Big Mouth Read online

  When he was right behind Lucy, my buddy winked at me, then leaned his mouth down near Lucy’s ear. “Take off your shoes,” he hissed. “You can count higher that way.” He playfully poked her in the side with the corner of a pizza box.

  “Gardo! You made me lose count.”

  “I made you jump, too.” He laughed and high-fived me, then sat down next to me on the plastic bench.

  I wagged a finger at him. “I expect a little more maturity from you, sonny.”

  “How about a little maturity from you both?” Lucy muttered, straightening her Hershey’s wrapper, er, apron. She was kind of smiling as she said it, though.

  Good ol’ Lucy. Always a sport.

  She went back to marking the graph.

  I took the pizza box from Gardo and set it on the table. “I was starting to think you wouldn’t show.”

  “Hey, it’s crowded. I had to push my way to the counters and talk fast. I barely had time to get off a wink. You should be thankful I made it at all.”

  “Oh, we’re thankful,” Lucy said without looking up.

  “We are,” I stressed. Unlike Lucy, I meant it. Gardo’s supreme flirting skills scored us the best free food in the mall. Not even the high school girls could resist him. We couldn’t risk him holding back because we were ungrateful. “Hey, hey. I see more donations there, Romeo. C’mon, fork ’em over.”

  “What, these?” He held up a cardboard carrying tray with three shakes, then grinned. “You should be extra thankful I can work the magic at high speeds.” He jiggled the tray. “I scored a bull’s-eye every time, baby. Girls might as well have targets on their foreheads.”

  Lucy whipped her head up. “Excuse me?”

  “What?” He lowered the shakes and looked to me for a clue. “What?”

  I shrugged.

  Lucy narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean, what?”

  Uh-oh. Better batten down the hatches, Gardo. Tropical storm Lucy is starting to swirl.

  “What you just said about girls,” she continued. “It was insulting.”

  “What’s insulting? I’m not insulting. Shermie, am I insulting?” Gardo looked at me again.

  This time, I didn’t even flinch. Shermie Thuff was no dummy.

  Lucy started to say something but then just sighed instead. “Why waste my breath?” She went back to writing again. “It’s not like you can help it; you are a Libra.” She said it like the guy had infantigo or something heinous like that.

  Gardo mouthed “PMS” my way, then spit his gum into the trash can by our table.

  I eyeballed the Slimmy Jim’s pizza box he’d put on the table. There were about a million smells swirling around the food court, but I could clearly pick out the salty aroma of pepperoni wafting from the square box, along with the smoky perfume of crisp, browned crust and the subtle undercurrent of woodfire-smoked tomatoes and the…the…hmmm, I can’t quite place that smell…It’s kind of sweet…kind of…citrusy! “Ew! Is there pineapple on that pizza?”

  “I swear, Shermie, you could be a bloodhound with that nose.” Gardo flipped open the box. I nearly shielded my eyes at the sickening sight of charred fruit infecting innocent pepperoni slices. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “Maybe not, but that pineapple is out of here.” I started flicking off the greasy chunks. Warm, seared pineapple baked into cheese and tomato sauce was a terrible combination. No one cooked strawberries or plums into a pizza, why would they try pineapple?

  My first pineapple flick went wild, though, pegging Gardo’s red Go, Plum Wrestling! T-shirt. “Sorry, man.”

  Gardo retaliated by snicking a golden chunk back my way and cheering when I dodged it. Then he tilted his head back and lowered a shiny circle of pepperoni into his gawping mouth, letting the grease trickle down his chin. “Umm-umm!”

  He might’ve loved pepperoni more than I did.

  I folded two slices into a sandwich and bit big. In the Sherman T. Thuff Book of Good and Tasty Things, Slimmy Jim’s woodfired pizza ranked five stars out of five.

  Across from me and Gardo, Lucy carefully capped her pen and tucked it into her binder pouch. When she clapped the binder shut, she looked pleased as pie. Another graph up and running. “Follow me, Sherman Thuff, and you will be a star.”

  As if to celebrate, she reached into the front pocket of her Chocolat du Monde apron and fished out two truffles. “Tada!” She set the truffles next to the pizza box.

  “Score!” I shouted. Add those beauties to the slightly green banana and the cup of Cookie Dough ice cream that I’d contributed, and we had a break feast.

  Gardo motioned his head toward the notebook. “I see you’ve got Shermie’s road to glory all plotted out.” A half-circle of pepperoni fell from his slice. I snagged it before he did. “Hey!”

  I grinned and chewed real big.

  “Strategy is everything.” Lucy picked up the banana and started peeling. “Competitive eating is the up-and-coming sport of this century. It’ll be in the Olympics soon. If Shermie wants to be a champion eater, he has to do it right.” She swirled the banana in the soupy part of the ice cream. “Olympic gymnasts and swimmers start training when they’re babies. Shermie’s way behind. He’s got fourteen years of goal-less eating to make up for.”

  Gardo slugged my shoulder. It smarted, but I didn’t let on. “You’re gonna kick butt, Shermie. But you do know that color-coded graphs will only get you so far, don’t you? You guys are forgetting something.”

  Lucy set her banana in the ice cream cup, then leaned back in her seat and crossed her arms. “And just what are we forgetting?”

  “An image.”

  “An image?” I said, a fleck of pizza flying out of my mouth. Lucy frowned as I wiped it up with a napkin. “Sorry.”

  “Yeah, an image.” Gardo continued. “All famous competitors have images. Just watch ESPN and you’ll see.” Gardo knew about ESPN. He watched it every night, studying the sportscasters for the day when he anchors the highlight reels. He’s going to be rich and famous, too. “Fame is all about sponsors and advertising, and to them image is everything. We have to make Shermie bigger than life. We have to sell him to the fans.”

  “We can make signs.” I swallowed before talking that time, so no pizza spray. “There’s some green paint in our garage from when Grampy moved in and made my dad paint his room. We can hang the signs around campus. We can even put my picture on them. People will notice that.” I smiled my cheesiest all-cheek Thuff smile.

  “That’s not what he’s talking about,” Lucy said. “He wants you to dress up in some stupid costume, like that Gaseous Maximus guy. He’ll probably have you in a giant hot dog suit, dancing around like that old drive-in snack bar cartoon.”

  “A dancing hot dog?” Over my dead body. “No way!”

  “It’s not stupid,” Gardo protested. “And you won’t have to wear a giant hot dog suit. Quick, Shermie, who’s the most famous wrestler ever?”

  “Easy. Hulk Hogan.” Of course I knew that. Gardo made me watch his WWE videos whenever we were at his house. I hated wrestling, but I didn’t complain because that’s what friends do for each other, they like the other’s stuff. At my house, he had to watch Galactic Warriors. The only ones running around in spandex shorts clotheslining each other on that show were the female aliens. “Hulk is the most famous ever.”

  “You got it, Shermie. The Hulkster.” Gardo sat back and crossed his arms, a mirror image of Lucy. “Now that’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Ahhh.” I nodded slowly, like I knew what the heck his point was.

  Lucy didn’t nod. “What’s what you’re talking about?”

  Gardo leaned forward and talked slowly. “Hulk Hogan has been retired for years, but even people who don’t like wrestling know him.” He shot me a quick look when he said that last part.

  Yikes. I didn’t know he could tell I hated wrestling. “Gardo’s got a point, Lucy.” I nodded real hard. “Hogan didn’t wear weird stuff, and he is famous.”

&
nbsp; “Well, he did wear feather boas sometimes,” Gardo admitted. “But what I’m saying is, it’s not about the costume. All the wrestlers have costumes of some kind but not all the wrestlers are famous like Hogan. It’s about having an extra-large personality. That’s what makes a guy famous. Hulk Hogan had it. Shermie has it.”

  “People do like me,” I said.

  “Sometimes,” Lucy muttered.

  Gardo put his hand on my shoulder and gave it a manly shake. “Most of the time. And that’s his ticket. People remember him. We just have to figure out how to bottle that. Turn his personality into an official image and build his rep. You know, market him.”

  I nodded vigorously. “Building is good. I like to build.”

  “You like your ego stroked,” Lucy mumbled.

  “Among other things.” I threw my crumpled napkin at her, but she batted it away easily.

  “Don’t be crude.”

  “This isn’t about Shermie’s ego,” Gardo said. “It’s about his image. Trust me on this one, Shermie, I’m a guy, I know these things.”

  “And I’m his coach.” Lucy tapped her colorful binder. “You can’t build a house without a foundation. To be a champion, the first things Shermie has to work on are his eating skills. He has to develop a bite technique, learn to control his throat muscles, build his jaw strength…” She opened the binder and pointed to one of her graphs: The Carrt Chmp—Jaw Strengthening Exercises “This is his ticket.”

  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

  “Vo
mit. 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.