101 Ways to Bug Your Friends and Enemies (2 page)

Ace yawned again for effect.

“Of course he's here,” Hayley said. “He wouldn't miss your party, would he?”

Debatable. Ace is cool. So cool he probably doesn't even attend his own—

“
That's
what this is about?” I asked. “A
party
—for . . .
me
?”

“Well, duh,” Goldie said, and with a yank that gave my sore nose carpet burn, the blindfold fell to my feet.

“Surprise!”
everyone (except Ace, who is too cool) shouted.

I blinked. My sight shifted from blind to blurry, taking in the familiar “sweetness” of Gadabout's office, which is built with fake lollipops, gumdrops, and graham crackers to resemble the witch's gingerbread cottage from Hansel and Gretel
.

Despite my nose being clogged with allergy goo (I'm allergic to practically everything except water and air), I managed to snork up the beloved smells of my home away from home: the lemony tang of golf ball washing solution; the oily metal of putters; lily pads fermenting in King Arthur's murky moat; the plastic putting greens, sepia-scorched from the blazing Southern California sun.

Aaaaaah
. It felt great to be home, back to my job, my sanctuary . . .

The Gordian Knot of Disappointment that had twisted my innards the past two weeks began to fray. Until—

“Surprise,” Hayley repeated, softer this time so only I could hear.

My vision sharpened crystal crisp.

Streamers dangled from the Tootsie Roll rafters. A balloon bouquet bobbed in the listless breeze of the ceiling fan. On a card table, arranged with festive forks, plates, and napkins, stood a cake.

Oh, what a cake! It was baked in the shape of my most ingenious invention: the Nice Alarm, a clock that awakens you
not
with an annoying bell or buzzer, but with two
nice
taps on the shoulder. Above it hung a banner, declaring in Hayley's bold, no-nonsense hand, the same message spelled on the cake in squares of sugar letters:

Well, duh, Sneeze
, I thought, à la Goldie.
Of course they don't know. You haven't told them yet.

At that, my nose started to tickle.

And tingle.

And itch.

I tried to hold back. Honest, I did. I wince-pinched my tender nostrils and sucked in a breath so hard I practically inhaled a streamer, but—

“AHHHH
-CHOOEY
!”

A sneeze of titanic proportions typhooned across the Nice Alarm cake.

“Mon Dieu!”
The wail wrenched from Pierre's mouth.

Goldie pouted. “I am so
not
eating
that
.”

Hot embarrassment flooded my cheeks. “Sorry, sorry!” I mopped my nose with a wad of tissues.

“You ee-dee-ot! 'Ave you no self-control?” Pierre looked ready to strangle me. “My cake—she eez ruined!”

Ace glanced over his sunglasses. “Shipwrecked, to be exact.”

Most of the meringue frosting had blown overboard. A few letters clung for dear life to a chocolatey edge. The others, strewn like flotsam and jetsam, now spelled TROUT LASAGNA ZONE.

“Disgust-o-
rama
!” Goldie whipped out her camera and, paparazzi-style, snapped a few photos. I had the sinking suspicion they'd soon appear in her column with the headline:
Sneeze's Supersonic Snot Scuttles Celebratory Snack
.

“Oh, for goodness golf tees!” Hayley's dangly golf ball earrings quivered. “You two are the rudest, most exasperating, insensitive . . .”

She snatched a cake server and troweled meringue off the table. “This. Is. Salvageable,” she announced, ready to re-slather frosting like mortar. “It might not look pretty, but it'll taste fine.”

“An unwise decision,” Hiccup warned. “A sternutation of that magnitude travels one hundred miles per hour, expelling forty thousand infectious droplets of—”

“Sacré bleu!” Pierre whispered, clutching his beret at the horror of it all.

Ace arced a dark eyebrow and lounged against Mr. Barker's desk. “Pierre is
snot
interested,” he said.

“I'm
sorry,
” I said. “My allergies are out of control this week. I'm sneezing triple my daily quota.”

Hiccup sprinted to my side like Medicine Man (MM), the caped superhero who stars in the graphic novels he draws. “Did you say
triple
?” he asked, grasping my wrist for a pulse.

“Is that serious?”

“I smell world record!” Goldie's gossipy fingers inched toward her notepad.

Hiccup shook his head. “The World's Longest Sneezing Fit was set by twelve-year-old Donna Griffiths of Great Britain. Her sneezes came at one-to five-minute intervals for nine hundred seventy-eight consecutive days.”

Ace released a long, low whistle.

Goldie made a frownie face, struggling to compute Donna's grand total.

Mine wasn't even close to Donna's—yet. My only “record” was for how many packets of travel tissue I'd wedged into my tool belt. Fortunately, I hadn't needed my tools since the Invention Convention®. Unfortunately, after what happened there, I might never need them again . . .

“
Serious
is an understatement.” Hiccup's worried, freckled gaze examined me from shaggy hair to straggly sneakers, searching for I-don't-know-what and I-was-afraid-to-ask. Crusty barnacles? Oozing pustules?

Goldie and Pierre peered at me with morbid fascination.

“'Eez nose! Eet eez even more grotesque than evaire!”

“
Ooo
, maybe it's
leprosy
!”

“Hanson's Disease,” Hiccup corrected.

“It's neither,” I snapped. “My schnoz is just chapped from blowing it so much. Now get out of my face, all of you!”

Hic was not deterred. “You passed the moat on your way in. Were you bit by a mosquito? Think, man! Your symptoms could reveal the onset of West Nile virus, posing dangers to pregnant women!”

“As opposed to pregnant men?” Ace asked.

“Get a grip, Hic. Mom is fine. We're all fine. Honest.” Hiccup has a crush on my mother. When he learned my parents were expecting a baby in December, his puppy love grew into a protective Doberman. Way weird, right? But to a hypochondriac who suspects he's contracted every disorder from Maple Syrup Urine Disease (after gobbling three dozen pancakes) to
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
(the fear of ultra-long words), swooning over my mother-the-scientist isn't weird at all. Especially since Mom saved him last spring from a terminal case of hiccups. (But that's another story.)

“
Whoop-pee-doo
.” Pierre flicked his beret into the air. “Everyone at zee Wyatt 'ouse eez fine. Let us not concern ourselves wis such minor zings as
zee cake
. Zee cake zat eez now not even fit for Heecup's dogs!”

Goldie rolled her eyes. “
Puh-LEEZ
! The Dynamic Duo of Doggy Garbage Disposals? Pierre, you've been
so
AWOL lately, you haven't heard what they gobbled
this
time.” She tossed her mane of golden hair and sent Hic a smug smile. “I'm sure
Sneeze
hasn't heard yet either.
Has he, Hiccup
?”

Hic's freckles blanched. “Ahem, alas, D and D continue to deserve their omnivorous reputation. Yesterday, Dasher dined on the pink pom-poms of our toilet seat cover—”

“That's
not
what I—”

“—and Dancer discovered the
D
section of my Disease Encyclopedia, gnawing from
Diaper Rash
to
Dumdum Fever
.”

“That's
not
what I—wait, is that a dunce disease?” Goldie asked.

Ace plucked an invisible hair from his shirt. “You would know.”

Goldie stomped another hoof.

“Dumdum Fever,”
Hiccup quoted.
“A parasitic infection, transmitted by sandfly, that—”

Hayley pulled me aside. “Are you sure you're okay?” she asked. Her eyes searched mine, but the SOS had softened. “That was an impressive sneeze. I've never seen one of yours do
that
before.” She pointed with the cake server. A dollop of meringue plopped onto my shoe. “Argh!”

“No worries.” I took the stack of napkins she thrust at me. We bent to wipe—

“Ow!”

She clutched her forehead. I clutched my nose. It hurt like crazy. But it also felt . . .
nice
. Not the clunking part. Her skin on mine.

My cheeks flooded hot again.

“Sorry about this,” Hayley muttered, gesturing at my shoe, then at the Bickersons. “The party was supposed to be just you, me, and Hic. I took extra precautions to keep it secret. But as always, Goldie found out—I swear she learned wiretapping at camp!—and she blabbed to Pierre, who blabbed to Ace—” She sighed. “Sorry. I'm not very good at throwing parties.”

“And I'm not very good at
going
to parties.”

“Huh,” she said, but flinched a smile.

“Anyway, I don't mind
them
,” I went on. “Much.”

Yeah, Goldie and Pierre bug the boogers out of me sometimes. Ha. Most times. We'd been thrown together last year for a couple of school projects, so now they assumed we were comrades-in-arms. More like comrades-in-calamity. But Ace was cool. (Despite a disquieting habit of appearing and disappearing without reason or warning.) And you couldn't find a truer, bluer pal than Hiccup. He'd been my best bud since toddler-hood. (Okay, my only bud till I met Hayley.) I was used to his eccentricities. He was used to mine.

Besides, the longer everyone bickered, the longer it would take them to remember the Invention Convention®.

“Sneeze, I'm
dying
to get the scoop on the Invention Convention®!”

Pen poised, Goldie perched on the desk a mere millimeter from where Ace lounged. He observed her with a detached annoyance she pretended not to see. “You promised me an
exclusive
interview, so spill it! I want . . .
information
.”

“Uh . . .” I said.

“How much
moola
will you get for the Nice Alarm? Will it be for sale in time for Christmas? Will you share any profits with your
loyal supporters?”

“Uh . . .”

I glanced at Hayley. Huge mistake. Her SOS powered up. Locked on target.

Uh-oh
.

She
knew
. I
knew
that she knew. Just like she always knows when something with me is Not. Quite. Right.

Goldie tapped her foot. Goldie tapped her pen. Goldie tapped her foot
and
her pen. She's a one-woman percussion band, that Goldie.

“WELL?”
she demanded.

“Cake!” Hayley said. “Time to eat cake!” She shot Goldie a
you-weren't-even-invited-so-don't-argue-with-me
look, then hacked out a huge hunk of Pierre's former masterpiece and plunged in her fork.

Goldie gagged. Hiccup choked. Ace shrugged. Pierre whispered, “
You are zee cray-zee woman
!”

Hayley eyed them with defiance and shoveled the mess into her mouth. Crumbs avalanched down her chin.

“Dee-licious!” she said, smacking her lips.

I'd known Hayley for more than a year. We'd been through a lot together. But in that instant, I
saw
her as if for the First Time: the bobbed, blond hair curled in a C behind one ear. The ice-cream-cold blue eyes. Her smooth skin, brown-sugary from a summer of sun. And her expression: It was a dare. A challenge. A choice that declared:
I know who I am. I like who I am. Even if you don't.

My heart raced the fifty-yard dash—in flip-flops. It slapped against my ribs. Stumbled into my lungs.

“Sneeze?”
Hic's voice.
“Are you unwell?”

I couldn't breathe. My legs felt wobbly. My toes and fingers, numb.

“He
can't
be sick.”
Goldie.
“He didn't eat any cake!”

Pierre.
“Zen why dust 'ee look like zat?”

Hayley gripped my arm. “What's wrong? Do you know what's wrong?”

I nodded. I knew. I knew as I watched her chew.

It was love at first bite.

A white meteor whizzed through the open window, streaked past my face, and plunked dead center into the Nice Alarm cake.

I jolted from my trance.
“What the—?”

Hayley reached into the chocolatey crater and dug out . . .

. . . a golf ball.

“Fore!” someone shouted from outside, followed by raucous laughter.

Fists clenched, Hayley strode from the office. Goldie trailed her, singsonging: “This is gon-na be
goo-ood
!”

No, this was gon-na be mes-sy. Hayley has a take-no-prisoners attitude when it comes to “hoodlum horseplay” at Gadabout.

Pierre and I thundered after them.

“Shall I fetch the first aid kit?” Hiccup yelled.

“Find Mr. Barker,” I hollered over my shoulder. “Hurry!”

He nodded and darted out the back.

We spotted Hayley standing atop Hole #1, the North Pole. Her SOS swept the course like a prison spotlight, searching for The Culprit.

My breath caught. My heart galumphed. My brain swirled upward with the candy cane stripes of the barber pole.

Hayley was . . . beautiful. The late-afternoon sun hung behind her, reflecting off the “snow,” shooting dazzling sword-rays at us. She stood straight and proud like Joan of Arc in a painting I'd seen once.