The Pizza Party

by Theo Baker

  I swung out my timepiece. “I don’t see why not.”

  Just as I was stuffing the forty-ninth piece of popcorn into my mouth without swallowing any of them, I heard a beeping sound. I’d actually been aware of it since the twenty-third piece of popcorn, but every time I asked my friends if they heard it, too, no one could understand me.

  “Does anyone else hear that?” Frankie finally asked.

  “I WOO!” I cried, and all forty-nine pieces of popcorn came flying from my mouth in a tidal wave onto a three-foot-high pile of garbage that covered the floor. “It’s Dad’s laptop!” I said. “No one panic. No one panic!”

  I dug through pizza boxes, wet popcorn, soda bottles, whipped cream, and a million other small and broken things on the floor for the laptop.

  Uncle Hank’s Grand Pizza and Ice-Cream Gala had been a smashing success, not to mention the soiree. We had feasted till we could feast no more. We had poured three flavors of ice cream down our throats. We had danced and made merry, and I had won three out of four eating and wrestling contests. I had even, on a dare from Frankie, drunk a smoothie he’d made using everything we’d had to eat tonight, with a healthy serving of Ashley’s whipped cream of course, and also three dabs of a mysterious greenish paste that Frankie had found in the back of the cupboard. The smoothie was delicious! It was a night to end all nights.

  And oh, the whipped cream, did it flow!

  And now, the night to end all nights was coming to a sudden and panic-inducing end. Plus, the mysterious greenish paste wasn’t sitting too well in my gut. Frankie couldn’t be sure that it was edible exactly, but you know how I am with eating things that aren’t really food.

  I found Dad’s laptop under a mountain of pizza boxes. I flicked off a hunk of pineapple from the screen. “It’s my mom! On video call! I’m panicking. Guys, I’m panicking!”

  The entire living room was covered with a solid layer of party fouls. I picked up the laptop, my eyes scanning desperately for somewhere cleanish to take it and answer the call. I looked toward the kitchen. That, too, had seen better days. Frankie hadn’t exactly tidied up while making his smoothie.

  That left my room. Unfortunately, it was filled with popcorn, from our no-holds-barred popcorn royal rumble.

  Mom’s room. That, too, was a mess, after I’d torn through Dad’s wardrobe trying to find a tie to one-up Frankie’s monocle.

  The bathroom. That was too weird a place to answer the call, plus I didn’t want anyone to see my shaving-cream-and-greenish-paste sculpture — not until it had dried, anyway.

  The hallway. Too suspicious. Why would I just be hanging out in the hallway?

  Emily’s room. Ditto.

  I’d have to work some Zipzer magic. “Clear a path! Make like a street sweeper and clear a path!” I called out to my regiment of well-dressed guests. While they spread their wings and pushed the piles of garbage to the walls, I found the tallest chair in the apartment, set the laptop on it, and put a bunch of my rubber soldiers under the laptop to angle the screen up so that the person on the other end couldn’t possibly see the floor.

  Everything set, I flipped the radio to some classical piano, drank the last of the everything-smoothie, and accepted the call. “Hi there, Mom!”

  “Where’s Katherine?”

  Two beady little eyes, magnified behind glasses, stared at me from the laptop screen. Emily. “Oh, it’s you,” I said.

  “How is she? Has her anxiety rash flared up? Put her on. I want to speak to her.”

  “You’ve . . .” I did everything in my power to keep my eyes from looking shifty and glanced around for a clue. I had put Ashley on lizard duty at the beginning of the night, and she was presently flipping through page after page of Emily’s lizard care notes.

  “You just missed her,” I said.

  Emily wasn’t buying it. “You haven’t checked on her once, have you?”

  “’Course I have,” I said, and wheeled my hand at Ashley to hurry up. Finally she held up a sheet of paper covered in microscopic words that were dancing and playing leapfrog. I squinted and tried to freeze everything in place, but everything was a gelatinous swirl. “I, uhh, err . . .”

  Thankfully Ashley saw my squinty look. She grabbed a marker, flipped the pages over, and wrote something on the back in huge block letters. “I . . . I put her to bled.”

  “She’s bleeding? Is her mouth rot coming back? What have you —”

  “Bed, bed. I put her to bed.”

  “I don’t believe you. What were you looking at? Why am I looking up at you from below your chin? Mom, Hank is an unfit guardian. We have to go home.”

  Everything shook as my family appeared to fight over the phone. Finally my dad’s face filled the screen. He was wearing a surgical mask, which he pulled down below his neck. “No, we don’t. You’re taking good care of her, aren’t you, Hank?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Why are you wearing a surgical mask?”

  But my dad didn’t have time to answer. Everything shook again till my mom had wrested back control of her phone.

  “Hank, have you eaten?”

  “Ask him why we’re looking up at him,” I heard Emily say offscreen.

  “I hope you’ve finished your project,” Mom said, and looked around with mom eyes, scanning my face and the whole view for anything suspect. “Why am I looking up your nose?”

  “I’m downloading something for school,” I said without missing a beat. Mom is an expert at spotting lies, but she’s useless with computers. “I have to keep the laptop at this angle, or I’ll sever the uplink.”

  “That’s not true,” I heard Emily say.

  “I really should jump off now,” I said, clicking a bunch of keys on the keyboard. “This call is eating into my bandwidth, and my JavaScript is unstable enough as it is.”

  I saw my mom thinking. She seemed to buy it, for now. “Have the others gone home yet?”

  Both of them leaned in behind me and waved for the camera, all smiles. “Hi, Mrs. Zipzer!”

  “How did it go?” Ashley asked. “Did they use a high-energy laser, or was it a cold-steel procedure?”

  In the background, behind Mom, I saw Dad call for the nurse and draw the mask up over his mouth again.

  “Neither,” Mom said. “They’ve delayed the operation till tomorrow.”

  “Oh, could you ask the doctor if Emily can keep the tonsils?” Ashley asked.

  “I’ve already put in a request,” Emily said from behind Mom.

  Just then, Frankie tripped a bit on the side of a pizza box, tried to catch himself, but wound up throwing out his arms and flailing to the ground in a crash of debris.

  “What’s that?”

  “Doorbell, Mom, Papa Pete’s here.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Emily said.

  “Emily sounds tired and scared. Better support her. I gotta get the door. Bye, Mom. Talk tomorrow. Nice chat. Bye.”

  “Is Frankie wearing my tie . . . ?” my dad was saying, but with a flick of my finger, I cut off the call, dived to the floor, and breathed an extra-large sigh of relief.

  “Think they bought it?” Frankie asked as we got up and brushed pizza sauce and popcorn kernels from our formal attire.

  I shrugged. “Does it matter? They’re not going to leave Emily in her time of need. And once we’re done cleaning up this place, it’ll be like it never happened.”

  “We?” Ashley said.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Yup.” Frankie yawned and stretched. “Better get home and hit the hay.”

  Ashley followed suit, yawning and rubbing her eyes.

  “You guys can’t be serious,” I said. “Who’s going to help me with my history project?”

  “You know it’s due tomorrow morning, right?” Ashley asked.

  I nodded meekly.

  “Hate to say it, dude,” Frankie said, “but this time you’re in deep.”

  And then I felt my life force drip out of my ear. I’d done it again!

  I c
rumpled to the floor and curled around a pizza box. “How am I gonna do three weeks of work in one night? With my brain?” I yawned. “And now my brain is really sleepy, too!”

  Ashley and Frankie did their best to reassure me, reminding me that I usually come up with something in trying times like these. But just as I was thinking that yes, maybe I had a shot, they told me about their projects. Ashley had made a medical study of the effects of gangrene, trench foot, and other war wounds, while Frankie had made some annotated graphic depictions of major battles for his presentation.

  “I’m so dead,” I said. I picked up a crust of pizza and hurled it at the picture of Miss Adolf I’d drawn earlier and tacked to the wall. It hit her square in her nose, ricocheted off the wall, and flew directly into my left eye. “Ow!”

  “Hank!” a voice barked. I looked through my fingers to see Papa Pete standing in the doorway with his hands on his hips, shaking his head. “What’s the matter with you, eh?”

  In silence, he marched through the living room straight to the table, past the carnage, and prodded a piece of pineapple in the pizza box, frowning. “Is that pineapple?”

  “Uh —”

  “You put pineapple on a pizza?!” He sniffed at the pineapple, reared back in disgust, then took a bite of a slice. He shook his head slowly as he chewed with great disapproval, before going over to the sink and letting the regurgitated bite drop from his mouth. He rinsed his mouth out thoroughly. “Who put pineapple on the pizza?”

  “We got it from Fidel’s.”

  “Fidel, eh?” He picked up the kitchen phone and dialed. I called out to him, but he put up his finger. “Fidel?” he asked. “It’s Pete. What’s the matter with you? Eh? You know what you did. You put pineapple on a pizza! A pineapple has no place on a pizza. It’s disgraceful, Fidel. Disgraceful. My grandson is sick from it. He’s on the floor right now —”

  “But, Papa Pete —” He put up his finger again and winked at me.

  “You’ll bake another and send it right over? Good. And put it in the stone oven. Twelve minutes and basta! And, Fidel, if I catch you putting pineapple on a pizza again, I’ll come over there myself. OK? Say hello to your mama for me. OK, buona notte.”

  He hung up with a smile.

  “Awesome!” Ashley yelled.

  “Pizza! Pizza!” Frankie chanted.

  “So, why wasn’t I invited?” Papa Pete asked, waving his hand around the apartment.

  “Sorry, Papa Pete,” I said. “It was kids only. But now it’s over. Frankie and Ashley are really tired.”

  “No, we’re not!” they both protested.

  “But I am.” I went over to the corner and retrieved Frankie’s hat and Ashley’s heels and handed them back as I walked my friends to the door. “And I have to get down to business.”

  “Here,” Frankie said, handing me the monocle. “Use it wisely.”

  After Frankie and Ashley had left, and after Fidel himself had personally brought over a piping hot pizza, Papa Pete and I sat and talked over my third dinner of the night. I told him everything. I can talk to Papa Pete about this stuff, and I never feel like I have to lie or bend the truth. My parents used to get really angry at me, before we learned about all my weird brain issues. And though they’ve been more understanding lately, I can still feel pretty defective when these things come up. Like they secretly want a better version of me or something. Sometimes it can even feel like I’m some sort of giant bug that can’t do anything right. I mean, they’re always trying to get me to go on all these special diets and buying me all these educational video games and — well, it can get tiring, and I feel so bad when I let them down because I know they’re trying. . . .

  But Papa Pete is someone I can talk to about it. Sure, he’s not thrilled when I tell him that I procrastinated for three weeks. But he knows that I’m trying. OK, so I don’t always really try. But even when I don’t try, I don’t feel like I’m a bad person in front of Papa Pete. So I told him all about the latest hole I’d dug for myself.

  “This is terrible, Hank.”

  “I’m really sorry, Papa Pete.”

  “The pizza, Hank, the pizza. Fidel is . . . I’m going to have to call his mama.”

  “But what am I gonna do? Don’t you know a lot about World War One?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Weren’t you in the war? Maybe I can interview you about it.”

  “World War One?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “How old do you think I am, Hank?”

  I shrugged.

  “Hank, when was World War One?”

  I shrugged again.

  “I think we have our work cut out for us. Come on, Hank. Let’s get this place cleaned up, then we’ll see about your project. You’ll think of something, but first get up and get the blood flowing, eh?”

  I slumped to the table. “Papa, I don’t have time to clean . . . and do my project! And look after Locust Breath!”

  “Who?”

  “Wait — where is she? Where is Katherine?”

  I had the Zipzer sense that something was deeply wrong. Ashley had gone into Emily’s room earlier to check up on the walking shoe leather, but from my seat at the table, I saw that Emily’s door was still open a crack. I was doomed!

  “Oh, no!” I screamed as I ran over and threw open the door, hoping to see those creepy eyes staring back at me from the pillow. I even half expected to see a skin-suit that Katherine had molted out of. But all I saw was the pillow. And on the floor, the writhing tub of locusts.

  I checked everywhere in Emily’s room. Under the bed. Under the covers. In her closet, where she keeps a stereo that is always on, playing jungle sounds. I checked all the drawers. I picked up the locust container and shook it, scanning around and calling out, “Dinner!”

  Oh, man. I had only ten hours before my first class tomorrow, and the last thing I needed at that moment was to be crawling around on the floor trying to sniff out a dinosaur. I tried to imagine that I had a lizard-mind-meld superpower, and thinking just like a lizard, I squirmed around and checked all the places a lizard would hide.

  But I didn’t have lizard-man superpowers. And I was running out of time. I ran into the living room. “No, no, no!” I shouted to Papa Pete. “I can’t lose Katherine. Emily’ll eat me alive if I lose her.”

  “Uh, Hank?”

  “Come on, Papa Pete. Don’t just stand there,” I said, and got on my hands and knees, peering under the sofa. “Help me!”

  “Hank?”

  “What?”

  Papa Pete was pointing at the sofa. I followed his finger, looked up, saw nothing, and shrugged.

  “Look closer.”

  Something strange clicked somewhere in my brain. I blinked. Then I saw an eye, a creepy yellow rock of an eye, looking right into mine. The eye was ten inches from mine. The eye was Katherine’s. She was sitting on the sofa without a care in the world.

  “Have you been there this whole time? I couldn’t see you!”

  Then something strange clicked in another part of my brain.

  “Hold on . . . I couldn’t see you ’cause . . . I’ve got it! I know what to do for my project. Thank you, sweet Katherine.”

  Then I had kind of an out-of-body experience, seeing myself from overhead. I watched myself lean in and give Katherine a big wet kiss on the lips, or whatever those things are. Then I snapped back into myself, just in time to watch Katherine lick her eyeball.

  “Gross! I’m becoming Emily!”

  From the pages of Emily Zipzer’s field notebook:

  April 10, 10:21 p.m.

  I have been informed by Nurse Adebayor that my procedure has been pushed back until tomorrow morning. My surgeon, Dr. Anita Henkes, has been tied up treating a youth who managed to stick a colored pencil all the way up his nose. I cannot quite fathom the youth’s stupidity. Nor can I fathom how the hospital could be so inefficient. Here I am presently in a bed, a bed that I’ve taken up all day, a bed that another sick pati
ent must need and cannot get. My sitting here is likely costing the system a great deal of money. Wasted money. I plan to request the hospital’s records when I get back and make a full audit of its data and patient-processing systems.

  While I’ve been thinking about efficiency and databases, the parents have been arguing about who gets to spend the night on the sole fold-out bed. The father wants to prove to the mother that he isn’t afraid of hospitals, and the mother, I presume, must have something to prove to that ridiculous book. Neither wants to be here, neither needs to be here, yet both are fighting for the privilege of sleeping on the dinky roll-away bed. Absurd.

  Even more absurd: we just got off a video call with Hank. The brother has clearly not checked on Katherine even once. In our short conversation, Hank made three obvious lies. And yet neither one of my parents feels the need to head back to the apartment, and instead are fighting tooth and nail to stay here, for no apparent reason.

  I repeat: FOR NO APPARENT REASON.

  “Is it possible not to let either parent stay?” I asked Nurse Adebayor. But before the nurse could answer my question and best see to my needs, both parents insisted that they would be staying. Even though there’s only a bed for one of them.

  Oh joy.

  April 11, 1:34 a.m.

  Have yet to catch a wink of sleep, thanks to the parents. Mom is sleeping in the fold-out bed. Every time she moves, the bed moves on its creaky wheels.

  The father, meanwhile, is making an absurd attempt to sleep in a chair. Every time his head leans back too far, he snorts, wakes himself up, mumbles, “Who’s there?” and then very gradually tilts his head back farther and farther until he snorts himself awake once again.

  I doubt I will get any sleep tonight. There is a reason that, as a present for my second birthday, I asked to stop being forced to sleep in their bed, instead preferring to share mine with the calm and supportive presence of a reptile.