Jake the Fake Goes for Laughs Read online

  Also by Craig Robinson, Adam Mansbach, and Keith Knight

  Jake the Fake Keeps It Real

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Craig Robinson and Adam Mansbach

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2019 by Keith Knight

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Crown and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  Trade Paperback ISBN 9780553523553 — Ebook ISBN 9780553523577

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v5.4

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Craig Robinson, Adam Mansbach, and Keith Knight

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  About the Authors

  About the Illustrator

  Jake the Fake Presents: The Greatest Fakes in History (100% Real!)

  This book is dedicated to my family, who keeps me strong; my fans, who continue to lift me up; my incredibly talented nieces and nephews, who will soon capture your hearts; and all the readers, who disappear deeper and deeper into the world they are discovering with every page they turn.

  —C.R.

  For Zanthe

  —A.M.

  To my little nephew, R.J.!

  Read on, neff! Read on!

  —K.K.

  It’s a good thing that the end-of-semester talent show at Music and Art Academy is followed by the end of the semester. First there was the stress of wondering how I was going to pull off playing the only song I could really play on the piano without being discovered as the fake I was. Then came the excitement of spontaneously figuring out onstage that, while I was a fake as a musician, I was actually a natural at comedy.

  I needed a break.

  A chance to reevaluate my life, preferably while lying on a beach and drinking something with a miniature umbrella sticking out of it.

  I got my wish in the form of a one-week family vacation to the Florida Keys.

  Although it wasn’t quite as relaxing as I would have liked because:

  a) Florida is one of the weirdest places in the world. It’s basically a swamp, but people decided to live there anyway, even though there are insects the size of Volkswagen Beetles and some of them have been elected to public office.

  Also, the hot swampy weather seems to make people go bat-guano insane and do really deranged things. I even found a website devoted to this phenomenon, called FloridaOrGermany.com, where they tell you about all these nutty and super-disturbing news items and you have to guess whether they happened in Florida or Germany. Like, “man running across freeway holding bucket of worms attacked by man running across freeway holding bucket of fishing rods” or “city water commissioner found guilty of pooping in reservoir.”

  I got pretty good at guessing, actually. As a general rule, the ones that seem like they’re probably caused by extreme sunstroke are Florida, and the ones that are so creepy they’re beyond anything sunstroke could ever make you do are Germany.

  b) Reading up on all the Florida weirdness made me jumpy and suspicious, so that even when we were just sitting at a restaurant or lying on the beach, I kept looking at everybody—the waiter, the guys riding on super-loud WaveRunners, the other vacationing families—and expecting them to start acting like lunatics. Which never actually happened.

  I did get to swim a lot and eat some excellent seafood, including lots of local dolphin, which is a fish, not a smarter-than-us, able-to-read-at-an-eighth-grade-level mammal, and if you are asking yourself why Floridians have chosen to name their sandwich fish the same name as the most beloved aquatic creature of all time, then you have not been paying attention to what I’ve been saying about Florida.

  I’m actually surprised they didn’t also have a dish called human eyeballs that is actually a green salad, or a dish called mountain of puke that is actually french fries.

  But the main thing that prevented Florida from being relaxing was:

  c) my big sister Lisa’s decision, on the first day of the trip, to tell my parents that her thoughts about college were “evolving.”

  Lisa is a senior at Music and Art Academy, but not just a senior. She is more like a magical creature who floats on a cloud of pixie dust and barfs cotton candy and pees sparkling streams of delicious strawberry elixir.

  She would be voted Most Likely to Succeed if M&AA did stuff like vote people most likely to succeed. Lisa can sing better than anybody you are likely to hear on the radio, and she is one of those people who, if you saw her wearing a snot-covered raincoat and shoes on her hands, your first thought would be “Oh, I guess snot-covered raincoats and shoes on your hands must be in fashion now.” Plus, she is generally good-natured and never intentionally lords her perfection over anybody, even me. But it is still mega-annoying, since if there is anything I’m not, it’s a perfect unicorn-like being who is good at everything. I’m more like the unicorn’s comic-relief sidekick, Stinky the Pig.

  Naturally, Lisa got a full scholarship to the college of her choice. In fact, colleges she hadn’t even applied to sent her admission letters and boxes full of cash and puppies.

  Not really. But you get the idea.

  So there we were, me and my parents and Lisa, chillaxing on a serene beach and staring out at water so blue it was almost fluorescent, and out of nowhere Lisa opened her mouth and said, “I’ve been thinking. College will always be there. But it just kind of feels like now is the time to really go for it, as far as making the whole band thing work. So I think I’m gonna defer my acceptance for a year.”

  I wasn’t even a part of this discussion, and I could feel my throat closing up like I’d been poisoned. There was a pause approximately as long as the Ice Age and twice as cold, and then my dad said, in a very slow and fake-patient voice, “What band, Lisa?”

  She took off her sunglasses and scrunched up her eyebrows at him, like she couldn’t believe he’d ask her something so insulting. Which wasn’t really fair, since as far as I knew, the band she was talking about was only a couple of weeks old, and I only knew about it because they practiced in our basement, which meant I couldn’t play video games there.

  “My conceptual art band, Daddy,” Lisa said.

  “I was not aware that you had a conceptual art band,” my mother said in a voice you could scrape frost off.

  Lisa nodded enthusiastically. Either she didn’t notice Mom’s tone or, more likely, she was doing a brilliant
pretending-not-to-notice-Mom’s-tone impression.

  “Totally,” she said. “It’s called Conceptual Art Band.”

  “How conceptual,” my dad said.

  “Right?” said Lisa, like she was pumped that he got it. “It’s me and Pierre.”

  Pierre is Lisa’s boyfriend of the past two years. He’s also a senior at M&AA, where he mostly paints gigantic mauve canvases that I don’t personally like but other people seem very enthusiastic about.

  Before that, he was into ceramics, and before that, beatboxing, tap dancing, miming, tuba, and ceramics again. Lately, he’s been talking about taking up interpretive water ballet. But apparently Conceptual Art Band was the biggest deal of all.

  “Pierre and me,” my mother corrected Lisa, which seemed a little beside the point to me, but I busted in with a joke anyway.

  “You’re in the band, too, Mom?”

  That got me a look of Butt out, Jake. So I did.

  “Why can’t you go to college and be in a band?” my dad asked. “I’m pretty sure it’s been done before. Maybe you’ve even heard the expression ‘college band.’ ” My dad tends to get sarcastic when he’s stressed.

  “I know,” said Lisa. “But that’s just it. We’re not a college band. We’re a conceptual art band. And if I’m going to make it work, I need to focus. College would be a distraction.”

  That left my parents pretty much speechless.

  “Just for a year,” Lisa said in what I guess was supposed to be a reassuring voice. “I’ll still go to college. Unless Conceptual Art Band gets huge.”

  “We’ll talk about this later,” my mom said in a voice that sounded like it had been clipped by garden shears. But she and my dad both know that when Lisa sets her mind to something, she’s like a pit bull clamping its jaws around a bone—she doesn’t let go or get distracted, and you can’t convince her to give it up. But those were the exact qualities that had made her so successful and perfect up until now, and I knew my parents weren’t sure what to do, because as much as they wanted their kid to go to college, just like all parents want all kids to go to college, they also knew that letting Lisa do what Lisa was passionate about had pretty much worked out so far. Plus, maybe they weren’t sure they could force her to go to college even if they tried.

  The only good thing about Lisa’s announcement was that it took the attention off me and my new thing of doing comedy, which I was getting kind of nervous about. On one hand, it was exciting to have found something I seemed to be good at and maybe even enjoyed. On the other, I didn’t have any idea what to do next. I’d just opened my mouth and jokes had come out, but I couldn’t keep doing that indefinitely.

  I had to figure out what comedy really was and stuff, like when Luke Skywalker goes to the remote system of Dagobah to learn the ways of the Force from the ancient Jedi Master Yoda or whatever.

  I worried about it for a couple of days, while Mom and Dad and Lisa discussed college and dreams and responsibilities and it became clear that Mom and Dad were not going to win. Then I decided to stop turning a good thing into a bad thing and put it out of my mind until I was back in school. After all, this was vacation. So instead, I worried about whether to go parasailing with Lisa, and specifically whether I might fall out of the harness and break my legs hitting the water and then get ripped apart by sharks. None of which ended up happening. Hooray.

  “I never thought I’d be excited to go back to school,” I told my best friend, Evan. It was Sunday night, and I’d just returned from Florida, and we were in my basement, playing a new game we’d invented. It was called sockball, and the goal was to throw a balled-up pair of socks across the room and hit the other person. Five points for the head, three for the chest, one for arms and legs. You weren’t allowed to move out of the way.

  It was strangely relaxing, and you could talk while you played. The score was 243 to 211. I was getting creamed, which is what usually happened when I played anything with Evan.

  “Right,” said Evan, whipping the sockball and hitting me square in the nose. “Because you’re a star now.”

  “I’m not a star.” I threw the sockball back, aiming for the head and grazing Evan’s shoulder. “I’m lucky I didn’t totally bomb and get kicked out. But even doing one of Mr. Allen’s crazy assignments is better than listening to Lisa and my parents have the same argument for seven straight days.”

  Evan threw, and the sockball bopped me in the neck.

  “What’s neck?” he asked.

  “How about four?”

  “Okay.”

  “That reminds me,” I said. “Lisa and Pierre want us to be in some video after school tomorrow. For a song called ‘The Ballad of the Duck-Billed Platypus.’ ”

  Evan shrugged. “I got nothing better to do.” Then he pegged me right in the face.

  * * *

  •••

  Usually I take the bus to school because I have to be there at eight a.m. sharp, whereas Lisa gets picked up by Pierre at like ten-thirty because seniors can make their own schedules and avoid early classes. But since it was the first day of the semester, we all had to show up early. So I snagged a ride.

  Pierre’s car is like the universe before the Big Bang, when all the matter in existence was crammed into one tiny, super-dense dot. Or, in this case, one medium-size van.

  “What’s up, Obi-Wan Ken-bro-be?” he said as he opened the passenger door for Lisa like some chivalrous knight of the Middle Ages, except that when he did it a soda can and two chicken bones fell out onto the street, and Lisa had to pick them up daintily with two fingers and toss them back into the car.

  “Not much, Shoeless Bro Jackson,” I said, clambering into the backseat. I pushed aside a rubber chicken, a paint-encrusted paintbrush, and a giant, almost-empty movie theater popcorn tub, and put on my seat belt.

  “I ran into Mr. Allen over the break,” Pierre said as we cruised down the block. “He’s psyched about your comedy thing, little dude.”

  “He said that?”

  “Uh-huh. I was at a yard sale, looking for costume stuff for the video, and there he was, going through old record albums.

  “He pulled out a bunch of comedy ones, like old Steve Martin stuff, and said he was gonna tape them for you.”

  I started to get a sinking feeling in my stomach, like I had swallowed a ten-pound barbell. The last thing I needed was the added pressure of Mr. Allen deciding to get personally involved in my “career.”

  Without thinking, I reached into the tub of popcorn and grabbed a handful and shoved it into my mouth.

  It tasted like it was six months old. I spat it back into the tub.

  “Tape them?” I said. “Why, were the covers splitting apart or something?”

  Then it hit me: he meant “tape” as in record onto cassette tape. That was Mr. Allen for you: buying music on one obsolete medium and transferring it to another obsolete medium. Where was I going to get a cassette player? An old folks’ home?

  Lisa turned around and smiled at me. “Sounds like he’s expecting big things, inorganic compound Chromium Bro-mide.”

  “With big expectations come big disappointments,” I told her.

  “Sounds like loser talk,” Lisa replied.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “It does, doesn’t it?”

  “Don’t worry,” Pierre said. “When Conceptual Art Band blows up, you can drop out of school and be our roadie. I mean, our bro-die.”

  I was opening my mouth to say a nice sarcastic Thanks a lot, Bro-ce Springsteen, but just then Pierre turned on the radio and some classical violin piece blared out of the speakers at a volume of 267, so I just shut up for the rest of the ride.

  The first person I saw when I walked into school was my friend Azure, but it took me a second to realize it was her.

  A normal outfit for Azure would be:

  a spiderweb drawn wit
h eyeliner that covers half her face

  one pink glove with the fingers cut off

  a T-shirt for a punk band she stole from her dad

  a baby’s shoe worn as a necklace

  a flannel shirt tied around her waist

  fake pearl earrings

  a pair of headphones connected to nothing

  But not today.

  I gave her a hug and said, “Why are you dressed like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re about to go play golf on a sailboat with people named Muffy and Chip,” I said, tugging on the arm of the yellow sweater she had tied around her neck.

  “Did you run out of eyeliner or something?”

  Azure shrugged. “New semester, new look. Prep is the new punk, dude.”

  “So then what’s the new prep?”

  Azure thought for a second. “Hillbilly,” she decided. “Come on, let’s go to homeroom.”

  “We have, like, ten minutes before the bell.”

  “Early bird gets the worm!” she said, and grabbed my arm.