Read Online Big Mouth by Deborah Halverson - Free Book Online Page B

for when Mom and Dad are out of town?
    Because with Mom and Dad out of town, you’re at his mercy to make his shopping list, you doofus.
Sighing, I dug out the old parka and gloves that Grampy kept in the freezer and grabbed the clipboard. Might as well start the inventorying, it was going to be a long, cold night.
    I put another clear bear in my mouth and started counting the Mint Chocolate Chip tubs.
One, two, three…

CHAPTER 7
    If there was a competitive sleeping circuit, they wouldn’t let me in for a million bucks. Not after last night. Grampy’s stupid inventorying took way longer than I’d expected thanks to my headache, so I didn’t get home from Scoops until almost a quarter to two, which put me in bed sometime around two-fifteen. Mom would’ve had a cow if she’d been home. And just to reach home at that hideous hour, I’d had to ride through the park, right up that gnarly hill in the middle. Stupid Grampy refused to drive our truck, claiming the stick shift made his bum knee swell, so I couldn’t call him to pick up me and my bike. Twice I almost laid my bike down and died in the grass. What genius puts a mountain in the middle of a park?
    At least I had the satisfaction of knowing that I hadn’t reversed my fortune in the freezer. Maybe sucking gummies kept my stomach in check. Or maybe the ice cream had frozen in my gut. Whatever the reason, I missed out on another Butyric Acid Event.
    What really torpedoed my sleep, though, was the post-park segment of my night: I was up several times each hour sprinting to the bathroom. It turns out that putting that much dairy into the human stomach causes some gross and painful side effects. I ached everywhere…in my stomach, my shoulders, my head, and, big surprise, my intestines. Then my guts rumbled like a bulldozer for a while, eventually leading to a smellfest worse than any Butyric Acid Event. Then the bathroom trips started. How humiliating. Was that what professional eaters went through after they competed? They looked so cool and collected, it was hard to believe they got reduced to
that
when they left the competition table.
    By sunup, my bloated belly had mostly settled. Even so, I’d tried to tell my mom on the phone that I was too sick to go to school. But she laid into me with all her motivational la-di-da and I caved. You would’ve thought she was blood-related to Grampy, the way she worked me. So that’s how I found myself sitting on the school bus this morning, totally exhausted, with the rickety rocking motion working on me like a baby in a cradle. All around me, Plums in Halloween costumes were hollering and laughing and throwing an empty plastic pumpkin back and forth like a bunch of first graders. Next to me, Lucy was trying to show me a bunch of training graphs she’d worked up last night. Reading in a jostling bus wasn’t kind on the eyes or the stomach. It didn’t help that I was half comatose.
    “I’m thinking we should start focusing on capacity instead of speed.” She took a highlighter out of the front pocket of her dress and marked a row labeled HBD CONSUMPTION TALLY on a yellow, red, and green line graph. “Each box represents half a hot dog. This yellow line may only creep up in the short term, but over the long haul you’ll see big improvement.”
    She put the highlighter back in her pocket. She was wearing a Cinderella costume. Not the fancy, twirling-at-the-ball Cinderella that I’d expect a girl to want, but the scrungy, slaving-in-the-kitchen Cinderella, all sooty and smudged and ratty-haired. That was Lucy. Even on Halloween, she had to buck the system.
    My costume, on the other hand, was a spit-and-polish Captain Quixote dress uniform. I liked the shoulder epaulets best. They stuck out way far and official-like, and the sun insignia on them almost glowed against the black fabric background. Then I had a row of medals on my chest showing all of Quixote’s First Contacts with alien species. There were fourteen of