Dodger for President

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  At lunch, all Lizzie could talk about were the assemblies. She babbled on about “issues,” “priorities,” and the electoral whatchamacallit thing, while I looked around the cafeteria and tried not to run out of there screaming in total panic. I wondered how Beeks and Flynn were taking this new development, but I couldn’t see them anywhere . . . until the last minute or so of lunch period, when they suddenly appeared against the back wall. Craig looked kind of nervous, but James was pounding him on the back and holding out his hand for a high five.

  Uh-oh.

  As soon as the bell rang, I found out why Beeks was so happy. There were new posters in the hallway. They featured side-by-side photos of him and me. Beeks was posing in front of the school, with his body facing the camera and his head turned to one side. He looked like a superhero. And the picture of me—YIKES! I was facing the camera, and it looked like I had my index finger up my nose. Beneath the pictures, in bright red letters, were these words:

  BEEKS OR RYAN?

  TAKE YOUR PICK!

  My mind was churning. As the whole darn fifth grade rushed by me, pointing and laughing, I thought back. How in the world had Beeks gotten that picture? I was pretty sure I’d have remembered if someone had come up to me with a camera and said, “Okay, Willie. Stick your finger up your nostril and say CHEESE!” And then it hit me: the girl at the doughnut table. When she had told me about the chocolate on my lip, it had been a setup. She had taken the picture on her cell phone camera.

  Holy cow. Dodger had been right about the lesson of The Little Mermaid. I should have been on the lookout for suspiciously helpful witches.

  The afternoon was horrible. Everywhere I went, kids were pointing, staring, and cracking up in my face. My class passed Amy’s on the way to art class, and she whispered to me, “What are they all laughing about? If you ask me, ’snot funny at all!” Then she giggled. “’Snot funny! Get it?”

  Yeah, I got it, Sherlock.

  After school, Lizzie grabbed my elbow when we got off the bus and marched me toward my house. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Through gritted teeth, she said, “Crisis meeting.” She steamrolled me into my house, right past my parents, and up to my room. As soon as we got there, she strode over and banged three times on the side of Dodger’s lamp.

  He appeared beside it, in bright orange pj’s. He was wearing an old-fashioned nightcap and clutching his ears. “Lizzie, OWW! What’s going on?” he asked.

  I looked at her. “Yeah, that’s what I said.”

  Lizzie explained the whole poster thing to Dodger. I couldn’t bear to hear it again, so I ran downstairs to get a snack. My dad was sitting in the big chair in our living room and asked me, “Son, is your friend up there talking to herself?”

  “Dad,” I said with what I hoped was a light-hearted tone, “that’s silly. Why would Lizzie be talking to herself?”

  Great. Now Amy was investigating us, my mom was practically planning our wedding, and my father thought Lizzie was a nutcase. I trudged back up to my room, where Dodger was sitting on my bed. He still had on his bizarre sleeping outfit, but was holding a pencil and a writing pad. Lizzie was using the dry-erase board in my room to give him a lecture. And—get this—Dodger was taking notes!

  Then, out of nowhere, I heard the weirdest music. It sounded as if there were a million percussion instruments going at once, but all of the instruments sounded like coconuts being banged against logs or something. There were singers, too—if you could call them that. They were chanting, “Ook ook eeee eeee eeee, ook ook eeee eeee eeee,” over and over in harmony. The effect was kind of amazing.

  Lizzie said, “Dodger, what in the world is that?”

  Looking around with exaggerated casualness, Dodger said, “Oh, that? It’s just the Chimptopian National Anthem. Technically, we should stand up right now, eat a banana, and scratch under our—”

  “No, I mean, where is it coming from?”

  He started edging his way toward the shelf that held his lamp. “Uh, it’s just my ring tone. But don’t worry, I didn’t use my cell phone to call any old magical friends or anything, because I’m not at all worried that you’ll get totally slaughtered in the—I mean, I wouldn’t just go calling the Great—uh, let me just take this call, okay? Back in a jiffy!”

  With a snap of his long fingers, Dodger disappeared into the lamp. The jungle music stopped. Lizzie and I were left to stare at each other in horror. Very quietly she asked, “Did Dodger just say what I think he said?”

  “I’m not sure. What do you think he said?”

  “What do you think I think he said?”

  “I think you think he—oh, never mind! I think he said he called the Great Lasorda. But he couldn’t possibly be that dumb, could he?”

  Lizzie looked at me some more without another word. But the scrunched-up look on her face told me everything I needed to know. And that was some scary news. See, the Great Lasorda was this super-powerful genie who was Dodger’s boss for thousands of years. And I had accidentally freed Dodger from working for Lasorda when I wished for Dodger to be my best friend forever. There was this fire in my kitchen and some really burned salmon and a baseball game. Oh, and a bunch of magic.

  Hey, if you think that all sounds pretty complicated, you should have tried living through it. And if Lizzie and I were right, I had a feeling my life was about to get complicated again.

  Yeah, like it wasn’t already.

  After a few minutes, Dodger popped out of his lamp with a sheepish grin on his face. “Well,” he said, “that was interesting. It seems my dear aunt Sally has been growing mujango beans in her rain-forest garden again this fall. And little Cousin Bongo is getting his vine-swinging license. It’s always nice to catch up with the old—what? What are you both staring at?”

  “Dodger,” Lizzie asked, advancing on him, “did you call the Great Lasorda today?”

  “Um, well, that wasn’t the Great Lasorda on the phone just now, I swear. It was just, uh, someone else.”

  I gave Dodger my best raised-eyebrow look (which I have to admit, I learned by watching Amy). “For real?”

  Dodger put his hand over his chest. “Cross my heart and hope to smell a durian fruit!”

  “What the heck, Dodger?”

  Lizzie chimed in, “You know, a durian fruit. They’re considered a delicacy in Southeast Asia, but are famed for their unpleasant—”

  “I don’t care about the stupid fruit, Lizzie. I want to know what the heck he was doing on the phone if he wasn’t talking to Lasorda.”

  “Buddy, it was no biggie, okay? I was just talking to, uh, a member of my family. So, Lizzie,” Dodger said, “can you get back to telling me about your three-part election strategy?” He smiled dazzlingly at her. “I love hearing all of your clever plans!”

  Lizzie fell for it—she totally let Dodger distract her from whatever trouble he had been creating on the phone. I swear, she’s willing to argue with me at an instant’s notice, but she instantly forgets her brains for the first flattering chimp that comes along and flashes some teeth her way.

  Girls!

  Well, at least I would get to hear Lizzie’s brilliant ideas. Apparently, our campaign should address three topics, which Mrs. Starsky had explained while I was staring out the classroom window and panicking. The topics were school climate, school rules, and school spirit. So we needed to come up with intelligent things to say about each of them. Lizzie stood next to the dry-erase board, chewing on the closed cover of a marker, waiting for our input.

  I was wracking my brains, trying to come up with something that sounded like a president might say it, when Dodger jumped straight up in the air and shouted, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!”

  Lizzie was so startled that she accidentally bit down on the cap of the marker, splitting it in half. She got a mouthful of bright blue ink and ran out of the room gagging. I ran after her, while Dodger hid himself in my closet. Lizzie ran into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her. Of course this
was the perfect moment for Amy to appear, so she came out of her room, chewing a huge wad of gum. She walked around me, Sherlock Holmes–style deerstalker cap on her head, and examined me with her magnifying glass. I didn’t say a word; I just hoped Amy might finish checking me out and go away before Lizzie came back out.

  No such luck. Amy turned away from me and knocked on the bathroom door.

  “Ick ’er’a’ent!” Lizzie exclaimed.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Ick ’er’a’ent!”

  Amy put one hand on her hip and used the other to poke me in the chest with her magnifying glass. “What in the world does that mean, Willie? Did you guys come up with some kind of dorky president code just so I wouldn’t be able to solve your campaign secrets? Come on, you can tell me—I’m your sister! What does ’ick ’er’a’ent! mean?”

  “I don’t know, I swear! Lizzie, are you okay? What does ’ick ’er’a’ent! mean?”

  The door burst open, and Lizzie was standing there with a fluorescent blue stain all around her mouth. When she opened her mouth to yell at me, I saw that her teeth and tongue were blue, too. “It’s permanent, you goofball!”

  I started to apologize and tell Lizzie that I didn’t think that particular brand of marker caused permanent stains, but Amy started talking first. “Well, jeepers, Lizzie, you could have just said so!”

  The next thing I knew, Lizzie was running out of the house.

  Amy was still standing next to me on the top of the landing. She blew a bubble, cracked it loudly, and said, “God! I hope when I meet the boy I’m going to marry, I’m not so obnoxious to him!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Skater Walk and the

  Secret Life of Craig Flynn

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, Dodger and I were sitting glumly on the edge of my bed. I had called Lizzie’s house, but her mom said she didn’t want to talk. I couldn’t stand it. I knew I had to be careful about talking with Dodger because Amy was prowling around, so I blasted some music. Then my mom came up, knocked, came in, sat next to me, and asked me to turn it down. Before her magical adjustment, Mom would have given me a whole big lecture on the horrors of popular music, but now she just mussed my hair and said, “Arguing with a girl, then cranking up the tunes—my Willie is turning into a teenager!”

  After she walked out, Dodger started jumping around, saying, “My Willie is turning into a teenager! My Willie is turning into a teenager!” and laughing his head off. Boy, was he a riot. And had my mother actually used the phrase “cranking up the tunes”?

  Dodger said, “Whoa, little teenage dude! I have the BEST idea. I’ve been thinking—for the election, you know?—that you need a cooler walk. I mean, no offense, but you need a cool-kid stride, a manly strut. Buddy, you need a skater walk! Now would be the perfect time to get you one. And then when you go grooving your way up to the stage for your speech, everybody will know what I know—that Willie Ryan is the most awesome presidentialtype guy around!”

  “Uh, Dodger? How do I get a new walk? I mean, I walk the way I walk. That’s just how I am.”

  “Nah, that’s how you think you are. Listen, I once had this really weird gig on a ship, helping this Greek guy named Jason find a golden fleece, and—”

  “What the heck is a golden fleece?”

  “It’s like a fur coat made of gold, but that’s not the point. The point is that I was sailing around for, like, a year. And when I got back onto land, my whole stride was totally different. For like a century after that, the Great Lasorda used to imitate my walk and call me his “little sailor monkey.”

  “Oh, so all I have to do is sail around the world a few times, and then I’ll have a walk that even a genie with sparkly gold pants can feel free to laugh at?”

  “No, that’s just how I did it. You don’t need a sailor walk anyway. And getting a skater walk should be a lot easier.”

  “All right, I’m listening. How do I get a skater walk?”

  “Easy. All you have to do is learn to FLY!”

  Oh, swell. All I needed to do was learn to fly. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?

  Half an hour later, I was in the woods with Dodger, wearing my bike helmet and a look of utmost fear. Dodger was trying to get me to step onto the Magic Carpet of Khartoum. He was also trying to persuade me to lose the helmet.

  What’s the Magic Carpet of Khartoum? Apparently, it’s a flying carpet, just like in the Aladdin stories, but even scarier—because when you’re on the Magic Carpet of Khartoum, you’re totally invisible! So anyway, Dodger said, “Bud, I’m telling you: There’s totally no point to wearing the helmet. You want to hear the wind whistling through the fur on your ears! Besides, it’s not like the helmet will do any good. You’re not going to fall, and if you did—well—I don’t think the helmet would really save you from—oh, never mind. Like I said, you’re not going to fall.”

  With those words of comfort ringing in my ears, I listened to Dodger’s very helpful instructions on proper flying-carpet usage. Here are some tips, for those of you who might want to try this at home with your own airborne floor coverings:

  -Dude, you’ve totally got to BE the carpet.

  -The carpet is, like, your friend.

  -All you have to do is—well, you just lean the way you want to go, and the carpet pretty much—I mean, usually—the carpet kind of just does it.

  -Don’t look down. Remember: The carpet is totally invisible, so you REALLY don’t want to look down.

  -Don’t hit any power lines. Seriously . . . don’t.

  -Oh, and tree limbs really hurt. I mean, duh! They’re completely made of wood.

  -Since you’re invisible, you can’t see your feet. And since the carpet is invisible, you can’t see the edge. I strongly advise you to, like, not move your feet around.

  -Remember the “don’t look down” part. And the thing about the power lines.

  -Have fun!

  Then Dodger decided I was ready for a testdrive. He got on the carpet (which, of course, I couldn’t even see . . . but I could tell he’d gotten on it when I suddenly couldn’t see him) and told me to stand behind him with my arms around his waist. Stepping on was unbelievable. I mean, everyone probably has dreams of being invisible, but when it really happens, your brain just can’t handle it. I kept thinking, Ahhh! Where’s my hand? Where are my feet? And this was the weirdest part of all—because I’d never even realized I could always see it at the lower inside edge of my vision—WHERE’S MY NOSE?

  Eventually I got over this enough to function, and Dodger talked to me until I followed his voice and found his waist. This was odd, too. My face felt the sensation of being pressed up against Dodger’s furry back, but I was looking right through him at the view ahead.

  “Ready, buddy?” Dodger asked.

  “Uh, wait, I’m not really—”

  “All right, then. Dude, let’s FLY!”

  So we did. Holy moley! I can’t even come close to telling you what it was like, but I’ll try. Picture the scariest roller coaster you’ve ever been on, with no safety harness. I mean, I hate roller coasters with a burning passion—but this was the single coolest thing that had ever happened to me. We were flying low over the trees, passing birds in midair. Dodger was leaning to one side, then the other, and we were banking from side to side, like a plane when it’s turning to land. And the wind was whistling around my furry ears—well, at least, it was whistling through the holes in my helmet.

  “Having fun?” Dodger shouted over his shoulder.

  I wanted to scream or cry or just whimper. But amazingly, all that came out of my mouth was a big belly laugh. And once I started laughing, I couldn’t stop. Dodger was laughing, too, so hard that I could feel his whole body shaking. “Hold on, dude,” he said. “It’s time for some advanced maneuvers!”

  Let me tell you, if you’ve ever gone flying off a skateboard ramp, you might have some starting point for understanding Dodger’s advanced maneuvers. Just picture that, but upside down, with some loop-d
e-loops thrown in. And you’re invisible, fifty feet up, holding on desperately to an invisible chimp. Jeepers. I wasn’t sure if I should have a heart attack or let go of Dodger, pound on my chest like King Kong, and shout my war cry to the skies.

  I settled for laughing some more. In fact, I didn’t stop until Dodger said, “Sssshhhhh! We have to be quiet now! Look!”

  I hadn’t really been paying attention to the view below me, especially since Dodger had told me specifically not to look down. But when I did, I couldn’t believe it. We were over the school playground. Directly below us, James Beeks and Craig Flynn were sitting on the swing set, having an argument. Dodger drifted lower and lower until we were hovering between two sets of tube slides, maybe twenty feet away from the swings. I could hear James saying: “We have to win. Ryan and Barrett embarrassed me publicly. They challenged me. Dude, they challenged us.”

  Flynn nodded. “That’s true,” he said. “But you were getting in their faces first. Besides, what do you have against them anyway?”

  “I just hate the way stupid Ryan ruined my whole baseball season.”

  Craig frowned. “How did he ruin your season? He got the big game-tying hit in the championship, right?”

  James snarled, “But then we lost anyway in extra innings. And I made the last out! All season long, I got the big hits. All season long, Willie Ryan struck out. I mean, come on—there’s a reason why we called him Wimpy all year. Then the one time he gets a hit, my dad is there, and—”

  Craig said, “I still don’t get it. What does his hit have to do with you?”

  James said, “Duh. You know my dad only came to that one game all stupid season, right? And I had to blow the game in front of him. And then when I got off the field, Ryan was standing right next to us, and both of his parents were giving him a hug. Then that ugly Lizzie gave him a high five. Meanwhile my father looked over at Wimpy and said, ‘Too bad you’re not a clutch hitter like that kid James!’ ”