Cheesie Mack Is Cool in a Duel Page 4

  I should have been suspicious. I reached for the salt. They were still staring and grinning.

  “Stare all you want,” I said. “It just makes you look stupid.”

  I lifted the shaker. Their grins got bigger.

  I glared at them, then turned the shaker upside down over my plate and shook it once. The little silver lid with the holes in it came tumbling off, followed by a landslide of salt. Kevin and Ty laughed hysterically. I looked down. My eggs were covered with a thick white layer.

  There were no more eggs. I ate toast.

  After that came morning activity. The other cabins did swimming, sailing, archery, crafts, and every kind of land sport. Cabin H did ballet.

  *

  Hold it! There is no ballet at Camp Windward!

  I stepped away from my computer for less than a minute to get a snack, and when I returned, someone had changed what Cabin H did to ballet. I suspected my dad, who had just gotten into the shower and was singing badly to hide his obvious guilt. So I stuck my head inside the bathroom and asked, but he just sang louder. So I am leaving ballet in until he confesses. And just to make sure he confesses, I have stolen his fake foot, which he does not wear in the shower. So if you are reading this, he has not confessed and has either grabbed his foot back from me or is hopping around. I explained why he has a fake foot in my last book. It had to do with a bomb on an aircraft carrier when he was in the Navy.

  Okay. Now I am actually several pages further along in the writing of this book, but I am coming back here to insert this explanation: the trickster was not my father. It was Goon. She giggled all through dinner and finally admitted it. I should have known. Ballet is one of the things she is actually very good at. I was going to take the whole episode out of this book, but my dad asked me to leave it in. He thinks it’s “a good representation of the way our family interacts.” Whether I left it in or not, the rules of the Point Battle mean Goon gets points. Here’s how I calculated how many. (Look in Appendix A if you want to follow my logic.)

  1. Sticking ballet into my book was sort of an insult. That meant one point for her because no one else knew about it.

  2. But I revealed the insult to Dad. My mistake. That made it two points.

  3. When I found out that I had accused the wrong person, that made it embarrassing. Four points.

  Since this all happened while I was writing after the summer was over, I can’t include these points in the running totals in this book, because the book gets to “The End” before the summer ends.

  Get it? The Point Battle is in two places at once.

  Wow! This is like time travel.

  *

  What we actually did for morning activity was lacrosse, and I was miserable. I was by far the youngest and way smallest in the twelve-and thirteen-year-old group. Think about it. I was still ten! My birthday was just over a month away. Everybody was better than me in lacrosse, which I had never played before. In fact, this was the first time I’d ever held a lacrosse stick, which BTW was taller than I was.

  Ty and a kid named Jason were team captains. They chose up, and of course I was picked last, with Jason actually saying, “Do I have to take Cheesie?”

  Ty couldn’t resist. “Nah, you don’t. He can go be with the Little Guys. I think they’re playing hopscotch somewhere.”

  It was embarrassing.

  I sat on the bench.

  “You’ll be the first sub,” Jason said, trying to be nice.

  Yeah, right, I said to myself. I sat on the bench for the rest of the game.

  Our second morning activity was computers. Most of the kids played video games (Georgie is a pro!), but I sat at one of the computers and started writing an email about camp to Carlos, my pen pal in Bolivia.

  Gumpy, my other grandfather, is a computer scienee professor at Yale College in Connecticut, and he says the word should be epal since pens are irrelevant to computer communication. You probably know where Bolivia is, but just in case, it is a country in South America.

  As part of fifth-grade Spanish, Ms. Higgins, my teacher, had connected our class in Gloucester with a fifth-grade class in La Paz, Bolivia’s capital city. (Actually, there are two capital cities in Bolivia. The other is Sucre. I don’t know why they have two. Maybe Carlos knows.)

  Carlos and I email each other almost every week. Here is the first email he ever sent to me:

  Hola,

  ¿Por qué te llamas Cheesie? ¿Es porque te gusta comer mucho queso? Tienes mucha suerte de vivir cerca del mar. Nunca he visto el mar.

  Tu amigo de email,

  Carlos

  Since I was just beginning Spanish and couldn’t translate it, I asked my grandmother Meemo to help. She is excellent in Spanish because after college, she lived for a couple of years in Argentina (which is also in South America). Here’s our combined translation of what Carlos wrote:

  Hello,

  Why is your name Cheesie? Is it because you like to eat a lot of cheese? You are very fortunate to live near the ocean. I have never seen the ocean.

  Your email friend,

  Carlos

  At first I didn’t understand about Carlos and the ocean, then I looked on a map and saw that Bolivia is one of only two countries in the Western Hemisphere (North, Central, and South America) that is landlocked—it doesn’t touch any ocean. The other is Paraguay.

  Anyway, I was almost finished writing a long email (in English!) to Carlos about camp. It would have been the first one he ever got from Maine.

  “What’re you doing, Runtboy?” Kevin said, sticking his cabeza fea (Spanish for “ugly head”) between me and the computer screen.

  “Stop bothering me,” I said.

  “You’re bothering me by being in my cabin,” Kevin said.

  “Bug off, Kevin,” I said, and then suddenly fell over backward. I looked up. Ty had pulled my chair over.

  “Sorry. I didn’t know anyone was sitting there,” Ty said, then walked away.

  I picked up my chair and went back to my email. The screen was blank!

  I glared at Kevin.

  “Don’t look at me!” he said. “You must’ve hit the delete button when you tipped over.”

  Carlos did not get an email from Maine. Time ran out.

  What happened next was the final straw. We were on the archery range, which is way off in a far corner of the boys’ sports fields.

  But before I get to that, since Georgie and I were a few minutes early, we took a long cut (opposite of a short cut) along the Border Line. We were playing Roboto. It’s a game we made up, and we pronounce it rowBOAT-oh because we didn’t want it to sound exactly like robot. We got the idea from being in the robotics club at Rocky Neck Elementary School. If you’re thinking, Whoa! Nerd alert! you’re wrong. Robotics club was super fun, and it helped me at camp … as you’ll read later in this book.

  This time I was Roboto Boy, and Georgie was the Computer Vision Controller, which we call the CVC. Roboto Boy has to keep his eyes closed—no peeking!—while the CVC gives him directions. The object is for Roboto Boy to walk and move like a robot and get where he’s supposed to go without falling or crashing, and especially without opening his eyes.

  This might sound like an easy game, but trust me, it’s not. It’s almost impossible to keep your eyes closed. Something in your brain makes you want to open them. And the longer you keep them shut, the harder it gets. If you want to try this with a friend, the Roboto game, with all the commands and stuff, is on my website.

  The CVC (Georgie) was trying to keep my robot feet right next to the Border Line’s yellow rocks.

  “Straight half. Right mini. Stop. Right mini. Forward full. Don’t peek,” he said.

  Roboto is a game of trust. If the CVC gives you bad commands, you can really bonk yourself. But I trusted my CVC, following instructions like a good Roboto Boy. It had been over a minute since I started Roboto-walking, and I hadn’t peeked once!

  I heard a bunch of cheeping birds fly above me and head off into Camp Le
eward.

  “Right half. My voice is going to sound farther away. I’m walking over to get a baseball and throw it back.”

  I knew we were walking next to the baseball diamond, so that made sense. His voice did start to sound farther away. I kept Roboto-walking with my eyes closed.

  “Hi, Cheesie. What’re you doing here?”

  My eyes popped open. I was standing between two cabins, and there, about six feet away, were Lana Shen, her camp friend Marci, and a couple of other girls. I spun around. Georgie was over fifty feet away, laughing so hard, he had to bend over. He hadn’t gone after a baseball. He was still standing next to the Border Line, and had directed me away from the yellow dashes right into Camp Leeward, right toward the girls’ cabins, right into No Boys Land!

  Without a word to the girls, I ran directly at Georgie as fast as I could and pushed him to the ground. I sat on him and bounced up and down. It didn’t bother him a bit. He kept laughing.

  “Cheesie? We need to ask you something.” Lana and Marci had come over to the Border Line.

  “What?” I was mad.

  “It’s a secret,” Lana said. “Come closer.”

  I climbed off Georgie the Traitor, but stood a few feet away from the girls on my side of the Border Line. “Tell me out loud.” I didn’t want a girl whispering in my ear.

  “Okay. But don’t tell anyone.”

  I nodded. Georgie, still laughing, stood up and came over.

  Marci smiled and waved her hand really fast. “Hi, Georgie.” Then her face changed, and both girls got really serious.

  Lana was almost whispering. “This is a secret. You promise not to tell?”

  She looked at me. I didn’t do anything. Georgie still had a Roboto-double-cross grin on his face. He nodded. I had no idea what was going to come next, but something told me I wasn’t going to like it.

  Then Lana turned to Marci, who began talking quietly, but really fast. “Okay. Here’s the problem. My brother, Marcus … you don’t know him. He was supposed to come to camp this summer, but he broke both his legs skateboarding. Really bad. And he’s home in bed with his legs all up in the air. You know, in casts with ropes attached to whatever.”

  “Your brother?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh. He’s my same age. We’re twins … fraternal.”

  (The “frat” part of that word, like in the word fraternity, means “brother” in Latin. My dad told me. He’s really good with words. But even if the twins are two nonidentical girls, or a boy and a girl like Marci and Marcus, they call them fraternal, like they’re brothers. Go figure.)

  “Anyway, I phoned him this morning when Lana and I were in the computer room, and he’s really sad. I mean really sad.”

  “How’d he break his legs?” Georgie asked.

  “Like I told you. Skateboarding,” Marci said.

  “I know,” Georgie said. “But, wow, both legs! What was he doing?”

  Georgie and I have skateboards, but neither of us is all that good. We have, however, watched tons of videos of guys doing awesome tricks.

  Marci looked confused for a moment. “I don’t know. Something dangerous. A double wobbly, I think.”

  Huh? I looked at Georgie.

  Georgie was puzzled, too. “I never heard of a doub—”

  “Something like that. I don’t know much about skateboarding,” she said. “Anyway, I was hoping you guys … I mean, Uncle Bud is your grandfather, right?”

  I nodded, but I was completely confused.

  Marci looked all around—I guess to make sure no one else was listening—which was unnecessary because there was no one even close to us. “Please. I am soooo worried about my brother. He needs me. He needs me to talk to him every day.”

  “Or text him,” Lana said.

  “Or text him,” Marci repeated. “Every day.”

  “Does it hurt?” Georgie asked. “His legs, I mean.”

  Marci didn’t answer immediately. She looked up at the sky, then back at Georgie, staring at him so hard he had to turn away.

  “It did at first. But now he’s just so sad. And I’m really worried.”

  “Did you see how it happened?” Georgie asked. “The wipeout?”

  I don’t remember what they said next because I started daydreaming about how I’d write a story about a guy like Marcus if he’d been skateboarding in Sleepy Hollow instead of New York City. I might call it “The Legend of Double Wobbly.”

  “—and I bet that it’s terrible and all that, but what do me and Cheesie have to do with anything?” Georgie asked.

  “Well,” Lana began, “if you, because he’s your grandfather …”

  She put her hand on my arm, and I jumped. Also, I did not like what I was hearing.

  “… could sneak us into the computer room every day. Like right before dinner?”

  They were asking me for help because at camp there are no cell phones or video games. You can bring them on the bus, but once you get to camp, they all go to the computer room, and you can only use them during computer activity periods (about twice a week) or to reply to phone calls that are received on the camp office phone. That keeps kids from texting and chatting and playing video games when they could be having summer camp fun. Some newbies whine and complain, but it’s really a great idea. After a couple of days, you don’t even miss it. You might not believe me now, but by the time you finish this book, I bet you’ll agree.

  “Lana says there’s no one else at camp who can help. Please …” Marci sighed, staring straight at Georgie. “I’m afraid my brother might go crazy.”

  I took a step backward. “Let’s go, Georgie. We’ve got to get to archery.”

  “Wait right there,” Georgie told the girls as he yanked me about twenty feet away. Then he whispered, “What do you think?”

  I shook my head no-way.

  “She said he might go crazy.”

  I shook my head harder. “That’s crazy. Marci’s crazy. People don’t go crazy from broken—”

  “How do you know? Remember how upset we were when we thought we weren’t coming to camp?”

  “Sure, but we didn’t go crazy,” I said.

  “C’mon, Cheesie. Have pity on this Marcus guy. What if you broke both your legs? She’s right about the computer room. It’s empty right before dinner. You could sneak keys from Uncle Bud. We could sneak the girls in.”

  “I’m not sneaking anything,” I said.

  Georgie grabbed both my shoulders and shook me as he spoke. “Think about it (shake). This could be a Cheesie (shake) and Georgie (shake) secret mission (shake).”

  Then he leaned real close and whispered like he was telling me the secret words for a magic spell: “And it’ll be fun.”

  My mind was spinning. Here’s what I thought:

  1. We definitely could do this.

  2. We definitely would have fun.

  3. We’d definitely be breaking a camp rule.

  4. But we’d definitely be doing a good deed.

  I looked over at the girls. Both said the same word at the same time: “Please.”

  “Okay. We’ll do it,” I said. “We’ll hack our way into the computer room with you. Meet us in the dining hall exactly fifteen minutes before dinner. But if you’re one second late, the deal’s off.”

  As we hurried to archery, I realized I had agreed to another one of Georgie’s Great Ideas.

  Twilight had come quickly, darkening the steep roadway. I skated over the top of Ichabod Hill and pushed off hard, picking up speed. I could hear dogs in faraway backyards barking and howling at the setting sun. Carving a tight line on the curving road, I shot downhill faster and faster, rapidly approaching the dangerous twists of Double Wobbly. Suddenly a wave of bad feeling came over me. It wasn’t fear exactly … more of a strange, demented sadness. I could not continue. I dug in, grinding my board to a stop.

  Just at that moment the distant dogs went silent, and a nearby rasp of wheels on pavement caught my ear. I looked uphill. There, concealed in a shado
w cast by a dark cloud, a towering figure stood on a glowing skateboard.

  My hair rose in terror. Was it the demon of Double Wobbly? Could I outrace this evil? I was fast on my board … but was I fast enough?

  At that moment the cloud moved off the low sun, and I could see my pursuer clearly.

  My heart went cold. The dude on the skateboard had no head!

  *

  In the last chapter, I wondered what a story with a headless skateboarder would be like, so today, while I was sitting in my middle school library waiting for my dad to pick me up (I have a dentist appointment), I reread “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” then wrote the beginning of my short story.

  Mrs. DeWitt, our librarian, suggested the word demented (it means “crazy” … it’s a terrific playground word!) when I got stumped.

  Marci had told us her brother had busted his legs doing a double wobbly, but since neither Georgie nor I knew what that was, I turned it from a skateboarding trick into a dangerous place where bad things—like broken legs—happen. And since the main character in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was named Ichabod Crane, I used his name, too.

  I don’t know if I’ll ever finish “The Legend of Double Wobbly,” because I have no idea what happens next or why the skateboarder has no head. If you have a good idea, tell me your plan on my website.

  Oh, and the reason this is Chapter ? is because it’s spooky.

  The Challenge and the Hack

  The archery range has nothing but woods directly behind the targets. They built it that way because we use real arrows with metal points. You could really hurt somebody, so the first archery lesson anyone gets is all about safety. Two years ago, I saw a kid aim crazy on purpose and shoot an arrow totally out of sight into the trees. He lost archery privileges for the rest of the summer. They found his arrow stuck in a tree about twenty feet up. It’s still there. I’ve seen it.

  I like archery, and I’m pretty good at it. I’ve gotten better every year since I was nine. (Seven-and eight-year-olds are considered too young for archery.)

  We were with another Big Guys cabin at the archery range that morning, and as I expected, I ended up last in line. Most of the guys were not very good. Kevin and Ty each got only one arrow in their hay-bale targets, and neither of those were anywhere close to bull’s-eyes.