The McVentures of Me, Morgan McFactoid

  Copyright © 2016 by Mark S. Waxman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design & illustrations by Sarah Brody

  Print ISBN: 978-1634501484

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63450-955-8

  To Paula, David, and Taylor

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1. Chased by a Brontosaurus

  2. The Goddess across the Street

  3. Meet the McCrackens

  4. A Wise Old Irishman

  5. A Solution to Shaving

  6. The McFactory

  7. The Mystifying Female Species

  8. Morgan for President

  9. A Pinch of This, a Dash of That

  10. A Flood, a Flop, and a First-Class Fiasco

  11. A Fuzz-Finding Friend

  12. The Tortoise and the Hair

  13. A Hair-Raising Formula

  14. Fame, Fortune, and Frustrating Girls

  15. Human Trials

  16. The Burly Bearded Bully

  17. Snollygoster Syndrome

  18. Got Some Satisfaction

  19. Warning: Don’t Dis My Dad

  20. The After-School Fight That Never Was

  21. The Bald and the Beautiful

  22. Town of Redheads

  23. Million-Dollar Miracle Mixture

  24. Hooked Like an Earthworm

  25. Bad Decisions Make Good Stories

  26. Different, Like Better

  27. The Man with the Bloody Hatchet Tattoo

  28. Robin Saves the Day

  29. Morgan Saves the Day

  30. Echo Saves the Day, Saves the Day

  31. The Most Popular Guy at School

  32. Following Your Heart Is the Best Thing

  33. Spread Your Wings and Fly

  CHASED BY A BRONTOSAURUS

  By the time you finish reading this sentence, ninety-three babies will have been born in the world, thirty-two thousand tons of water will have splashed over Niagara Falls, the earth will have rotated fifty-eight miles to the left at a speed twenty times faster than a bullet fired out of a rifle, and you’ll have learned three very cool facts!

  By the time you finish reading this page, more than 1.4 million video clips will have been watched on YouTube.

  And by the time you finish reading this book, you’ll learn that I was offered billions of dollars (counting to one billion nonstop, day and night, would take thirty-two years) for a monumental invention I came up with—an invention that almost got me killed. (The word “almost” is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order.)

  By the time he was eight years old, Mozart had composed his first symphony. I just turned thirteen and I still haven’t learned how to whistle, but soon everybody will know my name, which, by the way, is Morgan McCracken.

  Not everyone calls me Morgan, though.

  My grandfather, Poppy, calls me Sparky, because he thinks I have an “imaginative spark.” My irritating sister calls me Mister McFactoid, because I’m always spouting freaky facts and weird trivia. And the kids at school call me all kinds of names, probably because I’m different.

  I look different—I have unruly red hair and 203 freckles on my face.

  I think different—I wonder about things like, how do you handcuff a one-armed man? And who was the first person to look at a cow and say, “I think I’ll squeeze these dangly things and drink whatever comes out?” And why is “bra” singular but “panties” plural?

  And I act different—I’m an inventor. I invent strange things that usually get me into trouble and sometimes get me back out of trouble. For example, my Spring-Loaded Shoes allow me to jump a six-foot fence in a single, spectacular leap. And my Have A Seat Pants are trousers that turn into chairs, so you can always sit down when you want to. And I’m working on a device that would record dreams so you could watch them later.

  Unfortunately, I hadn’t invented anything to save me from Brad Buckholtz Jr., the meanest kid in school, who had decided one particular day would be my last particular day on earth. I wished I had devised a way for a person to instantly disappear, to evaporate, to vanish in a flash. Because that’s what I needed to do that afternoon. Brad hated me and he was determined to pound my red-freckled face into a bloody, red pulp. Neither one of us had any idea that our chilling encounter would lead to my billion-dollar idea.

  It all started after school, when nothing good ever happens. I was alone in the science room eating my favorite snack (french fries) and finishing my water displacement project. I was proving why an aircraft carrier floats, but a carpenter nail sinks. (McDonald’s uses about 7 percent of the potatoes grown in the United States for its french fries. And an aircraft carrier is longer than the Empire State Building.)

  I heard the classroom door squeak open and a nasal voice say, “Hello, Hairy.” It was the monster, Brad Buckholtz Jr. My heart started to beat faster. My blood went cold. Buckholtz, who had failed to graduate the eighth grade (three times!), was walking toward me along with his idiot friends, the short and fat Jerry the Jerk and the tall and thin Donald the Dope. Side by side, they looked like a ball and bat. I tried to ignore Buckholtz, but he spat on my plastic model aircraft carrier. A thick, booger-green loogie dripped from the flight deck. Brad’s kiss-up friends cracked up.

  “Hello, Brad,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking.

  “Hairy, Hairy, Hairy,” he replied.

  “You can call me Morgan . . . Morgan, Morgan.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  Here’s the deal: He liked to call me “Hairy” because I was the only boy in middle school with facial hair. I mean, I didn’t look like Santa Claus or Yosemite Sam. I just had some stubble. Buckholtz, whose face was as smooth (and as attractive) as a bowling ball, was envious that I shaved like a man. At almost sixteen years old, he still didn’t have a single hair on his chin—not even peach fuzz on his cheeks. It pissed him off. And he took his anger out on me.

  Buckholtz and his bozos weren’t the only ones who kidded me about my looks. Since moving from Boston, Massachusetts, to Carlsbad, California, six months earlier, the students at my new school had pointed at my red hair, my red freckles, and the red stubble on my chin—and called me everything from “Carrot Top” to “Measles Man” to “Moss Mug.”

  Buckholtz helped himself to my french fries. “We could smell these from down the hall. I just had to have one.”

  “Have two,” I said.

  “Ow ode r u, Hairy?” he mumbled, his big mouth full of fries.

  “How odd am I?”

  He swallowed the fries and asked his question again, louder. “How old are you? Everyone already knows how odd you are.”

  “Thirteen.”

  “No, really. How old are you?”

  I
don’t believe in violence. But right then, I wished I were seven feet tall with massive muscles and gigantic fists of granite. Then I could “Picasso” him with one powerful punch—you know, rearrange his face so he’d see with his ears, smell with his eyes, and chew french fries in his nose.

  “Your mommy must be feeding you special vitamins or something,” Buckholtz said as he munched more of my fries. Jerry and Donald finished the rest.

  “She’s not,” I said.

  “Then why do you have hair on your face? Huh, Hairy, why?”

  “I don’t know. And my name is Morgan.”

  “Maybe, Hairy Face, your name is ‘Werewolf,’” Buckholtz said, taking a step toward me. Jerry snickered. Donald giggled.

  “Yeah, maybe he’s a werewolf,” Jerry said, elbowing Donald deep in the ribs.

  While they were busy guffawing way too much, I sneaked a small plastic packet of ketchup into my hand and popped it into my mouth. I turned to them. “I am a werewolf!” I roared, tilting my head back and widening my eyes. Buckholtz’s friends stopped laughing. All you could hear was the ticking of the classroom clock. “My hair used to be blond,” I said, moving toward the classroom door.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Buckholtz snapped.

  “I’ve sucked so much blood that my hair turned red!” (For the record, werewolves are not bloodsucking vampires, but I figured these three imbeciles wouldn’t know the difference.) I bit down hard on the ketchup packet and out spurted red gobs between my teeth.

  Brad laughed.

  Jerry the Jerk laughed.

  But Donald the Dope apparently couldn’t stomach the sight of blood. Even fake blood. He gagged a couple of times, grabbed his stomach, and hurled.

  All over Brad’s boots.

  His new boots.

  “Uh oh. Your dad’s gonna kill you!” Jerry the Jerk said to Brad.

  Buckholtz looked down at the barf on his boots, then he slowly looked up at me. “You’re gonna lick these boots clean. And I’m gonna clean your face, one little hairy nub at a time.” His fat hand swiped a pair of tweezers off the lab counter and he started toward me, but he slipped and fell in the puddle of fresh puke. His favorite T. rex T-shirt was splattered with chunks of Donald’s lunch and undigested french fries. That made him crazy mad. He yelled, “You’re dead! You can kiss your hairy face goodbye!”

  THE GODDESS ACROSS THE STREET

  I ran to the door, shoved it open, and sprinted down the empty hall. One of my sneakers fell off, so I ran with a limp.

  It wasn’t the first time Buckholtz had chased me and it wouldn’t be the last. Unless he caught me. Then chances were, it would be the last, because Brad Buckholtz was strong and evil. He once wanted to get his hands on a pigeon’s nest resting on a high branch, so he yanked the small tree out of the ground, roots and all. That sort of strong. Then he stepped on the pigeon eggs. That kind of evil.

  And he weighed as much as a bulldozer. I swear the floor shook as he lumbered down the hall after me. But as big as he was, he was fast. (A three-ton African elephant can run twenty-five miles per hour. That’s three times faster than a house mouse.)

  I avoided his grasp outside the cafeteria, then I ran toward the baseball field, dived under the fence behind center field, and darted down the alley next to our school. I wish I had worn my Spring-Loaded Shoes that day. Maybe Buckholtz’s belly couldn’t fit under the fence or possibly he chose to let me live one more day, but whatever the reason, when I turned around Buckholtz was no longer on my tail. Even so, I didn’t take any chances. I kept running. As Poppy says, “It’s better to be a coward for a minute than dead for the rest of your life.”

  I sped past kids walking home from school. (In the average lifetime, a person will walk the equivalent of five times around the equator.) They ignored me, chatting, no doubt, about who was going with whom to the Valentine’s Day dance. They were totally unaware that Buckholtz had sworn to throw me to the ground and pluck every single hair out of my face, one whisker at a time. And then, kill me.

  I had never run harder or farther with one shoe or two. I used every shortcut I could think of to get to my house. I climbed over old lady Dewberry’s brick wall and dropped into her backyard, ripping my jeans and exposing my underpants (the striped ones . . . with a hole in them).

  Fortunately, Dewberry’s Rottweiler was locked in the house, barking and scratching at the sliding glass door. Dewberry stood in her well-kept flowerbed, seething and shaking a trowel at me. Unlike her dog, Dewberry had no front teeth. Like her dog, she had foam dribbling from her bottom lip.

  “Get off my geraniums!” she yelled.

  I high-stepped across her garden. “I’m sorry, Miss Dingleberry,” I blurted out, messing up her name in my panic. That only made her madder.

  “I’m calling your mother, Morgan McCracken!”

  I heard a thud behind me.

  Dewberry yelled, “I’m calling the cops, Brad Buckholtz!”

  Sure enough, Buckholtz hadn’t stopped chasing me! I threw a quick look over my shoulder to see how close he was. He’d somehow pulled himself up and over Dewberry’s brick wall and fallen face down onto her prized squash plant. Yep, he squashed the squash plant with a face plant.

  Buckholtz struggled up and charged after me with yellow squash guts hanging from his hair. He didn’t even try to avoid Dewberry’s geraniums. In fact, he kicked one of her precious purple plants high into the air. The soil rained down on the old lady’s wide-brimmed hat.

  I waited for a red traffic light before crossing busy Cypress Avenue while Buckholtz almost caught up. As soon as the light turned green, I raced across the street and zigzagged around lampposts, trashcans, and trees, with Buckholtz closing in behind me. I won’t lie to you: I was scared. My heart (which beats over one hundred thousand times a day) was pounding. My lungs were burning. (If your lung tissues were spread out, it would cover a tennis court.) And my legs felt like they were filled with sand. (A sandbag the size of a pillowcase weighs fifty pounds.)

  They say that just before you die, events in your entire life—in no particular order—pass before your eyes. I saw a few memorable images as I tore through my neighborhood that day wearing one shoe, with the baby-bird killer in hot pursuit. I saw myself as a lima bean in the kindergarten play; taking the training wheels off my bike; spinning in a Disneyland Mad Hatter teacup; speaking at Grandma Claire’s funeral.

  I shot down the sidewalk, taking longer and longer strides. But Bradzilla was gaining on me again!

  More images ran though my head: catching snowflakes on my tongue; finding out the truth about the Tooth Fairy; chasing fireflies at the Labor Day picnic; snagging a foul ball in my cap at Fenway Park; sleeping in a tent in the backyard all last August.

  I hurdled over a low picket fence in front of the house at the end of my block. Buckholtz barely cleared it, stumbled, and then regained his balance.

  More pictures of my past: falling off a skateboard and busting my arm; being voted “Most Quiet” in my old school’s yearbook; staying up all night holding my dog, Shambles, before he died.

  The final vision that flashed across my mind was the moment I first laid eyes on Robin Reynolds, the beautiful girl who lives across the street from our new house.

  All in all, it had been a good life—with the exception of the thundering footsteps I heard behind me, growing louder. Brad was within spitting distance, which I knew because he spit on my backpack. (The average human produces ten thousand gallons of saliva in a lifetime, which is enough spit to fill two swimming pools.)

  I could see my house at the end of the cul-de-sac. I was exhausted. I didn’t think I could outrun Buckholtz any longer.

  I was sure that soon he would tackle my legs, drag me to the ground, pin me on my back, dig his knees into my arms—MMA style—and yank each and every red whisker out of my frightened freckled face. And then, of course, he’d murder me.

  But suddenly, just as I was about to give up, I heard a mellow voice drift from acr
oss the street. It came from Robin Reynolds’s perfect lips.

  “Hi, Bradley,” she said.

  Robin had come to collect letters from her mailbox on the curb. She was my age and she sat two aisles away from me in history. She was the most popular girl at school and the prettiest girl in the Milky Way galaxy. Therefore, we had never spoken. (There are at least one hundred billion galaxies in the universe.)

  Buckholtz stopped in his tracks, wheezing, welcoming the interruption, especially by a girl as gorgeous as Robin. I kept running, hobbling with one shoe, my striped boxers hanging out, and my eyes focused on my front door.

  I scurried like a scared squirrel down the street in full view of Buckholtz and Robin, scampered into my house, and slammed and locked the door behind me. It was humiliating, especially hearing Buckholtz’s hyena laughter. But I was safe. And alive.

  I crawled to the window and peeked through the curtains. Buckholtz must have said something stupid because Robin pivoted and stomped back to her house, leaving the big behemoth alone on the sidewalk. He bent over, put his hands on his knees, gasping for air, dripping sweat and squash from his chin onto his stinky vomit-caked boots.

  MEET THE MCCRACKENS

  I’m a thinker, not a talker. I look at it this way: we have two ears and one mouth. So, we should listen twice as much as we speak. Whatever I do have to say I either keep inside my head, floating in the 80 percent brain water, or I record into my small digital voice recorder (I call it my “McCorder”), which I carry in my pocket at all times. It’s my way of jotting down notes and ideas that come to me. Anyway, my sister, Chloe—she’s fifteen—does enough talking for both of us.

  At dinner, my grandpa saw that I was even more tight-lipped than usual. He always senses when something is bothering me.

  Poppy had been living with us since Grandma Claire died. He took Chloe’s room, which of course was bigger than mine because she was older and the girl, which meant Chloe moved into my room, which meant I had to move into the basement, which I didn’t mind doing because Dad said I could move my workshop from the basement to the attic above the garage, which was much more private, which was better for conducting my secret experiments, which is why I was really happy Poppy moved in with us. That, and because Poppy understood me, maybe better than anyone.