Philip and the Loser (9781619501522) (4 page)

“
What was wrong?”

“
Nothing.”

“
Nothing? Why did he yell he couldn’t
see?”

Emery looked at Philip. “He couldn’t
see because he had his eyes closed. It was supposed to be a joke.
Then he started laughing his stupid
yuk yuk
laugh. His mother didn’t think he was very funny. Neither did
my mother. She had to clean the Coke off the rug.”

The bell rang, and Philip and Emery walked to
line up.

“
Don’t forget,” Philip said. “We gotta
decide which game we want to do.”

“
After school,” Emery agreed, and
classes started to walk into school.

After school, Philip and Emery walked
with Leon, careful not to mention what they planned to do with
their weekend. Mr. Sagsman had put Philip in a bad mood. Even
though his class didn’t have Mr. Sagsman on Fridays, Mr. Sagsman
had come to his classroom first thing in the morning and beckoned
Philip into the hallway. He asked Philip whether he thought his
assignment involved making fun of brotherhood. Not really, Philip
whispered back.
Definitely
not really, Mr.
Sagsman said in a hard voice. He told Philip he’d better do a whale
of a job on his brotherhood project because report card time was
coming soon. And to top
that
off Philip found
out that Leon’s class
never
had Mr. Sagsman
and so didn’t have to do any of his brotherhood stuff. Leon’s class
got Ms. Wong, the pretty young art teacher, and spent time drawing
and coloring two days a week while Philip had to listen to Mr.
Sagsman be boring.

“
We can’t play Kleebis this weekend,”
Leon sadly announced. “I’m punished. I messed up my tests. Just
like a Kleebis,
yuk yuk.”
The
yuk
yuk
came out pitifully small, nothing like his usual
loud and goofy laugh. “So I gotta study all weekend. Study all
weekend,
woo hoo.
Just like a Kleebis,
woo hoo.”
Leon turned down Brill Street, singing as
he walked away alone.

“
Pshew!
He’s a Kleebis all
right. I’m glad he’s gone,” said Philip. “We have work to
do.”

They hurried to Emery’s house, and Philip
waited on the lawn while Emery took his book bag inside. Then they
continued on to Philip’s bedroom to decide what game they were
going to make for the fair.

“
How about the cat game?” asked Emery.
“Your dad has those tennis balls we can use. We just gotta make the
cats.”

Philip approved. “Sounds easy. All we need is
wood for the cat to stand on, construction paper for the cats,
markers. A hammer and some nails. My dad has all that stuff in the
garage, and I have paper and markers.”

Philip got his construction paper out of his
desk, and he and Emery began to make cats.

“
How big?” Emery asked.

Philip stretched his hands apart. “Like this.
They have to be pretty big so people think they can hit them.”

Emery turned his paper one way then the other
way. He put down the red marker and picked up the brown one. He
scratched his head. “How do you draw a cat?”

Philip turned his yellow paper long ways.
“The paper has to go up and down.” He drew a small circle for the
head and a large egg shape for the body. Then he put two pointed
ears, eyes, a mouth, and four whiskers sticking out on each side.
“How’s it look?” he asked Emery.

“
It looks like a cross-eyed 8 that
needs a shave,” Emery answered. “Why’d you make the eyes so close
together?”

Philip crumpled up the paper. “Okay, you do
it.”

Emery drew the same kind of 8 as Philip
had drawn, but concentrated on the eyes. When the eyes came out
even, he gave Philip a
see-what-I-did
smile.

Philip grumbled, “Big deal.”

Emery put two triangles for ears and some
lines for whiskers. He put a double, curvy line for a tail down at
the bottom of the lower circle.

“
Now
that
looks like a cat,” he said
proudly.

Philip couldn’t argue. It did look like a
cat. “How many should we make?”

“
Well,” said Emery thoughtfully, “if
you have to knock down three to win a prize, we need at least
three. But suppose two people want to play at once?”

“
Then we’ll need six,” said
Philip.

“
What if three people want to
play?”

“
Nine.”

“
Suppose a lot of people want to
play?”

“
Then they’ll have to wait,” Philip
barked. “We’re making a game here, not a zoo. We can’t spend the
whole weekend making cats. Besides I don’t know how many pieces of
wood my dad has.”

“
Let’s go see. We don’t have to make
more cats than there are wood things to stick them on.”

“
Good thinking, Emery.”

They ran downstairs and out to the garage,
which sat behind the house at the top of a driveway. Philip’s
father usually left the car in the driveway, preferring to use the
garage to store things. A cement patio ran from the garage to the
back door of the house, but the rest of the yard was grass.
Philip’s father had planted a lot of flowers in the backyard, now
not looking so good as the cooler weather settled in. A picnic
table with a bench on each side of it stood on the cement patio
behind the house.

Philip lifted the garage door and pushed it
up over his head. “There,” said Philip. “See the wood in the
corner.”

Emery ran over and counted. “Seven pieces. So
let’s make seven cats.”

“
Seven? Good. That won’t take too
long,” said Philip.

They went back up to Philip’s bedroom, and
before long Emery and Philip had each added three cats to the one
Emery had already made. Some of the cats had stripes, some spots.
Emery even made one with rainbow colored circles on it. Philip
didn’t like it, and he and Emery argued over it, but Emery said if
he made it, he could make it any way he wanted.

“
It still looks stupid,” Philip mumbled
as they went back down the stairs and out to the garage.

Working at the picnic table, they hammered
the bottom of their cats onto the narrow edges of the small, flat,
square blocks of wood so the biggest part of the wood would make
the cat stand up. When they finished, the boys stood the cats up
and stepped back to admire them.

“
Hey! What are they doing?” Emery
cried.

All the cats had bent forward and appeared to
be checking out their paws.

Philip walked back to the table and
straightened the cat in the middle, but it stubbornly dipped down
and stared at its paws again. Philip looked at Emery in disgust.
“The paper won’t stand up. It’s not thick enough.”

“
They need something on their backs to
hold them up,” said Emery. “You got any more wood in the
garage?”

“
I don’t know. Let’s go
see.”

They searched the garage until they found
seven thin sticks resembling giant Popsicle sticks.

Philip studied the situation. “I think we
gotta take the cats off and glue them to the skinny stick and then
nail the skinny stick back onto the wood.”

“
Be careful you don’t rip the cats at
the bottom. I don’t want to have to draw seven more
cats.”

The boys gingerly pried the cats off their
wooden blocks, but couldn’t help ripping the bottom of the paper on
all of them.

“
How about we just cut the ripped part
off?” Emery suggested. “These cats don’t really need tails so
much.”

“
I guess we gotta.” Philip ran into the
house and came back with his mother’s scissors and some white glue.
They cut off the ripped part of the cat’s tails, and after they
glued the sticks to the backs of the cats, they hammered the cats
back onto their stands. The cats, now a little shorter than before,
stood tall nonetheless.

“
There!” said Philip with satisfaction.
“Let’s try them out. Get the tennis balls. They’re in a bucket. See
them?”

Emery got two tennis balls from a dented
bucket full of balls sitting on the floor of the garage. Philip
lined the cats up along the edge of the picnic table.

“
Let me try first,” said Emery. He
wound up and threw. The tennis ball missed everything and sailed
straight to the back wall of the house.

“
Ha. You won’t be winning any prizes,”
Philip teased.

Suddenly, one of the cats fell over. Emery
and Philip looked at one another. A weak breeze sailed through the
backyard, and three more cats fell onto their faces. As they
watched in amazement, a second breeze toppled the last three
cats.

“
I threw one ball and knocked over
seven cats,” Emery muttered in amazement. “Maybe they do need their
tails.”

“
Not you, goof. You didn’t knock them
over. The air knocked them over,” said Philip. “That’s no good.
We’d lose every time the wind blows.”

“
Maybe we can nail them down to a
table.”

“
Then they wouldn’t fall down even if
somebody hit one.”

Emery thought a minute. “Maybe we can make
them heavier. You got anything to hold them down?”

Philip scanned his backyard until his gaze
settled on the garden hose. He went and unscrewed the heavy metal
nozzle off the front of it. He moved to the picnic table and put
the nozzle down on the small wooden stand of the end cat. He stood
an unnozzled cat next to it.

“
There. Let’s see what happens if we
make it heavier.”

The boys watched for a few moments until the
wind blew. The cat with the nozzle did not topple over, but the
unnozzled cat fell on its face.

“
Ha! Pretty smart, eh?” Philip crowed.
“Let’s see how the game works now.” He held the second tennis ball
in his hand and moved to where Emery had stood. “Cross your
fingers.”

Emery crossed his fingers, and Philip
threw. He hit the cat held down by the hose nozzle right in the
stomach.
CRACK
.

“
Uh, oh,” said Emery. He inspected the
cat’s spine. “The stick is cracked in half. Poor guy’s got half a
tail and a broken back.”

Philip joined Emery to do his own inspection.
“The stick’s too thin, I guess. Anybody who hits a cat hard will
break the stick. We could be out of business after seven
throws.”

The boys stood quietly contemplating failure
until Philip’s mother opened the back door.

“
Emery, your mom called. She wants you
home.”

“
She needs help with my baby sisters,
I’ll bet,” said Emery glumly. He looked over the broken cat and the
other six cats lying on their faces on the picnic table and softly
said, “It looks like a cat cemetery.”

Philip scowled and muttered, “Stupid game
anyway. We’ll make a different game tomorrow.”

“
I’ll come over early,” Emery said.
“We’ll think of a new game. We still have lots of time. Tomorrow’s
only Saturday.”

Philip picked up the seven cats and dumped
them into the black plastic trash can inside the garage. “Yeah,
tomorrow we’ll think of something.”

Emery and Philip parted, downcast but not
ready to give up.

The next morning Philip and Emery met in
Philip’s backyard at ten o’clock.

“
What’ll we do now?” Emery wondered.
“The cat game took all afternoon and ended up a big mess-up. Even
Leon couldn’t have messed things up more than we did.”

“
Well, it was your idea,” said
Philip.

“
No, no. It was
your
idea.”

Philip couldn’t really remember whose idea it
was. “Well, if it was my idea, then it’s your turn to come up with
the next idea.”

“
Oh,” said Emery, realizing he’d
trapped himself. “Maybe it
was
my idea then,
the cats.”

“
No, no. You said it was my idea, so
you have to have the next idea.”

“
Hi, fellows.”

“
Hi, Dad.”

“
Hi, Mr. Felton.”

“
What’s cooking today?” Mr. Felton
asked.

“
We have to think up a game for Mrs.
M.’s fair,” Philip explained. “It’s a school project.”

“
Oh, yes. Your mom mentioned. Well, you
have a nice day for it,” he said, looking at the sky. “But I
thought you made up a game yesterday.”

“
We did, but it didn’t
work.”

“
What game did you make?

“
The one where you throw balls at those
standing-up cats.” Philip threw Emery a glance.
“
Emery
thought of it, but it . . . the cats .
. .” He shrugged. “It didn’t work.”

“
So what now?”

“
How about throwing rings on sticks?”
said Emery.

“
There you go. That’s a good game,” Mr.
Felton said encouragingly. “Well, good luck. Your mother and I are
off with the baby to the supermarket.”

“
Dad,” Philip called. “Can we use your
old wood if we have to?”

“
Sure. But be careful. Don’t hurt
yourself.”

Philip turned and walked toward the garage.
“Let’s go see what’s there.”