The World's Greatest Underachiever and the Killer Chilli

by Henry Winkler

  For Debra Dorfman – for your positive,

  supportive guidance and leadership, and oh …

  for saying yes. And always, always to my Stacey

  – H.W.

  For Cole Baker – my favourite cooking companion

  and cherished third son, with love – L.O.

  “Itchy knee,” Ms Adolf said, staring at me like I knew what on earth she was talking about.

  Ms Adolf stood there next to my desk, tapping her foot impatiently. Squinty grey eyes peeped out from behind her grey glasses. I could tell she wanted me to say something, but my mind was totally blank.

  “What comes next, Henry?” she asked.

  What do you say after itchy knee? Rashy ankle? Scratchy elbow?

  I wasn’t in the mood for riddles. My head was still spinning from the maths test I had just taken.

  We had just finished our Unit Four maths test on fractions, and I don’t mind telling you, it was the most confusing test I’ve ever taken. To begin with, maths isn’t my idea of fun. And tests, unit or otherwise, definitely don’t make it on to my top ten list of “Things to Look Forward to on a Monday Morning.” I guess if I was like our class genius, Heather Payne, who has never got anything lower than an A on any test, I might have a different opinion of tests. But when your highest grade ever on a maths test is a D-plus – well, that kind of sucks any possible fun right out of the picture.

  And fractions – who invented them, anyway? Probably the same guy who invented decimal points. I don’t get the point of either fractions or decimal points.

  I don’t get the point of decimal points. Hey, that’s not bad. Way to make yourself laugh, Hank Zipzer!

  I must have spaced out for a second, enjoying my little joke, because suddenly I heard Ms Adolf speaking to me.

  “Henry,” she barked. “Did you hear me? I said itchy knee. Do you know what comes after that?”

  I looked down at my knee. Now that she had brought it up, I noticed that it was itching a bit. But how could Ms Adolf possibly know that? Oh no! Maybe she had invented a secret itch-detector device and tucked it in the waistband of her grey skirt. Maybe at this very minute she was scanning everyone in the class for mosquito bites or patches of itchy dry skin. Wow, that thought gave me the creeps. If there’s one thing you don’t want, it’s your fourth-grade teacher secretly detecting your private skin conditions.

  Ms Adolf was still staring at me. Not so much staring as glaring, burning two holes into my forehead. She wasn’t going to back down on this knee thing until I answered.

  “Actually, I do kind of have an itchy knee,” I finally said. “On a scale of one to ten, with one being ‘no itch’ and ten being ‘it itches so bad that you have to scratch for an hour’, I’d say it itches three.”

  Everyone in the class burst out laughing.

  “I can’t believe you, Zipper Zit!” Nick McKelty howled from the row behind me, blasting out a stream of his rotten-egg breath. “You are as dumb as a…”

  I guess he couldn’t come up with the end of that thought, because he suddenly stopped laughing and looked around the classroom in a panic. His eyes fell on a noticeboard with a poster of a grey whale. I could almost see his big, slow brain latching on to that poster.

  “You’re as dumb as a whale,” McKelty said, looking really proud that he had finished his thought.

  “That shows how much you know, McKelty,” my best friend Frankie Townsend shot back at him. “Whales are extremely intelligent life-forms.”

  “Unlike you, Nick,” my other best friend Ashley Wong chimed in.

  Ashley and Frankie live in the same block of flats as me and we hang out together all the time. We’ve been best friends since preschool. Trust me, no one can say something mean to one of us without hearing from the other two.

  Ms Adolf clapped her hands three times, which she does when we’re talking out of turn without raising our hands. If you talk after that, you get sent to the head teacher’s office for one of his boring lectures about how great it is to have self-control, because without it, you’d spin into outer space. No one wanted to visit Mr Love, so we all shut up fast.

  “I wasn’t saying itchy knee, Henry,” Ms Adolf said, turning back to me. “I was saying ee-chee, nee. I was counting in Japanese. Ee-chee is ‘one’ and nee is ‘two’.”

  Why didn’t she just say that at the beginning? How was I supposed to know she was spewing Japanese? Do I look like I live in Tokyo?

  “Does anyone know what comes after ee-chee, nee?” she asked.

  “Why don’t you ask Ashley Wong?” McKelty hollered out. “I bet she speaks Japanese.”

  Ashley pushed her glasses up on her nose and started twirling her ponytail, like she does when she’s mad. “For your information, I’m not Japanese,” she said. “My parents are from China. And here’s some breaking news for you, McKelty. Japan and China are two entirely different countries.”

  “No reason to get so steamed up about it,” McKelty muttered.

  I thought Ashley was going to wind up and smash her fist into McKelty’s arm, but Ms Adolf clapped her hands three times again.

  “Pupils,” she said. “This is a very good introduction to our topic. This week we are celebrating Multi-Cultural Day. Everyone in the school is going to be learning about people in other countries. Our class is going to be cooking foods from around the world for the special lunch.”

  Katie Sperling raised her hand and shook it like she had to go to the bathroom.

  “Yes, Katie,” Ms Adolf said.

  “I hear people in France eat snails,” said Katie.

  “That’s so gross,” groaned Kim Paulson.

  “I’ve eaten a snail,” piped up Luke Whitman, whose nickname in our class is Captain Disgusto. “I liked the slimy part, but I spat out the antennae.”

  “Eeuuuwww!” Katie and Kim both moaned at once. “There should be a law against Luke.”

  You’ve got to hand it to Luke, though. He’s the only kid I know who would tell the two prettiest girls in the fourth grade that he spits out snail antennae.

  Ms Adolf just ignored him, like she usually does.

  “To celebrate Multi-Cultural Day, we have a special treat in store for us,” she went on. I think she actually smiled a little bit, showing a few of her upper teeth. They were the only thing about her that wasn’t grey, but they were on the way to being yellow. “Our class is to have a visitor from Japan. He’s in the fourth grade, and his name is Yoshi Morimoto.”

  A visitor. That sounded interesting. At least, it sounded much more interesting than the stuff Ms Adolf usually talks about, like spelling and fractions and note-taking skills.

  “Yoshi’s father, Mr Morimoto, is the head teacher of our sister school in Tokyo,” Ms Adolf explained.

  I wasn’t sure what a sister school was, but I sure hoped it wasn’t anything like my sister, Emily. She sleeps with her eyes open and flosses her teeth at the dinner table. I wondered if anything that gross went on at our sister school in Tokyo.

  “Mr Morimoto is touring schools in the United States,” Ms Adolf went on. “He’s bringing his son, and they’re coming to spend two days with us at PS 87.”

  “Can I introduce him to my tarantula – Mel?” Luke Whitman asked.

  “Absolutely most certainly not!” Ms Adolf answered.

  I could see Frankie trying not to laugh. I knew that he was remembering the exact same thing I was. Once, Luke had brought Mel to class for Pet Day. Mel had escaped from his cage and climbed up Ms Adolf’s leg. She had screamed so loudly, you could actually see her tonsils flopping around in t
he back of her throat.

  “To make this visit very special, Mr Morimoto has agreed to let his son Yoshi sleep over at the home of one of our students,” Ms Adolf went on. “He wants him to see how a typical fourth-grader in New York lives. We will be picking one of your families to host Yoshi.”

  My ears perked up like my dog Cheerio’s do when he hears my dad’s favourite opera singers screeching on TV.

  I hope they pick my family. That would be so cool.

  I love having guests from other countries. Well, to be honest, I’ve only had one. Vladys – he’s the sandwich-maker at my mum’s deli – spent a week with us when he first moved to New York from Russia and was looking for a flat. We had a great time. He stayed up really late with us, singing this wild Russian song called “Kalinka Malinka” and telling us stories about a circus bear named Igor who followed him to school.

  The only bad part was when Vlady brought us a jar of caviar to eat. In case you don’t know, caviar is fish eggs. Most of the time, they’re bluish-black. They’re supposed to be a treat, but how can something that smells so, well, fishy be a treat? When I thought Vlady wasn’t looking, I slipped my caviar to our dachshund, Cheerio. When Cheerio thought I wasn’t looking, he pushed it out of our tenth-floor window with his nose. It landed plop on Mrs Park’s air-conditioning unit. It stayed there for three days until a pigeon came by and gobbled it up. Bye-bye, fish eggs.

  “If you would like to volunteer to host Yoshi, please raise your hand now,” Ms Adolf said.

  My hand shot up like a rocket. So did thirty-two others’! In fact, the only person who didn’t raise his hand right away was Luke Whitman, and that’s because his finger was too far up his nose to get it out in time.

  Even though everyone else in the class had volunteered, I thought Ms Adolf should pick me. After all, if things got dull, Yoshi and I could sit around and count to two in Japanese. I could do that, no problem.

  Itchy knee.

  We all decided that the only fair way to pick who was going to host Yoshi was to pull a name out of a hat. After break, Ms Adolf told each of us to write our name down on a slip of paper. I thought we should put them in my Mets baseball hat, but some of the girls objected because it had got pretty sweaty at break. So instead we put the names in Ashley’s lavender baseball cap, the one she had decorated with a red rhinestone flower and a yellow stem.

  Ms Adolf closed her eyes, reached in and pulled out one of the slips of paper. Here’s what it said:

  Can you believe it?

  In case you hadn’t realized it, that’s me!

  I was very excited to have been chosen to host Yoshi. I still had to get permission from my parents before it was totally official. I was pretty sure I could get them to agree if I told them it was an educational experience. They’re very big on educational experiences.

  “Where is Yoshi going to sleep?” Ashley asked me as we sat down at our usual table in the lunchroom.

  “I call top bunk,” Frankie said, just assuming that he was going to sleep over when Yoshi did. “We’ll put the Yosh Man on the floor. People in Japan sleep on the floor all the time, you know.”

  “That’s not going to work,” I answered. “Katherine might sneak up on him in the night and lick him with that sandpaper tongue of hers.” Katherine is my sister Emily’s pet iguana, and trust me, you don’t want her long, sticky tongue anywhere near any of your body parts.

  I opened my lunch and groaned. My mum had packed me another one of her science-experiment sandwiches. My mum owns a deli called The Crunchy Pickle, and she’s trying to come up with a new low-carb high-fibre bagel to sell there. Since I’m always the guinea pig for her weird food experiments, she had packed me a broccoli-mushroom bagel for lunch. No cream cheese, of course, because that might actually taste good. Instead, she had covered my greenish-brownish bagel with ground-up kidney beans and parsley in soy juice. It looked like the stuff that holds the bricks in our fireplace together.

  “I’ll trade you half of mine for half of yours,” I offered Frankie. He had a peanut butter and banana sandwich on Wonder bread that my taste buds were screaming for.

  Frankie reached out and poked at my bagel with his finger. It didn’t move.

  “I think it’s dead,” he said. “Or dying.”

  Frankie handed me half of his peanut butter Wonder. After all these years of being my best friend, he just assumes he’s got to give me half of his sandwich on the days when my mum is practising her creative cooking.

  “I hope your mum doesn’t try to feed one of those bagels to Yoshi,” Ashley said. “He’ll go running back to Japan.”

  “Actually, that’s not possible,” said a nasal voice from behind us. “Japan is an island country consisting of four main islands and more than three thousand small islands surrounded by water. It’s not possible to run to Japan. Actually, he would have to swim.”

  It was Robert Upchurch, third-grade pest and Ruler of the Land of the Know-It-Alls. He lives in the same block of flats as Frankie, Ashley and me, and his goal in life is to be our best friend and my sister Emily’s boyfriend. Our goal in life is to keep him as far away as possible.

  “Anyone object if I join you?” Robert asked, putting his tray down next to Ashley before we could say, “Yes, we all object a lot.”

  “Hey, Robert, my man,” Frankie said, pushing my bagel in front of his bony hands. “Why don’t you try some of this delicious high-fibre bagel? It’ll keep your jaws busy so you can’t talk for a while.”

  Robert didn’t get the insult, which is nothing new. Once when we were taking swimming lessons at the YMCA, a kid looked at Robert in his skinny little swimming trunks and said that he reminded him of a wet rat. Robert didn’t feel bad. He just went off on a long rant about how a rat’s skeleton can collapse to be thinner than a German pancake, which is why they’re able to sneak under refrigerators to get forgotten bits of roast beef.

  “Actually, fibre is excellent for the digestive system,” Robert said, picking up the bagel and taking a major sniff of it. Robert is the kind of guy who smells everything before he eats it. “Fibre keeps your waste products moving through your bowels in a timely and healthy fashion.”

  “Robert,” Ashley moaned. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that normal people don’t talk about their bowels at the table?”

  “I don’t see what’s wrong with it,” Robert said. “Bowels carry human waste. Human waste is a completely normal product of the body.”

  “Yeah, so are bogeys and dandruff flakes, but we don’t just blab on about them, dude,” said Frankie.

  Robert adjusted his tie and took a big bite of his fish taco. That’s right. I said tie. Robert is the only kid I know who wears a tie to school. He is also the only kid I know who eats the fish tacos from our cafeteria.

  I noticed that Ashley had stopped listening. She was staring at someone across the room.

  “I don’t believe my eyes,” she whispered, pushing her plastic spoon into her lime jelly. “She’s walking over here. To our table. I’m serious.”

  Frankie and I whipped round to see who Ashley was looking at. Yikes! It was Ms Adolf. She was heading our way, carrying an overripe brown banana in a napkin.

  No. This wasn’t happening.

  “Mind if I sit down next to you, Henry?” she asked.

  Did I mind? Yes, I minded! I minded with every cell in my body, especially the ones that were going to be closest to her when she did sit down.

  “Of course not,” I said, hoping that maybe I’d get lucky and she would sit down somewhere in New Jersey.

  Everyone in the cafeteria had gone quiet and was just staring at us. It’s not natural for Ms Adolf to cruise up to your table, throw a leg over the bench and crank up a conversation. She’s not exactly your warm and cuddly type of teacher.

  “I would like to talk with you about Yoshi,” Ms Adolf said, taking a bite of her banana. I noticed that she was eating the brown spot, the very spot that normal people cut off with a knife and throw in the bi
n.

  “What about him?” I asked.

  “Well, Henry, I’ve been thinking. Don’t you think Yoshi would like to see what life is like in a typical American family?”

  “My family is going to blow him away,” I said.

  Ms Adolf looked down at the table and saw my broccoli-mushroom bagel covered with kidney beans.

  “I notice your mother’s cooking is not exactly … uh … typical,” she said, holding up the bagel, being careful to use the waxed paper it was lying on. “I wouldn’t want it to frighten Yoshi.”

  She took another bite of her rotten banana. Boy, talk about scary food. I could see the rotten banana squishing between her teeth. It looked like the Yellow Blob in there.

  “Zip’s family is a little unusual, but they’re totally fun,” Frankie said. “Did you know they have a pet iguana?”

  “Her name is Katherine,” I said. “She sleeps in the bathtub.”

  “An iguana in the bathtub,” Ms Adolf said, raising her eyebrows so high, they almost shot off her forehead. “Is that good lavatory hygiene?”

  I have to confess, I’m not crazy about Katherine myself, especially when I catch her hanging out in my underwear drawer. But I sure didn’t like Ms Adolf turning up her nose at our lavatory hygiene.

  “Wait until Yoshi meets Cheerio,” I said, trying to change the subject. “They’ll get along great. He’s the sweetest dog in the world. You’ve met him before.”

  “Oh, that dog!” Ms Adolf said. “The one that spins in circles until he knocks someone over. You know, Henry, that’s not typical, either.”

  “It is for him,” I said.

  Frankie and Ashley cracked up, but Ms Adolf just shook her head.

  “Yoshi would love Hank’s grandfather,” Ashley said.

  “Papa Pete is the best,” Frankie added. “He’ll make Yoshi an honorary grandkid, just like Ashley and me.”

  “I’m one too,” Robert said. “Even though Papa Pete is always complaining that I’m too skinny for him to pinch.”