Guys Read_ Funny Business_ Artemis Begins - Eoin Colfer [0]
By Eoin Colfer
A Short Story from
Guys Read: Funny Business
Volume 1 of the Guys Read Library of Great Reading
Edited by Jon Scieszka
With an illustration by Adam Rex
Contents
Cover
Title Page
ARTEMIS BEGINS
Guys E-Read
Biographies
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
ARTEMIS BEGINS
BY EOIN COLFER
I have four brothers. That’s five boys altogether all living in a small house, which is a recipe for major property damage at the very least. As kids, each of us had our assigned roles in the family, pretty much like the members of boy bands do today. Paul, the eldest, was the wise and reliable one. I was the aspiring writer, bespectacled and be-notebooked. Eamonn was the tearaway, never without a nest of twigs in his hair and a bleeding cut on his knee. Niall was the cutie-pie blond baby. But the brother with the most interesting role, as far as an aspiring writer was concerned, was brother number three: Donal. Donal was the young criminal mastermind.
Donal has always been the fixer in our house. If someone was in trouble, Donal could get them out of it, especially if the someone in trouble was himself and the trouble was of the kind visited on a little boy by his angry mother when the boy had totally smashed something he had been expressly forbidden to touch on pain of death or at the very least no TV for a week. Donal was always touching those kinds of things and often smashing them into more pieces than there were of Humpty Dumpty post–wall tumble. (What was an egg doing perched on a wall anyway? And why would all the king’s horses be so upset about one egg? It all sounds suspiciously like forced rhyming to me.) Donal’s tried-and-true method for getting out of trouble was to use the fact that our mother liked him quite a bit; in fact, it could be said that she loved him lots then and still does today in spite of all the mayhem he caused in the 1980s.
Donal callously played on this love to escape punishment. Even from a young age, his method was infallible: blink in a cute, babylike fashion and declare in a babylike voice how much he “wuves his mommy.” The key element in his whole scam was the aforementioned babylike-ishness, which cleverly transported my mother back to the day when Donal was a mere baby who could do no wrong, when the summers were longer and the music charts were full of actual songs that a person could sing along to.
And so no matter what Donal had been caught doing, he invariably got off with a mild tousling of the hair and perhaps, in extreme cases, a little finger waggling, which really ticked off the rest of us, who had to bear real punishments when we were caught doing anything wrong. But as much as we resented Donal’s untouchable status, we also admired him a little bit. After all, what mother’s son wouldn’t like to be able to gurn his way out of trouble whenever it suited him?
As Donal grew, so did his experience and the intricacies of his plans to avoid punishment. And it wasn’t long before we started turning to Donal in times of trouble to see if he could work some of his magic for us. Obviously we were prepared to pay. That went without saying. Donal was a payment-orientated kind of guy from a very early age who wouldn’t tie a toddler’s shoelace for less than a bag of gummi bears. So we went to him bearing gifts of potato chips or Wham bars or space poppers and begged him for a strategy to dig us out of the hole we were in. Once I scratched the door of Dad’s car with my bike handle. The car was only secondhand, which was the equivalent of brand-new for us, and I knew I was for the high jump. (This is a metaphor. We didn’t have an actual Olympic high jump in our garden. The official run-up track alone would have to be twenty meters long. Where do you think we lived, Buckingham Palace?) Donal took a look and gave me a bottle of Mom’s nail varnish to cover the scratch. It was a close enough match, and I was in university before dad noticed the camouflage. This little favor cost me more than candy. In payment, Donal forced me to call him by the title