That afternoon during Creative Writing, Oggie and his classmates made their final haiku guesses. When they were done, Mr. Snolinovsky took the poems off the board and began to read them aloud. The first one he read was typed on a piece of green paper.

I do not know yet

Exactly what it will be

But you will need it.

Amy was the only one who guessed correctly that Oggie had written it. She knew all about Oggie’s dreams of being an inventor. Oggie had guessed right about Donnica’s and David’s and Bethie’s haiku, but to his surprise, Dylan turned out to be the person who had written about the bicycle.

So who wrote the haiku about Ghoulers and Ghorks? Oggie wondered. When Mr. Snolinovsky got to that one and asked the author to stand, Oggie couldn’t have been more surprised. But he was not as surprised as the person sitting in the first seat in the third row.

“You collect Ghoulers?!” Dylan cried in utter amazement.

Dylan James had seen the poem on the board and had been waiting on the edge of his seat all day to find out who had written it. Imagine how shocked he was to discover that the one person at Truman who liked the same thing he did was … Amy Schneider. A girl.

*  *  *

After school that day, Oggie went to three grocery stores and two cheese shops. He saw cheddar balls, cheddar wheels, cheddar straws, cheddar sticks, and cheddar you could squirt right out of a can. But nobody had heard of cheddar jam. Discouraged, he decided to swing by Too Good to Be Threw and ask for his mother’s advice.

“Why do you want to give Donnica jelly for her birthday?” asked Mrs. Cooder.

“Jam,” Oggie corrected.

“Are you sure she wouldn’t rather have a purse?”

But Donnica had said she wanted cheddar jam. There was one more place Oggie hadn’t tried. As he headed out the door to continue his search, a flash of yellow and blue caught his eye and he snapped his fingers as he remembered Dylan’s brother’s request. A few minutes later, Oggie was walking down the street with a pair of blue-and-yellow-checked pants in Justin’s size tucked under his arm.

*  *  *

On his way home, Oggie stopped at the mini-mart attached to the Gas and Go filling station. It was his last hope, but it turned out that the only kind of cheese they had was plain old American, and even that looked a little moldy. Oggie kept his eyes peeled for the Georges and the cherry picker as he continued on his way, but again it seemed they were nowhere in sight. Turk was waiting by the door with his leash in his mouth when Oggie got home, so he dropped his backpack on the kitchen table, hooked the leash on Turk’s collar, and the two of them started off toward Walnut Acres to deliver the pants to Dylan’s brother.

As he walked his dog, Oggie resigned himself to the fact that he wasn’t going to be able to give Donnica what she really wanted for her birthday. He was disappointed, but what could he do? He’d looked everywhere he could think of for cheddar jam, but it was nowhere to be found.

Nobody was home at the Jameses’ house. Dylan’s bike was gone and there was no car in the driveway. The red trunk was still sitting on the lawn, so Oggie sat down on it and waited for a while to see if anybody showed up. After about ten minutes, he gave up. Before he left, he folded the pants and left them sitting on top of the trunk where he hoped Justin would find them.

*  *  *

That night before he went to bed, Oggie crocheted Donnica a pair of pink shoelaces. He used a ruler to make sure they were both exactly the same length. Maybe he hadn’t been able to find cheddar jam, but at least Oggie could make sure that Donnica wouldn’t be tripping over uneven shoelaces.

The next morning Oggie awoke feeling nervous and excited. In just a few hours he would be swimming in Donnica Perfecto’s pool! He got up and tried to make himself a bowl of cereal, but he was so worked up, first he spilled the last of the cornflakes on the floor and then he knocked over the milk carton. Turk was delighted, and more than happy to help with the cleanup. Oggie had really been too excited to eat breakfast anyway. He looked at the clock. It was only eight fifteen. How was he ever going to last until party time?

At nine o’clock, Oggie put Donnica’s shoelaces in a box and carefully tied a ribbon around it. At ten o’clock Mrs. Cooder drove Oggie down to Selznick’s department store, where they exchanged his red bathing suit for a yellow one. Oggie also talked his mother into buying him a pair of rubber swim fins he discovered in the sale bin. There was no rule against swim fins on Donnica’s list, and Oggie could hardly wait to try them out in the Perfectos’ pool. At eleven o’clock, Amy called to quiz Oggie one last time on the rules and to wish him good luck.

“Thanks a BAZILLION for all your help,” Oggie told her. “And by the way, how come you never told me you collected Ghorks and Windowsills?”

“They’re called Shadow Zwills,” Amy told him. “And I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think you’d be interested since you can’t play Old Maid with them.”

She knew Oggie well.

At twelve o’clock, Oggie was too excited to eat lunch, so he went to his room and prrrrr-ip-ed nonstop for an hour and a half. When he was finished, his tongue was completely numb. He tested himself by thinking about piggies-in-a-blanket and he was very relieved to find that he had prrrrr-ip-ed himself dry.

It felt like two o’clock would never come, but at last it did. Oggie put on his new bathing suit and got Turk settled in the backyard with a bone to chew on to keep him busy while he was gone. Before he left the house, without even thinking about it, Oggie stopped at the fridge, took out a few slices of American cheese, and slipped them into one of the pockets of his swim trunks.

As Oggie was leaving the house in his bathing suit and swim fins, a familiar white truck came cruising up Tullahoma Street. When it stopped in front of the Cooders’ house, Oggie was delighted to see who it was.

“Hi, Georges!” Oggie called to his friends from the phone company. “What are you doing here?”

The two Georges were glad to see Oggie. They explained that they were in the neighborhood because there had been some trouble reported with the phone lines. Oggie remembered that his mother had mentioned something about bad reception only the day before.

“Looks like you’re on your way to a party,” one of the Georges said, noticing the box with the bow on it in Oggie’s hand.

“Yeppers!” said Oggie happily. “It’s a swim party and there might even be piggies-in-a-blanket.”

“Have fun,” they told Oggie. Then Short George climbed into the bucket and Tall George began to raise him up to the phone lines.

As Oggie started flip-flopping across the street in his swim fins, a green van with a watering can painted on the side pulled into the Perfectos’ driveway. Several women wearing straw hats climbed out. Oggie waved to them, figuring they were probably relatives of Donnica’s who had come to help celebrate her birthday. When Oggie reached the front door, he rang the bell. After a minute, Mrs. Perfecto answered the door.

“Hello,” said Oggie, holding out the present to her. “Thank you for inviting me. Here’s a gift for Donnica. I made them myself.”

But instead of inviting him to come inside, Mrs. Perfecto gasped and put her hands on her cheeks.

“Oh no,” she whimpered miserably. “Not now. Not today.”

For a minute Oggie thought he must have gotten the day of the party mixed up, but then he noticed that Mrs. Perfecto was looking past him at the ladies in the straw hats. Mrs. Perfecto pushed Oggie out of the way and hurried down the walk, leaving Oggie to show himself into the house.

“Hello?” he called. “Anybody here?”

“Everybody’s out back by the pool,” came a muffled reply.

At first Oggie didn’t see him, because the owner of the voice was sitting on the couch, which happened to be the exact same shade of brown as the fur suit he was wearing.

“Bumbles!” cried Oggie.

The giant bear lifted a paw and waved.

“What are you doing in here?” Oggie asked. “Shouldn’t you be outside juggling by the pool?”

“The birthday girl told me to stay inside,” said Bumbles. “And it’s a good thing, too, because the cleaner shrank my suit and now the eyeholes are in the wrong place. I can’t see a thing.”

They were interrupted by the sound of a gasp coming from the other end of the room. Donnica, in a pink bathing suit with a terry cloth robe on over it, was standing in the doorway, staring at Oggie as if she were seeing a ghost.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“You invited me to your party,” Oggie told her. “Remember?”

“Of course I remember,” she said, “but you told me you had a terrible memory so you couldn’t possibly come. Remember?”

“I do have a terrible memory,” Oggie said. “But Amy Schneider and Richard of York helped me, and I memorized every single rule. Want to hear? ‘Putting salad under the couch is very messy and dangerous.’ Which means no prrrrr-ip-ing, no crocheted shoelaces, no Uncle Vern stories …”

But Donnica wasn’t listening. Her mind was racing a million miles an hour. Oggie Cooder and Bumbles the Bear were both at her birthday party. If she didn’t want to be the laughingstock of the entire fourth grade, she needed a new plan and she needed it fast.