The Manny Files book1 (21 page)

Mom, Dad, Uncle Max, and the manny came to watch the spelling bee. They sat in the third row. The manny had GO KEATS written on his forehead in green Magic Marker, like he was at a football game. Kids from class recognized him from my school birthday party and pointed at him. Ms. Grant waved to him and smiled without showing her teeth, the kind of smile where you scrunch up your cheeks and smile with your eyes instead of your mouth.

The finalist from each classroom sat in a row of chairs that faced the student-filled bleachers. It was like we were the leaders of Spelling Congress. Mr. Alien, our principal, was the emcee. He straightened his toupee and introduced each one of us by our name and our classroom teacher.

Then we began.

Sophie, one of the first-grade representatives, was the first to spell. She missed her word,
trophy.
I expected her to cry, but she laughed and skipped into the bleachers and hugged her mother. That’s what I wanted to do. If I missed my word, I wasn’t going to cry. I was going to shrug my shoulders, hold my head up high, and go sit with my family. I hoped.

When it was my turn, I stood up so fast that my chair fell backward and slammed against the floor. The entire audience flinched like it was a
gunshot, and then they started to giggle and laugh. Not a good start.

As I stepped up to the microphone, something came flying out of the crowd and landed right in front of Mr. Alien and me. It was my Scooby Doo underwear. The ones that had been missing since Craig stole them from the swimming pool locker room last May. The kids started laughing, and you could hear the rumble of moving feet in the bleachers. They sounded like the people in the movies who are at a town meeting and the mayor says something shocking about how the children are in danger of becoming delinquents.

I looked up into the crowd and saw Craig grinning with narrow eyes like the Wicked Witch of the West. I wanted to throw water on him and watch him melt into the ground. My ears burned and I could tell they were red. My nostrils flared like they do when I’m trying not to cry. I couldn’t cry. It was one thing to cry behind a Dumpster, but to cry into a microphone in front of the whole school would make it impossible for me ever to come to school again. I thought about what the manny had told me about how to handle things like this.

I said into the microphone, “Wow. I didn’t know I had such a fan base. This must be how the Rolling Stones feel.”

The teachers and parents all rumbled with laughter. The kids looked confused, except Craig. He looked annoyed.

The manny gave me a thumbs-up sign. He crept down from the bleachers, grabbed my Scooby Doo underwear off the floor, and shoved them into his pocket. He returned to his seat next to Uncle Max.

Mr. Allen turned to me and said, “Your word is
magnificent.
”

“
Magnificent.
M-a-g-n-i-f-i-c-e-n-t.
Magnificent.
”

“Correct,” said Mr. Alien, and the crowd cheered.

I went back to my seat and felt pleased with myself. So that’s how Lulu felt.

The spelling bee went on for two hours. Kids sat down as they missed their words:
incorrect, anticlimax, disqualify.
I spelled all of my words correctly:
intense, prepared, prodigy.

The last two people in the spelling bee were a fifth grader named Kyle and me.

Kyle stepped up to the microphone, and his class chanted for him. “Kyle, Kyle, Kyle!”

Mr. Allen gave him the word
harmonious
to spell.

Kyle accidentally spelled it-
eous
instead of-
ious.

Kyle’s class sighed in disappointment. He sat down in his chair, and I could tell from his
face that he was chanting in his head,
Miss it. Miss it. Miss it.
If I misspelled the word, he still had a chance to win.

I stepped up to the microphone. Mr. Allen said, “Keats. The word is
harmonious.
”

Harmonious. H-a-r-m-o-n-i-o-u-s
Harmonious.
”

“Correct,” said Mr. Alien as Kyle put his head in his hands. Mr. Alien went on, “If you spell this final word correctly, you will be our spelling-bee champion.” My class chanted my name. “Keats, Keats, Keats!” Only it sounded like, “Skeet, Skeet, Skeet!” I really had to pee. I looked at the manny, and he mouthed, “You can do it,” just like he had said at the swimming pool when I jumped off the high dive. I imagined Grandma chanting with them.

“Keats, Keats, Keats!”

Mr. Allen quieted the crowd and said, “Your word is
interesting.
”

I didn’t even have to think about it. I had read it every day on my coconut.

“
Interesting.
I-n-t-e-r-e-s-t-i-n-g.
Interesting.
”

“Correct,” said Mr. Allen. “Ladies and gentlemen, our new spelling bee champion.”

He grabbed my arm and held it above my head like I had just won a boxing match against Oscar de la Hoya. The overflowing bleachers gave me a standing ovation, and the back of my neck tickled.

Mom, Dad, Uncle Max, and the manny congratulated me while the kids filed back toward their classrooms for the rest of the school day. A man from the newspaper took my picture and interviewed me for next Wednesday’s paper.

Mom asked what I’d like for dinner that night, and then she and Dad left. They had to go back to work. The manny and Uncle Max walked me back to my classroom. The manny didn’t walk. He did cartwheels, but he stopped when he heard Mr. Allen coming around the corner. We laughed after Mr. Allen had passed us because the manny had said, “Hello, sir,” like he hadn’t been doing anything unusual.

Uncle Max said good-bye, and the manny gave me a high five. I could still hear them laughing as I went into my classroom, until my class started cheering for me when I walked through the door. Mrs. House and the kids had a party for me, complete with cake and punch. The kids in my class excitedly told their version of the spelling bee.

“I got so nervous when the chair flew out from underneath you. I thought for sure you were too jittery to spell,” said Sarah.

“I knew you were going to win the whole time,” said Scotty.

Craig didn’t say anything. He just sat at his
desk and ate cake while the other kids swarmed around me like bees.

At recess that afternoon I saw Craig walk over behind the Dumpster. I jumped down from the monkey bars and followed him because I thought that he might be writing something mean next to my name.

When I got there, Craig was crying.

He saw that I was standing there, and yelled at me.

“Get out of here, spelling nerd. If you tell anyone, I’ll smack you.”

He put his face right into mine and pushed his chin out as a threat.

I reached into my front pocket and pulled out a Sharpie. I always carry a Sharpie because you never know when you might need one.

“Here. If you want to sign your name on the Dumpster.” I smiled at him. He took the pen, and I said, “Okay. Bye.”

I ran back over to join Sarah, Scotty, and my other friends on top of the monkey bars. I didn’t tell any of them that I had seen Craig crying behind the Dumpster. Not even Sarah.

Craig didn’t say a word to me the rest of the day.

After school, on my way to the bus, I stopped by the Dumpster to see if Craig had written
anything by my name. He had. Written right next to
KEATS DALINGER
was
CRAIG PRICE.

I got on the bus.

“Congratulations on the spellin’ bee, darlin’,” said the bus driver.

Darlin
’. D-a-r-l-i-n-apostrophe.
Darlin
’.

For Halloween this year I wanted to be something spectacular.
Spectacular
is another word that Sarah likes to use with magical hand motions. She usually says it when I ask her about her vacations.

“How was your trip to Venice?”

“Spectacular. They have the most unbelievable pigeons there.”

“How was your visit to your cousins’ house in Wisconsin?”

“Spectacular. There weren’t any mosquitoes.”

“How was the airplane ride?”

“Dreadful.”

She likes the word
dreadful,
too.

This Halloween, Sarah dressed up as the Eiffel Tower. She and her mom went to Paris for summer vacation and to visit Sarah’s mom’s college roommate. Sarah’s been talking about the Eiffel Tower ever since. She says that the lights on it at night are spectacular. She built a miniature Eiffel Tower out of cardboard and white Christmas lights. She wore it so that she was inside the tower and all you could see were her legs and her arms hanging out. She said that I should go as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but I didn’t want to walk around leaning sideways all night.

Instead I dressed up as Scooby Doo. He’s my favorite cartoon character, as you might remember from the underwear incident. I learned what an incident was last year from Ms. Grant. We had to draw a poster for National Dental Month. I took my poster board home, and India drew a picture of a tooth sitting in a dentist’s chair with a gas mask on. She wrote the words
A BRUSH WITH SUCCESS
at the top. I colored it.

My poster won the contest, and they hung it in Dr. Craighead’s dentist office.

A few weeks later Ms. Grant needed somebody to draw posters for the school carnival. She said that I had done such a beautiful job on my dental poster that she wanted me to do these posters for her. I asked if I could do them at home, but she said she needed them quickly and handed me some poster board. I drew three posters, and each one was worse than the last. When I turned them in, she knew that I hadn’t done my own dental poster. All that these new posters had on them were stick people holding balloons.
I told her that India had drawn my poster and I had colored it. I explained that Andy Warhol’s entire career as an artist was based on that same philosophy. Uncle Max had been reading
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol,
and we had talked about it at dinner.

She called my mom about the “incident.”

Housman growled at me when I wore my Scooby Doo costume. He acted like he was going to attack my ankle, but instead he ran to my room and hid under my bed.

The manny dressed up as Shaggy, Scooby Doo’s best friend. He said things like “Zoinks” and “Let’s get out of here, Scoob.”

I said things back like “Ruh-roh” and “Scooby Dooby Doo” in my best Scooby impersonation, which wasn’t very good.

Uncle Max put on a white sweater and a red scarf and went as Fred. Lulu put on her miniskirt and a red wig and went as Daphne.

She loved being the pretty one.

India loved being the smart one. She put on an orange turtleneck and dark-framed glasses and went as Velma, the intellectual one who always loses her glasses.

Belly dressed up as Scrappy Doo, the smaller, tougher version of Scooby Doo.

The day of the school Halloween parade the manny walked with my class. I asked Mrs. House if he could walk with me because he was my sidekick. Like Batman and Robin. The Lone Ranger and Tonto. Siegfried and Roy.

Mrs. House said it would be fine.

I don’t think she had heard the fiasco story from last year’s Halloween parade. She was dressed up as Scarlett O’Hara, with a big hoop-skirt. I made sure not to walk anywhere near her.

Ms. Grant remembered. She was dressed up as a cowgirl, with chaps and spurs. She even had a lariat. When she saw me, she smiled, but I could tell she was thinking about how our entire class fell on her last year. She looked like she wanted to lasso me and tie me up like they do the calves at the rodeo.

Two summers ago Dad took us to a rodeo that came to town with the fair. I wore cowboy boots and accidentally stepped in horse poop. I didn’t cry because that’s what cowboy boots are for, and it made me feel like a real cowboy. I did cry when they did the calf roping. They roped a calf around the neck from the top of a horse and then ran over and tied it up as fast as they could. When they were done, they put their
hands up in victory like they had just wrestled an elephant instead of a forty-pound calf. It looked mean. I told Dad I didn’t like small things being picked on by bigger ones. We left early to get cotton candy and ride the Ferris wheel.

The manny and I threw Scooby snacks to the people watching the parade. They were really little bags of candy corn, but we called them Scooby snacks.

Craig was dressed in the same costume he wore last year. It wasn’t much of a costume. He wore a ripped-up white T-shirt and ripped-up jeans that had red dye all over them that looked like blood. He had a fake hatchet attached to the top of his head, with bloodred makeup around it and dripping down his face.

He walked with the manny and me during the parade.

He said that he liked our costumes.

The manny gave him Scooby snacks to throw.

He shoved most of them into his own pocket.

That night the manny and Uncle Max took us trick-or-treating in the Volkswagen Eurovan. We made cardboard panels for the side of the Eurovan that said
THE MYSTERY MACHINE.

We went up to each house as a group. Most people laughed when they saw our costumes. Especially when Belly would call them a wise
guy and demand miniature Milky Ways or popcorn balls.