The Fantastic Family Whipple (24 page)

The chimp, it seemed, was now determined to collide with him.

Touching down shakily on a thin slab of rock, the boy shot into the air once again—and found himself under the bitterest attack so far. Flying at him from the other side
now, Bonnie Prince Bobo managed to unseat Arthur’s left foot from its peg, filling the boy’s ears with piercing shrieks as he hurtled past.

Scarcely managing to get his foot halfway onto the peg before touching down, Arthur took another precarious bounce, knowing full well it might be his last.

The chimp was waiting for him. Having honed his aim over the first two passes, Bobo did not fly past his target this time—but met the boy perfectly in midair.

Perhaps a bit
too
perfectly, as it turned out.

Instead of barreling into Arthur and knocking him out of the sky, the chimp matched the boy’s trajectory so that both riders fell at the same rate and angle, with only a matter of inches between them. For a moment, their flight appeared almost synchronized, as if chimp and boy were in fact partners, performing some specialized stunt—but the illusion did not last long.

When Bobo realized his navigational error, he quickly resorted to his original strategy—namely, punching—and proceeded to wallop the boy.

Arthur did what he could to dodge the chimp’s jabs, but at such close range, he had little choice but to brace himself and take the punches. After a thump to the ribcage, the boy suffered a crack to the back of his head, which rattled his brains and left his helmet dangerously cockeyed. He barely had time to breathe before another blow struck him square in the stomach.

Robbed of breath and racked with pain, Arthur clenched
the handle of his rocket stick and prayed for some sort of safe landing as he plummeted toward a disconcertingly jagged boulder.

In this disoriented state, Arthur was not entirely sure what happened next. All he knew was that a moment after he touched down, the attack abruptly ceased—and he was shooting through the air, faster and higher than ever before.

What had happened was this:

Moments earlier, as Arthur approached the rocky plateau beneath him, the chimp’s abuse and proximity had grown so severe that by the time they touched down, the two rivals were practically occupying the same space. Reaching the rock a millisecond ahead of Arthur, Bobo prepared to deliver the knockout punch—just as the foot of Arthur’s rocket-stick landed squarely on the exposed outer tip of the chimp’s left peg.

Before either rider knew what was happening, the independent feet of their rocket sticks were compressing in tandem, one on top of the other, so that both pistons fired at precisely the same moment. The resulting burst of energy catapulted Arthur forward at nearly twice the velocity of a normal launch, while Bonnie Prince Bobo—deprived of thrust—smacked into the wall of rock ahead of him and slid into the greasy swamp below.

Barely detecting the sickening plop of his fallen nemesis, Arthur soared higher and higher, his chest growing increasingly hollow the further away the ground became. Then, for the first time since the race began, he noticed the
roar of the crowd. Strangely, its intensity seemed to grow in proportion to his altitude. And then he realized: they were cheering for
him
.

Glancing downward, Arthur could see the tops of dozens of his competitors’ helmets as he hurtled past them. He was no longer in the rear of the herd—in fact, he was swiftly advancing to its front.

Arthur found it difficult, however, to get too excited about this. For, as all things that go up must eventually do, he had begun to come down. Powerless to alter his dwindling momentum, the boy gripped his handlebars for dear life, his stomach floating toward his ribcage as the ground rushed up to meet him.

And yet, somehow, as the foot of his rocket stick struck the earth from that impossible height, Arthur did not splatter against the rocks, nor spontaneously combust, nor die in any way. Indeed, he managed to stay on his rocket-stick, and—despite a rather rough landing—merely bounced back into the race, as if he had planned the entire stunt all along.

Arthur allowed himself a moment to soak up the crowd’s approval. It was slightly disconcerting that he had never received anywhere near as much applause for anything he’d actually planned, but he wasn’t about to hush them now.

As Arthur surveyed the field, he found—to his astonishment—that there were only three riders ahead of him.

Leading the pack by several yards was none other than
Jump Johnston—the partially paralyzed rocket-sticking pioneer who required assistance just to walk, yet had managed not only to re-teach himself to ride, but apparently to win. If it had been inspiring to see him standing at the starting line, it was positively electrifying to see him now, a mere hundred yards from the gold medal.

The two competitors behind Jump were neck and neck in second place. Predictably, one of them was Andy Gravity, the up-and-coming hotshot who had been favored to win the entire race. The other rider’s identity, however, took Arthur completely by surprise. It was Roxy Goldwin—the ghost girl’s older sister—who, as far as Arthur knew, had never been in a rocket-stick race in her life.

Arthur then realized something even more surprising about the three frontrunners: he was gaining on them. The momentum from his last jump, it seemed, was carrying him forward at a faster rate than any of his competitors. As the gap closed between him and the second-place riders, a glimmer of hope arose in Arthur’s mind.

I might actually win this thing, he thought.

And yet, before Arthur or the others could make any sort of dent in Jump’s ten-yard lead, the finish line emerged around the spiral’s last bend. As the track wound down, so too did Arthur’s hopes of breaking away.

But then, it happened.

As Jump touched down on a rather unremarkable section of rock, his feet slipped from their pegs. In an instant, Jump’s body crumpled and disappeared behind the boulder.

It was an unsettling sight—and yet, it provided Arthur just the opportunity he needed. Launching perfectly off a ridge of earth, the boy quickly found himself shoulder to shoulder with Andy Gravity and Roxy Goldwin. With the residual momentum Arthur still possessed, there was little doubt he would take the lead on the next bounce. He had as good as won.

If only as-good-as-winning was actually as good as winning.

Sailing over the boulder that had concealed Jump Johnston’s fate, Arthur suddenly caught sight of the fallen frontrunner—and the first glimpse of his own undoing.

There, splayed out in the rocky gap below, a battered Jump Johnston strained to climb out of the crevice, dragging himself inch by inch toward his rocket stick, which had landed on the ledge above him. It was only five feet up, but in Jump’s impaired condition it may as well have been Mount Everest.

In the midst of his struggling, Jump glanced upward, and for a split second, Arthur caught his gaze. It was the most helpless, achingly tragic expression Arthur had ever seen—and in an instant, all the joy was sapped from his pending victory.

And then he realized: as important as the race was to himself, finishing first would never mean as much to him as merely
finishing
would mean to Jump. It was a bitter truth, but there was no denying it. He knew what he had to do.

Touching down alongside Andy Gravity and Roxy Goldwin,
not twenty yards from the finish line, Arthur shifted his weight to his rear. As his competitors shot ahead toward the finish line, he shot away from it. The crowd gasped.

Pulling a backflip in midair, Arthur landed on the boulder that held Jump’s rocket stick and quickly dismounted. His legs felt a bit like the World’s Largest Spaghetti Noodles now that he was on solid ground, but he managed to steady himself. Grabbing a rocket stick in either hand, he scrambled into the cleft where Jump lay hopelessly inching forward on his belly. Arthur set the rocket sticks aside and crouched down beside him.

“Come on, Jump,” he said, getting a shoulder underneath the other boy’s arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

Jump looked dazed. “Who—who are you?”

“I’m Arthur Whipple. I’m a big fan….”

Three riders zoomed past overhead, taking with them any chance of a medal for Arthur.

“Can you stand?”

“I think so.”

Another rider shot past.

Jump leaned his back against the wall while Arthur fetched the veteran’s rocket stick and stood it before him. Clutching the handles, Jump agonizingly hoisted his feet onto the pegs—then leaned away from the rock. Balancing himself unaided on the idling rocket stick, Jump turned to Arthur, who clambered onto his own HopRocket. “Thank you,” he said, his eyes watering unexpectedly.

Arthur nodded.

Composing himself, Jump added, “All right, Arthur—let’s go.”

With that, the two boys shot upward, touching down side by side on the boulder’s crest as they sprang back into the race.

“Unbelievable! Newcomer Roxy Goldwin has taken the gold and set a new speed record in the process! What an upset! And what a crushing blow to Andy Gravity! First, to be outpaced for most of the race by a debilitated Jump Johnston—who wasn’t even expected to crack the top thirty—and then to be edged out at the last second by a total novice…. What do you say, Chuck, do you think he still has a shot at replacing Jump as the new face of rocket-stick racing?”

“I don’t know, Ted—not if this Goldwin girl continues to perform anything like she has today…. And I’ve got to say it doesn’t seem Jump is willing to give up that role just yet anyhow. His performance today was nothing short of amazing. Leading the race until the very end, and then finishing eighth when he was only ranked thirty-second—after all he’s been through, he’s proved today he truly has the heart of a champion.”

“Absolutely, Chuck. But let’s not forget about Arthur Whipple! What an incredible race he had today.”

“That he did, Ted. You know, it’s one thing to be bested by fierce competition as Andy Gravity was, but to willingly
throw away a guaranteed medal—possibly even the gold—in some misguided outburst of compassion…well, it’s more than I can comprehend.”

“Absolutely, Chuck. In my days as a rocket-stick racer, it never would have crossed my mind to do something so foolish. Honestly, I don’t know what he was thinking.”

“Hard to believe he’s from the same family as his brothers and sisters, isn’t it, Ted?”

“Indeed it is, Chuck. Indeed it is.”

Arthur suddenly wished the radio broadcast had not been aired over the locker room PA system while he and the other riders were still inside. Though his ears had perked up with pride when the announcers first mentioned his name, it quickly became clear that pride was the wrong response to what they had to say about him.

Trying to escape the snickering of the other boys as soon as possible, Arthur swiftly stuffed his balled-up, mud-caked socks into his gym bag.
He
felt a bit like
they
smelt.

But disappointed as he was by his own loss, he couldn’t help but be just a bit happy for Roxy Goldwin. It must have been truly thrilling to win the gold medal in an event she had never even entered before. How proud her parents must be. Though it was sure to be the only event the Goldwins would win that day, at least their first Unsafe Sports Showdown had not been a total loss. For as well as Roxy had performed in the rocket-stick race, she had only won,
of course, because none of Arthur’s brothers or sisters had been competing against her. Surely, the rest of the Goldwins would not fare so well when they went up against the
real
Whipples.

As Arthur emerged from the changing room, Uncle Mervyn and Mr. Whipple were waiting with his older siblings to greet him. Henry and Simon attempted to smile, but try as they might, they could not hide their utter bafflement with their brother’s performance. Cordelia simply stood with her arms crossed and glared at him.

Luckily, Uncle Mervyn got to Arthur before his sister could. “Nicely done, lad!” he exclaimed. “It’s nothing short of incredible how much you’ve improved in just one year. You would have certainly won the whole thing, if you weren’t so hopelessly decent—but thank God you are, lad, thank God you are.”