Lizzie just sat there, stupefied. I whispered, “Dodger! Hide!”
“Why?” he asked. “You're the only one who can see me.”
“Uh, yeah, but I think other people might be able to see a floating mess of yogurt.”
Poof!
Just like that, Dodger disappeared. Lizzie, who had started frantically dabbing at herself with a wad of napkins, stopped long enough to ask me, “Did you just say something?”
“Uh, no,” I said. “How did you manage to splash all this yogurt everywhere, Lizzie? Didn't they teach you how to eat in England?”
Lizzie said, “Of course they taught me how to eat! How could you ⦠I ⦠you ⦠ugh! And to think I came over here to be nice to you!” Then her eyes started to fill up with tears and she ran out of the lunchroom.
I sighed and unscrewed the cap of my soup thermos. With a wet
POP!,
Dodger appeared next to me, jumping up and down and fanning himself. The yogurt was off his face, but it had been replaced by little bits ofâI sniffed at the airââchicken soup.
Apparently, when I'd told Dodger to hide, he had decided to conceal himself in my lunch.
“Ooh, it's HOT in there!” he exclaimed. “I haven't felt anything like it since those Aztecs sacrificed me and my third master to their angry volcano god back inâhey, where's Lizzie?”
“She ran away crying.”
“Well, that went rather well, Willie.”
“What do you mean, that went rather well? Didn't you just hear me say she ran away crying?”
“Dude, of course I heard you. We chimps have excellent hearing, sharpened by thousands of years ofâ”
“Yeah, but didn't you HEAR ME? We just made Lizzie cry.”
“Right. And I happen to know that your first wish was going to be: âMake Lizzie stay away from me.' Wasn't it?”
“Well, sure. Butâ” I had admit, he was right. And I had wanted to make her go away. But for some reason, I felt kind of rotten now that I had done it. Even if she was super-annoying.
“But nothing. She's away, isn't she?”
“Yes, butâ”
“Stop saying âbut,' okay? I like Lizzie. And that yogurt was excellent! But I'm just doing what you want me to do. If you want to drive away the one person in this school who cares what happens to you, it's none of my business. Now I have to go to the first-grade tables. Some kid over there brought a huge bag of mixed-fruit roll-ups. Yum!”
He went bounding across the room. Just as the high-pitched screams of the first graders began to fill the air, I decided I had better eat the rest of my lunch and try to get the table (and my hair) cleaned up a bit before Mrs. Starsky came for us. I plunged my plastic spoon deep into my soup, then stuck it in my mouthâand spat the entire mouthful across the table.
A note to the reader: Chicken soup tastes better if it's not mixed with banana yogurt and chimp hair. Just as I was about to get up and go dump out the rest of the muck that had been my lunch, a shadow fell over me. I looked up and saw the lunch lady standing over me, snarling. One of her hands held a dripping, stinky mop. The other was clenched tightly around the upper arm of my crying former lunch companion, Lizzie.
Then, over the wailing of what sounded like the entire first grade, plus one hungry chimp, I heard the enraged voice of Mrs. Starsky saying, “What in the world is going on here?”
All in all, it was turning into a pretty long day.
The Home Front
DODGER REFUSED TO GET BACK on the school bus, and I was in no hurry to get home with my note from Mrs. Starsky, so we took a long walk after school. You could probably guess that I was in a bad mood, but Dodger was really on a rampage:
“That teacher of yours is
nuts
. Get a smarter imaginary friend, she says. She thinks I'm dumber than a monkey. Just because I'm a little bit rusty in the spelling department. A smarter imaginary friend? Hmph!”
“Uh, Dodger? No offense, but Mrs. Starsky doesn't even believe I
have
an imaginary friend.
She was just being sarcastic. She really thinks I was cheating with Craig.”
“Oh, great, Willie. You're saying she thinks I'm so imaginary that I'm not even
really
imaginary?”
“Dodger, this isn't about you. It's about how this was the worst school day of my life. And how my mom is going to kill me.”
“Dude, funny you should mention that. Because it's time to start working on Part Two of the Three-Part Plan ⦠.”
By the time we walked in my front door, I was basically terrified. I now knew two parts of Dodger's plan. The first was to “solve your Lizzie problem,” and the second was to make my mom stop being so overprotective. Dodger still wouldn't tell me the third part, but I was having trouble imagining how it could be worse than the first two.
Silly me. Looking back, I should have imagined a little harder.
Naturally, as soon as my mom read Mrs. Starsky's note, she sent me to my room until dinner, with strict orders to study my spelling words. She also warned me that I should “Just WAIT until
your father gets home, young man!” So I was a little nervous, and being nervous made it hard to study. So did Dodger.
“Dude,” he said as soon as I sat down at my desk with my spelling book, “you're going to spend the whole night in your room, anywayâwe might as well play for a while before you look at those words.”
“What do you mean, the whole night? My mom just said until dinner, not the whole night.”
“Trust me, Willie. Things happen.”
Oh, that was excellent news. I asked Dodger to leave me alone for a while, which made him get all huffy. But he went
POOF
and disappeared. I forced myself to go over the words. I even wrote them five times each. It didn't take long for me to become an expert on S-e-r-e-n-g-e-t-i and T-a-n-z-a-n-i-a. Then I had nothing to do. I tried playing games on my handheld system, but Mom heard the beeps, came in, and confiscated my toy. I tried reading, but I was too hyper. Finally I said, “Dodgerâcome back!” I felt kind of dumb talking to the air, but didn't know what else to do.
I waited. Nothing happened. I raised my voice and tried again.
Still nothing.
I tried one last time, almost shouting it. Dodger didn't magically appear, but my sister, Amy, did, popping into my room without knocking, as usual. “Who are you talking to, Willie?”
“Nobody. I'm just studying my spelling words. Sometimes I like to say them out loud.”
“Yeah, right,” Amy said with a seven-year-old sneer. “You're up to something, and I'm going to find out what. I'm on to you, buster!” Then she stomped out. I swear, sometimes it was like she was my mom's clone or something. And one of my mom was already too much for me.
As soon as I heard Amy's footsteps fading down the stairs, I had an idea. It killed me to do it, but I said, “Dodger,
please
come back!”
Poof.
Dodger appeared. “Hey, bud,” he said. “I knew you'd miss me. Wanna play fear-ball?”
Fear-ball? What the heck was fear-ball? It was hard to believe I had actually asked Dodger to come back, especially when he explained fear-ball to me. The object of the game was to fix what
Dodger saw as the root of my baseball problem. He said I was afraid of the ball. Part Three of his plan was to make me a better ballplayer by conquering my fear. And the way to do that was to throw balls at me.
Fear-ball was dodgeball without the dodging part.
I tried to get out of the situation by suggesting other activities. But we couldn't play Trivial Pursuit because Dodger felt that spending years on end in a bottle gave him a disadvantage when it came to keeping up with the news. He refused to play chess because he said the horse-shaped pieces were degrading to animals. I offered to read to him, but he said, “Human books? Ha! Like what?
Clifford the Big Red Dog
? Have you ever tried to have a serious discussion with a dog? You might as well be talking to a treeâa tree that has an annoying habit of slobbering all over your fur.
Charlotte's Web
? Oh, because spiders are such great role modelsâexcept for the part where the females EAT the males.
Curious George
? At least he has opposable thumbsâbut
please
. Dude, where's the chimp literature? There was this one book that
my last master read to me called
Chimpy and the Chocolate Factory
. Do you know that one? About a kind, honest young chimp who finds a golden ticket andâ”
I had to interrupt. “Uh, Dodger, I know that book. But it's not about a chimp. It's called
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
”
Dodger looked heartbroken. “Oh,” he muttered. “Oh.”
Then he grabbed a Nerf ball from the corner near my closet and whipped it at my head. Nobody knows how to change a subject like Dodger.
Fear-ball wasn't very fun for me, although Dodger seemed to enjoy it. The game went like, this: I would stand in front of my bed, after piling up a bunch of pillows on it. Dodger would grab one of the various balls that were scattered around the bottom of the old toy bucket in my closet. Then he'd instruct me not to move, and try to throw the ball as close as possible to my body without actually hitting me. He also said he'd start out with throws that weren't very close or very fast, but that each throw would be faster and closer. For the first ten throws or so, I flinched,
ducked, whimpered, dived, etc. Then I started to have some confidence, some nerve, some guts. After fifteen throws or so, I didn't even blink until the ball whacked into the pile of pillows. Dodger announced that we were playing to fifty. I shuddered. At around the fortieth ball, Dodger took a couple of steps back, so that he was as far from me as the room allowed, and really started whizzing the balls by me. In fact, I was pretty sure the forty-fourth had grazed my right elbow. But I made it through to the last throw with all of my parts in one piece.
“Here goes, my fearless young friend. The final throw! And then you will be the new World Fear-ball Champion (Human Youth Division)! For this, we must add to the challenge. I want you to hold these weights!” He made me straighten my arms out to both sides, and put a notebook in each of my hands. “Now I want you to close your eyes. No, waitâthat's not good enough. Here, try this!” He went into my closet and took the belt off of my bathrobe, tossing the robe to the floor in a heap. Then he wrapped the belt around my head so it covered my eyes and tied it tightly behind my
head. Then I heard him walking away from me and picking something up from the floor.
“Uh, Dodger?” I asked shakily “You're using a Nerf ball for this one, right?”
“Well, basically,” he replied.
“What do you mean, âbasically'?”
“Well, it's a ball ⦠. Now get ready!”
How was I supposed to get readyâmake a last request? Watch my life flash before my eyes? I figured if I was going to get beaned, it might as well happen quickly, because my arms were starting to tremble under the weight of the notebooks. “All right, Dodger,” I forced myself to say in the deepest, steadiest voice I could manage, “I was
born
ready!”
I felt every muscle in my body tense up, awaiting the sharp, sickening
THWACK!
of impact. I heard a swish and a creak that must have been Dodger winding up. Then, just when I knew the ball must be about to fly, I heard my mom pound on the door. “Dinner!” she shouted.
And that's when Dodger released the ball.
When I woke up, my mother was kneeling over me, holding the belt from my bathrobe and
screaming my name. It took me a moment to figure out where I was, and another moment to realize what must have happened. The throbbing agony in the center of my forehead was the big clue: Dodger had missed. Or not missed, depending on how you looked at it. He was standing behind Mom, peering anxiously over her shoulder at me. I put my hand to my head and could feel some kind of weird indentation lines crisscrossing about two inches above the bridge of my nose. Over Mom's wailing, I heard Dodger say, “Oops! Sorry about that, dude. It's this eye patchâmesses up my depth perception. But man, you should have seen it: a perfect spiral. It was like,
bang!
And then you were like, ugh! And your mom was totallyâ”
I let my head ease back to the floor. Amy and my dad came bounding into the room way too fast. Amy tripped over Dodger's foot and crashed into Mom's back. Then Dad tripped over the football that was lying there and crashed into Amy's back. I watched in horror as all three of them tipped forward onto me. By the time we got untangled, Mom was scolding everyone in sight, Dad was helping me to my feet and looking sheepish,
Dodger was hiding in the corner under my bathrobe, and Amy was cracking up while pointing at my forehead.
When my mom paused for breath, I asked Amy, “What? What's so funny?”
She couldn't stop laughing, but she did manage to hold her hands in front of her so that her two pointer fingers made a plus sign. I looked at her. I looked at the football. I looked at Dodger, or at least the blue bottoms of his feet sticking out from under the robe. I felt my forehead again. Then I dashed out of my room and down the hall to the bathroom. I hit the light switch and looked in the mirror. What I saw was horrible: Dodger had pegged me smack-dab in the middle of my forehead with the point of the football, where the seams meet. The impact had left a perfectly formed, bright red plus sign dented into my skin. I looked like what Harry Potter would have looked like if Lord Voldemort had been really into math.
Jeepers. This was no good at all.
I trudged back to my room, feeling sort of woozy from the impact of the ball, followed by the impact of my family. When I walked in with one
hand covering my forehead, everyone started in on me. My mom said, in that icy-cold voice moms use when they're just on the edge of a total meltdown, “William, what exactly happened to you?”
“Well, uh, I was trying to use that belt”âshe was still holding the belt from my robeâ“to make a catapult. Um, for science? It's, like, this project-type thing, andâ”
“A catapult? IN YOUR ROOM? William Ryan, why don't you ever use your head?”
Amy couldn't resist: “He did, Mom! Didn't you see?”
Dad looked like he was trying hard not to smile at that until Mom turned to him and said, “James, tell William that we won't tolerate this kind of behavior! He could have been severely injured.”
Dad gave me a weak little shrug, but said, “William, we won't tolerate this kind of behavior! You could have been severely injured!”
“But Dad, I wasn't severely injured. I just got banged up a little. I'm fine, really.”
Mom still looked upset, but now she focused on my injury. Gently, but forcefully, she pulled my
hand away from my head. Amy snickered and said, “Wow, Willie, that's some addition!” I just looked at her. She snorted. “Additionâget it? Wow, I am definitely the funniest kid in second grade!”
And I was definitely going to be the dorkiest-looking kid in fifth grade.