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by Pete Hautman

  Mrs. Schutlebecker is delighted to talk to me about her son, Virgil.

  “He’s famous, you know,” she says.

  “I know,” I say. “He’s one of the fastest eaters in the world.”

  “Yes, but I can’t take credit for that. Our dinners at home were always quite civilized.”

  “I’m sure they were. Have you seen Virgil lately?”

  “I’ll be seeing him tonight. He’s coming over for dinner, all the way from Rockford. Poor boy, he’s been under the weather the past few days, so I’m making him my famous chicken soup.”

  “Did Virgil tell you about the hot dog he sold on BuyBuy?”

  “No, I don’t believe he did.”

  I tell her about the half dog — how Jooky Garafalo lost to Joey Chestnut, and how I found the half dog for sale on BuyBuy. Every so often she says, “Oh, my!” or “Oh, dear!” At one point, as I’m explaining how I think the AutoBuyBuy bidding was rigged — how the mystery bidder stopped as soon as I hit my limit — she interrupts me.

  “I just don’t see how that can be. Why, Darla works for them!”

  “Darla?”

  “Virgil’s wife. She works for BuyBuy. They’re based in Rockford, you know. I can’t believe she would allow a mistake like that.”

  “Mrs. Schutlebecker, I don’t think it was a mistake.” I take a deep breath. “I think your son and his wife rigged the system. The hot dog he sold me was a fake. I talked to Jooky Garafalo. He told me Virgil paid him twenty dollars to sign the fake certificate.”

  I’m not at all sure I’ve convinced her, or what she’ll do even if she believes me, but I keep talking.

  “I just thought you should know,” I say after I’m done explaining. “Before I go to the police.”

  “Police? Why would you do that?”

  “Your son stole two thousand dollars from me,” I say.

  She doesn’t say anything, but I can hear the air whistling in and out through her nose.

  “That boy,” she says, a new, sharper tone entering her voice. “That boy will be the death of me. If I don’t kill him first.”

  When Mom gets home, I’m under the picnic table using a wrench to snug up the leg bolts.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  “Fixing the table.”

  “It was broken?”

  “Mal took it apart.”

  “Where is Mal?”

  “In his room, rocking out.”

  “Oh. I bought some kohlrabi.”

  “I’m sure Mal will love it.” Not.

  Mal does not love kohlrabi.

  The next morning, Mal and I are getting ready to go for a walk when the postal carrier delivers an Express Mail envelope postmarked Galena, Illinois. Inside is a check for two thousand dollars.

  “Good news, Mal,” I say.

  “Okay, David.” He puts on his headphones.

  “Let’s go show Mom.”

  Mom is at her desk working on her laptop. I hand her the check.

  “See? I told you!”

  She frowns and reads, “Katherine Schutlebecker . . . that would be this Virgil Schutlebecker’s mother?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I can see how Virgil turned into such a reprobate,” she says. “Letting his mother pay for his misdeeds.”

  “He’s still in trouble with her,” I say. “No more chicken soup for him. In fact, Mrs. Schutlebecker told me she was going to dump the whole pot over his head when he showed up. I wonder if she did it.”

  “I wouldn’t waste the soup,” Mom says. “But I suppose every mother has her own way of dealing with her problem child.” She narrows her eyes at me.

  I give her my best grin. She tries to hold on to the stern look, but her scowl breaks into a smile. She reaches up and rumples my hair.

  “You’re okay,” she says.

  “Okay!” Mal, sunglassed and headphoned, is using his outdoor voice.

  “Hang on, Mal, we’ll go in a minute.” I look back at Mom. “Does this mean I get to keep the money I won?” I ask.

  “For college,” she says.

  “Okay, but . . . technically, it’s my money, right?”

  “Technically?” she says. “Technically, you are a minor. Technically, you stole my credit-card number.”

  “I have to pay Cyn and HeyMan.”

  “I will write them checks, as I told you. But the other four thousand goes in your college fund.”

  “I was thinking about giving half of it to Egon Belt.”

  “Who is Egon Belt?”

  “He’s the reason I won.”

  “You want to give two thousand dollars to a man you hardly know?” Mom says.

  “He let me tie him in the qualifier. He could have beat me, but he didn’t. And if he hadn’t got sick, he probably would have beat me Saturday.”

  “Yes, but if the situation were reversed, do you think he’d give you half his prize money?”

  “I don’t know. Does that matter? It’s not about what somebody else would do; it’s about what’s right. Right?”

  “It’s a lot of money,” she says.

  “Suppose it was only ten bucks. What would be the right thing to do then?”

  She doesn’t have an answer for that.

  “Wait a week,” she says. “Think about it, okay?” She looks past me. “Your brother is waiting for you.”

  “Okay!” Mal shouts.

  One week later, HeyMan and I ride our bikes ten miles to Halibut, Iowa.

  “You sure you want to do this?” HeyMan says as we pedal up a long, shallow rise.

  “How many times you going to ask me that?”

  “How many times have I asked you so far?”

  “At least five times in the last ten minutes.”

  “I’m gonna ask you all the way to Halibut.”

  “Give me a break, Hay. I’ve already been through this with my mom. She thinks I’m nuts, too.”

  “Your mother is a wise woman.”

  “Yeah, but she doesn’t have to be me.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I mean I have to live with myself. If I don’t do this, I’ll feel guilty for the rest of my life.”

  “You’ll get over it.”

  I decide to change the subject. “So what’s the deal with you and Cyn?”

  That takes him by surprise. He slows down as we reach the top of the hill.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you guys, you know, boyfriend-girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  “How can you not know something like that?”

  “Cyn says she wants to keep her options open.”

  “What options? We live in Vacaville!”

  HeyMan speeds up. I pedal harder to catch him, and when I do, he says, “I guess you could say we’re dating. But we’re not exactly advertising it.” We’re riding side by side, but he doesn’t look at me. “Are you cool with that?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I don’t know. Because we’re the Three Musketeers?”

  “Cyn and I talked about it, Hay. We’re cool.”

  HeyMan nods. I can feel him relax.

  “I think you guys would make a great couple,” I say. We pedal the rest of the way to Halibut without talking.

  Halibut is even smaller than Vacaville. HeyMan waits outside while I go into the town’s only café — just a counter and half a dozen tables. The daily special is the loose-meat sandwich combo. From the looks of the sign, it’s the daily special every day. I ask the waitress if she knows where Egon Belt lives.

  “Egon?” she says. “Egon has a place over on the south end of town. Look for the house with everything perfect.”

  “What do you mean, ‘everything perfect’?”

  “You’ll know it when you see it.”

  “Do you have an address?”

  She laughs. “Child, this is Halibut. You go more than eight blocks in any direction, you’ll either be wading through hog waste or los
t in a cornfield.” She points. “Just head down that way; you’ll find Egon.”

  I go back outside.

  “She says go south,” I tell HeyMan.

  “How far?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Four blocks away we come to a house that is, as the waitress said, perfect: a small one-story rambler painted blindingly white, with a matching white picket fence. Crisp black shutters frame the windows. The lawn is flat, utterly dandelion-free, and intensely green. The bushes in front are sculpted into precise cylinders. My dad would love it.

  “It looks like a cartoon house,” HeyMan says.

  On the mailbox the name BELT is spelled out in perfect, perfectly spaced block letters.

  “You want me to come with?” HeyMan asks.

  “That’s okay,” I say. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  I let myself in through the gate and walk up the short sidewalk. The pavers have been set in place with utmost precision. The doormat — WELCOME — is perfectly aligned with the edges of the landing. I press the doorbell. A few seconds later, the door opens.

  Egon Belt is dressed exactly the same as always: neatly pressed coveralls that look brand-new, a crisp chambray shirt, and the full, perfectly shaped, uniformly gray beard. He doesn’t say anything; he just looks at me.

  “Hi,” I say. “Remember me?”

  “Certainly,” he says. “Congratulations again.”

  “I wanted to give you this.” I thrust the check at him.

  He examines it without making a move to take it, then says, “Why?”

  “Because the Gurge poisoned you. He squirted some stuff on your pizza.”

  “I know that,” he says.

  “You knew?”

  He nods. “Virgil has used that nasty ipecac trick before. I blame myself — I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “I saw it. I could have said something, but I didn’t.”

  “Heat of the moment, son. It’s not your responsibility to take care of the other contestants.” He shrugs, then smiles. “It was almost worth it to see what happened next. That was a good move, giving Virgil a taste of his own medicine.”

  “You saw?”

  “You weren’t that smooth. You’re lucky nobody else noticed.”

  “So you knew I cheated?”

  Egon Belt laughs. “You didn’t cheat, son. You took advantage of a situation, turned the tables, and eliminated the real cheater.”

  “But I should have said something. You should have won.”

  He shakes his head. “I wasn’t about to catch up with Virgil. That boy was on fire. But he had that ipecac in his pocket, and he just couldn’t stand not to use it.”

  “If he hadn’t used it, you would have got second place at least.”

  “Free pizza for a year? No thank you. Anyway, I don’t get up to Vacaville all that often.”

  “But I want to split my winnings with you.”

  “You’re an idealist, son. I admire that in a young man. But I’m not going to take your money. I saw the way you put down those last two pizzas. The great Kobayashi himself would have bowed down to you. Fact is, if Virgil hadn’t pulled his little stunt, I think you might’ve passed up the both of us. How many slices did you eat?”

  “Fifty.”

  “Fifty.” He shakes his head slowly. “Fifty! You keep that money, son. You earned it.” He starts to close the door.

  “Wait!”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you. Thanks for letting me tie you at the qualifier.”

  “It was a legitimate tie. You have to learn to give yourself credit, son. Pat yourself on the back. It doesn’t hurt. And spend that money on something besides pizza.”

  He closes the door. I look at the check, fold it, and put it back in my pocket.

  “Well?” HeyMan says when I get back to the sidewalk.

  “He told me to give myself a pat on the back and keep the money.”

  “That’s what I told you. Except for the pat-on-the-back part.”

  “He said I might have won anyway.”

  “Do you think you would’ve?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” I twist around.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to give myself a pat on the back.”

  HeyMan reaches over and claps me on the shoulder. “There you go.”

  “Thanks. You hungry?”

  “I could eat. You?”

  “I could go for a loose-meat combo.” I smile. “My treat.”

  School started last week. I see HeyMan and Cyn every day, but we don’t hang out as much as we used to. The boyfriend-girlfriend thing seems to be working for them. I have a girlfriend now too, sort of. Actually, I’m not sure what we are, but I’ve been seeing a lot of Alicia Moreno lately. She likes pizza almost as much as I do, but not the pizza they serve at school, so the two of us usually skip lunch and walk over to Pigorino’s after school and split a sausage-and-mushroom. Two slices for her, the rest for me. At the moment we are more like eating partners than boyfriend-girlfriend, but you never know.

  Bridgette has a new boyfriend, a guy named Gaarth, with two a’s. Gaarth has blond dreadlocks down to his shoulder blades, multiple studs in both ears, a ring in his right nostril, and he wears a serape. He starts every sentence with the word “Basically,” as in, “Basically, the military-industrial patriarchy is our species’ suicide mechanism.” Gaarth wants to study salamanders because, “Basically, when the amphibians go, we all go.” He announced the first time we met him that he did not believe in having children. “Basically, we’ll all be dead in fifty years, so what’s the point in reproducing?”

  I haven’t seen any signs that Gaarth has a sense of humor, but he’s a lot more interesting than Derek. Also, Mal likes him.

  Mom and Dad were alarmed when Bridgette showed up wearing a nose ring of her own, but they seem to be coming around.

  “Maybe it’s just a phase,” Mom says. “That’s what college is for — to experiment, to try new things.”

  I don’t know if she’s talking about Gaarth or the nose ring. Probably both.

  “I’m thinking about getting a tongue stud,” I say.

  Mom gives me the stink eye.

  “Just kidding.”

  “You had better be. In any case, I’m sure one day Bridgette will meet her perfect young man.”

  “You mean perfect like I was?” Dad says.

  “Even more perfect.”

  I’ve seen pictures of Dad in college. He looked kind of like Gaarth, only in a Nirvana T-shirt instead of a serape.

  I’ll be in college too before long, probably at a state school, because unlike Bridgette, my grades aren’t exactly scholarship material. But I’m pretty sure I’ll do okay, because I always figure things out — one way or another. I might enter some eating contests to help pay for it.

  Mal will still be at home, of course. He will always be at home, despite Mom’s dreams for him. Since the contest, he has learned two more words: “mine” and “Arfie.” I think Mom’s bummed that he still hasn’t learned “Mom” or “Dad,” but I know he’ll get there. He has his own way of coming at things. I also know now that although I’m the middle kid in a typically messed-up family, I am not the slider that welds the two halves of the bun. That’s Mal’s job. I know that the way I know the sun will rise. But I also know he’ll be okay, because we will always be here to take care of him, and Mal will be here for us, teaching us his Rules, holding us together.

  Writing may be an expression of one’s inner self, but it is not a solitary act. None of us are truly alone, and for that we should be grateful.

  With that in mind, I’d like to offer many thanks, beginning with my parents, who raised seven wild animals and gently nudged them to become human. And to my six amazing siblings, who inspire me every single day in countless ways.

  To my Minnesota kid-lit friends, who form a vast and supportive community of writers, educators, and booksellers here in the Twin Cities, for the reality checks, th
e encouragement, the companionship, and the laughs.

  To the team at Candlewick, whose love and passion for children’s literature are unsurpassed, and especially to my editor, the redoubtable Katie Cunningham, who guided me to the heart of this book over a platter of sliders at Manny’s.

  To Nancy and Steve St. Clair, for their insights into six-hundred-pound butter cows and other Iowa arcana.

  To my literary agent, Jennifer Flannery, who has stuck with me through two decades of genrehopping madness.

  Finally, and foremost, to my partner and muse, Mary Logue.

  I thank you all.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2017 by Pete Hautman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  First electronic edition 2017

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number pending

  Candlewick Press

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  Somerville, Massachusetts 02144

  visit us at www.candlewick.com