Take Two! (15 page)

Aunt Birdie took a second to decode, then nodded in agreement and went back to folding her ten-thousandth tissue. “I’m thinking
of getting some buttocks on my face,” she said matter-of-factly. “So I look nice for the wedding.”

Mom and Aunt Olive stopped midfold and turned to her with puzzled squints.

“You know, those shots – like all the celebrities get?”

Aunt Birdie wasn’t exactly the brightest bulb in the marquee. But I’ve learned over time that if you just roll around what
she says in your brain for a little while, you’ll come up with what she really means.

“Botox!” I blurted out.

“Isn’t that what I said?”

Everyone laughed so hard that half the fake flowers got blown onto the floor. Cinnamon woke from her nap next to
the radiator and was in instant kitty heaven batting at the carnations. The room got even rowdier when she started zooming
laps around the table with a flower dangling from her mouth.

“Don’t let me interrupt your shindig, I’m just here for a banana,” Granny said, shuffling into the kitchen. “You’d better
clean up this mess when you’re through and I’m not gonna say it twice. We’re starting to get bugs.” Instant party poopage.
She bent over to pick up a single carnation – in agony, of course. “Oh, sweet Moses, my arthritis.”

“Just leave them, Ma, for heaven’s sake,” Aunt Olive said impatiently. “And no one gets bugs in October from leaving tissues
around.”

“Bugs!” Granny insisted, banging the flower on the table. “I still don’t think you’ve got your head screwed on straight, lady,
with all this wedding hooey. But you’re a grown woman and you can do as you darn well please.”

I grabbed a banana from the fruit bowl on the counter and presented it to my gran as if she were the Queen of England. “’Ere
ya go, m’lady,” I said, breaking into my cockney accent to lighten the mood.
The consummate showman – able to slip into character in the blink of an eye
. “Got a nice ripe one ‘ere for ya. Fancy that!” She grabbed the banana with a grunt. “Feelin’ a bit cheeky today, are we,
love?”

“Dustin, quit your playacting and come with me,” Granny ordered. She hobbled her way past Gordy, who was barreling
into the kitchen. “That screwy postman mixed in some of your mail with ours again. I could box his ears!”

“What, fisticuffs?” Gordy said, punching the air.

I froze. That was one of the Artful Dodger’s lines from
Oliver!
It means a fistfight – I’d looked it up. Gordy was groping through the fruit bowl on the counter when he noticed my questioning
glare.

“What?” he snarled. “It’s a real word!” He took a sloppy bite of an apple and put it right back in the bowl. “It’s on that
lame CD you’ve been playing on a loop for the last two weeks.”

That makes sense, I guess. Seeing our two worlds collide there for a brief second kinda threw me
.

Sifting through the stack of mail on the dining room credenza, I got to thinking about how I was still looking forward to
being onstage again, even though my television career was taking off like gangbusters.
I could end up being a filthy-rich movie star someday, but I shall always return to my humble roots in the theatre!
Suddenly I felt Gordy’s dragon breath on my neck as I separated silver-trimmed wedding RSVPs from bills addressed to Mom;
magazines addressed to Mom; a letter addressed to Mr. Gordon Grubbs –
from NBC Studios?

“Why the heck are you getting mail from NBC?” I asked, whipping my head around. “What’re you not telling me? Huh?”

Brother Grimm tore the envelope away from me and took off with a knuckle-punch to my arm. Right on cue Cinnamon leaped out
of nowhere, latching onto his back in an all-out
attack.
“Aaargh!”
Gordy howled, flailing and twisting down the hall. “Get this mangy thing off me!”

I used to think cats were minions of the Devil, but this one was beginning to grow on me. Back to the mail – and another stupid
postcard from LMNOP.

Hi, Dusti
N
G
R
u
BBS
,

W
HA
t’s up? A
RE
you Gi
V
i
NG
Ci
NNA
m
ON
lots o
F
S
WEE
t ki
SSES
? W
EN
t W
HA
l
E
W
A
tc
H
i
NG
to
DA
y AND
SA
w A po
D
o
F
Hump
BA
cks! I
N
c
RED
i
B
ly
AWES
om
E
!!! I
NEAR
ly F
R
o
ZE
to
DEA
t
H
t
HO
u
GH
, AND
ENDED
up “lo
S
i
NG
my lu
NCH
” i
N
St
E
llw
AGEN
B
ANK
.

Too much information!

“All right, stop dillydallying and bring those wedding cards to your aunt.” Granny gave me an impatient push. “Get ’em outta
my sight.”

I was about to head back to flower central when my own words stopped me.

“Gran, why are you acting like this?” She refused to look up – just kept smoothing out the lace doily on the credenza.
Someone has to talk some sense into her before she drives us all up the wall
. “Aunt Olive said she’d still send you money every month and come visit every chance she gets.”

“Oh, you don’t know nothin’,” Granny groused, waving away my words. “You’re just a snot-nosed kid.”

I dropped the mail and blew my nose on one of the tissue carnations that were peppered all around. “There ya go,” I said,
tossing it over my shoulder. “Snot free. So why don’t you educate me then?” I grabbed her hand and led her to the “sweet spot”
on the living room sofa, her favorite seat in the house. Granny zeroed in on peeling her banana, sniffing it and taking a
careful first bite.

“You want some?” she offered. “It’s good if you have the runs.”

“I don’t have the – spill it, Gran.”

“What do you want me to say? I didn’t expect your aunt to abandon us, running off with that bug killer…” She was beginning
to open up, but somehow veered off track, going on and on about the noisy garbage trucks waking up the whole neighborhood.

“Hello? Earth to Granny! We were talking about Aunt Olive.”

“Yeah, yeah, use your indoor voice.” She closed up the peels on what was left of her banana and set it on her lap. “For your
information I brought up all that wedding baloney in the confessional at St. Agatha’s yesterday – to that young Father Downing.”

“And? What’d he say?”

“Nothin’ worth a darn. He’s got this
holier than thou
attitude.”

“I give up!” I hollered, springing to my feet. The heat of frustration was burning my face as I bolted to the credenza and
grabbed the stack of mail. “You wanna know what I think?”

“No.”

“I think you’re just gonna miss Aunt Olive. A lot! And that’s all there is to it. I know I am.”

“Looks like somebody’s gotten too big for his own britches.” She flung the banana across the coffee table, knocking off the
pink poodle figurine. “Next, you’ll be moving away to the big city, just like your father. You think I don’t know where you’ve
been this weekend? Well, I
do
.”

I’d had it. I stomped back into the kitchen before we got into a bloody round of fisticuffs! Everyone had gone but Aunt Olive,
who was stuffing carnations into huge plastic bags. “Oh, Dustin, would you be a love and go through those response cards and
record the ‘accepts’ and ‘regrets’ in my wedding journal? I’m up to my elbows in flowers.”

“No sweat.” She cleared a spot for me at the table, and I got to work. There weren’t many invited guests, just close family
and friends, so things were sailing right along. It wasn’t until I’d gotten to Great-Aunt Iris’s RSVP that I’d actually stopped
and read one of the things. It wasn’t until I’d gotten to Great-Aunt Iris’s RSVP that I couldn’t breathe.

We look forward to celebrating with you on
… Just like in some demented Disney cartoon, the swirly-curly wedding date jumped off the card, spun through the air, and
singed my eyeballs:

Saturday, the eighth of October

“You have reached the offices of McKenna Casting, Inc. If you know the party you wish to speak to, please say their name now
.”

“Nathan Weiss.”

“Rachel White. If this is correct, press the pound key. If not, please repeat the name of the party you wish to speak to
.”

“Na-than Weiss.”

“Donald Baumgartner. If this is correct…”

Argh!
I had no choice but to stay on the line to speak to a human operator, who finally connected me to Mr. Weiss. Naturally he
wasn’t in, so I left a voice mail.

“Oh, yeah, hi. This is Dustin Grubbs – the actor from Buttermilk Falls. Uh, I have a callback for the Stink-Zappers commercial
at one-forty on October eighth, but that’s not good for me so I’d like to change that, please. To another day. Any day. Halloween
even. I have to leave for school now, but I can be reached anytime after three-thirty. Okay, thanks. Bye.”

I’d decided before the first school bell rang that I wasn’t going to let Aunt Olive know just yet that she went and picked
the worst possible day of the year to get hitched. Didn’t want her getting all worried for nothing. This was just a minor
glitch, and I knew I’d be able to work it all out – or die trying. In the meantime, I couldn’t wait to saturate the entire
playground with my “True Hollywood Story.” Pepper was psyched when I told her and she insisted I autograph her sweatshirt
with a Sharpie. My best friend, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found.

Once we were trapped inside Lynch’s lair, my sense of celebrity quickly fizzled out. Culture shock, I guess. I’d gone from
a whirlwind weekend of show-biz glamour and big city razzmatazz to a grueling morning of dividing compound fractions.
Bleah
. Mom must’ve dropped me on my head as a baby and damaged the math side of my brain because it never came easily. And slave-driver
Lynch had six of us lined up elbow-to-elbow along the lengthy chalkboard at the back of the room, working out problems in
a display of public humiliation. What was the point? Stars of TV commercials hired teams of accountants to divide their fractions
for
them.

“Miss Wathom, this may well be the biggest cranberry muffin I’ve ever seen – and it smells heavenly.” Mr. Lynch was peeling
back the plastic wrap and drooling over the thing as he paraded past me. It was hard enough to concentrate, being math impaired,
without mouthwatering distractions. “I’ll
exercise some restraint and wait until lunchtime,” he oozed on. “Tell your mother she’s outdone herself this time. But please
get control of your hair, dear, so Mr. Ziggler can see the board.”

Dear?
Maggie’s suck-up routine seemed to be working. She had been smothering Lynch with baked goods ever since she discovered he
had a major say in the casting of the musical. We’ll see if the kitchen closes after the cast list goes up.

“Mr. Grubbs, everyone else appears to be finished,” Lynch said, setting the megamuffin on his desk with a thud. “Is there
a problem?”

“Not really.” I was staring at my denominator so hard the numbers disappeared.
Focus, Grubbs. Divide and conquer
. “I take that back. It’s kind of the problem that’s the problem. I just don’t get it.”

“Well, let’s break it down. Why don’t you start out by refreshing the class’s memory on the rules for converting compound
fractions to simple fractions?”

“’Appy to oblige, gov-nah!” Cockney again. It just popped out of me when I least expected it. I faced the class and saw Maggie
looking up at me, pulling her frizzy curls into a pony-tail the size of a tumbleweed. “Okay, the rules for converting compound
fractions.” I cracked my knuckles. “Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m guessing it’s not ‘
I
before
E
except after
C
.’”

Candy giggled. That was when I first noticed it.
SLUDGE
was
printed across her hot pink T-shirt in gold glitter.
Hmm. Why is that word so familiar?
I stood there twiddling a fat piece of chalk, trying to shift my thoughts back to fraction rules, but my eyes jumped to Pig.
He was wearing the same shirt too, only in brown with white letters. And Tyler had an orange one with black letters. I scoured
the room and realized half the class was wearing those shirts. Green, blue, yellow-SLUDGE, SLUDGE, SLUDGE. There was a sudden
twinge in the pit of my stomach. I smelled something foul – and not just Stewy’s macrobiotic fish balls.

“Well, Mr. Grubbs?” Lynch’s voice cut through my wandering thoughts. “Do you know the answer or not?”

“Yes. No. Wait – what was the question again?”

“Take your seat,” he said all disgusted. “You’re wasting our time with your tomfoolery.”

Clearly I wasn’t racking up any brownie points with the Lynch-man – and after my disastrous
Oliver!
audition I needed all the help I could get. I mean how would it look if the star of a TV commercial with all kinds of natural-born
charisma didn’t even get a decent part in his own school play? I’d be the laughingstock of the Screen Actors Guild. I was
certainly feeling the pressure – what with that wedding-date conflict eating away at me all morning, and now the whole SLUDGE
thing. I had to find out what the deal was with that before I’d completely cracked up.

It wasn’t until around elevenish, when my class was
independently working on our Shedd Aquarium reports and Lynch was noisily printing stuff out on his computer, that I had
my chance. I was about to ask Candy “What’s with the shirts?” when she turned her head slightly and whispered, “Don’t hate
me,” through a veil of hair.