by Nancy Krulik
Alex shook his head. “Nope. Not on the list.”
George stopped in front of a purple-and-green striped basketball. “Is this on the list?”
Alex nodded.
“Maybe I’ll get it,” George said.
Alex thought for a second. “Bad move,” he said. “Louie will use it for killer ball. Basketballs are really hard. And that game hurts enough already.”
No kidding. Killer ball was a game Louie made up. It was a lot like dodgeball, only meaner. “So what about a deluxe rocket kit?” George said. He picked up the box and read the back. “It says that it is air-powered and can shoot up to two hundred feet in the air.”
George’s mom looked at the price tag. “It’s awfully expensive.”
“What if we split it?” Alex suggested.
Before George could ask his mom, he suddenly felt something strange brewing way down in his belly. It was fizzing and whizzing around.
George knew that what he was dealing with wasn’t air powered. It was gas powered. And no way was it on Louie’s list.
The super burp was back! Already it had ping-ponged its way out of George’s belly and was bing-bonging up into his chest.
The burp was ready to blast off. And this time it was not going to be stopped. Before George could do anything, the burp ping-ponged right up George’s throat, zigzagged its way between his teeth, made its way to his lips, and . . .
“George!” his mom shouted.
“Whoa, dude!” Alex said.
It was the loudest burp anyone had ever heard. It practically broke the sound barrier. Alex was covering both his ears.
Suddenly, George felt his feet running over to the bikes in the back of the store. “Where are you going?” he heard his mom call.
He wasn’t making his feet move. They were doing it all on their own. It was like George was an old-fashioned puppet and someone else was pulling the strings. He was heading to the bicycle aisle in the store.
George felt his rear end land—thud!—on the seat of a little red-and-white tricycle. The next thing he knew, he was pedaling the trike all around the store.
“Wheeeeee!” George shouted.
George didn’t want to ride a baby bike. He really didn’t. But George wasn’t in the driver’s seat now. The burp was.
“George!” his mother shouted. “Get off that, now.”
Alex was shaking his head and laughing.
George wanted to get off the tricycle. But his rear end didn’t. It felt like it was superglued to the seat.
“Whee! Here I come!” George shouted.
Honk! Honk! Suddenly, George’s hands began squeezing the big horn on the handlebars. Honk! Honk!
“Young man!” a woman in a green floppy hat cried as she leaped out of the way. “You almost ran over my foot!”
“Stop that at once!” Mr. Tyler shouted at George.
Instead, George rode around the lady in a circle. “Beep! Beep! Watch out! I just got my driver’s license.”
“I’ll get my son’s birthday gifts another time,” the woman with the green floppy hat told Mr. Tyler. “It’s dangerous in here.” Then she raced out of the shop.
“You’re scaring away the customers!” Mr. Tyler shouted at George.
The tricycle had now reached the front of the toy store. George’s butt suddenly got unstuck from the tricycle seat. His legs jumped off the trike. George waited to hear the whoosh sound that meant the burp was over. But it didn’t come. The next thing he knew, George was climbing into the storefront window where there was a huge display of wooden paddleball toys.
George’s hands grabbed two paddleball toys. His hands started paddling the balls between George’s legs and over his head. They paddled front. They paddled back. George had never been very good at this before. But now he was a whiz.
People walking outside on the street stopped to watch him.
The crowd outside was growing. A few little kids were cheering. The yellow-haired woman in the green sun hat was staring at George now. She looked so shocked that her eyes were bugging right out of her head.
“George!” Alex shouted. “Are you going for the world paddling record?”
“No. He’s not,” George’s mom said. “GEORGE! Stop that!”
But George’s hands kept paddling. They paddled up. They paddled down. They . . . CRASH! They paddled right into the display of paddleball toys and knocked it to ground.
Whoosh! Just then George felt something go pop in the bottom of his belly. It was like the air just rushed out of him.
The super burp was gone.
George was sitting in the middle of a pile of paddleball toys. He opened his mouth to say, “I’m sorry.” And that’s exactly what came out.
Mr. Tyler was really angry. “Sorry doesn’t fix my display, young man,” he told George. “You need to leave. Right now.”
“But I haven’t bought a gift yet,” George said.
“You’d better take your business somewhere else,” Mr. Tyler told George’s mom. He looked down at George and frowned. “Anywhere else.”
Chapter 5
“So, what are you going to do about a present for Louie?” Alex asked George the next day after school. The boys were hanging out in Alex’s backyard.
Alex was staring at George in a weird way. It was like he was trying to figure something out, but he couldn’t. It made George feel like he was a puzzle with a missing piece. It wasn’t a very good feeling.
“I got him a rock music CD,” George said. “I had to wait in the car while my mom went into the music store to buy it.”
“Probably safer that way,” Alex said. Alex stood there for a minute. Then, finally, he said, “Ummmm. Look, dude, did you ever notice that whenever you let out a massive burp, you get all weird and wacky?”
“What—what do you mean?” George stuttered.
“You know what I mean,” Alex said. “It’s like something comes over you, and you go nuts.”
George gulped. It was no use pretending nothing was wrong. Alex had figured it out. Sort of. Maybe Alex would understand. “It’s not my fault,” George said. “I get . . .”
Oh man. How was George supposed to talk about his super burps? It would sound crazy. It was crazy!
“You’re going to think I’m nuts,” George said slowly. “But right after I moved here . . .” George took a deep breath. “Okay, here goes,” he said. “My burps aren’t normal burps. They’re magic.”
“There’s no such thing as magic,” Alex told him.
“Yeah, that’s what I always thought, too,” George said. “But my burps really are magic.”
George could tell by the way Alex was wrinkling his forehead that he didn’t believe him. It wasn’t going to be easy to get a science guy like Alex to believe in magic.
“Are you talking about magic, like a magic trick?” Alex asked.
“No. Magic magic. Not trick magic,” George told him. George knew all about magic tricks—he put on shows for his parents all the time.
He was the Great Georgini. But this was different. “Whenever I have a magic burp, it takes over and makes me do stuff I don’t want to do. Like yesterday at the toy store. The magic burp made me get on that trike.”
“You’re serious? You’re not kidding me?” Alex stared so hard at George it was like he were peering into his brain. It was the same look George’s mom had given him that time she tried to figure out who broke her lamp.
George raised both his hands. “Dude, this is the truth.”
“So when you exploded the volcano while we were showing our science project... ,” Alex began.
“The magic burp,” George said.
“And when you jumped off the trampoline and got your underpants stuck on the tree branch—”
“With the world’s worst wedgie? Yeah, that was the burp, too.”
“And when you juggled raw eggs, went after the skunk, and dive-bombed into the principal’s lap?”
“Burp. Burp. And more burp,” George sa
id.
Alex sat on the ground. He blinked a few times. George could see he was trying to wrap his mind around something big—even bigger than the world’s biggest wad of gum.
“Wow. Magic burps,” Alex said finally. “When did it start?”
“Just a few weeks ago. I was normal before. I swear,” George said. “I had a root beer float at Ernie’s, and the first one came right after that.”
Alex thought about that for a minute.
“There’s got to be a cure. But it’s going to take a lot of hard work before we find it, that’s for sure,” he said.
“We?” George asked. “You’re going to help me?”
Alex nodded. “Sure. I don’t want you to keep getting in trouble.”
“Neither do I,” George said. He stopped for a minute. “You won’t tell anybody, will you? My parents don’t even know.”
“Your secret is safe,” Alex promised.
“You can’t even tell Chris,” George went on. Chris was George’s second best friend in Beaver Brook. “The fewer people who know about this the better.”
George smacked himself in the forehead. “Can you imagine if Louie found out?”
“Yeah, that would be bad,” Alex agreed. “He’d never stop making fun of you.”
“No kidding,” George said. “He’d probably stop calling me New Kid and start calling me Gassy Guy.”
Alex thought for a minute. “Tell me again about the first burp?” he asked.
“It happened at Ernie’s,” George said. “It was right after I drank a root beer float. But I’ve had thousands of root beer floats in my life. This time, though, a shooting star went by, and I made a wish. I think the wish came true but got kind of mixed up.”
“And that’s what made the magic burps come?” Alex had an “I don’t think so” look on his face.
“Yeah,” George said.
“Then we need to go back to Ernie’s,” Alex said.
“No way,” George said. “I did the hokey-pokey on a table with straws up my nose the last time I was there.”
“We need to check out the scene of the burp if we’re going to find a cure,” Alex insisted.
George folded his hands in front of chest. “Uh-uh.”
“How about if you wear a disguise?” Alex suggested.
George thought about that for a minute. “It would have to be a really good disguise.”
Chapter 6
“I better not run into the waitress who served me that root beer float,” George said. He felt sick to his stomach as they rounded the corner.
“She’ll never recognize you,” Alex said. George was wearing a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes and a pair of glasses with a fake nose and moustache attached.
They were standing in front of Ernie’s.
“Which table were you at?” Alex asked. “We have to sit at the exact same one.”
“Outside. Third one from the left,” George said.
Alex and George sat down at the table. A waiter skated over. “Hi, guys,” he said.
“Hi,” Alex answered.
“Hello,” George said. He tried to disguise his voice so he sounded older.
“Nice ’stache,” the waiter said.
“Thanks,” George said.
“What are you having?” the waiter asked Alex.
“I’ll have a vanilla and chocolate swirly cone,” Alex told him.
“And for you, sir?” The waiter turned to George.
“He’ll have a root beer float.”
“Ummm . . . I don’t know about that,” George said nervously.
“You have to,” Alex said under his breath. “We have to figure out what made the you-know-what happen.”
“Okay,” George said. “A root beer float.”
“I’ll be right back with your orders,” the waiter told them as he skated off.
George looked around. “I don’t know what you think we’re going to find out here.”
“I’m not sure,” Alex admitted. “But scientists always replicate their experiments to see if the same thing happens again.”
“Repli-what?” George asked him.
“Replicate,” Alex repeated. “It means do something over and over again. So you have to drink a root beer float over again, just the way you did before. We can see if the burp shows up and makes you act weird. Maybe it’s an allergic reaction to the root beer they serve.”
George still wasn’t sure. But at least this experiment involved drinking a root beer float. That used to be his favorite thing in the world. But he hadn’t had one since that bad, ba-a-ad night.
While waiting for their order, George reached under the table. “Hey, check it out!” he shouted. He held up a hardened piece of gum. “ABC gum!”
“Awesome,” Alex said. He took the gum from George and squished it onto his ever-growing gum ball. It was so large now, it bulged out of Alex’s backpack.
George reached underneath his chair. There was a piece of gum there, too. “Here’s some more,” he said excitedly.
“That one’s still a little gooey,” Alex said. “Must have been just been chewed.”
A minute later, Alex’s ice cream and George’s root beer float arrived.
“Here you go,” the waiter said as he placed them on the table. “Enjoy!”
George stared at the root beer float with its scoop of ice cream and whipped cream topping. It looked so innocent! But what if the fizzy bing-bonging and ping-ponging started up again?
Alex was examining the root beer float, too. “You know, it looks like they use extra bubbly root beer,” he said. “And maybe it’s the bubbles in the soda that make you burp.”
“Yeah, but even if the root beer has extra strong bubbles, why would they make me do crazy stuff?” George pointed out.
“That’s true,” Alex said with a shrug. “But we have to start our experiment somewhere. Drink up!”
George put his mouth around the straw.
“Wait!” Alex shouted.
George popped the straw right out of his mouth. “What?”
“You have to drink it exactly the same way you drank the float that gave you the burp,” Alex said. “Otherwise we are not replicating the experiment. Did you drink it fast or slow?”
“Fast,” George said. “Really fast. I was thirsty.”
Alex looked down at his watch. “Okay, go ahead and drink. I’ll time how long it takes you.”
“Why?” George asked.
“Because we need all the data we can collect,” Alex said. “That’s the scientific way!” He looked at his watch. “On your mark. Get set. Go!”
Slurp. The creamy root beer went through the straw, into George’s mouth, and down into his belly.
And then he waited for something ba-a-ad to happen.
He waited.
And waited.
And waited. But nothing happened.
“Maybe you have to drink it faster,” Alex suggested. “Forget the straw.”
George picked up the glass and took a huge gulp.
Alex started to laugh.
George stopped slurping and looked up. He hadn’t felt any fizzing. He hadn’t let out so much as a mini burp. And he certainly wasn’t dancing on tables or doing anything else weird.
“What’s so funny?” George asked.
“Your moustache,” Alex said. He pointed to the root beer float.
George looked down. The moustache was floating on top of the drink. It looked like a big, hairy spider floating on a mountain of ice cream.
George took the moustache out of the glass. He licked all the ice cream off the ends. No point in wasting perfectly good ice cream. Then he finished the float while Alex sucked the last of his ice cream out of the bottom of his cone.
Alex made George wait fifteen minutes to see if a burp came.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
By the time the boys finally left Ernie’s, Alex had fourteen new wads of ABC gum stuck on his gum ball. But they hadn’t figured out how
to stop the magical super burp.
You couldn’t find the cure for something like that hidden under a tabletop. Super burps were w-a-a-ay too sneaky for that.
Chapter 7
By the time Louie’s birthday party rolled around, George had been burp-free for four days. Alex thought maybe drinking the root beer float at Ernie’s had cured George. But he wasn’t taking any chances.
One day Alex had said, “I have been doing some research. We need to improve your digestion.” So he made George curl up in a ball with his legs tucked into his chest and roll around and around, because Alex read somewhere that rolling around makes stomach gas go away.
Another day, Alex had George breathe into a paper bag three times after every meal.
On the other two days, Alex made George do one hundred sit-ups to keep his stomach strong so his muscles could hold down the burp. Just in case.
George did what Alex said, but he was scared the magic burps were just lying in wait, ready to pop out at the worst time—like right in the middle of Louie’s party.
“I will not burp. I will not burp,” George said over and over to himself as he walked to Alex’s house on Saturday morning. George’s mom had to work at her shop, the Knit Wit craft store, and his dad was at the army base before George even woke up. So Alex’s mom was driving them to the party.
“I will not burp. I will not burp,” George said again as he rang the doorbell to Alex’s house.
“Hi. How does it feel to go ninety-six hours without a single burp?” Alex asked as he opened the door.
“Shhhhh!” George said. He looked around nervously.
“Relax,” Alex said. “My mom’s in the laundry room. You can’t hear anything over that clunky dryer. And Chris won’t be here for fifteen minutes.”
George frowned. He felt bad leaving Chris out of his secret, but if Alex really did find a permanent cure soon, there wouldn’t be any burping secret to hide anymore.
