Golden Boy
(The Midas Jump Start)
Chapter One
Brandon LeRoy Golden was not a tough kid. In point of fact, he was actually kind of a soft kid. Not soft as in “wishy-washy” or “too nice”—nobody would ever have said that Brandon was too nice.
Brandon was medium tall for his age, had an average sort of body and used his moderately smart brain just about half the time. He was medium spoiled in a middle-sized family that only paid a mediocre amount of allowance. In short, everything about Brandon was just kind of unremarkable.
And he hated that.
Brandon had great ideas. Great visions of what he wanted out of life. And in none of these visions was he unremarkable.
Which is why, when the school district got sick of coming in last at State Everything each year and decided to start a district wide sixth grade wrestling program, Brandon was the first kid to sign up for it.
Not that he knew anything about real wrestling. But he had a couple of very impressive WWF action figures, and there was obviously nothing in the least medium about either one of them. Besides, Mr. Sumoski, Brandon’s Favorite Teacher of All Time, was picked to be the wrestling coach for his school. And that was cool, because now everybody was calling the team “Sumo’s wrestlers.”
All shapes of kids made the final cut for the team: fat kids, skinny kids, and even, luckily for Brandon, medium kids. And every kid who got chosen to be on the team became an instant celebrity. That was the thing Brandon really liked about being a wrestler. What he didn’t particularly like about it was. . . the wrestling.
First of all, it was really kind of weird, grabbing people and rolling around on the mat and getting other people’s knees shoved up your nostrils. And then there was the work factor: practice was no walk in the park. If he’d had any clue how much work it was going to be, Brandon might have thought twice about signing his life away.
“You’re going to be finding muscles you never knew you had,” Mr. Sumoski told them at the beginning. And since Brandon had never done a whole lot of thinking about muscles, that meant he had an awful lot of them to find. It was three days after the first practice before Brandon could walk without looking like an arthritic stork. After the second practice, two days. And he wasn’t the only person suffering. Almost the whole team was complaining about it.
“I’ll make you into men,” Mr. Sumoski declared.
“You’ll make us into pretzels,” Brandon grunted, and everybody, including Mr. Sumoski, had started to laugh. This was one of the things that was so great about Mr. Sumoski; he could laugh at a good joke even though he was a serious teacher.
One of the bad things about him was that he expected the team to wear actual wrestling uniforms. At first, the idea of wearing a uniform had been very appealing. Brandon could see himself wearing the school colors—green and purple—with his name on his back in big gold letters. “Golden” written in gold—that had a nice ring to it. He’d had visions of himself just sort of casually wearing the uniform around, thereby inciting envy in the hearts of all the kids who hadn’t made the team. But this was before he actually saw the uniforms.
The truth is, the uniforms were embarrassing. They were so tight, trying to get yourself into one of them was like trying to pull on new skin. And once you finally got the suit on, you suddenly felt this fierce urge to go find something to stand behind.
Plus, the uniforms were green. Very green. Half the suited-up guys ended up looking like fat frogs, while the other half looked like green carrots. And there were these suspender parts that were supposed to hold up the skin tight bottoms, but really ended up pulling a kid’s shoulders down so far, almost every kid’s chest ended up looking totally deflated.
There was only one kid on the whole team who didn’t look like an idiot in the uniform, and that was Jason Mason. Jason Mason was the coolest kid in the entire sixth grade. Jason Mason was the only son of Maynard Mason, the man who built CoziCorner Estates and made a million dollars in three years. Jason was the fastest runner, had the coolest skateboard and the best balance of anybody in the sixth or seventh grade. The truth is, Jason Mason had everything any kid would ever want—and more: all the girls thought he was cute. But Jason Mason wasn’t interested in what girls thought. He was just interested in winning.
Brandon was also interested in winning. But stuffed into that uniform, watching Jason parade around showing off muscles you could actually see without squinting, Brandon knew he was going to need a miracle.