Cheesie Mack Is Not a Genius or Anything (4 page)

I clicked around the Internet until I found a site that
showed how much old Lincoln cents were worth.

Georgie tapped me on the shoulder. He held the coin up, then closed his left hand around it, waved his right hand over his left, wiggled his fingers, twisted his wrists around each other, opened his hands … and abracadabra, the coin was gone. An instant later (I could not tell how he did it), the coin was back … this time in his right hand! He was actually really good.

“You never showed me that trick before. How do you do it?” I asked.

Georgie shook his head. “The Great Georgio never reveals his secrets.” He held the old penny between two fingers. “So, how much is this worth?”

I looked back at the screen and read aloud: “ ‘Value depends upon the condition of the coin.’ I think that means how new it looks.”

Georgie examined the coin closely. “It looks pretty new to me.” Then The Great Georgio did his sleight of hand again. This time I watched super carefully, but I still couldn’t figure it out. I turned back to the screen
and found the listing for a 1909 Lincoln cent, but I was still thinking hard about the trick. I should have been paying more attention to the computer screen.

“Only three dollars,” I said.

“Huh?! Come on. Is that all?”

“That’s what it says. Three bucks.”

“Darn,” Georgie said.

I thought the coin was worth three dollars.

I was wrong.

And the mistake was my fault. I completely admit it in writing
right now
and
right here
. Georgie’s magic sort of distracted me, so I looked at the wrong line in the list of coin values. The 1909 Lincoln cent with
no
mint mark (which means it was made in Philadelphia) was the coin that was worth three dollars. The coin with the
S
(San Francisco) was worth a lot more … but I didn’t know that until much later. And my mistake made our lives a whole lot more complicated. You’ll see how if you read on.

Georgie set the coin down next to the computer keyboard and started putting his magician stuff back into its box. I picked up the torn envelope. “This
stamp is really old. Maybe it’s worth something,” I said.

“Yeah, maybe,” Georgie muttered.

I switched my search from coin collecting, which on the web page is called numismatics (
new-miz-MAT-iks
), to stamp collecting, which is called philately (
fih-LAT-eh-lee
). Those are two excellent words that I am going to memorize so that I can use them in a conversation with my dad, who I am sure knows them because he reads everything and has a great vocabulary and knows all kinds of weird things that no one else does.

You can probably tell by now that I like words. Maybe that’s why I like writing. I will definitely put some superlative (
soo-PER-lah-tiv
)—which means better than excellent—words into this book.

I heard a match strike. Georgie had lit a stubby candle from his magic set and was holding the unfolded paper above it. I looked at him with a question wrinkling up my forehead.

“Heat the paper, and the secret writing will appear,” he explained.

He held the paper over the flame. Secret writing did
not appear, but he did set fire to one corner. He blew it out, pinched the candle flame between his fingers (Georgie is tough!), and plopped down on his bed while I read about old postage stamps on the Internet.

A few moments later, we heard his father call, “Georgie! I smell something burning. What’s going on?”

“Just a candle, Dad. We’re trying to do some magic.”

“Be careful, huh? And come here when you’re done.”

I like Georgie’s father. He’s way older than my dad, but he cooks really excellent pancakes. I don’t remember Georgie’s mother. She died when we were two years old.

I went to another web page and there, along with lots of other old stamps, was the three-cent jumping king salmon.

“I found the stamp.”

Georgie stood up and peered over my shoulder.

“The stamp was first made in 1956,” I continued. “And look. It says here that the cost of mailing a letter increased to four cents on August 1, 1958, so this envelope”—I pointed at “3¢” on the stamp—“had to be mailed before then. Sheesh, it costs way more to mail a letter now.”

(I wonder what it will cost to mail a letter fifty years from now. You can take a guess by going to my website:
CheesieMack.com
. Maybe when I get enough guesses, I’ll put them into some kind of Internet time capsule, and fifty years in the future I’ll open it and see how close we were.)

Georgie pointed at the picture of the stamp on the computer screen. “Are there king salmon in California?”

I shrugged. I’d seen a TV show once about salmon swimming upstream to lay eggs, but I couldn’t remember what state it was in.

“Is it worth anything?” Georgie asked.

“Can’t tell. This is all about stamps in what they call
mint condition.”
We looked at the wavy lines of black ink crossing our stamp. “This one’s
canceled
. I don’t think it’s worth anything. Not even three cents.”

(I’m collecting images of cool stamps from around the world. If you have a favorite, please send it to me along with a clever, weird, or funny caption to go with it. There are examples on my website.)

Suddenly Georgie grabbed a pencil from his desk,
held it sideways, and started to smudge the lead across the partly burnt paper.

“Why’re you scribbling on it?”

“To see if someone left dents when they wrote on the piece of paper that used to be on top of this piece of paper,” he said, head down and concentrating. “I saw this in a movie once. It was about a murder and the killer’s name …”

In the corner farthest away from the scorch marks, a single word began to take shape. We both stared at it.

“I can’t read it,” Georgie mumbled.

“I think,” I whispered, “it says ‘EUREKA.’ ”

I couldn’t help whispering. If you’re doing something like making invisible old words reappear, you just automatically get quiet. I could tell from Georgie’s expression that he didn’t know the word
EUREKA
.

“It means,” I said, “something like ‘hooray’ or ‘yippee.’ My dad says you yell it when you find something.”

“Like treasure,” he said very softly.

Someone said “Whoa” again, and I’m pretty sure it was me.

W
e sat for a while thinking about what to do next, but since neither of us had an idea, we decided to get our mitts, go to the park, and hit some flies before it got too dark.

When we got downstairs, Mr. Sinkoff, who was sitting at the kitchen table with a bunch of papers spread out, stopped us by holding up his hand.

“Georgie,” he said seriously, “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”

Georgie and I stood looking at his father for what seemed like a really long and awkward time, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds.

I mean, here you are reading this book, and you want to know what the bad news was, but there’s
this long sentence that you’re reading right now that actually doesn’t take all that long to read, but because you’re in a hurry to learn about the bad news, this sentence seems to take a lot longer. Kind of like that.

Mr. Sinkoff cleared his throat, but the
scraff-scraff
sound he made must have done more clogging than clearing because he had to cough twice before he finally looked at me and suggested it might be time for me to go home. Georgie’s eyebrows were waggling up and down the way they do when he gets nervous.

I walked to the back door very slowly, sort of leaning with my head tilted, aiming my ear, straining to hear what was happening.

I’m usually not super nosy, but Georgie is my best friend, and I was thinking that it must be really serious because Mr. Sinkoff was almost whispering. I had my hand on the back doorknob when Georgie screamed, “OH, NO!”

Then silence again. Bad silence.

As I stepped outside into the twilight, I could hear everything everywhere: crickets … my dog,
Deeb, barking … the
brrr-rum
of a motorcycle a couple of streets away … some girls singing jump-rope rhymes … and a faraway plane. But everything in my mind was flat. I wasn’t thinking about anything. I just stood there. Deeb stopped barking.

Then Georgie came running out the back door, yelling or crying or both, “This really stinks!”

He ran right past me. And then he was out of sight, racing out the won’t-close-gate into the gully.

I ran after him.

Then I stopped.

Then I ran again.

Then I just walked. I knew where he was going. If he was crying, he’d want time to stop before I got there. Georgie has three brothers, but they are grown-up and don’t live with him, so he is sort of an only child, and he’s not used to crying in front of anyone.

So I walked.

I’ve noticed a funny thing about crying. Little kids actually seem to like doing it. When you’re small, you wail and wail. It’s loud. You make enough noise to block out the rest of the world. And the crying all by
itself fills you up so much that you forget why you started in the first place and just sort of hide in your own noise. But when you get to almost eleven, like me, mostly you don’t do that anymore.

I walked exactly 119 steps downstream from the path between our two houses (98 steps if Georgie’s counting … his steps are bigger). That’s where the creek, which almost never has any water in it, goes under a road. Just above the creek bed, there’s a four-foot-wide metal pipe that goes through the concrete
wall that holds up the road. Once inside the pipe, we’re completely out of sight of everyone, and there’s a sort of echo that makes everything we say sound more important, so Georgie and I have turned it into our secret clubhouse. We don’t have a club or anything. No members. No secret passwords. But we couldn’t think of a better name.

That’s where I knew I would find him. And I did.

When Georgie looked up, I saw that his eyes had that fat, swelled-up look that kids get when they’ve been crying. He sniffed, then rubbed his nose hard.

“I’ve got some really bad news.…………… Cheesie.”

Please look at the previous sentence.

I put those sixteen dots between the last two words because even though Georgie was talking at regular speed, my mind was zooming so fast that the split second between “bad news” and “Cheesie” lasted for a long time.

Here’s what the noise of my thinking sounded like:

1. Georgie was really mad. But he didn’t sound
   a bit sad or afraid. I think dying would make him sad and afraid. So I figured he didn’t have cancer or Ebola or stuff.
   
2. Maybe we weren’t friends anymore. But why would his father say he had bad news? It didn’t make sense.
   
3. That left just one possibility: I was pretty sure Georgie was moving away.
   

Georgie sniffed again, loud, and then said a word six times in a row that the people who print these books told me I definitely could not write. Then he took a deep breath and said, “Cheesie, my father told me I can’t go to camp.”

I hadn’t thought of
that
. We loved camp, and this year would be our fifth summer in a row. It lasts six weeks and is maximum fun.