Losing Joe's Place Read online

  Scholastic Canada Ltd.

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  Scholastic Inc.

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  Scholastic Children’s Books

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  ISBN: 978-1-4431-2450-8

  Text copyright © 1990 Gordon Korman Enterprises Inc.

  Cover photo © Shutterstock/Dumitrescu Ciprian-Florin.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read this e-book on-screen. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher, Scholastic Canada Ltd., 604 King Street West, Toronto, Ontario M5V 1E1, Canada.

  first eBook edition September 2012

  For Megan Sarah Pekilis from The Godfather

  —GK

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  September

  One

  June

  Two

  Three

  Four

  July

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  August

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  September

  Fifteen

  About the Author

  Other books by Gordon Korman

  ONE

  Joe Cardone, twenty-two, bodybuilder, big, mad, and my brother, screeched into the driveway in his black Camaro, roared in the front door, and bellowed,

  “Where is he?”

  The “he” was me, Jason Cardone, sixteen, weakling, small, scared, and hiding in my room.

  Joe had just flown in from Europe that morning, and was ticked off enough to drive a hundred and twenty miles from Toronto to Owen Sound just to kill me. I knew he’d be coming after me, but I figured he’d spend at least a couple of days in his downtown Toronto apartment, which he loved so much, and which he had to move out of by the 30th, thanks to me.

  What fool did away with locks on bedroom doors? What good were parents if they were going to be out shopping when their child needed protection?

  Joe burst into my room like a thundering herd of buffalo. I almost swallowed the book I was pretending to read.

  “Hi, Joe. Great tan.”

  “I’ll tan you, you little jerkface! What have you done to me?”

  “Aw, Joe, I’m really sorry —”

  “Sorry?!” Joe was wearing a sleeveless shirt, and when he yelled, the veins bulged out of his arm muscles. Even his biceps had biceps. “You lost my apartment! The best deal in Toronto! And I had it! And you lost it!”

  “But Joe —”

  “Shut up!” His tan was purpling rapidly. “When I let you and your two sleazy friends live in my place for the summer, did I play nanny and come up with a whole pack of rules — ‘do this,’ ‘don’t do that’?” He slammed a hammerlike fist down on the desk, sending my model of the U.S.S. Enterprise shattering to the floor. “No! I said one thing! ‘Don’t lose me my lease!’ Was that so hard?”

  Fifty perfectly good sob stories formed in my mind. But even if I could get a word in edgewise, what would I say? It was true. Don Champion, Ferguson Peach, and I had taken over the apartment while Joe was in Europe — a position of supreme trust. We were honored that my brother would have such faith in us. And what did he get for his faith? Evicted. That’s what. It didn’t matter to Joe that it wasn’t our fault. What did he care that we were victims of circumstance? He grabbed me by the collar and the seat of my pants and frog-marched me to the telephone. “Okay, dogmeat! You call up Frick and Frack and tell them to get their dumb butts over here! I want to have a discussion about how I used to have an apartment, and I don’t have one anymore because of three idiots!”

  What could I do? I picked up the phone.…

  TWO

  Ferguson Peach leaned forward and tapped the taxi driver on the shoulder. “Pardon me, sir, but after you let us off, you should go straight to a repair shop and see about your motor supports. They’re very weak.”

  The man glared at him in the rearview mirror. “Who are you — Mr. Goodwrench? Mind your own business, kid. I’ve been a cabbie for twenty years, and there’s nothing wrong with this car.”

  Don Champion nudged me. “Is he going to do this all summer?”

  Ferguson and Don were both best friends of mine, but they weren’t really friends of each other. Now, in the cab headed for 1 Pitt Street, seemed a stupid time for me to notice it.

  “I mean, we made it!” Don continued, motioning all around us. “Downtown Toronto. Bright lights, big city, and the best summer of our lives!”

  The Peach shrugged. “We’ll be working. If we stayed in Owen Sound, we could spend our summer on the beach.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “You’d die of boredom lying on the beach, Ferguson. You can’t fix a beach.”

  “You can dredge.”

  “Joe’s the greatest guy in the world to let us move into his place this summer,” said Don. “Let’s face it, Owen Sound is okay, but we’re not babies anymore. We need to see the world.”

  Don is a pretty confident guy. Back home in Owen Sound, he’s kind of like Mr. Wonderful. He’s the best hockey player in town, and high school president two years in a row, and he dates all the greatest girls. With a record like that, who wouldn’t look forward to each new day?

  “There’s a difference between the world and the inside of a plastics factory.” If life was a picnic, Ferguson Peach was rain. And ants.

  “We’ll do a lot more than just work,” I argued. “When school starts again in September, all those other bozos who spent the summer hanging around home will be like ten-year-olds compared to us. We’ll be men!”

  Don challenged Ferguson. “If this whole thing is so lousy, why are you here?”

  Ferguson cocked an eyebrow. “Because everyone I know is going to be at Joe’s place.”

  In a way, Ferguson and Don were in perfect agreement about our summer plans. Ferguson didn’t really want to come along, and Don didn’t really want him to, either. But we needed a third to split up the rent. And, to Ferguson’s credit, he gave the most spectacular performance of any of us on the day we hit up our parents for permission to go out into the world.

  We all tackled our folks at the same hour on the same night, so that when they stopped yelling at us and went to phone each other, the lines would be busy. That’s when we could say “Well, ——’s parents are letting him go.” Because of Ferguson’s artistry, the Peaches caved in first, followed by the Champions. The Cardones, my pair, held out to the end.

  “You’re too young,” was my mother’s big argument. When I’m eighty and she’s a hundred and nine, this will still make sense to her.

  “If I trust Jason, you should, too,” said my brother Joe, who would have to find another tenant if the deal fell through. “I mean, it’s my apartment.”

  Then my mother shifted into overdrive, and by the time the dust cleared, not only was I too young, but so was Joe. And she expected him to cancel
his trip to Europe, give up his apartment, and move back home. Joe bailed out on me there, but by that time, the Peaches and the Champions had both said yes. Mom didn’t have a leg to stand on.

  Mr. Wonderful put his arm around my shoulder. “Jason, I refuse to let this guy spoil our trip. I happen to know that it is mathematically impossible for this summer to be anything but perfect.”

  Ferguson snorted. “Mathematically? How does that work?”

  Don was smug. “One, everybody knows that Joe Cardone is the coolest guy ever to come out of Owen Sound. He wouldn’t live in just any old dump, so the apartment is going to be amazing. Two — Toronto is an awesome city for young single guys. Three — my uncle’s going to treat us great in his factory, so the jobs’ll be fantastic. That’s three for a good time, zero for a bad time; we’ve already got a hat trick, and we haven’t even moved in yet.”

  As we made our way through the traffic, a very weird feeling started to take hold of my stomach. It wasn’t fear; I didn’t want to go back. I was just so pumped up about the summer that I was operating at double speed while the rest of the world was in slow motion. When the guy at the Indy 500 says, “Gentlemen, start your engines,” all the drivers at the line feel exactly like I did in that cab.

  Don was going to Toronto to have fun and, knowing him, he would have lots of it, every day. Ferguson was going mostly because of me, and Toronto wouldn’t make much difference to him. Neither would Mars. But for me this summer was the only game in town. With my overprotective parents, this was my one chance to prove I could make it on my own. Screw up, and I’d be lucky to see the light of day before I started university.

  Most parents baby their first kid, and then learn to let go with the others. My folks got it backwards. They allowed Joe a lot of independence, and when he quit college, moved to the big city, and became a bodybuilder, they said to themselves, “Mistake!” Since then, Mom and Dad have been all over me like a cheap suit. They hadn’t even let me come to Toronto to visit Joe. The fact that I was now on my way to live in his place was a major miracle.

  “You’ll be back in a week, flat broke, with your tail between your legs.” This was my father’s parting shot on the platform in Owen Sound. I knew right then that, even if I died in Toronto, my last act would be to take a magic marker and write across my chest, Do Not Return Until September 1st.

  Don and I were rubbernecking out the windows, pointing and yammering about our new town. We couldn’t wait to see Joe’s apartment, which was going to be our bachelor pad. Because we were on the alert, we couldn’t help noticing that the scenery was getting older, dingier, and more run-down. The sleek chrome and gunmetal buildings were gone, replaced by tenement houses, and the taxi’s shocks began to protest the uneven pavement.

  Don got philosophical. “It’s a good lesson for us to drive through this area right on our first day. We’re moving to the city for all its good stuff, but we should remember that it can be a pretty tough place for the poor.”

  At that instant, our taxi veered in to the curb, and the driver popped the meter, and announced, “One Pitt Street.”

  Ferguson gawked. “Oh, my God — we’re the poor!”

  I could hardly speak. “Are you — positive this is the right place? Could there be — another Pitt Street?”

  The cabbie laughed. “This is the only one there is, kid. Take it or leave it.”

  “Well, obviously there’s been some mistake,” said Don. Things always turned out great for Mr. Wonderful, so he figured that the slum we’d arrived at was just a misunderstanding. “You see, the place we’re looking for is a great apartment. Probably a big tower, lots of chrome, doorman, pool, health club — that kind of thing.”

  The driver looked disgusted. “The guy asked for 1 Pitt Street, and here it is. Are you getting out, or what?”

  We got out. And when the cab pulled away, we must have looked like three total jerks, standing on the broken sidewalk, surrounded by our stupid luggage.

  “So this is Joe’s place,” said the Peach. If sarcasm was electricity, that guy would be a power station.

  I groped for words. There was no denying that the neighborhood was a dump, consisting of beat-up row houses, pawnshops, cheap bars, empty storefronts, an abandoned furniture factory, and a large field of electrical towers that made Pitt Street into a dead end. It was awful — dull, drab, dirty, ugly. How could any living creature thrive and be happy in such a place?

  But, on the other hand, my brother Joe thought he had the greatest apartment in the world. To him, paying six hundred and eighty-five bucks a month to live here was an incredible bargain. Obviously I was missing something because I’d grown up in Owen Sound and had no concept of city life.

  I gave Ferguson and Don my best superior look. “You guys know nothing about cool. What a couple of small-town hicks. In the city, people fight to get into a great area like this. It’s where the artists and musicians hang out. Don’t you ever watch TV?”

  Mr. Wonderful scanned our surroundings with an appraiser’s eye. “I’m starting to get the hang of it. It isn’t slummy; it’s — funky.”

  “And trendy,” I added.

  But when I think back to my first view of 1 Pitt Street, the only word that comes to mind is “rattrap.” Picture three stories of crumbling red brick, peeling white paint, and the Olympiad Delicatessen. Joe had mentioned there was a deli on his street, but he’d never said he lived over it. It was the whole first floor, with a string of salamis hanging in the dusty window. There a sign read:

  BREAKFAST — LUNCH — DINNER

  PARTY TRAYS

  HUB CAPS

  It wasn’t easy, but I smiled. “The best is yet to come, guys. Let’s check it out.”

  I already had Joe’s spare keys, and I found the one that fit the outside door. As it turned out, the lock was broken. The door swung wide, and I led a somewhat reluctant Ferguson and Don into 1 Pitt Street. My plan was to rave about everything. I went on and on about how terrific ancient linoleum was. I loved the rickety stairs that were covered in so much dirt that, if someone accidentally spilled a packet of seeds, the following year he’d have geraniums. I was really impressed by the peeling wallpaper and the battered framed photograph of several old men dancing with each other.

  Ferguson couldn’t hold it in. “This building is a structural nightmare.”

  “Sure,” said Don sarcastically. “The cab was supposed to explode, too, remember?”

  Apartment 2C was directly over the deli in front, down a long, dingy hallway. I had to admit I was expecting the worst, but stepping into Joe’s place was like entering the twenty-first century.

  It was all one room, but big, and boy, had my brother ever decked it out! The place was wired for sound, with speakers all over. It was impossible to tell which ones were hooked up to the stereo, and which to the wide-screen TV and VCR. He had it all — from Nintendo to darts. At opposite ends of the room, Nerf basketball hoops were tacked to the walls. Between them was a “court,” free of rugs and furniture, complete with tip-off circle and 3-point lines.

  When you have muscles like my brother, you enjoy getting your picture taken a lot, so the decor was mostly photographs. Amid the snapshots were some of the calendars he’d posed for. Throughout his career, Joe had flexed his way through every month except April. (My birthday’s in April. I’ve searched for some kind of meaning for this, but so far no luck.)

  I threw myself onto the leather couch and sank three inches into the stuffing. Joe was right. He did have a fantastic apartment. Not what we’d expected, but definitely great. Only something didn’t seem right.

  Don put it into words. “Why’s it so dark in here?”

  We investigated. There was only one window, and it was in the bathroom. That made the living area as dim as a church, while the people on Pitt Street had a spectacular floor to ceiling view of our toilet.

  “Very amateurish,” said Ferguson, shaking his head.

  Don reddened. “Is there anything, oh expert of
the world, that you actually approve of?”

  Ferguson thought it over. “Stonehenge,” he said finally.

  “Stonehenge?”

  “It was very well designed.”

  “Joe knows how to live, but he’s such a flake,” I said. “First, he forgets to pick us up at the train station. Second, he isn’t even here to show us where we can put our stuff. Third, there’s no note, no nothing.”

  “Let’s hope he remembers to go to Europe,” put in Ferguson.

  “I mean, look at this place!” I went on, warming to the subject. “Probably $20,000 worth of electronics, and I can’t see five books. With every barbell he lifts, a few more brain cells turn into muscle!”

  We’d probably still be standing there waiting for Joe if Don hadn’t noticed that the message light on the telephone answering machine was flashing. I leaned over and hit Play.

  “Hey, Jason,” came my brother’s voice out of the speaker. “Sorry I couldn’t meet you guys, but my flight was pushed up by two days. Isn’t the place great? You guys are going to have a ball, but watch out for Plotnick, the landlord. He’s kind of funny about certain things. The car’s parked on the street just down from the deli. Here are the keys.

  “Whatever you do, DON’T lose me this lease. It’s the best deal in town. Sell your friends, but hang onto that apartment.

  “I’ll send you a postcard from London. See ya.

  “Oh, yeah — Plotnick doesn’t know all three of you are going to be living here. I told him it was just you. Fake it. Say the others are houseguests or something.”

  “Houseguests?” Don repeated. “For three months?”

  “Impossible,” said the Peach. “You can’t be a houseguest in a place with no windows. We’re caveguests.”

  All this was lost on me. My attention was fixed on the car keys lying beside the answering machine, glinting in the lone shaft of sunlight threading the needle all the way from the bathroom.

  * * *

  To go from driving my mother’s rickety station wagon to Joe’s Camaro was like being promoted directly from training wheels to the space shuttle. The Camaro was ten years old, but my brother kept it in mint condition. We seemed to glide along the road like a hovercraft. I hung my arm casually out the window, waving at everybody and anybody. The paint job was dark and lustrous — we must have looked like an aerodynamic black hole cruising down Bathurst Street.