Belly Up by Stuart Gibbs

Author:Stuart Gibbs [Gibbs, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781416987314
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2010-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

The mascot dressing room was an architectural afterthought. FunJungle’s designers had originally envisioned an underground staging area connected to various points in the park via a network of tunnels—like Disney World had. Actors would have entered it near the employee parking lot and emerged at various points in the park as adorable animated characters. That way, they wouldn’t have to walk all the way to their posts in the hot sun, a task that could take up to fifteen minutes in a big, bulky suit. However, that was all before J.J. McCracken got the estimate for what the tunnels would cost: Five million dollars. “Screw that,” J.J. had said, and just paid for some extra dressing rooms.

If J.J. had ever entered one of those dressing rooms, however, he might have decided the tunnels weren’t such a bad idea: They would have kept the frightening assortment of people who played the mascots where guests couldn’t see them.

I’d heard that at theme parks in Florida and California, the people who played the mascots were usually young aspiring actors so desperate to break into show business that they considered dressing as a giant mouse to be a good career move. Central Texas had a dearth of such people. Our mascots had apparently been hired for two reasons: their body sizes roughly conformed to those of the animals they were playing—and they had to be inept enough at most jobs to take one that basically required them to stand still all day.

It was a group of people you’d expect to see in a police lineup, rather than a family theme park: a massive man with arms so tattooed they looked like the Sunday comics wore the bottom half of Eleanor Elephant while reading an old Guns & Ammo magazine; a lanky teenager who reeked of marijuana struggled to climb into her Gina Giraffe outfit; the scraggly man who played Uncle O-Rang had contorted wildly inside his costume so he could scratch his private parts. All of them probably should have been outside, amusing small children, but an impromptu cigarette break had been called. They all inhaled deeply, savoring their smokes, keeping an eye on the entrance in case a supervisor walked in.

Charlie Connor was smoking too. He held a huge cigar in his little green hands. “I wasn’t expecting a couple of kids,” he grunted, looking us up and down with annoyance.

We looked him up and down as well. It didn’t take too long, because he was a midget.

He was a few inches shorter than me, even though he was around forty. But his short stature wasn’t what made him look strange. It was the fact that, save for the head, he was dressed as a lizard.

“You said you know who killed Henry?” Summer asked, ignoring the crack about us being kids.

Charlie fixed her with a hard stare—until recognition suddenly dawned on him. Then he broke into a wide smile. “Wait a minute!” he said. “You’re that girl. The famous one. McCracken’s daughter.”

Before Summer could reply, everyone else turned toward her and gasped with excitement.

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