Cheesie Mack Is Running like Crazy! Read online

  READ ALL OF CHEESIE’S ADVENTURES!

  Cheesie Mack Is Not a Genius or Anything

  Cheesie Mack Is Cool in a Duel

  Cheesie Mack Is Running Like Crazy!

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2013 by Stephen L. Cotler

  Jacket art and interior illustrations copyright © 2013 by Douglas Holgate

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Visit Cheesie at CheesieMack.com!

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cotler, Stephen L.

  Cheesie Mack is running like crazy! / Steve Cotler; illustrated by Douglas Holgate. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Sixth-grader Ronald “Cheesie” Mack finds the best way to earn points against his older sister is to become popular, and decides to join the cross-country team, help his best friend run for class president, and ignore her attempts to embarrass him.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-97715-1

  [1. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 2. Elections—Fiction. 3. Best friends—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Track and field—Fiction. 6. Middle schools—Fiction. 7. Schools—Fiction.] I. Holgate, Douglas, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.C82862Chs 2013 [Fic]—dc23 2012017978

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Lanny and Doug … my brothers, creative partners, and BFFs. And for Mr. C, my middle school coach, who saw my passion and put me on the basketball team in spite of short stature and total lack of talent.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books in This Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 22 Preview of Coming Attractions

  Chapter 1 Doofus, Dweeb, and Dork-Boy

  Chapter 2 June Mack’s Little Brother

  Chapter 3 An Impossible Assignment

  Case #113-1 What I Wrote

  Chapter 3½ Mulligans and Noogies

  Chapter 4 My Wet Butt

  Chapter 5 Running for President

  Chapter 6 Cheesie Gets Socked

  Chapter 7 Running in the Zone

  Chapter 8 Sinkoff for President!

  Chapter 9 The Bus Ride of Paul Revere

  Ye Olde 9th Part The Shout Heard Round the World

  Chapter 10 Georgie’s Great Idea

  Chapter 11 Standing Tall for Sinkoff

  Chapter 12 Splinter and Splint

  Chapter 13 The Disappearing Streamer

  Chapter 13 The Goon Squid

  Chapter 14 Stuffing the Ballot Box

  Chapter 15 Don’t Vote for Georgie!

  Chapter 16 Running for Goon!

  Chapter 17 Zombies!

  Chapter 18 The Curse of Diana

  Chapter 19 Georgie’s Betrayal

  Chapter 20 The Best Man Wins … Sort Of

  Chapter 21 The Finish Line

  Bonus Stuff What You’ll Find at CheesieMack.com

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author and the Illustrator

  Preview of Coming Attractions

  This book contains the absolutely true story of my third adventure, and you probably think you’re at the beginning of that story.

  Well, you’re not!

  This is actually the last chapter.

  Sort of.

  What I mean is, I wrote this chapter last.

  I’m Ronald Mack, but everyone calls me Cheesie. If you can’t guess why, then you probably don’t like a certain kind of pasta glopped all over with a certain kind of dairy product.

  This chapter is like the previews of coming attractions you watch before the real movie starts, and if you’re like me, you really enjoy those previews. So pretend you’re in the theater with a bag of popcorn and a box of candy, the room is dark, and on the screen are the words: Cheesie Mack Is Running Like Crazy!

  If that title makes you guess there’ll be lots of running in my movie, you’d be right.

  But there’s lots of other stuff, too:

  1. The most evil teenager in the universe.

  2. Courageous knights who collide in bone-breaking jousts.

  3. Microscopic face bugs.

  4. A dancing squid.

  5. The weirdest election in the history of the sixth grade.

  That’s what’s coming. That’s my preview.

  So go ahead. Finish this chapter and turn the page. That’s when the Cheesie Mack Is Running Like Crazy! story will start playing like a movie in your own mind.

  It begins at the beginning of middle school. If you like it or don’t or can’t make up your mind, please go to my website and tell me.

  Signed:

  Ronald “Cheesie” Mack (age 11 years and 3 months)

  CheesieMack.com

  Doofus, Dweeb, and Dork-Boy

  Today was my first day at Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School. Everyone calls it RLS. But before I tell you about my new school (I’m in sixth grade), here are a few things you should know about me and my life:

  1. Georgie Sinkoff is my best friend. Our houses are next to each other but not on the same street. (If you read either of my previous books, you know why.) He lives with his father.

  2. I live with my mother, father, grandfather, and sister. My sister’s name is June, but I call her Goon. She is an eighth grader at RLS. She is despicable, a word that describes someone who is evil, nasty, mean, selfish, and ______________. (There are lots of other words that describe sisters like Goon. Fill in the blank!)

  3. Goon and I have been fighting and arguing for as long as I have been alive. But since the beginning of fourth grade, I have been keeping a private tally of who’s winning. I call it the Point Battle. No one else knows about it. (The rules I use for the Point Battle are in my first two books and on my website. Believe me, they’re complicated, but fair.) At the end of Cool in a Duel, my second adventure, I was leading by just one point: 669–668. That was when camp ended. Unfortunately, for the rest of the summer Goon tortured and teased me and mostly got away with it. She’s ahead again. The Point Battle score as of the beginning of school was 682–673.

  4. Georgie is big. At Rocky Neck Elementary School, he was the way biggest fifth grader. At RLS, he will be the second-tallest sixth grader. Ms.Dinnington, the school nurse (who is his father’s girlfriend, more on that later), told Georgie a girl from Iceland moved here over the summer and she is almost an inch taller. Georgie is strong, athletic, and not afraid of anyone. He has greenish-brown eyes, reddish-brown hair, glasses with bright red frames, and braces.

  5. I am not so big. I was the shortest in fourth grade, second shortest in fifth, and in sixth grade, I’m guessing I’ll be about 20 percent from the bottom. I do not have braces, but Mom says I may get them later this year. I have brown hair, brown eyes, and both my second toes are longer than my big toes.

  6. I have lived all my life in Gloucester, a small town on the Atlantic Ocean in eastern Massachusetts. (Do not say GLOUW-sess-ter, even though that’s what it looks like. It’s GLAH-stir, but most people in this part of Massachusetts pronounce it GLAH-stah because there’s a real shortage of
r’s around here. Maybe it should be spelled Glosta.) I once looked at Gloucester in a satellite image on my computer and zoomed in until I could actually see one of my father’s limousines parked in front of our house. (He owns a company that drives people around.) If I’d known the satellite was going to take that picture, I would’ve spray-painted “Cheesie Lives Here” on my roof. My dad has a great sense of humor. He would’ve let me do it. How cool would that be?!

  That’s enough background stuff. My sixth-grade adventure starts now.

  *

  I bounced out of bed with a grin on my face. It was the first day of school, and I had been dreaming about being the only kid with an anti-gravity bicycle.

  I yawned hugely and walked down the hall to the bathroom. As usual, Goon was locked inside, hogging it.

  “Hurry up!” I shouted, pounding on the door.

  “Get lost!” she yelled back.

  I wasn’t in a hurry, so I smacked the door four more times, then went back to my room to put the last few items into my SuperBinder. A SuperBinder is required for every kid who starts sixth grade at Stevenson Middle School. You’re allowed to decorate the outside of your SuperBinder any way you want, but I hadn’t decided yet, so mine was blank. Here’s what has to be in it:

  1. The RLS school rule book.

  2. Your class schedule.

  3. The homework website information sheet.

  4. Lots of three-hole lined paper.

  5. Subject dividers.

  6. A pencil pouch containing five sharpened pencils, an eraser, a ruler, and lots of other stuff.

  7. A chunk of dry ice.

  8. About ten other items.

  I’m kidding about the dry ice. I just wanted to see if you’re the kind of reader who gets bored with lists and skips to the end.

  Dry ice is weird. It’s not ice at all. It’s actually frozen carbon dioxide, and if you put a chunk in water, it creates bubbles of white water vapor and CO2. Lots of Halloween displays use dry ice because the bubbles look sort of spooky.

  “You can have the bathroom, Runto!” Goon shouted from the hallway. I closed my SuperBinder and ran. Now I was in a hurry—I guess because I’d been thinking about bubbling water, if you get what I mean.

  Bathroom, get dressed, breakfast … just like every kid does. I was so focused on getting ready, I didn’t keep track of the enemy. Big mistake! By the time I went back upstairs to grab my school stuff, Goon had “decorated” my SuperBinder in a hideous way, which I will describe in a moment.

  I didn’t have time to hide what she’d done, so I stashed the binder in my backpack and ran downstairs. Granpa looked up from his coffee and newspaper.

  “Good luck at school, kiddo,” he said. “Go, Panthers!”

  I zoomed by him and yelled back, “Pirates, not Panthers!” (The RLS school mascot is a fighting pirate.)

  Granpa gave me a squinty-evil-eye, which let me know he was just kidding (and made him look like a fighting pirate!). The squinty-evil-eye is what Granpa, Dad, and I do when we’re teasing each other. It’s a Mack Family Tradition.

  Seconds later I was outside and pedaling my bike. Georgie was waiting on his bike at the end of my block. “First day race?” he challenged, and we took off!

  I won. I almost always do. Bike riding is the one sport where I am totally better than Georgie.

  By the time we got inside the school, I had completely forgotten what Goon had done to my SuperBinder. The corridors were hubbubbing with kids talking, laughing, and high-fiving.

  New schools can be really confusing. It took me a few minutes of wandering to find my locker. Then I struggled to work the combination. It didn’t help that Georgie was leaning next to me repeating over and over in a singsong voice, “Middle school is totally cool. Middle school is totally cool.”

  When I messed up my locker combination for the third time (Georgie’s fault!), I spun around and pushed him. That’s when I saw Goon and her new boyfriend, Drew Teague, staring at me from across the hall.

  Goon used to like Kevin Welch (the older brother of Alex Welch, who is in my grade). But when Kevin and I became sort-of friends (if you read Cool in a Duel, you know how that happened), Goon called him a traitor and dumped him. About a minute later she texted Drew and told him he could be her new boyfriend.

  I finally got my locker open and stashed my lunch, but just as I closed it, Drew swooped in, grabbed my backpack off the floor, and passed it to Goon. I snatched it back, but not before Goon had pulled my SuperBinder out.

  “Look, everybody!” Goon shouted. “My twerpy brother has done an amazing job on his SuperBinder!”

  I leaped at her, but she zigzagged down the hallway, holding the binder up for everyone to see what she’d scribbled: DOOFUS in red marker (big!) on one side, DWEEB (bigger!) on the other, and DORK-BOY (biggest!!!) down the spine.

  Kids looked at me.

  Kids pointed at me.

  Goon was laughing so hard she had to stop and bend over.

  I was totally humiliated.

  I grabbed my SuperBinder and hurried back to my locker. I tried to cover up her graffiti insults, but I didn’t have enough arms.

  Sixth grade was less than five minutes old, and Goon had already beaten me for eight points, increasing her lead in the Point Battle to seventeen (690–673).

  Here’s how I calculated my loss. Goon had embarrassed me when other people were around—four points—which doubled to eight because my red face proved it was an excellent insult. Darn.

  Okay. So she had won the first round at RLS, but the Point Battle was far from over. An eighth grader versus a sixth grader would not normally be a fair fight. But this was the Point Battle—Goon versus Cheesie Mack—and Cheesie Mack was determined to win.

  June Mack’s Little Brother

  “Looks like you’re going to be in a Sister War all year,” Georgie said as we started down the corridor toward room 113. Then he took a deep breath and held it all the way down the hall. Georgie says it strengthens your lungs and makes you a better athlete. I think he just likes holding his breath.

  Room 113 was our homeroom. It was also where we had Core—language arts and social studies—for the first two periods every day. When we walked in, lots of kids were chattering. All but two seats were taken, so it was easy to find the desks that had our names on them. I was in the second row near the middle.

  Georgie’s desk was all the way in the back corner. As he walked to it, he let out his air in a big blast … POOF! It was so loud, it made lots of kids look up from their talking. Georgie just grinned at them.

  I slid into my chair and opened my SuperBinder, carefully placing it covers-down on my desk so no one could see what Goon had done to it. Then I looked around. Of the twenty-four kids in the room (four rows of desks, with six desks in each row), seven were from my fifth-grade class at Rocky Neck Elementary, including Glenn Philips, Lana Shen, Georgie, and me.

  You probably remember Glenn from my first book. He is smaller than I am and super smart. Lana is also smaller than I am, but I don’t know if she’s smarter. She’s okay, I guess, but she always wants to talk to me.

  I glanced at her. She was staring at me. When she saw me looking over, she gave me a huge wave. My return wave was smaller.

  Sitting to my left was a super-tall girl with light hair and blue eyes. I glanced at her name card. If you guessed that she was the girl from Iceland, you’re right. She had an odd name: Oddny Thorsdottir.

  I flipped through my SuperBinder and looked at my class schedule.

  Here it is:

  I looked up at the wall clock. In exactly one minute, sixth grade would start and I’d officially be a middle schooler.

  Just then a tall woman walked into the room. She was dressed entirely in black. All kid chatter stopped immediately. Without a word, the teacher turned her back to the class and began writing on the whiteboard: Mrs. Wikowitz. Then she turned around and said, “Good morning, students. Please open your SuperBinders to the Stevenson Middle School r
ule book.”

  My mother says I shouldn’t trust first impressions. “They are just hints, nothing more,” she says.

  My father doesn’t agree. He says, “First meetings can tell a lot about a person.”

  Granpa, as usual, has a crazy opinion. He says, “You let me eyeball anyone just once and I’ll tell you her favorite holiday, whether she likes chili on hot dogs, and if she can ride a unicycle.”

  My first impressions of Mrs. Wikowitz were:

  1. She wasn’t smiling, so she was unfriendly.

  2. She stood perfectly straight and didn’t fidget even the tiniest bit, so she expected our full attention.

  3. She was eyeing everyone, so she wouldn’t tolerate any monkey business.

  I admit my logic was weak, but it turned out I was right on all three points.

  “I would like each of you to read one of the school rules aloud,” Mrs. Wikowitz said. She pointed at Lana, who sat in the front row, all the way on the right. “You may begin.”

  Seven kids read, and then Oddny. She read perfectly, but with an accent that was sort of musical. I was staring at her and thinking that I had never met anyone from Iceland before, and that I had learned somewhere that they are all descended from Vikings. I forgot it was my turn.

  Mrs. Wikowitz said, “Ronald Mack? Number nine, please.”

  I jerked my eyes back to the school rule book and read:

  “Upon receiving a third tardy notice, students will not be admitted to class, but must instead go to the principal’s office and obtain a re-admit.”

  The kid on my right, a boy I’d never met—Eddie Chapple, according to his name card—was next. He was supposed to read:

  “A fourth tardy will result in a one-day suspension from school and require a student/parent meeting with the principal.”

  Instead he read:

  “A forced party will insult in a one-way suspicion of skill and require a prudent parrot beaten by the prince of pull.”

  Then he looked up and grinned.