

  Maybe not, but when did Cameron ever have reason to dream? Not when they watched Spencer fly off to superselective sports camp. Not when they cheered Spencer’s game-winning baskets. Not when they celebrated Spencer’s All-School Award.

  But since Cameron had an actual ticket in his hands, he felt a spark of possibility. Maybe the Gollywhopper Games were his dream now.

  Who would’ve thought? Not Cameron. Not before that email.

  The email had come two months ago. “Gollywhopper Games!!! Confirmed Ticket Notification!!!” Huh? Cameron hadn’t entered. Why would he enter something he couldn’t win? He almost deleted it as spam, but Spencer stopped him, pushed him out of the way, and celebrated until Cameron showed him the official ID rule.

  “No way! This was supposed to be me. I’m the one who can win.” Spencer sulked all day, until he launched his new walk-in plan. He pulled out his Gollywhopper Games study guide and shoved it into Cameron’s stomach. “Memorize,” he commanded Cameron. “If I get in, you’ll help me.” Then he totally abandoned the book like he’d abandoned his hermit crab.

  Two days after he’d gotten Crabby, Spencer caught Cameron pushing a kernel of corn toward him. “You love him so much,” Spencer had said, “you take care of him. That jerky crab just sits there. Sort of like you.”

  And Cameron had growled.

  “Mom!” Spencer yelled. “He’s growling at me, and all I did was tell him he could help take care of Crabby.”

  After that, Cameron only growled with his door locked and his face in his pillow.

  Cameron should have recycled Spencer’s notebook, a clone of Gil’s study guide from last year. If Golly Toy and Game Company used that info for its questions this year, it’d eliminate only three clueless people. The guide was everywhere online.

  Memorizing it, though, gave him momentum to work puzzles, find more Golly facts, and do locked-door weight training with recycled milk jugs he’d filled with water. The only thing he couldn’t truly practice was standing up to a thug like Rocky Titus. He had Spencer around, sure, but Cameron knew how to handle his brother. In the real world, though, against a true bully, he’d dissolve into a shuddering mass of goo.

  Did it really matter? He’d never advance enough for that to become an issue.

  There were one hundred regionals with 9,999 kids in each. If he were one of the 900 kids from across the country to (A) survive today’s regionals; (B) travel to Golly headquarters in Orchard Heights; and (C) join the 100 more who’d received free passes there, he’d still need to beat 990 other kids to make it into the finals. Cameron’s odds of doing that were ten in a million, only slightly better than his odds of meeting the president.

  Apparently Spencer didn’t think about odds. He expected to be in the final ten, and that was possible. Anyone could register at any regional for the Last-Chance Lottery. And if any ticket holders didn’t show up, their places would go to the lottery winners.

  The moment their dad pulled into the parking space in the arena garage, Spencer shot out of the car and raced down the stairs. By the time the rest of their family caught up with him, he’d navigated around the block and through the thick crowds inside the barricaded, pedestrian-only streets and walkways surrounding the arena. Somehow, he was already eighth from the end of the long Last-Chance Lottery line.

  Cameron lagged behind to capture the whole phenomenon on his videocam: the arena, the food tents, and all the activity. “Who knew,” he said just loud enough for his microphone to pick up, “that eleven- to fifteen-year-olds came in so many shapes and sizes? And colors.” He focused on a girl with red and blue hair wearing a rainbow shirt and shiny gold pants. “Like that’s going to give her a better chance to win.”

  “Maybe she just wants to get on TV,” Walker said. Either he had eagle ears or Cameron was talking louder than he thought. “Like Bianca did last year.”

  Bianca LaBlanc. Cameron and his buddies had decided she must have cast a spell on the other contestants to get as far as she had in the Games. Or maybe not. Maybe being Bianca was enough. If someone that beautiful had been on his team, he would have been worse than a shuddering mass of goo. He would have been a stuttering, drooling puddle of ooze.

  Cameron focused his videocam on a sign with a left-pointing arrow: TICKET HOLDER REGISTRATION. “That’s me,” he said for his microphone.

  He turned to his parents, who were watching Spencer in the Last-Chance Lottery line with that same crossed-fingers look they’d had for months. “He’s fifteen, it’s his last shot, and he wants it so much,” his mom had said yesterday as if reading Cameron’s mind. “But you”—and she looked him in the eyes—“you have a real chance.”

  Of course he had a real chance. He had a guaranteed ticket. He wished his mom had finished that sentence showing some faith in him, something like, “You have a real chance to win.” Not that he’d have believed her, but it would’ve been nice to hear.

  Cameron tapped his dad’s arm and pointed to the registration sign.

  “We need to stick together. It’s a zoo.” But then his dad looked at his watch. “Right.” They left Walker and his mom with Spencer and headed around the arena.

  “Good morning,” said the woman when it was finally their turn at the registration tables. “Or is it afternoon already?” She looked at her watch. “Nope. Ten more minutes of morning. Ten minutes plus an hour till arena doors open. And you are?”

  Cameron slid his computer printout and his birth certificate across the table to her.

  “Cameron. Welcome.” She scanned the printout’s bar code, then looked at her computer screen. “You are number sixty-three forty-two.”

  A girl came from a curtained area behind the tables, waving what looked like a runner’s bib—a white rectangle with his number, a bar code, and his name. She handed it to the woman.

  “If I were you,” said the woman, scanning his bib, “I’d pin this to your shirt now so you don’t lose it. And don’t bother giving it to anyone else; that person wouldn’t get past the front gate. Now smile!” A camera went off. “Face recognition software.” The woman affixed an untearable paper bracelet around Cameron’s wrist, then one around his dad’s. “Once you go inside, neither of you can leave the arena without the other. Good luck, Cameron.”

  They were the first to arrive at the family meeting spot, a patch of shade away from most of the action. “Let’s find them in line,” his dad said.

  Cameron gripped his videocam. “Can’t I wait here?”

  “You know how you get turned around in big spaces.”

  Cameron sighed.

  “Fine,” said his dad. “Just don’t move.”

  After his dad was out of sight, Cameron held up his camera, waved his arms, and shook his legs. “I moved, Dad. Sorry.”

  A couple of people looked at him like he was pathetic. It didn’t matter. Now he had time to shoot some really good footage without anyone, like Spencer, calling him a geek. />
  He scanned the crowd with his videocam, taking in full scenes, zooming in on one detail, then out to capture the flavor of everything beyond. The smoke from the barbecue stand. The brilliance of the flags. The squeals of people in awe that this thing they had seen on TV last year, this event—well, they were part of it now. And so was he. So was he!

  He had to stop being delusional. No way would he get further than having a bib pinned to his shirt. But that counted for something, didn’t it? A souvenir? A movie prop? Something to use in a film about a day in the life of a contestant in one of the Gollywhopper regionals? If he made that into a video, maybe it would go viral. Yeah, right.

  He kept his camera rolling anyway. “What am I doing here?” he muttered.

  “Getting ready to win the Games?”

  He turned, his camera focusing in on . . .

  “You’re—” He felt his mouth open and close like a starving guppy.

  She laughed. “I get that all the time. Isn’t this awesome? I mean the Games. I mean even without me having a chance to win this year. I’m Bianca. What’s your name?”

  He dropped his camera to his side but kept it rolling to capture the sound. “Cameron.”

  “Hi, Cameron.” She reached for his camera, and he did something he never did. He let her have it. Then she pointed to Walker. When had he gotten here? “Who’s this guy?”

  “He’s my brother,” said Cameron.

  “Yay! Cameron’s brother!” She handed him the videocam. “You have a new job. I love being on camera and your brother’s never in his own movies. Am I right or what?”

  “You’re right.”

  She turned back to Cameron. “So Cameron, huh? That’s a lot of letters.”

  Just one more letter than in your name, he wanted to say.

  “You need a nickname. What should we call you?”

  She could call him anything she wanted.

  “Not Cam. He was the worst boyfriend ever. His name should’ve been Jerkface. Something else, some other name. What about Ron? Ronny? No. You don’t look like one.” She bit her lip. “I have it! Let’s do initials. What’s your last name?”