Excerpt

Chapter One -- That Day

On that particular day in June, the day that would forever be referred to by his parents in regretful tones as That Day, Larry Butterball rose from bed at the usual time, 7:00 A.M. He stretched and wiggled his toes, and then he crossed the room to his closet in order to pick out his clothes. Today, he was looking for something special to wear.

He grabbed a shirt off a hanger and then dug through the closet for some pants. Yesterday, his mother had taken his favorite pair of shorts away, saying that the tear in the butt had grown so large that she was surprised he did not feel a breeze when he wore them. He grabbed the new pair of shorts she had bought him, and then he did something very unusual.

Larry rummaged through the dirty laundry basket until he found a pair of underpants with an embarrassing stain. He held them up and snickered. Chili Day at School last Tuesday. He put them on and smiled, satisfied. Larry didn't usually wear dirty underpants, but today, he had a mission.

He put on his shirt and stepped into his new shorts. Larry immediately realized that he had a problem. The shorts were too big. They kept slipping down his backside, threatening to drop to the floor. Belts were definitely not cool, so he gave them a good yank up, pulled his t-shirt down over the waist band to cover the gap between the shorts and his stomach, and hoped that his mother would not notice.

He pushed thick, black-rimmed glasses up over his nose and tried to pat down his dark hair, not bothering with a comb. Then he stepped back and looked at himself in the mirror. The image that stared back at him screamed dork, but as this was no different from any other morning, he crossed the room to his desk and reverently picked up a sheet of paper that lay on his desk. He smiled a sly smile. The paper was titled "My Mission".

It all started when Grandpa Joe came to dinner last night. Grandpa Joe ate dinner with Larry's family three times a week. He always wore the same brown jacket with the patches over the elbows and a pair of grey pants. Only his shirt changed. He sat next to Larry and talked non-stop through dinner. It wasn't the talking that bothered Larry. What drove Larry crazy was the way Grandpa Joe couldn't finish a sentence without throwing in a saying to make his point.

When Larry had opened his mouth to take a bite of his chicken drumstick, Grandpa Joe had hooted, "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush!" When Larry had glanced at the clock, praying that dinner would be over soon, Grandpa Joe had shouted, "A stitch in time saves nine!"

Larry had asked, "Nine what?"

Grandpa Joe had responded in a mysterious tone, "Curiosity killed the cat."

Now, this habit of Grandpa Joe's would simply annoy any other kid. In fact, some kids might even like it. Larry did not, because Larry insisted on facts. When Grandpa Joe had made his comment about curiosity killing the cat, Larry wanted to know exactly which cat and how he had died. People had to be careful what they said to Larry.

If another kid stepped on a worm and announced that it was as “flat as a pancake”, Larry would run inside, beg his mother for a pancake, and lay it on the sidewalk next to the worm. He would lie flat on his stomach with one eye squeezed shut and compare the width of the worm to the width of the pancake. This habit of taking things literally made Larry a little annoying to the other kids, which is why he didn't have any friends. It also earned him the nickname Logical Larry.

Larry's Mission contained a long list of sayings. Some of these he had heard from Grandpa Joe; the rest he had heard from the children at school or from his teacher, Mrs. Havers. He planned to disprove each one of these expressions and to show the world how foolish sayings really were.

First on his list was Wear clean underpants in case you are run over by a bus. Ridiculous, he thought. If a bus were to run him over, he doubted that anyone would care about his underpants. He thought about the stain in the pair he now wore and snickered again. Then he headed to the kitchen for breakfast.