Welcome to Wonderland #4 Read online

  But she wasn’t happy about it.

  Dill and I slipped over to the pool, where the gurgling fountain would cover up what I was about to say.

  “Dill?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I have to ask a huge favor.”

  “Anything. After all, you saved my life at the Seawinds.”

  “Okay. I need you to take a dive.”

  “In the pool? Right now? I thought we were playing Frolf….”

  “It’s an expression. It means you throw the game. You lose on purpose.”

  “Why?”

  “So Geoffrey leaves happy.”

  “Is he sad?”

  “Not right now. But I think he will be if he loses.”

  “You’re probably right. He seems supercompetitive. Me? If I have fun, then I’ve won.”

  I clapped him on the shoulder. “Good attitude.”

  “Thanks. And don’t worry. I’ll make it look like I was really trying to win.”

  “Thanks, Dill.”

  We headed back to the tee box.

  Gloria shot first. Her disc twirled about ten feet and died in the sand.

  Dill went next.

  He did something with his follow-through that made the Frisbee hang in the air, where a breeze sent it sailing sideways.

  “Oh, man,” he moaned. “That wind came out of nowhere!”

  “Better luck next time,” said Geoffrey with an evil grin. “Oh, there is no next time. This is the final hole.”

  He let his disc fly.

  It whirled like a ninja star, banged the pole, rattled the chains, and fell into the basket.

  “Nailed it!” Geoffrey shouted. “Another hole in one!”

  “Wow,” I said through a forced smile. “You won. Congratulations, Geoffrey.”

  “Losers!” He ran off to tell his mother about his triumph.

  Dill shook my hand. “Thanks for another awesome afternoon, P.T.! You too, Gloria. I’m going to go buy a ton of souvenirs so I can always remember just how much fun I had playing Frolf with you guys!”

  He took off.

  It was just me and Gloria, standing at the end of the zip line, not saying a word.

  Finally, Gloria shook her head.

  “I am so disappointed in you, Phineas Taylor Wilkie. Dill deserved to win. Or at least have a chance at winning.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “But it’s best for the motel. Geoffrey’s mom’s a judge. A judge and our mystery shopper!”

  “You don’t know that for certain.”

  “No. But I have a pretty strong hunch.”

  * * *

  Turned out my hunch had been a good one.

  Bright and early the next morning, Mom got a call from the magazine people.

  We’d won the first round.

  We were voted the top family activity attraction on St. Pete Beach. We’d beaten the Fun Castle, the Seawinds, and everybody else, including Mr. Frumpkes and Captain Sharktooth’s Pirate Cruise.

  When we heard the news, Grandpa took us into his workshop to show us four square inches of dusty, uncluttered shelf space.

  “That’s the spot! Right there is where I’ve always planned on putting whatever trophy I won when I beat Disney. Thanks to you two, I’m getting closer to filling it!”

  It was on to Tampa and the regionals!

  And if I had anything to do with it, we were going to win that round for Grandpa, too. He was finally, after forty-some years, going to bring home a trophy for that empty spot on his shelf.

  That morning, the TripsterTipster website listed all the attractions moving on to the Tampa Bay regional round of the competition.

  My jaw dropped. It does that sometimes when I’m surprised.

  Something called the Super Fun Castle was in the regionals, too.

  “I thought we already beat those guys!” I said as Gloria and I stared at the list.

  “The Super is their Tampa location,” said Gloria.

  “Fine,” I said. “We beat them once, we can beat them again.”

  Gloria clacked a couple of keys on the computer in our business center, which is what we call the table with the coffeepot and the napkin-lined basket of doughnuts and assorted Danishes. She brought up the Web page for the Super Fun Castle in Tampa.

  “It’s their biggest and ‘most funtastic’ location,” she said, reading the banner headline flashing on the screen.

  “We need to see it,” I said. “Figure out how to beat them.”

  Since we were still on vacation from school, Grandpa drove Gloria, me, and Dill (whose parents weren’t really into the whole “Honey, let’s entertain the kids” thing) to Tampa in his pickup truck to check out our new competition.

  It was the Fun Castle mother ship.

  They had dancing fountains, an actual castle, an indoor Mega Mini golf course, and an outdoor one, too! Their dinosaur, which was a thirty-foot-tall T. rex, roared and swung its tail across the putting green so you had to time your shot perfectly to put it into play—just like the windmill hole on our Stinky Beard course. That’s right. They had a screeching, tail-thrashing, tiny-arm-wiggling T. rex. We had a windmill.

  They also had a roller coaster.

  “I’m not impressed,” said Grandpa. “That dinosaur looks too new and shiny. How can it be prehistoric if it’s shiny? And a roller coaster? This is Florida, not Coney Island!”

  “Come on, let’s go inside,” suggested Gloria. “Examine the full scope of their amusement offerings. Search for any weaknesses.”

  “That dinosaur looks pretty weak,” said Grandpa. “See how tiny his arms are? Couldn’t even pick up a bucket of chicken.”

  We passed another one of those Sir Laughsalot alligator guys working the parking lot.

  “Here’s a tip, son!” Grandpa said to the guy in the costume. “Alligators don’t dance!”

  “Except in that Walt Disney movie Fantasia,” said Dill.

  “Disney,” hissed Grandpa. Then he started shaking his fist at the guy in the alligator suit. “Go back to Orlando, buddy! This is Tampa Bay! We don’t like dancing alligators, talking ducks, or singing bears!”

  A motion sensor made the Super Fun Castle’s tinted glass doors magically whoosh open.

  “Hey, ho, kiddos,” chirped a cheery guy in khaki shorts and a polo shirt.

  Well, he was cheery until his eyes adjusted to the blast of sunlight and he realized who we were.

  I recognized him, too.

  It was the funmeister we had just defeated on St. Pete Beach.

  Bradley.

  “Oh,” said Bradley, dropping his whole chipper-dipper act. “It’s you. Defeat me once, shame on you. Defeat me twice, won’t get defeated again.”

  “What?” said Gloria. “That makes absolutely no sense.”

  “I think what you meant to say—” Dill started, but Bradley cut him off.

  “Doesn’t matter. You motel maggots got lucky on St. Pete Beach. This round? You’re going down!”

  “You like to rhyme a lot, don’t you?” I said.

  Bradley grinned on one side of his face—the way dogs do right before they snarl. “What I like to do is win. That’s why I put in for a transfer. This is my new B.O.”

  “You have B.O.?” said Grandpa. “In my day, we didn’t brag about such things. We used deodorant, too!”

  “B.O. means ‘base of operations,’ old man! They bumped me up to head funmeister here at H.Q. And I’ve got all sorts of new ideas. Winning ideas.”

  Bradley glared at Grandpa hard. “I know how to beat you, old-timer. You wanna know why?”

  “Not particularly…”

  “Because I’m a professional winner. Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing. You? You’re a dinosaur.”

  “And you’re
a bully!” I snapped.

  “Aw. Are you going to melt, little snowflake?”

  “P.T.’s not a snowflake,” said Grandpa. “We don’t have those in Florida. We have snowbirds.”

  I think Grandpa wanted to punch Bradley as much as I did, but Gloria suggested we all go home.

  We didn’t even check out their double Mega Mini golf courses.

  Or the laser tag maze.

  Or the flight simulator, even though that probably would’ve been fun. We could’ve practiced crashing and burning, which was what we were going to do in the regionals if we didn’t totally up our game.

  “Cheer up, kiddos,” said Grandpa as we crossed the causeway to St. Pete Beach. “We’ll swing by Laurette’s office. See how our stocks are doing today. Maybe if we’re up enough, we can cash out and use the money to build our own laser tag maze thingy inside a flight simulator.”

  “That would be neat, sir,” said Dill. “Like being inside a Star Wars movie.”

  “Exactly! It’ll go with my whole rocket ship theme room. Now, I have a few friends at the airport. I’m guessing they have a spare flight simulator or two lying around. And lasers? Easy-peasy. We’ll buy some of those red-dot pointers cats love. You put the two together, line the cockpit with glow-in-the-dark stars, and—bing, bang, boom—we’ve got a brand-new attraction: Lasers in Outer Space!”

  We pulled into the strip mall on Gulf Boulevard where Ms. Oldewurtel had her offices.

  The receptionist told us to take a seat and wait.

  “Wait?” said Grandpa. He jokingly jutted out a thumb at Gloria. “This is Gloria Ortega. The wizard of Wall Street. The sage of St. Pete Beach.”

  That was when Ms. Oldewurtel came out of her office, looking frazzled.

  “Is something wrong?” asked Gloria.

  Ms. Oldewurtel nodded. “We need to talk.”

  “Have we peaked?”

  “No, Gloria. We’ve tanked.”

  “It’s my fault,” said Gloria as we all climbed back into Grandpa’s sweltering hot truck and crawled down Gulf Boulevard for home.

  He believes in the old-fashioned kind of air-conditioning for cars—the kind where you crank open all the windows. It’s like riding around in the dryer, except your clothes are all wet and sticking to your back.

  “I wasn’t watching CNBC like I should’ve been!” Gloria continued. “I wasn’t tracking the minute-by-minute trades. I was too busy helping set up the Frolf tournament.”

  “Well, that was important, too,” I said, sounding semi-defensive.

  “And extremely fun,” added Dill.

  “What goes down must come back up!” said Grandpa, trying to buck us up. “Unless there’s a problem with the elevator. I had that happen once. Had to hike down twenty flights of stairs….”

  Gloria and Grandpa’s stock portfolio wasn’t completely wiped out. It was just worth about one tenth of what it had been three days earlier. That edible-eraser company was being sued by the parents of a kindergartner who had gagged on her chocolate-flavored kitty-cat pencil topper. The girl’s father was a lawyer, the kind that does TV commercials about suing people when you slip on a grape at the grocery store.

  No way were we building Grandpa’s Lasers in Outer Space attraction anytime soon. And there would be no new theme rooms for the regional round, even though Grandpa had big ideas for a Jungle Room, complete with roaring cabinets, and one he called the Bermuda Triangle, where “your socks are guaranteed to get lost.”

  When we hit the motel, Grandpa headed off to his workshop to fix himself a bologna and mustard sandwich with extra pickles.

  “Extra pickles always help me think better,” he said.

  Dill went to his room to check in with his parents.

  Gloria and I stepped into the lobby and savored the sweet, sweet air-conditioned air. Seriously. If it weren’t for air-conditioning, everybody’s clothes would turn into moist, mildewed towels—the soggy kind you find on the floor of a motel bathroom.

  Mr. Ortega was at the front desk, showing Mom his phone.

  “What’s going on, Dad?” asked Gloria.

  “Biff Billington just texted me a copy of what he claims will be his ESPN audition tape.”

  “He did a very cute interview with the Phillie Phanatic,” said Mom.

  Mr. Ortega winced a little.

  “I’m sorry, Manny,” said Mom, “but it’s true. It’s cute.”

  “I know,” said Mr. Ortega, taking in a deep steadying breath. “Funny and heartwarming at the same time.”

  “Heartwarming?” said Gloria.

  “The googly-eyed, funnel-nosed, green-feathered freak doesn’t even talk!” I added.

  “True,” said Mr. Ortega. “But, oh, what a sad and woeful tale his silence can tell. Especially with weepy violins on the soundtrack.”

  Mr. Ortega showed us the video on his phone screen.

  “Biff Billington is punking you,” I said. “No way is that his real audition.”

  Mr. Ortega thought about that for a second. I could tell he was thinking because he arched his left eyebrow.

  “You might be right, P.T. Why else would he show me his hand?”

  “He’s trying to defeat you by getting you to do something equally ridiculous. Don’t fall for it. Do like Gloria says: knit up your stockings!”

  “Actually,” said Gloria, “the expression is ‘stick to your knitting.’ ”

  “Sorry. My bad. But seriously, Mr. O, you should do that story with the teenaged golf prodigy. Johnny Zeng.”

  “He’s definitely interested,” said Mr. Ortega. “I was finally able to talk to his parents. They are quite protective of their son’s privacy.”

  “Of course they are!” I said, snapping my fingers, because I was having one of my patented P. T. Wilkie brainstorms. “You see, more than anything, Johnny Zeng wants to be a regular sixteen-year-old kid. He wants to play video games, eat cheeseburgers, and go to the prom. Golf is his gift, but it’s also his curse.”

  “Oooh,” said Mr. Ortega. “I like this.”

  “I told you he was good at developing a backstory,” said Gloria proudly.

  It was time for my big finish, the most important part of any story, because that’s all anybody’s really interested in: what happens in the end?

  “And what could be more ‘regular kid’ than playing a fun, frivolous, and surprisingly frustrating game known as Frolf?”

  “Huh?” said Mr. Ortega, because I’d kind of lost him.

  “Frolf! Frisbee golf. Shoot your boy wonder competing in the Wonderland Open Tournament.”

  “And when’s that?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. Whenever the judges decide to come back.”

  “Sunday,” said Mom. “Sorry. Forgot to tell you guys. The magazine people called. They’ll be back here in three and a half days.”

  Just like that, we had our gimmick.

  That was a good thing, because we didn’t have time or money to build a new attraction.

  The Super Fun Castle might have had the technological edge and the cooler things for kids to do and a T. rex and a flight simulator and a laser tag maze and a roller coaster, but we were offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: a chance to play Frolf with the one and only Johnny Zeng.

  “We’re gonna win Grandpa that trophy!” I said, ready for a “booyah” from Gloria.

  Gloria didn’t give me one.

  “Slight problem,” she said. We were hanging out in the front room of the suite where Mom and I live. The TV was on, but I’d muted the sound. Gloria and I had too much to plot and plan. We didn’t need distractions. Unless a Shark Tank rerun came on. We love us some Shark Tank.

  “Johnny Zeng could give us some very snackable content,” said Gloria, “but right now, only Dad and some sports geeks at ESPN really know who
this child prodigy with a putter is. Plus, we don’t know what he looks like. Neither does Dad. There are zero images of him on the Internet. His parents have done an excellent job protecting his privacy.”

  “So we need to build him up,” I told her. “Turn the mysterious Johnny Zeng into a star. They do it on TV all the time. Especially reality TV. What did the real housewives of wherever actually do to become TV stars? Nothing. They just had to be real. Sort of.”

  “We’ll need an intensive social networking campaign. Twitter. Facebook. Instagram. Snapchat.”

  “Definitely.”

  Suddenly, something on the TV screen caught my eye.

  A commercial for Tampa’s Super Fun Castle. A spiraling starburst promised “Super Big News.”

  And there was Bradley, twirling a Frisbee on his index finger.

  I grabbed the remote and pumped up the volume.

  “Hey, ho, kiddos. Are you ready for some serious fun? Because the Super Fun Castle is proud to introduce the Tampa Bay area’s first and only Professional Disc Golf Association–approved Mega Mini Frolf course. And the pros from the PDGA already agree: it’s the most challenging disc golf course in the Tampa Bay area. Everything else is just for amateurs and fly-by-night flingers.”

  “So,” said Bradley, wrapping up his spiel, “if you’re looking for some serious fun in the sun, and not just some rinky-dink disc tossing around the grounds of an antique motel, storm the Super Fun Castle, home of Tampa Bay’s top-rated PDGA Frolf course!”

  Bradley had totally ripped us off and stolen our Frolf idea!

  And then he’d done something worse.

  He had made it better.

  The Super Fun Castle wasn’t our only competition.

  Snarlin’ Garland’s Alligator Alley, a go-kart racetrack in Sarasota, was the third finalist in the Tampa Bay regional competition.

  There would be no mystery shoppers this time. Those scores would carry over from the first round. The panel of judges would visit the Tampa branch of the Fun Castle chain on Friday, Snarlin’ Garland’s Alligator Alley on Saturday, and the Wonderland on Sunday.