“SIT UP STRAIGHT,” said George.
“Use your fork,” said Muriel.
“Do you want to end up with peas on the floor?” hollered George. “Do you know what happens if you have peas on the floor? Every pea,” he said, “they subtract fifteen points.”
“Do you have any idea,” Muriel said, “what five little green peas could mean?”
“Seventy-five points,” said Sam, quick as a flash, although there was not a pea in sight and he was sitting with an empty white plate in front of him. “Five times fifteen equals seventy-five.”
“This is not a math contest,” said Muriel nastily. “If you dropped five peas in front of the judges, you would have no hope of being Perfecto Kiddo, It wouldn’t matter how perfecto your hair was. Not even Wilfred’s hair could save you. You would be a disgrace, and I would be so angry with you, I don’t know what I’d do.”
“You’d pull his nose,” Wilfred said.
Sam looked up from the little table George had set up for him to practice at. He wished he was Wilfred. Wilfred was lying on the king-size bed with Sam’s baseball cap perched on top of his shining, curly head.
“Actually,” said Muriel, “I think I’d twist his ear.”
“But Mom …” Wilfred said. “He’s trying. He’s trying really hard.”
When Wilfred said that, Sam stopped being mad with him about the baseball cap (although he wished he was wearing the baseball cap himself and not this nerdy velvet suit and this ridiculous bow tie).
“Now we have to practice for the spaghetti test,” said Muriel. “Chop, chop, come along. We can’t leave anything to chance.”
“He can’t practice for spaghetti without real spaghetti,” said George.
“Sweetie bear,” said Muriel, smiling through clenched teeth, “he can’t eat spaghetti now. If he eats real spaghetti now, he’ll ruin his appetite for the competition. Don’t you remember what happened in Madrid?”
“That, my precious pretty footsie,” said George, who was starting to go a little red above his collar, “that is what I mean. How can we have him practice his spaghetti-eating without real spaghetti? Nothing is as slimy as real spaghetti. Nothing is quite as splattery as real spaghetti sauce.”
“Maybe they won’t have spaghetti,” Wilfred said. “Maybe they’ll have tough steak instead.”
“They had spaghetti in Tokyo,” said Muriel. “And in Paris. Oh, you were so good in Paris, Wilfred. It was your most perfecto win. Remember, George, how they had the four-foot-long spaghetti strands? Those horrid judges. Those horrid, horrid French judges. But Wilfred wound that long, long strand on his fork, and not a drop, not a drop did he spill.”
“My mum cuts up my spaghetti for me,” said Sam.
“Your ‘mum’ will be nowhere near you,” said George, “and I am going to teach you how to eat spaghetti like an adult.”
“How?”
“With string,” said George, slipping an M&M into his mouth, “and soap.”
“Not to eat,” said Wilfred. “He doesn’t mean eat. He means wind it around your fork.”
Five minutes later Sam was sitting at the table with a sheet wound around him. In front of him was a bowl of slimy tangled soapy string. As Sam looked on. George unscrewed the cap off a bottle of blue ink and poured it over the top.
“Not a splatter,” he said. “Not a drop.”
“I can’t do that,” Sam said. “I know I can’t.”
“Oh, yes you can,” said George, taking a fork in his long bony fingers. “Now watch me, laddie, watch me closely.”
Sam watched him. It was not a pleasant sight.