Cheesie Mack Is Not a Genius or Anything (7 page)

And you
cannot
get warts by touching either a frog or a toad. I have held frogs lots of times and a toad once, and I have zero warts. It’s a myth.

Even though we passed The Toad twice every school day, going and coming home, neither Georgie nor I had ever, never seen any sign of life. No lights. No mailman. No gardener. Not even that bluish glow that comes from a television set. So we decided it was deserted. But we didn’t exactly think there was anything weird about it … not yet.

Then one day about a year ago, maybe near the end of fourth grade, we were biking home from school when I suddenly jammed on my brakes just as we were passing by The Toad. I stopped so fast that Georgie almost crashed into me. I was staring up at the old house … and I wasn’t saying anything.

“What?” Georgie asked me.

I just stared. I didn’t even turn my head to look at him.

“What?” he repeated in a softer, more nervous voice.

“Something moved,” I whispered. “I saw something move behind that curtain upstairs.”

“Which one?” Georgie whispered, looking up at The Toad, his eyebrows waggling.

I pointed up at a window, and Georgie followed my
finger with his eyes. We stared for a long time. Then he looked at me, and I looked at him, and he said very seriously, “I saw it, too.”

Of course Georgie hadn’t seen anything. And neither had I. He just said that to go along with me. I think here’s why we did it. Sometimes kids like to make up scary things just to scare themselves. So from then on, Georgie and I would pretend to see shapes moving inside the old house whenever we rode our bikes past. And that’s when it became The Haunted Toad.

So this day, the day of our fifth-grade graduation, with the two of us dressed up, we rode past The Haunted Toad, and Georgie as usual pointed at a third-floor window and pretended to be terrified.

I started to let out one of my super-scary soft-and-spooky howls. (It’s kind of an “ow-hooo-eeeee.” I do it very well. At night sometimes when my parents are downstairs, I howl it, and even though it doesn’t really scare my sister, she gets mad at me anyway.)

But I was only starting into the “hooo” part when something I had seen a million times stopped the sound half out of my throat.

I braked my bike and stared. I was fumbling in my jacket pocket when Georgie asked, “What?” He looked at me and then back up at The Haunted Toad. Then back at me. Then back and forth one more time.

“What?”

I couldn’t say anything. I bet I looked like I had seen a ghost!

I pointed at the street sign we had passed to and from school every day since kindergarten. Then I pointed at the number on the mailbox in front of The Haunted Toad. Then I pointed at the address I had written on the yellow phone-book page in my hand: 207 Eureka Avenue.

G. J. Prott lived in The Haunted Toad!

Just then one of the mice in the paper bag decided the time was right for an escape. It—he or she … mice probably know the difference, but I can’t tell—bit a hole through the bag and stuck its nose out. Georgie instantly folded the bag to cover the hole and rode off toward school.

“Come on!” he yelled.

I took one last look at the address I’d written, then biked after him at full speed.

Lots of kids were already inside the auditorium when we walked in. Georgie’s bag now had two bite holes in it, one of which had a mouse head poking out. He tucked it tightly under his jacket.

“I don’t know, Cheesie. Maybe this isn’t such a good—”

I raised my hand to stop him from finishing. Only four rows away, my sister and Kevin Welch were
talking to his brother, Alex. She pointed at us, and Alex hurried over.

“My brother and your sister want to know what’s in the bag,” he said. Alex looked like he didn’t know what he was talking about, which is pretty usual for him.

“What bag?” Georgie asked.

“Yeah, what bag?” I echoed.

“I don’t know.” Alex shrugged. “They just told me to say that.”

Georgie suddenly jerked, said something that sounded like “Eee-yeen!” and pulled me toward a side door, leaving Alex standing there looking stupid, which is pretty usual for him.

In the empty corridor outside the auditorium, Georgie began squirming like crazy. “Help me, Cheesie! One of the mice just went into my shirt!”

Six Georgie twitches, five Georgie hops, and four Georgie contortions later, I pulled his shirt out of the back of his pants and a mouse dropped to the floor. It skittered under a wall of lockers.

“No way, Cheesie! This isn’t going to work.”

Clutching the bag tightly with both hands, he ran down the corridor to his locker and yanked it open. Luckily Georgie never uses his locker for anything except storing his lunch, so there was no lock on it and he didn’t have to waste time with a combination. The bag was totally coming apart, and he was losing mice fast.

One dropped to the floor. I grabbed it. Another crawled out and scampered up Georgie’s arm onto his shoulder. I grabbed that one, too. Georgie shoved the bag of mice into his locker and slammed the door shut.

I didn’t even have time to ask what the heck I was supposed to do with a mouse in each hand when the door to the auditorium flew open. Goon was holding it and grinning big-time as Mrs. Crespo came striding through, heading right toward Georgie and me.

M
rs. Crespo, our principal, has been at our school for 247 years. I’m exaggerating, of course, but I know it’s a really big number. She was actually my dad’s fourth-grade teacher, and he told me she was the youngest, shortest, funniest, and strictest teacher he ever had. Here’s what I know about Mrs. Crespo and those four things:

1. She’s not young anymore. She must be way more than forty or sixty or something.
   
2. She is very short, almost as short as I am.
   
3. She grins a lot, which I think is unusual for school principals.
   
4. She is very strict, which I think is usual for school principals, because principals have
   to punish the kids who do bad stuff like bring mice to school.
   

As Mrs. Crespo approached, I stuck both my hands, a mouse in each, into my pants pockets. She passed Georgie, who was leaning against his locker and making
plip-plop
noises with his lips so Mrs. Crespo wouldn’t hear the mice scratching around inside. She stopped about five inches in front of me.

“Your sister says you have a bag I should look into. May I see it, please?”

It was one of those moments when a kid’s stomach gets all hot and watery because you know you’re probably in big trouble. Even so, I thought of three things I could do:

1. I could say “What bag?” like I did with Alex, but Mrs. Crespo’s a million times smarter than Alex.
   
2. If I had another bag—an empty bag—I could show that to her. It wouldn’t exactly be a lie because Mrs. Crespo didn’t exactly ask for a bag of mice. And I kind of remembered that there might be an empty
   lunch bag in my locker, which was in the next hallway. But I wasn’t sure.
   
3. I could say I didn’t have any bag. It wouldn’t exactly be a lie because Mrs. Crespo asked for
   my
   bag, and the bag of mice that by this time was probably in shreds inside Georgie’s locker was G
   eorgie’s
   bag, and actually I had never even touched it … only looked inside it.
   

But before I could say anything, Georgie abruptly yanked open his locker and pointed. There was a very
short no-one-made-a-sound, and then Mrs. Crespo’s mouth jumped into a big circle and a loud “oooh” came out.

One second later my principal’s arm whizzed by me and slammed the locker shut.

Mrs. Crespo’s circle mouth turned into a line. She looked really strict. She had a you-better-explain look on her face. Georgie and I were going to have to tell the truth. And when we did, bad things would happen. Mrs. Crespo would tell my mother, who is a little bit afraid of mice and crawlies. Mom would think we did a really bad thing, and I’d be punished. Probably no TV or computer games for the rest of my life.

Georgie looked down at his feet and said, “I did it. Those are my mice. Cheesie didn’t do anything.”

“Go on,” Mrs. Crespo said. Goon was now standing right behind Mrs. Crespo.

Georgie mumbled, “I got them at the pet sto—”

Mrs. Crespo waited for him to continue, but he couldn’t talk. His eyebrows were waggling, but his voice was paralyzed. He looked at me helplessly, and
even though Goon was grinning wickedly, I ignored her and started talking. I told Mrs. Crespo what Georgie had originally planned to do at graduation: cross his eyes, hold his breath, pretend to barf—the whole list is way earlier in this book, in
Chapter 1
.

“But he wasn’t going to do any of those things anymore. None of them. He was only just bringing mice to school.” As soon as I said it, I realized how lame it sounded.

Mrs. Crespo turned away from me and faced Georgie. “Is this true?”

Georgie nodded.

It was exactly then that I, both hands still in my pockets, suddenly twitched my left arm and half spun around. This surprised Mrs. Crespo, who turned toward me, waiting for an explanation. I said nothing. I wasn’t about to explain that the mouse in my left hand had almost wriggled free.

Mrs. Crespo stared back and forth from me to Georgie and then began to tap her fingers together. I had seen her do this lots of times before. It meant that she had already decided that someone was guilty and
was now trying to think up the right punishment. We were doomed.

“Well then, George Harrison Sinkoff, you will stay right by my side until graduation starts, at which time you will take your seat and behave yourself. If you do not, you will be PARTIALLY EXPELLED from school for the rest of the year. And since the rest of the school year consists of just one event, your fifth-grade class party, being PARTIALLY EXPELLED will consist of coming to the party and sitting by yourself doing absolutely nothing while everyone else has fun. Is that clear?”

Georgie’s eyebrows stopped waggling for a moment, and he nodded.

“And you, Mr. Mack … As accomplice to this mischief, you will stay with me and Mr. Sinkoff at all times and make certain that he does exactly as I said. And if he misbehaves, you, Mr. Mack, will also be PARTIALLY EXPELLED.”

I nodded seriously and asked, “May I go to the bathroom?”

Mrs. Crespo nodded. “You have two minutes.”

Hands still in my pockets, I walked to the end of the hall and turned into the corridor where the Boys room is. Once out of their sight, I sprinted, arms flying, a mouse in each hand. I shot right past the bathroom and was out the side door in less than ten seconds. I ran to the grassy field and carefully placed the two mice on the ground. “Look out for snakes,” I warned them, then sprinted back into school.

With graduation almost ready to start, Mrs. Crespo was super busy, and we had to stay right next to her. First she tracked down the school custodian and told him about the mice in Georgie’s locker. Then she started organizing the graduation ceremony, making Georgie walk on her right side and me on her left so we couldn’t even whisper to each other. It was really embarrassing when Goon saw Mrs. Crespo holding our hands like kindergartners. But the worst thing was that I was going to have to give my sister 32 points.