The World's Greatest Underachiever and the Soggy School Trip Page 6
“But—”
“Keep your mouth closed. No one speaks on this vessel unless I say he can! Is that understood, you over-filled flea?”
I think Nick tried to say something, but all we could hear was the captain yelling. Collin and I tiptoed out of the bunk room and ran up the stairs.
It wasn’t until we reached the deck and closed the hatch that we burst out laughing and high-fived each other about ten times.
CHAPTER
16
Frankie saw us laughing like idiots and came over to see what was so funny.
“You look like you’re having a good old time,” he said without his usual smile.
“We got even with McKelty,” I said to him. My sides were hurting from laughing so much. “You should have seen his face, Frankie. He stuck me with the captain’s assistant job, and we stuck him right back. It was incredible, wasn’t it, Collin?”
“This guy is hysterical,” Collin said, slapping me on the back. “I had a blast. And Nick McKelty is a Twinkie-loving fool.”
“Zip, can I talk to you for a minute?” Frankie said. He grabbed me by the arm and practically yanked me over to the railing. “Man am I glad to see you,” he said. “Luke Whitman is driving me nuts. That dude can’t keep his finger out of his nose. I’ve got to get away from him. How about if you and me partner up. I’ll talk the first mate into a switch and I’ll ditch Luke.”
I might as well tell you right here and now. I’m not proud of what I did next. But it’s what really happened, so I have to be honest with you.
Frankie Townsend is my best friend. He has been ever since we were born. I should have wanted to partner up with him. But I didn’t. Nothing against Frankie. It’s just that I was having such a great time with Collin. And to be absolutely honest, it felt really good to have the guy everyone wanted to be friends with want to be with me. Collin Rich thought I was clever and funny. He thought I was a genius. Me, Hank Zipzer.
So I said no to my best friend.
“Listen, Frankie, I want to partner up,” I said, “but I’ve already promised Collin I’d stay with him.”
“Collin?” said Frankie. “You promised Collin?”
“Yeah.”
“So let me get this straight. You and Collin are going to hang out together?”
“Yeah, I promised him.”
“For the whole night?”
I didn’t answer. Frankie gave me a cold stare. I couldn’t blame him.
“So that means I’ll just be with Luke Whitman and be covered in bogeys from head to toe,” Frankie said.
I looked over at Collin. He was waiting for me. I turned back to Frankie.
“I want to hang out with you, Frankie. Really I do.”
“Right,” said Frankie. “And my name is Bernice.”
He shook his head and walked away.
CHAPTER
17
“Everything ok?” Collin asked.
“Yeah, fine,” I said. I knew Frankie was mad, and I didn’t feel good about that. But what could I do?
We all gathered on deck while the galley crew handed out dinner. Each of us got a portion of gruel, which looked like thin porridge and tasted like wallpaper paste. They served it in wooden bowls and we ate it with a wooden spoon.
I took a bowl and handed one to Collin. I could see Frankie out of the corner of my eye. He was standing with Luke on the starboard side of the ship’s deck. Or maybe it was the port side. I couldn’t tell because it was too dark for me to see my pinky fingers.
While everyone ate, the first mate talked to us about our next shift.
“Excuse me, Mr Mate,” Katie Sperling said, interrupting him. “But when do we get our real dinner?”
“This is your dinner,” said Mr Gladson. “And I would be grateful if I were you.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Kim Paulson, letting the gruel drip off her spoon and back into the bowl.
“Tomorrow at daybreak, you’ll get your ration of salt beef and ship’s bread. Now that’s a meal,” Mr Gladson said. “For now, all you get is gruel.”
“But I saw some chicken downstairs. And fruit,” Ashley said. Good old fearless Ashley. Of course, she’d be the one to speak up.
“Aye, that’s for the captain,” said Mr Gladson. “You can’t expect him to be eating gruel.”
“I don’t see why not,” said Ashley. “We’re eating it.”
“How dare you compare yourselves to the captain,” said Mr Gladson, shaking his finger at her. “No more talk! Avast, matey.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Ashley asked.
“It means stop it right now. No lowly sailor talks back to an officer on the Pilgrim Spirit.”
I could see Ashley getting mad. She was opening her mouth to answer when Frankie reached out and said something to her. I bet you anything that he was telling her to take a deep breath in through her nose and let the anger out through her mouth. It seemed to be working, because Ash didn’t say another word. Part of me wished I was over there with them. But the other part felt really proud to be standing there with Collin.
After we had finished our gruel, the first mate handed out our next assignments. He told Katie Sperling and Hector Ruiz that they were on galley clean-up crew. He assigned Frankie and Luke to swab the decks. Then he came over to Collin and me.
“You two sailors were captain’s assistants on the first shift. Correct?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said Collin. “And I’ve never had so much fun in my life.”
Mr Gladson seemed surprised. “That’s not the usual reaction,” he said. “Captain tells me your successor, Mr McKelty, is having a difficult time of it.”
I started to snigger, but stopped when Mr Gladson shot me a look.
“Sorry to hear that, sir,” I said, trying to look serious. “He wanted that job so badly.”
“This shift, you two will be line handlers,” Mr Gladson said. “You’ll tie down the ship for the night. You know any knots?”
“No, sir,” I answered.
He handed me a book that had been tucked under his arm. It was called One Hundred Most Useful Nautical Knots. Oh, boy, I didn’t like the sound of that. I had so much trouble just learning to tie my shoes. Tying a boat knot seemed impossible, let alone one hundred knots!
“Study this book,” said Mr Gladson. “It’s the first thing sailors read right after they learn to throw a clockwise hitch on a cleat.”
What I wanted to say was, I have no idea what you’re talking about. But instead I said, “Will do, sir. Can’t wait, sir.”
“Learn the basic knots,” he said. “Bowline, square knot, figure eights, cleat hitch. When you’ve got that down, use a hitch to tie the mooring lines on the starboard side to the two cleats on the dock.”
“Will do, sir.”
I said it again! What is wrong with you, Hank? Why are you agreeing to do something when you have no idea what you are agreeing to do?
“Which knot should we use, sir?” Collin asked.
“Whatever feels the most secure,” Mr Gladson said.
He started to walk away, and then he stopped to face us again. “By the way, gentlemen. If you complete this assignment, you’ll get the line handlers certificate of merit. Captain will give it to you himself. Good luck.”
“Let’s get busy,” Collin said after Mr Gladson had left. “It’d be fun to show that captain we’re not the losers he thinks we are.”
Collin and I went to the front of the boat. Collin picked up some coiled ropes and lugged them over to us. I looked out at the water and for the first time, I really noticed where we were. The Brooklyn Bridge stretched across the river right next to us. I know it’s just a bridge, but, boy, is it a beautiful thing to look at. It’s like a shiny, steel spiderweb without the spider, strung with lights. If I turned and looked out into the harbour, I could see the Statue of Liberty. She was all lit up too. She looked a whole lot better in person than on Head Teacher Love’s cheek, I’ll tell you that.
I guess my mind had wandered off. It likes to do that.
“Do you have any idea what exactly we’re supposed to do?” I asked Collin, snapping to attention.
“Not really. But we can figure it out.”
He looked out on to the dock and thought for a minute. He pointed to a big wedge-shaped metal thing sticking up from the dock. A fat rope was tied around it, holding the boat in place while it bobbed in the water.
“I’ll bet that metal thing is a cleat,” he said. “Do you agree, Hank?”
“Couldn’t agree more,” I said.
I had no idea what a cleat was. What I did know was that Collin was clever. I could almost see the thoughts racing around his mind.
Collin picked up two loose ropes that were coiled up on the deck near us.
“These must be the mooring lines,” he said. “What do you think, Hank?”
“I have to say yes to that,” I said. “They look like mooring lines to me. Indeed they do.”
I wouldn’t know a mooring line from a dotted line. But who was I to disagree with Collin Sebastian Rich the Fourth?
Collin took a torch out of his pocket and shone it on to the dock. We could see two smaller metal things jutting up behind the big one.
“I bet those are the two cleats he wants us to tie the boat on to,” Collin said. “What do you think, Hank?”
“I think that I’m in total agreement.”
Hank, you ding-dong! Can’t you say anything other than “I agree”? You sound stupid even to yourself.
“Do you know how to tie any knots?” Collin asked me.
“Nope, but we have this book. One Hundred Most Useful Nautical Knots. Sounds like a thriller.”
“Let’s get started,” Collin said. “How hard can it be to learn how to tie a knot?”
I flipped open the book. When I looked inside, it was my worst nightmare. No, worse than my worst nightmare. It was my worst nightmare having a nightmare. It was ugly – page after page of diagrams and instructions. There were drawings of right hands and left hands pulling pieces of rope inside and outside loops. I couldn’t tell what was what. The letters and pictures started to move around on the page, just like always. Tadpoles swimming in a pond.
How hard can it be to learn how to tie a knot?
Try impossible.
CHAPTER
18
Frankie, Ashley and I have a magic act called Magik 3. Frankie is the magician and we’re the assistants. There’s this one trick Frankie does where he cuts a rope into two pieces and drops it into a top hat. He waves a magic wand over the hat and says, “Zengawii,” which is his magic word he learned in Zimbabwe. When he pulls the rope out of the hat, it’s back in one piece!
As I sat there with the book One Hundred Most Useful Nautical Knots in front of me, I wished I knew a magic word that would make the stupid rope I was staring at tie itself into a knot.
“Zengawii!” I muttered, giving the coiled rope a kick. Nothing happened.
“What’d you say?” asked Collin.
“I said Zengawii, which in Zimbabwe means why did they make these dumb instructions so complicated?”
Collin laughed. “We’ll get it, buddy. Just read me the steps.”
We were trying to tie a hitch, which is the kind of knot you use to tie a boat to the dock. You’d think that would be easy enough. But noooooo! Turns out there are cleat hitches and clove hitches and rolling hitches and half hitches and other kinds of hitches you never even dreamed of.
We decided to try a cleat hitch. It sounded so right. I looked it up in the table of contents and opened the book to page 97. So far, so good. There were about twenty little complicated diagrams. They were mostly hands with arrows that showed how the hands would move if they could move. Next to each diagram was a sentence describing what the picture was supposed to be showing you.
I tried to read the first few sentences to myself before I read them out loud to Collin. Every other word was one I couldn’t read or pronounce. Like tension and taut and counterclockwise. I knew if I tried to read those instructions out loud, I would stumble all over myself and sound totally dumb. I had two choices. I could either confess to Collin that I had a reading problem or I could talk my way out of this.
Guess which one I chose?
“Tell you what,” I said to Collin, trying to make it seem like a gigantic light had just gone on in my head. “You read the instructions and I’ll do the rope-tying.”
“Why?” he asked. That was a good question.
“Because,” I answered. That was a stupid answer.
I didn’t wait for him to tell me that, though. I just handed the book to him really fast. He shrugged and took it.
From the corner of my eye, I could see Katie Sperling and Kim Paulson looking at us. They were on watch at the stern of the ship, but the person they were watching was Collin. He kept his face in the book, concentrating on the diagrams. I thought it was amazing that he didn’t seem to notice that girls looked at him all the time.
Mr Lingg strolled by and smiled at us.
“You boys need any help?” he asked. “I got a Boy Scout badge for rope-tying when I was a kid.”
I wanted to say, “Pull up a chair, Mr Lingg, and help us figure this mess out.” But, instead, I heard my voice say, “We’re doing fine. No problem here.”
I hate it when my voice speaks without asking me first. Mr Lingg passed by us and headed over to Katie and Kim.
“OK, I think I’ve got it,” Collin said, looking up from the book. “Step Number One.”
I hate instructions that begin with Step Number One, because that means there are seven thousand more steps coming.
“Step Number One,” Collin repeated. “Take the line to the ear of the cleat furthest from the load.”
Hello! Can somebody translate that into English?
“Step Number Two,” Collin read on. “Start your figure of eight across the top of the opposite ear.”
My coat, please. I’m out of here.
“Hey, Collin,” I said. “Excuse me a minute. I’ve got to use the head.”
I dropped the rope and took off. I needed Frankie.
I found him and Luke sitting with a group of kids at the stern of the ship. (How about that for nautical vocabulary?) They were studying the sky while Mr Gladson explained how sailors navigate using the stars.
“Psst, Frankie,” I whispered, and motioned for him to come over to me. Mr Gladson stopped talking and frowned at me.
“Are you having trouble with your knots, sailor?” he asked.
“No way. Piece of cake. We’ll be getting that certificate for sure. I just need to talk to Frankie for a second.”
Frankie didn’t look happy about it, but he got up and came over to me.
“I’m in trouble,” I whispered to him. “I need help.”
“Go and ask your new best friend Collin,” Frankie said. He started to leave, but I pulled him back.
“Frankie, listen. We’re supposed to tie the ship down, but I can’t figure the knot out. We’re all going to float away.”
“No we’re not,” he said. “Use your head, man. The boat is already tied down. Didn’t you see the huge rope wound round that thingamajig on the dock?”
“It’s called a cleat.”
“Wow, listen to you, matey. Whatever. You think they’re going to let a kid be responsible for making sure we don’t drift out to sea?”
He had a point. But Mr Gladson told us we had to tie down the other two ropes. And there was the line handlers certificate to consider. Collin really wanted that.
“Frankie,” I begged. “You know how I am with instructions. Come on, you’ve got to help me. It’ll be fun. I’ll give you my certificate.”
“Oh, now you want to hang out with me?” he said. “Forget it.”
“But, Frankie—”
“This is the w
ay you wanted it, dude. Tie your heart out.”
Frankie went back and took his seat with the group.
On my way back, I ran into Collin. He was heading down the stairs to go below deck.
“Did you give up?” I asked, hoping like crazy that he had.
“I just got cold,” he said. “I’ll get our coats and be back.”
While I waited for Collin, I leaned over the railing and stared out at the dock. That big rope Frankie had talked about was bouncing up and down as it strained against the cleat. The moon was shining and I could see the knot clearly. It didn’t look so complicated from where I was. In fact, all of a sudden, it was big and clear.
They should make diagrams in books that big, I thought. Then they’d be much easier to follow.
Wait a minute. That’s it. My brain started going so fast that I thought I actually heard it clicking.
Yes! Hank Daniel Zipzer. You’ve just had a brilliant idea.
CHAPTER
19
You have to know this about me. When I get a good idea, I move fast. There’s no stopping me. My brilliant idea required that I leave the boat. So I zipped over to the gangplank as fast as myshort little legs could carry me.
I could see one of the boat’s crew members leaning up against the rail guarding the gangplank.
Hector Ruiz and a kid from the other school were keeping watch on a platform just past the real sailor. I walked past the guard as naturally as I could and over to Hector.
“Hey, Hector, I need you to do something for me.”
“I can’t now. I’m on watch,” he said.
“Hector, this is important. Would you call the guard over and ask him how long you’re on watch for?”
“I know how long it is – it’s two hours.”
“Then ask him something you don’t know. I need you to keep him talking.”
“Why?” Hector asked.
“Trust me, it’s for the good of the ship.” I was lucky that Hector didn’t ask me in what way it was good for the ship. He did, however, say, “Why should I do this for you?”