Later, after Santa had ho-ho-hoed his way past our sidewalk viewing spot and the parade was over, our class headed uptown to a restaurant so everybody could eat some Thanksgiving turkey. Well, everybody except Anna and a few others. They were going to order the Tofurkey. Don’t ask.
On our way to the restaurant, we passed all sorts of kids wearing Pottymouth & Stoopid sweatshirts or carrying miniature versions of our helium balloons.
Four goofy-looking guys were walking south while we were walking north.
They saw Michael and me. They grinned and waved. Yeah, they were doofuses just like us.
And then one of them said, “Hey, David! Hey, Michael! Thanks for everything!”
It was kind of amazing. The best Thanksgiving of my life and I hadn’t even scooped the marshmallow goop off the candied yams with my finger yet.
We were David and Michael.
Finally.
But being Pottymouth and Stoopid had helped a whole bunch of other kids be who they really were too.
So maybe all the bad stuff we had to go through was sort of worth it.
There’s something my mom once said that stuck with me (like a bad nickname, but way nicer): You can’t see the stars shine until it gets really, really dark.
For Michael and me, aka ex-Pottymouth and ex-Stoopid?
It was our turn to shine.
P.S.
Oh, that book the Cartoon Factory said they might make about us?
You just read it!
James Patterson received the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community at the 2015 National Book Awards. He holds the Guinness World Record for the most #1 New York Times bestsellers, including Middle School and I Funny, and his books have sold more than 350 million copies worldwide. A tireless champion of the power of books and reading, Patterson created a children’s book imprint, JIMMY Patterson, whose mission is simple: “We want every kid who finishes a JIMMY Book to say: ‘Please give me another book.’” He has donated more than one million books to students and soldiers and funds over four hundred Teacher Education Scholarships at twenty-four colleges and universities. He has also donated millions to independent bookstores and school libraries. Patterson invests proceeds from the sales of JIMMY Patterson Books in pro-reading initiatives.
Chris Grabenstein is a New York Times bestselling author who has collaborated with James Patterson on the I Funny, Treasure Hunters, and House of Robots series, as well as on Jacky Ha-Ha, Daniel X: Armageddon, and Word of Mouse. He lives in New York City.
Stephen Gilpin lives and works in a cave just north of Hiawatha, Kansas, with his wife, Angie, their kids, and an infestation of dogs.
JIMMY PATTERSON BOOKS
for Young Readers
The Middle School Novels by James Patterson
Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life
(with Chris Tebbetts, illustrated by Laura Park)
Middle School: Get Me Out of Here!
(with Chris Tebbetts, illustrated by Laura Park)
Middle School: Big Fat Liar
(with Lisa Papademetriou, illustrated by Neil Swaab)
Middle School: How I Survived Bullies, Broccoli, and Snake Hill
(with Chris Tebbetts, illustrated by Laura Park)
Middle School: Ultimate Showdown
(with Julia Bergen, illustrated by Alec Longstreth)
Middle School: Save Rafe!
(with Chris Tebbetts, illustrated by Laura Park)
Middle School: Just My Rotten Luck
(with Chris Tebbetts, illustrated by Laura Park)
Middle School: Dog’s Best Friend
(with Chris Tebbetts, illustrated by Jomike Tejido)
Middle School: Escape to Australia
(with Chris Tebbetts, illustrated by Daniel Griffo)
The I Funny Novels by James Patterson
I Funny (with Chris Grabenstein, illustrated by Laura Park)
I Even Funnier (with Chris Grabenstein, illustrated by Laura Park)
I Totally Funniest (with Chris Grabenstein, illustrated by Laura Park)
I Funny TV (with Chris Grabenstein, illustrated by Laura Park)
I Funny: School of Laughs (with Chris Grabenstein, illustrated by Laura Park)
The House of Robots Novels by James Patterson
House of Robots
(with Chris Grabenstein, illustrated by Juliana Neufeld)
House of Robots: Robots Go Wild!
(with Chris Grabenstein, illustrated by Juliana Neufeld)
House of Robots: Robot Revolution
(with Chris Grabenstein, illustrated by Juliana Neufeld)
The Treasure Hunters Novels by James Patterson
Treasure Hunters
(with Chris Grabenstein and Mark Shulman, illustrated by Juliana Neufeld)
Treasure Hunters: Danger Down the Nile
(with Chris Grabenstein, illustrated by Juliana Neufeld)
Treasure Hunters: Secret of the Forbidden City
(with Chris Grabenstein, illustrated by Juliana Neufeld)
Treasure Hunters: Peril at the Top of the World
(with Chris Grabenstein, illustrated by Juliana Neufeld)
The Daniel X Novels by James Patterson
The Dangerous Days of Daniel X (with Michael Ledwidge)
Watch the Skies (with Ned Rust)
Demons and Druids (with Adam Sadler)
Game Over (with Ned Rust)
Armageddon (with Chris Grabenstein)
Lights Out (with Chris Grabenstein)
Other Illustrated Novels
Word of Mouse by James Patterson
(with Chris Grabenstein, illustrated by Joe Sutphin)
Jacky Ha-Ha by James Patterson
(with Chris Grabenstein, illustrated by Kerascoët)
Public School Superhero by James Patterson
(with Chris Tebbetts, illustrated by Cory Thomas)
Sci-Fi Junior High
by John Martin and Scott Seegert
How to Be a Supervillain
by Michael Fry
For previews of upcoming books in these series and other information, visit jimmypatterson.org.
Hi, my name is Jimmy and you’re reading one of my books!
Well, actually, it’s your book. Or the library’s. Or maybe it’s your friend’s or your cousin’s or your sister’s and they lent it to you, which means they’re sort of like a library (which is totally awesome, by the way).
The point is, I, Jimmy, published this book. That’s right. I made it at my own book-making company called…ta-da: JIMMY!
I have to tell you: seeing that JIMMY logo on the cover of this book is pretty cool.
You want to go back and look at it again?
Go ahead. I’ll wait.
(While you’re checking it out, I’ll hum something from Echo by Pam Muñoz Ryan, one of my favorite books about the power of music!)
You’re back? Great!
For me, that little JIMMY thingy is my dream come true.
I don’t know this for sure, but I think the most important thing in the world is for kids to have dreams.
What’s yours?
You do dream, don’t you? And not just when you’re sleeping. I’m talking about a BIG, wide-awake, I’ll-do-whatever-it-takes-to-make-it-happen kind of dream. Something like winning the Olympics, finding the cure for a scary disease, stopping your little brother from gumming up the Xbox controller with peanut butter again, or running your own book company.
Fact is that ever since I was a little kid (yeah, yeah—soooo long ago, right?) I’ve loved books.
You ever hear that saying, “Do what you love, love what you do”? Well, that’s exactly why I wanted to start my own book company.
I know how crazy that sounds. Laugh-out-loud nutso. At least that’s what all the grown-ups in my life kept telling me.
“That sounds crazy,” said my uncle Herman.
“Laugh-out-loud nutso,” added Aunt Irene.
“Run a book compan
y? You?” said this bald guy named Jeff. “You’re just a middle schooler! You won’t stand a chance, kid. I’ll crush you like a cockroach—just like I crushed all the other, older cockroaches who came before you!”
(Jeff, I think, runs his own book company.)
But like I said, a kid has to have a dream before any of his dreams can come true.
So here’s how everything happened; how an ordinary kid like me got his own publishing company. It’s so exciting, I could write a book about it.
So guess what?
I did!
I figured there were tons of kids hungry—maybe even starving—for fun and exciting books.
That meant I would need to make lots and lots of books. But how could I pull it off? Don’t forget, I was just a kid. Still am. But being a kid has its advantages. For one thing, we eat a lot of delicious sugary snacks. Sugar will keep your mind buzzing. Plus, kids wake up earlier than adults. That’s why they invented cartoons, which we watch while eating sugary cereal. Talk about a mental buzz.
After brainstorming for weeks, it was time to start putting my thoughts down on paper. I drew sketches whenever and wherever I could of what I wanted my book company to look like.
By the way, drawing while walking gets easier with practice.
Still, I don’t recommend doing it while riding a bike or skateboarding. You bump into stuff. Stuff like fire hydrants and lamp poles.
I was obsessed.
All the kids at school were totally into my dream, too.
“I want to work at your book company!” said my good friend Chris Grabbetts. “I like writing.”
“You mean you have fun making up stories, too?”
“Sometimes. But mostly, I like writing. Especially cursive. I’m thinking about taking up calligraphy, except I don’t know how to spell it.” Like always, Chris was joking around.
“Instead of freight elevators, you need a Ferris wheel to move books from one floor to the other,” suggested my bud Raphael Katchadopoulos, whom everybody calls Rafe. He’s pretty good with markers and a sketchpad so he doodled a quick visual. I love, love, loved it.
“You also need a bowling alley,” said Chris.
I raised both eyebrows. “A bowling alley?”
He shrugged. “I like to bowl.”
“I’ll put a lane over here near the Ping-Pong and foosball tables,” said Rafe, his pen scribbling across the page.
“You need a bouncy house,” said Maxine Peterman, another great pal of mine. “A place where employees can eat and goof off on their lunch break.”
“But won’t all that bouncing up and down make people lose their lunch?” worried Chris.
“Even better,” said Maxine with a shrug. “Projectile vomit is always fun.”
With everybody’s awesome ideas, my dream factory was inching closer and closer to becoming a reality. At the end of the month, I had an actual blueprint—mostly because I drew it with a blue ballpoint pen.
Yep, everybody at school was super excited about my big idea.
My parents?
Not so much.
So this is Mom and Dad.
Dad’s a big-time CPA, a certified public accountant. That means he crunches numbers for other people and does their taxes for them. Mom is a hotshot lawyer. The kind that handles tax stuff. I sometimes wonder if Mom and Dad met on April fifteenth. You know—tax day.
Mom never goes to court or does anything dramatic like, say, the awesome Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Instead of drama and excitement, my parents both have huge, boxy briefcases filled with paper. Not books. Paper. Reams and reams of it. Dad’s papers are covered in lines, grids, graphs, and numbers. Mom’s have Post-it notes sticking out between the pages.
You know how most grown-ups work nine to five? My mom and dad work five to nine. That’s right. They head to their offices at 5 a.m. and don’t come home until 9 p.m., just in time to ask me if I finished my homework and say a quick good night.
I sometimes wondered if I was actually an orphan, like some of my favorite characters in books. Harry Potter. Anne Shirley. Oliver Twist. Cinderella.
In fact, I had a hunch that my real parents had been eaten by an angry rhinoceros so the couple I called my mother and father were actually my aunt Sponge and uncle Spiker. I kept waiting for an enormous enchanted orange to grow on a barren orange tree in our backyard so I could fly in it like a hot-air balloon, meet a bunch of friendly talking bugs, and set sail for New York City!
But then I realized, that wasn’t my story. It was James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl—I just changed the fruit because I’d had orange juice for breakfast.
Yep, there are a lot of orphans in books. Comic books, too. Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, the Hulk, Daredevil, Robin, Aquagirl—all those superheroes without any ’rents.
Sometimes, that’s how I felt.
Minus the X-ray vision or web-slinging.
My superpower?
Reading!
Read more in
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Pottymouth and Stoopid Page 11
