Call the Shots (Swim the Fly #3)
Don Calame
“IT’S MY BEST IDEA YET.” Coop’s got a huge grin on his face as he wrestles his ice skate onto his left foot. “It came to me last night while I was launching a mud missile.”
“Oh, God, here we go again.” Matt rolls his eyes as he pulls the blue plastic skate guards off his blades. “It’s like a recurring nightmare.”
“No, listen,” Coop insists. “This is the one. I’m telling you. It’s going to make us all obscenely rich.”
“Seeing a live naked girl last summer was ‘the one.’” I dig around in my backpack, searching for a pair of wool socks. “Playing in the Battle of the Bands was ‘the one.’” Instead of socks, I find one of Buttons’s fossilized hairballs, which I quickly huck under the bench. “Every one is ‘the one.’ Except that they never are.”
“How can you live with yourself, being so wrong all the time, dawg?” Coop says. “All of my plans have turned out for the best. Think about it for a second. When we saw a live naked girl, Matt got a girlfriend. When we played in the Battle of the Bands, I got a girlfriend. If you play your cards right, Sean-o, this could be the thing that finally gets you a girlfriend.”
The muscles in my jaw twitch. “I’ve had a girlfriend.”
“You know what I mean,” Coop says. “One who doesn’t look like a hobbit and who sticks around for more than a week.”
I flip him off. “Remind me again why we’re friends.”
Coop claps me hard on the shoulder and beams. “Because I’m always thinking about how to make your life sweeter.”
I finally find the wadded-up socks at the bottom of my bag. I give them a quick sniff and recoil at the damp, woolly urinal-cake stench of them.
Matt laughs at me. “Why do you always do that? You think this time they’re gonna smell like cinnamon?”
“I don’t know,” I say, my ears getting hot. “I smell things. It’s how I experience my world. Maybe I was a dog in a past life.”
As soon as the words spill from my mouth, I realize I’ve just set myself up. I brace myself for the bar-rage of butt-sniffing jokes from Coop but nothing comes. Which is totally uncharacteristic. And can only mean that he must be über-focused on his new plan. Used to be that him being so excited about his ideas would get me going too, but I don’t know. As we’ve gotten older — and everyone but me has benefitted from his insane schemes — I’ve found it harder and harder to take him seriously.
Of course, if I thought there was even the tiniest chance that this plan of Coop’s, whatever it might be, could actually make us rich, I would be on it like a parrot on a peanut. Because, as much as I hate to admit it, he’s right about my girlfriend situation. I am a lost cause. After Tianna broke up with me at the end of last summer, I’ve been on a starvation diet where girls are concerned. I could use any advantage I can get — and if that extra boost came from being a millionaire, I’d take it, despite what my mom says about the kinds of girls who like you for the size of your bank account instead of the size of your heart.
But it’s stupid to get hopeful, because all we ever get out of Coop’s schemes are headaches and heartbreaks. And that’s when things actually go well.
So life will just continue on as it has, with everyone else paired off.
Coop and Helen.
Matt and Val.
And me and my urinal-cake wool socks.
On the plus side, at least I don’t have to spend the night with only our pack of foster animals for company. Love them as I do, they’re a little boring in the conversation department.
“A movie,” Coop announces, like me and Matt have been begging him to spill the beans. “That’s the sitch this semest. We’re going to make a cheap-ass horror film like Psychopathic Anxiety. Or The Jersey Devil Assignment. They shot those things for a few thousand bills and then sold them for megabucks. There’s no reason we can’t do exactly the same thing.”
“I can think of a few thousand reasons right off the bat,” I say, my feet feeling claustrophobic in my old stiff hockey skates. “I mean, seriously. If there were awards for your dumb ideas, this one would win Best . . . Most . . . Dumbest.”
“Ouch,” Coop says flatly. “That stings, Sean. Too bad you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Because it’s a genius idea. Case in point. Your favorite movie of all time. A little film called El Mariachi. Made for seven grand. Turned over two mil. And that was just in theaters. That’s not even counting the five trillion copies of the DVD you bought.”
I blow a lip fart. “Whatever. Even if we knew the first thing about making a movie — which we don’t — where the hell are we going to find seven grand? Or any grand, for that matter? We might as well conjure up a million dollars and be done with it.”
“It’s not like I’m springing this on you uninformed,” Coop says. “I researched filmmaking on the Internet for almost an hour last night.”
“A whole hour?” Matt says, sounding fake-impressed. “Why didn’t you say so? This plan is obviously foolproof.”
“Look.” Coop starts pacing around, a little wobbly on his skates. “There are a ton of ways we can raise the cash. We get a bit here. A bit there. Family. Friends. Local businessmen. It’ll be simp. You’ll see.”