Nobody Beats Dave: The Day Dave Fell

The Story

Keyboard you play sitting down, quiet and neat. Trumpet you stand up for. You can guess which one is Dave’s favourite.

He gets picked for the solo, and everything before the concert goes exactly as it should. Then it does not. What follows is a weekend Dave would rather not describe, an office he did not want to sit in, and the slow discovery that the people who stay are the point.

The Day Dave Fell is the third Nobody Beats Dave book, and the one where the joke stops for a moment. Still funny, still Dave — but about embarrassment, recovery and what friends are actually for.

For ages 9–12. The last of the three, and best read in order.

Right. So a few things have happened since I last spoke to you.

Most of them were good. One of them was not.

I’m going to tell you about the not-good one because it’s the kind of thing you have to tell someone. And you’re here. So it’s going to be you.

But I have to start before the bad part. Because the bad part doesn’t make sense unless you know how good things were first. That’s how these things work. You have to climb up before you can fall down.

It started on a Monday.

Actually, it started a bit before the Monday, at home, with my trumpet. So I’ll start there.

I should explain about the trumpet, because it matters for the whole story. I play two instruments. Keyboard, which I’ve done for ages and am very good at, and trumpet, which I started about a year ago. And here’s the thing about me and those two. Keyboard you play sitting down, sort of tucked in, quiet and neat. Trumpet you stand up for. Trumpet is loud. When you play trumpet well, everyone in the room knows, because they can hear it whether they want to or not.

I think you can already guess which one is my favourite.

That Monday morning I was practising before school, which I’m allowed to do for exactly fifteen minutes because after fifteen minutes Mum says the whole street has had enough. I was doing scales. Devin came and stood directly in front of me, very close, and watched my face the entire time with great seriousness, like the scales were coming out of my eyes and not the trumpet.

“You can’t stand there,” I said, in the gap between notes.

“I’m checking,” Devin said.

“Checking what?”

Devin didn’t answer. He just kept checking. I never found out what he was checking. With Devin you mostly don’t.

Then it was time for school, and the trumpet went back in its case, and that was that. A normal Monday morning. I didn’t know yet that the day had something in it.

Mrs Williams stood at the front of the class and did her thing where she waits for everyone to be quiet without telling anyone to be quiet. She just stands there. And it works. One by one everyone stops talking until the room goes silent and you can hear the clock and someone’s chair squeaking and Jordan trying to finish a sentence before realising everyone else had already stopped.

“I have some exciting news,” Mrs Williams said.

The complete Nobody Beats Dave set

Three books, read in order — Dave meets his match, Dave learns what a friend is actually for, and Dave falls over in front of an entire concert hall. All three as EPUB and PDF, downloaded straight away.