Losing Joe's Place by Gordon Korman

car.
    â€œI can’t believe you did this!” Don roared at the Peach, who was making things worse by being totally unruffled. “Haven’t you ever heard of territory? You don’t move in on another guy’s girl!”
    â€œI didn’t,” said Ferguson. “She asked me out.”
    â€œAha!” Don was triumphant. “I caught you in a lie! And I can prove it! Jessica didn’t have
my
number; I just had hers! So there’s no way she could get in touch with you!”
    â€œI was riding home in your uncle’s limo, and we were stopped at a light, and I noticed Jessica waiting for the bus. It was raining, and I knew she lived around here, so I offered her a lift.”
    â€œThat’s even sleazier!” raged Don. “Using wealth and power to impress a girl! How low can you get?”
    â€œHey, hey, hey,” interrupted Rootbeer. “Don’t you guys know that arguments like this cause stress, and stress causes executive burnout?”
    A “mind your own business” died on Don’s lips. Rootbeer had been with us for a while, and all had been serene, but none of us ever lost sight of the fact that, at any moment, we could be on the receiving end of
bad luck
.
    â€œYou guys should take an interest in my stamp collection,” the giant went on. “It really gets your mind off the pressures.”
    Don got his mind off Jessica by putting a call through to Kiki. It lasted about ten seconds.
    â€œHer dad answered the phone,” he told me. “What a bonehead that guy is.”
    â€œHe didn’t let you talk to her?” I asked.
    â€œWorse than that. He said, ‘There’s no Kiki here.’”
    â€œWhat are you going to do?”
    Don shrugged. “Keep calling until
she
answers. I’ll try in the daytime, when he’s at work.”
    Plotnick’s voice came up through the vent. “If my daughter got phone calls from such a chrome polisher specialist like you, I’d commit suicide, kill myself, and then jump off a building.”
    â€œI’m feeling stress!” said Rootbeer warningly.
    I thought there wasn’t a man alive who wouldn’t be intimidated by Rootbeer. I stand corrected. Plotnick could laugh off the neutron bomb if it wasn’t going to cost him money.
    â€œNo wonder,” he called back. “There’s a lot of pressure in the gorilla business these days. You never know where your next banana is coming from.”
    I was excited. I couldn’t wait for Rootbeer to go down there and rearrange some of Plotnick’s lard. I would have helped, or at least called out suggestions. But Rootbeer just returned to his stamps. In his mammoth paws, he held up two tiny identical American stamps, depicting Thomas Jefferson.
    â€œHey, you’ve got two of that one,” Don commented.
    â€œThe book says they’re different,” said Rootbeer, squinting his eyes into slits. “One’s supposed to have ten and a half perforations, the other only ten.” He began to count with an index finger three times the width of the stamp. “One, two, three, four — hold it, I think I missed that one. One, two, three —”
    Suddenly he slammed the album shut hard enough to fuse the pages, and bellowed, “It’s washday!”
    In one lightning motion, he had the poncho over his head. An avalanche of stuff rained to the floor — an eggbeater, three pairs of sunglasses, one scuba flipper, a few crumpled bills and the odd coin, an Aztec fertility charm, a New Orleans city bus pass good for October 1981, an alarm clock with only one hand, a toilet brush, a mummified liverwurst sandwich, a Bulgarian-Greek pocket dictionary, a lime-green Nerf ball, and a diploma in the name of Gavin Gunhold from the University of Iowa. That was just the highlights. The pile was up to his knees, and things were still appearing. There were elastic bands and paper clips by