TJ and the Quiz Kids

by Hazel Hutchins

  It was also exactly what Mr. Phelps had wanted in the first place. Brother.

  MEOW MEOW MEOW.

  “What’s wrong with T -Rex?” asked Seymour.

  “He’s hungry,” I said. “Come in the house. I’ll show you where he spent the afternoon. You’ll be amazed!”

  CHAPTER 8

  “Hey, TJ. Come see this!”

  Saturday morning I got up early, fiddled around with the old desk and watched TV for a while. When I heard Dad call from the front hall, I was pretty sure I knew what he’d found.

  “Seems to me they’ve taken it right over,” laughed Dad, pointing to the cats.

  Alaska was sound asleep, curled into the folds of the fleece hoodie I’d lain across the top of the desk. T-Rex had jammed himself into one of the two drawers I’d left open. He looked totally pleased, and his tail hung over the edge like a furry bookmark…errr, desk-mark.

  I thought about cat condo renovations while we ate our fast-food breakfast. When we started up the hill toward the Jessop place, however, I could feel my stomach getting into a tighter and tighter knot. I really didn’t want to have another run-in with Elizabeth Ann Jessop.

  I tried telling myself she wouldn’t be home. She was rich, so she’d be off playing polo somewhere. Her dog was rich, so he would be at the spa.

  But when we got to the Jessops’ house, there she was sitting on the front steps. Frooie came bounding to meet us like we were long-lost friends. Play it cool, I told myself. Keep your mouth shut and play it cool.

  “Hey there, pup,” said Dad, giving Frooie a friendly scratch behind his ears. “Eaten any good shoes lately?”

  “No shoes,” said Elizabeth. “But he got into a giant box of cornflakes first thing this morning. Mom made me vacuum the entire living room. Parts of it still crunch when you walk through.”

  Dad laughed.

  “I’m supposed to tell you to just walk in,” said Elizabeth. “They’re in the kitchen.”

  Dad went inside without looking back. Elizabeth looked at me meaningfully. Except it wasn’t really meaningful because I had no idea what it meant. My plan to play it cool began to teeter on the edge.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked.

  “I hope it’s okay that I told them,” she said.

  “Told them what?” I asked.

  “That he’s your dad and that he owns the business too,” said Elizabeth.

  “Why wouldn’t it be okay? It’s the truth,” I said. And then a very unpleasant thought hit me. “Unless it’s because of the mess-up with tiling…”

  To my surprise, Elizabeth began to smile and nod encouragingly.

  “That’s what it’s about!” she said. “With the way your parents are making sure the tiling gets done properly, Mom figures she’s finally found people she can trust to do a good job. Sometimes contractors rip people off like crazy up here. Mom’s hoping Rooms by Rita will do our kitchen next. Do you think your parents will agree?”

  I’d been so convinced it was going to be something negative that it took a few seconds for my brain to really sort through the words. This wasn’t negative—this was great. However, I still tried my best to play it cool.

  “Well, they’re pretty busy,” I answered. “But I think they’ll find a way to fit it in.”

  “I hope so,” said Elizabeth. “It would be neat to see what design your mom comes up with. Can you believe Frooie broke into a box of cornflakes?”

  Now she made it sound as if my parents’ business and Frooie the cornflake-eating dog were somehow equal, which they definitely weren’t in my mind, but I figured I could let it pass since I’d downplayed how pleased Mom and Dad would be. Besides, at the sound of his name, Frooie had begun to snuffle my fingers. Then he maneuvered the top of his head right under the palm of my hand. I pretty much had to pet him.

  “He really is a nice dog,” said Elizabeth, “even if he does get into all kinds of trouble.”

  “T-Rex has been in trouble lately too,” I said. “He’s been getting trapped in weird places, like between doors and in the layers of floor under the living room. It’s really strange to hear a cat running around under your feet.”

  “Did he get stuck?” asked Elizabeth. She actually sounded worried.

  “We opened a tin of salmon,” I said. “He got himself out.”

  “Food works for Frooie too,” said Elizabeth. “I guess cats with weird names can get in as much trouble as dogs with weird names.”

  She brought out something from behind her back.

  “Do you want to play Frisbee?” she asked. “I mean, since you don’t have to supervise your dad?”

  There was a lot of space in that big yard for throwing a Frisbee around. Frooie ran back and forth between us. Every once in a while he’d make an interception and then it would take us about ten minutes to get the Frisbee back again. Finally even Frooie was exhausted. We sat on the grass and watched him glop glop glop water out of the fishpond. A real fishpond. With real fish!

  “I told the dog trainer about his tongue going backward,” said Elizabeth. I guess I must have looked at her strangely then because her expression changed. “What?” she asked.

  “It just seems weird…to have a dog trainer.”

  “It does?” she asked.

  “A dog trainer and a huge house and a Mafia car and a yard the size of a baseball field.”

  “It’s not that big,” she said. She looked around and smiled. “Well, maybe about as big as the infield. I don’t really notice, I guess. I’ve always lived here. It’s my home.”

  She looked thoughtful for a moment and then glanced at me sideways.

  “Mafia car. That’s what Mom calls it too. She says people think lawyers are big-enough crooks without having a car that looks like it’s paid for by the mob. It drives my stepdad crazy because he just really happens to like that kind of car.”

  A different type of vehicle was coming down the drive at the moment, however. It was Tony in his pickup truck.

  “I’d better go,” I said to Elizabeth. “I might be able to help.”

  Tony had just done the first two rows, with Dad doing most of the cuts and me passing things when needed, when I heard noises above us on the landing. Elizabeth and Frooie must have come through another door and up the back stairs to her bedroom. Now she was setting a stack of books on the top stair.

  “Being out here is more fun than studying in my room,” she called down. “And it’s like watching one of those home makeover shows.”

  “Except we won’t be finished in an hour,” said Tony. “We’re going to lay this out real pretty, though. A special work of art by Tony.” Dad looked at me and winked. When Tony talks like that, things always turn out better than expected.

  “I won’t be finished in an hour either,” said Elizabeth. She sighed as she looked at the books. “Oh well. Only one more week to go.”

  That meant she was studying for Quiz Kids. How could I not take a second look at the books beside her? Some looked like regular textbooks. Others were large and glossy—I recognized the expensive art books from the living room. That made me think of the paintings on the walls, the fancy piano and Elizabeth’s mom being a professor. The kids in Fairview definitely had some advantages over the kids in our school.

  When I looked back at the tiles being laid out before me, however, I saw what Tony meant. Bit by bit, a wonderful pattern of geometric intricacy was spreading out across the floor. Tiling isn’t something that just anyone can do well. It’s especially difficult in the tricky spots, like around the curving bottom of the stairs where the tiles have to be smaller at one end and larger at the other and grow gradually outward in a mathematical progression. And Tony doesn’t use pen-and-paper calculations either—he eyeballs it into place with intuition and experience.

  That’s when I really began to understand. There are a lot of different things to know in the world and a lot of different ways of knowing them. Academically, I probably wouldn’t be able to tou
ch Elizabeth and her teammates or the kids on my own team, but maybe—between Seymour’s wild facts and some of the other things I knew—I could help out our school after all.

  CHAPTER 9

  One week to go until the Quiz Kids contest. That Monday at noon hour, Mr. Phelps called our team to the gym for a practice. There on the stage were the actual podiums, microphones and electronic buzzers that would be used the day of the contest. No one was more pleased than Maria.

  “This is outstanding,” she said. “You’ve brought in the equipment early from the TV station! It’s going to be almost exactly like the competition itself, isn’t it?”

  Mr. Phelps nodded.

  “The students at Fairview School do a lot of public speaking,” he said. “We can’t make up for that overnight, but at least we can treat this week like a dress rehearsal; it should help with the butterflies.”

  “Butterflies are right,” said Seymour, standing at one of the podiums, looking out over our great giant gymnasium and imagining it packed with people. “Did I ever tell you about the time I was a shepherd in a Christmas pageant and got stage fright so badly I barfed all over my flock of sheep?”

  “Another reason you shouldn’t be on the team,” said Maria.

  “Definitely,” said Seymour, climbing down from the stage.

  Catchy theme music suddenly flooded the gym. We looked at Mr. Phelps. He was now wearing earphones and had stationed himself in front of a panel of switches and dials. An announcer’s deep voice boomed out over the music.

  “And now, from Riverside Elementary School, it’s The Quiz Kids TV Spectacular !”

  Practicing on the stage with podiums and microphones was definitely different than practicing with service bells in the science room. It felt a lot scarier, standing up on stage. Some teachers and students came in to watch us, so we actually had a small audience, and we even broke into two teams so we’d get used to working against people on the other side of the stage. It was a good experience. It also made all of us realize that these were our last five days before we experienced either the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat. And that’s when I felt something else begin to happen.

  Quiz Kids is a game, a competition. It’s not real life. It’s not going to determine whether someone is happy or sad. It’s not really going to turn the kids from one school into winners and the kids from another school into losers. In the big scheme of things, Quiz Kids doesn’t actually matter at all. I knew all that. And yet all of a sudden I could feel a great weight beginning to push down upon me. Pressure. Big-time. Part of me felt like I was walking very, very slowly on the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean, carrying a cannonball to weigh me down even further.

  Seymour felt the pressure too. His reaction, however, was different from mine. Seymour went into maniac mode. Every moment he could find, he fed weird facts into my brain.

  “Mosquitoes have heat sensors so they know where to bite to get your blood.

  “There are three billion possible ways to play the first four moves in a chess game.”

  He fed me facts on the way to school, on the way home from school, in the middle of playing video games, over the phone last thing at night.

  “There are one hundred lightning strikes for every second of every day all around the world.

  “Tube worms never eat. They get all their food from germs that live in their bodies.”

  I tried my best to remember. Sometimes I made up wild stories in which tube worms were hit by one hundred strikes of lightning so that the germs inside them glowed warmly and attracted heat-sensing mosquitoes. Sometimes I made up sentences with clues in the first letter of each word. Other times I remembered facts just by thinking about how amazing they were.

  “Vampire bats will die if they go two days without blood.”

  Two days! Two days isn’t long at all. I knew vampire bats fed on blood, but I had no idea they’d die if they didn’t eat for two days!

  Seymour didn’t stop with straight facts. The memory book said that being in the same location, and especially being around the same smells, helps people remember. At school, Seymour got permission for us to study on the stage itself. At home he wanted to spread dirty socks around the living room so it would smell the same as the gym. I didn’t want to study around smelly socks!

  And in the midst of all the studying, I still didn’t tell my parents that I was going to be on Quiz Kids. I could maybe manage to stand up on stage with Quiz Kids and not fall apart, but I didn’t want the extra pressure of having Mom and Dad watch me. Every once in a while, however, I did share an amazing fact with them.

  “Did you know frogs can use their eyeballs to eat?” I told them over supper Thursday night. “They can actually drop their eyeballs down below their eye sockets to help push food down their throat.”

  “Amazing,” said Dad. “Strange. Bizarre. Slightly gross. But totally amazing.”

  “I have something amazing to share with you as well,” said Mom. “Well, not quite as amazing as frogs and eyeballs. But it’s amazing to me. And I had to do a lot of research. That desk in the hallway isn’t just fifty or sixty years old. I’m almost certain that it’s a true antique, over two hundred and fifty years old. And I’ve found an antique dealer who will give us a very good price.”

  “Congratulations!” said Dad. “Rooms and Antiques by Rita. “Then he looked at me and winked. “Mind you, the cats might not be as pleased.”

  “I was kind of thinking of turning it into a cat condo,” I admitted. “But don’t worry, they’ve got lots of other places to hang out. That’s great, Mom.”

  “Thank you,” said Mom. “Would it keep me in the cats’ good books if I offered you carpet samples and the old wooden display stands from the shop? You could build them something from scratch. Pun intended.”

  “Even better,” I said. “I’ll give them their notice of eviction.”

  “We need to work out a few things though,” said Mom. “The only time the dealer can stop by the house is this Saturday morning. I’ve got appointments with clients at the shop.”

  “Hmmm,” said Dad. “Mr. G.’s still sick, and I’m helping Tony in exchange for the help he gave us last weekend. Plus I’m backup if Gladys’s husband doesn’t get back in time to take Gran and Gladys to the airport. And one of us should be at Quiz Kids to support Seymour…”

  “I’ll be there,” I said quickly. “I can be at the house for the antique guy and still get to Quiz Kids. Seymour won’t mind if you can’t come—he’ll give you the play-by-play later. He’ll like that even better.”

  “Perfect,” said Mom.

  One day I’m going to remember that just when you think things are “perfect,” that’s when you need to worry most of all.

  CHAPTER 10

  On Saturday morning I lay in bed with a very strange sense of unreality. Today was the day I had to stand on stage and pretend I was a genius.

  “TJ?” called Dad. “Can I come in?”

  “Yup,” I said.

  “We’ll go back to our regular junk-food breakfast next week, okay? And tell Seymour good luck. And I’ll leave the bedroom door open so the cats can come and go.”

  “Yup,” I said.

  About half an hour later, Mom stopped at my door.

  “TJ? Are you awake? There’s three things I need to tell you.”

  “Awake,” I said.

  “Thing one—the people from Treasured Antiques should be coming to pick up the desk in the next hour or so.”

  “Desk,” I said.

  “Thing two—Gran’s going to stop by for the suitcase on the way to the airport, but the clothes we’re sending to Belize still need to be dried. Listen for the buzzer on the dryer and keep putting them through. Remember, there are two loads—one already in the dryer and one waiting to be dried.”

  “Clothes,” I said.

  “Thing three—tell Seymour good luck. Can you remember all that?”

  “Seymour,” I said.

  Another hal
f hour and the door bell sounded a double-ring. I heard Seymour’s voice in the front hall.

  “TJ? TJ!”

  T -Rex must have told him where I was. I heard them racing up the stairs together.

  “Why are you still in bed?” demanded Seymour.

  “I feel like I’m the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I told him.

  “No big deal—I feel like that all the time,” said Seymour. “Guess what? Mom’s going to record the show so your parents can watch the tape while I tell them about it.” He held up a clear plastic container. “And I brought you brain food for breakfast.”

  It looked like brains—gray and lumpy. Yuck.

  I took as long as I could to shower and get dressed. I found Alaska nestled in my pile of clothes, and I spent a long time petting her. When I finally headed downstairs, she followed me. Seymour was in the kitchen, eating his way through a peanut-butter sandwich.

  “Arachibutyrophobia—that’s the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth,” he announced. “I don’t have it, but it’s a great word.”

  I wondered if there was a word for how I felt about Seymour’s brain food.

  I ate cold cereal instead of the gray goop. Seymour talked about a guy who claimed that if we somehow squished all our molecules so that there was no space between the atoms and electrons and protons and all the other stuff that makes them, the entire human race would fit in a sugar cube. That got him babbling about even smaller particles called quarks that came in flavors named left, right, up, down, charmed and strange.

  “They aren’t going to ask that stuff,” I said. “They’re going to ask how many legs are on a spider.”

  “Dryer!” said Seymour.

  At first I thought he was talking about either spiders or more flavors of quarks. He wasn’t. The clothes dryer was buzzing. I’d almost forgotten about Gran and the clothes and her trip! I went into the laundry room and began to unload the dryer. One more load to go.

  “Telephone!” said Seymour.

  I left the dryer door open and went to answer the phone.