Almost a Winner Read online

  DEDICATION

  To my folks, Mom, Pop, and Joanne.

  You are my wisecracking, straight-talking,

  hardworking, always-enthusiasticators. In other

  words, my I’m-nothing-without-you-ators.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  March

  April

  Acknowledgments

  Teddy’s Lists

  Back Ads

  About the Author and Illustrator

  Books by Molly B. Burnham

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  MARCH

  GROSSER THAN GRAVY WRESTLING

  The day my brother covered himself in pigeon poo and feathers was the day I knew my life would never be normal again. And that’s saying something, because with five older sisters and a little brother I call The Destructor, normal is not possible.

  I admit, I actually thought I had made peace with The Destructor. It seemed funny when I first found him covered in a layer of pigeon poo and feathers. And I even laughed when he said, “Call me Pigeon Boy!” and then cooed like a real pigeon. He is only five, after all. I figured, if pigeon poo is strong enough to stick the feathers onto his clothes, how worried should I be?

  But then The Destructor hugged me.

  Being hugged by a kid covered in pigeon poo and feathers is not funny. I know this because even though pigeon poo is very sticky, it’s not sticky enough to stop it from smearing all over everything it touches.

  By everything I do mean me.

  Which explains why, at this very moment, just like The Destructor, I am covered in pigeon poo and feathers!

  Strange but true, the only way I could be any grosser right now is if I were Joel Hicks, the guy who, according to The Guinness Book of World Records, holds the record for most wins at the World Gravy Wrestling Championships.

  Seriously, wrestling in a pool of gravy!

  To be perfectly honest, I’d rather wrestle in gravy than be hugged by The Destructor. Even when he’s not covered in poo. Unfortunately, I wasn’t given a choice.

  THERE WILL ALWAYS BE MORE

  Most people call my brother Jake. That’s what my parents named him, but he’ll always be The Destructor to me. Here is a list of reasons why I call him The Destructor. This list only includes what he’s done this year. There isn’t enough paper in the world to make a list for all five of his years.

  1. Destroyed my Star Wars action figures: he ripped them apart with his bare hands.

  2. Destroyed my birthday #1: he puked all over the place.

  3. Destroyed my birthday #2: he passed his puking to everyone in my family.

  4. Destroyed my birthday #3: he opened all my presents.

  5. Destroyed my sneakers: he clogged the toilet with a sock and pee water overflowed all over my feet.

  6. Destroyed my copy of The Guinness Book of World Records: he drew all over it.

  7. Destroyed my tent: he jumped on it and skunked it.

  8. Destroyed my world record: he thought I was in trouble because I was covered in pigeons, but I was trying to break the record for most pigeons on a person. It’s true that I was in pain, but again, I was not in trouble.

  THERE WILL ALWAYS BE MORE PART 2

  There are so many more things I could say about The Destructor. But what I have come to realize is that there will always be more destruction.

  MOM

  Like usual, when I walk into the kitchen, Mom is reading her newspaper. She looks up at The Destructor and me, and then her glasses slide off her face and land on the floor. She doesn’t try to stop them or even pick them up. “What world record were you trying to break this time?”

  “Mom,” I say, “this is obviously not a record.”

  “Well,” she says, finally reaching down for her glasses, “you never know.”

  She’s right to wonder. Over the past year I have tried to break a lot of world records.

  SOME OF THE RECORDS I ALMOST BROKE

  1. Pushing an orange the farthest with just my nose.

  2. Stretching the most rubber bands across my face.

  3. And, of course, getting the most pigeons to land on me.

  THE RECORD I BROKE

  I am happy to say I do hold a world record now. I slept in a tent the longest time for anyone under the age of twelve. And I’m only ten! The next version of The Guinness Book of World Records will probably have my name and a picture of me in it. Or maybe I’ll be on the website. I don’t care which, because they are both amazing, and being in either will be the greatest moment of my life.

  And strange but true, I have my family to thank for it, because they knew I was breaking a record when I didn’t know it myself. I guess I also have The Destructor to thank, because he drove me out of the house and into the tent, but I’ll never admit that to him, because it’s not like he was trying to help me. He was just being him. Honestly, sleeping in the tent was not so hard. At this very moment I am, in fact, wondering why I ever moved back into the house.

  Clearly, it was a moment of weakness.

  Anyway, my point is that under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that Mom thinks I was trying to break a record.

  Mom looks at The Destructor and me all covered in pigeon poo and feathers and sighs really deeply and then says, “It’s not even bath night.”

  BATH NIGHT VS. GROUP RECORDS

  A couple of years ago, Dad decided one bath a week was fine for anyone under six. He also said that with nine people in our family, our water bill was high enough.

  I know some people think taking a bath only once a week is gross, but if you lived with The Destructor you would agree with Dad, because no human can actually stand his screaming more than once a week.

  The Destructor hates baths as much as I hate group records in The Guinness Book of World Records. Those are the records where a bunch of people do the exact same thing at the exact same time. For example, there’s a record for the most people brushing their teeth together (13,380) or, the alway-gross most people hugging (5,369). (Yuck!)

  I admit, the largest snowball fight (5,834 people) and the largest pillow fight (4,201 people) sound fun, but still, breaking a record should require more than just a lot of people doing the same thing at once. I mean, that’s just fun. And I don’t think breaking a record should ever just be fun. Breaking a record should definitely involve hardship and suffering.

  Which is basically what I’m going through right now. I thought maybe The Destructor would change his mind about baths once he became Pigeon Boy. Pigeons are very clean birds and take baths every day.

  But The Destructor has not changed. Even with two pillows covering each ear and tied onto my head with an old scarf, I can hear him howling all the way from the upstairs bathroom.

  I can’t hear anything Mom says until she hollers, “Jake! Get back in the bathtub this minute!” And two seconds later The Destructor streaks past me, yelling, “Whatever you do, don’t tell Mom where I’m hiding!” He dives under the sofa.

  This just seems to prove my point about group records and The Destructor’s feelings about baths.

  We both want to stay as far away from them as possible.

  MOM’S TO-DO LIST

  Mom keeps a list of everything she needs to do in a day. She calls it her to-do list. I like these lists. They are orderly in a way that my family is not. There’s something cool about how she adds things to it and crosses things off. She sometimes also loses her list and tries to remember what was on it. This does not usually go so well.

  I remember one time Mom lost her list and forgot to do laundry, and I had to wear a pair of pants that belonged to my older sister Grace. And they had hearts all over them!

  I’m on sp
ring vacation, so I don’t have much to remember. But because I don’t have anything else to do right now except listen to The Destructor squawking about his bath, I find a sticky note and write a list of my own.

  MY TO-DO LIST

  1. Break a world record with Lonnie and Viva before the end of vacation.

  2. Invent a way to keep The Destructor far away from me.

  3. Feed the pigeons.

  THE PIGEONS

  The Destructor is still fast asleep when I wake up the next morning. And it’s not because he’s worn out from the bath he had last night. It’s because I wake up really early every morning to feed my neighbor’s pigeons. Technically it’s the first day of spring vacation, but that doesn’t matter, because I still have a job to do. These pigeons almost helped me break a record. They’re the same ones The Destructor borrowed the poo and feathers from and the same ones that live next door with Grumpy Pigeon Man.

  As his nickname suggests, Grumpy Pigeon Man is a grumpy man. But last October for some reason he hired me to take care of his pigeons. I still don’t know why he picked me out of my whole family, but I suspect it’s because he knows I can put up with a lot. To be perfectly honest, I don’t care why he picked me, because I just love those birds!

  So now every morning I wake up at five thirty a.m. to feed them. My job is to pour water into the birds’ drinking bowl and into their bath and give them their food. It’s fun to watch them. The pigeons never fight. They share their food. They perch next to each other and coo. They flutter around but don’t collide. And still each pigeon has its own personality. After all the time I’ve spent with them, I can really tell them apart.

  They’re like a family. A really, really huge family.

  It’s always amazing to me that they can live together so peacefully but that my family cannot. I mean, there are fifty-seven of them and only nine of us!

  LONNIE

  When I get back from feeding the pigeons, Lonnie is waiting for me. Even for a best friend like Lonnie, this is early. And I can’t imagine his parents agreed to drop him off.

  Lonnie and I have been friends since kindergarten, when he taught me that drawing Star Wars stuff was as fun as playing Star Wars. Lonnie is training to be a Jedi Knight. Not a real one; he knows they don’t actually exist. He just wants to be as much like one as he can. I think he’s very successful, but in his own way, not like a repeat from the movies.

  One of Lonnie’s Jedi skills is that he can read my mind. So right away he says, “Jerome dropped me off.” Jerome is his big brother, who is now dating my oldest sister, Sharon. Thinking about it makes me feel a little sick to my stomach, so instead I think of something else. The only other thing that comes to mind is the record for the largest bowl of porridge in the world. It’s 3,042 pounds 6 ounces and is about as big as a hippopotamus. People are very dedicated about breaking world records. Otherwise, who would even dream of making so much porridge?!

  After thinking about the porridge, my brain goes back to Lonnie and Jerome, and I can’t help wondering why Jerome dropped Lonnie off so early. Jerome is not known for his generosity. He is Lonnie’s older brother, after all. Again, Lonnie reads my mind. “It was pretty simple,” he says. “I told him he either brings me here now or I’d tell Sharon how he used to stick kidney beans up his nose, chase me around the house, and shoot them at me.”

  “Snot beans!” I say. “I remember that.”

  Lonnie nods.

  “That was the funniest thing ever.”

  “It was,” Lonnie says. “But it turns out that when you’re seventeen it’s not funny anymore. And even Jar Jar Binks would drive me here instead of having that story revealed to his true love.”

  “Ick,” I say.

  Lonnie shrugs. “I’m just glad I found his weakness.”

  I’m always impressed by Lonnie. He finds a peaceful way to work out everything.

  VIVA

  Seconds later Viva shows up. Viva’s life is very different from mine. She’s an only child, which means she gets both privacy and attention. She says it’s not so terrific, but she’s never had to eat a mayonnaise sandwich for lunch because someone in her family stole the bologna and lettuce.

  Anyway, Viva is pretty great and has some Jedi skills of her own, which could explain how we ended up friends. It definitely helps that she knows as much about Star Wars and The Guinness Book of World Records as we do.

  She must be able to tell that I’m shocked that she’s here as early as Lonnie because she says, “My parents were still in their pajamas. I mean, it might have been hours until they were ready, so I told them I’d bike.”

  “Were they okay about that?” I ask. Viva’s parents are very strict with her.

  She laughs. “Are you kidding? The chances of my parents letting me bike over here are about as likely as them letting me break the record for snapping the most mouse traps on my tongue in one minute. And Teddy, don’t say what the record is because it’s forty-seven.”

  Viva knows me pretty well.

  Lonnie shakes his head. “No parent would want their kid to break that record.”

  Viva smiles. “Which is exactly why they drove me.”

  Sometimes Viva is so good at getting her way it’s scary.

  JEDI MINDS CAN DO ANYTHING

  “We should find something that’s already a record and do it faster,” Lonnie says.

  Viva agrees. “We don’t have time to make up a new record.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I say as I pull out the two copies of The Guinness Book of World Records that I own. Picking a record to break is almost harder than breaking a record. Lonnie and Viva were really happy when I broke my world record, and after that we all wanted to break one together. So we came up with the plan to spend all of vacation doing exactly that. That way we could all have a record. Technically I’d have two, but that’s okay.

  We have only one week, which is not much time, especially because breaking a record is not easy, but I’m confident that together we can do it.

  After all, Lonnie and Viva are awesome and can do anything when they put their Jedi minds to it.

  RECORD ATTEMPT

  It took us a little longer than I thought it would, but we finally decided to beat the record for breaking the most eggs with our toes in thirty seconds.

  The record is for 55 eggs. This means we’ll each need 56 eggs, which adds up to a grand total of 165 eggs in all. Luckily, Mom buys every household item in bulk, so we always have about a million of everything. We even have an extra refrigerator and freezer in the basement.

  I’ll have to remember to write “buy more eggs” on Mom’s to-do list because after we’re done, we’ll only have three eggs left. But it will be so worth it!

  FAILED RECORD ATTEMPT

  It turns out that breaking eggs with our toes is harder than we thought. We didn’t get past five eggs.

  After all that crushing, our toes couldn’t bend, so we had to walk on our knees for hours, which might have been a better record to break, but now it’s too late.

  And even though we crushed the eggs over a bowl, Mom got mad. I guess she had a point. Who would want to eat eggs crushed by our toes with the shells mixed in? Not even Dad, and he eats practically anything. I tell Mom that the good news is she doesn’t have to add eggs to the grocery list.

  Mom breathes deeply and then says, “I have other things to do over vacation than clean up after you three. So from now on you can attempt only one record a day.”

  I open my mouth to complain and Mom says, “One record a day or none at all.”

  I’ve lived with Mom long enough to know when she’s serious. This is one of those times.

  PIGEON BOY

  “Tomorrow,” Viva says, “we’ve got to try something really good.”

  Lonnie says, “In the words of Yoda: ‘Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.’”

  Viva punches him in the arm. “We still can only do one a day, so it better be good.”

  We decide to go to t
he aviary and pick tomorrow’s record. Lonnie and Viva are the only other people who Grumpy Pigeon Man lets into his aviary. He’s very picky about stuff like that.

  I open the door and walk in. The Destructor is here crouched down and covered in pigeon poo and feathers.

  Again.

  “Hi, Lonnie. Hi, Viva. Hi, Teddy,” he says, and then goes back to covering every inch of his body.

  And sure, it’s terrible that he’s slathered in poo and feathers, but right now the really terrible thing is that HE IS IN THE AVIARY AT ALL!

  This is my place. My own private place. My no-one-else-in-my-family place. But most importantly, it’s my Destructor-free place!

  I’m about to tell him this, but Lonnie places a hand on my shoulder and says, “Don’t go to the dark side.”

  And Viva adds, “He’s only five.”

  “That’s what everyone says,” I say. “And they’ve been saying it since he was born.”

  Viva leans down to The Destructor, who’s scraping up poo with a feather and gluing it to himself. “I thought you liked hanging out in the litter box.”

  The Destructor looks at her. “We call it a cat box.”

  “Whatever you call it, it’s where you usually are.”

  Viva’s right, of course: until a few days ago The Destructor’s favorite place to hang out was in Smarty Pants’s toilet. This was just plain gross, even in my family. Mom bought The Destructor his own cat box so Smarty Pants didn’t have to share and The Destructor didn’t get covered in cat poo. Mom was very pleased with herself about this.

  “I’ve changed,” The Destructor says as he stands up. “Pigeon Boy! Call me Pigeon Boy!” He starts flapping around, which is bad because the aviary is not very big. Lonnie and Viva duck out of the way, but I don’t, and The Destructor runs straight into me, knocking me over and covering me in poo and feathers.