Funny Boy Takes on the Chit-Chatting Cheeses from Chattanooga (5 page)

Eventually, Bob Foster regained control of himself and sat back down on the bed.

“I love Tupper Camembert,” I complained. “But she won’t give me the time of day.”

“Look,” Bob Foster said, putting his arm around my shoulder. “You’re still new to this planet. You gotta understand the way the game of love works. If this girl is acting like she’s not interested in you, that means just one thing—she is totally in love with you. Don’t you see it? She’s just playing hard to get.”

“Hard to get? What does that mean?”

“When a girl likes a boy, she pretends she can’t stand him. And when a boy likes a girl, he pretends he can’t stand her. That’s the way the game works. So if this girl acts like she can’t stand you, that is a sign that she is in love with you.”

“Either that,” Punch shouted from the next room, “or she just can’t stand you.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense,” I told Bob Foster. “If somebody really likes somebody else, why don’t they just come out and say so?”

“That’s the game of love.” Bob Foster grinned, shaking his head and chuckling. “Girls want to be chased. She wants you to pursue her.”

I decided to put Bob Foster’s theory to the test. When school let out the next day, I spotted Tupper Camembert walking home. I didn’t follow her, because I didn’t want her to know I was trying to catch up with her. Instead, I ran around the block so she would have to bump into me and it would look like she was following me.

“Hi, Tupper,” I declared. “Are you following me home?”

“No.”

I thought that if I told a joke, it might loosen Tupper up a little.

“What did one plate say to the other?” I asked.

“What?”

“Lunch is on me.”

She wrinkled up her nose, as if she had smelled something really bad.

That’s good, I said to myself. The fact that she hadn’t laughed at the joke meant she really liked it. Maybe Bob Foster was right. Now I had to show Tupper that I didn’t have the least interest in her.

“You don’t want to go out for dinner with me sometime, do you?” I asked.

“No, I don’t.”

“Don’t give me your answer right now,” I interrupted. “Take your time and think it over.”

“I did. The answer is no.”

“Good,” I replied. “I don’t want to have dinner with you either. I just wanted to make sure we were in agreement. You don’t want to go out for lunch, do you?”

“No.”

“What a coincidence. Me neither,” I replied. “What about breakfast?”

“No.”

“Great!” I exclaimed. “You know, Tupper, I think you and I have really hit it off. We have a lot in common. You don’t want to go out with me, and I don’t want to go out with you either. We’re the perfect couple.”

Tupper just stared at me like I was from another planet, which made sense because I
was
from another planet.

“What about a snack?” I asked. “You wouldn’t be interested in joining me for an after-school snack, would you?”

“No,” she replied. “Will you leave me alone, please?”

“You don’t eat much, do you, Tupper?”

“Look, why don’t you take a long walk off a short pier?”

Boy, Earthlings certainly do enjoy water sports! I couldn’t get over it. Back home on Crouton, we used to swim once in a while when the weather was hot. But here on Earth, people must go swimming all the time. I was constantly being told to jump into lakes, dive off cliffs, soak my head, and take long walks off short piers.

I remembered what Bob Foster had told me. Tupper was playing hard to get. Deep down inside she felt the same way about me as I felt about her.

This was great. She was acting like she really couldn’t stand me. So she must truly be in love with me. Things were going perfectly according to plan! If I just kept it up, eventually Tupper would admit her love for me and we would live happily ever after. That is, unless something really horrible happened to mess everything up.

And then something really horrible happened to mess everything up.

IF YOU’RE A GIRL THINK ABOUT SKIPPING THIS CHAPTER, UNLESS YOU’RE THE KIND OF GIRL WHO HATES THE LOVE STUFF AND LIKES VIOLENCE AND DESTRUCTION AND DEATH.

Around seven o’clock the next evening, in the town of Cape May at the southernmost tip of New Jersey, precipitation began to fall from the sky.

Now, you may think the weather had nothing to do with this story. In fact, it had
everything
to do with this story.

Ordinarily, the word “precipitation” means rain or snow. But what fell from the sky were little flecks of cheddar cheese.

At first, nobody noticed anything unusual. It looked like snow flurries. But gradually, people realized it wasn’t snow at all.

A little girl stuck out her tongue to catch a snowflake, and she spat it out immediately. A driver flipped on his windshield wiper and found that it smeared the flakes across the windshield. A lady felt some flakes land on her arms and wondered why they didn’t feel cold.

The cheese stuck to the ground and soon the town of Cape May was blanketed in white. Friends started calling other friends on the phone, and people came running out of their houses to see if the raining cheese was some kind of joke. In minutes, the whole town knew the truth.

New Jersey was getting cheesed.

The cheese storm moved up the coastline and soon accumulations of three inches of cheese were reported all over the state. Trenton, the state capital, was cheesed in. Northern New Jersey was paralyzed.

At first people thought it was funny. Kids celebrated because they wouldn’t have to go to school the next day. They had cheese-ball fights and built cheesemen in their backyards. Some people started shoveling the cheese off their driveways or brushing it off their cars so they would be able to drive to work in the morning.

But there would be no work the next morning. By six o’clock, the National Weather Service reported that a foot of cheese had fallen on some parts of New Jersey, with drifts as high as three feet. All the schools in the state were closed.

It didn’t stop. It got worse. Big globs of cheddar cheese fell from the sky. Cars got stuck in it. It clogged up sewers and chimneys. People couldn’t open up their front doors to get outside. The brave souls who tried to trudge through all the cheese to get to supermarkets found their boots got stuck in the glop until they couldn’t move. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, as all the supermarkets were shut down and boarded up to prevent looting.

The Garden State Parkway, a highway that crosses the state from top to bottom, became a river of cheese. Cars just stopped in the middle of the road with cheese up to the axles. Tow trucks couldn’t move.

Newark Airport was closed. The Lincoln and Holland tunnels going into New York City were closed. So was the George Washington Bridge. Bus and train service was halted. Police, fire, and ambulance crews prepared for the worst.

As temperatures got higher during the day, the cheese began to melt slightly. By noon it was a sloppy, oozing, gooey mess. Helicopters flying overhead reported that the state of New Jersey looked like a giant undercooked pizza.

The most amazing thing was, New Jersey was the only state that got cheesed. Not a drop fell on Pennsylvania, New York, or Delaware, all of which border the state.

The rest of the country watched what was happening with amazement and horror. JERSEY GETS CHEESED! shouted the headline of the
New York Post.
Emergency crews rushed to the state to rescue people who were trapped inside their houses. When the President declared the entire state of New Jersey to be a disaster area, comedians joked that they’d thought New Jersey already
was
a disaster area.

I watched the cheese storm on the Weather Channel with Bob Foster and my dog, Punch.

“What could be causing it?” Punch asked. “Cheese doesn’t just fall from the sky.”

“Maybe it’s a hoax,” I guessed.

“It’s no hoax,” Bob Foster replied, with a worried expression on his face. “It has something to do with those cheeses in Wisconsin. I told you they weren’t just normal cheeses.”