The Life of the Party

Craig Moorhead is the funniest kid in Odyssey, and everybody knows it. Wherever he goes, a crowd of kids follows him around, waiting for the next joke. At Whit's End he tries out a knock-knock joke about an orange, and when his friend Freddy misses the point entirely and mixes the orange up with a banana, even John Avery Whittaker cannot keep up with how fast Craig turns one silly line into another.

Craig and his family have only lived in Odyssey for three and a half weeks. His father, Bill, has given up a good job in Columbus to open a handyman business of his own, and so far the work has been thin. About the only customer he has is Whit, whose freezer motor makes a terrible racket. When Bill hauls the motor off to his shop to fix it properly, Whit has a whole freezer of ice cream and nowhere to keep it, so he cheerfully announces that seconds, thirds, and fourths are on the house.

Stuffed with ice cream and feeling miserable, Freddy is in no mood for wisecracks. Craig keeps joking anyway, until Freddy blurts out that his parents are getting a divorce and his dad is moving out this weekend. Go ahead, he says, make a joke about that. Craig, who had no idea, is left standing there with nothing funny to say.

Things are no better at home. Craig's father is too busy with the freezer motor to listen to a knock-knock joke, and when his mother comes home from job hunting in town, the two grown-ups begin to argue. She misses their old house and her old friends and wants to move back to Columbus. Bill says fine, they will pack up the car and go. Craig shouts at them to stop and runs out of the house.

Racing away on his skateboard with his parents' words replaying in his head, Craig wipes out and scrapes himself badly. When his friends find him, all they want is another joke, and Craig finally says what has been building up inside him - that making them laugh is the only reason they keep him around, and nobody is around to make him happy. His friends leave him sitting alone.

Craig limps to Whit's End for a bandage and finds Whit and Tom Riley puzzling over a raspberry seed hiding in a scoop of orange sherbet. Tom, a farmer for twenty-seven years, insists that you get what you plant. Whit turns that into something Craig can use. Being funny is a real gift from God, and it is one good seed, but a garden planted only with raspberries gets tiresome. There are other seeds a friend can plant, too - encouragement, sympathy, trust, and, as Craig himself works out, listening when somebody wants to talk.

Then comes the best news of Craig's day. He calls home and learns that the argument was only an argument, and his family is staying in Odyssey after all. Freddy turns up at Whit's End soon after, and the two boys apologize and head off together to see a new display in the Discovery area. Craig promises to leave the jokes alone, and Freddy admits that he could use a laugh anyway - which is how the story ends, with two polar bears on motorcycles and a friendship that is finally growing more than one thing.