Cheesie Mack Is Not Exactly Famous

  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 © 2014 by Stephen L. Cotler

  Jacket art and interior illustrations copyright © 2014 by Douglas Holgate

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

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  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 not exactly famous / Steve Cotler; illustrations by Douglas Holgate. — Ist ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Cheesie and Georgie unearth an artifact from Colonial times and become

  middle school celebrities.

  ISBN 978-0-385-36984-8 (trade) — ISBN 978-0-385-36985-5 (lib. bdg.) —

  ISBN 978-0-385-36986-2 (ebook)

  [I. Antiquities—Fiction. 2. Celebrities—Fiction. 3. Best friends—Fiction.

  4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Family life—Massachusetts—Fiction. 6. Middle schools—Fiction. 7. Schools—Fiction. 8. Massachusetts—Fiction.] I. Holgate, Douglas, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.C82862Chh 2014 [Fic]—dc23 2013011798

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

  v3.1

  For my parents, Edith and Ted.

  Her unsung brilliance gave a small boy the tools to sculpt a life. His arms-wide songs and stories gave that boy the palette to paint it.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter ∞ After … The End

  Chapter 1 Total Mud War

  Chapter 2 One Last Shot

  Operation Three Teetering on the Edge

  Chapter 4 My Adventure Begins

  Chapter 5 The Thingie

  Chapter 6 The Mack Supreme Court

  Chapter 7 Tragabigzanda

  Chapter 8 The Time Capsule

  Chapter 9 Harry Potter and the One-of-a-Kind Book of Uniqueness

  Chapter 10 Red Cheeks

  Chapter 11 Sewer Rats

  Underground Quest

  Chapter 12 Switcheroo Times Two

  Chapter — Triskaidekaphobia

  Chapter 14 Second-Story Sneaker

  Chapter 15 Ring Around the Georgie

  Chapter 16 Everything Goes Wrong!

  Chapter 17 Sink Off*

  Chapter 18 The Imaginary Water Cannon

  Chapter 19 Cable News Cameras

  Chapter 20 Smelliness Rules!

  Chapter 21 Hello, Kitty!

  What You’ll Find at CheesieMack.com

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  This book contains the complete story of my fourth adventure.

  Is it all true?

  Yes!

  I should know. I wrote it. I’m Ronald Mack, but everyone calls me Cheesie. I’m a sixth grader at Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

  But this is not the beginning of my book. Even though most authors put the beginnings of their books at the beginnings of their books, I don’t.

  Right here, right now is actually the end of my story. You’re reading what comes after chapter 21, which is at the back of this book, and if you looked at the table of contents it’s called “Hello, Kitty!” (But if you think it’s about a Japanese girly thing, forget it! You’re wrong.)

  So now I’m writing this chapter after I already wrote “The End,” which is why this is called “After … The End.”

  And since my dad told me infinity is the end of numbers, and nothing comes after it, I named this chapter with an infinity sign. That’s what the squiggle that looks like a sideways eight at the top of this page is.

  Anyway, if you keep reading, you’ll find yourself in my fourth adventure, which contains some very unusuweird* stuff:

  1. 100-year-old pizza

  2. super-sticky mud

  3. Pocahontas

  4. slime mice

  5. osmium

  6. stinking, rotting whale blubber

  You’ll also read about the continuing problems I have with my older sister. When this book starts, the score of the Point Battle between me and her is 735–694. I am way ahead! You’ll have to read all the way to chapter 21 to see what the score is now. (The rules are on my website.)

  Mostly this adventure has to do with how I become sort of famous. It takes place in October and starts while I am asleep.

  I hope you like it. If you do or you don’t or you want to tell me something about this book or about yourself or what the kid who sits next to you in math is like, you can write to me on my website.

  Signed:

  Ronald “Cheesie” Mack (age 11 years and 4 months)

  CheesieMack.com

  *

  * I made up unusuweird. Do NOT use it in school writing … your teacher will not understand!

  I am eleven years old. That’s not very old, but there’s one thing I know for sure. Every single moment of my life (and yours, too!) might be the beginning of a new adventure. You never know what’s coming next. And mostly you never know an adventure has begun until you’re already into it.

  It was a Monday morning in mid-October.

  “It’s raining cats and dogs out there.” That was the first thing I heard when I awoke. It was my dad, rumbling in the hall outside my bedroom. My head was still on my pillow, and my eyes were shut. I listened to the raindrops drumming on my roof.

  Cats and dogs …, I thought.

  I lay there wondering what it would sound like if cats and dogs were actually bouncing off my roof.

  It would be way noisy. Probably meowingly and barkingly loud!

  That thought woke me up more, because I asked myself, Why do people say “cats and dogs”? Why not “cows and sheep”? Or “aardvarks and antelopes”?

  I know. You think I’m weird.

  Well, you’re right. I am. Sometimes I get wondering about something, and I just won’t let go of it until I know what it’s all about.

  So I popped out of bed and flipped on my computer. I looked over at Deeb, my springer spaniel and the best dog in Gloucester. She hadn’t moved from the foot of my bed, but her eyes were on me.

  “I am looking up something about your species. Pay attention, mutt.”

  She didn’t seem to care, and just closed her eyes.

  A few minutes later, standing there in my pj’s and sort of hopping from foot to foot because I had to pee, I found out that “raining cats and dogs” probably comes from long-ago England. If a rainstorm was really huge, the water would wash everything down the streets, including any dead pets and strays that had been tossed into the gutters.

  Ugh. Gross.

  Kind of made me appreciate the garbage trucks that come through our town every week.

  I ran to the bathroom and returned just as my cell phone burped. (I recorded Granpa belching and turned it into a really cool ringtone that blorps “riddle-dee-diddle” whenever I get a text.)

  It was from Georgie: Byx nix. Dad ya.

  Georgie is much better at texting than I am. But sometimes it’s hard to figure out what he means. This one, however, was easy. I looked out my window at
the “cats and dogs” pouring down from the sky. His text meant we weren’t going to ride our bikes (byx) to school. His father would drive us.

  Granpa uses the word nix all the time. It means nothing.

  I’m serious. It actually means nothing.

  I mean nix means something, but the something it means is actually “nothing.” Granpa told me it comes from the German word nichts, which is pronounced almost the same as nix. Nichts means “nothing” in German. Granpa was born in Germany. He came to America when he was five, so his first language was German. But he never talks about his childhood. I think it was bad or something.

  I trotted downstairs for breakfast. My sister, Goon, had just put her dishes in the sink and was heading out the door. Mom had left for work hours ago. She’s an air-traffic controller at Logan Airport in Boston. And Dad was already out somewhere driving somebody around in one of the limousines he owns.

  Granpa cracked an egg for my breakfast into a frying pan. He stared into the pan, then looked at me with a squinty-evil-eye. “Hey, kiddo,” he said. “How would you like it if I guaranteed you a day filled with nothing but good luck?”

  “That would be fine,” I replied cautiously. Granpa was up to something. The squinty-evil-eye was my clue. That’s what we Mack guys do when we’re pulling tricks or kidding around or something.

  “Clap your hands three times.”

  I clapped.

  He flipped my egg over. “Grab your left ear with your right hand, hop on your right foot, and spin around twice.”

  I grabbed, hopped, and spun.

  “Now say the alphabet forward and backward, leaving out all the vowels.”

  I messed it up. (You can hear Granpa doing it on my website.)

  “Doesn’t matter, my young Mack boy,” he said as he slid a single egg with two yolks onto a plate. “All that was just me goofing on you. Lookee this!”

  Granpa pointed two fingers in a V at my egg. “A double-yolker! That means you are on the way to a very-very lucky-lucky day-day.”

  “Cool-cool.” I grinned, gave Granpa a high-five, and sat down to eat.

  (Later that day I looked up double-yolk eggs on a school computer. Some people believe a double-yolker is good luck. I don’t really believe in any of that superstition stuff—omens or black cats or whatever—but if you read further, you’ll see if Granpa was right.)

  On the drive to school, it was raining so hard, Mr. Sinkoff’s wipers couldn’t sweep the water off the windshield fast enough, so he had to stick his head out the window and drive super slowly. But it was a warm October day—Indian summer is what we call that kind of autumn weather in New England—so even though he got drippingly wet, Mr. Sinkoff laughed about it.

  At school, just as Georgie and I entered class, the room lit up with a flash of lightning.

  Instantly Glenn Philips started counting out loud. “One thousand one … one thousand two … one thousand three …” He had just passed seven when a huge clap of thunder surprised us.

  A couple of kids shrieked. One dropped a book.

  “That lightning is about one and a half miles away,” Glenn announced calmly.

  Georgie looked out at the dark sky. “How can you tell?” he asked.

  “It takes sound just about five seconds to travel a mile,” Glenn explained. “Light travels almost a million times faster. That’s why we see the lightning flash almost instantly. But it takes a while for the sound to reach us. So, if you count the seconds from the flash until you hear the thunder and divide by five, the result is the number of miles away.”

  Glenn is the smartest sixth grader at our school. I’m convinced of it. If you want to see how he figured all this out, go to my website. I let him put up a page there to explain it. He also explains how you can tell what the temperature is by counting cricket chirps.

  Just then there was another lightning flash. I started counting thousands along with Glenn. We both were up to nine when another BOOM shook the windows.

  “That one was louder,” Georgie said.

  “But farther away,” I said. “Almost two miles.”

  “That would suggest the storm is moving away from us,” Glenn said.

  He was right. There was lots more thunder and lightning, but a half hour later it stopped raining, the sun came out, and the rest of the day was same old, same old school. Some work, some fun. It was good, but absolutely nothing was the least bit unusual.

  That’s why I did not suspect the beginning of an adventure was just a few hours away.

  My last class was physical education—we call it PE or phys ed. The all-night rain had left the fields super muddy, so we stayed inside and played volleyball in the gym. Afterward, most of the boys changed back into their regular clothes, but Georgie and I didn’t. All I switched was my shoes, because I had cross-country practice (I’m second fastest on the sixth-grade team). And because Georgie had a basketball game starting in an hour, he put on his red and blue uniform. It has RLS on the front and a big 11 on the back. His stenchy gym clothes were in a repulsive pile on the bench next to me.

  “When are you going to wash those?” I asked.

  “Never!” Georgie bragged. “I’m helping the environment by saving water.”

  “More like destroying the environment by polluting the atmosphere,” I replied, holding my nose. Georgie reached out to grab me, but I dodged away and trotted toward the door. “I’ll zoom through my practice run. I’ll be there for the start of your game.”

  “Take your time. I won’t be playing, remember?” Georgie held up the splint on his broken finger. (If you read my last book, Cheesie Mack Is Running Like Crazy!, you know about the Cheesie—Georgie backyard jousting match that caused it.)

  “Who cares about you?” I kidded. “I want to see Eddie Chapple in action.” Georgie and Eddie are the two best players on the sixth-grade team. They are also two of the three co-presidents of our class. Diana Mooney is the other. (How we ended up with three presidents is also in my last book.)

  The ten of us on the sixth-grade boys’ cross-country team have become friends even though we came from three different elementary schools. There are four guys from Goose Cove and four from Bass Rock. Glenn and I are the only ones who went to Rocky Neck.

  For practice we usually run about four miles. It’s an up-and-down, curvy-swervy path that goes:

  1. through the Dogtown woods (there were houses there hundreds of years ago … you can see the ruins),

  2. around a not-so-small pond (very cool salamanders and frogs … I have caught both),

  3. out to an abandoned lighthouse (someday I want to climb to the top and look out),

  4. back alongside the railroad tracks (Granpa says there used to be lots more trains than now), and finally,

  5. between two Little League fields, and then to our school.

  Because of the huge rain, this particular practice was miserably fun. It was such a sloppy-gloppy pack of puddles, we were way slower than usual.

  I was splooshing along in the middle of the pack, just behind Glenn. Josh Lunares was out in front. His mother is my Spanish teacher.

  For the last two weeks, we’ve been blocked off from finishing our practice runs the usual way. We’ve had to make a long detour around the field next to the school because big yellow earth-moving machines have been excavating. (Great word! The prefix ex means “out” and cav comes from the same root as “cave” … so it means digging holes.) We’re going to get a new middle-school auditorium/​media center/​bowling alley.

  (I’m totally lying about the bowling alley. But wouldn’t that be so cool?)

  Today there were no workers. The splash-and-bang thunderstorm had canceled everything. Nothing was moving. I didn’t know it yet, but this unmanned construction site would turn out to be where my adventure would begin.

  I looked at my runner’s watch. “We’re going to miss the start of the basketball game!” I yelled. “Let’s cut across.”

  “Yeah!” Josh shouted. “Follow me!” />
  He zigged around a bulldozer and zagged behind a backhoe. We were right behind him. The ground had been all torn up, so everything was puddles or mud or both. It was like running a super-slippery obstacle course. We hurdled over twine strung between stakes in the ground, leaped over two-foot-wide, four-foot-deep trenches, and slogged up and down huge mounds of dirt.

  Halfway up the second dirt pile, just a step behind Josh, Glenn slipped and slammed into him, and they both fell forward onto their knees. I tried to scoot around, but I tripped over somebody’s legs and toppled chest-first into the mud.

  But this was not your usual, everyday mud. Nope.

  What if you mixed Super Glue with dirt and water?

  Yep. That’s what this gunk was. It stuck to everything!

  We struggled and slip-slopped back up to our feet, laughing about how muddy we were. Then Josh charged to the top of the mound and yelled, “I’m king of the hill!”

  King of the Hill is a game with really simple rules. Whoever stands on top is the king, and everyone else tries to knock him off and take over the throne. Glenn was first to try, but the footing was way too slippery. Josh shoved him when he got close, and Glenn gloop-glooped down the hill on his butt.

  “Get Josh!” I shouted, waving an arm to encourage the others to join me as I powered up the mound.

  That’s when the Mud War began.

  Okay, maybe I started it with a perfectly thrown mudball that pegged Josh in the chest, but when he yelled, “Get Cheesie!” Glenn and two other guys totally creamed me. Then the rest of the guys joined in, and the Mud War escalated (Granpa told me that’s military talk for “got more violent”) into Total Mud War. It became an everybody-throw-at-anybody melee. (An excellent word! It’s pronounced MAY-lay. It means a giant, crazy fight going in all directions.)

  Mud was flying everywhere! But I made it to the top and was doing okay as King of the Hill, dodging most of the incoming missiles, until Glenn and Josh charged up behind me and smooshed handfuls of mud into my hair.