Page 69 of Eye on the Ball

We applauded wildly. In my peripheral vision, I noticed Tess, Peabody, and the teacher walk toward us, laughing. The woman reached into her tote bag, pulled out the bottle, and held it out for Tess. Just then, though, two little boys raced around the side of the bleachers and ran into them.

The bottle flew up into the air; the stopper popped off, and the contents of the bottle sprayed out and landed all over Tess, who shrieked.

They were still ten feet away from me, but the perfume had the same effect on me as it had at close quarters: I started sneezing, over and over, and couldn’t stop.

Here’s the thing about sneezing: It is almost impossible to keep your eyes open when you do it.

So, I didn’t see the danger until it was too late.

Somebody in the crowd yelled, “Watch out!” and then everybody started shouting. I forced my watering eyes open just in time to see Porker Posey and Kim Kardashaham whip their heads around, start running, and fix their beady gazes on … Tess.

The piglets—all eight of them—raced toward the fence that kept them from the crowd.

Correction: the fence thathadkept the piglets from the crowd.

They plowed through that flimsy barrier like a hot knife through butter, squealing and grunting and coughing and even making weird barking noises.

“Oh, crap,” Uncle Mike said. He stood and grabbed Shelley before I could, swinging her up behind him and onto a higher riser on the bleachers.

“Oh, crap is—achoo!” I groaned. “That perfume … oh. No. It couldn’t be.”

“Couldn’t be what?” Mike shouted over the noise of the crowd.

The pigs kept coming, and every single one was focused on Tess.

“The enchanted perfume! Ursula said it could affect animals!”

Tess, perfume dripping all over her, finally noticed the cavalcade of bacon-on-the-hoof heading toward her. She yelped and looked at me.

“Jack!”

I leapt up off the bleachers and stood directly in the path of the piglets.

“How’sthatfor heroic, Monkey?” I muttered, wondering when my life had turned into a circus. Then I started sneezing again, this time so forcefully the sneezes actually rocked me back on my heels.

“Jack!” Tess started running, which was probably the wrong move, because the squealing amped up in volume, and the litter of piglets divided into two columns and flowed around me like I wasn’t even there.

I was sneezing too hard to even try to stop them. When I could finally open my eyes and catch a breath, I whirled around to see Tess running down the open pathway between the pop-up carnival tents and stands.

And all eight piglets raced after her, running so fast that all four of their little legs would rise off the ground at each bound.

People on the path yelled and yanked kids and strollers out of the way, but some were too slow. The pigs took them out like porky bowling balls knocking down pins. Tess looked back over her shoulder, and the look of terror on her face spurred me into a lucid moment and I finally remembered that tigers are not allergic to perfume.

At least this tiger wasn’t.

Seconds later, people started screaming for a different reason, when a quarter-ton Bengal tiger shot down the grounds after the pigs.

“Whee!” somebody whooped, and I glanced to the side to see Monkey and his friends raising their glasses of beer to me in a toast. “You get that bacon, dude!”

I—heroically, again—refrained from biting him.

And I kept running.

Here’s a true thing: tigers can run faster than piglets, and nobody even has to give us Oreos to get us to do it. But by the time I reached the end of the fairway, Tess had ducked between two food trucks and started back toward the racecourse.

I roared to get her attention, and the lady doing face painting at a small booth across from me shrieked and threw a box of paint at me. I felt it hit my side, ignored it, and kept running.

I was a tiger, but Tess had a heck of a head start. The piglets were highly motivated, and there were a lot of people in my way. I didn’t catch up to them until Tess was back at the course.