Welcome to Wonderland #4

by Chris Grabenstein

  “I’ll definitely be coming back,” said Mr. Cerone as Mom handed him his receipt.

  If he was our mystery shopper, we were golden.

  Ms. Matchy-Matchy and her son came to the lobby about ten minutes later.

  “I hope you enjoyed your time at the Wonderland,” said Mom as the printer churned out another receipt.

  “We certainly did!” gushed Ms. Matchy-Matchy.

  “I wish we could stay longer!” said her son. “That pirate show was awesome! And the pillows in the Mermaid Room sparkle like seashells.”

  Ms. Matchy-Matchy smiled. “I found the bubbler in the aquarium to be quite soothing. Almost hypnotic. I slept like a baby.”

  “I’ll tell my father,” said Mom. “The bubbles were his idea.”

  “We have a few other places in St. Pete Beach we need to check out,” said Ms. Matchy-Matchy, sounding more and more like a mystery shopper. “But we’ll definitely be coming back.”

  She and her son left.

  I leapt up and did a happy dance.

  “We are so going to win this thing!” I said as I boogied in place with shoulder shrugs, arm rolls, and hip sways.

  That was when Mr. Ortega walked into the lobby.

  “Smooth moves, P.T.,” he said. “Reminds me of the Ickey Shuffle, an end-zone dance made popular in the late eighties by Cincinnati Bengals fullback Elbert ‘Ickey’ Woods.”

  “You guys did a fantastic job,” said Mom. “We might actually have a shot at winning this thing. Your grandfather will be so happy, P.T.”

  That made me blush a little, so Mom turned the spotlight back to Mr. Ortega.

  “How’s your audition for ESPN going, Manny?”

  “Still playing catch-up with Biff Billington and the Phillie Phanatic. But I’m sending out feelers, trying to land a one-on-one interview with Johnny Zeng. I hope his parents say yes. Right now, I’m on the dance floor but a long way from the band.”

  “Huh?” said Gloria.

  “I’m working on my golf clichés,” her dad explained. “That one means I’m on the green but far from the stick.”

  “What’s the stick?” I asked.

  “That flag thingy they put in the hole.”

  “Oh. Cool.”

  “Wish me luck, all. And remember—you chip for show, you putt for dough!” He gave us a two-finger salute off the edge of his eyebrow. “Be the ball!”

  Be the ball? Why would anybody want to do that? When you’re a golf ball, people whack you with fourteen different kinds of clubs.

  We all smiled and nodded even though we were totally confused. We were new to golf lingo, too.

  Gloria and I headed out of the office.

  And bumped into Mr. Frumpkes.

  He was carrying a shrink-wrapped stack of shiny brochures for Captain Sharktooth’s Pirate Cruise.

  “Put these in your lobby,” he barked, the same way he orders me to keep my eyes on my reading material when I get bored in history class and start looking around, wondering what if George Washington’s army had had just one fighter jet. Or a tank. What if? is where a lot of good stories get started. Daydreams, too.

  “Um, we’re competing against your pirate cruise, remember?” said Gloria.

  “So? I’m your teacher. I know what’s best.”

  “Then why are you wearing that shirt?” I cracked.

  “Because the fabric is very breathable. It also wicks away my moisture. I have very active sweat glands.”

  Whoa. TMI.

  I took the stack of brochures from Mr. Frumpkes, mostly because it’s what merchants do up and down St. Pete Beach. We help each other out—even if we’re competing for the same prize. Also because I didn’t want to hear any more about Mr. Frumpkes’s overactive sweat glands.

  Gloria and I traipsed back into the lobby and put the pirate cruise pamphlets in the brochure rack. Mr. Frumpkes watched us through the floor-to-ceiling windows. He tapped on the glass when he thought we weren’t giving him a primo slot.

  So we swapped the Captain Sharktooth’s Pirate Cruise leaflets with the ones for the Sea Horse BBQ Grill in the top row. Mr. Frumpkes gave us a semi-satisfied “that’s better” harrumph and moved up the block.

  “The coast is clear,” I said when I couldn’t see him anymore.

  Gloria and I went outside.

  And this time, we bumped into Dill.

  “Hi, guys,” he said, waving at us eagerly, even though we were only two feet away. “What are we gonna do today?”

  “We’re not sure,” I said. “But, I was thinking, maybe we should go scout out the Seawinds Resort. See what else they’ve got that we don’t.”

  “A jet pack,” said Dill.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A jet pack! It’s amazing. You put on a helmet, blast off, and fly over the ocean.”

  Okay. This we had to see.

  And then we had to see if we could somehow copy it.

  Dill led the way when we reached the resort, which was only about ten blocks down Gulf Boulevard from the Wonderland.

  The place was huge, with all sorts of things to do.

  “But the BlastOff is the best!” said Dill. “You’re like a jet pilot without a jet, just the engine!”

  We hurried down a winding path, through all sorts of tropical landscaping, to the beach and what the brochures called the “coolest, most exhilarating water sports ride of your life—guaranteed to take your beach vacation to new heights.”

  It was incredible.

  We watched a guy and girl ready to blast off.

  They were waist-deep in the water, wearing helmets, life vests, and jet packs. Each backpack was hooked up to a thirty-foot-long fire hose connected to a floating water pump.

  “Blast off!” shouted the ride operator.

  Foamy white water shot out of two nozzles on each jet pack, rocketing the guy and girl twenty feet up to the sky. It was amazing.

  I had to try it.

  Fortunately, I was tall enough to ride this ride.

  Gloria paid for my ticket; Grandpa had given her a credit card linked to her portfolio. That was a good thing. Because one jet-pack ticket cost—hang on to your swimsuit—ninety-nine dollars!

  “It’s a jet pack,” said the guy in a Seawinds polo shirt who swiped her credit card. “Jet packs are expensive. We have to import them from the future.”

  “It’s also a legitimate business expense,” said Gloria. “Research.”

  “I want to ride, too,” said Dill. “I brought my own money.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I’m tall enough. I wanna do it. Please?”

  Dill was giving me his sad puppy dog eyes.

  Who can resist the sad puppy dog eyes?

  The guy running the ride noted the wad of cash in Dill’s hand and cut him some slack, pretending not to see him going up on tippy-toes to meet the minimum height requirement.

  “You two flying together?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’m just watching,” said Gloria.

  “Costs ten dollars to watch,” said the guy.

  Gloria rolled her eyes and slapped a Hamilton into his gimme-gimme hand.

  Dill and I strapped on our helmets, life vests, and harnesses. The ride operator gave us, like, a five-minute training talk.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” were his closing remarks.

  And then it was time to blast off.

  He fired up the two supercharged water pumps. Water shot up the six-inch-wide fire hoses and sprayed out the one-inch-wide nozzles. You don’t need to be a physics genius to figure out what kind of pressure that’s going to create. White clouds, as thick as booster-rocket fumes, zoomed down and smacked the water we were wading in. For every action, there is an equal and o
pposite reaction. We lifted off! I was actually flying, just like I said I had in all those kitesurfing stories.

  I was ten, twenty, thirty feet up. The brochure was correct. My beach experience had definitely reached new heights.

  Unfortunately, Dill’s liftoff wasn’t quite as smooth.

  Have you ever seen a garden hose go wild, whipping around on the ground, when you accidentally dropped it?

  That’s kind of what happened to Dill.

  He was too tiny. He was off-balance. He was panicking.

  And I couldn’t blame him.

  He skittered along, slapped the crest of the waves, and bounced around on his belly like a flat rock you skim across a lake.

  “Hey, kid!” the ride operator shouted at Dill. “You break it, you buy it!”

  “I-I-I c-c-can’t c-c-control this c-c-crazy thing!”

  shrieked Dill.

  “Hang on!” I shouted. “I’m coming.”

  I eased up on my throttle, dipped down, swerved behind Dill, and grabbed him under the arms.

  That meant I had let go of my control handles.

  Now I was the out-of-control garden hose.

  We both went spinning. Sideways.

  We totally wiped out.

  Good thing we were flying over the Gulf of Mexico.

  When you crash on water, it doesn’t hurt as much as it would on land. But it really, really stings.

  “You okay?” I asked Dill when we both bobbed to the surface and spit out some seaweed we’d recently swallowed.

  “Yes. I think so. But, P.T.?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can we go back to the Wonderland and play pirates? It didn’t hurt so much.”

  “Good idea.”

  Monday, Gloria and I went back to school and the stock market reopened.

  I mention that last bit because Gloria checked some stock-tracker app on her phone during lunch and shouted, “Woo-hoo!”

  It was her turn to do a happy dance.

  Apparently, that edible-eraser company’s stock had just split. That didn’t mean it had broken in half or gotten up and walked away. It meant that every single share of stock Gloria and Grandpa held in the company had, magically, become two shares of stock—and the price per share was skyrocketing! We could afford all of Grandpa’s wacky ideas. We could afford a second swimming pool.

  “The stock split coupled with the jump in share price over the past week means we’ve quadrupled our investment,” Gloria explained. “Your grandfather can afford his third and fourth theme rooms.”

  “Does he have ideas for the new rooms?”

  Gloria nodded. “The Bat Cave.”

  “Cool.”

  “And the Bologna on White Bread Room.”

  “Huh?”

  “The bed is shaped like a sandwich. The blankets are pink and spongy. The pillows are pickles.”

  “What about the mustard and American cheese?”

  “Yellow and orange sheets.”

  For the first time in forever, we had all the money we needed to do just about anything we wanted to do.

  Now all we needed was a winning idea. Pickle pillows were cool, but they weren’t technically family activities—unless you and your kids used them for a pillow fight.

  After school, Gloria ran up to her room, because she wanted to check the day’s “volatility and volume” and see if she could do any “bottom-fishing before the closing bell.”

  I still had no idea what she was talking about.

  I drifted down to the beach to think.

  We’d done well with the mystery shoppers. But the panel of judges, accounting for 60 percent of our Florida Fun in the Sun score, would arrive next Tuesday.

  What could I do, in just seven days, to create an attraction so amazing it would guarantee Grandpa the prize he’d been chasing for over two decades?

  I didn’t have a clue.

  Until the answer hit me.

  Seriously. It hit me in the side of the head.

  Some people on the beach were playing Frisbee. The wind knocked their disc off course, and it whacked me, right above the ear.

  When I was done saying “ouch” and rubbing my ear, I remembered something another bud at school, Kip Rand, had told me a few months earlier.

  “Frolf.”

  Of course. Frolf was the answer!

  Frolf is a quicker way of saying “Frisbee golf.”

  Or what is known in professional circles (yes, there are professional Frolfers) as disc golf. You aim your disc at a target—usually a pole with loops of dangling chains—and try to park that disc in the basket below.

  Way back before Spring Break, Kip Rand had told me, “You guys could lay out an insane Frolf course on your property!”

  He was right!

  We could use all of Grandpa’s wacky statues for holes. Dino the Dinosaur. Morty D. Mouse with his humongous cheese wedge. The rocket ship. Even Ponce de León, the Muffler Man.

  That night, over dinner at the Banana Shack, I told everybody my idea.

  “I love it!” said Grandpa.

  “It sounds like fun,” added Mom.

  “We could definitely monetize it,” said Gloria.

  We all stared at her.

  “That means we could make money doing it,” she explained.

  “Ohhhh,” we all said together.

  “We should do a Surf Monkey hole,” I said.

  Gloria agreed. “That’ll help us boost sales of movie souvenir merch.”

  “And we could put a sand castle hole, with the world’s toughest sand trap, down on the beach,” I said.

  “You kids could do that Fountain of Tall gag with your friend at the Ponce de León statue,” said Mom, getting in on the action.

  “Brilliant, Wanda!” said Mr. Ortega. “Your brain is as beautiful as your, uh, the rest of you!”

  “Why, thank you, Manny,” said Mom.

  I was jotting down everybody’s ideas on the back of a Wonderland postcard.

  “This is great, you guys. Now we just have to build it!”

  “And I need to build my bologna sandwich room!” added Grandpa.

  “We only have seven days to build it all,” said Gloria. “The judges will be here a week from tomorrow.”

  “So hey, hey, Tampa Bay,” said Mr. Ortega, giving us his TV catchphrase, “it’s time to get to it!”

  We worked on our Frolf course every chance we had for the rest of the week and into the weekend.

  Grandpa and his contractor finished four more theme rooms in record time.

  Monday we started our vacation from school and opened the Frolf course to our guests.

  They loved it!

  Especially the zip line we rigged down to the eighteenth hole on the beach. It was like riding a golf cart to chase after your first shot, only way more fun.

  Tuesday afternoon, right on schedule, the panel of judges from Florida Fun in the Sun magazine showed up. Ms. Matchy-Matchy, the woman who’d stayed with her son in the Mermaid Room, was one of the judges.

  Woo-hoo!

  We’d guessed correctly! She had to be our mystery shopper.

  “Good to see you again,” I said.

  “Is this new?” she asked, looking at all the happy Frolfers flinging discs and rattling chains on hole poles.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Here at the Wonderland, we’re always adding fun new activities. Enjoy!”

  Gloria and I teed off in a Frolf foursome with Dill and Ms. Matchy-Matchy’s son, whose name, we learned, was Geoffrey.

  Dill was surprisingly good at Frolf. On the jackalope hole, he ricocheted his disc off our outdoor soda machine to avoid the palm tree blocking his straight-line shot.

  “Woo-hoo!” Dill hollered when he pinged another
hole in one.

  His grin was wider than the jackalope’s.

  But Geoffrey, the judge’s son?

  He wasn’t smiling so much.

  Geoffrey was also extremely excellent at disc golf.

  In fact, after sixteen holes, he and Dill were tied.

  “I got lucky,” said Dill, penciling in another “1” on the scorecard for the jackalope hole.

  “Maybe I’ll get lucky, too,” said Geoffrey.

  He took his shot—copying the one Dill had just made.

  “Nailed it!” he shouted.

  “Way to go!” said Dill, who was a superb sport.

  “Did you put down my hole in one on the scorecard?” demanded Geoffrey.

  “Of course.”

  “Let me see.”

  Dill showed him the card.

  While Geoffrey made certain that Dill had properly recorded his hole in one, Gloria looked at me. I could read her eyes: she did not like the judge’s bratty little son.

  Neither did I. But I knew we had to let Geoffrey win. If he did, he’d tell his mother what a wonderful, fun-in-the-sun time he’d just had.

  If he didn’t, he’d whine to Mommy and we’d probably be eliminated from the competition in the first round.

  We moved on to the eighteenth hole—the sand castle down on the beach. The tee box was near the clothes-drying pole anchoring the zip line ride.

  “You guys go ahead,” I said to Gloria and Geoffrey. “I want to show Dill something.”

  “What?” asked Gloria.

  I gestured toward the pool. “The, uh, dolphin fountain.”

  “Oh, I’ve already seen it,” said Dill.

  “But I want to show you something special.”

  Gloria narrowed her eyes. She seemed to know what I was about to do.

  “Show Geoffrey how to use the zip line,” I told her.

  Gloria did.