The Awesome, Almost 100% True Adventures of Matt & Craz

by Alan Silberberg

  While Craz stood helplessly in the background, Matt cleaned the mess and then dropped the wet tissue into the trash. “You know what?” he said, and sighed. “This is all stupid. And I still think Skip Turkle is a pig!”

  He grabbed the mouse and moved the cursor to shut down his computer. But instead of turning off, the screen lit up with a pop-up ad.

  DRAW BETTER NOW! the rectangular ad read.

  “Give me a break. Now what?”

  “Must be an ad from one of the sites we visited,” said Craz. “Just click off it.”

  Matt clicked on the X in the corner to close the annoying pop-up, but then three more identical windows opened up, each one shouting in bold caps, DRAW BETTER NOW!

  “Stupid spambots,” Matt said as he tried to navigate away from the evil ads, which now just kept multiplying on his screen. “I hate these things.”

  Craz tossed the last bite of his pizza pocket into his mouth, wiped his hands on his pants, and stepped next to Matt. “Okay, force quit. Try control-alt-delete.”

  “What do you think I’m doing?” Matt said, his fingers already spread across the keyboard in an effort to execute the kill command. The pop-up ads kept taking over the computer until Matt tried to force quit a second time. He smiled when there was a momentary hiccup on-screen that made all of the ad windows disappear. “Yes. It’s working.”

  But instead of fixing things, the forced quit triggered something even worse. The screen went to black, leaving just the cursor blinking in the empty void.

  “Dude, what did you do?” Craz said, leaning over Matt’s shoulder. He grabbed the keyboard and repeatedly pressed the escape key. At first nothing happened, but a few seconds later the computer hummed and the empty screen gave way to a bright new web page. The page had a simple design and read, Boyd T. Boone invites YOU to be the best cartoonist ever! Beneath the words was a cheesy cartoon drawing of an artist in a smock and a beret, and a large blinking icon that read, ENTER.

  “Enter?” asked Matt as he stared at the curious invitation. “Enter what?”

  “Dunno,” Craz said. He put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “But I’m ready to find out if you are.”

  8

  THE WEBSITE

  THE ENTER ICON BLINKED INVITINGLY.

  “Here goes nothing,” Matt said.

  With a simple click of the mouse, a new web page loaded and the computer screen erupted into a spinning spiral of colors, while the tiny speakers on Matt’s desk blared a music loop that sounded like it came straight from a circus sideshow.

  Craz looked at the URL of the website. “www.draw­betternow.com?” Craz said. “What kind of a name is that?”

  “Weird,” Matt said as the colorful vortex drew him in. He tried to turn off the music, but no matter what he did, the annoying jingle just repeated over and over. “Ach! This music is terrible.”

  “Actually, I kind of like it,” Craz said as he bounced along to the oompah blasts of the tuba. “Makes me want to smother my face in cotton candy.”

  The music suddenly stopped and the intro screen of twirling colors was replaced by a big, bold question set against a white background.

  TIRED OF NO ONE SEEING YOUR CARTOONS? the question asked.

  “Well, duh,” said Craz. “Click the yes button.”

  Matt clicked yes, and the first question was replaced by a second one.

  WISH YOU COULD BE A SUCCESSFUL CARTOONIST?

  “Ditto on that one,” Craz said. “Hey, I like these questions. They’re easy.”

  Again Matt clicked yes, making a third question appear on the screen.

  WANT TO BRING YOUR CARTOONS TO LIFE?

  “Bring my cartoons to life? What’s that mean?” asked Matt.

  “Simple. It means make cartoons that are so awesome, they jump off the page. The kind everyone likes. Even Turkle.”

  “Even Turkle,” repeated Matt. “I like the sound of that.”

  Matt moved the cursor so that the word “yes” was highlighted. As soon as he clicked the mouse, the question disappeared, leaving just empty white space on the screen. The computer then hummed and whirred, and the boys could hear the CPU working overtime as the hard drive spun loudly inside the computer case.

  “Now what?” asked Craz as a small video window popped open and started playing automatically.

  In the video a wide man sat hunched over a drawing table. The bulky figure had his back to the camera while he worked wildly at some unseen drawing. His right hand clutched a pen that speedily drew across the sheet of paper in front of him, and his shiny bald head bounced along as his whole body became part of the motion of his drawing hand.

  Suddenly the man just stopped, as if his batteries had run out. “Another masterpiece!” he declared, and then spun around in his chair, clutching the finished drawing in his hands.

  Matt and Craz stared at this bearlike figure, shoulders slightly curved from too many hours at a drawing board. His bare scalp and round face were accented by a big bushy mustache, and two furry caterpillar eyebrows hung like drapes above his eyes.

  Smiling at the camera, the man then revealed the sketch he’d just made—a squiggly-lined cartoon of two boys who looked vaguely familiar.

  “Hey,” said Matt. “That looks like . . .”

  “Us,” Craz said, his mind struggling to figure out how that could be even remotely possible. “That kid’s even wearing my shirt.”

  “It’s just a coincidence,” said Matt. “Or a trick.”

  As if he had heard them, the man in the video flashed a toothy grin and then squished the cartoon into a ball before he chucked it off camera and gave his chair a big spin so that he went around and around like a little kid on a ride.

  “Cartooning . . . is . . . fun!” he shouted, before stopping suddenly and looking directly at the boys. “Greetings,” he began. “Boyd T. Boone here, and yup, if you’re watching this, then you’re probably already wondering if you want to cartoon with Boyd T. Boone. That answer better be, ‘You betcha.’ Otherwise you clicked on to the wrong place.”

  “Boyd T. Boone?” asked Matt. “Never heard of him.”

  “Of course you’ve probably never heard of me,” the man in the video continued. “But that’s no reason not to listen closely to what I have to offer.”

  “You heard the man,” said Craz. “Let’s hear what he’s got to say.”

  Boyd T. Boone flashed his grin again. “I know what you want. You want to be taken seriously. You want to make people laugh. You want folks to stand up and notice your cartoons. Am I right?”

  The boys both nodded.

  Boyd T. Boone held up a mysterious purple satchel. “Well, then, just order my special one-of-a-kind cartooning kit, and I promise your world will never be the same.” He dangled the purple pouch, letting it swing back and forth in his fingers.

  “Cartooning kit! See, Matt? That’s what I’m talking about! Told you we just needed the right supplies.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Matt wasn’t quite so positive. “What’s the catch?”

  “It’s simple,” Boyd T. Boone said as he walked close to the camera so that his face filled the screen. “Use my kit. Change your lives.” Then he squished his caterpillar eyebrows together and got serious. “Order now before it’s too late!”

  The video ended, and the web page changed to a large blinking icon that simply read, ORDER HERE. A digital clock appeared beneath the words and began counting down from sixty seconds. Fifty-nine . . . fifty-eight . . . fifty-seven . . .

  “Whoa. A time limit? Come on. Click it, Matt.” Craz was sure that ordering the kit was the right thing to do. Who cared if the guy in the video was a little odd?

  “No way,” said Matt. “This is totally
creepy.” He reached for the mouse, wanting to click off the web page. “Besides, we don’t even know what this is going to cost us.”

  Ding! The figure $29.95 popped up on the screen.

  “Thirty bucks?” Matt said. “That’s way too much money.”

  Ding! A red X appeared over the $29.95. Next to it a flashing $10 appeared. The countdown clock was down to thirty-six seconds.

  “Ten bucks!” Craz said. “Even if all we get is a chewed-up pencil and a piece of an eraser, we can risk ten bucks.”

  Matt hesitated. “I don’t know, man.”

  Craz got serious. “Come on. Aren’t you sick and tired of no one knowing how good we are? And why is that? Because nobody gets a chance to ever see our stuff.” Craz sighed. “If no one sees what we do, it’s the same as not doing it.”

  “That’s not true,” said Matt. “I like to make cartoons for myself, not just so other kids see them.”

  “Fine. You keep filling your notebooks with stuff that no one’s going to look at,” Craz said. “But I’m telling you now, the only way to go from the kid in the back of the class who just doodles to the star cartoonist of the school is to get our stuff copied and out to other kids. We have to be seen to be noticed!”

  The countdown clock on the screen was at fourteen seconds.

  “I do want to be noticed,” Matt said desperately. “It makes me sick that Diesel gets all the attention.”

  “You can draw circles around that little skunk.”

  “I know. His cartoons aren’t even funny.”

  “Not like ours, my friend. That’s why we need to take a chance. Five bucks each. That’s all it takes.”

  The clock was at eight seconds, seven . . . six . . .

  Craz grabbed the mouse and moved the cursor over the ORDER icon. “Well?” he asked. “Do it?”

  The clock counted down. Four . . . three . . . two . . .

  “Do it!” Matt shouted.

  Craz clicked the mouse, and the ORDER button disappeared. Both guys let out a sigh of relief.

  “See?” Craz said. “Taking chances is a good thing!”

  Matt was about to agree, but then his whole computer came to a crashing halt. The screen went black. The power shut down. The hard drive gave off a sickening spinning sound.

  “Oh, great,” Matt moaned. “I bet we just downloaded a virus.”

  “You worry too much, Matt,” Craz said. “If it’s a virus, I can fix it. Look on the bright side. We took a chance. That’s got to be a good thing.”

  Matt just shook his head. “Boyd T. Boone. What kind of a name is that?”

  9

  GYM

  HATING MONDAYS WAS A NO-BRAINER. AND Tuesdays were no good because Craz and Matt had to sit through the painfully dull health class, where Mrs. Petrone, the teacher with the most peculiar overbite on earth, talked on and on about how adolescent boys’ and girls’ bodies change and grow like delicate flowers.

  A typical Petrone-ism: “Showering often may reduce unwelcome body odors. Soap is your friend.”

  Soap is your friend? Try keeping a straight face listening to things like that!

  But as terrible as Mrs. Petrone’s Tuesday puberty PowerPoints were, Thursday was a much worse school day for the simple reason that Thursday was gym day.

  “Let’s go, Worfle,” Coach Arakanian bellowed. “You can’t hang up there all day.” The wire-haired, bulky gym teacher shook his head in disgust while the rest of the class snickered and stared up at Matt, who hung helplessly on to the climbing rope that was suspended from the gym ceiling.

  The problem? Matt was frozen in place. He’d somehow managed to pull himself halfway up the stupid rope, and now, thirty feet above his classmates, he clung fearfully to his lifeline, unable to move in either direction.

  “You can do it, Matt,” yelled Craz, trying to encourage his friend. “Use your upper body strength.”

  Matt knew he didn’t have any upper body strength, or any body strength, for that matter. “Working on it!” he shouted back while looking down at the sea of expectant faces. He considered his options. The only thing between him and spending the rest of the school year on crutches was the gym mat, which was just two inches of compressed foam covered in blue vinyl. No way it would break his fall, and he doubted Jimbo Gilligan, the biggest kid in class, would catch him, though it did make a funny cartoon in his head.

  While Matt hung on to the thick gym rope with every ounce of his energy, the jock kids started chanting, “Weak-ling! Weak-ling! Weak-ling!”

  Coach Arakanian let the bullying continue. In his beady eyes the jocks at Kilgore could do no wrong, which left plenty of room for the muscle-impaired kids to be total flailing failures.

  “Oh, man. I’ve got that nauseous thing going on again,” Craz said, watching Matt sway helplessly from side to side.

  “Tell me about it,” said Sammy Kinsella, who, along with Len Bruddle, stood behind the lean lineup of classmates who were already placing bets on Matt’s demise.

  Matt felt like a cat trapped up in a tree. A big scaredy-cat.

  Paulie Frick, the stuck-up quarterback for the Kilgore Killer Bees football team, grabbed hold of the other climbing rope. “I’ll get him down, Coach. No sweat.”

  Effortlessly Paulie got into position—two hands above his head, feet clenched tightly below. Like a toy on a string he shot up the rope.

  “Dude is like a spider monkey,” Sammy Kinsella said through his retainer spit.

  “See, this is where genetics pay off,” added Len. “In my gene pool I can barely do the doggie paddle.”

  Matt closed his eyes. He hoped when he opened them that he would be back in bed and that this whole rope-climbing fiasco would be a really bad dream.

  “Hey, dork,” Paulie called out from the parallel rope. “I’ve seen six-year-old girls with more muscles than you.”

  “Gee, thanks, Paulie,” Matt said from his position dangling above the class. “Way to boost my confidence.”

  “Like I really care about your confidence or whether you break every bone in your pathetic body. I’m just up here as eye candy for las chicas.”

  Sure enough, Paulie hung on to his rope with one hand and was flexing his muscles in the hopes that the girls’ class in the other half of the gym would notice him. Matt looked past Paulie and his muscles to where the seventh-grade girls were busy playing badminton.

  Paulie Frick whistled through his teeth so that the girls would check him out, which of course they did. Donna Gerland waved her badminton racket, and Patty Lintoff showed off with a handstand.

  Matt closed his eyes tightly, hoping he could be invisible.

  “Hey, Romeo,” Paulie said. “Wave to the ladies.”

  Matt looked again. Most of the girls were laughing and pointing at him. Matt wanted to die, which, given his precarious situation, was a distinct possibility.

  The only good news for Matt was that Cindy ­Ockabloom was too busy lacing her sneakers to look up. Even from this distance Matt could see just how pretty she looked in the saggy gray gym uniform. Her honey-brown hair was tied back in a ponytail, and Matt could almost picture that one cute freckle on the back of her neck—the one he’d stared at all year, sitting at the desk behind her during sixth grade. Matt wished he was more like Paulie and could get girls to like him just by showing up. But Matt wasn’t the kid with the muscles and perfect smile. Sure, he could draw stuff like that, but he’d never be that kind of guy.

  Paulie waved once more to the girls, then turned to Matt and hissed, “Listen, you’re going to climb down the dumb rope and get your sorry butt onto that gym mat. Got it?”

  Matt took a deep breath and then clenched his knees tightly against the rough rope bef
ore starting his slow slide down.

  “That’s gotta hurt,” Sammy slurred.

  “No doubt,” Craz said, already worried his best friend might have a hard time drawing new cartoons anytime soon.

  After he was safely on the ground and Paulie was off getting high fives from the other football players, Matt plopped down, exhausted and red-faced, onto the gym bleachers, wishing the bell would just hurry up and ring.

  “Okay, leeches,” Coach Arakanian bellowed to the class. “Fifty laps. Move it!”

  All Matt could do was moan.

  10

  THE PACKAGE

  MATT GOT OFF THE BUS AND WALKED TOWARD his house, hoping to forget the school day completely. He just wanted to grab something to eat, head to his room, and get lost in drawing. Doodling always made him feel better, which is why he knew filling a blank page with nonsense would help erase the day he’d just had.

  Ricky sat alone on the couch, watching TV with his dirty sneakers propped up on the coffee table. A carton of mocha chip ice cream sat dripping on the couch cushions, and an electric guitar lay across the canyon of his lap.

  “Hey, runt,” Ricky grunted without looking away from his favorite program. It was a rerun of one of those cop shows where the cameras follow police around as they try to catch some deadbeat thief. Ricky couldn’t get enough of that reality stuff. “Dad called. Guess what? No visit this weekend. Something about a thing at work. Deadlines. Working late. The usual stuff. I don’t even listen anymore.”

  Matt nodded. This was the third weekend in a row that his dad had to cancel. Since he’d moved out of the house three months ago the weekend stays at his condo had been getting less frequent and his excuses lamer. Before he’d separated from Matt’s mom, it hadn’t mattered as much that work was so important. His clothes had been hanging in the closet. His dirty dishes had been in the sink. Parts of him had been home even when he wasn’t. But now? Even though he only lived on the other side of town, it felt like he was gone for good.