Big Mouth (3 page)

Gardo glanced at the graph with all its girly hearts and curlicues, then reached out and flipped back a page, where he read the label on the graph Lucy just spent so much time computing.

“Graph one, hot dogs?” He closed the binder with a flip of his wrist. “We need to think bigger than that. We need something that screams Sherman T. Thuff. You want people screaming your name, don’t you, Shermie?”

I imagined crowds of people chanting my name.
Thuff! Thuff! Thuff!
My heart started racing.
Thuff! Thuff! Thuff!
Yeah, I could handle that; I was ready to be famous. Del Heiny Junior 13 was peanuts. I wanted the whole world to know who Sherman T. Thuff was.
Thuff! Thuff! Thuff!

“Thuff! Thuff! Thuff!” I shouted.

“Now
that’s
what I’m talking about.” Gardo punched me in the shoulder again, even harder this time. “I’m sorry, Lucy, but ‘graph one, hot dogs’ is just not Thuff enough. Hey!” He pounded the table solidly with his palm, making me and Lucy both jump. “That’s it! That’s our hook. ‘Are
You
Thuff Enuff?’ E-N-U-F-F. It’s perfect!”

I imagined people shouting at me, “Are
YOU
Thuff Enuff?” and me shouting back, “I AM!”

“Perfect!” I pounded the table, too. “I can already see it, I’ll jog up to the hot dog table with ten thousand fans chanting ‘Thuff! Thuff! Thuff!,’ all of them wearing T-shirts with my name on them. Me, Sherman ‘Thuff Enuff’ Thuff. Awesome!”

“Oh, we’re not stopping at crummy T-shirts, my friend.” Gardo picked up another pizza slice and eyed it from different angles. “We’ll do hats and sweatshirts and mugs. The memorabilia shop on level four will be begging for Thuff Enuff stuff. Begging! And the endorsement deals, they’ll pour in by the boatload.” He bit into the slice and talked while he chewed. None of his food spit out, though. “Thuff Enuff, my good man, I am going to make you rich and famous.”

I thumped him solidly on the back. “And when I’m rich and famous, Gardo Esperaldo, you can call my play-by-play at the Glutton Bowl.”

“Oh, I’ll call it, all right.” He tossed his slice back into the box and jumped to his feet with his arms spread wide, right in the middle of the food court. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, sports fans of all ages! I give you the one, the only…Sherman ‘Thuff Enuff’ Thuff!”

He yanked my hand straight up into the air like I was Rocky Balboa himself. I went with it, standing up and throwing my other arm into the air.

“Sit down!”
Lucy whipped up her binder to hide her blushing face.

Some kids in yellowy-red
GO, ROMA TOMATOES!
T-shirts pointed at our table from the Nature’s Nectar smoothie counter. Seventh graders, probably. Their matching yellowy-red ball caps were tilted back on their heads as they slurped at their fruit shakes. The geeks. One of them dropped his smoothie, splashing pink goo up the front of his jeans.

Please tell me I wasn’t that pathetic last year.
“So they’re looking at us,” I told Lucy. “Who cares? We’re higher up in the food chain than a bunch of pea-greeners.” A seventh grader’s opinion was as useful as an empty can of Coke, especially seventh graders from Del Heiny Junior High #11, home of the Roma Tomatoes. I shouted in their direction: “Thank you! Thank you!”

Gardo jumped up on the bench and pointed their way three times. “Are…
YOU
…Thuff Enuff?”

The tallest one flipped us the bird.

I waved at him with both arms, real exaggerated, a bird in each hand. “I AM!”

Ha! Unless that kid has three hands, I win this round.

Gardo high-fived me again as most of the pea-greeners scowled and wandered off like good little underclassman. They left the goop-splashed kid to fend for himself with the Nature’s Nectar napkin dispenser.

Laughing, we climbed down and attacked the rest of the pizza.

Lucy didn’t eat anything more, though. She just fingered the colored tabs on her binder silently. We probably embarrassed her too much. Again. She could get oversensitive about that kind of thing.

Gardo ran his mouth enough for the three of us, though, telling us all about how he’d kick butt at his wrestling scrimmage coming up. With all his big-man-on-the-mat talk, he lost interest in the pizza pretty quickly. Me, I was more than happy to focus my energy on the feast in front of us. Hey, I was hungry. I hadn’t had much luck with those hot dogs at lunch.

I polished off the truffles first. Clearly Gardo wasn’t going to eat them, and Lucy would have jabbed out her own eye rather than eat a truffle. Working with chocolate all the time made her lose her taste for the stuff. Aversion therapy, I think she called it. I was just glad it didn’t work that way with ice cream. After a quick check of my cell phone’s clock, I hurriedly slurped the last dribbles of Cookie Dough out of the cup and grabbed one last slice of pizza for my hustle back to Scoops-a-Million. Just fifty-eight seconds left of break. I rushed off with a hasty good-bye, with one last sad look at the milkshakes. No one had touched them. What a waste.

As I dodged my way back to Scoops, I tuned out the drone of the air conditioners, letting the sounds of my upcoming fame fill my head instead:
Thuff! Thuff! Thuff! Thuff!

I couldn’t wait to be rich and famous.

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CHAPTER 2

“Vomit. Puke. Throw-up.”

Ms. Maxwell’s lecture voice boomed throughout the science lab, vibrating the paper jack-o’-lantern hanging above her head. “You know the smell, now you know the name: butyric acid. Used in the manufacture of plastics, butyric acid naturally occurs in sweat, rancid butter, cod liver oil, and, yes, good old vomit.” She pulled a stained lab coat over her fitted yellow T-shirt and signaled Lucy, in the first row, to pass out the Experimentation Documentation worksheets. “You, my inquisitive young scientists, will be working with butyric acid in today’s experiment.”

Girly groans mixed with macho cheers as my class reacted to the news of another Mad Max Lab Day. What a way to follow up a two-and-a-half-day weekend! Science Concepts in Action was every bit as cool as I’d heard it would be. Last week we did an experiment where we lit potato chips on fire with Bunsen burners and measured how much grease dripped out. I didn’t eat chips for a whole day after that. The week before, we’d lobbed balloons filled with mustard off the roof to test Newton’s Second Law of Motion. What other teacher on the planet would let thirty-two eighth graders on top of a three-story building with balloon bombs? Max didn’t even get mad when the mustard splattered the fresh red paint on the walls of the school’s office. In fact, I would have sworn she was laughing behind her hand when it happened, not coughing. No wonder she was the most popular teacher in the whole school. It also didn’t hurt that she was totally hot.

Butyric acid, huh? I did know the smell. Too well. The sour memory of Friday’s hot dog episode was still fresh in my nose. And Lucy had me scheduled for
eleven
HDBs in twelve minutes tomorrow after school, so I had a feeling I’d be on intimate terms with the raunchy stuff soon enough.

Despite the cool gross-out factor, though, today’s Mad Max experiment was falling flatter than a pancake. Max explained the steps for the lab clearly enough, but she was cranky the whole time, snapping at us left and right. When she suddenly ripped into the guys at the table next to mine, I almost ducked under my chair.

“What’s her problem today?” I whispered to my lab partner, Linus “Tater” Tate, after she’d stormed off. “Did someone let the rats out of their cages?”

“We should be so lucky.” Tater had earned his nickname in fourth grade when he jammed four Tater Tots up his nostrils. That got him such a big laugh, he’d been doing it ever since. I guess everyone needed their claim to fame, but I just couldn’t look at Tater without staring at his nostrils. He checked to make sure Max wasn’t close, then leaned over, his hand on his office aide key ring to make sure the keys didn’t jangle. I tried to focus on his eyes. “Word is, one of the science teachers got suspended at that emergency school board meeting. Supposedly he gave his class a lecture on tomatoes, saying they’re more acidic ounce for ounce than a car battery. He said they’d burn your stomach lining right out of you if you ate enough.”

I nearly gasped out loud. “He said
that
?”

“Uh-huh. He also said there are a thousand tomato bug eyes in every squirt of ketchup.”

“Really? Dang.” What was that teacher thinking? District policy strictly forbids anti-tomato talk on campus, and the school board strictly enforces district policies. Of course they’d nail him. And of course Max would be ticked off about it. That was just the kind of power trip that burned her Bunsen. If we were living in the seventies, she’d be marching around with hippie braids and a
DOWN WITH THE MAN
sign. “Shoot, she’ll probably be cranky all week.”

“Probably.” He went back to stirring our gel mixture. Some butyric acid splashed the bottom of his yellow shirt. He scrunched up his big nostrils. “I don’t see what the big deal is, though. So he got suspended. I wouldn’t mind staying at home for a week. It’s not like he got transferred to home ec like that teacher at Del Heiny Junior 7 last year. Now that would suck.”

“Seriously.” But then, that science teacher had refused to apologize to the school board, or to the PTA, or, worst of all, to the school’s almighty sponsor.

In our district, every school had the same sponsor: Del Heiny Ketchup Company. It had been that way for years, ever since the district’s budgets got slashed. They needed cash from somewhere, so like cities do with sports stadiums, the school board decided to get a sponsor. The soda companies were out of the running, though, since the state’s Department of Cafeteria Nutrition started cracking down on campus soda sales. Which sucked, by the way. How did the D.Caf.Nuts expect us to wash down our hamburgers? With
milk,
for crying out loud? Anyway, Del Heiny Ketchup Company stepped in and saved the day by offering to sponsor the entire district. All the school board had to do was agree to name every school after Del Heiny and turn their mascots into tomatoes. That arrangement passed muster with the D.Caf.Nuts, with ketchup being a vegetable and all. So in one swoop, Del Heiny got an image boost, the district got its money, and I got stuck here, in glorious Del Heiny Junior High #13, home of the oh-so-fierce Plum Tomatoes.

“No, no, no. You’re doing it all wrong, Linus. Didn’t you pay attention to the instructions?” Mad Max didn’t like the consistency of our butyric acid gel mixture.

I didn’t like the smell of it. For the sake of science, though, I leaned in for a closer examination—holding my breath, of course. The mixture looked fine to me, like cherry Jell-O. Rubbery and red. Which, like an idiot, is what I said to Max.

“Is this experiment about making cherry Jell-O, Sherman?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Is it about Jell-O at all?”

“No, but—”

“Then the point of your comparison is?”

“I don’t know, I just—”

“That’s what I thought. Now discard this gel and follow the steps written on your handout. Come on class, let’s pick up the pace here! We’re running out of time.” She clapped her hands and zipped away to terrorize another lab group.

Jeez. I’d almost rather be hanging out with Arthur.

Tater flared his big nostrils and exhaled like a rhino. “Thanks, Thuff. For a minute there I thought she’d assign me after-school cleanup again. I hate cleaning up after lab days. Her experiments always reek by sixth period.”

It wasn’t like I’d really done anything, but hey, he thought I did. “No problem, man. I got your back.” I clapped him solidly on the shoulder, then scooped up the gel tray.

“Wait.” He stopped me before I could walk away with it. Pulling out his cell phone, he snapped a quick picture of it. “My brother’s not gonna believe this one. I just wish this picture was scratch ’n’ sniff.”

“He’ll be glad it isn’t.” I left him pulling out his lucky green marker to fill out our worksheet.

When I passed Lucy’s desk, she caught my hand and whispered, “Hey, Shermie. Big news. I know how you can get down
thirteen
dogs instead of eleven.”

We both looked around quickly. Max was browbeating the troops on the other side of the room, and everyone else was working on their experiments. I knelt down next to Lucy. “Spill it.”

“Wet buns.”

“Excuse me?” I instinctively covered my rear with my hands, spilling my gel blob onto the floor. It oozed under the table behind us. I made a funny face to make the girls at the table giggle. When they went back to their experiment, I quickly shoveled the red gel back onto my tray with my foot.

“Wet buns,” Lucy repeated when I knelt down next to her again. “That’s what the pros do. They dunk their hot dog buns in water before they eat them, separate from the wieners. Wet buns go down easier and quicker than dry buns.”

Wet buns, of course!
I swear, taking Lucy on as my coach was a stroke of genius. I’d just do whatever she told me, and then the fame and money would come rolling in.
Thirteen-Dog Tuesday, here I come! Next stop, the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog–Eating Contest, the Super Bowl of competitive eating. Fame will be mine!

Lucy nudged me away suddenly. “She’s coming. Go.
Hurry.
” She turned back to her goo, which was bright yellow, and tried to look studious. “Man, this stuff stinks.”

Of course it stank. It was butyric acid. Vomit. Puke. Throw-up. Blood of the evil Porcelain God. And, with thirteen wet HDBs staring me down, probably my new best friend.