My Dog's a Scaredy-Cat (4 page)

“Check out Zipperbutt!” Nick McKelty was the first to yell. “What are you supposed to be, creep?”

McKelty was decked out in gruesome, top to bottom. He had a bleeding eye pasted to his forehead. He had a bleeding scar pasted to his cheek. He had bleeding bandages wrapped around his arm. He had bleeding knees, bleeding elbows, bleeding toes, bleeding guts. He was, as I had always thought of him, an open, disgusting sore.

“Unlike yourself,” I said, “I have used my creativity to come up with an original, if smelly, costume.”

“You stink like a garbage Dumpster,” he said.

“For your information, I am a dining table in a great Italian restaurant.”

“What's that got to do with Halloween?” the Great Brain asked.

“I think Hank had a very clever idea,” Ashley spoke up. She was dressed in a dolphin costume, which she had covered with turquoise, gray, and white rhinestones. She waved one of her fins at me and whispered, “If you walk around a little, the air might tone down some of the smell.”

“An Italian restaurant!” McKelty shouted. I guess the idea had finally seeped through his thick skull into his brain. “That is so lame. Only a kindergartner would think that's funny.”

“I'm a kindergartner,” Mason said. “And I don't think it's funny.”

“See that! Not even a dumb five-year-old thinks it's funny,” McKelty hooted.

“You're very mean,” Mason said to McKelty, and ran back to where the kindergartners were gathered.

“Good riddance,” McKelty hollered after him. Then he turned back to me. “Check me out, Zipperhead. My Halloween costume is cool. Blood and guts. That's where it's at.”

“I think Nick's costume is the greatest,” Joelle Atkins chimed in. You have to think everything Nick does is the greatest if you want to be his girlfriend, which I can't imagine anyone but Joelle ever wanting to be.

“Of course you do,” I said to her. “He's bleeding everywhere and you're dressed as a Band-Aid.”

“I am not a Band-Aid,” she said. “I am a cell phone. Can't you see the numbers written on my back?”

Joelle is totally in love with her cell phone. She walks around with it strapped to her wrist at all times, which is weird, because no one ever calls her. I guess she's hoping someone will. It didn't surprise me that her costume was a cell phone. She turned around and sure enough, there was a cell-phone number pad constructed on her back.

“I bet if you dialed her number, there'd be nobody home,” Frankie whispered to me.

I didn't even have time to laugh, because just then I heard Emily calling me from across in the school yard. I looked around and saw her on the handball court where the fourth-graders were lining up. She and Robert were leading the pack in their flu-germ costumes. They both waved at me, looking really proud of themselves. Geeky as they were, you have to give them credit for bravery and originality. There wasn't another flu germ on the playground, except maybe the real ones living in Luke Whitman's nose.

Suddenly, Emily and Robert bolted out of line and ran up to the little stage that had been set up with a microphone for Principal Love.

“Hi, everyone,” Emily yelled into the microphone. “We're flu germs.”

“Don't come too close,” Robert added, “or you'll catch us! Get it? Catch us!”

Then he snorted his geeky hippo laugh into the microphone. The microphone made it sound way geekier than it is in real life, if that's possible.

“You two are disgusting!” McKelty shouted out. “You make me sick. Get it? Flu germs make me sick!”

A bunch of kids laughed. Emily looked really hurt, and poor Robert just looked confused. I felt red-hot anger rise up from the bottom of my tablecloth all the way past my butt chair and into my head. Who did that McKelty think he was? I mean, it's one thing if he wanted to embarrass me in front of everyone. But only a total bully would pick on Emily and Robert.

I spun around and started over to him. I wasn't going to let him get away with that. But I was stopped dead in my tracks by Frankie.

“Ow!” he said. “Watch it, Zip.”

My tabletop had butted him right in the head and gotten caught in the face mask of his football helmet. He was going as Tiki Barber, his favorite player on the New York Giants. But in the war between my tabletop and his football helmet, the helmet won. As he disconnected his face mask from the cardboard, a chunk of my table collapsed under me. I watched helplessly as the plastic bottle with the candle slid down the tabletop and onto the playground. Ryan Shimozato came running by and stepped on it. I heard it crunch beneath his foot.

“Sorry, dude,” he said. “I didn't mean to break your . . . uh . . . whatever this is.”

At that moment, Principal Love stepped up to the microphone.

“Attention, students. I now declare the PS 87 Halloween Day Parade officially open. As I always say, a parade is an occasion for parading.”

Principal Love likes to say everything twice. I looked down at the smashed bottle and waited.

“So join me now,” he went on, “as I lead you into the world of celebratory spirits and marauding goblins. Yes, a parade is an occasion for parading.”

He waved his banner, which was black with orange pumpkins on it. Then he leaned into the microphone and let out what he thought was a scary laugh. It turns out it was actually very scary, because it caused so much screeching feedback over the loudspeaker that a bunch of the kindergartners started to cry.

Principal Love wasn't even aware that he had frightened the little kids half to death. He just set off marching around the playground, waving the banner. A lot of kids lined up to follow him. Pretty soon, we were all marching in a circle, with the teachers and the parents of the little kids surrounding us and applauding as we marched.

I had to pull myself together to try to march with confidence. True, I had gotten off to a bad start. The garlic-scented olive oil had spilled, the breadsticks had turned to dust, the candlestick was crunched, and my tabletop was definitely drooping. But I reminded myself that I was the only Italian table in the parade. So I put my shoulders back, held my chin up, and took off with confidence . . . until . . .

. . . I marched past the kindergarten teachers, Mr. Zilke and Ms. Warner.

“I wonder who's eating garlic bread?” Mr. Zilke said.

“Boy, that's a strong smell,” Ms. Warner agreed. “Smells like someone took a bath in garlic cloves.”

As I walked by, I saw them both hold their noses. That didn't help my confidence any. Call me crazy, but I don't like to think I stink so bad that people have to hold their noses around me.

I noticed that many of the neighbors who were looking through the chain-link fence were pointing at me and laughing. And not necessarily in a good way.

Here's a tip for you to remember next time you're in a parade: You shouldn't be thinking about other things while you're marching, especially when you're wearing a large, almost square tabletop.

I hadn't noticed that the line had stopped while I kept marching. The
boom
I'm referring to was me crashing into Principal Love's balding head.

“Oww!” he screamed as he dropped the school banner and fell face-first into the punch bowl that was waiting for everybody at the end of the parade. Without going into detail, let me just say that when he came up for air, he was shouting my name.

“Mr. Zipzer!” he gargled. “Your costume is a menace!”

“It's stupid, too!” McKelty yelled.

“And smelly,” Joelle added.

“But it was a great idea,” I said.

“Do us all a favor, Zipzer,” McKelty said. “Next time you get a bright idea, just remember, it's probably really stupid like everything else you do.”

For once, I had to admit that maybe McKelty was right.

Halloween was all about gushing blood and gory guts.

And me? Well, I was all about stinky olive oil and broken breadsticks.

I looked over at McKelty, who was still laughing at me. And all I wanted was to disappear.

1. A nine-foot-tall emperor penguin that looks friendly but when it wraps its wings around McKelty it would squeeze him like the slimy fish that he is.

2. The ghoul from Zeon whose claws shoot out slime that would harden around McKelty and glue him to the playground where the kindergartners would use him as a jungle gym.

3. A giant eyeball that squirts out eyeball gel, and when it lands on McKelty removes every hair from his head. Everyone would call him Eyeball Head for the rest of his life. (Come to think of it, that name is probably too nice for him.)

4. A walking hand that is trained to pinch McKelty in the butt twenty-four/seven.

5. A crazed bowling ball that would follow McKelty around and knock him down every three-and-a-half minutes. It would give new meaning to the word “strike.”

6. A zombie that lives in McKelty's closet and howls every time he opens it up. Wait a minute. The smell of McKelty's old gym socks would probably drive that zombie out of there and back to Zombieland forever.

7. Ms. Adolf in her all-gray outfit, who constantly gives McKelty a spelling test of really long words he's never heard of before, like
cornucopia
or
epiphany
.

8. I could keep going forever, but then I'd never get to tell you what happened next, so I'll stop now. Okay, maybe just one more, because these feel so good I don't really want to stop.

9. A human vacuum cleaner that would suck McKelty up and put him in a bag filled with carpet dust and iguana droppings. (Oh, Hank Zipzer, you are on fire! It's moments like these when I really love my brain.)

IN CASE YOU COULDN'T TELL from that list, I was boiling mad at Nick McKelty. He had no right to make fun of my costume. He had no right to make fun of my sister. He had no right to make fun of me. And most of all, he had no right to call me stupid in front of the whole school and neighborhood.

And I told all that to my grandpa, Papa Pete, as he walked me home from school that day. I'm really lucky to have a grandpa who understands when I'm mad and lets me spew it all out and doesn't tell me to watch my language and not use angry words.

“Who is he to make me feel like a jerk in front of everyone in the whole school?” I said to Papa Pete as we headed to Harvey's, our favorite pizza stop at the corner of Broadway and 78th. “He's just a big bully who thinks it's cool to make fun of everyone else.”

“That's what bullies do,” Papa Pete said. “They attack first. And think later.”

“Not in McKelty's case,” I said. “He never thinks at all.”

We crossed the street and walked by the West Side Bagel Shop and Wonder Nails Salon, which meant that we were only a couple of doors away from Harvey's. I could feel my nose being attacked by the delicious smell of pizza pie, my favorite smell in the whole wide world.

“Papa Pete, I would never think of making someone else feel so bad all the time.”

“That's because you have a good heart,” Papa Pete said. “And you care about other people's feelings. Maybe your learning challenges have helped with that.”

I stopped dead in my tracks, right in front of the glass door to Harvey's. No one, and I mean no one, had ever even hinted that my learning challenges could be good for anything except frustrating me.