My Life Is a Joke

by James Patterson

  Putting the suspicion on Schuyler was Ringworm’s plan all along. And I fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. I’m thinking about calling Dad and handing him another collar.

  But what if I’m wrong? What if Ringworm got his five-dollar bill at the grocery store just like Ms. O’Mara did? What if his super-weird hobby is spray-painting red flames on skateboard decks in the middle of the night?

  Trust me: When you’ve just made the biggest mistake of your whole, entire life, you’re not super-eager to make the exact same one again.

  I’m pretty sure Ringworm and maybe Bob are the real criminals wreaking havoc up and down the boardwalk.

  But I need more proof.

  And I’m going to need help getting it.

  CHAPTER 60

  When I wake up the next morning at around eleven—just like a normal kid on summer vacation—it hits me: I’m unemployed.

  I don’t have a job.

  You know who else doesn’t? Bubblebutt and Ringworm haven’t worked anywhere since school let out. So how’d they raise all the money for their Battle of the Bands entry fee? It’s pretty steep, I find out when I call the concert organizers. Five hundred bucks! I guess Bubblebutt and Ringworm made their money the old-fashioned way. They stole it.

  In the light of day, the truth is even more obvious.

  I bike over to Ms. O’Mara’s apartment to apologize (again) and to ask for her help.

  Schuyler is there, of course, since that’s where he’s living this summer. He meets me on the front stoop, looking tired and frustrated.

  “Hey, Jacky,” he says, his face pulled way down into a mega frown. The kind you get when you ask for a pony for Christmas and all you get is a box of horse manure. “What do you want to arrest me for today?”

  “Nothing. But if you want, you can lock me up for being an idiot.”

  “Is that a crime now? If so, how do you explain ‘Ice Ice Baby’ making it all the way to number one?”

  “Seriously, Schuyler. I’m so sorry.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Prove it.”

  “How?”

  He gestures grandly toward the door. “Step in and enjoy some of my aunt’s delicious pancakes.”

  I hesitate.

  “Um, isn’t Ms. O’Mara a terrible cook?” I ask.

  “The worst,” whispers Schuyler. “She’s so bad, I usually pray after the meal. This will be cruel and unusual punishment.”

  I nod. “Exactly what I deserve.”

  We head inside. I tell Ms. O’Mara again how sorry I am. And then I prove it to Schuyler by sinking my knife and fork into a stack of the slimiest, foulest, most half-baked pancakes ever to spend time on a griddle. Schuyler empties the last drips out of the syrup bottle, so I have to eat mine raw. Which they kind of are. Raw. Once you break through the burned crusty shell, there’s still soupy batter oozing out of the middle.

  After I choke down a few bites and guzzle some orange juice to wash the taste of half-cooked Bisquick out of my mouth, I tell my brunch (and I use that term loosely) companions my theory.

  “I think Bubblebutt and Ringworm are the ones behind all the thefts and stuff up and down the boardwalk and beach. I think they did it to raise money for their Battle of the Bands entry fee.”

  I give them my evidence. The paint on Ringworm’s hands. The wad of cash in his pocket. The Lincoln-Spock five-dollar bill.

  Then I tell them my big fear.

  “It’s all circumstantial evidence,” I say. “My parents say that makes it harder to convict someone. It’d be way better if they’d just, you know, confess.”

  Ms. O’Mara puts down her fork. Pushes away her plate. She has a very thoughtful look on her face.

  I mimic her moves. So does Schuyler. Hey, if she can bail on the pancakes, so can we.

  “‘The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king’!” says Ms. O’Mara, totally randomly.

  “Um, we’re talking about Bubblebutt and Ringworm,” I say.

  “Not Elvis Presley,” says Schuyler.

  “It’s a line from Hamlet,” says Ms. O’Mara. “He adds a few details to a play that a troupe of traveling actors is going to perform for the king, so the king will react badly and confess to killing Hamlet’s father.”

  “Does it work?” I ask.

  “Yes,” says Ms. O’Mara. “Just like a mousetrap!”

  “So I need to do the same thing!” I say.

  “No, Jacky,” says Ms. O’Mara. “You need to build an even better mousetrap!”

  CHAPTER 61

  Jeff, Dan, Meredith, Bill, Schuyler, and I brainstorm our mousetrap ideas that afternoon at play practice, where, because we’re getting closer to opening night, we’re working on our makeup and costumes.

  Since we’re playing fairies (well, everybody except Schuyler), our face paint is extremely wild. We also have all sorts of wigs and hats and feathers and sparkles to play with.

  I tell my friends the plan. Everybody is in.

  We head down to the convenience store, home of my one true love, the Slurpee machine, during a rehearsal break. While we walk, we toss around ideas about what we should do to “catch the conscience” of Bubblebutt and Ringworm.

  “We could do it at the Battle of the Bands!” I suggest. “In front of a huge crowd!”

  “Cool,” says Jeff. “We can nail them in public!”

  “Get them to confess to all their gnarly crimes!” adds Schuyler.

  “Fer sure, dude,” says Dan, who, since his part in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is so tiny, has also been practicing his surfer ’tude.

  “Um, Jacky?” says Bill. “What exactly are we going to do at the Battle of the Bands?”

  All eyes turn to me, but I got nothing.

  “Any ideas?” prompts Meredith.

  “Well, uh, we could be a band.”

  “Slight problem,” says Jeff. “None of us plays the guitar.”

  “Or the drums,” says Dan.

  “Or anything,” says Meredith.

  “I play the tuba,” says Bill. “Some.”

  “Dude,” says Dan, “nobody wants to hear a tuba at a rock concert.”

  That’s when, finally, I have an idea. “We don’t need instruments!”

  “Uh, yes we do,” says Bill. “It’s a battle of bands.…”

  “And we’ll be a band of merry players!”

  “Who don’t play music?” says Jeff.

  “Exactly. Come on, you guys, what’s Shakespeare but old-fashioned, rhyming rap with a hip-hop beat? We can be the band of bards.”

  “Barts?” says Dan. “You mean like Bart Simpson?”

  “No. Bard is an old-fashioned word for ‘poet.’ People called Shakespeare a bard. We’ll chant a rap. Make it rhyme like crazy.”

  “I can scratch out a beat on a turntable,” says Meredith, because she’s the most musically gifted one in the group.

  “I can make bass noises with my mouth,” says Bill. It earns him a few stares. “I can.”

  He demonstrates. It is, as we used to say, the bomb.

  “We could write up some fun lyrics about a group called Toxic Sludge,” says Jeff, “which everybody will know is really Bubblebutt’s group, Toxic Trash.”

  “We can have them bragging about stealing Sony Walkmans from professors!” I add. “Robbing money boxes on the boardwalk. Spraying graffiti in drippy red paint…”

  “If we do it right,” says Schuyler, “those guys will freak out! Just like Claudius does in Hamlet.”

  We all look at him.

  He shrugs. “Aunt Kathy showed me the mousetrap scene in Hamlet. Claudius is Hamlet’s uncle, who killed Hamlet’s father so he could marry Hamlet’s mother.”

  “So Hamlet is like a soap opera?” says Jeff.

  “Sort of,” says Schuyler.

  “Wait a second,” says Bill, sounding practical again as we enter the 7-Eleven. “Those other guys had to rob, cheat, and steal to raise the entry fee. How are we g
oing to come up with five hundred bucks?”

  “I’ll give it to you!” says the man behind the counter, throwing up both his arms. “Don’t shoot me. Please! I’ll give you all the money in the cash register.”

  We all stare at him.

  “Huh?” I say.

  He lowers one hand to gesture at us. “You’re robbers, right?”

  “Um, no. We just came in for a Slurpee.”

  “Then what’s with the disguises?”

  We turn to look at our reflections in the plate-glass windows. We forgot we were in makeup and costumes.

  Yep. If I saw us coming in, I’d freak out, too!

  CHAPTER 62

  We explain to the store clerk who we are and why we look so weird.

  We also promise to give him two free tickets to the show. And then we all buy Slurpees and pose for a picture with him.

  We head back to the church and tell Ms. O’Mara our idea.

  “It might work,” she says. “Shakespeare would be proud.”

  “There’s only one small hitch,” I say.

  “What?”

  “We need to come up with five hundred dollars for the Battle of the Bands entry fee.”

  “Without stealing it,” adds Schuyler. “Because I’m not goin’ back to the slammer. Ya hear me, copper? I’m not goin’ back!”

  We all laugh. Schuyler does a good gangster movie impression.

  “Relax,” says Ms. O’Mara. “Let me talk to a few people.”

  We finish our rehearsal. Afterward, we’re all back in the dressing room, scrubbing our faces with cold cream to wipe away the makeup. Ms. O’Mara, who looks amazing in her Titania outfit, comes in with Tony Keefer, the sitcom star, who’s playing Bottom, the funniest of the rude mechanicals, not to mention the one who gets turned into a donkey.

  “Boys and girls,” says the jolly Tony Keefer, “Kathy told me about your diabolically clever scheme. Kindly allow me to pay for your mousetrap. I’m a millionaire! Did I mention that I was on the cover of TV Guide three different times?”

  “Yes,” says Schuyler. “Four times.”

  “No. It was only three.”

  “Maybe. But you told us about it four!”

  Now Latoya Sherron comes into the dressing room. “And since I am one of the official judges for the contest, I don’t think you kids will have any trouble at all winding up in the show. You just need to have an act and a name for your group.”

  “We’ve got both!” I say.

  And then we free-form a few improvised verses for our musical mousetrap.

  CHAPTER 63

  We keep rehearsing our Battle of the Bands number at every Midsummer Night’s Dream rehearsal.

  We have only a week to work out our routine, complete with break-dance moves.

  Break dancing, by the way, was a very acrobatic style of dancing where you did all sorts of crazy moves and stunts and usually ended up breaking something. An arm, a leg, a wrist.

  Jeff Cohen and I work on the lyrics for our Toxic Sludge number. Meredith finds some backing samples to scratch out on a turntable. Bill turns his mouth into a beatbox.

  Fortunately, our scenes for the Shakespeare show are all in pretty good shape. We open ten days after the Battle of the Bands—on the same stage.

  When our “Toxic Sludge” parody rap is also in good shape, I get ambitious. On the night of the big Battle of the Bands show, I arrange for Sophia and Victoria to accidentally (on purpose) show up backstage to wish Schuyler and Jeff luck.

  “I’m sorry Jacky said all those mean and horrible things about you,” Sophia tells Schuyler.

  “Me too,” says Schuyler, who’s dressed all in black leather like a punk rocker. “But she and I are cool now.”

  “What about us?” asks Sophia, batting her eyelashes.

  “We’re super-cool.”

  “Good. Then, since we’re officially dating…”

  Schuyler looks a little nervous when Sophia says that. Boys usually do.

  “… I have to be honest with you, Schuyler. I don’t like what you’ve done with your hair. That spiky Mohawk with the blue tips? I hate it. Sorry. I do.”

  Schuyler laughs. “It’s part of the costume. For the show tonight.”

  “Oh. Right. You’re in showbiz. Like Jacky. Well, we can work on that.…”

  They drift off, so I go make sure Victoria and Jeff are doing okay, too.

  “You’re not dressing up as a cow for this evening’s performance?” Victoria says when she sees Jeff in his hip-hop costume.

  “No. Tonight, I’m DJ Jazzy Jeffrey.”

  “Oh. It’s a whole new role?”

  “Yep.”

  “My. You are extremely versatile and talented.”

  “That I am!” says Jeff, wiggling his eyebrows.

  And then, gag me with a spoon, he and Victoria kiss. I’m serious.

  “Jacky Hart?” calls out a guy wearing a headset and carrying a clipboard. I figure he’s the stage manager for the Battle of the Bands.

  “Yes, sir?” I say, grateful to have something to look at besides Victoria and Jeff’s smooch-fest. By the way, I could totally tell that Victoria had been studying how-to-kiss manuals to prepare for her big moment with Jeff.

  All the couples are back together. It’s like Shakespeare said, “All’s well that ends well.” Actually, he didn’t say it. He just used it as a title for a play.

  “You’re up next,” says the stage manager, ticking a list on his clipboard. “This is your five-minute warning.”

  I grin because the stage manager should really be warning Ringworm and Bubblebutt.

  We’re about to spring our mousetrap on ’em!

  CHAPTER 64

  We assemble in the wings and wait for the Bruce Springsteen tribute group to finish their set. They call themselves the D Street Band instead of the E Street Band. They probably should get a D for destroying the Boss’s big hit “Born to Run.”

  Bubblebutt and Ringworm see us waiting in the wings.

  Bubblebutt looks semi-shy, with his head hanging down. I get the feeling there’s been a switch in their rankings. Bob, or Bubblebutt, used to call the shots. Now it seems that Ringworm has been bullying him this summer. The bully has become the bullied.

  “What are you doing here, Jacky Ha-Ha?” sneers Ringworm. “Why are you dressed up like that?”

  “You mean like you?” says Schuyler.

  “How come you’re not in jail, Skee-Ball? Everybody knows you’re the one who spray-painted all that Fat Guts graffiti up and down the boardwalk.”

  “You mean,” I say, “that’s what you wanted everybody to think when you did it, right?”

  “Ha! I didn’t do nothing.”

  “Which means you did something.”

  “Huh?”

  “They call it grammar. Study it sometime!”

  The D Street Band strum their final chord and take a bow. Their friends and family applaud politely. Bob is looking at me like he wishes he could say he’s sorry. But he doesn’t.

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen,” booms the announcer through the mammoth speakers ringing the stage, “please welcome our next group, representing Shakespeare Down the Shore, here they are, one of Latoya Sherron’s personal faves—the Band of Bards!”

  The audience goes crazy. (Don’t forget, I have a HUGE family.) I give Ringworm a wink.

  “Pay close attention to the lyrics,” I tell him. “I think you’ll enjoy them.”

  “Not as much as you are going to enjoy ours!” shouts Ringworm. “You’re just like Schuyler. You’re a thief, Jacky Ha-Ha!”

  At that second, I didn’t know what he was talking about. I couldn’t worry about it either. We were on!

  We rush onstage and strike our opening break-dance poses. Meredith scratches out a riff on the turntable. Bill lays down a steady beat into a microphone pushed tight to his lips. We launch into our rap about Toxic Sludge—a punk band of roving criminals terrorizing Seaside Heights.

  Everybody watching t
he show is cracking up.

  Except, of course, the members of Toxic Trash waiting in the wings. Ringworm is seething. If life were a cartoon, there’d be steam shooting out of his ears. Bob, on the other hand, is looking embarrassed. Like he wishes Ringworm weren’t his friend. Like he wishes he could just disappear.

  We repeat the line with Bob’s nickname in it.

  “We sprayed graffiti, laughed off our bubble butts. Did it up in red, yo! We’re ye Fat Guts!”

  “And though this might just make you squirm,” ad-libs Schuyler. “My first mate is called Ringworm!”

  I can’t blame Schuyler. After all, Bubblebutt and Ringworm totally tried to trash his good name and make everybody think he was the one doing all the illegal stuff. It’s only fair that he gets to return the favor.

  I glance off into the wings.

  Ringworm (I really do need to learn his name someday) is furious—and not just because we’ve worked him into our rap and told Seaside Heights what he’s been doing on his summer vacation. He’s mad because Bob is leaving!

  He’s taking off his studded leather gloves, combing out his Mohawk, and heading home.

  Huzzah! Our mousetrap worked!

  As we prance offstage triumphantly, Ringworm is smiling.

  “Did you enjoy that?” asks Schuyler.

  “Yeah,” says Ringworm. “That was super-cute. You looked like a bunch of ballerinas out there. But you know what, Sky-dork? You’re going to enjoy our song even better.”

  “What?” I say with a laugh. “You’re doing a solo act? Looks like your partner in crime abandoned you.”