Zero to Hero (9 page)

“I don’t see why I have to do this,” he growled. “It’s ruining my afternoon.”

“Well, perhaps your bad attitude is ruining my afternoon,” his mother answered. “After
you’ve finished there, I think you should go to your room and take a nap so you don’t bring that sour behavior to the dinner table.”

“I’m not six. I don’t need a nap.”

“Then just lie there in your room and think about the way you’re acting. Don’t come out until you can put a smile on your face.”

The Hoove was way ahead of Mrs. Brownstone. While Rod was walking to the kitchen to hang up the hand vac, the Hoove hurried into Rod’s room to check out what kind of misery he could cause him in there. He saw some real possibilities. He could empty his underwear drawer into the wastebasket. He could short-sheet his bed. And he could even sprinkle water on the bottom sheet, so when Rod laid down on it, it would be soaking wet.

When Rod came in, the Hoove was floating on the ceiling, watching to see what the big jerk would do first.

Rod closed the blinds and looked around to make sure no one was watching. Then he put a chair in front of his door and crept over to his
bookshelf. He moved three volumes of the
Guinness Book of Sports Records
, reached behind them, and took out a wooden box.

It had a word chiseled on the front, and when the Hoove read that word, he knew he had Rod Brownstone right where he wanted him.

The word chiseled on the box was
BLANKIE
.

Rod had carved it with his Boy Scout knife when he was ten years old to earn a badge in woodworking. He was too embarrassed to show it to anyone except the assistant scout leader who gave out the badges. Rod had made the box as a special hiding place for his favorite possession — a dollar-size swatch of blue satin, the last remaining piece of the baby blanket he had carried around with him every minute of the day. Once, when he was almost four years old, he had forgotten Blankie at home on a family ski weekend in the mountains north of Los Angeles. He cried so hard and for so long that they finally had to turn the car around and drive over a hundred miles back home so he could be reunited with his blanket.

Over the years, Blankie had suffered a lot of rips and tears from being dragged around. The only thing left was the corner piece of satin trim and an inch of soft, furry blanket. But no matter how ragged it had become, Rod was attached like glue to his blankie. He took it out every night when he went to bed, holding it in his right hand and rubbing it back and forth on the tip of his nose. He couldn’t fall asleep without it. And on occasions when he felt especially upset or nervous, like before a big football game, he’d take Blankie out for an emergency nose rub.

Rod had never told anyone about the existence of his blankie. It was his deep, dark secret. He would die if any of his football buddies knew that he couldn’t go to sleep without it.

Hoover, a student of human nature, immediately understood how important it was for Rod to keep his secret deep and dark. He watched with glee as Rod took the tattered blanket piece out of its wooden box. He howled with laughter when Rod flopped on the bed, folded his pillow
in half, and put the piece of blue satin against his nose and whispered, “Okay, Blankie. Do your stuff.”

The Hoove circled the room, doing an invisible victory dance in the air. His mind raced with all the possibilities of what that little piece of fabric could do. If used correctly, it would give Billy a perfect opportunity to put the Brownstone goon in his place.

Ah
, Hoover thought.
Revenge is sweet.

The Hoove waited impatiently for Rod to nod off into the nap he hadn’t wanted to take and didn’t feel he needed. Just to pass the time, Hoover amused himself by turning a few of the football pennants on the wall upside down and tying the laces of all of Rod’s shoes together into a ball. After a few minutes, Amber stomped in.

“Mom wants you to set the table for dinner,” she said, waking Rod up.

“You do it,” he said with a yawn. “You need the practice.”

“It’s your turn, dingbat,” she said. “And by the way, what is that in your hand?”

“Nothing,” Rod answered, immediately shoving the blankie into the two halves of his folded pillow.

“It’s not nothing. It’s something. Otherwise you wouldn’t have shoved it under your pillow. It looked like one of my doll blankets.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Rod snapped. “What would I want with a stupid doll blanket? Now get out. The sign on the door says ‘private’.”

“I know what it says,” Amber answered, putting her pudgy hands on her hips. “I can read. In fact, I can even read your pennant upside down. It says ‘Chargers Go!’ ”

“What are you talking about?” Rod said. “It’s not upside down.”

“Take a look, Mr. Know-It-All.”

Rod glanced at the wall. His “Go Chargers” pennant was indeed upside down.

“You did that just to annoy me, didn’t you?” he snarled at Amber.

“I wouldn’t come into your room for a million dollars,” Amber said. “I have better things to do than watch you poke around in other people’s lives with your spy cam.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? I gather intel.”

“No, you don’t. You just spy.”

The Hoove was thoroughly enjoying the conversation. Little Amber was a firecracker, and he was developing a real liking for her.

Feeling satisfied that she had won the argument, Amber left. As soon as she was gone, Rod snatched his blankie from under the pillow and stuffed it back in the wooden box. Holding the box behind his back, he crept over to the bookshelf and put it in its secret hiding place behind the Guinness records books. The Hoove could hardly wait to get his hands on it. It was all he could do to keep himself from pouncing on that blankie box. As soon as Rod left the room, he swooped over to the bookshelf and grabbed it.

“Oh yeah,” he said to the box. “You and me, we’re going to make some beautiful music together.”

He tucked the box securely under his arm and shot through the wall, making it to the other side. However, in his excitement, he had completely forgotten that although he could travel
through walls, earthly things made of matter could not. He found himself outside of the Brownstones’ house, empty-handed. Looking through the window, he saw the wooden box lying on the rug where it had fallen when he passed through the wall.

Diving headlong through the stucco, the Hoove went back into Rod’s room, glancing around to make sure he hadn’t returned. The only activity he saw was Rod’s Siamese fighting fish swimming around his bowl in alarmed circles.

“Hey, don’t worry about it, big fin,” the Hoove said to him. “I’m not after you. Ghosts like fishies.”

The Hoove picked up the blankie box from the carpet and zoomed over to the window. Throwing it open, he escaped into the evening air with his prized possession in his hand.

Billy was in his room, working out with dumbbells, when the Hoove burst in through the wall.

“Put those things down right away,” he ordered Billy. “I have big news. A Bingo-Rama for the good guys.”

“I can’t put them down,” Billy said, continuing to curl one weight at a time. “If I do, I won’t be able to lift them up again. Besides, I have a rhythm going.”

“Trust me. This is worth it.”

“And trust me. My biceps are screaming for help. I can’t ignore them now.”

The Hoove hovered a few inches off the ground, getting right up in Billy’s face.

“What am I holding behind my back?” he asked Billy. “Guess.”

“I don’t have to guess,” Billy answered, the veins in his neck sticking out from his last set of
curls. “I can see right through you. It’s a box. What’s so great about that?”

“Feast your eyes, Billy Boy, on a little bit of magnificence.” With a flourish, the Hoove brought the box out from behind him. He opened it very slowly as if it contained the most valuable object in the world.

“Okay, okay. Cut the drama. I’ll look,” Billy said. As he leaned down to place the dumbbells on the floor, their weight pulled him off his feet and he almost stumbled right into the box.

“Will you try to remain standing?” the Hoove said. “This is serious business.”

“I didn’t mean to fall. I’m just a little weak, which is why I’m lifting these stupid weights in the first place.”

“Where you have been weak in the past, you will now be strong,” the Hoove declared. “For in this box is the answer to all your problems. A magic carpet ride, so to speak. What do you see?”

Billy glanced into the open box.

“I see a little piece of an old blanket. Big deal.”

“Right here we have an example of the main difference between you and me,” the Hoove proclaimed, pointing one of his pale fingers at Billy.

“Other than the fact that I’m alive and you’re dead? I’d say that’s the main difference. Oh yeah, and breathing. That’s another difference.”

“Billy Boy, you are focused on the wrong things, as usual.” The Hoove lifted Rod’s blankie out of the box and waved it in front of Billy. “The difference,” he went on, “is that you see a blanket before you. And me, I see possibilities.”

“To do what? Go into the ratty old blanket business?”

“What if I told you that this piece of cloth used to be Rod Brownstone’s baby blanket and that he still takes it to bed with him every night?”

Billy laughed at the very idea. “I’d say that could never happen. He’s too tough to need a blankie. That’s more my style.”

Billy bent down to pick up his dumbbells again, but the Hoove reached out to stop him.

“Just this afternoon, I happened to witness Rod rub this exact piece of cloth against his nose as he curled up in his beddy-bed,” the Hoove explained.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. And it gets even better. No one, not even his little sister, knows it exists.”

Billy considered what the Hoove was telling him. Little by little, it began to dawn on him why the Hoove had presented his discovery of the blanket with so much drama. He was thinking of revenge, of getting even. And this piece of blanket held the key.

Billy’s mind didn’t naturally go to thoughts of revenge — that wasn’t his nature. But the Hoove was showing him another path, a way to stand up for himself, and as his mind embraced the idea, his eyes lit up.

“I think I’m getting it,” he whispered. “What you’re holding in your hands is Rod’s deepest secret and worst nightmare.”

The Hoove let out a howling laugh.

“Just imagine, Billy Boy, what some of those
cute girlies at your school, such as Ruby Baker, would think if they saw Mr. Football Hero’s baby blankie run up to the top of the flagpole.”

A smile spread across Billy’s face. The Hoove went on.

“Or how about if your mom came on the loudspeaker and announced that Rod’s baby blanket had been turned in to the Lost and Found, and he could come pick it up whenever it was convenient for him.”

“How would she know it belonged to him?” Billy asked.

“How did Ruby know that tonsil was yours? There was a note attached.”

Suddenly, Billy was loving this conversation. His mind shifted into gear, and all kinds of spectacular revenge possibilities burst into his head, like a fireworks display on the Fourth of July.

“We could put up flyers all over school, announcing that it’s lost,” he began.

“Go on.” The Hoove nodded. He was grinning broadly. “You’re getting it.”

“Or put it in the display case where the football trophies are,” Billy went on. “We could tape a note to one of the trophies with an arrow that says,
I am Rod Brownstone’s baby blankie. He loves me more than football
.”

The Hoove laughed even harder. He was feeling victorious that finally Billy was getting some of the Porterhouse Attitude. Maybe there was hope for this kid yet.

“I like the train of thought you’re riding on,” he said to Billy. “Put it on full throttle and blow the whistle.”

“Okay, how’s this for the best idea yet?” Billy said. “We could spread the word about Rod’s baby blankie and then charge admission to see it. Anyone who wants to take a look has to cough up a dollar.”

“Brilliant,” the Hoove said, snapping his suspenders the way he did when he felt everything was going his way. “We humiliate Brownstone just like he did to you AND we put some extra cabbage in our pockets at the same time.”

Billy suddenly stopped laughing and looked perplexed. “Wait, Hoove. Why would we want to put a vegetable in our pockets?”

“Cabbage … you know … as in moolah. Money. What’s the matter, don’t you speak English?”

“Sure I do. Just not hundred-year-old English.”

“You make a good point, ducky. Sometimes I forget I’m a hundred and thirteen. So what’s it going to be? Flagpole? Flyers? Cabbage?”

Billy didn’t know. He and the Hoove had come up with so many revenge plots so quickly that his head was spinning.

“I have to take a break, Hoove, and clear my mind,” he said. “I’ll be back in a sec. I need some Gatorade.”

“Gatorade?” the Hoove repeated. “Is that made directly from the alligator? Because if it is, count me out. I don’t drink juice they have to squeeze a reptile for.”

“Boy, you really are a hundred and thirteen years old!” Billy laughed. “Gatorade is a
sports drink. I drink it when I need a burst of energy. Like now, when I have a lot of things to mull over.”

“What’s there to mull over? You’re going pull off this plan, aren’t you?”

Billy didn’t answer. He had never really done anything like this before. Usually when he had a conflict with someone, he would take the easy way out and let the other person win. This new way would take a lot of courage. The Hoove saw Billy waffling, and moved in very close to him.

“Listen, Billy,” he said, suddenly very serious. “You have to stand up to this guy or he’s not going to stop making you miserable.”

“I’m going to get Brownstone,” Billy said, suddenly sounding not so sure of himself. “At least I think I am. I just have to figure out how. I’ll be right back with a solid plan.”

Billy headed down the hall toward the kitchen, his mind racing. The idea of getting even with Rod was very appealing. Yet there was something gnawing at him. He wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of revenge.
He had been taught that two wrongs don’t make a right. In the back of his mind, he wondered if embarrassing Rod Brownstone would make his situation any better.