The charving would have to wait a little longer.
Later that morning at school, Oggie was sitting at his desk daydreaming about how great it would have been if he had won the Bakestuff name-the-bagel contest. He pictured himself strolling into the grocery store and running into one of his classmates. David Korben, for instance.
“Hey, Oggie,” David would say. “You sure do have a nice tan.”
“That’s because I just got back from Hawaii,” Oggie would tell him.
“Oh, that’s right, I heard about how you won that contest.”
Then David would pick up a bag of Raisin’ the Roof bagels, which just happened to be on display nearby. “Are these the ones you named?” he’d ask.
Oggie would nod and smile modestly.
“That’s pretty cool,” David would say. “Hey, you don’t happen to be free after school today to come over and shoot some hoops with me and the guys, do you?”
Oggie would have loved an invitation to play basketball with the guys, but it was about as likely to happen as Donnica Perfecto inviting him over to one of her pool parties. David Korben and his jock buddies had given Oggie the nickname Duck because in gym class, no matter what kind of ball you threw at him, Oggie always ducked. And as for Donnica’s pool, Oggie had never even seen it, though he had heard kids splashing around in it plenty of times during the summer.
Oggie’s seat was directly in front of the teacher’s desk, so when Mr. Snolinovsky clapped his hands to announce that it was time for the spelling test, Oggie, who was still daydreaming, was so startled he jumped right out of his seat. Unfortunately, he missed it on the way back down and ended up on the floor in a heap. Bethie Hudson, who sat right behind Oggie, rolled her eyes.
“Remember, class,” Mr. Snolinovsky said as Oggie picked himself up off the floor and slid back into his seat, “you are to use each spelling word in a sentence and the sentences must make sense.”
He gave them ten minutes to complete the test.
The words they had been assigned that week ended in the letters o-u-s. Oggie knew how to spell them all, thanks to his handy dandy flash cards. When Mr. Snolinovsky told them it was time to put their pencils down, Oggie felt fairly confident that he’d done well on the test.
“We’re going to try something new today,” Mr. Snolinovsky announced. “Instead of marking your tests myself, I’m going to ask you to mark one another’s work. Please pass your paper up one seat to the person sitting directly in front of you.”
Bethie Hudson groaned and rolled her big blue eyes again. Oggie didn’t hear her, though, he was too busy worrying about what to do with his paper.
“No offense, Mr. Snolinovsky, but I don’t get it,” Oggie said. “You told us that we were supposed to pass our papers to the person sitting in front of us, right? But how am I supposed to pass my paper to the person sitting in front of me when there isn’t anybody sitting in front of me, except for you, and you’re not even sitting there at the moment, you’re standing over by the blackboard scratching your head?”
“Could you have possibly found a longer, more complicated way of asking that question, Oggie?” Mr. Snolinovsky laughed.
“I’m not sure,” said Oggie, “but I’ll give it a try if you want me to.”
Mr. Snolinovsky had been kidding, but Oggie didn’t get it. He often took things the wrong way. Either that or he was saying something he shouldn’t — like the time he asked Mrs. Stifler if the reason her stomach was so big was because she was expecting triplets. Mrs. Stifler hadn’t been too happy about that question, since she wasn’t even expecting one baby at the time, let alone three.
“If, like Oggie, you happen to be sitting in the front row,” Mr. Snolinovsky explained to the class, “I’d like you to get up and quietly take your paper to the person sitting in the last seat in your row.”
There was a flurry of activity as people passed their papers. Oggie got up and carried his test back to America Johnson, who was the last person sitting in his row. America had a twin sister, Asia, who was in the other fourth-grade class at Truman. Oggie sometimes wondered whether Mr. and Mrs. Johnson were planning to have any more kids and, if so, whether they’d be naming them after continents, too. He thought Antarctica Johnson had a nice ring to it.
“You get to do mine,” Oggie said, handing his paper to America.
“Lucky me,” said America flatly.
When he returned to his seat, Bethie’s spelling test was sitting on Oggie’s desk.
“The first word is ridiculous,” Mr. Snolinovsky began. He slowly spelled the word for them: “R-i-d-i-c-u-l-o-u-s.”
Oggie didn’t even have to look at Bethie’s paper to know that she had spelled the word right. Bethie Hudson had great big front teeth that reminded Oggie of piano keys, and she was the best speller in the class.
“Please make sure that the word is spelled correctly and that it has been used properly in a sentence,” Mr. Snolinovsky said. “If the person whose paper you are marking has successfully accomplished both of those things, you may place a check mark next to the answer.”
Bethie had written: Ridiculous is a ridiculously easy word to spell.
Oggie put a big check mark next to Bethie’s answer.
Mr. Snolinovsky cleared his throat, ready to move on to the next word, when he noticed that America’s hand was raised.
“Question?” said Mr. Snolinovsky.
“What do we do if the person spelled the word right, but the sentence doesn’t make any sense?” America asked.
Good question, thought Oggie, until it occurred to him that the sentence America was talking about was his.
Oggie suddenly felt nervous. He reached for his back pocket, knowing that a little charving would calm him down. The only problem was, Mr. Snolinovsky had a strict rule against food in the classroom. Oggie took his hand out of his pocket and sighed. It looked like he was going to have to face this difficult moment without any help from his cheese.
Mr. Snolinovsky asked America to read Oggie’s sentence out loud.
“It says, ‘Someone is a ridiculous man funny bongo,’” said America.
Everybody laughed.
“That’s not what is says,” said Oggie. “You read it wrong.”
“No, I didn’t,” said America defensively. “That’s what you wrote. ‘Someone is a ridiculous man funny bongo.’ ”
More laughter.
“That doesn’t even make sense,” said Oggie.
“See?” said America. “He agrees it doesn’t make sense, and he wrote it!”
The whole class was really enjoying this. David Korben laughed so hard, he actually snorted.
“Calm down, everybody,” said Mr. Snolinovsky. “America, please bring me Oggie’s paper.”
America, holding Oggie’s spelling test by the corner, carried it up to Mr. Snolinovsky, who looked at it for a minute, then scratched his head.
“I’m sorry, Oggie,” he said, “but I’m having a little difficulty reading your handwriting myself. I’d like to hear what you wrote. Would you mind reading it for us?”
He handed the test paper to Oggie, who smoothed it out on his desk and slowly ran his finger along under the words as he read: “‘Sunshine is a ridiculous name for a bagel.’”
“That doesn’t make any more sense than the bongo one,” snorted Donnica. She pulled out her lip gloss to apply a fresh coat, instantly causing Dawn and Hannah to do the same thing.
“What do you mean?” said Oggie. “It does so make sense.”
“You’re cuckoo in the coconut, Cooder,” said Jackson Polito, crossing his eyes and twirling a finger around next to his ear.
“If he calls his bagel Sunshine, what do you think he calls his hamburger? Sweetheart?” David shouted out.
Some kids were hooting and clapping by now.
“Quiet down, please,” said Mr. Snolinovsky. “Let’s give Oggie a chance to explain.”
Oggie was grateful for the opportunity.
“Sunshine was
n’t my idea,” he began. “My idea was Raisin’ the Roof, because of the raisins.”
“Aww, isn’t that nice, he’s building a little house for his raisins,” said Jackson.
“No, I’m not,” insisted Oggie. “Raisin’ the roof means having fun, and I figured Bakestuff probably wanted people to think eating their bagels would be fun, right?”
“I’m not sure I’m following,” said Mr. Snolinovsky, scratching his head again. “Why exactly is the bagel named Sunshine?”
“Beats me,” said Oggie, shrugging his shoulders and shaking his head. “If you ask me, Raisin’ the Roof is a much better name.”
To the amusement of Oggie’s classmates, it was soon revealed that the rest of his spelling sentences were also about bagels:
It was a VICIOUS idea to name the bagel Sunshine.
There is nothing DELICIOUS about a bagel named Sunshine.
It would have been more GENEROUS to name the bagel Raisin’ the Roof.
It took a while, but Oggie finally managed to explain about the contest he had entered. Mr. Snolinovsky agreed that under the circumstances, Oggie’s sentences, though unusual, did in fact make sense. Not all of the kids agreed.
“Weirdo.”
“Dork.”
“Doofus.”
“Dweeb.”
Oggie slipped his hand into his back pocket again and touched the cheese. Boy, did he ever feel like charving now. Donnica Perfecto frowned at him and turned up her pointy little nose. Little did she know that it would only be a matter of time before Oggie Cooder would be holding her ticket to Hollywood in the very same hand that was touching that slice of American cheese.
At lunch, Oggie sat at his usual table in the corner next to the garbage cans. The only other person sitting there was Amy Schneider. Oggie and Amy sat together every day at lunch, but it wasn’t because they were friends. The way it worked at Truman was that every lunch table had a crowd of kids who sat together because of something they had in common. There was the jock table where David Korben and his basketball buddies sat, and there was the table for girls who liked horses where Bethie Hudson and all her horsey little girlfriends sat. Donnica Perfecto had dibs on a choice table by the window, where she and Hannah and Dawn ate lunch together every day.
There were lots of tables in the cafeteria, but not one of them was for people like Oggie who liked to crochet shoelaces and charve cheese. Charving cheese was one of Oggie’s favorite hobbies and, in a sense, Amy Schneider had been the one who’d discovered it.
The Schneiders had moved to town right after the school year began, and Amy was placed in Mr. Snolinovsky’s class. On her first day at Truman, when nobody made any attempt to be friendly or invite her to sit at their lunch tables, Amy noticed there were empty seats at Oggie’s table. She asked him if it would be okay if she sat there, too.
“Sure,” said Oggie, who happened to be eating a piece of cheese at the time.
Amy was painfully shy. Plus, she had a mouth full of metal braces, with a complicated crisscrossing of colored rubber bands connecting her top teeth to the bottom ones in a way that made it difficult for her to open her mouth. She took the rubber bands off to eat, but the rest of the time she had to keep them on. Between her shyness and the rubber bands, she hardly ever talked, and when she did, it was usually in a whisper. Oggie tried asking her a couple of questions that first day to be polite, but it was so noisy in the cafeteria he couldn’t hear her answers. Finally, he gave up and went back to eating his cheese.
He was sitting there, absentmindedly nibbling away, when suddenly Amy whispered —
“Florida.”
“What?” Oggie asked, wondering why this strange new girl was talking about Florida all of a sudden.
Amy pointed at the cheese in his hand.
“It’s Florida,” she said.
Sure enough, without meaning to, somehow Oggie had managed to bite his cheese into the shape of the state of Florida.
When he got home from school that day, he took an economy pack of cheese slices out of the refrigerator, got the big atlas off the shelf, and spent several hours practicing charving the cheese into the shape of all fifty states.
Charving, a word he made up by combining the words chewing and carving, was something Oggie discovered he not only enjoyed, but also found very relaxing. That’s why, after the nerve-racking experience of having to defend his bagel-related spelling sentences in front of the whole class, Oggie felt that a little charving was exactly what he needed. Sitting there in the lunchroom across the table from Amy Schneider, he was relieved to finally be able to pull out one of the slices of cheese he’d been carrying in his back pocket all day and get down to business.
The reason Oggie didn’t keep the cheese in his lunch bag or his backpack was that he had discovered his back pocket was the only place that could be depended upon to keep the cheese at exactly the right temperature for charving. If the cheese got too cold, it would crack, and if it was too warm, it became sticky and hard to handle.
Oggie decided to charve Texas. Some states were easier than others. For instance, Kansas, which was basically a square piece of cheese with the upper right-hand corner chewed off, was about as easy as it got. Texas happened to be one of the most challenging. Oggie had just nibbled down the western side of the state and was heading east toward the panhandle when he suddenly burped, causing him to take too large a bite and ruin the whole thing.
“Frappuccino,” he said, tossing the mangled cheese down on the table.
Without a word, Amy opened her sandwich and pulled out a limp, mayonnaise-coated piece of white cheese, offering it across the table to Oggie.
“No, thanks,” he told her. “Swiss cheese is no good for charving. Too many holes. Don’t worry, though, I have an extra piece of good old American right here,” he said, patting his back pocket. “I always carry two.”
Amy shrugged and stuck the cheese back in her sandwich, while Oggie pulled the straw off the back of his juice box and stabbed it into the fruit punch a little too hard, causing a stream of red liquid to squirt out and hit him in the face. He stuck out his tongue just in time to catch a drop of juice as it slid off his chin.
Amy covered her mouth and giggled, then handed Oggie the napkin out of her lunch box.
Maybe the road to fame and fortune was not the only path that would turn out to be paved with cheese.
After lunch, Mr. Snolinovsky’s class always did science and math. Then they would finish the day with an hour of creative writing.
Creative writing was Oggie’s worst subject. For one thing, his handwriting was horrible — which was one of the reasons America hadn’t been able to read his spelling sentence earlier in the day. But the bigger problem was that Oggie could never seem to think of anything he wanted to write about.
“Ideas are like seeds,” Mr. Snolinovsky had explained to the class one day. “Plant a seed and you’ll grow a story.”
Oggie had stayed after school that day to ask Mr. Snolinovsky a question.
“Where do those story seeds you were talking about come from?”
Mr. Snolinovsky tapped the side of his head. “In here,” he said. “And here, too.” He tapped the left side of his chest, over his heart. “We’re all full of seeds, Oggie.”
“You mean like all watermelons are full of seeds?” Oggie asked.
Mr. Snolinovsky smiled and said, “Yes. Exactly.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” sighed Oggie.
“What do you mean?” Mr. Snolinovsky asked.
“My Aunt Hettie has a garden and she grows watermelons that look like regular watermelons from the outside, but when you cut them open they don’t have any seeds in them at all.”
Mr. Snolinovsky scratched his head.
“I think I know what you’re trying to say,” he told Oggie, “but believe me when I tell you that you’re a very interesting person, Oggie Cooder. And unlike your aunt’s watermelons, interesting people always have seeds in them.”
Oggie liked that Mr. Snolinovsky had chosen the words “very interesting” to describe him, but he was not convinced that what his teacher had said about the seeds was true. As he sat at his desk listening to the scritch-scratch of pencils going on all around him, Oggie’s mind was a total blank. Not a seed in sight. Finally, he raised his hand.
“May I go get a drink of water?” he asked.
Mr. Snolinovsky nodded, and Oggie went out into the hall to the drinking fountain. He took several long gulps of cool water, and when he lifted his head to wipe his mouth, he looked down the hall and noticed a very short man standing outside the school office with a cardboard box in his arms. The man was bald and had dark sunglasses pushed up onto his forehead. As Oggie watched, the man placed the box on the floor, opened it up, and took out a piece of bright pink paper. Then, standing on the box in order to help him reach, he tacked the pink paper up on the school bulletin board. The man noticed Oggie watching him.
“Check it out,” he called down the hall to Oggie. “You never know, kid. This could be your big break.”
Oggie wasn’t sure what the man was talking about. But even though he was curious, he was afraid if he took the time to walk down the hall to look at the bulletin board, Mr. Snolinovsky might notice he was taking too long to get his drink. He didn’t want to get in trouble.
“Three o’clock tomorrow afternoon at the Bandshell,” the man called, then jumped down off the box, picked it up, and left. Oggie went back to his classroom, telling himself to be sure to remember to stop and look at the pink flyer after school to find out what it was all about.
As he opened the door, he ran right smack into Donnica Perfecto, who was on her way out of the classroom with a bathroom pass in her hand.
“Excuse you,” said Donnica as she pushed past him.
* * *
Oggie had hoped that taking a water break might somehow loosen his brain enough to make a story seed fall out of it. But nothing like that seemed to be happening. Mr. Snolinovsky noticed that Oggie was having trouble and came over to talk to him.