The McVentures of Me, Morgan McFactoid Read online

  Poppy made me feel okay about being different. He once said, “Being different means standing out. Standing out means being outstanding.” Everyone should have a grandfather like Poppy.

  “I got a ‘B’ on my Geography test,” Chloe boasted as she reached for the salad. Chloe had adjusted quickly and easily to the West Coast and was already popular in our new school. She was a sophomore, an adequate chess player, an aspiring surfer, and the fastest one-thumb texter I’d ever seen. Even though she jabbered nonstop, I guess you could call her cute. Chloe didn’t have red hair or freckles like me, because she was adopted.

  She piped up again, “I would have gotten a ‘B+,’ but I got one question wrong—‘What is the population of the fifth largest continent?’ I mean, really, what sort of lame question is that? Oh, and Stanley Canfield might ask me to the Valentine Day’s dance, because Rena Hicks broke up with him at Stephanie Rivera’s party, but—”

  “There’s nothing wrong with a ‘B,’” Mom interjected, passing the platter of corn to my dad, who ate in silence. (On average, an ear of corn has eight hundred kernels in sixteen rows.)

  “How was your day, Morgan?” Mom asked me.

  “Okay,” I muttered.

  My dad stopped chomping on his cob and gave me a long, squinted stare. In our home, dinner is considered the Family News Hour. Chloe and I are expected to talk about our day. One of the rules of giving our nightly report is that we have to be descriptive. Nods, grunts, and one-word answers, like “okay,” aren’t okay.

  “You can do better than that,” Mom said.

  “Uh, I got plenty of exercise today,” I added.

  “Exercise?” Mom asked.

  “Yeah. I did a lot of running.”

  Poppy winced, knowing for sure that something shady had happened to me. My dad just shook his head. He needed more details, but luckily Chloe the Chatterbox jumped in.

  “You got exercise? Good. Because all you do is sit on your bony butt all day doing your silly research. Such a waste of time.”

  The vein in Dad’s neck began to bulge. He always got upset when Chloe and I teased each other. So he wasn’t too pleased when I said to her, “One thousand.”

  “One thousand what?” Chloe fired back.

  “That’s the population of the continent of Antarctica, the fifth-largest continent,” I said. “Oh, and did you know that if you spell out numbers, you would have to count to one thousand before coming across the letter ‘A’? Or that Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, and driest place on earth? I learned all that doing my silly research.”

  Chloe rolled her eyes.

  I responded with, “It takes more than two million working parts in the eye for you to roll them. An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain. And a worm has no eyes at all.” I smiled and added, “Research. Such a silly waste of time.”

  “Can somebody unplug the McFactoid Machine?” Chloe said.

  I had to have the last word. The last factoid. “The continent of Europe has the world’s largest country, Russia, and the world’s smallest country, Vatican City,” I said, taking a little bow. “Ta-dah!” I love being the annoying little brother.

  Dad stood up, frowned at Chloe and calmly said, “Go upstairs and clean your room.” Then he frowned at me and calmly said, “Clear the table and help Grandpa with the dishes.” Then he folded and placed his napkin neatly on the table and calmly said to my mom, “Thanks for dinner, Sweetheart.” We all watched in silence as he trudged up the stairs, his feet landing heavily on each step.

  Dad had been under a lot of stress lately. He had relocated our family to California because he got a good job as a maintenance engineer at a TV station in San Diego, which is thirty-five minutes away. Poppy moved in to watch Chloe and me while Mom and Dad were at work. Plus, Poppy was tired of the New England winters. But the TV station recently had to lay off a bunch of people, including my dad. A couple nights ago, I overheard him tell Mom that we couldn’t live on her bookkeeper’s salary alone and if he didn’t find work soon, we’d have to sell our new house. It freaked me out. But, I found comfort in remembering that “bookkeeper” is the only word with three consecutive double letters.

  Whenever I get flustered or frightened, I concentrate on the random and wacky tidbits collected in my head to calm myself down. Facts are my friends. Facts are always there for me. And that’s a fact. In fact, I feel an obscure fact coming on right now: women blink twice as much as men.

  I knew that grown-ups were supposed to be the ones to worry about financial problems, but I was worried that we might have to move again, maybe to another city, maybe into a small apartment and that—worst of all—maybe I’d have to share a room with Chloe.

  Poppy carried a stack of dirty dishes into the kitchen. I followed with a stack of my own. He and I had our best talks while doing the dishes. He washed and I dried. Dad paid bills upstairs. Chloe gossiped online (instead of cleaning her room) and Mom hummed show tunes while folding laundry. (Did you know that you can’t hum if you plug your nose? Go ahead. Try it. I’ll wait.)

  Poppy was inspecting a dirty fork, when he said, “So, about that ‘exercise’ you got today . . .”

  “I hate him,” was all I needed to say.

  “Buckholtz again?”

  “He’s getting faster. What do I do?”

  A WISE OLD IRISHMAN

  Grandpa and I washed dishes quietly for a few minutes. I didn’t say anything. I waited for him to think up a plan for defeating my nemesis: Brad Buckholtz.

  Poppy handed me a heavy frying pan to dry.

  I raised the pan over my head like a weapon. “If I had this, I wouldn’t mind if Brad caught me.”

  “Nah, you can’t fight Buckholtz. He’s too tough,” Poppy said. “You have to use your strengths.” (“Strengths” is the longest word in the English language with just one vowel.)

  Poppy had a way of saying things that forced me to think deeper and solve my own problems.

  Before he retired, he’d been a barber in Boston for fifty-three years at the same location on Columbus Avenue. He enjoyed listening to other people’s troubles and, when asked, giving them advice. He called himself a “cutterologist.”

  “Seems he picks on you every couple weeks,” Poppy said.

  “Yeah. He’ll be torturing someone else tomorrow. He’s an equal opportunity bully.”

  “Why was he chasing you this time?”

  “Because I can grow hair on my face but he can’t.”

  “Bullies. They’ll find any excuse to pick a fight.”

  “If whiskers were like lunch money, I’d give them to him.”

  Poppy stopped washing the dishes. “I’m sorry he torments you. It’s not right.”

  “I don’t know why my whiskers bother him so much.”

  “I have a theory,” Poppy said, scrubbing a pot.

  “What?”

  “Do you know his father?”

  “He’s a fisherman. Drinks a lot.”

  “I bet he’s big and tough.”

  “And has a beard,” I said. “His face looks like a tumbleweed with eyeballs.”

  “Bullies come from bullies, Sparky. It’s a hand-me-down trait. Buckholtz wants to prove to himself and to his dad that he’s a man, but without whiskers he doesn’t feel like one.”

  “And maybe his father makes fun of him for not having any.”

  “Gotta feel sorry for a kid like that . . . with a father like that.”

  “Do I have to?”

  Poppy put his wet hands on my shoulders. “What you have to do is use your traits. Use your strengths.”

  “What are my strengths, Poppy?”

  “We’re McCrackens,” he said proudly, tapping the side of his bald head with a soapy finger. “We use our noggins.”

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I had too much going on inside my three-pound brain. (Bullfrogs, ants, and honeybees never sleep. I wondered what they had to worry about. In recent years, honeybee populations across the continent have fallen by as
much as 70 percent. That fact alone must keep the bees up at night.)

  I gazed at my ceiling, on which I had painted the control panel of the space shuttle in glow-in-the-dark paint.

  I turned on my McCorder. “Message to me,” I said. “I have to figure out a way to use my noggin to stop Buckholtz from picking on me. I also have to think of an idea that will make money, which will save our house. I also have to get to sleep.” (Whales and dolphins only fall half asleep. Their brain hemispheres take turns so they can continue surfacing to breathe.)

  At five o’clock in the morning, the rattling of old water pipes woke me up. No matter what time it is, whenever someone flushes the toilet or takes a shower in our house, there is loud knocking in the basement pipes. I wondered who was awake so early. I grabbed my emergency, hand-sized, solar-powered light-and-siren combo I invented and tiptoed upstairs to investigate.

  Poppy’s bathroom door was half open (or was it “half closed?”). He was leaning over the sink, wearing his going-to-church pants. His shirt was off, and he had a towel around his neck. His face was coated with thick, foamy shaving cream. He looked like he had been hit with a cream pie. All you could see were his pale blue eyes. I quietly entered the bathroom and whispered, “Hi, Poppy.”

  “Top o’ the mornin’ to ya,” he whispered back. “Hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “No. I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “Where’re you going?”

  “To a job fair,” he said, using a straight-edge razor to even his red sideburns.

  “You’re looking for a job?”

  He stopped shaving and stared at me. “What word is in the word retired?” he asked. We always played word games like this.

  “Red.”

  “Longer.”

  “Tire?”

  “Longer.”

  “Tired?”

  “Bingo! I’m tired. I’m tired of being retired,” he said, lifting the tip of his nose to trim the hair on his philtrum. (That’s what they call the groove under your nostrils, just above your upper lip.)

  I sat on the edge of the bathtub, considering whether to ask my next question. “Is it because we’re having money problems?”

  Poppy tilted his shiny bald head back, shaving over his Adam’s apple. (The Adam’s apple is really just an enlarged larynx—your voice box—which becomes big enough to be visible in your neck. While we’re on the subject, Adam’s apples stick out more in men than women because grown men have larger voice boxes. This is also the reason why dudes speak in deeper tones.) Poppy was careful not to swallow. It was a delicate maneuver, but one he had performed all his adult life on himself and, as a barber, on thousands of others. Poppy is the person who taught me how to shave.

  He remained silent. It was clear he didn’t want to talk about Mom and Dad’s troubles. Through pursed lips he said, “I could’ve slept another ten minutes if I didn’t have to stand here shaving.”

  “I wish I didn’t have to shave either,” I said, hating my premature whiskers for making me look different.

  “I’ve spent ten minutes a day for nearly sixty years dragging a blade across my face. That’s about—” Poppy tried to do the math.

  “Thirty-six hundred hours,” I said. “Which is one hundred and fifty days or five months.”

  Poppy put his razor down on the side of the sink and looked me square in the eyes. “Think about that,” he said. “Five months. That’s a long time just mowing skin.” He wasn’t kidding. He was sending me a message.

  “There’s a wise old Irish saying, Sparky,” he whispered. I switched on my McCorder to capture whatever wisdom Poppy was about to impart. He said, “Time is something you never get back.”

  “Who said that?” I asked him.

  “A wise old Irishman.” He splashed cold water on his skillfully shaved face. “Now, this McCracken’s gotta get crackin,’ or he’ll be late.”

  A SOLUTION TO SHAVING

  I went back to the basement, got back into bed, and tried to fall back to sleep. (The average person falls to sleep in seven minutes.) But I couldn’t keep my mind from working overtime. Poppy’s words stayed with me, stirring my imagination and keeping me up. I played them back again on my McCorder: “Time is something you never get back.” Words worth repeating.

  I tossed and turned, then sat up in bed. I needed to distract myself. I turned to one of my inventions: Morgan’s Neighborhood Watch, a periscope with infrared and camera functions. Dad and I made it out of spare parts we found in a junkyard. We mounted the camera lens on a swing arm fastened to the top of the chimney. I can lower the eyepiece from my ceiling to my bed by cranking a fishing reel attached to the bed frame. My periscope allows me to keep track of our neighborhood without lifting my head off the pillow.

  The contraption slowly descended from the ceiling, stopping in front of my eyes. I set my face inside the eyeshade and wrapped my fingers around the joysticks, moving—by remote control—the lens outside, on top of the roof. I could tilt and pan, swivel 360 degrees, zoom in and zoom out. I could see in the dark. And it all recorded onto a digital memory card, 24/7.

  I had an unobstructed view of my neighborhood from high above our cul-de-sac. The streetlamps were just turning off. The automatic sprinklers were just turning on. The newspapers were just being delivered. And the blue jays were landing on the phone lines, squealing their morning song. It was a typical Saturday morning on Crestview Drive, except for one thing: across the street, on the second floor of the Reynolds’s home, Robin was resting her elbows on her windowsill, her chin in her hands, her green eyes gazing blankly into the daybreak.

  I wondered why she was up before dawn, especially on a Saturday. I wondered what she was thinking about. I wondered if we would ever talk. I wondered if the hottest girl in town and the nerdiest boy in town could ever be friends.

  I didn’t know much about girls and what made them tick. But I did know this: girls like her weren’t interested in boys like me.

  I panned my periscope over and saw my seventy-three-year-old grandfather, all dressed up, wearing his Boston Red Sox cap on his bald head, shuffling down the street to the bus stop.

  I cranked the fishing reel and the eyepiece rose, returning to my ceiling. I finally gave up on the idea of sleep and climbed out of bed. And shaved.

  I needed some fresh air. I went outside to our small backyard. My pet tortoise, Taxi, who wasn’t allowed in the house, was nibbling his breakfast in our garden, where Poppy grew lettuce for him.

  Taxi was the size of a dinner plate. The thick skin on his front legs looked like the bark of a tree, and his hind legs looked like they had plates of armor attached. His shell resembled a rusty old army helmet. And he had the face of E. T. I loved him.

  I picked Taxi up and sat on the patio swing. He liked rocking in my lap. Although Taxi didn’t do tricks like the late-great Shambles or cuddle like our calico cat, Kitten Kaboodle, he was a loyal companion and would last longer than any other kind of pet. In fact, tortoises can live up to 150 years.

  I liked talking to Taxi. When I heard my own voice, it helped me get my thoughts straight. “Maybe,” I said to him, “I could come up with something that would save people the time it takes to shave. Maybe I could design a faster razor. Maybe I could create a superior shaving cream.”

  I lifted Taxi high, like an offering to the Gods. “Maybe, just maybe, I could invent something that would stop whiskers from growing and eliminate the need to shave altogether!”

  I stood up with Taxi in my arms. “If I could find a solution to shaving, I’d never have to go to school again with stubble on my face. I’d never be teased again. If I could develop a product that everybody in the world would buy and use every day, I’d be rich and famous. Then Dad and Poppy wouldn’t have to find jobs, Mom could quit hers, we could keep our house, I could keep my basement bedroom, Buckholtz and the other kids at school would think I was cool, and maybe even Robin would look past my red hair and freckles and say ‘hi’ to me.”

  Taxi blinked one eye at
a time, and then his head retreated into his shell. (The muscle that lets the human eye blink is the fastest muscle in your body. It allows you to blink five times a second. I bet you’re trying it right now.)

  I continued to think aloud, “I’ve gotta get McCrackin’ on my new invention, Taxi, because time is something you can never get back.”

  I marched with purpose across the backyard, lifted the garage door, and went inside. We used the garage for storage, leaving our cars parked in the driveway. Leading up to the attic was a trapdoor in the ceiling. I opened the combination lock (08-29-58: the birthday of my favorite singer, Michael Jackson) on the attic door latch and pulled the rope handle attached to the trapdoor. I unfolded the narrow wooden stepladder. With Taxi firmly in hand, I climbed the ten steps up to my laboratory loft.

  As I entered my lab (I call it the McFactory), I said loudly and proudly, “Yeah, I’m a McCracken!” Taxi’s head poked out from under his shell to hear more. “My strength is my brain. And my brain can solve all my problems!”

  A husky voice cried out. “Quiet!”

  THE MCFACTORY

  I switched on the light in the garage attic. Staring at me from across the room were the black gleaming eyes of Echo, my parrot . . . my Red-lored Amazon, as they are known. She was in her cage, which hung over my lab table.

  “Sorry, ma’am. I didn’t mean to disturb you,” I whispered.

  “Nighty night!” she said, closing her eyes and falling back to sleep.

  Most Red-lored Amazons enjoy the company of humans. Not Echo. They told us at the Parrot Rescue Center that Echo was a loner (like me) and preferred to hang out in a cage filled with lots of toys and plenty of seeds, fruits, and vegetables. Echo may not have been social, but she was one brainy bird. She had a vocabulary of a thousand words, a photographic memory, and one cocky attitude. Lately, she had been showing an interest in the outside world, perching on the windowsill and bird watching by the hour. The Rescue Center said that someday she might want to be released into the wild where she would join one of many parrot colonies in Carlsbad.