Shells, Smells, and the Horrible Flip-Flops of Doom Read online

  Ahhhhhhhhhhhh.

  August 29, Sunday

  Mom and Dad are proud about my gold medal and also my two silvers. (They stopped asking about that other one from Montana C., which is hiding in my desk drawer. I am going to sneak it into her backpack sometime during fourth grade.)

  But they are even prouder of how I handled camp and how I rose to the occasion.

  They talked to me about it privately, just the three of us out on the deck. Natalia had called them, I guess. I don’t know exactly what she told them because I was trying to hurry the conversation along and get to the next thing, which was a wrapped box sitting there waiting patiently on the table with the name JUSTIN on it. So I was not fully listening to every word, even though they were mostly words like proud and brave, which I do enjoy. But it was worth hurrying through those excellent words, it turned out.

  In the box was a half-pound bag of gummy worms all for myself that I don’t even have to share with anybody, not even Elizabeth.

  Then after she got back from trying to walk Qwerty all by herself, Elizabeth told us the whole story of that adventure and then went dashing up to her room to get something. When she came back onto the deck, she handed me a heavy thing wrapped in tissue paper.

  “What is it?” I asked. It was not my birthday, so I felt kind of confused.

  “Open it,” she said.

  I took the tissue paper off it carefully. Underneath was a big papier-mâché item, painted in every imaginable color and a few others, too.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “It’s a battlefield,” she said. “For your knights. I know they are just plastic toys, but I also know, well, they’re … they need a field to battle on, to prove their hero-ness.”

  “Heroism,” Dad said.

  “Hero-ness” Elizabeth insisted, and pointed at the battlefield I was holding in my hands. “Heroes need a place to prove themselves, so they can get brave.”

  “Yeah,” I told her.

  “Well, that’s what I was thinking, and I already made a million things for Mom and Dad, so why not you? And also it was going to be a bowl for your shell, but it smooshed so, oh, well.”

  “It’s perfect,” I whispered to her. And it was the truth.

  So that is why just now, while everybody is sleeping, I just snuck into Elizabeth’s room and arranged on her desk a little turret made of about 20 to 23 gummy worms, surrounding my shell. And next to it, I wrote a note that says, “For Elizabeth. Love, your brother, Justin K.”

  My heart is pounding now but partly in a proud way.

  August 30, Monday

  What I love about summer is the nothing-to-do-ness of it.

  Today I spent all morning digging a hole in the backyard, just for the fun of digging. Then I spent all afternoon undigging it, just for the fun of not getting yelled at anymore about what the heck I was doing digging up the whole darn garden, young man.

  Elizabeth spent the day making a castle out of shoe boxes and construction paper for her perfect shell to be the queen of. (Elizabeth thinks the shell is a she.)

  Qwerty spent the day throwing up the gummy worms that were originally guarding the shell on Elizabeth’s desk.

  Then at dinner out on the deck, Mom said to me that my friend named Cassius Plotz would like to play together sometime, and I said, “Who is Cassius Plotz,” and Mom said his mother called and said you were his best friend at camp this summer and I said, “Cash?”

  So he is coming over for a playdate on Thursday.

  I am trying to think whatevs, but instead I am actually thinking Oh, no.

  August 31, Tuesday

  Today is the last day of August. When we got home from another morning at the pool, all red-eyed and cloggy-eared, the class lists were in the mailbox. Elizabeth tore hers open, shouting, “I’m in the grades! No more kindergarten! Finally in the grades!”

  But I’ve been in the grades a long time, so I was much less sparky about the whole thing. Fourth grade sounds soooo much older than third, never mind first. I opened my envelope carefully, after I put my stuff in the laundry and went to the kitchen. I am not so uncontrolled as first grade.

  Fourth grade.

  That is the good news.

  The rest, I decided, is just a disaster that I am not going to think about yet because it is still summer for goodness’ sake.

  But then I stared at the paper with my class list on it for a very long minute, because I could not stop thinking, No way, no way. While Elizabeth and Mom went upstairs to put her class list up on her new bulletin board, I got a pencil out of the everything drawer and sat down at the kitchen table with my list. I am more of a math guy than a decorate-a-bulletin-board guy, so I put a number from one to five next to each kid’s name with one meaning disaster all the way up to five for hooray.

  There was only one hooray.

  There were a LOT of disasters.

  And one zero next to Mr. Leonard, my fourth-grade teacher.

  I am not being prejudiced, but I never had a man teacher before. A lot of people think he is cool because he has a quiet voice and his eyebrows can move independently of each other, especially if a kid says a wrong answer. No yelling, no putting your name on the board. Just an eyebrow, up a millimeter toward his hair. I don’t know if it matters if it’s the left eyebrow or the right that goes up. How am I supposed to know that? I am probably going to get at least one raised eyebrow in the first week, if I know me. Also, Mr. Leonard is a very tall person for a teacher, which means you have to tip your head back very far to see if one of his eyebrows went up, to know if you made a mistake. Which could give you a stiff neck.

  I am actually used to having teachers who are female and more on the loud and obvious side of letting you know when you are incorrect. But now I got Mr. Leonard and his eyebrows for a fourth-grade teacher.

  I also got Xavier and Noah, Montana C. and Daisy in my class. Not Penelope Ann Murphy or Bartholomew Wiggins but, even worse, a kid with the name of Cassius Plotz.

  So fourth grade is probably going to be a complete disaster.

  But right now, it is still August, so I after I erased all the scores I gave out—so nobody would be able to know my opinions—I crumpled that class list up and threw it in the garbage in the kitchen. I poked it down into a bunch of gross breakfast garbage. I am not in the mood today for anybody to talk to me about how it’s important to be brave and have a good attitude.

  The mighty forces can come to my aid tomorrow.

  For now, I am just going to sit here on the deck in my bare feet with their too much space between the toes while my knights battle it out on their lumpy battlefield. I can hear little shrieks of delight from Elizabeth’s bedroom window, blending in with the birds across the yard, shrieking their delight to each other. Maybe they are in the grades, too.

  What I am mostly doing is smelling the afternoon. I’m sucking today into my lungs as much as possible, because tomorrow when I breathe, it will be September air clogging up my respiratory system instead. And I just think it might be nice to have some summer left over inside me for if I need it.

  August air in my backyard smells nothing like pudding or bus farts.

  It smells like grass and heat and the sweet-sour of fresh gummy worms and also like Nothing to Worry About at all.

  Read all about Justin Case in:

  A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2010

  An IndieBound Selection for Fall 2010

  “The writing is sharp, unpredictably clever, and establishes third grade as a minefield of the absurd—which is to say, real life.”—Avi, Newbery Medalist

  “Vail employs easy, direct language in a rhythm and syntax that captures the essence of a charming, lovable, and very believable boy. Readers transitioning to longer fiction will groan, sympathize, and laugh out loud in delight. Absolutely marvelous.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  “Honest and full of heart, Justin Case is a story for an oft-ignored segment of kids: the sensitive, introverted, and observant. The format wil
l remind many readers of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, but with fewer illustrations and a more reflective tone than Jeff Kinney’s series. This is subtly satisfying storytelling.”—School Library Journal

  A FEIWEL AND FRIENDS BOOK

  An Imprint of Macmillan

  JUSTIN CASE: SHELLS, SMELLS, AND THE HORRIBLE FLIP-FLOPS OF DOOM.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Rachel Vail.

  Illustrations copyright © 2012 by Matthew Cordell.

  All rights reserved.

  For information, address Feiwel and Friends, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  ISBN: 978-1-250-00081-1

  Feiwel and Friends logo designed by Filomena Tuosto

  First Edition: 2012

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  eISBN 9781466874299

  First eBook edition: May 2014

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