10 The Sanderpiece

Chapter 10 The Sanderpiece The next morning me and the guys saw a sign on the boardwalk that said SAND CASTLE JUDGING TODAY! It said that a judge would be coming down the beach to choose the best sand castle. The winner would get a trip to France. "Hey, what's that?" Neil asked, pointing up at the sky. "Somebody is parasailing," I said, and I told the guys what parasailing was. "That is cool!" they all agreed. We went down to the beach. A bunch of kids were looking at Mr. Sunny's sand castle through the fence. It was amazing. It looked just like a real castle. "I must have silence as I put the finishing touches on my sanderpiece," Mr.

Sunny said. "It must be perfect so I can win the trip to France." Mr. Sunny had hooked up an electric toothbrush to his solar-powered baseball cap. He was crawling around on the ground, using the toothbrush to brush away the last tiny specks of loose sand.

"Your sand castle rocks, Mr. Sunny!" Michael said. "It's gonna blow the doors off all those other sand castles" I told him "You're sure, to win the contest." Mr. Sunny got up and stepped back from his castle. "That's it!" he announced. "Voilà! Fini!* My sanderpiece is complete!" "WOW!" everybody said, which is "MOM" upside down. I spotted Andrea down by the water, so me and the guys went over there to pester her. Pestering girls is fun. Especially Andrea. She was eating a piece of pizza and reading one of her Shakespeare books. "Are you still upset about Mr. Sunny?" I asked her. "'What's done, is done,'" Andrea said sadly. "'They do not love that do not show

their love.' 'Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.' 'Fair is foul and foul is fair.'" I didn't know that Shakespeare guy wrote about baseball. "Stop moping around," I told Andrea. "You should take my advice and pretend to drown." "Yeah," said Neil the nude kid, "it's the only way to get Mr. Sunny to notice you." "And this is the perfect time," Ryan added. "He just finished his sand castle. He's got nothing to do until the judge shows up." "But what if pretending to drown doesn't work?" Andrea asked, dabbing her eye with a tissue. "There's only one way to find out," said Michael. Andrea thought it over. Then she stood up.

"Okay," she said, handing me her book, "I'll do it!" Andrea went running out into the ocean. "Don't forget to yell 'help' and 'glub, glub,'" I hollered at her. "This is gonna be cool," said Ryan. We all watched as Andrea dived into a wave and swam out into the deep water. That's when the strangest thing in the history of the world happened. "Shark!" somebody suddenly screamed. "There's a shark out there!" We all squinted to see. Sure enough, there was a fin moving back and forth. It was on the other side of the beach from where Andrea was swimming.

"It's probably that crazy guy Mr. Granite," Michael said. "He must be swimming back to Australia." But it wasn't that crazy guy Mr. Granite. And it wasn't a kid. And it wasn't a lifeguard. And it wasn't my mom or dad or sister. You'll never believe in a million hundred years who it was. I'm not gonna tell you. Okay, okay, I'll tell you. But you have to read the next chapter, so nah-nah-nah boo-boo on you!