12

By the time Dean's actual birthday rolled around, I'd already broken the robot's hand and lost the gun that came with it, so I skipped the party. I've felt guilty about that ever since, and today I didn't want to cheat Dean out of a gift for the second time. So when I got to school, I asked the secretary in the front office to call Mom and see if she could pick something up for me. And she came through just in time. The teacher started handing out the Secret Holiday Buddy gifts, and I got a jar of gummy bears. Finally, there was only one present under the tree, and it was the one for Dean.

Unfortunately, Mom didn't understand that the gift was supposed to be ANONYMOUS, so it was totally embarrassing when the teacher read the card on Dean's present out loud. THIS ONE SAYS, "TO DEAN DELAROSA, FROM YOUR SECRET HOLIDAY BUDDY, GREG HEFFLEY." Dean looked like he wanted to crawl under his desk and hide, and I felt the same exact way. Saturday I always thought the only place in the world where you could get Drummies was at the Holiday Bazaar. But today me and Mom were at the grocery store, and you'll never BELIEVE what I found in the frozen food aisle.

DRUMMiES! Now I know that I can have Drummies whenever I want and that they're TOTALLY ripping us off at the Holiday Bazaar. You can buy a whole BOX at the store for what they charge for three or four individual Drummies at school. In fact, now that I could get my own Drummies, I realized I could run my OWN Holiday Bazaar. But first I had to buy up the grocery store's supply before the school beat me to it.

Other kids in my neighborhood have done this sort of thing before. Last summer Bryce Anderson and a bunch of his cronies set up a restaurant for all the neighborhood parents. I heard they pulled in almost three hundred bucks, and I know for a fact that one of Bryce's goons bought a brand-new BB gun with his share. I knew I couldn't run a Holiday Bazaar all by myself,

so I called Rowley and asked him to help out. We found some Christmas ornaments and some other stuff in my basement we could sell. But I figured if we were gonna compete with the school's Holiday Bazaar, we'd have to come up with better games than the beanbag toss and the ping-pong-ball bounce. Rowley suggested a dunk tank, but I told him I didn't think Mom would allow that in the house. Plus, we had a dunk tank when we ran a Fun Fair in Rowley's yard over the summer, and it was a DISASTER. We didn't know you were supposed to protect the guy in the dunk tank by putting him in a cage. Me and Rowley decided it would be really cool if our Holiday Bazaar had a video game arcade. We didn't

have the money to buy real arcade machines, so we got a bunch of cardboard boxes out of the basement to make homemade versions. We started off with Pac-Man because we thought it would be pretty easy to make. In Pac-Man you've got a little character who goes around eating pellets while getting chased by ghosts. In our version we were gonna have Rowley on the inside of the box operating ghosts glued to pencils, while the person who was playing the game maneuvered Pac-Man from the outside with a popsicle stick.