The Big One-Oh (6 page)

That afternoon, I was at my locker when our Class President Leo hobbled by on crutches.

Oh, didn't I tell you? The big news in school that morning was that Leo broke his foot.

From what I overheard in the halls and the classrooms, I was able to piece together the story: the previous afternoon, Leo was messing around with a bunch of guys, and he had jumped off the roof of his house. Everybody was saying how he had done it “millions of times before,” but this time he “landed wrong,” and all the guys who were there heard a “loud crunch.”

Ouch. The word “crunch” made me wince each time I overheard it.

So today Leo showed up on crutches with his foot in a white cast, which everybody started writing on so that, by lunchtime, it was covered with people's signatures and drawings of lightning bolts.

Because Leo had to hold on to the crutches to walk, a bunch of guys were following him around—carrying his books, carrying his lunch tray, opening his locker and stuff. And they all kept asking Leo how he felt and patting him on his shoulder and saying how sorry they were.

And I thought:
Wow.

I opened my Birthday Notebook and under
You can buy friends with gifts,
I wrote
You can get friends with sympathy.

 

 

But later that afternoon, when I stood on the high brick wall at the far end of the school parking lot and looked down on the hard, black asphalt where I was planning to “land wrong” and suffer a minor injury—an injury that would attract my very own mob of friends—I had second thoughts.

Isn't there some way, I wondered, to get friends without getting hurt and requiring medical attention?

I decided to keep looking.

As I was climbing down off the wall, I
did
scrape my elbow kinda badly, but I didn't think that I could win any sympathy with a big scab, so I never showed it to anyone.

 

 

A few days later as I skateboarded home, I stopped to watch a baseball game in the playground, and, as I looked on from the sidelines, something amazing happened.

A baseball player raced from third plate and slid home in a cloud of dust. Well, the reaction he got was
incredible!
His teammates went berserk, pounding him on the back, patting him on the head and screaming things like, “Way to go, pal!” and “That was awesome, buddy!”

Aha!

I opened my Birthday Notebook and, underneath
You can get friends with sympathy,
I began to write
Sports heroes make tons of friends.

But I never got to finish.

That's because the very next batter popped up a ball that flew out of bounds in a high arc and fell—BOINK!—right down on my head! The sudden and surprising impact made me drop my Birthday Notebook and sit down, stunned, right where I had been standing.

I rubbed my head, where a lump was starting to form.

None of the ballplayers made a move toward me. The school groundskeeper, Mr. Gavin, came over, knelt down and held two fingers up in front of my face.

“How many fingers?” he asked. When I answered correctly, he told me to go home and put ice on my bump, which was starting to hurt something fierce.

But not as much as it hurt to hear the ballplayers' snorts and titters as I staggered away from the playground.

So much for being a sports hero.

I was going to erase that one from my Birthday Notebook. As a matter of fact, I vowed to go home and scratch out
You can get friends with sympathy
, too.

 

 

But before I could go home, I still had to go shopping for that night's dinner.

And that's when things got real strange.

As I walked the aisles of the Happy Giant Supermarket, my head kept throbbing where that baseball had crashed down on me.

But then I turned my cart into the bakery aisle.

Normally, I would roll right past that section of the store, because Mom and Lorena don't eat a lot of desserts. But that day I slowed down and looked up, up, up at the shelves and shelves of cake mixes and cans of frosting that rose high above me. And in that moment, staring up at that Great Wall of Cake, my head stopped hurting and the discouraging thoughts of my unsuccessful hunt for a friend flew from my mind. One thought and one thought alone remained:
“I'm going to have a birthday party,”
I told myself,
“so I will need a birthday cake.”

But what kind? Chocolate? Dark Swiss Chocolate? Angel Food? Devil's Food? Lemon Mousse? Butterscotch Swirl? So many choices!

I pulled a box of Confetti Coconut Cake Mix off the shelf to look over the directions. I had just started reading: “In a large bowl, combine . . . ,” when the box was smacked upward, out of my hands, and a familiar voice whined,
“Ooooh! Who's gonna bake a cake?”

It was Cougar. And, of course, Scottie was right behind him. What they were doing in the store was probably illegal, but there they were.

I yelled, “Cougar! Scottie! Stop it!”

As the box fell from the air, Cougar snatched it and tossed it over my head to Scottie, who bleated, “
Charley's
gonna bake a cake!”

“C'mon, give it back!” I said as they played keep-away with my cake mix.

I really should have known better, because they started to mimic my words, but in high, screechy voices: “C'mon! Give it back! Give it back!”

I finally grabbed the box at the same moment Scottie caught it. Then Cougar seized it, too, and the three of us wrestled for control while they continued to rag on me.

“You wear an apron when you cook?”

“I bet he's got a really cute apron!”

“STOP IT!” I yelled, and I yanked at the box.

And it exploded.

Confetti Coconut Cake Mix flew up in the air and covered everything with a fine, white powder.

We all stopped and looked at each other. What had we done? We destroyed a box of cake mix that we
hadn't even paid for!

Cougar and Scottie suddenly heaved with laughter, stepped back from the scene of devastation and pointed at
me!

“CLEANUP ON AISLE THREE!” Cougar yelled so the whole store could hear.

I wailed, “I didn't do it! I didn't do it!” but who was I kidding? I was holding the box. I was covered with powder. And it was their word against mine.

So I dropped the box and pushed my cart up to speeds that its little wheels were hardly designed for. I skidded around corners and veered around shoppers as Scottie and Cougar chased me, chanting, “Cleanup on aisle three! Cleanup on aisle three!”

But then I turned down an aisle and found that—oh, no!—I was headed straight for a cart that was blocking the aisle sideways! I couldn't stop in time, and I smashed right into it.

Everything got quiet. And I immediately noticed something weird: the cart was filled to the top with about fifty bags of potato chips. And nothing else.

And the worst part?

That cart belonged to Garry Quarky, my neighbor. The freak.

He looked up. I looked up. He blinked when he recognized me.

“Oh,” he said, pointing at me. “You're . . .” And then he stopped, because he didn't know my name. So he simply said, “. . . you.”

I was so stunned that it took me a moment to remember I was being chased. I glanced back and there, ten paces behind me, Cougar and Scottie waited, smirking.

Garry cleared his throat. “Shopping,” he said. He pointed to his cart and explained, “Yup. That's what I'm doing. Doing the shopping.”

He really talked like that.

I would gladly have left him at that moment, but I couldn't. His cart still blocked the aisle, and I sure wasn't going to turn around and get dragged by Cougar and Scottie back to the scene of our crime in aisle three. My thoughts were interrupted when Garry started stammering, “See, my girl . . . girlfr . . . girlfriend . . . y'know? Stacy?”

Stacy?
I thought; Pincushion's name was really
Stacy?

“She . . . uh, Stacy used to shop. But now she's . . .” and he flapped his hands like a bird winging off.

“She's gone,” I suggested.

“Yeah,” he mumbled, and his voice cracked a little. He sniffed and dabbed what might have been a tear from his eye, and the little voice inside my head was screaming:
“Oh, man! Is he crying? Please don't let him cry in the supermarket! Not in front of
Cougar and Scottie
!”

But Garry wiped his nose, cleared his throat, and then, like he had just awakened from a terrible spell that had turned him temporarily stupid, he asked me in a clear, adult voice, “Can I ask you
one
thing?”

I was so startled by the change in his tone that I simply nodded.

Garry pointed at his cart full of fifty bags of potato chips and asked, “Is this enough?”

“For . . . ?”

“For . . . now? Is this enough
for now?
”

I tried to puzzle out what he was asking:
Are you wondering if fifty bags of potato chips are enough to keep you alive for a while?
But then that leads to the question:
Are potato chips all you plan to eat?

He must have sensed the wheels whirring in my head, because he pointed at my cart and explained, “I mean, look at you. You. You really
shop.
You got your chicken . . . parts. Got your, uh . . . green vegetable . . .”

“Broccoli,” I offered.

“Right. Broccoli. Full of iron. Vitamin C. Good stuff, broccoli. Right?” He looked up and saw that I was staring at him strangely; he immediately dropped his head and turned his cart away.

“Y'know what? I've bothered you enough. 'Kay. Bye.”

And off he went. Leaving me at the mercy of Cougar and Scottie, who I could feel creeping up behind me. So I did something that I could never have imagined myself ever, ever doing in a million years.

I called after Garry.

“Where's your protein?”

He stopped, turned around and squinted.

“Huh?”

“You really should have protein in every meal. Potato chips are not protein.”

I looked back at Cougar and Scottie. They were bored. Cougar nudged Scottie with a “C'mon,” and they were gone.

Behind me, Garry protested, “But I don't cook.”

I turned back to him. “Can you reach the sink?” I asked.

He nodded a slow “Yes.”

“Then you can cook.”

Trying to explain cooking to Garry Quarky was like trying to explain a computer to a cat. Garry didn't understand how to peel vegetables, or why you simmer soups, or how to broil a hamburger. Heck, he didn't know the difference between lettuce and cabbage.

Finally, after we cruised a bunch of aisles without adding anything to Garry's cart, he turned to me.

“Where's the stuff in boxes?”

And don't ask me how, but I knew what he was talking about.

 

 

We stood before the big frozen TV dinners cases, and I thought Garry was going to cry again. One by one, he took boxes out of the cold and lovingly touched the pictures on the covers: photos of fried chicken and meat loaf and beef pot pies that looked just like the meal waiting for Garry inside the cardboard.

Garry put thirty-six TV dinners in his cart, and he would have taken more, but I told him that that was “enough.” For now.

 

 

I got the rest of my groceries, and then Garry followed me to the checkout lines, where he rolled his cart up right behind mine. There were a few large carts ahead of us, so we waited in silence until I finally got up the courage to say:

“Now can I ask
you
one thing?”

“Sure,” he nodded.

I took deep breath, not sure how he was going to handle my question. “Okay. Here goes. Remember that day you chased Boing Boing into the hedge cuz he stole something of yours?”

Garry looked confused. “ ‘Boing Boing'?”

“My dog. His name's Boing Boing,” I explained.

“Oh,” he nodded. “So that's the noise you're making when you're running around? I thought it was some kind of game you play. With an imaginary friend.”

An imaginary friend? Whoa!
I thought.
How old do you think I am?

“No. Just my dog,” I assured Garry. “Anyway, that day you were in the hedge on your knees? In your rubber apron, remember? And Boing Boing was chewing on something and . . . ?”

“Oh, yeah. Right, right.”

As we spoke, a lady wearing a lot of lipstick and biting her fingernails rolled her cart behind Garry.

I continued to him: “What was that . . .
thing
?”

“Well, what did it look like?”

I shrugged: “It looked like you had chopped off somebody's foot or something . . .”

The lady behind Garry snapped her head up as I added: “. . . like you hacked it off at the ankle.”

“Exactly!” Garry exclaimed. “That's what I was going for!”

The lady's eyes opened wide.

“And was that blood? Cuz it looked like it was dripping with blood,” I wondered.

“Yes!” Garry cried. “But did you think that there was too much blood? I always worry that there's too much blood.”

That's when the lady made a little
“Yeep!”
sound and raced away so quickly that her shopping cart left skid marks on the tile floor. Garry and I both looked after her. Then we shrugged at each other.