Cheesie Mack Is Not a Genius or Anything (13 page)

Mrs. Crespo looked straight at me, one eye getting slitty because she was thinking so hard. It looked just like she was giving me the squinty-evil-eye, but without anything funny in it. Everyone was silent. Right then I became aware of my split lip and tasted the blood in my mouth. I could feel my heart pounding in my temples. I looked at my sister. She hadn’t moved. Her face looked frozen.

Then Georgie stepped up and said, “Punish me, too. If Cheesie’s wrong, then we’re
both
idiots and make it
triple
.”

I told you he was my best friend.

Mrs. Crespo took a deep breath and turned toward my sister. The frozen look on Goon’s face cracked into a weird sort of fake smile.

“This is ridiculous,” Goon said. “I’m leaving.” She started to walk away.

“Stop, young lady,” Mrs. Crespo said.

Goon didn’t stop.

“June!”

Goon kept walking. “Come on, Kevin,” she said. Kevin ran after her, kind of like when I call Deeb.

“June!” Mrs. Crespo repeated. “I will have to call your mother.”

Goon turned around suddenly, knocking into Kevin. “Please do. And tell her that my brother is a liar.” She took a deep breath and calmed her voice a bit. “Mrs. Crespo, I am not trying to be disrespectful, but Ms. Higgins asked me to help, and I did, and I am just completely insulted by my brother’s stupid lying.” Without waiting for a response, she turned and walked away, with Kevin trotting after her.

N
o one said a word until Goon and Kevin were out of sight.

Finally Mrs. Crespo spoke. “Well, Miss Mack has called her brother a liar. Are you a liar, Ronald?” Her lips were pinched into a thin line. I don’t think I had ever seen her so mad.

I shook my head.

“We shall see,” Mrs. Crespo said as she tipped the jar of ticket stubs over onto the table. “Ms. Higgins,” Mrs. Crespo said, “there are twenty-nine students at this party. Right?”

Ms. Higgins nodded.

“So,” Mrs. Crespo said, “if June is correct and Ronald is lying, there should be exactly twenty-nine
stubs in this pile. But if Ronald is telling the truth, there should be twenty-seven. We shall now find out.”

Mrs. Crespo counted the stubs out loud and dropped them one by one back into the jar. When she reached twenty-two, I knew what the outcome would be. I could see how many stubs remained on the table.

“And the last one,” Mrs. Crespo said, “makes twenty-seven. It appears, Ronald, that you are telling the truth.”

“That only proves that two are missing,” Glenn Philips interrupted. “To complete the proof, you need to make certain that Cheesie’s and Georgie’s are the ones.”

Of course Glenn, who is super smart, was right.

Mrs. Crespo nodded. “What are your ticket numbers?”

Georgie answered quickly. “Mine is zero-five-five-five-five. And Cheesie’s is zero-five-five-five-four.”

Mrs. Crespo emptied the tickets out and dropped them back in one by one, silently scanning each for our numbers. As she dropped the last one in, she
turned to Glenn. “The proof is complete.” And then to me. “You are
not
a liar, Ronald.”

Georgie grabbed me around the shoulders and squeezed. I grinned, and my lip hurt.

“Your sister is in big trouble now,” Alex Welch said.

Duh.

“And now, at last,” Mrs. Crespo announced, “we shall have the pizza party drawing.”

“Mrs. Crespo,” Glenn interrupted, “without Cheesie’s and Georgie’s stubs, they can’t win.”

“Quite right again, Glenn,” Mrs. Crespo responded. “But I have a solution. I shall now draw a winning ticket.” She reached in, pulled out a ticket stub, and read the number. “Zero-five-five-three-seven.” There was complete quiet for a couple of seconds while all the kids examined their tickets (except for me and Georgie).

Then Lana Shen squealed and hugged her two best friends. “I won!”

After the shrieking and screeching died down, Mrs. Crespo continued, “I will now draw for a second pizza
party prize, identical to the first, which I will donate and which will be won by whoever has the winning ticket that I am now drawing out of this imaginary jar that contains all the missing ticket stubs.”

“My ticket’s sort of missing!” Alex Welch shouted. “I can’t read the numbers.”

Mrs. Crespo nodded at Alex, then made a big show of holding up an imaginary jar and pulling out an invisible ticket stub. “The winning number is … zero-five-five-five … and the last digit is … is this a four?” She pretended to peer at the imaginary ticket.

“No … it’s a five!”

“That’s mine!” Georgie yelled. “Pizza!” He grabbed my shoulders and shook them really hard. “See? I told you I was lucky!”

While Mrs. Crespo was explaining to Georgie that she would call the pizza parlor and set up his prize party and that all he had to do was call them whenever he wanted to go, I sat listening to a conversation between a dope and a genius.

“It’s not fair,” Alex objected.

“It is fair,” Glenn explained. “Your stub was in the primary jar with all the other similar stubs.”

“But the numbers were all rubbed off my ticket,” Alex protested.

“Had Mrs. Crespo extracted”—Glenn really uses words like that—“your stub, you would have won, but she selected Lana’s instead.”

“But I couldn’t read my number.”

“An unmatched stub would have established your claim to the prize,” Glenn explained patiently.

“But how would I know?” Alex whined.

I couldn’t stand it any longer. “If she called out the number and no one claimed the prize, then the number on the stub would have to be yours!” I said directly and way too loudly into Alex’s ear. Alex looked at me blankly, which is normal for him, so I gave up.

“It would be proof by the absence of evidence,” Glenn continued. “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle often employs comparable methods in his Sherlock Holmes mysteries.”

I have read two Sherlock Holmes stories,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
and
A Study in Scarlet
.
They are old and take place before cars and airplanes and way before computers. If you don’t mind British spelling—“colours” instead of “colors”—I recommend them highly. I learned many vocabulary words from them. In fact, a few months ago, after I found the Sherlock Holmes book that I had borrowed from the library hidden inside my dog’s kibble bin—it was a week overdue—I said to my father, “You may call it conjecture (guessing), but I believe that our domicile (house) is inhabited by a choleric (angry) personage (MY SISTER!) whose exploits (actions) include purloining (stealing) and deceit (lying).” My father laughed. Goon was punished. I got 8 points.

About half the class was gathered around Georgie, begging to be invited to his pizza party, while most of the others were huddled around Lana Shen, doing, I guess, the same thing. I grabbed Georgie by the back of his bathing suit and pulled him toward the Boys room.

“What’s the matter?” Georgie asked once we were inside and changing out of our swimsuits.

“You better be careful how many kids you ask to your pizza party.”

Georgie didn’t respond. He just grabbed his wet swimsuit off the floor with his toes and flipped it backward up over his head. Georgie is a very excellent athlete. He didn’t even look. He just stuck his hands out in front of him, and the suit flew over his head and landed—plop—right on them. (I cannot do this. But I have a diagram of how to do it on my website. You can try it if you want.)

“I think pizzas cost about ten bucks each. Add in drinks and you’re only going to be able to buy three pies … maximum. Eight slices to a pie—”

Georgie was pulling on his pants, which made him lose his balance and crash into me. He is an excellent athlete, but sometimes a klutz.

I pushed him away and continued. “That’s only twenty-four slices. Figuring the average kid’ll eat three, maybe four slices—”

“I can eat seven,” Georgie bragged.

“Yeah, but some kids’ll eat only two, so that means you can invite only five or six other kids besides you and me.”

“I wasn’t planning to invite you,” Georgie said, squatting down to tie his shoes.

I glared at him. He didn’t even look back. Then I leaped onto his back and began fake-pounding him.

“You dare to insult the supreme dignity and undeniable worthiness of Dr. Cheez?! You shall be punished (pound), beaten (pound), battered (pound), and thumped mercilessly.”

With me hanging on to him and continuing my fake pounding, Georgie wobbled to his feet and began lumbering around. He grunted, “Ee-Gorg sorry, Master. Ee-Gorg bad. Ee-Gorg very bad.”

I already told you that Georgie is really strong and almost twice as big as I am, so a real fight would be over in less than one microsecond, with me flattened into a grease spot on the wall. So you can probably guess that this is a game Georgie and I play. In it I am the brilliant and totally warped Dr. Frank N. Cheez. Georgie is Ee-Gorg, my super-strong half-witted monster. We made up this game back in third grade, which is when he started to get really big.

When Ee-Gorg—toting his merciless, pounding master—came staggering out the bathroom door, he crashed us right into Lana Shen, who was standing
there waiting. She screamed. I jumped off. Georgie, still acting like a demented (a good word to use as an insult—it means insane) monster, shambled away. Banging into everything in his path, he grunted, “Ee-Gorg get bicycle for Dr. Cheez. Ee-Gorg like bicycle. Ee-Gorg eat bicycle.”

I was laughing at Georgie until I realized that Lana was standing next to me, staring and smiling. She’s weird. In conversations, I think I mostly look at the other person’s mouth. But when she talks to me, she looks right in my eyes … and barely ever blinks.

“You and Georgie almost crushed me into the wall. So. Anyway. Here’s the deal. If you get Georgie to invite me to his pizza party, I’ll invite both of you to mine.”

“Umm, I don’t know. It’s up to him,” I said. She has straight teeth. I am going to have to wear braces starting next year.

“I have a small appetite. So it would be a good trade. Because, you know, Georgie eats a lot.”

Of course Georgie would say yes.

“I’ll try,” I mumbled.

She continued smiling and staring. Her hair is black and very shiny.