by Jon Scieszka
“All you have to do is kneel here, at the edge of the stairs, and when I give the signal, scream like you’re in great pain.”
“What’s the signal?” asked Niall, which I thought was a fair question, but Donal would not have agreed with my thought had I voiced it, which I didn’t, as I was merely an observer.
“What’s the signal?” Donal repeated, shocked. “What’s the sig…Are you questioning my methods? Are you trying to run the show? Maybe I should just leave you to get out of trouble yourself and see how far you get.”
Niall’s nose candles dripped in shock. “No. No. Don’t go. I’ll be good.”
“You will be obedient,” corrected Donal. “Like a puppy!”
“Woof,” said Niall.
“Okay. You’ll know the signal when you see it.” Donal poked his head between the banister posts. “Now we wait.”
It was not a long wait. Mere seconds later we heard the familiar snick of the front door closing and the mutter of Mom’s voice as she complained to herself about the person she had just been talking to. We followed her footsteps down the hallway and into the kitchen, where the crystal shards would be winking a Morse code of guilt that read: NIALL NIALL NIALL.
“Niall!” my mother shrieked, being well-versed in crystal codes. “Niall!”
“Here we go,” said Donal, rubbing his hands.
Niall pointed at the rubbing hands. Was that the signal? He was afraid to ask.
Mom was on the hunt now. She picked up the trail of muddy trainers coming in the back door, followed it to the bottom of the stairway. From above, her body language seemed a little hostile. An impression that was not helped by the wringing of a dishcloth between her fingers.
“Mom is wishing that was your neck,” said Donal to Niall with a merry wink.
“Niall,” called Mom. “Niall!”
Her eyes swept up the stairs, following the trail of mud, and just before her gaze rested on the culprit, Donal decided that it was time for the signal.
In one violent motion, Donal elbowed Niall off the top step and sent him tumbling down the stairs.
“Scream, grasshopper,” he called after his rapidly descending brother. “Scream your little lungs out.”
Niall did not need to be told twice; in fact he didn’t need to be told once. He screamed with great gusto and in genuine fright, pausing only to take a mouthful of carpet at every revolution. Down and down he went, making a xylophone of the banister posts with his legs, bashing the air from his lungs. And when he finally came to rest at my mother’s feet, the fury was whipped from her face like a tissue in the wind and replaced by maternal concern.
“My baby!” she cried, sinking to her knees, cradling Niall’s head, the broken award utterly forgotten. “My baaaaby!”
On the top step, Donal surveyed the scene with some satisfaction. He had, he knew, saved Niall’s hide while simultaneously securing his place in local legend.
He shot a salute down to his bleeding baby brother and whispered, “You’re welcome.”
Donal actually patted himself on the back, then turned to me and said, “Did you get that, writer gimp? I am the biggest genius wot you shall ever meet. You should do a book about me.”
I could only stare in awe. There was no doubt that he was an evil genius, but likable, too. A curious mixture. Surely people would like to read about a boy like this.
And the seeds for the Artemis Fowl series were sewn.
The following day, Mom remembered the broken award, and Niall was grounded with no TV for a month. Donal never mentions that part.
KID APPEAL
BY DAVID LUBAR
Dwight Howtzler is an idiot. He’s also my best friend. Brains aren’t all that important most of the time, and they’re definitely not the first thing I look for when I pick my friends. For example, Zeke Walther, that motormouth show-off, is super smart, but I’d never want to hang out with him.
There are lots of other things that make someone a great best friend, like loyalty and courage. Dwight’s totally loyal. He’d never tell on me, no matter what I did. Even though he got six weeks of detention, Dwight never admitted he had help when he dumped twenty packs of cherry Kool-Aid into the school’s new fishpond. I swear we thought there weren’t any fish in it yet. I guess it’s a good thing only two of them were hiding in there at the time. They looked real pretty right before they turned belly up. It was sort of like a Dr. Seuss story. One fish, two fish. Red fish, dead fish.
And to this day, nobody who could punish me for it has a clue I was with Dwight when we snuck into the principal’s office and replaced the regular CD of the National Anthem with one where the whole song was burped. At least he got only one week of detention for that.
As for courage, I know Dwight would stand right next to me if I got attacked by a band of ninjas or a pack of zombies. If I got bitten by a snake, I’d bet he’d even suck out the poison. As long as I got bitten on the leg or arm. If I got bitten on the butt, I’d understand if he let me die.
So being smart isn’t important most of the time. But it’s sort of helpful when you’re entering a contest. And it looked like we’d be doing that. You see, right before the last bell, our teacher, Ms. Flayer, handed out a bunch of papers, like she does every Friday. It was the usual stuff: a bake sale, eye exams, a book fair, something about a sewage leak in the cafeteria. Nothing important.
When she got back to her desk, she waved a sheet of yellow paper at us. “I hope some of you will consider entering this contest.”
Contest? I loved winning stuff. I shuffled through the papers and found the yellow one. I got as far as the first line: CELEBRATE THE HISTORY OF NEW CAIRO.
I stopped right there. I’d rather celebrate the fact that my gum lasted for three hours this morning. Our teachers had been jamming the town’s history down our throats since way back in first grade. After five years of that, New Cairo’s past was the last thing I wanted to celebrate.
I guess Dwight read the whole paper, because he grabbed my arm as soon as we got into the hall and said, “We are so doing this, Charlie. It’s going to be awesome.”
“Doing what?” I pulled my arm free, which wasn’t easy since Dwight is one of the biggest kids in our class.
“Look at this!” He shoved the paper in my face and pointed at the next line. WIN BIG PRIZES!!!!!
Okay—that caught my attention. But I knew “big prizes” meant different things to adults than it did to kids. Grown-ups actually seemed to think a kid would get all excited about a savings bond or a dictionary. Anything that’s going to get my heart racing needs to say stuff like “radio controlled” and “Wi-Fi enabled.”
But I guess, once in a while, an adult gets it right. According to the flyer, first prize was a trip for two to the grand opening of Splashtastic Park. I’d heard it had fifteen water slides and a gigantic saltwater wave pool, all inside a dome. That would be a perfect way to start summer vacation, which was only two weeks away. I’d been dying to go there ever since I’d seen the ads, but my parents said it was too expensive.
Suddenly, the history of New Cairo sounded a lot more interesting. I read the rest of the flyer. It turned out the New Cairo Chamber of Commerce—whatever that was—was sponsoring the contest to help celebrate the 150th anniversary of the town’s founding.
“We have a week,” I said after I read the rules. The projects had to be brought to school next Friday and set up in the auditorium. The whole school would have an assembly at the end of the day to watch the judging.
“That’s tons of time,” Dwight said. “I do most of my projects the day before they’re due. Or even that morning. And I’ve never gotten lower than a C minus. Except once or twice.”
“I think, if we’re gonna do it, we better give it a bit more time than just one day.”
“If?” Dwight asked.
“I’ve got a ton of math and reading to slog through.” I glanced back at our classroom door. Ms. Flayer seemed to think that homework kept kids from getting
into trouble. If that was true, I never would have tried to make grilled cheese sandwiches for me and Dwight using his mom’s iron or jump my bicycle from the garage roof to the porch last week. I was still picking scabs off my knee from the crash. But that’s okay—I sort of like picking scabs.
“We have to do it,” Dwight said. “It’s our only chance to get to the Splashtastic Park grand opening. I’ve heard it’s going to be awesome.”
“I don’t know….”
That’s when a high-pitched laugh shattered my thoughts. It sounded like someone was tickling a gigantic baby with a pitchfork.
“You guys are going to enter?” Zeke Walther, who’d slithered up behind us, cackled again, then said, “Forget it. Unless they add a nice last-place prize. There’s no way you losers have a chance. Not against me. I’m full of smarts. You’re just full of farts.” He smirked and walked off.
I turned to Dwight, held up my hand, and said, “Let’s do it.”
He smacked my palm. “We’ll show him who the loser is. I can already feel myself floating in that wave pool.” He closed his eyes and swayed from side to side like he was up to his neck in the water. Then he farted.
“Dwight! Knock it off.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I like making bubbles.”
“You’re not in a real pool,” I said.
“Good point.”
I reminded myself not to get too close to him once we hit the water. And we were definitely hitting that water. Somehow, some way, my idiot friend and I were going to win first prize. Whatever we did, I had a feeling I’d be doing all of the thinking and most of the work. That didn’t stop Dwight from spitting out a stream of ideas as we walked to my place.
“We could bring in cookies,” he said. “I could get my mom to bake them. Everyone loves her cookies.”
“It’s supposed to be about something from the history of the town,” I said. “Cookies don’t count.”
“What if she makes them now and we let them get stale? Then they’d be historic. And she lives here, so they’d be from the town.” He grinned at me. “Wow. I thought this would be harder.”
“It still won’t count,” I said. “Even if it did, we need to come up with something way better than cookies.”
“Oh.” Dwight sighed, stared at the ground for a moment, then let out a whoop and clapped his hands together. “I got it! This is perfect! We’ll make one of those diarrhea things.”
“What are you talking about?” My brain wrestled with itself, trying to think up any possible connection between stomach cramps and history.
“You know, a shoebox diarrhea,” Dwight said. “Where you cut out stuff, color it, and glue it in the box.”
“That’s a diorama,” I said. “Not a diarrhea.” Now my brain was wrestling with the image of Dwight carrying a sloshing shoebox to school. Luckily my imagination was nice enough to make sure the box had a lid on it.
“Diorama?” he asked. “You sure?”
“Yup. I’m positive.”
“Shoot. I guess that explains why Mrs. Esheritchia kept laughing at me last year when I turned in my project and told her it was the best diarrhea I’d ever made.” Dwight stared at the ground for another minute as we walked. “So, anyhow, you think we should make one of those?”
“Half the kids who enter are going to do that,” I said. “The other half will probably do some sort of poster.”
“What about the third half?” Dwight asked.
“That would be us,” I said. “We need to come up with something awesome. We have to completely blow away all the shoeboxes and posters.”
By the time we reached my house, Dwight had tossed out a bunch more suggestions—most of which had nothing to do with history. The couple things that might have worked would also definitely get both of us expelled if we brought them to school. Though I had to admit that the idea of making a full-size, fully working Civil War cannon was sort of cool. So was an authentic Samurai sword, even though I didn’t think there was any connection between Japanese warriors and New Cairo.
A blast of freezing cold air hit us as we went inside. Dad must have been trying to use the thermostat again. Last year, to save energy, Dad bought this fancy electronic thermostat with programmable timers that controlled the heat and air-conditioning in all the rooms in the house. But he still didn’t understand how to set it, so I never knew whether I’d be coming home to a refrigerator or an oven, or some combination of freezing and steaming rooms. The main control panel was in the hallway, right by the stairs. I switched off the air-conditioning and turned on some heat so the house would warm up quickly.
We went into the living room to watch TV and kick around ideas. My parents both worked, but Mom had left a snack for me.
“Whoa, that’s huge.” Dwight grabbed the half-gallon jar of crunchy peanut butter from the coffee table.
“Yeah. Mom’s been shopping at that new warehouse place, Big Globs. Last week, she bought a ten-pound bag of Fig Newtons.” I opened the box of crackers. It looked like there were enough to shingle a roof.
After we got settled, I started searching for something to watch. There was a science program playing high up past the channels where they show all the infomercials. A couple guys in a museum were examining mummies.
“That’s it!” Dwight shouted. “We’ll make you into a mummy.”
“That’s crazy.” I looked at the front of his shirt. “And don’t shout when your mouth is full of crackers.” It’s a good thing my folks own a really good vacuum cleaner.
Dwight brushed off the crumbs. “But that’s how the town got its name. Right?”
“Yeah, that’s true….” From what we’d learned at school, right around the time of the Civil War this guy named Joshua Stirling traveled around the southwest, charging people money to see an authentic Egyptian mummy taken from a secret tomb in Cairo. When his wagon broke down near the Skenbatch Creek, he decided to stay there.
He built a little cabin and turned it into a sort of museum where people could come and see the mummy. And for a while, people did. But there weren’t a lot of people living around there at the time, so eventually everyone had seen it. Joshua Stirling could have moved on, but he liked where he was. So he tried something different. He started grinding up bits of the mummy to sell to people as medicine.
I guess people were pretty stupid back then, because Joshua Stirling made a ton of money with his mummy powder. He started selling other cures and remedies. After a while, he ran out of mummy, but by then he had a small store that sold all kinds of medicine, some of which actually made people better, or at least didn’t make them sicker. That’s how New Cairo began. A couple other companies also started making medicine here, and then, about thirty years ago, they built a medical school and a hospital. Now the school and the hospital are among the best in the country.
Despite all of this, I didn’t think that dressing me up as a mummy was going to get us any prizes. I put down the remote. “Let’s get serious. How are we going to win this thing?”
“I know you said we can’t use cookies for our project. But what if we gave cookies to the judges?”
Dwight’s suggestion, as stupid as it was, actually gave me an idea. “We can’t bribe the judges. But we can appeal to them.”
“Peel them?” Dwight frowned. “They aren’t going to let us do that.”
“No. Appeal to them. We can make sure our project is something that they especially like. Hang on.”
I dug the flyer out of my backpack. The sponsors were listed at the bottom of the sheet: Kendra’s Chocolate Cottage, Delancy’s Butcher Shop, and Mitchell’s Sporting Goods. “Okay, so we need a project that people who are into chocolate, meat, and sports will like.” This was good. I’d bet Zeke wouldn’t think of aiming at the judges.
“We could play catch with chocolate-covered meatballs. All the judges would love that.” Dwight flashed me a grin, then he frowned and said, “Wait. Maybe it’s a bad idea.”
“I’m glad you figu
red that out all by yourself.”
“Yeah. If they’re chocolate covered, nobody would know there’s meat inside.” He scratched his head. “This could be tricky.”
“At least we know what kind of idea we need to find.”
“That’s a good start.” Dwight picked up the remote and switched channels. “Hey, look. Martians with chain saws. Cool. They have four arms.”
“Whoa,” I said as the scene got violent. “Make that three arms.”
“This is great. I can’t believe your parents don’t block this channel.”
“They don’t know how.” Like with the thermostat, my parents were clueless about technology. If they ever figured out how to use any of the electronics in our house, my life wouldn’t be anywhere near as nice.
At least the room was finally comfortable. I went back to the control panel and switched off the heat so it wouldn’t get too hot. My folks had also spent big bucks getting new windows and extra insulation for the house last year. We sat back and watched the rest of the movie. By the time it ended, Dwight had to go home.
“We’ll figure the rest out next week,” I said. There was no way I was doing any extra thinking on the weekend. “At least we know what we’re doing.”
“We’re going to win for sure,” Dwight said.
I met up with him outside of school on Monday morning. Before we could talk about our project, Zeke strutted up to us and said, “You guys might as well quit right now. My project is going to be unbeatable.”
“Doesn’t matter what you do,” Dwight said. “You’re going to lose, because we—”
“Have a better one,” I said, before Dwight could say something stupid like We’re going to appeal to the judges. I didn’t want anyone to steal our plan.
“Yeah, right,” Zeke said. “And I’m going to grow wings and fly around the school. Forget it. You’re going to lose.”
“Wanna bet?” Dwight said.
“How much?” Zeke asked.
Dwight turned toward me. “I have twenty dollars left from my birthday.”
“I can match that,” I said. It would wipe out my savings if I lost, but we had a great plan, and it would be wonderful to make Zeke a double loser.
