Big Mouth by Deborah Halverson Read Free Book Online Page B

more competitions you can enter and the more marketable you are as a personality. Look at Bo Jackson. He played pro baseball
and
pro football. His coaches gave him a hard time, but he didn’t care. And you know what, now
everybody
knows Bo. How many people can name his coaches?”
    Who’s Bo?
    Not that it mattered. I mean, I got Gardo’s point. There
were
a lot of eating competitions out there—burritos, waffles, pumpkin pies, baked beans, shrimp, SPAM, even weird stuff like turducken and hutspot. Lucy told me herself. And in a lot of those competitions, the same names were popping up as winners. Even the invincible Japanese guy, Tsunami, with his fifty-three-and-three-quarters HDBs, held records in foods that weren’t hot dogs: 69 hamburgers in eight minutes, 20 pounds of rice balls in thirty minutes, 17.7 pounds of—
ugh!—cow brains
in fifteen minutes. So really, Gardo was right. The more contests I entered, the more I’d win and the more exposure I’d get. Specializing would only hurt my career.
    Still, Lucy had graphed out a pretty tight game plan for me. “Maybe I should check with Lucy first.”
    “You don’t need to check with Lucy. How can you be a big star if you can’t even make a simple decision about ice cream? Quit stalling and start eating. Or don’t you think you can?”
    “I can.” I gazed upon my creamy paint set. Cocoa brown, minty green, banana yellow…a rainbow of temptation.
    Gardo chanted softly: “Thuff, Thuff, Thuff…”
    I didn’t know why I was wimping out. It wasn’t like Lucy would know. Who would tell her? It was just me and Gardo.
    “…Thuff, Thuff, Thuff…”
    I didn’t want to reverse in front of him, though.
    “…Thuff, Thuff, Thuff…”
    But then, he was right that I needed practice.
    “…Thuff, Thuff, Thuff…”
    And I did love ice cream.
    “…Thuff, Thuff, Thuff…”
    Who said I’d have a reversal of fortune anyway? Ice cream wasn’t hot dogs. I didn’t have to chew it; it would just slide down. “Okay, let’s do it.”
    “Atta boy!” He slam-dunked the empty spoon into the trash can, then rubbed his hands together, making me think of the Del Heiny Junior 13 janitors. “All right, then, here we go.”
    I took a huge metal spoon from the drawer behind me and set it in the heated water trough that hung along my side of the display case. Wet metal always slid through ice cream easier than dry metal. “Okay. How much do I eat?”
    “I don’t know. What are you asking me for?”
    “Lucy didn’t make graphs for ice cream. I need to establish a base number.”
    “I’m sorry, did I miss something? Are we in
math class
? Just eat the ice cream until you can’t eat anymore.”
    “I need a time goal, at least. Twelve minutes, just like the pros.” I scanned the colored rows. “Which flavor?”
    “
Whichever
flavor. Will you start already?”
    “You won’t tell Lucy?”
    “Shermie, look who you’re talking to.”
    I crossed my arms. He’d watched
Galactic Warriors
enough. He knew that the most successful missions were the top-secret ones.
    He sighed heavily. “Fine: No, I won’t tell Lucy.” He pretended to lock his mouth and throw away the key. Through squeezed lips he mumbled, “I’ll keep my big mouth shut.”
    “Good.”
    As my spoons warmed, I studied the open barrels. Should I go with Bing Cherry? Its fruity sweetness was smooth going down, but the frozen cherries could choke a horse. Mint Chocolate Chip? No, the dusty chocolate flakes probably wouldn’t clog my throat, but the mintiness always crept up the back of my nose. Fudge Brownie? That was always a good fallback when I couldn’t decide what flavor my mood was. Wait, no, not Fudge Brownie. Grampy had started ordering the kind with walnut brownies, and walnuts taste like dirt. Maybe Spazzy Monkey? In the Sherman T. Thuff Book of Good and Tasty Things, that was the King Kong of ice creams: rich banana ice cream, delicate shards of toffee that packed deep into my molars with