Oggie Cooder

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  Sneak Peek

  Also Available

  Copyright

  Oggie Cooder lay on the deserted sandy white beach sunbathing in a green and purple polka-dotted bathing suit he’d never seen before in his life. In his hand, he held a giant coconut filled with the most delicious drink he’d ever tasted, and all around him graceful palm trees swayed to and fro, dancing a hula to the sound of a distant ukulele. A fiery sun hung like a spitty yellow tennis ball overhead. Feeling the need to cool off, Oggie rose in his unfamiliar polka-dotted bathing suit, ran down to the water’s edge, and waded in. As he paddled out into the crystal blue sea, the warm salty waves lapped against his cheek and the air was filled with the sweet tropical aroma of dog breath.

  Wait a second, thought Oggie, DOG BREATH?

  He opened his eyes. His dog, Turk, was standing next to him, licking his face. The whole thing had been a dream. Oggie wiped the dog slobber off his cheek and looked over at the clock. 7:45 on the dot.

  “Good dog,” he said, reaching over to give Turk a pat on the head. “You’re a regular alarm clock. Except that you’re furry. And you have fleas. And really bad breath.”

  Turk, whose real name was Turkey-On-Rye because that was the name of Oggie’s favorite sandwich, barked and raced out of the room, only to return a minute later with a soggy yellow tennis ball in his mouth. He whined and wagged his giant tail, nearly knocking a lamp off the bedside table.

  “Okay, okay, I get the message,” said Oggie, sitting up and rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Go get your leash and I’ll walk you around the block before school.”

  And that was how Oggie Cooder, future famous cheese charving champion of the world, started his day.

  * * *

  By the time Oggie got back from walking Turk that morning, his parents had already left for work. They’d gone in early to meet with a plumber about fixing a leaky pipe that had been giving them some trouble at their store. Oggie poured himself a quick bowl of cereal and picked up the mail, which was sitting in a pile on the kitchen table.

  “Bills, bills, junk, bills …” he said as he sorted through the letters. “Hold on. Is this what I think it is? Yes!” He held the long pale blue envelope aloft.

  “Prrrrr-ip! Prrrrr-ip!” Oggie fluttered his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He always made that sound when he was excited about something. At the moment, the something he was excited about was a letter from the Bakestuff Company about the name-the-new-bagel contest he had entered several weeks earlier. Oggie loved contests, and had been waiting eagerly to hear whether he had won the grand prize — a trip to Hawaii. He’d been dreaming about sandy beaches and palm trees practically every night. Although he had never won anything in his life, he was hopeful that he might actually have a shot at winning the Bakestuff contest. Oggie was very proud of the name he had come up with for a cinnamon-raisin bagel. He had gotten the idea from something he’d overheard his mother say on the phone one day when she was talking to his Aunt Hettie.

  “You better warn the neighbors ahead of time, Het, ’cause we’re definitely going to be raisin’ the roof,” she’d said.

  “What’s the matter with Aunt Hettie’s roof?” Oggie had asked his mother after she’d hung up.

  Mrs. Cooder laughed.

  “That’s just an expression, Ogg,” she explained. “‘Raisin’ the roof’ means ‘having a good time.’ Your Aunt Hettie and I were talking about the family reunion we’re going to have this summer.”

  “Is Uncle Vern coming?” Oggie asked hopefully.

  Uncle Vern was Oggie’s favorite relative. He drove a pickup truck with a jacked-up rear end, and he could make his belly button talk without using his hands.

  “Yes, Uncle Vern will be there,” Oggie’s mother replied. “Which is probably something else I’d better remind Aunt Hettie to warn the neighbors about.”

  * * *

  Uncle Vern and his talking belly button were far from Oggie’s thoughts now as he ripped open the letter from the Bakestuff Company. “Raisin’ the Roof is a perfect name for a cinnamon-raisin bagel, don’t you think, Turk?” Oggie asked.

  Turk wasn’t paying attention. He was too busy sniffing around under the table looking for something to eat.

  Oggie unfolded the letter and began to read.

  Dear Mr. Cooder:

  We thank you for your entry. However, we regret to inform you …

  “Frappuccino!” cried Oggie in disappointment.

  There was no cussing allowed in Oggie’s house. Mrs. Cooder kept a big jar on the kitchen counter, and anyone who slipped up had to put a quarter in it. Oggie didn’t see the point of wasting his allowance on expensive cuss words when there were plenty of perfectly good free words you could use instead.

  “Frappuccino. Frappuccino. Frappuccino …” Oggie grumbled as he read the rest of the letter.

  Not only had the people at Bakestuff been unimpressed with the name he’d come up with for their new bagel, Oggie couldn’t believe what they’d chosen instead.

  “Sunshine? What kind of a name is that for a bagel?” he asked Turk. “It doesn’t even have the word ‘raisin’ in it!”

  Oggie crumpled the letter into a ball and threw it across the room, missing the wastebasket he’d been aiming for by a good foot and a half. Turk, who was always hungry, trotted over and wolfed down the balled-up letter in a couple of quick bites.

  “I guess the only way I’m ever going to get to Hawaii is in my dreams,” said Oggie sadly. He shoved his homework and his lunch into his backpack. Then, as he was about to walk out the door, he suddenly remembered something. He went to the fridge, got out two slices of processed American cheese, and slipped them into his back pocket.

  That cheese would change Oggie Cooder’s life forever. Because while sometimes the road to fame and fortune is paved in gold, there are other times when it’s made of cheese. Processed American cheese, to be exact.

  Directly across the street from the Cooders’ house, Donnica Perfecto was sitting at the breakfast table doing what she did best — whining.

  “You don’t really expect me to eat this toast, do you?” she asked her mother. “It’s burnt.”

  “I’m sorry, Cupcake,” said Mrs. Perfecto. “I’m not used to that new toaster yet.”

  “It’s top of the line, Miriam, nothing wrong with that toaster,” Mr. Perfecto piped up from behind his newspaper. “They really turned up the dial with this one. Took toasty and made it toastier. Most people would kill to have that kind of firepower on the counter.”

  “Yes, dear. It’s just that with the old one, the toast popped up when it was done,” said Mrs. Perfecto.

  “Popping up is old-fashioned, Miriam,” Mr. Perfecto insisted.

  Mrs. Perfecto sighed. “If you say so, dear.”

  “Daddy?” said Donnica, poking absentmindedly at her toast with a pink-glitter-polished fingertip. “This year for my birthday, can we buy a house in Hollywood and move there?”

  “Hollywood?” cried Mr. and Mrs. Perfecto at the same time.

  From the moment she could talk, if you asked Donnica Perfecto what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would say the same thing — “Famous!” Her parents had shelled out a considerable amount of money over the years for music, dance, a
nd acting lessons, but it had become painfully clear that Donnica had absolutely no talent in any of those arenas. Even so, she was sure she was going to become a star.

  “Why would we want to move to Hollywood?” asked Mr. Perfecto.

  “Well, you don’t really expect me to live here forever, do you?” whined Donnica.

  “What’s wrong with Wawatosa?” Mrs. Perfecto wondered.

  “It’s in Wisconsin,” Donnica said disgustedly, flicking her burnt toast with a finger and scattering a sooty shower of black crumbs across the clean white tablecloth. “How am I supposed to get discovered in a place where the only thing that’s famous is cheese?”

  * * *

  George Perfecto owned a large discount appliance store out on Stadium Boulevard called Big Dealz. The license plates on the two silver SUVs in the Perfectos’ driveway said big one and big two. Donnica’s room was painted her favorite color, bubble gum pink. She had her own private bathroom and a closet full of expensive clothes, a queen-size canopy bed, and a minifridge stocked with her favorite drink, imported apricot fruit water — which, if you read the label carefully, was actually bottled in Hoboken, New Jersey.

  Things were a little different over at the Cooders’ house. Mr. and Mrs. Cooder had only one car, an old Volvo station wagon, which had definitely seen better days. They drank their water from the tap, and the whole family shared a single bathroom. With the exception of underwear and socks, which Mrs. Cooder purchased new from Selznick’s department store, all of their clothes came from Too Good to Be Threw, the resale shop that the Cooders owned and ran in downtown Wawatosa.

  Mrs. Cooder wore exclusively purple clothing, plum being her signature shade, and she was also very fond of unusual hats. Mr. Cooder favored bowling shirts with other people’s names embroidered over the pockets. Oggie didn’t care about clothes at all. His method of getting dressed in the morning was to yank a pair of pants out of the closet, pull a shirt out of the drawer, put them on whether or not they really went together, and be done with it.

  If the pants in the closet and the shirts in the drawers had been ordinary things, like T-shirts and jeans, Oggie might have looked like any other fourth-grade boy who had gotten dressed in a hurry. But since it was Mrs. Cooder who chose the things that went into Oggie’s closet and drawers, he sometimes ended up with crazy-looking outfits. On the day Oggie received the disappointing news from the Bakestuff Company, he was wearing blue-and-white-striped seersucker pants and a plaid duck-hunting shirt — complete with a pouch for carrying dead ducks, which, of course, he was not planning to do. On his feet, he wore size-11 sneakers, with laces he had crocheted out of colorful yarn.

  It was during a visit to Zanesville, Ohio, that Oggie’s Aunt Hettie had taught him how to crochet. She hadn’t done it out of the goodness of her heart. She’d done it in order to keep him out of her garden. Oggie, who’d been only five years old at the time and bored to tears with listening to grown-up talk, had wandered out into the garden, where he decided to pretend he was on the moon.

  He’d imagined that the garden was a big crater, and the birdbath was his rocket ship. Aunt Hettie, spying him out her window, had let it be known in no uncertain terms that she did not appreciate Oggie moonwalking through her zucchini plants, and she did not appreciate him digging for moon rocks in her potato patch. She especially did not appreciate Oggie sitting in her birdbath with one of her good mixing bowls on his head shouting Blast off! and scaring all the birds away. So Oggie had explained that what he didn’t appreciate was that the most exciting thing to do at Aunt Hettie’s house was to eat a whole bunch of cucumbers for lunch and then sit around waiting for the burping to begin. Aunt Hettie had laughed and pulled a crochet hook out of her apron pocket.

  “Come here, Oggie Cooder,” she’d said, sitting down on the porch step and patting a spot beside her. So Oggie went and sat down beside his aunt and let her teach him how to crochet shoelaces. He’d been making them ever since. Some of the kids at school, the kind of kids who are always looking for a reason to be mean, made fun of him for doing it.

  “Weirdo.”

  “Dork.”

  “Doofus.”

  “Dweeb.”

  Oggie couldn’t help it that he liked to do things a little differently than other people did. He was who he was. And even though there were times when his oddness made life a little bit difficult, if Oggie Cooder had been anybody other than who he was, the extraordinary thing that was about to happen to him never would have occurred.

  Oggie Cooder and Donnica Perfecto were both in Mr. Snolinovsky’s class at Truman Elementary School. On the first day of school, Mr. Snolinovsky wrote his name on the board and made everybody practice saying it slowly a few times. SNOW-LINN-OFF-SKEE. Oggie had never had a man teacher before, although he had noticed that several of his previous teachers had very hairy arms.

  In kindergarten, Oggie had been in Mrs. Foerster’s class. He had liked Mrs. Foerster. She had pretty blue eyes, wore flowery perfume, and because she had been raised somewhere in the South, when she talked, she had a gooey way of stretching out her words that made it sound like she was saying something nice, even when she wasn’t.

  On his final report card that year, Mrs. Foerster had written: Oggie is a very unusual child. One example she gave of Oggie’s unusualness was his tendency to grin when he was being scolded. When Oggie’s mother asked him why he did that, he explained that it wasn’t because he thought getting in trouble was a joke, it was just that when Mrs. Foerster got mad, sometimes she said funny things. For instance, the time she caught Oggie trying to sharpen a carrot — which he insisted he’d stuck into the electric sharpener by accident, thinking it was a No. 2 pencil — she said, “You can put your boots in the oven, Oggie Cooder, but that don’t make ’em biscuits.”

  Some parents might not have been happy about the word unusual being used to describe their child, but Mr. and Mrs. Cooder were perfectly fine with it. They made their living collecting unusual things at garage sales and auctions and reselling them at Too Good to Be Threw. As far as they were concerned, the more unusual an object was, the more value it had.

  Over the years, Oggie’s teachers had found all kinds of interesting ways to describe him — unique, quirky, one-of-a-kind. Last year, in third grade, Oggie’s teacher, Mrs. Stifler, had said that Oggie marched to the beat of a different drummer. Oggie had found that comment surprising, considering the only instrument he knew how to play was the kazoo, and Mrs. Stifler had specifically told him never to bring it to school again because it was a) incredibly annoying and b) extremely spitty. (Later, Oggie’s father had explained to him that saying someone marches to the beat of a different drummer is just another way of saying that a person is unusual, unique, quirky, and one-of-a-kind. Then his mother had taken out the rubber cement and had carefully glued the report card into the family scrapbook alongside all the others.)

  Oggie sometimes wondered what Mr. Snolinovsky was going to write about him on his fourth-grade report card. But this particular morning, he was too busy thinking about having lost the name-the-bagel contest to think about much else. As he made his way to school in his seersucker pants and duck-hunting shirt, he noticed Donnica Perfecto up ahead, her bubble-gum-pink backpack slung over one shoulder. She was walking with Hannah Hummerman and Dawn Perchy, two other girls from Oggie’s class. Oggie had an idea.

  “Hey, you guys!” he called out to them. “Wait up a sec!”

  Donnica glanced over her shoulder at Oggie, then whispered something to the other girls. They all began to walk faster.

  Oggie started running and finally caught up with them at the corner, where they’d gotten hung up waiting for the light to change.

  “I guess you didn’t hear me calling,” Oggie panted. He was a little sweaty from his run, so he wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

  “Ewww,” said Donnica. “Guh —”

  “— ross!” Hannah and Dawn said in unison, providing the ending of the word.

  “W
hat do you want, anyway?” Donnica asked.

  “I was thinking, since it’s Thursday, which means we’ve got a spelling test today, maybe we could all walk together and quiz each other on the words on the way.”

  “Puh —” said Hannah.

  “Watch it,” Donnica snapped. “I do the first syllables.”

  “Sorry,” said Hannah, hanging her head.

  “Puh —” said Donnica.

  “— leeze!” added Hannah and Dawn together.

  Satisfied, Donnica nodded and pulled a tube of cherry-flavored lip gloss out of her pocket. Immediately, the other two girls did the same thing, and all three of them got busy rubbing sticky pink goo onto their mouths.

  “Nice outfit,” said Donnica to Oggie, as she recapped the gloss and slipped it back into her pocket. “Let me guess — is that from your parents’ store?”

  “Yeppers,” said Oggie as he smoothed the front of his shirt with his hand. He didn’t notice Hannah poke Dawn in the ribs or how they were both biting their cheeks to keep from laughing. “So do you want to practice the spelling words?” he continued. “I even made some flash cards.” He fished around in his duck pouch and pulled out a bunch of beat-up index cards riddled with what appeared to be tooth marks. “Turk tried to eat them, but don’t worry, most of the spit should be dry by now.”

  Donnica sighed loudly and tucked a loose strand of long, honey-gold hair behind her ear.

  “I’ve got two words for you, Oggie Cooder, and they’re both EEEEW.”

  When the light changed, Donnica Perfecto and her glossy-lipped posse stepped off the curb. As they flounced away, Donnica called back over her shoulder, “Love your shoelaces, Oggie Cooder!”

  “Thanks!” said Oggie, completely missing the sarcastic tone in her voice. “I made them myself.”

  “Loo —” said Donnica under her breath.

  “— zer!” added Dawn and Hannah, and the three of them dissolved in a fit of high-pitched giggling.

  As Oggie watched them walk away, he sighed and reached for his back pocket — this would be such a perfect time to charve, he thought. But he stopped himself. He really should study his spelling flash cards once more before he got to school.