by Geoff Rodkey
And I felt like it had to be the whole animal for my plan to really work.
For a while, I thought maybe I could find one just lying around, like a pigeon or a rat. But I spent some time looking around on the street, and I couldn’t find any.
I was actually glad about that. It’s not like I wanted to pick up a dead pigeon.
But if I couldn’t buy one or find one, I was pretty much out of luck, dead-animal-wise.
Unless I wanted to kill something myself, and I’m not so into that. Ed. Note: True. R can’t even kill water bugs in the tub.
So I decided to get Xander involved, because he’s good at thinking up stuff that’s kind of gross and also a little mean.
CLAUDIA
I’m sorry—I know I promised to give this whole chapter to my brother, but there are two things everyone needs to know about Xander Billington.
First, he is the devil. Seriously. He might even be worse than Athena Cohen, which is saying a lot.
Second, Xander likes to tell people he’s “old school.” And he totally is, but not the way he wants to be. He’s not the cool kind of old school—he’s the OLD kind of old school.
Here is what I mean by that: back in first grade, when Mrs. Beres was telling us the story of the first Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims who came to America on the Mayflower, Xander yelled, “My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was one of them!”
Everybody thought he was lying, including Mrs. Beres. Ed. Note: Xander lied a lot in 1st grade (also 2nd-6th grade) But it turned out to be true.
Xander is ACTUALLY RELATED to somebody who was on the Mayflower.
Which is why it’s so completely ridiculous that he tries to talk like a rapper from the South Bronx.
XANDER BILLINGTON, soccer idiot/Mayflower descendant
Reese was all, “Yo! Top secret project!” And I was down with that.
But then he was all, “I want to creep something stanky into my sister’s backpack.”
And I was all, “Yo, that is WAY too easy. Duh! Poop.”
REESE
I couldn’t do poop. It was just too nasty. I mean, whose poop would I use? Mine? Eeeeech.
And using somebody else’s poop would be ten times worse.
XANDER
I was all, “Fine, what-eva. Get some stinky cheese, yo.”
REESE
THAT was a good idea. Except it had to be weird cheese. Normal stuff like cheddar doesn’t even really smell that bad.
I went to Zabar’s, because they have a whole counter full of weird cheese. I picked up some of the wedges and started sniffing them, and the guy behind the counter went, “Can I help you?”
And I went, “What’s your smelliest cheese?”
And he went, “Apwas.”
[Editor’s note: I do not know how to spell this cheese name.]
But the Apwas was $27.99 for a little round box. Which was cray! I mean, I wanted revenge and all, but not $27.99 worth of it.
So I went, “What’s your SECOND-smelliest cheese?”
And he went, “Gorgonzola.”
The great thing about the Gorgonzola was you could get just a tiny wedge of it. Which still cost $3.82. But I had five bucks, so I was okay with that. I was going to tell Ashley the cheese was for a science project, but she didn’t even ask why I bought it.
Ashley can be kind of spacey.
Claudia must have been expecting me to try to mess with her, because when I got home, her backpack wasn’t lying around anywhere—she had it in her bedroom, and the door was closed.
So I had to play it cool for a little while.
CLAUDIA
I’m sorry. I hate to keep interrupting Reese’s chapter. And I don’t want to be mean to my mentally challenged brother. But what he’s saying is completely ridiculous.
First of all, I wasn’t expecting Reese to mess with me at all. The reason my backpack wasn’t lying around is because I am a responsible person who puts her things away where they belong. My backpack is NEVER just “lying around.”
Second, Reese did NOT play it cool. At all.
He came charging into my room, looking all excited and holding a Zabar’s bag. When he saw me sitting there, he got all deer-in-the-headlights confused for a second.
Then he yelled “WAZZZZZUUUP!” and ran right back out again.
At that point, I had a little mental argument with myself.
On the one hand, I suspected the Zabar’s bag was something gross and smelly he was planning to hide in my room, or possibly my backpack. On the other hand, even though Reese is not exactly the most brilliant mind of his generation, I didn’t think he’d be so incredibly lame and uncreative that he’d try to get back at me by doing EXACTLY what I did to him.
So I decided to give him a little test. I poked my head into his room and said, “I’m going to go for a walk. Do you want anything from the store?”
Which, if he had even the tiniest little speck of a brain, he would have realized was very, very suspicious.
Then I left the house for ten minutes.
REESE
Eventually, Claudia went out for a while, and I snuck into her room and hid the cheese in one of those little outside pockets of her backpack next to a pack of gum and some hair scrunchies.
I actually hid it TOO well, because even though it started to stink right away, it took her two days to find it.
CLAUDIA
It took me two MINUTES to find it. Not even. It was more like two seconds.
What took me two days was deciding how to respond.
The first thing I did was get an airtight storage container from the kitchen, seal the stinky cheese in it, and stick it way back in the rear of the fridge.
The second thing I did was call Sophie. When I explained the situation to her, she had a brilliant idea.
SOPHIE
I was like, “Why don’t we eat it?”
CLAUDIA
Brilliant. Seriously.
But it was Tuesday when I called her, so Sophie was on her way from ballet to violin. And we’re both busy Wednesdays, which meant the cheese had to stay in the fridge until Thursday.
REESE
By the second day, the cheese in Claudia’s backpack stank like crazy. I could smell it from halfway across the cafeteria.
CLAUDIA
Reese is out of his mind. The cheese was in the fridge THE WHOLE TIME.
But I’ve never told him that, so the only way he’ll ever find out is if he reads this book. Which, now that I think of it, is actually an excellent way for me to tell if he ever reads it. He says he will, but I doubt it. The only book Reese has ever read that wasn’t assigned in school was a Pokémon handbook when he was eight years old. And even then he mostly just looked at the pictures.
I’m getting off track here. Back to the cheese.
REESE
It stank so bad that Xander went up to my sister in the cafeteria and yelled, “YO, CLAUDIA—WUT UP WITH YOU STANKIN’ LIKE ROTTEN CHEESE?”
And then Claudia said, “I don’t know—maybe it’s ’cause I’ve been standing next to your mother?”
I have to admit that was pretty funny. Everybody laughed except Xander. He got really mad.
Like, kind of a little TOO mad. Xander’s got a temper.
CLAUDIA
Xander is also the world’s biggest idiot. The cheese was literally a mile away when he said that.
But the thing is, I shouldn’t have humiliated him in front of everybody like that. Because it turned him into my sworn enemy.
And like I said before, Xander is evil. Which made him a MUCH more dangerous enemy than my brother.
Like, if this was World War II, Reese was basically Italy—definitely a bad guy [Editor’s note: Weird that Italy was a bad guy in World War II, right? I was very surprised to learn this, too. But it’s right there on Wikipedia.], although not the bad guy people were really worried about, because Italy is just not that scary.
And Xander was Germany—a WAY more serio
us bad guy whose leader I’m not going to mention here, because Dad says you should never, ever compare anybody to that particular person, since he was so much more evil than anyone else in history that if you bring him up in an argument, you will just look ridiculous.
But his name rhymes with “Fitler.”
And in this War, Xander was definitely Rhymes-With-Fitler.
But more on that in the next chapter.
Thursday afternoon, Reese was at soccer, so Sophie came over after her Korean class, and we ate the cheese on some crackers. All I can say is, Gorgonzola is delicious. Although I don’t get why it’s called Gorgonzola when it’s really just blue Ed. Note: “bleu?” cheese.
While we ate it, we talked about whether I should get back at Reese for trying to stink up my backpack or just forget the whole thing. On the one hand, I still felt bad about ruining his favorite backpack. And the way he’d tried to get back at me was not just a total fail, but also very sad and pathetic.
On the other hand, I didn’t want him to think he could mess with me and get away with it. I felt like that would send a message of weakness.
SOPHIE
What was that thing you quoted? From the guy who was president before we were born?
CLAUDIA
“This aggression will not stand.”
SOPHIE
You are so smart! Where did you learn that?
CLAUDIA
I saw it in a movie about bowling.
Anyway, even though I definitely believed his aggression should not stand, I didn’t want to do anything TOO mean. At this point, The War still wasn’t even really a full-on war. It was more like an exchange of hostilities. And I wasn’t going to be the one to escalate it into anything crazy.
That’s why I finally decided the best thing was to just mess with Reese’s head a little.
REESE
Claudia must have found the cheese while I was at soccer practice. Because when I came home that night, she was waiting in my room for me.
CLAUDIA
You know that thing evil geniuses do in old movies where they’re sitting with their back to you, and then they spin around slowly in their chair and tell you their evil plan with a wicked smile on their face?
That’s what I did. I even had a little stuffed animal in my lap that I was petting like it was a cat. Because for some reason, evil geniuses usually have pet cats.
Reese didn’t get what I was doing at all, though, because he never gets jokes if they’re even a little bit clever.
REESE
She was sitting at my desk chair, and when I came in, she went, “Hellooooo, Reese,” in this weird voice like she had a bad cold.
And I went, “What are you doing in my room?”
And she went, “I hid your cheese. HAHAHAHA!”
CLAUDIA
Ugh! He’s totally messing up my lines. I did this whole evil-genius speech in a fake British accent. It went like this:
“Hello, Reese… I’ve come to thank you for the delicious gift of your cheese. Sadly, I’m lactose intolerant. So I’ve chosen to return it to you. And since you’re so obviously fond of playing hide-and-seek, I’ve placed it in a secret location somewhere in your room. Best of luck finding it before the fumes overpower your senses, slowly driving you to the brink of insanity. MWAH-HAH-HA-HA-HA!”
I’m not actually lactose intolerant. That was part of the joke.
And it was hilarious. Seriously. Or it would have been, if I hadn’t wasted it on somebody who wasn’t smart enough to get it.
Even so, the look on my brother’s face when I told him I’d hidden the cheese in his room was pretty great.
REESE
I spent, like, an hour looking for the cheese before I gave up. Claudia hid it REALLY well. But I figured eventually it’d start to stink bad enough that I could track it down just by the smell. And sure enough, after a couple of weeks, my closet started to reek so bad I knew the cheese must be in there somewhere.
But I still can’t find it. And Claudia won’t tell me where it is.
So I’m stuck with a closet full of reeky cheese that I can’t find. It’s pretty gross.
CLAUDIA
I have no idea what’s making Reese’s closet stink like that.
But it is DEFINITELY NOT CHEESE.
(Eeeeeew.)
CHAPTER 6
FITLER JOINS THE WAR
CLAUDIA
Up until now, The War had been pretty one-sided. Ever since Reese’s cruel and unfair sneak attack on me in the cafeteria, I had basically kicked his butt all over the map. So I figured he’d learned his lesson, and that’d be the end of it. Even if he hadn’t, he wasn’t clever enough to launch a counterattack that could really hurt me.
Unfortunately, The Cheese Incident (which, if this were French class, I would call L’Affaire du Fromage) had a major and completely accidental side effect: it brought Xander into The War as an enemy combatant.
And Xander is the devil. Or at least the devil’s incredibly obnoxious, thinks-he’s-cool-but-is-actually-an-idiot little punk nephew.
REESE
I was mad angry at Claudia by now. She ruined my backpack AND my closet! AND she got away with it!
Both times!
If I didn’t do something, I was going to spend the rest of my life getting pwned Ed. Note: not a typo (google it) with dead fish and smelly cheese.
Plus, it was making me feel like a loser. There’s this team in our soccer league, Knickerbocker FC, that gets beat like 9–0 every game. They’re a total doormat, and everybody either laughs at them or feels sorry for them. That’s how it was getting to be with me. I was like the Knickerbocker FC of my own family.
I didn’t like that at all. I needed a win, bad.
But the good news was I had somebody else on my team now. Because after Claudia ripped on him in front of everybody with that joke about his mom, Xander was almost as mad at my sister as I was.
And when Xander gets mad, he gets even.
XANDER
I was all, “Yo! We gots to PWN her, babylicious! We gots to HAMMER DOWN on that!”
CLAUDIA
Honestly, it is the saddest thing ever that Xander talks like this. I almost feel sorry for him that he thinks it’s cool. (I bet Fitler was a total fail at being cool when he was in junior high, too. Come to think of it, that would actually explain a lot about world history.)
REESE
Xander said if we really wanted to mess with Claudia, the thing to do was to get other girls involved. Because according to Xander, girls are like sharks—when they smell blood, they all go nuts and swarm in for the kill.
XANDER
True dat. Most of the time, boys just be playing. Like, a boy’ll smack you down, and then be, like, “It’s all good, Bro-seph.” And then you’re cool again.
But girls don’t play, yo. They are VICIOUS. They will cut you deep.
And they all be on ClickChat 24/7, rilin’ each other up.
REESE
When Xander told me all we had to do was post something nasty about Claudia online and all the girls in our ClickChat circle would blow it up huge, that kind of made me nervous.
Because even though I hate Claudia, she’s still my sister.
But Xander promised it wouldn’t be THAT bad. Like, it’d be bad for a couple of days. And then everybody’d forget about it.
So I was like, “Okay. What do we post?”
And he was like, “What’s the straight-up nastiest thing she does?”
I thought about it for a while, and all I could think of was sometimes when she’s watching TV in the living room and she doesn’t think anybody’s looking at her, she picks her nose.
And Xander was like, “YO! That is stone cold! But we need video.”
So we decided he should stay overnight at my place. That way, we could stake out the living room with our iPads until we caught Claudia picking her nose on camera.
MOM AND DAD (text messages)
(MOM) Reese wants to have Xa
nder
overnight Saturday
(DAD) Do we like Xander? I forget
We do not. He is kid who broke end
table at birthday
Oh, THAT Xander
Yes. And we owe the Templemans so
I’d rather have Wyatt over instead
You can’t do that
Can’t do what?
Swap kids
Sure I can
Ask Reese
I asked. You are right. Can’t swap
So is Xander coming over Sat?
I guess so. Can’t think of good reason
to say no
Tell Reese we have plans. Then make
plans
Too late. Already told him we have
no plans
Rookie mistake. Next time let me
handle negotiation. I am a lawyer
