by Lorri Horn
DEWEY
FAIRCHILD,
Parent Problem Solver
Lorri Horn
Amberjack Publishing
New York, New York
Showering 101
Having too many secrets is never a good idea, but Dewey Fairchild really, really hated that his mom made him bathe every day. It was a waste of time. It was a waste of water.
As the bathroom filled up with steam, he sat on the toilet lid in his underwear and socks flipping through an old Lego magazine.
“Dewey, make sure you wash your hair!” his mother called out through the closed bathroom door. His smooth camel brown hair hung below his ears. His eyes, seemingly undecided on one color, were a blended hazel with a honeydew hue.
“OK,” he called back to her.
Ergh. Now he had to dunk his head in the sink. Still it was better than getting all wet, so he stuck his head quickly under the faucet for a quick soak.
“Ouch!” he cried, but forced himself to stifle the sound, so his mother wouldn’t hear. “Stupid faucet,” he grumbled.
The pages of his magazine started to get floppy from the steam, so he abandoned it in favor of drawing stick figures and figure eights in the bathroom mirror.
Finally, when a respectable amount of time had passed for faking a shower, Dewey leaned in and turned off the running water, trying not to get his arm or the floor wet.
Just then, a couple quick knocks and the handle on the door knob turned. A quick wave of shock shot into his fingertips and tingled up his scalp—there he stood, in his underwear and socks, totally dry except for some damp hair with a shower curtain in his hand!
No. Wait. He had locked the door. It turned but didn’t open.
“Want me to hand you your towel?” his mom asked through the door. “Dewey, I won’t come in without knocking, but I really don’t want you to lock the door.”
“OK. Sorry. No, I got it,” replied Dewey, hiding himself behind the shower curtain, as if she could somehow see him through the door.
Dewey’s heart rate slowed back down after his narrow escape. He put on his fresh clothes quickly. His assistant, Clara, had contacted him earlier and said that Danny Tedphrey had requested his services. He wanted to get back up to the office, ASAP.
How It All Began
One of Dewey’s favorite new computer games involved simply clicking for cookies. The more you clicked, the more cookies you collected.
“Arrrgh! My arm is burning! I’m up to 8,000 cookies,” yelled out Dewey’s friend Colin while they each clicked away one day in the computer lab during lunch. “I’m going to get carpet tunnel!! But I don’t care! Must. Get. 9,000!”
“Shh! Carpal tunnel, you goof. You need to buy more grandmas and farms, so they can make cookies for you.”
“What I need is a little brother or one of those Harry Potter house elves I can command to click for me.”
“Ha! Oh! I’m at 12,000!” Dewey announced.
Colin Decker stood about fifty-four inches tall, with brown eyes, brown skin, and curly black hair. That made him half an inch taller than Dewey, three-and-a-half times the height of a bowling pin, seven-tenths the height of Michael Jordan, one-fifth the height of a giraffe, one-sixteenth the height of a giant sequoia tree, one-seventeenth the height of the Statue of Liberty, and about 10,000 times the height of a sheet of paper.
Or so Colin had read online. You can’t believe everything you read, though. So one of these days, before he grew too much, he planned on testing some of these out.
“Holy narwhal! My grandmas are losing their teeth.”
Dewey laughed. Colin was obsessed with narwhals, those great whales of the arctic whose males grew up to sixteen feet long and had a single, gigantic tusk, like a unicorn, up to ten feet in length.
Grandmas, on the other hand, needed steel plated rolling pins to stand up to the great forces of nature. Or so it seemed.
This was the scene when their other lunch pal, Seraphina, shared a problem, and Dewey really had nothing better to do than help her (they really weren’t supposed to be playing games in the lab). Plus, she always had good snacks, and he always felt hungry.
“I just can’t take one more single day of it. My mother is a complete nut job. You have to help me!”
Seraphina Johnson was definitely flipping out. She came right at him, her books piled up under her lunch tray, the cheese sliding off of her pizza boat as her tray took a shortcut down her science book, and the juice from her fruit cup sloshed all over her fries.
“Um, watch your lunch!” Dewey cried as the tray slid off, narrowly missing the computer table and falling right into his hands. He wiggled the cheese back into place and balanced the tray on his knee.
“What!?” he asked, sucking the grease off of his fingers as Seraphina shot him a look for poking at her cheese. She grabbed her lunch back, and they all headed out to the lunch tables.
“She’s insane, that’s what. Do you know that she still holds my hand when we cross the street?! When we got to school today, she actually parked the car, walked me in, and held my hand until we got to the other side.” Seraphina moved her hair out of her face, sat down, and stared at them for a reply.
Dewey and Colin sat across from her at the tables, and Dewey took a bite of his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. There was just nothing about a school lunch that looked appetizing to him. Too much sauce on the pizza. Too much cheese. Seraphina didn’t seem to be enjoying it much either as she went on and on about her mother. At least she hadn’t taken a bite. Nothing not to like about the fries though; he reached over and grabbed a few that seemed to have escaped the puddle of fruit slosh.
Dewey’s mom had made his sandwich. He knew because it was cut in triangles, not in half, which was his dad’s style. He liked triangles better—much more satisfying biting into the corners. And what’s up with the crust anyway? Why wouldn’t his parents cut it off? It couldn’t be healthier to eat the crust just because it’s darker, right? Were there more minerals or vitamins in the crust? It didn’t make any sense.
“Are you listening to me?!” Seraphina let go of her long, brown, curly hair, which she’d been twisting while carrying on about her mother’s overprotective ways. He was pretty sure he’d caught most of what she’d said.
Chips or pretzels were a must with PBJ, because the salt mixed with the sweetness of the jelly was epic. He wanted to say so but didn’t want to seem insensitive to the plight of his fellow parent-sufferer.
“Maybe I can help,” he said, pushing a chip and then a french fry into his mouth. “Let me follow you guys around a bit when your mom doesn’t know and see if I can figure out what the fruit is going on.”
Fruit. That had reminded him. He had a juicy nectarine in his lunch sack.
Colin, who had been mostly bored by the theatrics and lost in his own thoughts, looked up from his lunch. “Wait, what?” he said. Now this was going to be interesting.
