‘Hmmm . . . good weight, interesting rattle . . . I’ll take it,’ he said, putting a coin into my hand, and I popped it into the plastic Feeko’s ice cream tub, which is where we keep all our money.
‘Is that the one?’ whispered Bunky, and I snortle-nodded, even though I wasn’t really in a snortle-nodding sort of mood what with Fay COM-PER-LEET-ER-LY copying my loserkeelness and everything.
Gordon slid his finger along the top of the box and opened the flap. ‘Raisins!’ he smiled, grabbing a handful of tiny, brownish, dried-up, bobbly balls and opening his disgusting mouth.
‘Yeah, my NOSTRIL raisins!’ Bunky laughed.
‘EUUURRGGGHHHYYUCK!’ screamed Gordon, throwing the bogies into the air, and they swirled off in the wind like tiny planets. ‘Ha ha, nice one Bunky,’ he said, not wanting to look stupid, and he walked away with his box of bogie raisins still rattling.
Nancy turned round and gave us one of her looks. ‘If we’re going to make a success of Verbunkenloser Ltd, we cannot afford to annoy our customers,’ she said, tidying up the pyramid.
Another poster saying ‘YOU COULD BE CLASS CAPTAIN!’ blew in front of my eyes like a magician’s cape. Sharonella and Fay appeared from behind it and I did a little blowoff out of shock and annoyedness.
‘WHA-EH-VA,’ said Sharonella, reading the box she’d picked up. ‘What’s inside? Not that I’m bothered . . .’
‘You never know with a Verbunkenloser Whatever Box!’ smiled Nancy like she was on TV. ‘But every one’s a winner!’
‘Ooh, random! Go on Fay, you can’t lose!’ said Sharonella, nudging Fay forwards, and I looked at the pyramid of Whatever Boxes swaying in the wind and came up with one of my brilliant and amazekeel ideas right there and then on the spot.
Fay pulled her pen out and plopped the lid off. ‘ONE PLEASE,’ she wrote, sliding a coin towards Bunky and picking up a box. She opened the lid and peered inside.
‘Ru-ub-bish!’ moaned Sharonella, as Fay’s hand pulled out a smelly old hair clip with a faded plastic goldfish perched on it that I’d found down a drain.
I stepped forwards and got ready to play it loserkeel.
‘Woohoo! Fay is a winner, everyone!’ I shouted, pretending to trip on a piece of gravel and fall towards the pyramid of Whatever Boxes. ‘ARRRGGGHHHH! I’M SOOOOOOOO LOSERKEEEELLLL!!!’ I screamed, crashing into them.
Light-blue boxes flew into the air like rectangle chunks of sky and my nose thudded on to the floor, me following behind it.
‘That is SO you, Barry!’ laughed Sharonella as I lay on the ground covered in Whatever Boxes, and I breathed a sigh of relief, because I was back to being the loserkeelest person in my class.
(Not really.)
It felt good being the most loserkeel person in my class again, and to celebrate I’d come up with ANOTHER one of my brilliant and amazekeel ideas.
It was the next day and we were in the school coach on the way to Mogden Poo.
Mogden Poo is our town’s swimming pool, except the ‘L’ from the sign disappeared one night eight million years ago and no one ever found it.
‘Don’t forget, aim them right for my nose!’ I whispered into Bunky’s ear as we jumped out of the coach and ran into the changing rooms, Darren Darrenofski blowing off with excitement behind us.
One of the keel things about the changing rooms at Mogden Poo is that the girls’ and boys’ are right next to each other with a wall in-between that doesn’t go all the way up to the ceiling, so you can spy on the girls getting changed.
‘I can see Donnatella’s pants!’ screamed Stuart Shmendrix, wobbling on top of Darren and peering over the wall.
‘ARRGGGHHH!’ shrieked the girls from their changing room, and I looked over at Bunky and gave him the signal.
I was on the spying-wall side of the room, doing my Future Ratboy super-high-speed pants-into-swimming-trunks change, and Bunky was by the door.
I counted down from five in my head and got ready to look like the most loserkeel superloser ever.
The elastic strap on Bunky’s swimming goggles twanged as they shot out of his hands towards my face.
As they flew across the room, I went through the plan in my head:
1. Get hit in the nose by Bunky’s goggles
2. Start spinning around, screaming like a loser
3. Tangle myself up in the towel hanging on the hook next to me
4. Stumble into the showers like a blind ghost
5. Accidentally turn on the water and end up lying in a puddle, groaning
I smiled to myself, imagining everyone laughing at how loserkeel I was.
Then I realised I’d managed to do the whole list inside my head AND a smile to myself, all with the goggles still not hitting my nose.
I looked up and saw them shooting over the wall into the girls’ changing rooms.
‘FAY BABES!!! WATCH OUT!’ screamed Sharonella, then everything went quiet.
I