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  “I’m a what?”

  “A tube. Teeth on one end, butt hole on the other. All those other things — arms, legs, eyes, brain, heart — are just extras. Topologically speaking, you’re a meat donut — a hole surrounded by flesh. If you take into account the nostrils, you are a three-hole donut. But basically you’re a tube.”

  “Great. Now I feel really special.”

  “I’m a tube, too. It’s important to recognize one’s own nature.”

  Derek reaches into the backseat and grabs a snack-size bag of Fritos. He tears it open; the car instantly fills with the smell of corn chips. He shoves a handful into his mouth and starts chewing and talking at the same time.

  “Did you know that Fritos were invented in the nineteen thirties?” he says.

  I didn’t know that, but I want some. I make a move toward the bag, but Derek holds it away from me.

  “The only thing you’re eating today is sliders.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Just stay hungry,” he says, munching. “So what do you do when you’re not eating?”

  I do a lot, I want to say, but instead I say, “Nothing.”

  “You don’t have a girlfriend?”

  “I’m fourteen,” I say. “I haven’t had the opportunity.”

  “Sometimes you have to create your own opportunity.”

  “There’s not a lot of choice in Vacaville. I mean, there are only about twenty girls in my whole class.”

  “What about your friend the Chinese girl?”

  “You mean Cyn? She’s not —”

  “She’s cute. She got a boyfriend?”

  “No. And she’s not —”

  “Opportunity,” Derek says.

  “Cyn’s just a friend,” I say. “And she’s not Chinese. She’s Korean-American.”

  “Whatever.” He shrugs. “Same thing.”

  It’s a good thing Cyn isn’t there, because she might have taken the opportunity to punch him in the throat.

  The Kappa Alpha Delta frat house looks nice from the outside: three stories, ivy-covered brick walls, little peaked windows sticking out from the slate roof, and a fresh coat of white paint on the wraparound porch.

  “You live here?” I say.

  “Officially, yeah. But sometimes I stay with Bridgette.” He gives me a look. “Don’t tell your folks.”

  I have a conflicted moment — it’s kind of cool to be in on Derek and Bridgette’s secret, but it feels yucky at the same time. I don’t say anything.

  Inside, the frat house is more like a pigsty. The main room is littered with beer cans and crumpled snack-food bags, the tile floor is sticky, and the oversize stone fireplace has been used as a trash bin.

  “I thought your job was to fix the place up,” I say.

  “No point in doing much until the fund-raiser’s over — they’d just trash it all over again.”

  A guy wearing boxer shorts and a Simpson College sweatshirt appears from another room and sees us standing there. He salutes Derek with his beer, slopping foam over the rim of his plastic cup, and screams, “DUDE!”

  Derek returns the salute with a pretend beer of his own.

  “I guess they got started early,” Derek says.

  “It looks more like a beer party than a fund-raiser,” I say.

  “It’s both,” Derek says. “We call it a fund-raiser and give some money to the cancer kids. That way the cops and the administration leave us alone. Also, we get free product from SooperSlider. Come on — everybody will be out back.”

  He ushers me through an even stickier-floored kitchen, where two girls wearing tank tops and gym shorts are serving loose-meat sandwiches on sesame buns. If you don’t live in Iowa, you probably never heard of a loose-meat sandwich. It’s like a sloppy joe, only without the sauce.

  Derek says to one of the girls, “Hey, Britt, you seen Randolph?”

  “Out back.” She offers us each a sandwich. Derek takes one for himself but slaps my hand away when I reach for one of my own.

  “Not for you.”

  Britt gives me a pitying look. “Gluten intolerance?”

  “Contestant,” Derek says.

  If the inside of the frat house was a sty, the backyard is a zoo. About forty guys and a dozen girls are milling around, most of them clustered around a beer keg, all of them holding red plastic cups. Along the back of the trampled lawn several wooden doors have been placed on sawhorses to make a single long table. A couple of guys are setting up a row of folding chairs along the back side of the table.

  Derek exchanges high fives with several of his fraternity brothers as we weave our way through the throng. Nobody pays any attention to me. Randolph, who turns out to be a weaselly-looking guy wearing a Deathchain T-shirt and a magenta fauxhawk, is in the side yard, standing over a charcoal brazier, turning some sort of animal on a spit. The smell of barbecued meat sets my mouth to watering. I take a closer look at the spitted creature and notice a long, naked, charred tail coming off one end of it. Suddenly I am not so hungry.

  “Hey Derek,” Randolph says. “Who’s the kid?”

  “This is David, Bridgette’s little brother. He thinks he can eat fast.”

  “Has he met Hoover?”

  “Not yet.”

  “He’s kind of small, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, but he’s got a big mouth.”

  “Well, if he’s got twenty bucks, we got sliders coming.”

  I hand Randolph a twenty — pretty much all the money I have in the world.

  Randolph pockets the bill. “You’re in. We got sixteen guys signed up. And one girl.”

  “Who?”

  “Who do you think? Ally Boudreaux.”

  “Oh.” Derek looks at me. “Ally came in second last year.”

  “What is that?” I ask, pointing at the thing cooking on the spit.

  “What does it look like?” Randolph says.

  “A giant rat?”

  He laughs. “Close. It’s a fresh Iowa possum.”

  I take a step back. Opossum is one of the things I won’t eat. Not that I’ve ever considered it before.

  “Possy was our mascot,” Derek says. “She got hit by a car.”

  I try not to gag. Roadkill is another thing I won’t eat.

  “She’ll be ready by the time the sliders get here,” Randolph says.

  Derek abandons me to talk to some of his friends. I find a relatively quiet corner in what used to be a garden, sit on a cracked stone bench, and watch the action. Mostly, the action is drinking beer and talking loud, so it’s kind of boring. I keep thinking about the loose-meat sandwiches the girls were making. I sometimes think I have mental powers, because just then this guy comes walking up to me holding a paper plate piled with three loose-meats in one hand while using his other hand to shove a fourth one into his mouth. The guy looks like the Incredible Hulk, only not so green.

  “Crazy party, huh?” he says.

  “Yeah, I guess.” I notice that he is wearing a holster strapped to his waist. It’s not a gun holster — this holster is a cup holder clasping a plastic beer cup. He sets the plate of sandwiches on the bench, draws his beer like it’s a six-gun, drains it, belches, and reholsters the empty cup.

  “You hungry?” He points at the sandwich plate.

  I am hungry, but I know I shouldn’t eat anything. Not if I want to win two hundred dollars.

  “No thanks,” I say.

  “They’re really good.”

  “They look good. But I’m in the contest.”

  He laughs. “Me too!” He grabs one of the sandwiches and gestures at the plate. “I’ll leave those for you.” He walks off, eating.

  I look at the two loose-meat sandwiches. My hand twitches and moves toward the plate.

  “I see you met Hoover.”

  I jerk my hand back. Derek is standing in front of me.

  “That was Hoover?”

  Derek looks at the sandwiches and says, “How many of those did you eat?”

  “N
ine,” I say.

  “Seriously?”

  “Don’t worry. I didn’t eat any,” I say.

  “Good. Because —”

  He is interrupted by a horn. Several horns. Vuvuzelas, actually — those long, plastic horns people blow at soccer games. Everybody looks toward the sound as six vuvuzela blowers decked out in red-and-yellow T-shirts come marching into the backyard carrying stacks of red-and-yellow cardboard boxes emblazoned with the SooperSlider logo.

  The SooperSlider team heads straight for the long table and starts setting out the boxes. Two of them unroll a gigantic plastic SooperSlider banner and fasten it to the edge of the table. They go back out to their truck and return with huge trays of SooperSlider wings, onion rings, and jalapeño poppers, then start handing them out to the crowd. My mouth is watering, but with Derek standing next to me, I can’t have any.

  “Eaters!” Randolph’s voice booms from the speakers set up at each end of the long table. I see him off to the side, holding a microphone. “Take your places!”

  “We’re on,” Derek says. He grabs my arm and pulls me toward the table. Several guys, most of them enormous, are already taking their seats. I grab a seat near the middle. In front of each seat is an open box of thirty SooperSliders and a forty-ounce SooperSlurp. Randolph is talking, but I hardly hear what he’s saying — I’m too excited. I see a girl sit a couple seats down from me. That must be Ally. She’s not that big.

  A voice in my ear growls, “How’d you like them loose-meats?” It’s Hoover, grinning.

  “They were awesome,” I said. “I ate two more.”

  “That makes us almost even.” He takes the seat next to me and belches. “I ate six.”

  Randolph is still talking. “. . . new rule this year, gentlemen and lady. In honor of our late mascot, Possy, every contestant will start out with a scrumptious possum appetizer!”

  The two girls who were making the loose-meat sandwiches move down the table, presenting each of us with a small paper plate containing a chunk of spit-roasted roadkill opossum.

  “I thought this was a slider-eating contest,” I say, scowling down at the bloody, undercooked hunk of Possy flesh.

  Hoover grins at me. “Man, I love me some possum!”

  I turn to Derek, who is standing behind me. “Do I have to eat this?”

  He shrugs, looking worried as Randolph answers my question over the loudspeakers: “Time starts when I say go. Possum must be consumed before you get into the sliders. ARE YOU READY?”

  “YEAH!” yells everybody but me.

  “GO!”

  I watch with horror as Hoover shoves his hunk of possum meat into his wide mouth, chomps down twice, and swallows.

  “David! Go!” Derek yells in my ear.

  I take a deep breath and fill my mouth with possum. I can’t bear to chew it, so I force it to the back of my throat and swallow. It gets stuck. I grab my SooperSlurp and guzzle. The possum meat breaks loose, and I get it down. I take a quick look at Hoover. He’s already on his third slider.

  “Go!” Derek shouts.

  I go.

  The slowest part is the unwrapping. When I did my practice run with Derek, we unwrapped all the sliders ahead of time. I tear into my box with both hands — rip off wrapper, squeeze slider, shove, chomp, swallow. Rip-squeeze-shove-chomp-swallow. By the time I get half a dozen down I have a system for unwrapping with one hand as the other hand shoves. I peek at Hoover. With all the loose wrappers on the table it’s hard to tell, but I think he’s about five ahead of me. I try dipping the squeezed slider in my SooperSlurp cup to facilitate the slide. It helps.

  I hear, in the distance, Randolph’s amplified voice. “Two minutes!”

  “Go!” Derek yells.

  The crowd is chanting, “Hoo-VER! Hoo-VER!”

  I think I’m on number twelve when I hit the zone. The sound of the crowd fades, and Randolph’s announcements sound like the distant tweeting of a bird. The loudest sound is that of sixteen eaters chomping, gulping, gasping, and occasionally gagging. I stay in the zone. I shove them in, one after another, a continuous rope of pulverized slider from my hand to my stomach. I feel like everything is happening in slow motion. I’m afraid to look at Hoover — the sound of his eating is like the ocean in my left ear.

  Suddenly, my box of sliders is completely empty. I look around in a panic. Now what? Hoover is staring at me, aghast. There are still three unwrapped sliders in his box. Everybody is looking at me. None of the other eaters have managed to finish even half.

  I reach over to Hoover’s box, take a slider, unwrap it slowly, and take a bite.

  “Time!” Randolph yells.

  The crowd goes wild.

  People are thumping me on the back and shaking my hand. I am trying not to throw up. Randolph grabs my arm and pulls me to my feet.

  “We have a winner — the Amazing . . .” He moves the mike away from his mouth. “What’s your name, kid?”

  “David,” I manage to say.

  “The Amazing David!” He screams into the mike. “David and Goliath!”

  There is more cheering. Even Goliath — I mean, Hoover — is clapping.

  With a flourish, Randolph presents me with a small plastic card. I look at it, not understanding.

  Randolph throws his arm around me and squeezes. I almost lose it. “A TWO-HUNDRED-DOLLAR SOOPERSLIDER GIFT CARD!” he shrieks.

  More cheering.

  I am in shock. I am beyond shock.

  A gift card?

  “That was epic,” Derek says, for probably the tenth time. “Epic.”

  We are driving home in his little Toyota. I never before noticed how many bumps there are on the highway. Every time we hit a little crease in the asphalt, I can feel the jolt shivering the drum-tight walls of my stomach.

  Derek gives me a concerned look.

  “You gonna hurl?”

  I slide my butt forward on the seat to straighten out my abdomen a little.

  “I can pull over anytime,” he says.

  I shake my head and close my eyes. Bad idea. I open my eyes and swallow.

  “You okay?” Derek says.

  “Gift card,” I mutter.

  “Hey, I didn’t say it was for cash. Besides, you like SooperSliders, don’t you?”

  “I need money.”

  “Tell you what, I’ll buy the card off you.”

  He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a thick wad of bills. “I made a few side bets,” he says.

  I regard the wad of bills with mixed feelings. “How much you win?”

  “A couple hundred.”

  “Okay,” I say, and reach for the money. He pulls it back. “I didn’t say I was gonna give you all of it. Tell you what, I’ll give you fifty bucks for the card.”

  If we hadn’t been going sixty miles per hour, I’d have shoved him out of the car.

  “Forget it,” I say. Maybe I can sell it on BuyBuy.

  He shrugs and puts the money back in his pocket. “Whatever.”

  It’s almost ten by the time Derek drops me off at home. I manage to stagger from the car to the house without barfing. My mom is in the living room watching TV. Arfie is sleeping at her feet. They both look up. Mom says, “Did you see Bridgette?”

  “Nope.” I sink slowly into my dad’s recliner and stretch out. “Where’s Mal?” I ask, because we are always supposed to know where Mal is.

  “Dad took him for a drive.” Mal likes to ride in cars.

  “I won the contest,” I say.

  “Contest?”

  “At the fund-raiser. They had a SooperSlider-eating contest. I ate thirty in five minutes.”

  “David!”

  “Then I ate one more. It wasn’t that hard.”

  “David, that’s disgusting.”

  “It was, kind of.” The mass of grease and meat in my belly is churning. “But I won two hundred dollars.”

  She looks away. “You could make money doing something useful.”

  “Like what?”

>   She shakes her head, and I feel a little sicker. I lever myself out of the recliner and slowly make my way up the stairs. I can feel her eyes on my back.

  No one has bid on the Jooky dog.

  I lie on my back on my bed and watch the ceiling. There used to be a bunch of interesting cracks up there, but Dad and I plastered and painted it last fall, and now it is just an expanse of smooth off-white. It looks like mayonnaise. The world record for mayonnaise eating is four quarts in eight minutes. I close my eyes and imagine the river of pulverized slider crawling sluggishly through my digestive system.

  My situation is seriously desperate, and I’m not talking about the sliders in my gut. Sometime in the next few weeks, an envelope will arrive in the mail, and it will contain my mother’s Visa bill, and there will be a two-thousand-dollar charge from BuyBuy, and life as I know it will come to an end.

  My phone chirps.

  I sit up with a groan. It’s a text from HeyMan.

  I type in my reply.

  Two hundred dollars’ worth of SooperSliders. The thought of eating another slider produces an alarming gurgle in my upper intestine. I hit SEND, turn off my phone, and flop back on the bed. A few minutes later, I hear the front screen door slam. Dad and Mal are back. I hear Mal’s feet on the stairs. I close my eyes. My bedroom door opens. I pretend to be asleep. I know Mal is standing in the doorway. All he wants is for me to look at him and say good night, but I just can’t deal with him at the moment. Sometimes Mal feels like a huge ball and chain. Sometimes I wish he didn’t exist.

  I hear him coming closer, and I sense him standing over me. Something touches my lip. I jerk my head back and open my eyes to see Mal’s hand, offering me a single Cheerio.

  “No thank you, Mal.” I pull the covers over my head.

  A few seconds later, I hear him shuffle out of the room and close the door behind him.

  I feel terrible.

  The next morning I wake up feeling pretty good — until I remember my Jooky-dog situation. Still no bids. I go downstairs. Dad is sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading a trade magazine about refrigerators.