Philip and the Loser (9781619501522) (7 page)

Leon nodded his head faster and faster and
pointed at his mouth.

“
He did!” said Philip. Both boys
smacked Leon as hard as they could.

“
Arrglll, ufffff,”
and out
came the needle. “Oh, oh,” Leon moaned. “I almost needled
myself.”

“
Leon,” said Philip angrily. “Will you
please go home? You’re a jinx. You’re a wrecker.”

“
Leon, leave us alone. We’re working on
a project, and you ruin everything every time you show up,” Emery
added, as upset as Philip.

Leon rubbed his neck and shrugged. “I
thought it would work. You blow it out.” He shot his fingers
forward to show what he meant. He shrugged again, and as he walked
away, Philip heard him say, “Just trying to help, and I almost got
needled.
Sheesh.”
Leon disappeared around the
corner of the house.

Monday, Philip and Emery met again after
school and tried a guessing game. But when Emery guessed that his
mother weighed one hundred and ninety-six pounds, she scolded him
for such a high guess. “What do you think I am? An elephant?” She
tossed a baby onto her shoulder and stomped out of the kitchen. The
boys decided a guessing game would only get them into trouble.

Tuesday, Emery had to stay in and help Leon
with his homework. Philip left Emery’s house quickly when he heard
Leon was on the way. Mrs. Moriarty, who’d stepped outside to put a
plastic bag of trash into a trash can, saw Philip and called him
over.

“
Hi, Mrs. M.,” said Philip.

“
I wanted you to know I reserved a
space for you and Emery at the fair Saturday. The fair starts at
noon, so be there ahead of time to set up anything you need. We
have plenty of tables and chairs, so don’t worry about them. What
kind of game did you finally decide on?”

“
Well . . . well, it’s going to be kind
of a surprise,” Philip replied nervously.

“
Good,” said Mrs. M. “I like surprises.
I’ll be looking forward to whatever it is.”

So will I,
Philip said to
himself.

“
Anything I can do to help, you let me
know,” Mrs. M. said. “See you Saturday.” Mrs. Moriarty turned and
went back into her house.

That night Philip talked with his father.

“
Dad, I need a game for Mrs. M.’s fair
on Saturday.”

“
I thought you and Emery worked all
weekend picking a game.” His father rested his newspaper in his lap
for a moment.

“
We did, but nothing worked. Especially
after Leon came along.”

“
Leon?”

“
He crunched our pegboard, you saw.
Then he almost swallowed a needle.”

“
What kind of game involves swallowing
a needle?”

“
No
game. Leon is a jinx.
Today, Emery has to help him with his homework so we can’t do
anything.”

“
He’s Emery’s cousin,
right?”

“
Yeah, and he’s a real loser, Dad.
Everything he does is a mess. He got the lowest marks in the school
in his math and spelling tests. His mother had to go see the
teacher.”

“
Well, maybe he has hidden
talents.”

“
Hidden? How about
invisible?”

His father picked up his newspaper again.
“Why don’t you simply have those little toy ducks in a tub of water
and put a star on the bottom of a couple. Whoever picks the duck
with the star gets a prize. What kind of prizes are you giving
out?”

“
We didn’t even
get
to that yet.”

Philip stared at the newspaper now
covering his father’s face and went up to his room. Ducks with
stars was
not
a good idea, he thought.
Way boring!

Wednesday and Thursday it rained, so Philip
and Emery spent Wednesday in Emery’s house and Thursday in Philip’s
house. Try as they might, no good games came to mind. On Friday,
Philip and Emery slumped hopelessly on Philip’s backyard picnic
bench, and in desperation Philip told Emery about his father’s
suggestion.

“
Toy ducks? Where you pick them up and
turn them over?” Emery asked.

Philip shrugged. “Yep.”

“
Not too exciting.”

“
I know.”

“
And we don’t have any toy ducks,
anyway,” Emery reminded him. “Or prizes.”

“
How about we stick little notes into
balloons that say
You’re a winner.
Then
everybody can pay to pop a balloon and see if they win.”

Emery frowned. “Yeah, but
everybody
can pop a balloon. That’s going to be an
awful lot of balloons to blow up. And if the balloon’s the right
color you can see inside it. We’d have to put papers in every
balloon to try to trick people. At least with the dart game people
would miss, and we wouldn’t need so many balloons. We’d have to
blow up a million balloons if all you did was just pop them, and we
don’t have a million balloons.”

“
Well, what are we going to do? I
already told Mrs. M. we had a surprise game for
Saturday.”

“
It’s going to be a surprise if we
have
any
game on Saturday,” Emery said
mournfully. “Mr. Sagsman is going to kill us if we don’t have a
brotherhood project to give him on Monday.”

“
Me especially. I got like a zero on
the composition.”

Leon walked around the corner of the house
into the backyard. He had a bandage above his eye.

“
Uh, oh,” said Philip. “Leon, stay
there. You’re a jinx.”

Leon stopped and plopped down on the
grass.

“
What happened to you?” Emery
asked.

Leon gave a
yuk yuk.
“I was jumping on my bed, and I missed again.”

“
You missed?” asked Philip. “You missed
the whole bed?”

“
One leg missed, and I went blammo!
into the dresser. Lots of blood. It was neat,
yuk
yuk.
Want to play a game of Kleebis?”

Philip and Emery looked at each other and
didn’t bother to answer Leon, choosing instead to continue to think
about the fair. Leon got up.

“
Leon, don’t go near the garage,” said
Philip.

“
Leon, don’t come near the table,” said
Emery.

“
Leon, sit back down on the grass,”
said Philip.

A partially open, folding red lawn chair sat
on the grass near Leon.

“
The grass feels wet,” said Leon. “I’ll
sit here.”

“
Leon, look out!” Emery
cried.

Leon threw himself into the chair which
immediately closed on him, like a gaping red mouth swallowing a big
bug with a giant gulp.

“
Ow, ow, ow,”
Leon
screamed.

Philip and Emery jumped up and tried to open
the chair.

“
My finger’s stuck,” Leon
bellowed.

Philip saw Leon’s finger caught in between
the metal arm of the chair and one of the metal rungs of the back
of the chair.

“
OW, OW, OW,”
Leon
roared.

Philip tapped the chair. “Emery, hold
here.”

Emery grabbed the arm of the chair, and
Philip pulled the chair’s back as hard as he could.

The chair opened a little, and Leon fell
out.

“
Yow, ow, oo,”
Leon screeched,
jumping up and down like a kangaroo. He froze for a moment to
inspect his finger. “
Blood!”
he screamed and
took off running around the back of the house. Philip could hear
him howling, “Blood! Blood! Blood!” as he ran down the street
toward home.

Philip and Emery gave up trying to think of
any more games. Leon had messed up their concentration. They
decided to meet the next day morning at ten and somehow or other
figure out something they could do at Mrs. Moriarty’s fair.

At ten-thirty on Saturday morning, only
ninety minutes from the start of Mrs. Moriarty’s fair, Philip and
Emery were deep in an argument.

“
I told you. I can’t
get
my dad’s darts. They’re too fancy, and they’re
locked up, and he’s not home anyway, so cross out anything with
darts,” Emery insisted for what felt like the tenth
time.

Philip looked down at the loose leaf
notebook in his hand and crossed off another possibility. He’d
spent Friday night making a list of possible games he and Emery
could make to get them out of their emergency. “Then let’s blow up
a lot of balloons and do something with them,” said Philip. “You
can blow up balloons, can’t you?” he added testily. Panic had begun
to bubble in Philip’s stomach. The list he’d made was nothing but
crossed out ideas. Mrs. M. would think he was an idiot if he didn’t
show up with the game he’d bragged about, and Mr. Sagsman
would
tell
him he was an idiot and probably
give him a big red
I
on his report card to
show he was an idiot.

“
We don’t have time to blow up a
million balloons,” Emery argued. “Anyway, it takes me forever to
tie those little knots in them. I had to blow a lot of balloons up
twice the first time for the darts game ’cause the air leaked out
when I tied the knot. Some of them jumped out of my hand and flew
around the room.”

Philip had no answer. The same thing had
happened to him when he blew up his balloons. “Your sisters got any
toy ducks? I think Becky has one.”

“
We need more than two or three ducks.
Anyway, ducks is a stupid game. All you gotta do to win is watch
which duck has the star. How could you forget if there’s only three
ducks. Everybody’d win a prize, and we don’t even have any prizes.
This is a disaster.”

“
Did somebody call me?” Leon walked
around the corner of the house and entered the backyard. He had a
white bandage around his left hand to go along with the bandage
above his eye. He held his hand up. “A chair bit me,
yuk
yuk.
You saw.”

“
You weren’t laughing yesterday,”
Philip said grumpily.

“
That’s because it bit me yesterday.”
Leon walked over to the lawn chair lying on the lawn where he’d
left it. He gave it a kick and said, “Bad chair.” Then he took a
step away from it and gave a
yuk yuk.
“Did
you feed it today, I hope?”

“
Leon,” said Philip. “Can you please
shut up and stay over there? If you get near us, the picnic table
will probably fall apart.”

“
And maybe the house will fall down,”
Emery added.

“
Yeah. Don’t make my house fall down,”
said Philip half seriously.

Leon laughed and wiggled his fingers at
Philip’s house as if he were a wizard casting a spell.

Philip and Emery watched the house for a
moment, just in case.

“
Don’t worry,” said Leon. Then with
some pride he added, “I can’t stay long. I’m meeting my school
friends in a little while.”

“
You
have friends?” said
Philip.

“
Of course. They told me to meet them
in the schoolyard.”

“
Well, sit there and wait and don’t
make trouble,” said Philip.

“
Can I have some paper to play with?”
Leon asked.

“
Will you stay there and not knock
anything over?” Philip asked in return.

Leon smiled. “I’ll be as quiet as a
Kleebis.”

Philip rolled his eyes and took some papers
from his binder. He gave them to Emery, who walked over to Leon and
handed them to him. Leon sat down, and Philip and Emery went back
to arguing.

At eleven o’clock, Philip crossed out the
final item on his list. “We’re dead,” he said simply. “Where’d Leon
go?”

Emery looked behind him. “I don’t know. Went
to the schoolyard, I guess.”

“
He threw his garbage all over,” Philip
complained. Six crumpled balls of paper lay spread out over the
grass. “Great. He throws his junk around, and I’ll get in trouble
for it.” Philip gathered up the papers and put them on the picnic
table. “Well? What’ll we do?”

“
Go tell Mrs. M. we don’t have a
game.”

Philip made a pained face. “I told her
we
did
have a game. Come on, Emery.
There
must
be something we can think of to
get money for the fair.” Philip looked at his watch. The fair began
in fifty minutes.

For five more minutes the two boys sat
on the picnic bench, heads drooping, thinking of the embarrassment
looming ahead for them. In frustration, Philip slammed his palm on
the picnic table, smashing one of the papers Leon left behind.
“There
has
to be something. We can’t both be
this dumb.” The paper he’d smacked opened up a little and something
caught Philip’s eye. He picked up the paper and opened it. He
looked at Emery, then back at the paper.

“
What?” asked Emery, seeing the
surprise in Philip’s face.

Philip smoothed the paper out and turned it
toward Emery.

“
Hey,” Emery cried. “That’s you. It
looks just like you.”

Philip opened another of the papers. “This
one is you.” He showed Emery.