Cheesie Mack Is Not Exactly Famous Page 8

  Marlon had taken over Georgie’s room, so we figured that’s where we’d find Squirrel. But she wasn’t there. We prowled around the second floor, looking in closets and under beds. Finally we found her in Georgie’s dad’s bedroom, lying on top of his dresser.

  “Hello, fat cat,” Georgie said softly, stroking her from head to tail. “Look at your giant tummy.”

  “How many kittens do you think she’ll have?” I asked.

  “I guess …” Georgie looked up at the ceiling like he was doing some kind of calculation. “I think … maybe … thirty-seven.” Then he laughed.

  (I looked it up online … the record for most kittens in one litter is nineteen!)

  So I punched his arm. It wasn’t hard—I wasn’t mad or anything—that’s just a way to say “Shut up.”

  But Georgie staggered like I had really slugged him, instantly turning into Ee-Gorg, the insane companion of the mad scientist Dr. Frank N. Cheez. (Georgie and I invented these crazy characters in third grade.)

  “Ee-Gorg sorry, master. Ee-Gorg very bad.” He shambled around the bedroom with his arms in front of him like a zombie.

  I began petting Squirrel and spoke in my most evil Dr. Frank N. Cheez voice: “Do you like cats, my brainless friend?”

  “Mmmm … cats. Yes, master. Ee-Gorg like cats very much,” Georgie said. “Ee-Gorg eat cats.”

  He lurched crazily toward Squirrel with his mouth open like he was going to bite her. For a second I thought she might get spooked, but she just lay there purring.

  Suddenly Georgie stopped and picked up a small black velvet box on the dresser, next to Squirrel’s tail. He opened it. Inside was a gold ring.

  “Excellent, Ee-Gorg,” I continued in my Dr. Cheez voice. “One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them. One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”

  (You probably know those words come from The Lord of the Rings, which IMO are really great books and really great movies.)

  “Yes, Ee-Gorg,” I continued. “You have found the one magic ring that can grant me immense powers. Give it to me!”

  I was still playing Dr. Frank N. Cheez, but Georgie wasn’t in our game any longer.

  “Cool it, Cheesie. This is the ring my dad’s going to give Lulu. It’s what I get to carry at the wedding.” He closed the box and headed toward the door.

  I grabbed his arm. “Why are you taking it?”

  He shook himself loose and headed down the stairs. “If I’m going to wear fancy clothes and be the ring bearer, then I’m going to keep it with me and be responsible for it. C’mon!”

  We zoomed back through the older brothers’ party (snatching some treats as we passed through), grabbed our plastic bags from the kitchen, and opened the back door.

  “Don’t get anything dirty!” Ms. D said.

  “I have the ring!” Georgie shouted back to her just before the door slammed behind us.

  Deeb was waiting at the won’t-close gate. The three of us raced up to my bedroom and closed the door. We got the black pants on in a flash, and the shoes at the bottom of the bag seemed obvious, but I couldn’t figure out the shirt.

  “Look at these ruffles. I think this is for girls. And there are buttonholes on the sleeves, but no buttons. And what’re these for?” I held up some jewelry gadgets.

  Georgie shrugged a how-should-I-know. “These pants are weird. Look at the shiny stripe down the leg.”

  “And what the heck is this?” I held up a super-wide belt made of black cloth.

  “Beats me,” Georgie replied. “There aren’t even any belt loops on the pants.”

  I opened my bedroom door. “Granpa!” I shouted. “Can you come here? Georgie and I need help.”

  Granpa came in, took a long look, chuckled, and then got us dressed. If you know what a tuxedo is, you know why we were confused. If you don’t, here’s what was what.

  When we were completely dressed, Granpa stood back and grinned. “You boys look like a couple of penguins.”

  “I wanna see,” Georgie said. He picked up the black velvet box and walked toward the bathroom.

  He was admiring himself in the mirror when I came in. Just then I heard Goon open her door, so I quickly shut and locked the bathroom door. I did not want her to see us and start teasing or anything.

  The two of us stood in front of the mirror.

  “Wow,” I said softly. “We do look like penguins. But really classy, good-looking penguins.”

  Georgie nodded. “Very sharp. We look like on TV when someone wins an award.”

  I held up an imaginary microphone. “And the winner of the Ring Bearer Award is Georgie Sinkoff.”

  Georgie smiled, gave a little bow, and waved a hand to his imaginary fans in the mirror.

  I continued speaking into my invisible microphone. “Would you show our viewers the award-winning ring-bearer technique you intend to use at the wedding this weekend?”

  “I’d be happy to, Mr. Cheesie. Please step back. I need room.”

  I moved out of his way. Georgie took the ring out of its box and placed it in his pants pocket. The way he moved his hands reminded me of how he does magic tricks when he’s dressed up as The Great Georgio.

  Georgie spoke in a very dignified manner. “When the bride asks for the ring—”

  I forgot about my imaginary microphone and became myself again. “I think your dad’s the one who asks. And then he puts it on her finger.” I’ve never been to a wedding, but I’ve seen movies.

  “Whatever,” Georgie said. “When my dad asks for it, I’ll pull it out like this—” He yanked his hand out of his pocket and flung it out in front of him like he was offering it to someone. Unfortunately, the ring slipped out of his fingers, flew up and bounced off the mirror, and dropped into the sink. It rolled around like a marble.…

  We both stood there … just staring in shock.

  And then the ring disappeared down the drain.

  “Uh-oh,” Georgie said softly.

  In a voice I could barely hear, Georgie asked, “What do we do now?”

  I was speechless for a second … then, “We’ve got to get it before it goes down the sewer. C’mon!”

  We zoomed out of the bathroom and down the stairs. Like always, Deeb chased after us, barking excitedly.

  “Hold on!” Granpa shouted as we passed through the TV room. “Where are you birds running to in those tuxedos?”

  We didn’t stop. And what came out of my mouth was sort of almost the truth. “Georgie’s new mom needs to see how we look.”

  We went out the back door but did not go to Georgie’s. I cut around the side of my house.

  “Where are you going?” Georgie yelled after me.

  I ran through my front yard. Deeb stopped at the edge of the street. I have trained her NEVER to go past the curb … even if she’s chasing me.

  I stopped in the middle of the street, looking down at a manhole cover until Georgie caught up.

  “I asked my dad once. He said all the water and stuff from our house goes through pipes and pours out into the sewer here. We’ve got to get down there and find the ring before it washes away forever.”

  Georgie looked at me in horror. “Are you serious? Do you know what goes into the sewer?”

  “Of course I do. But that’s where that ring’s going to go eventually. Do you have a better idea?”

  We stood there silently, then Georgie shook his head. “My dad said being ring bearer was a position of trust. Oh, man … I really blew this one.”

  “We’re not giving up,” I said. “But we can’t go searching for the ring in these clothes. Let’s go show Ms. D. Then we’ll figure out something.”

  In Georgie’s kitchen a minute or so later, with the noisy big brothers’ party still going on elsewhere in his house, Ms. D gave us a total tuxedo inspection. “You both look very handsome,” she said.

  “The wedding ring I took,” Georgie mumbled to her. “Did you tell Dad?”

  Just then Mr. Sinkoff entered. “T
ell me what?” he asked.

  “We’ve got to get out of these clothes before we mess them up,” I said hurriedly. “Let’s go, Georgie.”

  Before Mr. Sinkoff could repeat his question, we were out the back door. By the time we put our fancy clothes back into the bags in my room, it was too dark to search through the sewer, so we had dinner, did our homework, and then just sat in my room until bedtime, doing nothing and being miserable until I turned out my bedroom light.

  After a minute of in-the-dark blanket moving and pillow adjusting, Georgie spoke. “It’s gone. My dad is going to be so …” He wasn’t crying, but his voice cracked. I waited, eyes closed, for him to finish his sentence. He didn’t, but it didn’t matter. I knew what he was feeling. We’ve been friends forever.

  In the morning, Georgie was still miserable.

  At the top of the stairs, I told him, “Don’t give up. We’ll think of something. We always do. But right now we’ve got to act happy. Otherwise Granpa will suspect something.”

  We had the fakiest smiles on our faces all through breakfast. Granpa paid no attention, but Goon knew something was up. She gave us dirty looks, but we didn’t crack.

  “Let’s get a move on,” Granpa finally said, so we loaded the box of time capsule items into his car, and he drove us to the museum.

  Mr. Hernandes seemed pleased with what we had brought. “Excellent … excellent. I’m going to look through our museum’s collection and pick out something to add to what you kids have put together.”

  “I’ve got something to add,” Granpa said, pulling a piece of paper out of his shirt pocket. He laid it down on Mr. Hernandes’s desk with a smack of his hand.

  I leaned over and looked at it closely. It was a check for ONE MILLION DOLLARS signed by Melvyn Mack (that’s Granpa’s real name).

  “Put that in your time capsule and you’ve really got something,” Granpa said proudly. “I’ve dated the check exactly one hundred years from now and left the Pay To line blank so whoever opens the box can write a name in and collect the money.”

  Mr. Hernandes guffawed (which means he laughed with his mouth open wide … which made his huge beard flap all around).

  “Do you really have a million dollars?” I asked.

  “Not sayin’,” Granpa responded slyly. “You want to find out, you’ll have to live to be one hundred eleven and be the old man who opens the capsule.” Then he gave me a squinty-evil-eye.

  “Anyway, it’s the thought that counts,” Granpa added, plopping down in a chair. “You kids get going to school. I’m going to argue with Bob here for a while.”

  We walked to school. Georgie stared at his feet the whole way. I knew why. But there was nothing we could do about the ring until we got home, so I tried to get him to think about something else. “Do you think Goon is up to something? Messing with Mrs. DeWitt’s signed book. You know, taking that picture.”

  It didn’t work. “I don’t know” was all he said.

  I don’t remember anything about Mrs. Wikowitz’s class that morning, except neither of us raised our hands or spoke. In second period, however, I got an idea. It came because Mr. Amato was talking about properties of metals. He held up a milk carton.

  “This pint container has a volume of sixteen liquid ounces. If I filled it with water, the contents would weigh one pound. Sixteen ounces equals one pound. If instead I filled it with osmium, the densest, the heaviest of all metals, it would weigh more. But how much more?”

  Everyone had to write down an answer. Before I tell you what I wrote, make your own guess.

  Do you have one? If so, keep reading.

  I like to guess at things. But I don’t just guess randomly. I try to make what my mother calls an “intelligent guess.” That means you think of a good reason for your guess. So here’s what I thought:

  1. I have held steel or iron objects lots of times. They seem much heavier than water. My guess … four times heavier than water. So a pint milk carton full of steel might weigh four pounds.

  2. My dad once let me hold a hunk of lead. I don’t remember exactly, but it seemed about twice as heavy as steel. So if my guess for steel was good, a pint of lead would weigh eight pounds.

  3. If osmium is the heaviest, maybe it would weigh twice as much as lead. Two times eight is sixteen pounds.

  Could a little pint container of some metal I had never heard of actually weigh sixteen pounds? That seemed ridiculously heavy, but that was my guess. Only Eddie Chapple guessed higher. When he said one thousand pounds, Mr. Amato chuckled and patted his pretty big belly. “That’s even more than I weigh.”

  The answer was twenty-two and a half pounds!

  I was closest … and that gave me my idea. “Mr. Amato? How about gold?” I asked. “Gold’s heavy, too. Right?”

  “Very heavy. Nineteen times heavier than water,” he said. “That’s why prospectors panned for gold in creeks. They’d scoop up material from creek bottoms with a pan and slosh it around in the flowing water. The rocks and dirt would wash away, but the nuggets and flakes of gold would be so heavy, they’d stay in the bottom of the pan.”

  I had to tell Georgie there was still a chance! Maybe the ring hadn’t washed all the way into the main sewer.

  Mr. Amato continued. “Today we use other methods to find metal. Have any of you ever used a metal detector?”

  Glenn raised his hand. “I have a metal detector. I’ve used it to find coins and other metallic objects at the beach.”

  Mr. Amato then explained how metal detectors work (something to do with magnetic fields), but I was too busy thinking about finding Georgie’s ring. After class I asked Glenn, and he said I could borrow his metal detector.

  I got so interested in metals, I asked Mr. Amato lots more and ended up putting a page with interesting facts about them on my website. Did you know, for example, that if you make a spoon out of a metal called gallium, and stir a cup of hot tea with it, the spoon will melt?

  I was late meeting up with Georgie in the lunchroom because Mr. Stotts stopped me in the hall.

  “We’re going to bury the time capsule on Monday, and, weather permitting, the whole school will assemble outside for a short ceremony. How would you like to give a little speech?”

  “Um, okay,” I responded. “But what do I say?”

  “Something about the past, the future. Make it short, very short. Mayor Raglan’s going to be there. But the main thing is the TV coverage. The cable news guys want you on camera again. I don’t know, Cheesie. I guess you’re famous now.” Mr. Stotts smiled and ruffled my hair.

  Georgie was already sitting at our table when I arrived with my tray. Normally he’d be eating seconds by now, but he was still so miserable, his food was almost untouched, and he was sort of slouched. As I told him what I had learned about gold in Mr. Amato’s class, he straightened up, and when I said we could use Glenn’s metal detector, he sat up and took a big bite of his burrito.

  Georgie wanted to go metal detecting immediately after school, but we both had practice: cross-country for me, basketball for him. And anyway, Glenn runs XC with me, so we couldn’t have gotten his detector early. (In case you didn’t read my last book, “XC” is the abbrev for cross-country … and in case you didn’t figure it out, “abbrev” is my abbreviation for abbreviation.)

  Georgie and I live only a few blocks from Glenn, but even in only that short distance, we used his metal detector on lawns and in a small park and found two nickels, two pull tabs from soda cans, a motorcycle license plate, and a rusted screwdriver with a broken handle.

  “This is going to work,” I assured Georgie as we climbed the stairs to my bedroom toting our backpacks and the metal detector. Knowing Goon might be listening, I whispered, “If the ring’s there, we’ll find it for sure.”

  As we passed Goon’s room, I glanced in. She was sitting on her bed, holding a book. But not like she was reading. More like she was inspecting it. I held up my hand … and like two soldiers on patrol, Georgie and I halted. For a long
moment, Goon didn’t notice us spying on her. Then she did, jumped up, and closed her door.

  “Very suspicious,” I said quietly, dropping my backpack onto my bed. “Did you see what she was looking at?”

  “Uh-uh. Nope. Did not,” Georgie replied. “Let’s get outside.”

  “Well, I did. She was looking at her Harry Potter book.”

  “So?” Georgie was in a hurry. He dumped his backpack next to mine, picked up Glenn’s metal detector, and was out my door.

  I trotted after him, grabbed two flashlights from our laundry room cabinet, and caught up with him at my front door. “Goon read that book years ago. It’s been sitting untouched on her shelf forever. But since we got Mrs. DeWitt’s autographed copy, she’s been all of a sudden very interested in it again. I don’t get it.”

  Georgie shrugged “Who cares,” then walked quickly into the street and over to the manhole.

  I live on a very un-busy street. It’s a dead end, so the only cars that drive on it belong to the people who live here. Some grown-ups might not allow it, but my parents have let me play ball in our street since I was seven.

  Georgie switched on the metal detector and waved it over the manhole cover. It beeped like crazy!

  I gave him a look. “Duh! The whole thing is made out of metal.”

  Georgie switched it off. “We’ve got to get this open,” he said, poking at the manhole cover with his shoe.

  I looked at the cover. It had one metal word in raised letters on it: SEWER. It was perfectly round except for one notch. “See this?” I said, bending down and sticking my finger in the notch. “I bet you pry it up from here.”

  I tried lifting. No way.

  “We’ll need a crowbar or something,” I said.

  “Forget it,” Georgie said. “Even if we get it open, right out here in broad daylight someone will see us and call the cops or the sewer police or whatever.”

  What happened next was weird. Deeb was at the edge of my yard, excitedly jumping around because she knows she is not allowed in the street. The weird thing was she was barking. Deeb is not a barker, and anyway, there was nothing to bark at. Georgie and I walked to the curb. When we got close, Deeb took off, running toward the backyard.