Eww! What's on My Shoe?

by Nancy Krulik

  “Turn right,” Mike told Louie.

  But Louie was too busy talking to listen to Mike. “I wonder if a guy can get two pages in the Schminess Book of World Records.”

  “Louie, TURN RIGHT,” Mike repeated louder. “Louie…”

  Slam! Louie skated right into Principal McKeon!

  “LOUIE FARLEY!” the principal exclaimed. “What are you doing?”

  The kids in the hall all stopped and turned to see what was happening.

  “I was breaking a world record,” Louie tried to explain.

  “For being unsafe in the school hallway?” Principal McKeon asked.

  “No, for roller-skating backward,” Louie corrected her.

  Principal McKeon shook her head. “You know you’re not supposed to have a cell phone in school,” she told Max.

  “It’s Louie’s,” Max explained nervously.

  Louie glared at him.

  “Hand it over now,” the principal told Max. She turned to Louie. “I’ll give it back to you after school when we call your parents. Now pop those wheels back into your shoes, and go to class the correct way.”

  George grinned. It was nice seeing someone else get into trouble for a change. Especially when that someone was Louie Farley.

  “The science quiz was really hard,” George complained later that afternoon as he and Alex stood in line for lunch. “I think I got half the questions wrong.”

  “You should have taken your sunglasses off,” Alex told him. “The questions are easier to answer when you can see them.”

  “That’s true,” George said. “But rock stars never take off their sunglasses.”

  George put his tray down on the metal shelf and reached for his food. He grabbed a hot dog and a bowl of vanilla ice cream.

  “Um, dude,” Alex said. “I thought you hated…”

  George didn’t hear the rest of what Alex said. He’d already started carrying his tray toward the lunch table.

  He sat down and looked at his lunch. Behind the dark glasses, George could barely see a thing. But he knew he was going to eat his lunch the way he liked best. Backward! That meant dessert first. George picked up his spoon and dug into the bowl of vanilla ice cream.

  Except it wasn’t vanilla ice cream. It was creamy clam chowder. Yuck! George hated clam chowder. The clams were all chewy—they tasted like pieces of rubber dipped in hot milk. He made a face and spit a clam into his napkin.

  “I tried to warn you, dude,” Alex said.

  “It looked like ice cream from behind my sunglasses,” George said with a sigh. “All I saw was something creamy in a bowl.” He looked down at his tray. “That’s really a hot dog, though, right?”

  “Yeah,” Alex told him. “You can eat that.”

  George frowned as he took a bite of his hot dog. In the past two days, he’d whacked his head on the blackboard, taken a flying killer ball to the gut, bombed his science test, and chewed a rubbery, milky clam—and the super burp had made him kiss a girl. Blech.

  This going-down-in-history thing was a whole lot tougher than he’d ever imagined.

  “Yo, dudes!” Alex exclaimed as George and Chris walked into the shed behind Alex’s house on Thursday afternoon after school. “You made it.”

  “I told you I’d be here,” George said. “No way would I ever miss this. I just had to run by home real quick to change.” He took off his cowboy hat because it was blocking his view of the ABC gum ball. “That’s amazing!” he exclaimed.

  “Huge,” Chris added.

  “I hope it’s huge enough,” Alex said. “I measured it three more times this afternoon, just to be sure.”

  “Look what I made for you,” Chris said. He held up a poster that read:

  The letters were formed with gum balls that had been glued to the paper.

  “No congratulations yet,” Alex told him. “Not until Harris Faris gets here to measure it and say I officially broke the record.”

  Just then, Julianna and Sage walked into the shed. Sage hurried over to stand by George. George hurried across the room to stand away from Sage.

  “Has the Schminess guy gotten here yet?” Julianna asked.

  “Nope,” Alex told her. “Any minute, I think.”

  “Good,” Julianna said. She took her video camera out of the case. “I want to get every second of this on tape.”

  “Georgie, I love your cowboy hat,” Sage said. “I have one just like it at home. Except it’s purple.”

  George rolled his eyes. A purple cowboy hat wasn’t a genuine cowboy hat. Cowboys usually wore brown or black hats. George knew because he had seen real cowboys during a trip his family had taken to a dude ranch.

  But George didn’t have time to argue with Sage now. Other kids were already arriving to see the official measuring. Most were fourth-graders. But there were some fifth-graders, too. Word had definitely spread.

  Alex’s mom followed the group of kids into the shed. She was carrying a big shopping bag. “Hi, kids,” she greeted them. “I’ve got something special to give each one of you as a souvenir for Alex’s big day.”

  “Mom…you shouldn’t have,” Alex told her. But he was smiling.

  Alex’s mom started pulling toothbrushes and dental floss out of her bag. “After you chew, remember to brush and floss,” she reminded the kids. “Here, let me show you.”

  Alex’s mom shoved a strand of floss between her teeth and pulled it back and forth. Then she held it up for everyone to see. A chunk of green gunk was stuck to the floss. “Look at that big piece of broccoli,” she said. “If I hadn’t flossed, that could have been stuck between my teeth for weeks. Or until I swallowed it. And broccoli doesn’t taste better the second time around, believe me.”

  Alex’s smile drooped. “Mom,” he groaned. “You REALLY shouldn’t have.”

  George felt Alex’s pain. Moms could be embarrassing sometimes. This was definitely one of those times.

  George shoved a piece of green gum into his mouth. Maybe he had time to add one more piece to Alex’s gum ball before Harris Faris arrived.

  “You guys, I think he’s here!” Chris shouted excitedly from the back of the shed. “I heard a car pull up out front.”

  “Whoa,” Alex said.

  George glanced over at his buddy. He looked nervous.

  Unfortunately, Alex wasn’t the only one who was scared. George was afraid, too. He was afraid of what was brewing in his belly. There was something bubbly and bouncy down there. And it was going wild.

  The super burp was back!

  Oh no. George couldn’t let the burp escape. Not at the most important moment in his best friend’s life. He had to squelch the belch.

  George shut his lips tight to keep the burp from escaping. But the burp was strong. Bing-bong. Ping-pong. The bubbles were kickboxing his kidneys and spinning on his spleen.

  Ping-pong. Bing-bong. The bubbles cling-clanged through his colon and hip-hopped up to his heart. George swallowed hard, trying to push the burp back down. But the burp fought back. Bubbles tap-danced on his tongue and twirled around his teeth. Tap, tap. Twirl, twirl…

  The kids in the shed all turned and stared at George.

  “Dude, no!” Alex shouted.

  Dude, yes. Right here. Right now. The burp was out. And it wanted to play! The next thing George knew, his finger had shoved itself into his mouth. It was grabbing his gum and pulling it out in a long, skinny string.

  “George, please put that gum back in your mouth,” Alex’s mom insisted.

  George wanted to put the gum back in his mouth. He really did. But the burp had something more fun in mind. So George’s finger kept pulling. Longer…longer…longer. Soon George had a slippery, slimy rope of gooey green gum hanging from his mouth.

  “Yeehaw!” George swung the gooey, gummy rope around his head like a lasso. “Yeehaw!”

  Ooey-gooey gum spit flew all around and rained down on the kids in the shed.

  “Watch it!” Julianna yelled at him. “You’re getting spit on
my camera lens.”

  Sage hid under the tool bench. “Not in my hair, Georgie,” she said.

  “Yippie-ki-yay!” George shouted loudly. He twirled the green gum lasso faster and faster. “Waaaahhhooooo!”

  “George, chewing gum is not a toy!” Alex’s mom scolded.

  Maybe not, but the super burp sure was having fun playing with it. George twirled the gum harder. More ooey-gooey gum spit flew across the room.

  George put his gum back in his mouth. He raced over to the ABC gum ball and broke off a massive chunk.

  “Dude! Don’t!” Alex shouted. “I need every single piece if I’m going to break the record.”

  “You’re ruining everything,” Alex’s mom told George. “What kind of friend are you?”

  George was a really good friend. But the burp wasn’t. It was a selfish, terrible, doesn’t-care-about-anyone-else kind of friend. And it was in charge now. So George started to shove the chunk of ABC gum into his mouth.

  “George, don’t you dare put that in your mouth,” Alex’s mom shouted. “You don’t know where it’s been.”

  “Sure, I do,” George’s mouth replied. “It’s been on Alex’s gum ball.”

  “Put that big chunk of gum back!” Alex shouted. “Please, dude!”

  But the burp had no intention of putting that hunk of gum back. George’s hand started heading for his mouth and…

  Whoosh! George felt all the air rush out of him. The super burp was gone. But George was still there, with the big chunk of ABC gum in his hands.

  Quickly, George walked over to Alex’s giant ABC gum ball and shoved the gum back on the ball. Then he pulled the piece he had been chewing out of his mouth and planted it on top. “One last piece,” he told his best friend. “For luck.”

  “Uh…thanks,” Alex mumbled.

  “Young man, that was quite a burp!” a man’s voice bellowed suddenly.

  George turned to see a short guy in a Schminess Book of World Records blazer walking toward him.

  “Do you always burp like that?” Harris Faris asked George.

  “Well…I…,” George began.

  “Sometimes he burps even louder,” Chris interrupted.

  “Impressive,” Mr. Faris said. “That might be a record-breaking burp. If you’re ever interested in finding out, you should stop by my office. We can measure the sound level to see if it qualifies as the world’s loudest burp.”

  “You can do that?” George asked.

  “Sure,” he replied. “All you have to do is burp into our SPL meter.”

  “A what?” George asked.

  “SPL meter,” Alex chimed in. “It stands for ‘sound pressure level.’ It’s a machine that measures decibels—how loud something is. I read about it in one of my science books.”

  “I don’t know if the burp will pop out while I’m sitting in front of a machine,” George explained. “It just sort of comes up when it wants to.” But he took Mr. Faris’s card, anyway.

  “Wait just a minute!” Suddenly Louie’s voice rang out from the path leading up to the shed. “I’ll take your card,” he shouted.

  Louie started to run across the lawn toward the shed. George looked at him curiously. Louie seemed to have gained fifty pounds since school let out. He was huge.

  “Hurry up,” Louie called to Mike and Max, who were following right behind him—as usual. “And keep that camera on. We have to capture every minute of this.”

  The path was icy. Louie ran a few more steps and then…SPLAT! He fell flat on his face. George sure hoped Mike and Max had captured that!

  Louie tried to stand. But he couldn’t. His legs wouldn’t bend.

  “What’s wrong with you?” George asked Louie.

  “Nothing,” Louie answered. “It’s just hard to get up when you’re wearing twenty-seven pairs of snow pants.” He looked up at Harris Faris. “That’s the world record, right?”

  “Wrong,” Mr. Faris answered. “That was last year’s record. A few weeks ago a guy in Tajikistan put on twenty-nine pairs of snow pants. He’s the new record holder.”

  Louie looked like he’d been punched in the gut. Or like he wanted to punch someone else in the gut. Either way, he was really mad—and hot.

  Harris Faris pulled his official measuring tape out of his pocket and walked over to the gum ball. “Okay, let’s measure this thing,” he said.

  George’s heart started pounding so hard it felt as though it could pound its way right out of his chest and go bouncing across the floor. “This is it,” he whispered to Alex. “Good luck.”

  Harris Faris carefully wrapped the official Schminess Book of World Records measuring tape around the gum ball. He pulled it tight—but not so tight that it would squish any gum that hadn’t completely hardened. Then he held the measuring tape with his thumb and looked at the numbers.

  George rolled his eyes. How long could it possibly take to read a number on a measuring tape?

  Harris Faris pulled out a small camera and snapped a picture of the numbers on the measuring tape.

  Come on, George thought to himself. Say something already.

  Finally, Mr. Faris looked out at the crowd of kids. “The circumference of this gum ball is one thousand, six hundred twenty-five millimeters and four micrometers,” he announced.

  Is that big enough?

  George looked nervously at Alex.

  Uh-oh. Alex wasn’t smiling. But then again, he wasn’t frowning. Or moving. He was frozen in place.

  George couldn’t wait any longer. “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “It means that Alex is officially the world-record holder for the largest ABC gum ball built by someone under the age of eighteen!” Harris Faris replied.

  A big grin broke out across Alex’s face.

  George smiled, too. But not so big. That old jealousy thing was nagging at him again. Alex really was going down in history. It was something no other kid at Edith B. Sugarman Elementary School had done before. George wished he had been the one to do that.

  Then, out of the corner of his eye, George spotted Louie. His face was all red and angry. His eyes were scrunched up into jealous little slits.

  The last thing George wanted was to be like that. So George forced an even bigger smile onto his face and pumped his fist in the air. “Alex! Alex! Alex!” he cheered.

  Chris and Sage joined in. “Alex! Alex! Alex!”

  Before long, everyone was cheering for Alex. Well, everyone except Louie, anyway. He was too busy trying to stand up. Besides, Louie only cheered for Louie.

  Harris Faris grinned at Alex. “Young man, you have just become a junior world-record holder. And that means you’re going to San Luis Obispo!”

  Huh? The kids stopped cheering and stared at him.

  “He’s going where?” George asked.

  “San Luis Obispo, California,” Mr. Faris repeated.

  “I know where that is!” Alex said excitedly. “San Luis Obispo, California, is home to the world-famous Bubble Gum Alley. The walls in the alley are covered in ABC gum that’s been stuck on by tourists from all over the world. I saw it in a book I read about the history of chewing gum.”

  “Exactly,” Mr. Faris said. “It’s the perfect backdrop for your official Schminess Book of World Records photograph.”

  “Wow! I’m going to California!” Alex exclaimed.

  “Yep,” Harris Faris told him. “This weekend. You, your family, and the friend of your choice.”

  “I choose George,” Alex said immediately.

  “Me?” George asked excitedly. “You want me to go with you to Bubble Gum Alley?”

  “Sure,” Alex told him. “Who else?”

  Alex really was a great friend. Now George felt even more guilty about being jealous of him. George knew that Alex had worked really hard to be in the Schminess Book of World Records. He deserved to be in it. In fact, Alex should be in the book twice—once for the world’s largest ABC gum ball and once for being the world’s greatest best friend.

&
nbsp; “Wow! First class,” George said as he took his seat across the aisle from Alex on the airplane on Saturday morning. “I don’t think even my parents have flown first class before.”

  “The Schminess people sure know how to do things right,” Alex’s mom said.

  “Make sure the gum ball is belted in for takeoff, son,” Alex’s dad reminded him.

  “It is,” Alex assured his dad.

  Some of the other people in first class had given Alex strange looks when he’d placed the gum ball on the seat next to him and buckled it in. But George didn’t think it was strange at all. Of course the gum ball had a first-class seat. It was the guest of honor, after all.

  “Here you go, boys,” Alex’s mom said. “Chew this gum when we take off. It will keep your ears from popping.”

  George looked at her strangely. “You’re telling us to chew gum?”

  “It’s sugarless,” Alex’s mom told him. Then she gave George a stern look. “Just make sure you keep it in your mouth.”

  George frowned. He wished the stupid super burp hadn’t gotten him into trouble with his best friend’s mom. He wanted to tell her it wasn’t his fault. It was the burp’s fault. But George knew she wouldn’t believe him, even if he did. So instead, he just said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  George sat back in his seat and chewed his gum as the plane raced down the runway. He listened carefully as the flight attendant told them about emergency exits and oxygen masks. He kept his seat belt buckled and his seat in the upright position for takeoff. George was determined not to cause anyone any trouble.

  Once they were in the air, George reached into his backpack and pulled out his copy of last year’s Schminess Book of World Records. He’d bought it at the book fair at his old school in Cherrydale, way before he’d even moved to Beaver Brook. Back then, George never dreamed that his new best friend was going to be in the Schminess Book of World Records—or that he’d be flying all the way to California to see him photographed for it.