Scurvy Goonda Read Online Free Page B

himself in the mirror, using his dagger to pick bits of bacon out of his teeth.
    “You messed me up pretty good, Scurv,” said Ted.
    “A lad needs scars.”
    Then came a pounding at the bathroom door and the sound of Jed shouting on the other side:
    “Get back to work, Merritt! Whatever you’re doing in there, you can do on your break!”
    “Sorry, sorry.”
    Ted opened the door. Jed stood right in front of him. The night manager’s eyes flicked from the bruises on Ted’s arms to the raspberry on his forehead.
    “Man, somebody beat the
crud
out of you,” said Jed. “Kinda wish I had seen that.”
    “I just fell off my bike,” said Ted.
    “Guess that makes more sense. If you got into an actual fight, you’d probably be dead.”
    “I get into fights all the time.”
    “Oh, I’m sure you and your pirate pal are quite the dynamic duo.”
    “Give me three minutes and I’ll turn him into chum,” whispered Scurvy, poking the night manager’s voice box with the tip of his dagger. “We’ll fish for marlin with the scraps.”
    “Get back to work, Merritt,” said Jed.
    Ted knew that other kids were spending their vacations driving around in Jeeps with cute girls, or teaching tennis to the children of summer people for thirty dollars an hour, or sitting in lifeguard chairs and blowing their whistles at the bronzed and the bikinied. He wondered if his job would be more fun if he had the chance to blow a whistle every now and then. It would definitely be more fun if there were more bikinis around the Stop to Shop.
    All of a sudden, Scurvy smacked him across the face.
    “Snap out of it!” said Scurvy. “You only need tah do this job fer three months!”
    “Don’t hit me!” said Ted.
    He grabbed a liverwurst pack and used it to cuff Scurvy on the ear.
    “How do you like it when I smack
you
?” said Ted.
    Ted stomped on Scurvy’s tricorne hat, grinding it into the freshly waxed supermarket floor.
    “And see that?
That’s
for knocking me off my bike!”
    “ME HAT!”
Scurvy roared. He struck back by putting his head down and ramming it into Ted’s chest, bull-rushing him into the next aisle, where they scraped and clawed each other into a tank of lobsters that crashed to the floor with a terrific explosion that sent water gushing and crustaceans scurrying toward the dairy section. Ted grabbed Scurvy’s beard and wrapped it around his neck, but with a quick flip Ted was on his back and Scurvy was sitting on his chest.
    “For tha past
three hundred and twenty-five years,”
said Scurvy, breathing hard, “that
hat
has been through wars and battles and monsoons without losing its fine, handcrafted
shape!
Which ya’ve now
ruined!”
    “It serves you ri—” said Ted, but he never finished his sentence. Over Scurvy’s shoulder he could see Carolina Waltz and the rest of the popular girls. They were all laughing at him.
    “What are you DOING?” said Carolina.
    “Oh. Hi, Carolina,” said Ted.
    “God,
that’s
what its voice sounds like?” said Carolina’s friend Bridget Skoke, which Ted thought was an awful name. “I didn’t know it could
talk!”
    “I’m not an
it,”
said Ted.
    “Maybe that’s his
pirate
voice,” said Carolina.
    “It’s my normal voice,” said Ted, who didn’t think there was anything weird about the way he spoke.
    “He talked
again!
He sounds so
weird!”
said another of Carolina’s awful friends.
    Sprawled on his back, Ted could see new girls continually popping into his sightline—he imagined girls piling up throughout the supermarket, clawing over cereal boxes and packets of toilet tissue, just to see him on the ground, looking stupid.
    “You are so
weird
, Ed,” said Carolina.
    “My name is Ted.”
    “Little Teddy!”
    “Carolina has a teddy!”
    “That’s not a teddy, that’s
underwear!”
    Then a booming voice drowned out all the other voices. “Merritt!” shouted Jed.
    With that, Ted knew he had been fired from his summer job. He also knew that