My Pops Is Tops! (5 page)

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Authors: Nancy Krulik

BOOK: My Pops Is Tops!
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Her glasses? Wait a minute. Katie didn’t wear glasses.
“Hey, Max, what are you doing out in the yard in your pajamas?” asked the tall man with the gray ponytail at the back of his balding head.
Max? That was Pops’s name.
Oh, no! Had Katie turned into her grandfather?
Katie looked down. Sure enough, she was wearing Pops’s red-and-white, polka-dot flannel pajamas.
Pajamas!
In public!
This was
so
embarrassing.
“Now quit playing with that dog and get dressed,” the short man said. “We’ll be in the clubhouse waiting for you.”
“Waiting?” Katie asked. “For what?”
“Don’t tell me you forgot about our Scrabble game?” the man with the ponytail said. “Or are you afraid you might get beaten by John or me?”
The shorter man, John, looked up at his tall, skinny friend. “You know what, Nate?” he asked him. “I think the champ is afraid to give up his title.”
Wow! John had just called Pops the champ. Katie was seriously impressed.
She was also seriously awful at Scrabble. In fact, Katie had only played the game once before, when she was home sick from school one day. She’d lost really badly to her mom.
Of course, that had been a year ago. Katie was a much better speller now. And she knew a lot more big vocabulary words. Mr. G. made the kids in class 4A do a lot of vocabulary work sheets. Still . . .
“Not today, fellas,” Katie told Nate and John. “I’m kind of busy.”
“What, are you
chicken
, Max?” Nate asked.
Chicken? How dare Nate call Pops chicken? Pops wasn’t afraid of anything. And Katie wasn’t about to let his friends think he was.
“Just give me five minutes to get ready,” she said.
“Great!” John exclaimed. “We’ll meet you at the clubhouse.”
The clubhouse was only a short walk away, but today it felt longer. One of Katie’s legs was very sore. Probably from Pops’s victory jump last night.
As she walked down the carpeted hallway to the game room, she glanced at her reflection in the mirror.
Ew!
She took a step closer and peered through her glasses. Was that hair growing on the tops of her ears? Yuck! How come she hadn’t noticed that on Pops before?
“Hey, Max, come on! We don’t have all day, you know,” John said, waving Katie into the game room.
“Coming,” Katie said.
“Take your seven letters,” Nate told her. He and John had already set up the Scrabble board and trays on one of the card tables. “John’s keeping score.”
“Okay,” Katie said. As she placed her letters in the tray, she frowned with frustration.
EFCJNPO
What was she supposed to do with those?
“I’m going first,” John said. He laid down five letters going across. “HIVES,” he said. “That’s eleven points.”
“Good one,” Nate complimented him. Then he added AGUE below the V. “VAGUE.” He picked up his pencil. “Double-word score. That’s eighteen points for me. Your turn, Max.”
Katie stared at the board. What could she do? Finally she came up with something. “PEA,” she said, placing a P and an E in front of the A in VAGUE.
“You can’t do that,” Nate said. “Because then your H and P are together, and so are the I and E. HP isn’t a word. Neither is IE.”
“What’s wrong with you, Max?” John asked Katie.
“I . . . um . . . I just wanted to see if you were paying attention,” she said.
“Yeah, well, stop testing us and start playing,” Nate told her.
Katie moved her P and E tiles farther down the board until she spelled the word PEE. “Pee . . . but a different kind.” She giggled.
Nate and John looked at her strangely.
“What?” Katie asked them. “It’s a real word. I know because Suzanne and I looked it up in the dictionary once.”
“You and who did what?” John asked, surprised.
Oops.
Katie had almost forgotten that she was supposed to be Pops. “I mean my granddaughter told me that she and her friend looked it up once. Kid stuff, you know?”
John and Nate nodded.
Phew.
That was a close one.
“So PEE is your word, huh?” John asked. He sounded kind of disappointed.
“Yup,” Katie said. “Why?”
“It’s just so much shorter than your usual words,” Nate said. “And it’s worth only five points.”
“Yeah, you’re slipping, Max,” John added.
Katie frowned. She hated the fact that she was losing the game for Pops. But there was nothing she could do. It was all the fault of the magic W-I-N-D.
Chapter 9
Katie looked down at the letters she had left to use. She, John, and Nate had been playing Scrabble for about an hour, and all she had was a Z and an E. The Z was worth ten points. But what could she do with it?
Katie frowned as she looked all around the board. Then suddenly her face brightened. “Got it!” she cheered. “And it’s a double-word score!”
Nate looked from Katie to the board and back again. “L-O-Z-E?” he asked. “What’s that?”
“LOSE,” Katie told him.
“That’s spelled with an S . . . L-O-S-E,” John told her.
Katie blushed. She knew that. How could she have messed up an easy word like that?
“Well, if you can’t do anything else, the game’s over,” Nate said. “Total them up, John.”
“You scored eighty-five points total,” John told Katie as he finished adding up her score.
“Must be some kind of record,” Nate said.
“Yeah, a
losing
record!” John laughed.
Katie frowned. John and Nate were being really mean to her. Well, actually they were being mean to Pops, and that was worse. Especially because it was all Katie’s fault.
Tears were forming in Katie’s eyes. But imagine what Nate and John would say if they saw Pops cry! Katie couldn’t let that happen. She took a deep breath and blinked away any tears.
“Well, I’d better go home,” Katie told her grandfather’s friends. She wanted to get away from that game room as fast as possible.
But as she passed by the pool table on the way to the door, an older man grabbed her by the arm. “Hey, Max,” he said. “I need you.”
Katie turned to him. “Why?” she asked him.
“I’m having so much trouble with my shots,” the man replied. “I need some help.”
“From me?”
Just then, a woman with blue-gray hair walked over to the table. “Of course from you. Who better for Patrick to learn from than Max Carew, pool champion of Marsh Manor?” She smiled at Katie and blinked. “I just
love
watching you shoot pool.”
Katie blushed red. She couldn’t believe it. This old lady acted like she had a crush on her. Yuck!
“Come on, Maxie,” the woman said. “Show us what you’ve got.”
Maxie?
Ugh. Now Katie knew how Jeremy felt when Becky talked to him. It was awful.
But not nearly as awful as the idea of having to teach Patrick how to play pool. Katie was no pool champion.
Katie had seen her grandfather play pool before. He was really amazing at it. Sometimes he was able to get all the balls into the pockets of the pool table without giving anyone else a turn.
Once or twice Pops had tried to show Katie how to shoot pool. But the stick was so long. She hadn’t been able to control it.
Still, Katie was taller now. And she had Pops’s long arms. Maybe she could play pool. Especially if she remembered Pops’s pointers, like lining up her right foot, her right arm, and her chin in the direction of where she wanted the ball to go. Or remembering to lift the knuckles of her left hand up off the table when she rested the stick on them.
By now, a whole crowd of people had gathered around the pool table. Nate and John were in the group. If she could just get a few balls in, maybe that would stop Nate and John from making fun of Pops.
“Okay, let me go get a pool stick,” Katie said.
“Uh, Max?” Patrick said.
“What?” Katie answered.
“You mean a pool
cue
, don’t you?” Patrick told her.
Oops. Oh, yeah. Katie kind of remembered her grandfather calling the stick a cue when he was teaching her.
“You knew what I meant,” Katie said, going over and pulling a pool cue off the rack. She watched as Patrick rubbed some chalk on his cue. She did the same thing.
“Okay,” Patrick said. “I’ll set ’em up and you can break, Max.”
“You want me to go first?” Katie asked nervously.
“That’s what
break
usually means,” Nate said sarcastically from his place in the crowd. Everyone began to laugh.
“I knew that,” Katie told him. “I was just testing you—again.”
Nate gave Katie a funny look, but he didn’t say anything.
“Okay, here goes,” Katie said. She bent over the table, just like she remembered Pops doing. Then she curled her fingers and rested the cue over her knuckles. She stared at the balls on the table and tried to concentrate.
But that wasn’t easy. Two women were playing Ping-Pong in the same room. Every time Katie tried to focus on the pool table, all she could think about was the sound of the Ping-Pong ball hitting the table.
G-nip g-nop. G-nip g-nop.

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