Dunc and Amos Hit the Big Top by Gary Paulsen

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    Dunc folded the newspaper neatly, exactly as it had been folded when it was fresh, and placed it on his desk carefully, the edge of the paper lined up with the edge of the desk. Then he rearranged his pencil holder—an old distributor cap off a car—so that the older pencils, the shorter ones, were in front and the longer new ones were in the rear …
    “Stop it!” Amos, his truly best friend for life, except for the time Dunc made Amos go hang-gliding and they got lost in a wilderness area and Amos was rich but grabbed a can of Spam instead of a bar of gold—Amos couldn’t stand it when Dunc was being neat.
    “You’ve been fiddling with that desk and stuff for hours and hours.”
    “No,” Dunc said, looking at his watch. “Altogether I spend about thirty-five seconds a day straightening my desk, and by rough calculations that thirty-five seconds saves me nearly seventy-four minutes through the day because I don’t have to hunt for things—”
    “I’m going to strangle you.”
    “—the way you have to search for things. Besides, what does it matter how much time I spend straightening my desk?”
    Amos moved to the desk and picked up the paper, jerked it open, ripped a page loose (Dunc winced at the sound of the tearing paper), and held it out to Dunc. “This is why it matters.”
    Dunc took the page of paper and scanned it. “It’s an advertisement. So what?”
    Amos looked at the ceiling, started to think of a word to say that he’d seen written on a locker in the gym, then sighed. “What is it an advertisement for?”
    Dunc shrugged. “A circus.”
    Amos shook his head. “No, Dunc—not just
a
circus. This is
the
circus. This is the annual Chamber of Commerce circus.”
    Dunc shrugged again. “Like I said, so what? A bunch of tacky costumes and bored animals and stale popcorn. We go every year, and every year it’s the same thing.”
    Amos shook his head. “Not this time. This time, if you had taken the extra moment to read the small print at the bottom of the ad, you would have found that they are going to include a special section for amateur talent.”
    Dunc nodded. “I read that. So?”
    “Man—sometimes you are so dense. So every year Melissa goes to the circus, and I have been trying to get her to notice me.”
    Dunc nodded again. Amos had long ago decided that Melissa Hansen was pretty much the cosmic center of the universe as he’d come to know it, and she pretty much didn’t think of him at all. Ever.
    “So,” Amos said. “I’ve signed up for the amateur talent night at the circus. Melissa will be sitting right down front, and there I’ll be, right out there where she can’t miss me.”
    “Amos …”
    “On the trapeze.”
    “The trapeze?”
    Amos smiled. “You bet—I need something that shows, something great. I figured the trapeze was the best way to go. I thought about lion taming, but I’m not sure they’ll let you in with the lions—you know, if you’re an amateur.”
    “Trapeze?” Dunc repeated, shaking his head slowly. “Amos, you can’t be serious.”
    “Dead serious.”
    “That might be exactly what it comes to—dead. Amos, you just got the neck brace off, or have you forgotten last week?”
    Amos rubbed his neck. “No. I haven’t forgotten.”
    “That was in the privacy of your own home, your own room—what will it be like on a trapeze?”
    Amos held up his hand. “That was a fluke.”
    “You were answering the phone and almost killed yourself.”
    Amos rolled his neck from side to side and shook his head. “That isn’t quite right. I was
trying
to answer the phone, and I had a little accident.”
    “Little accident? You totaled the house!”
    “No—it wasn’t even close to the whole house. More just the kitchen and the back porch and part of the garage and the trash cans in the alley.” He paused, remembering.
    Amos was always certain Melissa was going to call, and he always tried to get to the phone by the end of the first