“YOU DON’T HAVE TO go,” his mum said. His dad held Sam’s hand firmly and looked him in the eye. “We can walk right out of here,” he said. “You don’t have to do a thing.”
But Nancy was already standing up. She was drenched, bedraggled. As she began to walk across to the podium, a nasty buzz of whispering rose up inside the ballroom.
“It’s okay Dad,” Sam said.
He had to go with Nancy. This mess was all his responsibility. It was his fault she was being whispered about by all her so-called friends, by all their parents up in the gallery.
Sam looked up at the gallery, and there she was. Muriel. She stared down at Sam with her wild and angry bright blue eyes swimming behind her spectacles.
“Up here,” the chief judge’s voice boomed out across the ballroom. “One culprit on each side of me.”
It seemed like the judges’ podium was a mile away. And once he was there, there were steps to climb and wires to trip on. Finally, Sam sat down in the chair next to the chief judge. It was like some kind of dreadful nightmare. The judge put his big brown hand across the microphone. Up in the gallery George lifted his two hands in the air and wrung them, as if he was twisting Sam’s neck.
“Now,” the judge whispered to Sam, “what’s your real name?”
“Sir?” Sam was looking at George. He had put his long white fingers around his own neck and was throttling himself.
“What is it? Your real name.”
“Sam Kellow.”
“Not Wilfred Mifflin?”
“No, sir.”
“Your parents here?”
Sam pointed to the table where he had disgraced himself. His father sat in Sam’s wet chair, his mother in Nancy’s, while Sam and Nancy sat up here, on the podium, in their dripping clothes.
Sam looked down and found, on the desk in front of him, the scorecards the Perfecto product managers had left in plain view.
There was one chart for boys and one for girls. Sam looked at his number. This judge had given him minus two for dancing, minus four for deportment. Then she had written Disgrace.
“Good evening, ladies, gentlemen, children,” boomed the voice of the chief judge. “My name is Phillip Lopate and when you first saw me tonight I was not pleased to be here.”
At this point Sam stopped listening. He heard the big voice booming out, but he could not bear to listen to the words. He could not look at his parents, either. He shivered inside his wet clothes and looked at that big word Disgrace.
“I was pretending to be pleased,” the chief judge said, “but as many of you know, I am an actor. Now, however, I am in the happy position of saying what I really think. Ladies and gentlemen, I have seen the Perfecto Kiddo, or rather, two of them. Look at them,” he said.
He was looking at Sam and Nancy, but Sam had his head bowed and did not notice. Disgrace, he thought, that’s right.
“If by ‘perfecto,’ we mean to suggest perfect, then these look pretty perfecto to me,” the chief judge said. “These are not fake. These are the real McCoy. No one would mistake them for adults. They have been into mischief. They have messed up their hair. One has spaghetti sauce on his face. Who cares?” the judge boomed. “WHO CARES? I have seen smiles on these two faces that would, in the words of the great poet, light up the heavens.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I announce the winners of the Perfect Kiddo Competition to be Sam Kellow and Nancy See.”
There was a shriek from the gallery. A great dreadful shriek of rage. it was so dreadful that Sam’s mother never forgot it. It was what Sam’s mum and dad mentioned first when they told the story of the day Sam Kellow was called a Perfecto Kiddo—the sound of Muriel shrieking as she rose unsteadily into the air above the gallery.
Five feet she rose, shrieking, pointing with her finger at Sam Kellow.
Sam could tell the story, too, but the truth was he didn’t see the whole of Muriel’s ascent. When he finally realized he had won the Big Bazoohley, he fainted and fell off his chair. He did not see Muriel’s flight come to a dead stop as she bumped her head against the gallery ceiling. He therefore missed her curse, her fall, her broken leg. Indeed, he could never quite believe it had happened.
By the time he woke, Muriel had been rushed to the hospital. Sam had also been carried from the ballroom. When he awoke, he was lying on a sofa in a strange room with soft light. Nancy was bending over him, holding a piece of pink paper. On it was written “Pay to the order of Sam Kellow Ten Thousand Dollars.”
