“Well, it’s about helping, mostly … ” I began, and then trailed off.
“And?”
“And assisting,” I went on. I knew how stupid I sounded, but I was really cornered. “Aiding … You know, pitching in … ”
My desperate gaze fell on my sister. No way was she going to bail me out. She hadn’t had this much fun since watching me take the heat for the ziti. Pavel and Chuck had nothing to offer, either. Pavel regarded me in sympathy and Chuck seemed honestly interested in what I was going to say. Which was crazy, since he knew better than anyone that I had diddly-squat.
The rest of the kids were starting to get a little restless, because, let’s face it, there wasn’t too much information coming at them. All except String, who was leafing through a football playbook, and Xavier, who was asleep.
“Uh, doing our fair share … making Sycamore a better place … ”
At last, my eyes fell on Daphne. She was leaning so far forward in her seat that she looked like she was about to tumble down the risers and land on her head. But seeing her there gave me my first flash of inspiration—a way to change the subject from the fact that I was laying a total egg at my own meeting.
“And most important of all,” I blurted, “we’ve got to find a way to save that poor beaver out there!”
“Yes!!!” Daphne sprang to her feet. “We’ve got to create a home for Elvis! We’re the Positive Action Group, and this is the most positive thing we could possibly do!”
She pounded the music stand in front of her, creating a gonging sound that woke up Xavier. He looked around, annoyed, and closed his eyes again.
“Elvis?” came a few confused voices. At least I wasn’t the only person who’d never heard of him.
Daphne went into her emotional speech about the beaver who’d been uprooted by the new mall and abandoned by his colony and blah, blah, blah. I was more than happy to let her have the spotlight, so I sat back down between Pavel and Chuck. I wasn’t a big Daphne fan, but once she had the floor, she was good for at least twenty minutes.
A few of the kids thought this was a great idea. Others weren’t so sure. Shouldn’t the mission of the P.A.G. be helping people, not animals? This went back and forth a couple of times, with Daphne’s voice becoming louder and more shrill.
Then my darling sister put in her two cents. “Why are we arguing over this? We’ve got the founder of the P.A.G. right here. What do you think, Cam?”
What did I think? I wanted to be an only child, that’s what I thought. Aloud, I said, “That gives us something to chew over until our next meeting.”
“Next meeting?” Daphne wouldn’t hear of it. “We’re not done with this meeting!”
“Yeah, Cam,” Chuck said earnestly. “We need to know now.”
I stared at him in dismay.
Mr. Fanfiction bailed me out. “These are all really good questions. But as your faculty adviser, I’ve already set up the P.A.G.’s first project. The senior citizens’ garden project on Seventh Street is due for its fall cleanup. I’ve volunteered us to help.”
This announcement sucked all the energy out of the argument. The murmur that passed through the group was a little disappointed. But after all, who could complain about helping old people? Even Daphne, whose face was bright pink, bit her tongue and sat back down. One thing was definite: The way the guidance counselor had told it to us, it sure sounded like a done deal.
String looked up from his playbook. “Did I miss something?”
“We’re going to be pulling weeds,” Pavel supplied.
Xavier shifted to his left side and began to snore.
“I understand, people.” The guidance counselor was smiling. “When you hear ‘positive action’ you picture yourselves saving the world, so gardening is kind of a letdown. But remember—every journey begins with the first step. This is real hands-on work, helping elderly people who might not be able to do it on their own. It’s an excellent project to start with. Right, Cameron?”
“Sure.” At that point, I would have said anything so long as nobody expected me to talk anymore.
Felicia rose, dragging Jordan with her. “The Toleffsen-for-president campaign is behind this one hundred percent.” She reached around with her phone and snapped a selfie of the two of them to capture the moment.
One by one, the members of the Positive Action Group signed on to cleanup day at the senior citizens’ garden project. Even Xavier opened his eyes long enough to nod.
“Mark your calendars,” Mr. Faneuil Hall instructed the dispersing crowd. “Saturday, ten a.m. Don’t be late. And keep selling those raffle tickets. Or, in the case of most of you, start selling them!”
Saturday, ten a.m. It was a slap in face. That was prime gaming time, especially if you were in training for Rule the World. But nobody cared about that.
“That was a pretty good meeting,” Chuck commented as we exited the school. “And you were worried.”
It said a lot for our friendship that I didn’t even hit him.
Well, I wasn’t happy. How could I be?
Not that helping the elderly with their garden wasn’t a good thing. Of course it was! But winter was coming soon. All those senior citizens could go home to their warm houses and apartments, while Elvis would be left slapping his tail against cold concrete.
I didn’t blame Mr. Fanshaw. He was just doing what he thought was best for the Positive Action Group. It was Cam Boxer I was mad at. As P.A.G. president, it was his job to make sure we tackled important problems. Digging up dead plants and yanking out weeds hardly counted as that. He knew the misfortunes and dangers Elvis faced every single day—I’d told him myself that time I went over to his house. I should have known better than to expect leadership from a guy with a sheet of plywood for a front door!
At the meeting, I was so devastated that I almost quit on the spot. But who would speak up for Elvis if I wasn’t even a member? After all, Mr. Fanshaw didn’t say we could never build a beaver habitat, just that it wouldn’t be first.
No, I had to stick with the Positive Action Group. I would go along with all their plans, doing everything they did, only better. I’d be the greatest garden-helper those senior citizens had ever seen. I intended to make myself indispensable to the P.A.G. And when it got to the point that they couldn’t function without me, I’d demand that they do something for Elvis.
I arrived at the seniors’ garden early on Saturday. Wouldn’t you know it? Everybody else was late. It was the first cold morning of the fall. There I stood, fuming and shivering. An icy drizzle began to come down.
I decided to start working right away. That way, Mr. Fanshaw would see how motivated I was. And a little physical activity might warm me up. One problem: I wasn’t much of a gardener, so I wasn’t sure exactly what to do.
Weeding would definitely be a part of it. That was as good a place to start as any. I surveyed the patchwork of garden plots that stretched clear across the lot. There was definitely no shortage of weeds.
I bent over a long stringy stalk and pulled. It wouldn’t budge. I tried again, grabbing on with both hands and putting some back into it. Nothing. So I braced my legs, angled my back, and heaved with all my might. I staggered back a few steps as the weed popped out. And there, dangling at the end of it—
“Hey—what do you think you’re doing, pulling up my prize turnips?” came an angry voice behind me.
A little old lady who probably didn’t come up as high as my shoulder stalked toward me, gesturing angrily with a garden claw. She was dressed in so many layers of sweaters, vests, and coats that she waddled. But she still managed to make her approach look menacing.
“Those are my turnips! I leave them in until the snow flies so they’re perfect for Thanksgiving!”
“Sorry.” I dropped to my knees and tried to stuff the big, rock-hard vegetable into the crater I’d opened up in the ground. It didn’t fit.
“Too late now. You can’t transplant a mature turnip. Everybody knows that. It’s r
uined.” Her eyes shot sparks. “What are you doing here? This is private property.”
Actually, it was public property, but I didn’t tell her that. She was still wielding that claw, and I didn’t have a weapon, except maybe the turnip—which, come to think of it, probably could have taken out a charging rhino.
It must have looked like a fight was brewing, because when Mr. Fanshaw showed up, he ran between the two of us like a referee breaking up a boxing match.
“Hello there!” he said breathlessly. “We’re the Positive Action Group from the middle school. We’re here to help.”
“It’s my fault,” I admitted. “I thought this turnip was a weed and I pulled it out.”
“Never you mind, dear.” The claw lady did a complete about-face. I was no longer a turnip murderer. I was a doer of good deeds.
As it turned out, the senior gardeners were really grateful to have some help with their fall cleanup. As one after another came out to thank us, I felt a little guilty that I’d been so against this idea. It was my loyalty to Elvis, of course. But some of the seniors were in their nineties and a couple might have been over a hundred. The manual labor of bending and weeding and digging would have been too much for them.
Mr. Fanshaw had brought Xavier and String with him. He probably figured that the only way those two would show up was if he drove them personally. I was interested to see if our club president would bother to put in an appearance. But to my surprise, everybody came—all fourteen P.A.G. members, including Cam.
Each volunteer was assigned to a senior gardener who would supervise the work. I got Mrs. Demarest, the claw lady, who loved me now. And with her telling me the difference between the weeds and the turnips, I was doing great—especially since I had the claw.
I wasn’t so sure about the others, though, especially Xavier. He’d been paired with this cranky old guy, who was bossing him around, never satisfied with anything Xavier did. It was all “No, that’s not right!” and “Don’t do it like that!” and “What did I just tell you?”
I was getting a little nervous, and so was Mr. Fanshaw, because Xavier was, well, Xavier. He wasn’t known for his patience and gentleness. And if he lost it with Mr. Meanie, it wasn’t going to reflect well on the P.A.G., no matter how much the nasty geezer had brought it on himself.
“Oh, yeah! Look at that dirt fly! Nobody digs like The String! Can you dig how I’m digging?”
Another problem: That jock, that showboat, String McBean, had to treat everything like it was a competition. There he stood in a blizzard of topsoil, his shovel just a blur, bombarding silver-haired ladies with earth, trash-talking some imaginary opponent. “Don’t even bother trying to keep up, losers. It can’t be done.”
Not everybody was as annoying as String. Most of us worked hard and did an okay job. But there was plenty of goofing off as well, and a lot of mud balls aimed at the backs of heads. Cam and that Pavel kid were kind of dogging it, but their friend Chuck was hoeing, and seemed to be taking this at least semiseriously.
When I looked over to see how Mr. Fanshaw felt about how things were going, I noticed that we had company. A short, squat woman stood talking with the P.A.G. faculty adviser. She huddled under an enormous umbrella, even though it was hardly raining anymore. It wasn’t until I spotted the notebook in her hand that I recognized her from her byline photo in the newspaper. It was Audra Klincker, who had a weekly column about happenings around town in the Sycamore Gazette.
If she was here to write an article about the P.A.G., it would be amazing PR, and a lot more kids would want to join up! I tried to read her expression to see if she was impressed. But at that moment, she turned away to watch String, who had spiked his shovel and was performing his touchdown dance on somebody’s rhubarb plants.
That was when I noticed a familiar slapping sound. I wheeled around.
I gawked. I goggled.
About ten feet behind String was a large brown bundle of fur. Beady black eyes watched the touchdown dance while a flat tail whacked at a mud puddle. A half-eaten plum tomato stuck out from behind buckteeth.
Elvis!
I was just about to cry out when an angry voice exclaimed, “Get away from my tomatoes, you mangy rodent!”
Before I knew it, one of the senior citizens was running after Elvis, waving a long-handled rake over his head!
“Sir!” Mr. Fanshaw called in alarm. “Please be more careful with that around the children!”
But the man continued to chase the poor beaver, and for an old guy, he could really move. He was definitely one of the youngest of the seniors, probably in his sixties. Not that I cared about that. If he was a danger to Elvis, it didn’t matter to me if he was a hundred and fifty or three and a half.
Thunk! He swung the big rake. The tines bit into the earth just a few inches behind the beaver’s wide, flat tail. Elvis hustled away at his top speed, which wasn’t very fast at all.
That did it. Everybody started yelling at the same time, seniors and kids alike. To my horror, a lot of the gardeners were cheering for the guy with the rake. I guess the tomato wasn’t the only vegetable Elvis had stolen from this garden. But being hungry shouldn’t be the kind of crime you paid for with your life!
There was no time to make up my mind. I acted on pure emotion. That animal abuser had to be stopped, and there was only one way to do it. I threw myself at his legs, clamping my arms around his knees. He went down like a sack of potatoes, with a loud “oof” as the two of us hit the ground. I face-planted in the dirt, which wasn’t fun. But I was rewarded by the sight of Elvis making his getaway.
The fallen gardener scrambled up and turned blazing eyes on me. “Is that your idea of helping?”
The last person I ever would have expected to come to my defense hauled me to my feet and stood in front of me. String.
“That’s not it!” the football star exclaimed reverently. “It was a tackle—a highlight-film tackle! The String couldn’t have done it any better himself !”
The old guy was spitting mud. “And that makes it okay? I’ve got arthritis in those knees!”
Mr. Fanshaw rushed over to him. “Sir—we’re so sorry—”
“I’m not!” I interrupted. “He was trying to kill Elvis!”
“That thieving woodchuck has been helping himself to our vegetables all season!” the man charged.
“He’s not a woodchuck—he’s a beaver! And we should all have sympathy for a poor soul kicked out of his colony and left behind to starve. Is it too much for you to sacrifice one lousy tomato to make his life more bearable?”
“I’d be thrilled to give him a tomato,” the man insisted. “But he won’t eat one tomato—he takes a bite out of all of them. And the peppers, too. And the cucumbers.”
I was about to snap back at him—but then I noticed Audra Klincker. She was huddled beneath her giant umbrella, jotting notes at a furious pace, a disapproving look on her face. And I thought: As much as this old stinker deserved to be screamed at, it wouldn’t look good if this week’s Klincker Kronicle was about how a member of the Positive Action Group did a negative action like tackling one of the senior citizens she was supposed to be helping.
Even if it was a highlight-film tackle.
Who knew that being a good person would turn out to be so boring? Seriously, I gave up an entire day of video games for this?
“Boring?” Pavel laughed at me. “Haven’t you been paying attention? Daphne tackled a senior citizen. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen String compliment someone other than himself.”
“Yeah, real entertaining,” I muttered. “I thought that reporter lady would have a heart attack when Daphne laid that guy out. If my parents read in the paper that the P.A.G.’s bad, I’ll be right back where I started—no Rule the World.”
“Forget Daphne,” he told me. “Worry about a real problem. That cranky guy who’s bossing Xavier around doesn’t realize he’s juggling nitro. If he wakes up across town, that won’t just be in the Klincker Kronicle. It�
��ll make the front page.”
“I need a break,” I complained.
“From what?” Pavel challenged. “Technically, you haven’t moved a single molecule of earth. Look at Chuck. He’s weeded two whole plots already.”
It was true. For some reason, Chuck was treating today like it was a real thing. Old ladies were lining up to get his attention. He was the darling of the senior citizens’ garden. Where would a member of the Awesome Threesome get such a bad attitude?
“Well, I’m the president,” I grumbled, “and I still say that the Positive Action Group doesn’t exist.”
“I hate to break it to you,” Pavel retorted, “but it’s existing all around you in living color. There’s even a reporter here to record it for posterity.”
I sighed. “Mr. Fanorama’s busy trying to calm down the tackled guy. I’m going to check my clan.”
“Your phone will get wet.”
“I’ll sneak into the lobby of the apartment building next door. Cover for me.”
“But … ”
I left him standing there. If I didn’t get something decent into this wasted day, I was going to lose my mind. Besides, the way clan warfare worked, you could actually be invaded while you were offline. I didn’t have that much faith in my fellow clan members to ride to the rescue and defend my base for me.
Anyway, I’d cover for Pavel later so he could check on his own clan—and for Chuck, too, if he could tear himself away from all that helping.
With the guidance counselor distracted, it was easy to complete my disappearing act. I ducked in the side entrance and stood in the stairwell as the app opened with its usual fanfare.
Sure enough, I’d suffered two attacks, although the damage wasn’t serious. As I made the necessary repairs, I couldn’t help noticing a puddle of water forming at my feet. At first I assumed that rain was leaking in from outside. Then I noticed a tiny trickle running down the steps. Curious, I followed it up to the second floor. It was traveling in a thin stream, shining in the fluorescent lights.
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