Double Down

The day of the band concert arrives. Greg still cannot play his instrument, but he figures that if he sits next to Evan Pittman, the other French horn player, during the concert, no one will notice. Unfortunately, Evan never arrives at the concert. Greg learns that Evan is getting his braces off and is going to miss the whole show. Greg starts to panic. As the band is filing out of the band room and onto the stage, Greg gets locked in the band room. He tries to pound on the door to get someone’s attention, but no one hears him over the sound of all the students tuning their instruments. 

Finally, Rowley sees Greg banging on the door and opens it, but rather than standing aside and letting Greg out, he “[steps] INSIDE the room and let[s] the door shut BEHIND him” (181). Both boys are trapped inside the band room. The concert starts, and no one hears Greg and Rowley banging on the door. Greg rips his pants trying to get the door open and asks Rowley to color his exposed underwear black with a marker. Eventually, Mr. Heffley opens the door and sees Greg and Rowley trying to color Greg’s underwear. Greg’s father is very angry.

Mr. Heffley does not want to listen to Greg’s explanation about what happened at the band concert. Greg’s punishment is “two weeks with no television or video games, and [he is] not allowed to have friends over after school” (185). He is only allowed to practice his French horn. He cannot even use the online videos, as the girl who uploaded them has also given up learning to play.

While practicing, Greg gets hungry and looks for candy. He knows that there must be leftover Halloween candy hidden somewhere in the house, but all he can find are chocolate chips that his mother has told him are off limits. Greg figures that his mother will “never notice if just ONE chip went missing” (187), so he cuts a tiny hole in the bottom of the bag. Greg soon eats “at least a quarter of the bag” (187). Before he can decide how to cover his tracks, the bag splits open and spills the remaining chocolate chips all over the floor. Greg eats most of them.

Greg calls Rowley to ask for help. Rowley arrives with a handful of chocolate chips to replace the ones that Greg ate, but they have all melted. The boys decide to call another friend to see if he has any chocolate chips, but Rowley gets chocolate fingerprints all over the phone. Greg goes to the basement to get paper towels to clean up the mess, and finds Mrs. Heffley’s “stash of leftover Halloween candy” (191). Greg decides to prank Rowley with some of the gummy worms in the stash: He puts one in his nose and ends up terrifying his friend. This gives Greg an idea and he decides that they should make a horror movie with the gummy worms. He believes that with the movie, they might become millionaires. 

Greg finds his parents’ camcorder and he and Rowley get to work. Greg writes the script, but will not let Rowley write it with him. He tells Rowley that he can draw the movie’s storyboards. They start filming, using Rowley as their only actor. They have to get creative with how they film Rowley when he plays a woman, but they make it work: Greg wants Rowley to wear a dress, but he is only comfortable wearing yoga pants. Throughout the filmmaking process, Greg has to keep reminding Rowley that it is all made up; Rowley is terrified of the worms. Some of the scenes do not look quite how Greg imagined them, but he hopes it will “look realistic when it’s all edited together” (207).

While they are filming, Greg finds the pet pig, which has gotten into the rest of the Halloween candy. Before Greg can decide what to do, he hears Rowley screaming. He runs to investigate, and finds Rowley looking out the window. Outside, the geese that have been terrorizing the neighborhood have descended on the lawn and are eating all the gummy worms that the boys had left on the grass. Greg and Rowley try to scare the geese away, but nothing works. They go back to the basement to try and find something to scare the geese. In the process, the electronic witch goes off and the boys knock over a large storage unit. Rowley is so terrified by the witch that he runs out of the house and climbs up a tree. Greg’s father arrives home and finds Greg trying to get Rowley to come down by hitting tennis balls at him.

Greg’s parents are very unhappy with Greg. Mr. Heffley is angry about the state of the basement, and Mrs. Heffley is upset because Greg taped over footage of Manny’s first steps with his movie. As punishment, Greg has to reorganize the whole basement. To make matters worse, Rowley is enjoying a moment of fame, as “a news crew recorded the moment when the fire department got him down out of the tree” (216). Apparently, he has not been back to school since the incident “because every morning talk show wants a piece of him” (216). Greg is upset that Rowley does not mention him at all during his interviews. He reflects that fame makes people act like “the world revolves around [them]” (217) and says that he would never make “a fool out of [himself] just to get a cheap laugh from the people watching at home” (217).