Captain Caleb and Bug Boy’s Za-Wow! Adventure

  It is the first eastern lubber grasshopper that I’ve seen for realsies. It’s yellow with black circles and stripes on it, and it’s almost as long as my hand! I move my jar closer to it.
  When I’m lying on my tummy in the green grass looking at a bug, I feel like someone has shrunk me to bug-size. Would me and this grasshopper be friends if I was really the same size as it?
  I try to breathe quietly so it doesn’t get scared. I remember Papi said that when you scare an eastern lubber grasshopper, it sprays stinky stuff like a skunk. He will be proud of me when I bring it home and put it in the bug habitat he bought for me at the Family Dollar Store. Mommy doesn’t like me bringing home bugs though, so I’ll have to hide the jar from her.
  The grasshopper is feeling the edge of the jar with its antennas. Oh, no, the grass is tickling my nose. I have to hold in a sneeze. A-a-cht! The grasshopper doesn’t notice a thing.
  “Buuuuuuuuuuuuuttttttttttttttttttttttt!” A boy’s body lands oof! on my back. My face is in the spicy dirt.
  “Get off!” I yell, rolling over and pushing him off me. It’s my best friend, Caleb.
  “Did you hear that, José?” Caleb asks. “I just called you butt! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!”
  “You chased away my grasshopper!” I say, folding my arms.
  Caleb bends his elbows with his hands out like he’s saying it wasn’t his fault. His blue eyes go wop, wop, back and forth. That means he has a good idea but he’s waiting until I’m paying attention to tell me. Finally he says, “I know how we can steal my brother’s fireworks.”
  “Fireworks? Coooooooool!” Caleb always has the best plans.

  We’re hiding in the dead bushes between Caleb’s house and his neighbor’s house. A couple whitefringed beetles crawl by. “Okay,” says Caleb, “you go around the back. I already put a box under Andy’s door. You just have to climb in. Remember where I said the fireworks are?”
  “Underwear drawer. It’s on top.”
  “Yeah. Alright, I’m going to go distract my mom. Wait ’til I get in the door, and then hurry. Got it?”
  “Yeah.”
  Caleb skips barefoot across the pokey brown lawn. He opens the front door and steps inside. I keep my head bent below the bushes and run to the back of Caleb’s house.
  Just like he said, the window is open and a big box that says coors light is under it. I climb on the box and put my hands on the windowsill. The box is empty and starts to crunch under me. I pull myself into the window and fall onto a pile of Andy’s clothes on his bed.
  I freeze. The door to the bedroom is open. I can see into the bathroom on the other side of the hallway.
  “Boy, put that down!” I hear Caleb’s mom yell.
  “Make me!” Caleb yells back. I hear scrambling and then a crash.
  Caleb’s mom yells the f-word. “I’m going to kill you!”
  “Naa, nana, nana, naa!” yells Caleb. Caleb’s feet go bumbumbumbumbum around the living room. His mom’s go boom! boom! as she chases him.
  I am afraid she’ll see me in Andy’s room, so I close the door. On the back of Andy’s door is a big picture of a woman with no clothes on. Boobs! Boobs! Boobs!
  Boobs! Boobs!
  Kabam! Something slams into the door and the naked lady’s picture shakes. Caleb’s mom yells the f-word twice and the s-word once and the h-word three times.
  I remember what I am supposed to do. I trip over a pile of DVD cases on the way to Andy’s dresser. His dresser is tall. When I pull open the top drawer, I can’t hardly see inside it. I pull out the bottom drawer too and stand on top of the clothes in it. Now I can see.
  Andy and Caleb’s mom must not fold their underwear like Mommy folds mine. Andy’s briefs are stuffed in the drawer in little balls. Looking for fireworks, I find a brown paper lunchbag. Inside are a bunch of shiny blue packages, but they don’t say fireworks and they seem a little small. Just in case, I stuff the bag in one pocket of my cargo shorts and keep digging.
  The dresser rocks back and forth I’m digging so hard. Finally in the way back of the drawer I find a bigger, heavier paper bag. The boxes inside it have pictures of fireworks on them and say things like mineshell mayhem and double trouble roman candle.
  “I’m leaving!” I hear Caleb yell down the hallway. It’s our signal. Before he slams the front door, he calls his mom the b-word.
  “Yeah, you’d better run! When Frank gets home, he’s going to whup you where the sun don’t shine!” Caleb’s mom yells back.
  Not even waiting to close the dresser drawers, I hold the bag of fireworks in one hand and tumble out the window.
  Dada-dumdum! I am a super-secret agent running away with a million dollars! Bang, bang, bang! I roll on the ground so the bullets go whiz, whiz, whiz over my head. I jump on my bike and twist the handlebar. “Vroom!” I say.

  “Yesssssssss!” says Caleb when I sneak into the Ragnos’ old barn and he sees I’m carrying the fireworks. He holds onto a rope and jumps off the hayloft. He swings a few feet above my head going, “Yahoo!”
  “Shhh!” I say.
  Caleb tries to do a somersault off the rope but lands on his back. He coughs and pops back up. He grabs the bag from my hands and dumps everything on the dirty concrete floor.
  “Which one do you want to try first?” he asks. He takes a yellow plastic lighter out of his pocket.
  “Shouldn’t we go somewhere else to actually light them?” I say. “Like maybe down at the gravel pit?”
  “The gravel pit’s dumb,” Caleb says, opening the double trouble roman candle box. He pulls out a red and blue tube that’s as big as the bottom half of my arm. On one end of the tube is a point with a little rope poking out, and on the other is a stick.
  I take the instructions out of the box. “Hmm,” I say, sounding out the bigger words, “it says first you have to—”
  “Light it!” Caleb yells. His lighter goes zzt! and he holds the flame to the little rope sticking out of the top of the firework. It lights up with a little psht!

How I Got My Lucky Test Pencil

  Once I was at church, and the youth leader—who is like forty but you can tell was prom-queen material back in the day and probably spends half her husband’s income on wrinkle creams, diet pills, and hair dye—got all emotional and told the girls we should appreciate our beauty because we will never be as beautiful as we are right now in high school. I went home and cried for like an hour.
  Being fat’s hard. I know there are lots of other fat people—the latest study I read said that almost thirty percent of Americans are obese—but somehow that doesn’t make me feel better. I hold on to hope that I’ll find the right diet and get a hot body sometime before I graduate, but some people aren’t that strong. I have this friend named Stephanie who’s fat too. She and I don’t hang out much in public because we don’t want to be the fat twins. Anyway, Stephanie has really low self-esteem, so she goes down to the train station and hooks up with skeevy older guys who have fat fetishes. She’s only fifteen, but being fat makes you look older, so she gets away with it. She says she feels pretty when men want to do her.
  I have another friend named Emily who’s anorexic. She likes hanging out with me in public because I make her look skinny. I actually tried to be anorexic once. We watched a movie about it in health class, and I was like, that looks like a fast way to lose weight. Some of the girls in the video lost thirty pounds in like a month! I even asked Emily for tips, and she said I should make Crystal Light and drink it all the time so I’d feel full. My anorexia lasted for a day and a half, and then I broke down and ate everything in the fridge. Mom was really pissed about that because I’d eaten all the ingredients for dinner and the leftover half of my brother’s birthday cake. Even the pickle jar was empty when I was done with it, and I don’t even like pickles! The next day, in health class, I learned that what I had done was called bingeing.
  Emily and I like the same guy—Teagan Zarelli—but we don’t fight over him like girls on the CW fight over boys because he doesn’t even know either of our names on account of me being fat and Emily being freaky skinny and very weird. Teagan’s not even a jock, though. He’s the kind of sensitive, artsy type who plays his guitar in the hallway during lunch. He has thick, glossy, dark hair that flops around his chiseled face. Mm, I’m drooling just thinking about his hair. He’s a junior, too, which is really spun because he’s going to be around for a whole ’nother year. Emily and I—this is so retarded—get together at my house and have Teagan parties where we basically worship him as a demigod. We’re not stalkers or anything—we just like to get together and talk about how amazing he is. I cut all the photos of him out of last year’s yearbook and pasted them on this posterboard under the word TEAGAN written in my most fancy handwriting. I also taped on some photos Emily took with her cellphone when he wasn’t looking; a program from the MLKHS Battle of the Bands, which he totally rocked; and a number 2 HB pencil.
  That pencil has a story, actually. You see, at the beginning of the school year, my parents convinced me to take the PSAT. It was only for practice because I’m a sophomore, but as long as my parents wanted to pay for it, I thought, what the heck. I’m pretty good at school, so if I do well on the PSAT and SAT next year, I might get a scholarship. Anyways, for the test, we showed up at school at eight in the morning on a Saturday, and they led us into the auditorium. The auditorium! We had to sit in those little auditorium seats with those dinner plate–sized fold up desks. They made us leave an empty seat between all of us so we wouldn’t cheat, and I was glad because my fat was kind of spilling into the seat next to me. But guess who took the next seat over? Teagan! I almost died. Then, with a minute left before the test started, I reached into my purse to take out my three brand-new, perfectly sharpened pencils out of my purse and I really almost died. I had my graphing calculator, my good white vinyl eraser, my hot pink pencil sharpener, my labelless water bottle, my granola bar to eat during the break, but not my pencils. I think my face must have gone white because I could feel my lips tingling. I dug through my purse, desperate.
  “Do you need a pencil?” Teagan’s manly, musical voice interrupted my panic. He had noticed that I didn’t have a pencil on my desk yet and that I was looking a little frantic. He’s so observant!
  “Um,” I replied giving my purse one last shake to see if a pencil would magically appear among the gum wrappers and ticket stubs, “I totally failed. I think I left my pencils on the kitchen table this morning because I was sharpening them and—”
  “That’s okay,” Teagan interrupted. “You can have one of mine. I brought lots.” He held out a brown pencil, and when I took it, our fingers brushed for like a second. Electricity!
  My face was burning, so I mumbled “Thanks” and pretended to be examining my desk but was really examining the pencil. It was the good kind—Ticonderoga—but brown instead of yellow because it was made of recycled wood or something. So he’s environmentally conscious too! Melt!
  The pencil also had a few teeth marks near the end, which means that it had been in his mouth! I was touching a pencil that Teagan Zarelli personally chewed on! I thought I’d never be able to concentrate on the test if I was using Teagan’s pencil the whole time, but I ended up getting a really good score. I won’t tell you what it was because I don’t want you to be jealous, but I’m definitely going to use the same pencil when I take the PSAT and SAT next year. I’m superstitious like that.
  After the test, I tried to give Teagan his pencil back, but he just shook his head and was all, “You keep it.” That’s where the story stopped when I told Emily all about it later. However, after he said I could keep the pencil, Teagan asked me if I wanted to go to YoCream with him to celebrate the test being over.
  I said no. Maybe after I lose fifty pounds.