Swim the Fly (12 page)

Mrs. Hoogenboom takes the present inside. I don’t even want to know what she’s going to say when she opens the box.

Back at the house, Grandpa grills me for details. “What did she say?” “But how did she say it?” “Did she smile?” “Did she open it?” “Did she read the card?”

I give him as much as I can, though none of it seems to satisfy him.

He starts to pace, pushing his glasses up on his nose, stroking his goatee, rolling his tongue around his mouth. “Okay, okay. I’ll give it a couple of hours. Then I’ll phone her up. Just to say hello. And we’ll see if she mentions it.”

I tell him that sounds like a plan, but he doesn’t seem to be listening. I pull my workout instructions from my back pocket and head upstairs.

Pete’s room is like a museum exhibit. Everything is neat and organized and clean. All his CDs and DVDs are lined up in alphabetical order. All his books are arranged in the bookshelves using the Dewey decimal system. The clothes in his closet are color-coordinated. His posters — Harry Houdini, Clint Eastwood, the Beatles — are professionally framed and hung squarely on the walls. His fancy airplane models are placed strategically around the room, strung up from the ceiling or set out on a special display table made up to look like an aircraft carrier, with little air force figures standing around and tiny brass placards describing each airplane. He spends months making these models, getting all the details exactly right, and I have to say, I don’t see the big deal.

Pete’s dumbbells are stacked by the weight bench in neat little pyramids. I tiptoe toward them, careful not to brush up against anything. I unfold my workout sheet and look around for somewhere to place it. I decide that the floor would be best.

I test out a few of the weights to see how much I might be able to lift. I decide on two ten-pound dumbbells and start in with the Barbaric Bench Press. Three sets of thirty reps. I barely make it through, but you’re not supposed to rest in between exercises, so then it’s a twenty-pound dumbbell in each hand and some Ludicrous Lunges. My legs are burning halfway into the second set.

This working-out stuff really sucks. It feels like my muscles are being torn apart. There’s no need to look like Mr. Universe, so I decide to skip the last set of lunges and pick another exercise from the sheet. Impossible Push-ups are out, because I know from gym class that I can only manage three regular push-ups before I collapse. I’ll give the Crazed Crunches a shot and see if they don’t make me want to puke my guts out.

You’re supposed to be able to do the entire routine in forty-five minutes.

It takes me three hours.

When I finally get to my last set of Insane Standing Shoulder Presses, I am spent. But I’m not giving up. I have to finish. I’ve got too much riding on this to shortchange myself. I heave the fifteen-pound dumbbells over my head using all the force of my breath and every ounce of strength I have left. It’s twenty-four . . . twenty-five . . . twenty-six . . . twenty-sev . . . sev . . . sev . . . But I can’t get the dumbbells up past my ears. My legs feel rubbery. My arms are empty. With only four reps left.

I don’t know why, but I get it into my head that if I can just finish these last few presses, then I will somehow be able to take second in the butterfly and I’ll be able to ask Kelly out and she will be happy to be my girlfriend. I make that deal with myself.

I take a deep breath, screw up my face, and groan loudly as I force my arms up into the air. They’re shaking like crazy, but somehow I get the weights up past my ears.

I smile because I know that I am going to finish now. There is no doubt.

And just as I’m thinking this, my arms lock and my legs disappear from under me, and life switches into slow motion as I fall backward, clutching the dumbbells, smashing into Pete’s model-airplane display table, sending shards of wood and plastic and figures and little brass placards soaring and tumbling into the air.

I lie there on the floor in complete shock. It looks like a miniature Pearl Harbor. Pete is going to freak. He might even cry. Right before he beats me to death with what’s left of his Sopwith Camel. He won’t care that it was an accident. I could have taken a loose lamb-tikka-masala dump on Pete’s pillow and it wouldn’t have been as bad as this.

I have to think. How can I fix this? How can I make this better? I get to my feet and survey the situation. Okay. Okay. Some of the models don’t look too bad. Some of
the wings have just snapped off. The aircraft-carrier table is split in two, but it’s a pretty clean break. I don’t know. Maybe I can do some repair work.

I heave the weights back into their little pyramids and bolt downstairs.

“What the hell was that?” Grandpa calls from his bedroom.

“Nothing, Grandpa. I just dropped . . . something. It’s fine.”

I dash outside and over to the garage, yank the garage door open, and find the old rusty toolbox. I root around and grab some heavy-duty wood screws, a screwdriver, a little vial of SuperDuper glue, and some electrical tape.

Back up in Pete’s room with my makeshift repair kit, I stand there in the middle of the wreckage and there’s no friggin’ way I’m going to be able to make it look like nothing happened here. I need a plan B.

And plan B is to make it look like it wasn’t my fault. Something fell on the table. Like Pete’s framed Harry Houdini picture. It could have happened. It’s not right over the table, but who knows how these things go. The weight of the picture frame wrenched the nail out of the wall and then the rest was physics. He should have let Dad help hang the picture. But Pete was stubborn and he wanted to do it himself. I remember that. And now look what happened.

The thing is, if Pete were a normal brother and would just scream at me and let me give him some money to
smooth things over, then I’d never even think about covering it up. Okay, I’d think about it, but I probably wouldn’t follow through. But Pete will kill me and I’m not kidding. It will be a crime of passion. Pete loves those models more than anything. If he had to choose between Melissa and his models, there wouldn’t even be a discussion. It’s really just survival at this point. He’ll probably thrash the poor Harry Houdini picture, but better Houdini than me.

I move to the wall and carefully lift the heavy picture frame off its hook, shuffle to the right, and then drop it into the mess. I pull the nail from the wall, throw it on the floor, and tell myself that it looks believable. It’s a bit of a stretch, but I have a few weeks to try and convince myself before Pete comes home.

COOP HAS CALLED SEAN
and me to an emergency strategy meeting. We’re already three weeks into July and we are no closer to seeing a naked girl — and Mandy Reagan in particular. What with swim practice and the Kelly situation, and the fact that our last attempt backfired in such a big way, we haven’t exactly rededicated ourselves to the cause. Coop says that if we don’t start planning something right now, this could be the first summer we fail to achieve our goal, which, to hear him tell it, would upset the balance of the entire universe. I don’t know about that, but what I do know is that if we don’t somehow get that picture of Mandy, our own little universe will be more than just upset. It will be completely capsized.

“What we need is a Clamato Classic to get our creative juices flowing,” Coop says as the three of us make our way into his backyard.

And sure enough, Coop’s got his rickety old Ping-Pong
table all set up and ready to go. The Clamato Classic is a round-robin table tennis tournament that we came up with a few years ago. The objective is not so much to come in first but to avoid coming in third. Because third place means you have to drink the most unholy of beverages: a super-sized Adventure Town souvenir cup filled to the brim with equal parts Clamato and chocolate milk. It makes me queasy just thinking about it.

“Whoo-hoo!” Sean hollers, running to the table and grabbing a paddle. “Who wants to get their butt wiped first?” He leaps around, swatting an invisible ball.

“You can
wipe
mine.” Coop laughs. “But only after I
whip
yours.” He picks up the other paddle along with an orange Ping-Pong ball.

I take a seat on one of Coop’s wobbly foldout beach chairs.

“Volley for serve.” Coop sends the ball over the net and Sean returns it. They go back and forth about a dozen times before Coop lobs a high one that just nicks the corner.

“Damn it.” Sean snatches the ball off the grass and tosses it back to Coop.

“All right,” Coop says, bouncing the ball on the table several times, testing it out. “Let’s talk strategy. How are we going to get that naked picture of Mandy Reagan? We can’t let the locker-room incident get us offtrack. That was probably too complicated. We should try to keep things simple.” He grabs the ball and serves a low, fast
shot.

Sean handles the serve easily. “It was a good plan. And it would have worked if it wasn’t for someone’s mocha mud slide.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I say. “Can we let that go?”

“Well, we know
you
can let it go.” Coop laughs, cutting the ball underneath, trying to add spin. It doesn’t fool Sean, though, even though he’s laughing. He follows it perfectly and sends the ball right back.

Sean and Coop are pretty evenly matched. They can play for twenty minutes straight without anyone taking a point. It’s kind of annoying.

Finally, Coop gives the ball a violent smack. It catches the top of the net, and the ball dribbles onto Sean’s side, making it impossible for him to return it.

“Cheap,” Sean says.

“Not as cheap as your momma.” Coop points his paddle at Sean.

“My mother’s not cheap, flush hole.” Sean hurls the Ping-Pong ball at Coop, who catches it without flinching.

“Oh, that’s right.” Coop nods, apologetically. “She just let me use a coupon that one time.”

“Laugh all you want now,” Sean says. “We’ll see how funny you find it when you get that first room-temperature taste of tomato, clams, and chocolate milk.”

“I’ll find it pretty damn funny because I’ll be the one watching
you
suck down Satan’s swill.”

“Guys,” I say, trying to get us back on track, “let’s get
focused. We have a situation to deal with here.”

“Matt’s right.” Sean sighs. “Cathy smirks and waves her cell phone at me every time she sees me.”

Coop shrugs. He balances the Ping-Pong ball on the surface of his paddle. “I’m fine with trying to see Mandy Reagan naked if we can work it out. But if we can’t, and Cathy sends out the picture, I still say we can claim she Photoshopped it. I mean, it doesn’t look like anyone’s examined Matt’s incriminating underwear too closely, so there’s no proof we were in the girls’ locker room.”

My stomach sinks. “Yeah, about that . . .” It’s not fair to hold out on them anymore. “There’s something I didn’t tell you guys,” I say.

Coop and Sean both look at me with concern. The ball rolls off Coop’s paddle and bounces on the table.

“When I went to the bathroom . . . I sort of ran into Kelly.”

“Are you serious?” Sean blinks. “But she didn’t recognize you, did she?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I explain. “If that picture of us gets out, she’ll put it together. That’s all the proof Cathy will need.”

“Aw, man.” Sean groans. “I can’t believe this. If we weren’t totally screwed before, we are now.”

Coop taps his Ping-Pong paddle on his chin. “Okay, wait. Let’s not overreact, here. So, you passed Kelly in the bathroom. Big deal. She probably won’t even remember.”

I sigh. “Oh. She’ll remember.”

Sean and Coop both bury their heads in their hands and moan.

Coop starts to laugh. He pulls his hands down his face. “Matt. Jesus, dude. I’m sure there’s something worse than shitting your pants in front of the girl of your wet dreams; I just can’t figure out what that would be.”

We spend the next two hours playing Ping-Pong and trying to come up with any way we can think of to see Mandy Reagan naked. The ideas get progressively more ridiculous as the day goes on. There’s a plan to string a tightrope between Mandy’s house and her neighbor’s. There’s another where we hang-glide past her bathroom window when she’s taking a bath. And then there’s Sean’s latest, where we get someone to buy us a lottery ticket and we win a million dollars and then offer it to Mandy to take all her clothes off.

“Dude,” Coop says, “if we had a million bucks, we’d get to see all the woofers and tweeters we wanted.”

“That’s true.” Sean nods, perched on the edge of the beach chair. “But that still wouldn’t solve our problem with Cathy.”

Coop cocks his head. “You don’t think a few grand wouldn’t buy your sister off ?”

“All right, enough already,” I say, squeezing my eyes shut. “I have to concentrate on the game.”

Coop chuckles. “Ooooh. Someone’s getting a little panicky.”

We’re down to the final match that’ll decide third
place. It’s between me and Coop and I’m behind nineteen to eighteen and it’s his serve and, yes, I’m getting a little worried. I’ve had to drink the clam-milk once before and it’s disgusting. Plus, you end up burping it up for the next three days.

“I’m not getting panicky,” I lie. “I just want to focus.”