Oggie Cooder, Party Animal

  How lucky to be

  So beautiful and perfect

  Don’t you envy me?

  Bethie Hudson’s was about winning a spelling bee — something she never missed an opportunity to remind people she’d done back in the second grade. And there was one other haiku that Oggie felt certain he knew who had written:

  Ghorks and Shadow Zwills

  How you fill my heart with joy

  My secret Ghoulers

  It had to be Dylan’s. Who else would have written about Ghoulers and Ghorks? Each time Oggie visited the bulletin board, his eyes would drift up to the upper right-hand corner where he would reread his own haiku, wondering whether people would recognize the essence of him in the words.

  Many of the haiku were hard to match up with a particular person. There was one about riding a bicycle and another about playing with a cat. Pretty much anybody with a bicycle or a cat could have written those. At noon, before the class was dismissed to go to the cafeteria, Mr. Snolinovsky made everybody promise not to discuss the haiku game during lunch.

  “I want your guesses to be based only on the poems,” he told them. “Not on hints your friends drop about which ones they wrote.”

  As promised, Amy and Oggie did not discuss the haiku. Instead, Amy quizzed Oggie on the B.P.R.’s while they ate their sandwiches.

  “ ‘Our moon is not cheese, so what’s that funny smell?’ ” said Oggie.

  “No,” Amy corrected. “It’s not, ‘so what’s that funny smell,’ it’s ‘but what’s that funny smell?’ Remember? The b stands for brain cells.”

  “Oh, right,” said Oggie. “Rule Number Thirty-Five: NO TALKING ABOUT THE THINGS THAT YOUR PARENTS TELL YOU WILL KILL YOUR BRAIN CELLS.”

  “I wonder why you always forget that one,” said Amy.

  “Probably those fifty-three marshmallows I ate.”

  “Or maybe the cotton ball.” Amy giggled.

  As they walked back to class together after lunch, Oggie asked Amy, “Do you think I’ll know all the rules by heart by tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Absolutely,” Amy told him.

  “Well, in that case, do you think Donnica likes purses?”

  “That’s a weird question,” said Amy.

  “Not really. If I go to the party, I have to bring a gift. My mom thinks I should give Donnica a purse, but I don’t even know if she likes purses.”

  Amy’s personal feeling was that the only thing Donnica Perfecto deserved from Oggie was a big fat punch in the nose.

  “If she doesn’t like purses, I was thinking maybe I could crochet her some pink shoelaces,” said Oggie.

  “What about Rule Number Two?” Amy re-minded him.

  “Do you think it would still be breaking the rule if the shoelaces were in a box?” asked Oggie.

  Their conversation was interrupted by a loud voice behind them. Donnica was yelling at her friends.

  “How many times do I have to tell you? It’s not my fault. I told Daddy that the only thing I wanted for my birthday was Cheddar Jam!”

  Oggie’s eyes got very wide.

  Prrrrr-ip! Prrrrr-ip!

  “Did Donnica just say she wanted cheddar jam for her birthday?” whispered Oggie excitedly.

  “That’s what it sounded like to me,” Amy confirmed.

  “What’s cheddar jam?” Oggie asked.

  Amy shrugged. Neither she nor Oggie had attended the Valentine Dance, so they hadn’t heard of the band. Living in Wawatosa, Wisconsin, though, they were used to people trying to come up with new and creative ways to use cheese. But jam? Oggie squinched up his face as he tried to imagine eating a peanut butter and cheddar jam sandwich. It didn’t sound very appetizing.

  I wonder why Donnica wants cheese for her birthday, Oggie thought. But it didn’t really matter. What was important was that Oggie finally knew what Donnica wanted for her birthday, and he made a promise to himself then and there that he was going to get it for her.

  Cheddar jam.

  That afternoon during Creative Writing, Oggie and his classmates made their final haiku guesses. When they were done, Mr. Snolinovsky took the poems off the board and began to read them aloud. The first one he read was typed on a piece of green paper.

  I do not know yet

  Exactly what it will be

  But you will need it.

  Amy was the only one who guessed correctly that Oggie had written it. She knew all about Oggie’s dreams of being an inventor. Oggie had guessed right about Donnica’s and David’s and Bethie’s haiku, but to his surprise, Dylan turned out to be the person who had written about the bicycle.

  So who wrote the haiku about Ghoulers and Ghorks? Oggie wondered. When Mr. Snolinovsky got to that one and asked the author to stand, Oggie couldn’t have been more surprised. But he was not as surprised as the person sitting in the first seat in the third row.

  “You collect Ghoulers?!” Dylan cried in utter amazement.

  Dylan James had seen the poem on the board and had been waiting on the edge of his seat all day to find out who had written it. Imagine how shocked he was to discover that the one person at Truman who liked the same thing he did was … Amy Schneider. A girl.

  * * *

  After school that day, Oggie went to three grocery stores and two cheese shops. He saw cheddar balls, cheddar wheels, cheddar straws, cheddar sticks, and cheddar you could squirt right out of a can. But nobody had heard of cheddar jam. Discouraged, he decided to swing by Too Good to Be Threw and ask for his mother’s advice.

  “Why do you want to give Donnica jelly for her birthday?” asked Mrs. Cooder.

  “Jam,” Oggie corrected.

  “Are you sure she wouldn’t rather have a purse?”

  But Donnica had said she wanted cheddar jam. There was one more place Oggie hadn’t tried. As he headed out the door to continue his search, a flash of yellow and blue caught his eye and he snapped his fingers as he remembered Dylan’s brother’s request. A few minutes later, Oggie was walking down the street with a pair of blue-and-yellow-checked pants in Justin’s size tucked under his arm.

  * * *

  On his way home, Oggie stopped at the mini-mart attached to the Gas and Go filling station. It was his last hope, but it turned out that the only kind of cheese they had was plain old American, and even that looked a little moldy. Oggie kept his eyes peeled for the Georges and the cherry picker as he continued on his way, but again it seemed they were nowhere in sight. Turk was waiting by the door with his leash in his mouth when Oggie got home, so he dropped his backpack on the kitchen table, hooked the leash on Turk’s collar, and the two of them started off toward Walnut Acres to deliver the pants to Dylan’s brother.

  As he walked his dog, Oggie resigned himself to the fact that he wasn’t going to be able to give Donnica what she really wanted for her birthday. He was disappointed, but what could he do? He’d looked everywhere he could think of for cheddar jam, but it was nowhere to be found.

  Nobody was home at the Jameses’ house. Dylan’s bike was gone and there was no car in the driveway. The red trunk was still sitting on the lawn, so Oggie sat down on it and waited for a while to see if anybody showed up. After about ten minutes, he gave up. Before he left, he folded the pants and left them sitting on top of the trunk where he hoped Justin would find them.

  * * *

  That night before he went to bed, Oggie crocheted Donnica a pair of pink shoelaces. He used a ruler to make sure they were both exactly the same length. Maybe he hadn’t been able to find cheddar jam, but at least Oggie could make sure that Donnica wouldn’t be tripping over uneven shoelaces.

  The next morning Oggie awoke feeling nervous and excited. In just a few hours he would be swimming in Donnica Perfecto’s pool! He got up and tried to make himself a bowl of cereal, but he was so worked up, first he spilled the last of the cornflakes on the floor and then he knocked over the milk carton. Turk was delighted, and more than happy to help with the cleanup. Oggie had really been too excited to eat breakfast anyway. He loo
ked at the clock. It was only eight fifteen. How was he ever going to last until party time?

  At nine o’clock, Oggie put Donnica’s shoelaces in a box and carefully tied a ribbon around it. At ten o’clock Mrs. Cooder drove Oggie down to Selznick’s department store, where they exchanged his red bathing suit for a yellow one. Oggie also talked his mother into buying him a pair of rubber swim fins he discovered in the sale bin. There was no rule against swim fins on Donnica’s list, and Oggie could hardly wait to try them out in the Perfectos’ pool. At eleven o’clock, Amy called to quiz Oggie one last time on the rules and to wish him good luck.

  “Thanks a BAZILLION for all your help,” Oggie told her. “And by the way, how come you never told me you collected Ghorks and Windowsills?”

  “They’re called Shadow Zwills,” Amy told him. “And I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think you’d be interested since you can’t play Old Maid with them.”

  She knew Oggie well.

  At twelve o’clock, Oggie was too excited to eat lunch, so he went to his room and prrrrr-ip-ed nonstop for an hour and a half. When he was finished, his tongue was completely numb. He tested himself by thinking about piggies-in-a-blanket and he was very relieved to find that he had prrrrr-ip-ed himself dry.

  It felt like two o’clock would never come, but at last it did. Oggie put on his new bathing suit and got Turk settled in the backyard with a bone to chew on to keep him busy while he was gone. Before he left the house, without even thinking about it, Oggie stopped at the fridge, took out a few slices of American cheese, and slipped them into one of the pockets of his swim trunks.

  As Oggie was leaving the house in his bathing suit and swim fins, a familiar white truck came cruising up Tullahoma Street. When it stopped in front of the Cooders’ house, Oggie was delighted to see who it was.

  “Hi, Georges!” Oggie called to his friends from the phone company. “What are you doing here?”

  The two Georges were glad to see Oggie. They explained that they were in the neighborhood because there had been some trouble reported with the phone lines. Oggie remembered that his mother had mentioned something about bad reception only the day before.

  “Looks like you’re on your way to a party,” one of the Georges said, noticing the box with the bow on it in Oggie’s hand.

  “Yeppers!” said Oggie happily. “It’s a swim party and there might even be piggies-in-a-blanket.”

  “Have fun,” they told Oggie. Then Short George climbed into the bucket and Tall George began to raise him up to the phone lines.

  As Oggie started flip-flopping across the street in his swim fins, a green van with a watering can painted on the side pulled into the Perfectos’ driveway. Several women wearing straw hats climbed out. Oggie waved to them, figuring they were probably relatives of Donnica’s who had come to help celebrate her birthday. When Oggie reached the front door, he rang the bell. After a minute, Mrs. Perfecto answered the door.

  “Hello,” said Oggie, holding out the present to her. “Thank you for inviting me. Here’s a gift for Donnica. I made them myself.”

  But instead of inviting him to come inside, Mrs. Perfecto gasped and put her hands on her cheeks.

  “Oh no,” she whimpered miserably. “Not now. Not today.”

  For a minute Oggie thought he must have gotten the day of the party mixed up, but then he noticed that Mrs. Perfecto was looking past him at the ladies in the straw hats. Mrs. Perfecto pushed Oggie out of the way and hurried down the walk, leaving Oggie to show himself into the house.

  “Hello?” he called. “Anybody here?”

  “Everybody’s out back by the pool,” came a muffled reply.

  At first Oggie didn’t see him, because the owner of the voice was sitting on the couch, which happened to be the exact same shade of brown as the fur suit he was wearing.

  “Bumbles!” cried Oggie.

  The giant bear lifted a paw and waved.

  “What are you doing in here?” Oggie asked. “Shouldn’t you be outside juggling by the pool?”

  “The birthday girl told me to stay inside,” said Bumbles. “And it’s a good thing, too, because the cleaner shrank my suit and now the eyeholes are in the wrong place. I can’t see a thing.”

  They were interrupted by the sound of a gasp coming from the other end of the room. Donnica, in a pink bathing suit with a terry cloth robe on over it, was standing in the doorway, staring at Oggie as if she were seeing a ghost.

  “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “You invited me to your party,” Oggie told her. “Remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” she said, “but you told me you had a terrible memory so you couldn’t possibly come. Remember?”

  “I do have a terrible memory,” Oggie said. “But Amy Schneider and Richard of York helped me, and I memorized every single rule. Want to hear? ‘Putting salad under the couch is very messy and dangerous.’ Which means no prrrrr-ip-ing, no crocheted shoelaces, no Uncle Vern stories …”

  But Donnica wasn’t listening. Her mind was racing a million miles an hour. Oggie Cooder and Bumbles the Bear were both at her birthday party. If she didn’t want to be the laughingstock of the entire fourth grade, she needed a new plan and she needed it fast.

  Donnica wasted no time launching Plan B.

  “Quick, you two,” she told Oggie and Bumbles. “Follow me. Dawn is upstairs stuck in the bathroom, and you have to help rescue her.”

  “Rescue Dawn?” asked Oggie.

  “Yes,” said Donnica. “The bathroom door gets stuck sometimes and the only way to get it open is to push it from the outside. You both have to come rescue her.”

  “You want me to come, too?” asked Bumbles.

  “Uh, duh, Yogi,” said Donnica. “I said I need both of you, didn’t I?”

  There was a loud crash as Bumbles stood up, accidentally knocking over a lamp.

  “Sorry,” he said, trying to pick up the lamp and in the process knocking a stack of magazines off the coffee table and onto the floor. “I really can’t see a thing. I’d take my head off, but I think the zipper’s jammed.”

  “Forget about your head. There’s no time for that now. We have to get upstairs!” shouted Donnica.

  Oggie tossed the birthday present on the table and grabbed Bumbles by the paw. Together, the two of them stumbled up the stairs behind Donnica.

  “Okay,” Donnica said when they reached the top of the stairs. “Here’s what we’re going to do. You two lean against this door, and on the count of three push as hard as you can.”

  Oggie and Bumbles did as they were told and put their shoulders to the door.

  “Ready?” said Donnica. “One … two … three!”

  The minute they leaned against the door, it flew open and Bumbles and Oggie tumbled into the bathroom, landing in a tangle together on the floor. Knowing she didn’t have a second to spare, Donnica pulled the door shut, and using the belt from her robe, she quickly tied the outside bathroom doorknob to the knob on the door of the linen closet right next to it in the hall.

  Bumbles and Oggie were trapped in the bathroom!

  “What’s going on?” Oggie asked as he jiggled the knob in vain.

  “Oops!” Donnica yelled through the door. “I guess Dawn wasn’t locked in there after all. But now you guys are. Don’t worry, though — I’ll go find someone to help get you out. I’ll be right back.”

  But Donnica had no intention of coming back. Plan B had worked perfectly. She had Oggie Cooder and Bumbles exactly where she wanted them.

  * * *

  Bumbles and Oggie waited for half an hour for Donnica to return. When she didn’t come back, they tried pounding on the door, but everybody was outside in the backyard, and Donnica had turned the music up loud so nobody would be able to hear them.

  “I had a bad feeling about this gig from the beginning,” groaned Bumbles. “But I need the money. Now I probably won’t even get paid.”

  Oggie climbed up on the edge of the bathtub so he
could look out of the window. The green van was still parked in the driveway, but there was no sign of Mrs. Perfecto or the ladies in the straw hats. Across the street, the two Georges were working on the phone wires. Oggie cranked open the window as far as it would go and called out to them, but they couldn’t hear him over the loud music that was playing out by the pool, where the party was now in full swing. Oggie sniffed the air and was certain he smelled piggies-in-a-blanket.

  “What are we going to do?” Oggie asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Bumbles, “but I’ll tell you one thing — if I don’t get out of this suit soon, I’m going to burn up. You wouldn’t believe how hot it is in here.”

  Oggie went around behind Bumbles and tried to get the zipper on the bear suit unstuck, but it was no use. It was completely jammed.

  “Maybe we should cut the legs off so you can take the suit off from the bottom instead,” Oggie suggested.

  “Go for it,” came Bumbles’s muffled reply.

  So Oggie found a pair of toenail clippers in the medicine cabinet and began to cut the suit apart. As he clipped away at the brown fur, a familiar flash of yellow and blue caught his eye.

  “Hey!” said Oggie. “Where’d you get those pants?”

  A few minutes later when Bumbles finally managed to wriggle out of his bear suit, Oggie had his answer: Bumbles the Juggling Bear was none other than Dylan’s brother, Justin James.

  “Hey, Oggie,” said Justin, brushing his long hair out of his eyes and tucking it behind his ears. “I didn’t realize it was you out here.”

  “I didn’t realize it was you in there either,” said Oggie. “Are you really Bumbles the Bear?”

  “The one and only,” said Justin. “And it looks like now I owe you two favors. One for the pants and one for getting me out of my costume. Thanks, man. I was really roasting in there. I wish someone would come up with a way to air-condition a bear suit.”

  Justin reached over and picked up four seashell-shaped soaps that were sitting in a dish next to the sink. At first Oggie thought he was planning to wash his hands, but instead Justin tossed the soaps up in the air and began to juggle them.