Cheesie Mack Is Not a Genius or Anything Page 2

  I have brown hair, brown eyes, and a whitish scar on my thumb where a fishhook stabbed me when I was on a lake with my dad. I was eight and fooling around. Don’t ask.

  Georgie and I go to the same school, have always had the same teacher, and in the summer, always go to camp in Maine.

  “I was down here looking for black widow spiders,” Georgie continued. “I figured if I caught one in a jar, we could use it to scare your sister. But this”—Georgie brought his arm around and held up a yellowed envelope with one corner ripped off—“was completely hidden between those two boards.” He pointed under the stairs, but I took my eyes off the envelope for only a second. “It’s addressed to my house, but the name is”—he squinted at the envelope—“G. J. Prott.”

  “Probably there was somebody named G. J. Prott who lived here before you guys,” I said.

  Georgie nodded. “Look what was in the envelope!”

  He held out a piece of paper folded up small, then opened it. Inside were a silvery metal heart on a silvery metal chain and one penny.

  “A penny? Not exactly treasure, Georgie.”

  “Yeah, but this necklace is probably real silver. And what if there’s more hidden stuff? Like gold and diamonds.”

  I picked up the necklace and held it high between us. The lightbulb on the basement rafters was not very bright, but the heart sparkled as it spun slowly.

  “I bet a hypnotist could use this to hypnotize people,” I said.

  Georgie didn’t say anything. Maybe I’d sort of hypnotized him.

  I placed the heart necklace back on the paper in Georgie’s hand and examined the coin. The back looked a lot different from any other penny I’d ever seen, but the front had the same face on it: Abraham Lincoln, our sixteenth president.

  (Glenn Philips, the smartest kid in my class, can name all the presidents and all the vice presidents. In order!)

  I looked at the date on the coin. “This penny was made in 1909.”

  That snapped Georgie out of his trance. He grabbed the penny and peered at it closely. “That means it’s over a hundred years old.”

  One of us said, “Whoa.”

  I don’t remember who.

  Georgie set the penny down on the paper next to the heart necklace and handed it all to me. He held the envelope up so that we both could look at it.

  The postmark—that’s the inky stuff in the circle that tells when and where the letter was mailed—was kind of smeary. We could read “Calif.” and “Mar 11 9:43 AM 195,” but the last number of the year and whatever city in California were unreadable. The stamp was blue-green, with Wildlife Conservation across the top, 3¢ United States Postage 3¢ on the bottom, and in the middle, a big fish jumping from a stream next to the tiny words King Salmon.

  “I’ve got it!” Georgie said suddenly. “Someone didn’t want anyone to know where this letter came from, so they ripped off the corner where the return address was and smeared up the postmark on purpose.” He pointed at the unfolded paper in my hand. “And there’s something real suspicious about putting plain white paper in an envelope.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe whoever sent it just wanted to keep the stuff inside from flopping around. And maybe the envelope got ripped and smudged by accident.”

  “Nah,” Georgie said. “We are on to something big. That coin. It’s probably worth millions.”

  I didn’t think it could be worth that much, but I looked at it closely. “I don’t think I’ve held anything that was over a hundred years old before.”

  “Maybe this,” Georgie said, jabbing at the paper in my hand, “has invisible ink on it.”

  I held it up to the light. “It looks like plain, ordinary paper to me.”

  “Look, if it had a secret map on it, you wouldn’t be able to see it. And maybe, since you can’t see it, that proves it’s there.” Even though we were alone, Georgie lowered his voice like he didn’t want anyone else to hear. “If we could read it, we’d know where the rest of the treasure is buried.” He touched the postmark. “Probably in California.”

  I took the envelope from Georgie and pointed at the stamp. “Probably in the bottom of a stream with a bunch of king salmon jumping all around,” I teased.

  Georgie tried to get me into a headlock, but I squirgled out of his grip and jumped away. (There is actually no such word as “squirgled,” but since what I actually did was to squirm and wiggle … Well, you get it.)

  “I don’t know about any buried treasure,” I said, “but let’s get on your computer and see what we can find about this old penny.”

  We trotted upstairs to his bedroom and turned on his computer. While it booted up, Georgie dug around in his closet for an old magician’s set that he said had a potion that would make invisible ink turn visible.

  I did a web search for “United States coins” and found a site that listed every United States coin ever made. Did you know that we used to have three-cent coins?

  Then I searched for “Lincoln penny value” and discovered that it’s a Lincoln cent, not penny. The word “cent” means that there are one hundred of them in every dollar and is almost the same as the word “century” (one hundred years, duh!). I don’t know where the word “penny” comes from—and neither does anyone else. I looked it up. But there are pennies in England, and I’m guessing that there are one hundred of them to the pound or euro or whatever the people in England use for money. I wonder if every country uses money that breaks into one hundred smaller pieces. If you know of a country that doesn’t, please go to my website. I’m making a list.

  Georgie had opened his magic set and was struggling to unscrew the potion bottle when I saw that there was a little letter S under the 1909 next to Abraham Lincoln’s chest.

  Georgie grunted as he got the top off the potion bottle. “Rats, it’s all dried up.”

  “Hey, Georgie,” I said after reading more of the web page. “It says here that this little S means that this penny was made in San Francisco.”

  Georgie leaned over, took a quick look at the coin, and nodded a couple of times. “California. See? I told you so.” He put on his magician’s hat and bow tie and began waving his wand around, trying to make some fake flowers appear and disappear.

  I clicked around the Internet until I found a site that showed how much old Lincoln cents were worth.

  Georgie tapped me on the shoulder. He held the coin up, then closed his left hand around it, waved his right hand over his left, wiggled his fingers, twisted his wrists around each other, opened his hands … and abracadabra, the coin was gone. An instant later (I could not tell how he did it), the coin was back … this time in his right hand! He was actually really good.

  “You never showed me that trick before. How do you do it?” I asked.

  Georgie shook his head. “The Great Georgio never reveals his secrets.” He held the old penny between two fingers. “So, how much is this worth?”

  I looked back at the screen and read aloud: “ ‘Value depends upon the condition of the coin.’ I think that means how new it looks.”

  Georgie examined the coin closely. “It looks pretty new to me.” Then The Great Georgio did his sleight of hand again. This time I watched super carefully, but I still couldn’t figure it out. I turned back to the screen and found the listing for a 1909 Lincoln cent, but I was still thinking hard about the trick. I should have been paying more attention to the computer screen.

  “Only three dollars,” I said.

  “Huh?! Come on. Is that all?”

  “That’s what it says. Three bucks.”

  “Darn,” Georgie said.

  I thought the coin was worth three dollars.

  I was wrong.

  And the mistake was my fault. I completely admit it in writing right now and right here. Georgie’s magic sort of distracted me, so I looked at the wrong line in the list of coin values. The 1909 Lincoln cent with no mint mark (which means it was made in Philadelphia) was the coin that was worth three dollars. The coin with the S (San
Francisco) was worth a lot more … but I didn’t know that until much later. And my mistake made our lives a whole lot more complicated. You’ll see how if you read on.

  Georgie set the coin down next to the computer keyboard and started putting his magician stuff back into its box. I picked up the torn envelope. “This stamp is really old. Maybe it’s worth something,” I said.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Georgie muttered.

  I switched my search from coin collecting, which on the web page is called numismatics (new-miz-MAT-iks), to stamp collecting, which is called philately (fih-LAT-eh-lee). Those are two excellent words that I am going to memorize so that I can use them in a conversation with my dad, who I am sure knows them because he reads everything and has a great vocabulary and knows all kinds of weird things that no one else does.

  You can probably tell by now that I like words. Maybe that’s why I like writing. I will definitely put some superlative (soo-PER-lah-tiv)—which means better than excellent—words into this book.

  I heard a match strike. Georgie had lit a stubby candle from his magic set and was holding the unfolded paper above it. I looked at him with a question wrinkling up my forehead.

  “Heat the paper, and the secret writing will appear,” he explained.

  He held the paper over the flame. Secret writing did not appear, but he did set fire to one corner. He blew it out, pinched the candle flame between his fingers (Georgie is tough!), and plopped down on his bed while I read about old postage stamps on the Internet.

  A few moments later, we heard his father call, “Georgie! I smell something burning. What’s going on?”

  “Just a candle, Dad. We’re trying to do some magic.”

  “Be careful, huh? And come here when you’re done.”

  I like Georgie’s father. He’s way older than my dad, but he cooks really excellent pancakes. I don’t remember Georgie’s mother. She died when we were two years old.

  I went to another web page and there, along with lots of other old stamps, was the three-cent jumping king salmon.

  “I found the stamp.”

  Georgie stood up and peered over my shoulder.

  “The stamp was first made in 1956,” I continued. “And look. It says here that the cost of mailing a letter increased to four cents on August 1, 1958, so this envelope”—I pointed at “3¢” on the stamp—“had to be mailed before then. Sheesh, it costs way more to mail a letter now.”

  (I wonder what it will cost to mail a letter fifty years from now. You can take a guess by going to my website: CheesieMack.com. Maybe when I get enough guesses, I’ll put them into some kind of Internet time capsule, and fifty years in the future I’ll open it and see how close we were.)

  Georgie pointed at the picture of the stamp on the computer screen. “Are there king salmon in California?”

  I shrugged. I’d seen a TV show once about salmon swimming upstream to lay eggs, but I couldn’t remember what state it was in.

  “Is it worth anything?” Georgie asked.

  “Can’t tell. This is all about stamps in what they call mint condition.” We looked at the wavy lines of black ink crossing our stamp. “This one’s canceled. I don’t think it’s worth anything. Not even three cents.”

  (I’m collecting images of cool stamps from around the world. If you have a favorite, please send it to me along with a clever, weird, or funny caption to go with it. There are examples on my website.)

  Suddenly Georgie grabbed a pencil from his desk, held it sideways, and started to smudge the lead across the partly burnt paper.

  “Why’re you scribbling on it?”

  “To see if someone left dents when they wrote on the piece of paper that used to be on top of this piece of paper,” he said, head down and concentrating. “I saw this in a movie once. It was about a murder and the killer’s name …”

  In the corner farthest away from the scorch marks, a single word began to take shape. We both stared at it.

  “I can’t read it,” Georgie mumbled.

  “I think,” I whispered, “it says ‘EUREKA.’ ”

  I couldn’t help whispering. If you’re doing something like making invisible old words reappear, you just automatically get quiet. I could tell from Georgie’s expression that he didn’t know the word EUREKA.

  “It means,” I said, “something like ‘hooray’ or ‘yippee.’ My dad says you yell it when you find something.”

  “Like treasure,” he said very softly.

  Someone said “Whoa” again, and I’m pretty sure it was me.

  Really Bad News

  We sat for a while thinking about what to do next, but since neither of us had an idea, we decided to get our mitts, go to the park, and hit some flies before it got too dark.

  When we got downstairs, Mr. Sinkoff, who was sitting at the kitchen table with a bunch of papers spread out, stopped us by holding up his hand.

  “Georgie,” he said seriously, “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”

  Georgie and I stood looking at his father for what seemed like a really long and awkward time, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds.

  I mean, here you are reading this book, and you want to know what the bad news was, but there’s this long sentence that you’re reading right now that actually doesn’t take all that long to read, but because you’re in a hurry to learn about the bad news, this sentence seems to take a lot longer. Kind of like that.

  Mr. Sinkoff cleared his throat, but the scraff-scraff sound he made must have done more clogging than clearing because he had to cough twice before he finally looked at me and suggested it might be time for me to go home. Georgie’s eyebrows were waggling up and down the way they do when he gets nervous.

  I walked to the back door very slowly, sort of leaning with my head tilted, aiming my ear, straining to hear what was happening.

  I’m usually not super nosy, but Georgie is my best friend, and I was thinking that it must be really serious because Mr. Sinkoff was almost whispering. I had my hand on the back doorknob when Georgie screamed, “OH, NO!”

  Then silence again. Bad silence.

  As I stepped outside into the twilight, I could hear everything everywhere: crickets … my dog, Deeb, barking … the brrr-rum of a motorcycle a couple of streets away … some girls singing jump-rope rhymes … and a faraway plane. But everything in my mind was flat. I wasn’t thinking about anything. I just stood there. Deeb stopped barking.

  Then Georgie came running out the back door, yelling or crying or both, “This really stinks!”

  He ran right past me. And then he was out of sight, racing out the won’t-close-gate into the gully.

  I ran after him.

  Then I stopped.

  Then I ran again.

  Then I just walked. I knew where he was going. If he was crying, he’d want time to stop before I got there. Georgie has three brothers, but they are grown-up and don’t live with him, so he is sort of an only child, and he’s not used to crying in front of anyone.

  So I walked.

  I’ve noticed a funny thing about crying. Little kids actually seem to like doing it. When you’re small, you wail and wail. It’s loud. You make enough noise to block out the rest of the world. And the crying all by itself fills you up so much that you forget why you started in the first place and just sort of hide in your own noise. But when you get to almost eleven, like me, mostly you don’t do that anymore.

  I walked exactly 119 steps downstream from the path between our two houses (98 steps if Georgie’s counting … his steps are bigger). That’s where the creek, which almost never has any water in it, goes under a road. Just above the creek bed, there’s a four-foot-wide metal pipe that goes through the concrete wall that holds up the road. Once inside the pipe, we’re completely out of sight of everyone, and there’s a sort of echo that makes everything we say sound more important, so Georgie and I have turned it into our secret clubhouse. We don’t have a club or anything. No members. No secret passwords. But we couldn’t
think of a better name.

  That’s where I knew I would find him. And I did.

  When Georgie looked up, I saw that his eyes had that fat, swelled-up look that kids get when they’ve been crying. He sniffed, then rubbed his nose hard.

  “I’ve got some really bad news.…………… Cheesie.”

  Please look at the previous sentence.

  I put those sixteen dots between the last two words because even though Georgie was talking at regular speed, my mind was zooming so fast that the split second between “bad news” and “Cheesie” lasted for a long time.

  Here’s what the noise of my thinking sounded like:

  Georgie was really mad. But he didn’t sound a bit sad or afraid. I think dying would make him sad and afraid. So I figured he didn’t have cancer or Ebola or stuff.

  Maybe we weren’t friends anymore. But why would his father say he had bad news? It didn’t make sense.

  That left just one possibility: I was pretty sure Georgie was moving away.

  Georgie sniffed again, loud, and then said a word six times in a row that the people who print these books told me I definitely could not write. Then he took a deep breath and said, “Cheesie, my father told me I can’t go to camp.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. We loved camp, and this year would be our fifth summer in a row. It lasts six weeks and is maximum fun.

  “My father said he can’t afford it. He got laid off.” Georgie’s face was all scrunched, and his eyes started to get even puffier and redder.

  Georgie’s father works worked for some kind of technology company. He’s a microwave transmission engineer. I don’t know what that means, but I know it does not have anything to do with the microwave I use to heat frozen burritos.

  Georgie picked up some pebbles. I leaned backward because I thought he was going to fling them hard. But he just clinked them against the metal wall of our clubhouse and slumped his head. I had never seen him this miserable.

  Then I felt miserable because this summer at camp was going to be our best yet. It has to do with Big Guys and Little Guys.

  Granpa (I forgot to mention that he’s the camp director) and his staff of counselors divide the boys at Camp Windward into two groups. Big Guys stay up later, play some different sports like lacrosse and flag football, and have dances and stuff with Camp Leeward, the girls’ camp next door.