Dodger and Me

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  I love doughnut holes. He held out the bag to me and said, “Want some? Go ahead. Just reach in and wish for doughnut holes.”

  Trying hard not to think of all the fur that was probably stuck to the inner walls of the bag, I reached in and felt around. The bag was empty. “Ha-ha, very funny,” I said. “You know, I don’t go around tricking you.”

  Dodger’s eyes widened. “What are you talking about, dude? Give me that bag!” I did, and he shoved his hand in again. It came out holding a chocolate-covered banana. He winked at me and ate the entire thing in two huge gulps. Well, he didn’t exactly eat the whole thing; about half of the chocolate ended up smeared on his face. “The food is there for you, buddy,” he said. “You’ve just gotta want it.”

  I grabbed the bag back from him and reached in again. It was empty! I said, “I wish this stupid bag was full of chocolate doughnut holes!” I felt the bag expand in my hand, peeked in, and saw a nice pile of steaming-fresh doughnut holes. Now this was more like it! Dodger watched with amusement as I shoved about nine of those babies in my mouth at once. I nearly choked, but they were so good, I just couldn’t stop myself. These were the best doughnut holes I had ever tasted! They were perfect! I could eat them forever and not get tired of them.

  I grabbed handful after handful, popping them in my mouth at top speed. For about a minute, I was totally satisfied. Then I started thinking, Wouldn’t the doughnut holes be better with milk? I wish there were some milk in the bag. With a strange slurping noise, the bag started getting heavier and heavier. I looked in and saw that the doughnut holes were now floating in a rapidly rising sea of milk. Oh, man—that wish hadn’t quite come out right. I looked over at Dodger, who was smirking at me.

  “What do I do now? The milk is going to overflow!”

  Dodger said, “What milk?”

  I said, “Well, the doughnut holes got kind of dry after a while, so I wished for some milk.”

  Dodger started cleaning his nails with one of my homework pens. I didn’t have time to think about how gross that was, though, because the milk was starting to spill over the edge of the bag onto the hardwood floor. It was clear that Dodger wasn’t about to jump to my rescue, so this was up to me. I said, “I wish the bag were bigger!”

  The bag seemed to swell in my hands, and for a moment, the milk stopped spilling over the top. Then it overflowed again. I said, “I wish the bag were sealed at the top!” Instantly the bag had a domed top. The milk was contained! But the bag kept getting heavier and heavier. I could barely even hold it. And the milk was still expanding inside.

  I looked at Dodger and said, “Do something!”

  He said, “I did. I gave you my awesome doughnut bag.”

  “But—” I said. “But—it’s going to explode!”

  “You wanted to make wishes, dude. Maybe you should start wishing for a raincoat.”

  “A raincoat?” I asked shakily. The bag was getting so heavy that I could barely speak.

  “Yeah,” he said, “for when it—”

  He didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence because just then, the bag popped. I shook my head to get the gooky mixture of milk and chocolate doughnut bits out of my eyes, and looked around in horror. Every surface of the entire room was coated in milk, chocolate, and shreds of paper.

  “My room!” I shouted.

  “Dude, my doughnut bag!” Dodger replied.

  We glared at each other. Then I thought of something: My mom would be home by five. I looked at my wall clock, but couldn’t see the hands through the mess. I wiped the face with my sleeve and saw that it was 4:30. I only had half an hour!

  “Bet you wish you could get this cleaned up in thirty minutes, huh?” Dodger said.

  Oh, jeepers! “Yes, I wish I could get this cleaned up in thirty minutes!”

  Dodger winked at me and loped out of the room, heading down the hall toward our bathroom. He was gone for maybe a minute, while I debated running away from home before my mom saw the mess I had made because of Dodger. Then he came back balancing a bucket, a mop, and my mom’s big box of cleaning supplies. He handed me the mop and said, “Your wish just came true, buddy. You can get this cleaned up in thirty minutes.”

  “But that’s not what I meant! I meant, like, you should make the mess go POOF!”

  Dodger settled himself back on my bed, which had miraculously been missed by all of the flying goop. As he began picking his toes, he sighed contentedly Then he said, “Dude, I’m tired. Wishes are never as fun as you think they’re gonna be!”

  I pulled on my mom’s hot-pink rubber gloves, and Dodger started humming to himself. The tune sounded a lot like “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Of Fish and Fire

  WHEN MY MOM GOT HOME that night, I had cleaned up every square inch of my room. The walls were shiny, the floor was sparkling, and every flat surface was dust-free. The place had a strange odor of chocolate, milk, and lemony freshness, but thankfully, Mom just focused on the cleanliness. She took one look around, sniffed the air, and said, “Good job cleaning your room, William. Is your homework all done? If it is, I might even consider ungrounding you for your baseball game this weekend. Do you think you can avoid destroying anything until then?”

  I nodded. Meanwhile, behind her, Dodger was picking little specks of chocolate out of his chest fur and eating them. He looked up at me and winked, then snapped his fingers and disappeared. I had a feeling that avoiding destruction would be harder than she thought.

  In the morning, Mom told me that she had a meeting after school, so I should stay at the school after-care room until she picked me up at 5:30. But at lunch, Lizzie told me that I had to sneak out before after-care and go home right at three. She wouldn’t tell me why. I explained the grounding situation yet AGAIN, and even told her that if I got busted for anything before Saturday, my mom wouldn’t let me play my last ball game. I had to play that game. The whole team would think I was a total chicken-weasel if I missed it.

  Plus, I never sneak out of anything. I’m not a “breaks the rules” kind of kid—I’m a “terrified of breaking Mom’s rules” kind of kid. I guess I just take after my dad.

  But Lizzie didn’t back down. She insisted that she had a plan for getting me more freedom for years to come. I said that she should just go ahead and work on her plan alone if it was so important. Then she replied with the scariest eleven words in the English language: “I won’t be alone. I’ll be with Dodger—in your house!”

  So that’s why I was pacing back and forth in the front hallway of my house at ten after three, peeking through the curtains every few seconds for signs of my insane new buddies. I felt like a criminal, and I was about ninety-five percent sure I was going to get busted, big-time. I was also really thirsty after sprinting the ten blocks from school to my house, so I tore myself away from the windows for a moment to get a drink of water from the kitchen. That’s when the doorbell rang.

  When I opened the door, I could have screamed. Standing there with loaded shopping bags in their hands were Dodger and Lizzie. They stepped inside, smiling dementedly at me. I slammed the door behind them as quickly as possible.

  “Uh, guys? What in the world are you doing here? What’s this plan of yours? I am so dead. If my mom and dad go to pick me up at after-care and I’m not there, I’m dead.”

  “Chill. You’ll be back at the after-care room in plenty of time for your mom. Trust me!”

  “And if my mom and dad come home and find Lizzie, I’m dead. I’m supposed to be grounded.”

  “Right,” Dodger said. “That’s why we’re not taking you anywhere except back to the school. Duh!”

  “But ‘grounded’ also means ‘no friends over.’”

  “Nah, that’s ‘unfriended.’ It’s much more serious than ‘grounded.’ And you’re not in nearly enough trouble to be unfriended. Believe me.”

  While Dodger did his usual alarming job of trying to be logical, Lizzie stomped into the kitchen and dropped
her bags on the counter. I gave up on arguing with Dodger and followed her. She started unpacking. First she pulled out a bunch of bananas and placed it on the counter-top. Then she placed a paper-wrapped bundle that said SEAFOOD next to the bananas. Reaching back into the bag, she removed another bunch of bananas, followed by a six-pack of banana yogurt shakes, a clove of garlic, an onion, a box of banana wafer cookies, a bag of tossed salad, several jars of banana baby food, two boxes of spaghetti, a can of crushed tomatoes, more bananas, a little plastic container of Italian herb mix, a copy of National Geographic, and a five-pound bag of sugar.

  Dodger put his bags next to Lizzie’s and piled up several more banana products on the counter. Then he panicked, dashed all around the room, poked his head into each of his now-empty bags, and reached into Lizzie’s bag, which was still on the counter. With a look of relief, he gently pulled out a bunch of grapes and popped a grape in his mouth. “Wow, I thought we had left these back at the market!” he said.

  “Dodger, what are you doing with all these groceries?” I asked.

  “Unpacking.”

  “I know that. I mean, why are you unpacking them all over our kitchen?”

  “Dude, the kitchen is where groceries go.”

  “No, I mean …” I stopped for a second and rubbed my eyes. I could feel a headache coming on. “What are we supposed to do with the groceries?”

  Dodger beamed at me. “Tonight,” he exclaimed, “you conquer fire!”

  Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. “Con … conquer … fire?” I stuttered.

  Lizzie interjected. “Yes, Willie. Dodger explained all of your problems while we were at the store—how you’re a total failure at baseball, how your mum won’t trust you to do anything without injuring yourself, and how you were too shy to be friends with me. So we’re fixing the mum part by making a delicious dinner for your family. We’re conquering fire by cooking, get it? When your mum sees how excellent you are at handling the responsibility of cooking a meal for your family, I’m quite sure she will unground you. And then we can work more on doing baseball. We still have two more days to practice before your last game!”

  She started showing me various items on the counter and explaining how we could use them to make our meal. Apparently, if we chopped up the onion and garlic, fried them up in oil for a few minutes, and then dumped in the can of crushed tomatoes and some of the Italian herb mix, we’d get spaghetti sauce. If we boiled a pot of water and threw in the spaghetti, we’d get cooked spaghetti. If we dumped the bag of salad into a big bowl, we’d have—well—a salad. And the seafood was to make—

  “Hey, Lizzie,” I asked. “What’s the seafood for, again?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “And how about the banana stuff?”

  Dodger said, “What, doesn’t the chimp deserve a little treat now and then? Oh, sure, the people get the fish, the salad, the spaghetti. And the chimp is just supposed to sit there and suffer? Sheesh.”

  “Oh,” I said. My headache was coming on a lot faster now. “Sorry, Dodger. I know how much you like bananas. And the grapes?”

  “They’re for variety. What am I supposed to do, eat nothing but bananas?”

  “And, um, the National Geographic?”

  “Well, I like the pictures. Besides, I know some of the models. My uncle Joe was on the cover once.”

  All right, then. It was time to cook. If we were going to burn down my house, we might as well get started. Otherwise, my family might get home before we were finished with the job. Lizzie and I started rummaging around the kitchen for cooking utensils. Dodger reclined on the floor, put both feet up on my seat at the table, and fed himself grapes.

  Within minutes, we had a bizarre assortment of plates, pots, pans, cutting boards, and assorted gadgets spread across every available surface. I was totally clueless about this stuff, mostly because my mom generally didn’t let me handle anything sharper than a spoon. But Lizzie seemed to know what she was doing, and soon she was chopping vegetables, barking orders at me, making Dodger fill pots with water, and yelling at both of us just because Dodger was shedding his fur all over the side dishes.

  I had never realized how hectic cooking could be.

  After twenty minutes or so, the kitchen started to smell good. The salad was in a fancy bowl, all ready to go. The onions and garlic were slowly cooking in a pot, while the spaghetti water heated on the next burner. “And now,” pronounced Lizzie, “it is time for the main course!” She held up the bundle of seafood.

  “Okay, now will you tell me what’s in there?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s salmon. I got it to make your mum’s favorite dish.”

  This was puzzling. I had been living with my mom for more than ten years, and she had never eaten salmon in my presence. Lizzie continued, “See, your mum and my mum were chatting at our kitchen table one day when they were working on this PTA report, and your mum was telling mine about her favorite food: sweetish fish. I don’t think we have that in England. I asked the man at the store for the sweetest fish they had, and he said they didn’t have sweet fish, but that this one kind would taste good with a sweet sauce. So here we are.” She grinned. “Oh, your mum will be so delighted!”

  Sweetish fish? Sweetish fish? My mom’s favorite food was—OH, JEEPERS! “Lizzie, Dodger, I hate to break this to you, but my mom’s favorite food isn’t fish at all. It’s candy!”

  Lizzie looked disgusted. “Fish-flavored candy? What kind of crazy treat is fish-flavored candy? No offense, but holy mackerel—that is really gross!”

  “No, you still don’t get it. Her favorite food is Swedish fish. S-W-E-D-I-S-H fish. They’re these red, sort of transparent goo candies.”

  “Oh, they’re goo candies,” Dodger chimed in. “That sounds much better!”

  “Listen, Dodger, it doesn’t matter whether you think Swedish fish sounds like a delightful snack. What matters is that now we have this stinky salmon and a bag of sugar. How are we supposed to turn salmon and sugar into a main course?”

  While Dodger and I continued to argue, Lizzie marched over to the counter, ripped the wrapping off the fish, and slapped the filets onto a cookie sheet. Then she stabbed a hole in the top of the sugar bag with a knife and poured the sugar all over each piece of fish. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Sugar tastes good, right? And the fish man said salmon would taste good with a sweet sauce. So this should be fine. It will be our invention. We can call it Sweet Salmon Surprise! What do you think, Willie?”

  I thought it would definitely be a surprise. I just didn’t realize quite how big the surprise would be. Lizzie put the salmon in the oven and told me and Dodger to set the table. We went into the dining room, turned on the lights, and started going back and forth to the kitchen with spoons, forks, napkins, and knives. Then Dodger shouted, “Dude! Heads up!” and started tossing the little wooden salad bowls to me one by one. Apparently, he felt that we could practice my baseball skills while we worked. Needless to say, I didn’t think this was a great plan.

  “Wait,” I said. “I’m not ready!”

  “Oh, come on, bud,” he replied, flipping another bowl in my direction. “Setting the table is boring. Let’s have some fun!”

  As I caught the second bowl, I said, “I’m serious, Dodger. We’re going to break something!”

  He just giggled and kept the bowls flying. Actually, I didn’t do too badly with them—I only dropped one of the four we’d need for my family. I made sure that the bowl hadn’t cracked on impact with the floor and breathed a little sigh of relief. But the sigh turned into a gasp when I realized that Dodger wasn’t stopping with the bowls. By the time I could say anything, one of my mom’s best china dinner plates was hurtling toward me like the world’s most expensive Frisbee. I gasped, “No, not the china!”

  Dodger giggled some more. I managed to catch the plate—barely—and just got it onto the table in time to whip back around and try to grab the next one.

  The key word there was try. The plate flew right bet
ween my outstretched palms and shattered all over the floor beneath my father’s chair. Dodger shrugged as he ambled over to me. “Oops, my bad,” he said. “But hey, it’s no big deal. They probably won’t be throwing plates your way at the big game.”

  As I knelt and started picking up the largest fragments of the broken plate, I shouted at him, “Gee, you’re probably right, Mr. Banana-Munching Super-Genius. Thanks for making that excellent point!”

  Even though he was completely wrong in this situation, Dodger yelled right back at me, “Oh, sure, make with the chimp jokes. Dude, I build you your own personal stadium, recruit Lizzie to be your friend, and take her food shopping WITH MY OWN MONEY so we can get YOUR mom to stop treating you like a five-year-old. We’re having a great time, making some quality food, and now you get all personal just because YOU drop one measly—”

  “You’re blaming me for dropping the plate? How do you know it’s my fault? Did it ever occur to you that maybe it might be hard to catch something that’s hurled at you BY A CHIMP WITH AN EYE PATCH?”

  “You ungrateful—”

  “You crazy—”

  We were both stopped in the middle of our insults when Lizzie stepped through the doorway and said, “Uh, guys?” I turned to her and put my hands to my head. Behind her, a thick cloud of black smoke was rolling right at us. She said, “I don’t know what happened. I put the salmon in and turned the oven to five hundred degrees so it would cook nice and fast, and now—”

  Dodger and I both ran past Lizzie into the kitchen. The room was filling up quickly with smoke. It also smelled horrible, like some unholy mix of fish guts and cotton candy. Apparently, Sweet Salmon Surprise and high heat was a bad combination. I opened the oven door, which released even more smoke. Then Dodger shoved some oven mitts on his hands, reached in, and grabbed the cookie sheet that had the flaming fish on it. He staggered over to the sink and flooded the whole thing with water. Steam mixed with the smoke, and Dodger stepped back. The fire was out, which was a good thing. However, the whole house was filled with terrible, oily fishsmoke, which was not so good. I looked at the clock. It was 5:07—also not so good. How was I going to salvage the dinner, get the house cleaned up, and somehow sneak back to the school in time to get picked up in only twenty-three minutes?