by Doug Wilhelm
When we were finishing, Mr. Dallas came over. He was pretty excited, even for him. “Hey, guys! I saw your e-publishing thing,” he said. “Are you going to do another one?”
“We just did,” I said.
Mr. Dallas nodded, but then he shook his head, like he was having an argument with himself. “You know, I love what you’re doing,” he said. “It’s an inspired use. But … it’s also got you guys in the scope.”
“In the what?”
His lips pressed tight. “People are aware of this. I don’t mean just the students. You also sent this thing to the powers that be.”
“That was a mistake,” I said. “We’re not doing that again.”
He nodded. “That’s good—but you’re already in the scope. I mean, it’s not that you’re doing anything wrong. Just try not to …”
We waited. “Not to what?”
“I don’t really know,” he said, and he smiled and shrugged. “I guess I’m just nervous. Giving students open access to a schoolwide LAN is an experiment—it’s only a one-year trial, and I really had to argue, plead, and wheedle to get that approved. The powers that be are pretty uneasy about it. What you’re doing helps prove how much kids can do with this. I just … well, I guess I just hope it doesn’t get us into something we can’t control.”
“But something is happening,” Elliot said. “We’re not really controlling it.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes! I can see that. I see kids all over school, reading your thing. You’ve put the network on the edge. That’s where it should be. We’ll just see what happens. Hey! Listen, something else. I’m organizing something new for next month. We’re calling it the Creative Science Fair. To enter, you have to develop something that has experimental or other scientific value, something that wasn’t there before you started. Something you create. Get it?”
“Uh, sure,” Elliot said.
“Think it’ll catch on?”
Elliot looked at me. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”
“Well, anyway,” Mr. Dallas said, “you three make a good team. You might think about doing something.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll talk about it.” But I figured we probably had enough to work on.
“All right,” he said with gusto. “Great!”
We were out in the hall, hurrying, almost late for last block, when Burke came the other way. Elliot was flinging his crutches ahead and swinging through on them—he was getting pretty good at that. Burke, passing, flicked his foot to stop one of the crutch tips so the other crutch came down ahead of Elliot but the blocked one didn’t and Elliot tilted, flailing at a bad angle, and clattered to the floor. I tried to catch him but I couldn’t. He was down and his crutches were spread out wide like wings. When I looked up, Burke was gone.
“Aw, man,” Elliot said. He rolled over slowly, pulling his hands loose. “He did that on purpose, didn’t he?”
“Yeah.”
He shouted, “You’re an ass, Burke!”
I winced. It echoed down the hall, nearly empty now, with almost everyone in class.
Quick tap-tap-tapping footsteps started coming our way. Elliot was just back on his feet when the principal came around the corner.
“Mr. Gekewicz. Could that possibly have been you I just heard?”
Elliot nodded.
“He had his crutch kicked out from under him,” I said.
Mrs. Capelli didn’t look at me. “That kind of language is a level-two infraction, Mr. Gekewicz. It’s totally inappropriate, and I will not have it in my school. Automatic detention this afternoon. Room 202.” She spun on her heel to leave.
“Hey, wait,” I said. “You mean it’s okay to kick a kid’s crutches out from under him, but it’s not okay to get mad about it?”
She turned back and peered at me. “We base disciplinary measures on infractions we have visually seen, or for which we have reliable evidence, Mr. Trainor. And we definitely do insist on appropriate verbal expression. Which does not include swearing in the halls.”
Mrs. Capelli was short, with short blond hair, and she always stood very straight as if she was trying to be taller. She had bulging eyes, with heavy eyelids like curtains lowered halfway. Peering at you that way, she always looked like she didn’t believe you. Which, generally, she didn’t.
“Well,” I said to Elliot, “I guess visually seeing is believing.”
He grinned. Mrs. Capelli’s breath sucked in like an angry hiccup. “Suddenly you two are becoming a trouble center,” she said. “I have no idea what’s come over you, but if this is what you want, this is what you’ll get. Room 202. Immediately after school. Both of you.
“You’ll be able to think about whether you want to spend a lot more time there,” Mrs. Capelli added as she tap-tapped away.
In detention, Elliot passed me a note.
I can’t believe you talked back to the principal, he wrote.
I wrote back, I didn’t. I was talking to you.
Right.
Anyway, that’s so stupid. Visually seeing.
Elliot quickly scribbled back. THIS is the kind of thinking that creates a Trouble Center!
I gave him a thumbs-up. The teacher looked our way, and we both studiously scrutinized our scrap-torn notebook pages.
We split up outside. I cut across the parking lot and walked to Convenience Farms. It was high time for a root beer.
While I was in there closing the cooler door and holding my bottle, Richie came in. He went to the counter.
I went up and put the plastic bottle on the counter, beside his pack of Winstons. We both paid. He turned and pushed open the door with his back, looking at me and lifting his eyebrows. I put the root beer in my backpack and zipped it up quick.
Outside, Richie was zipping open his cigarettes.
“So,” he said. “Let me ask you something.”
I waited. He looked out at the street. Put a cigarette in his mouth.
“I hear you’re publicizing the bad guys in school,” he said, lighting up. “That’s what I hear.”
“Yeah, kind of,” I said. “Like you said, remember? Put the squids in their place?”
Richie took a drag. “What are you doing, exactly?” he said, letting the smoke come out and drift away.
“Well, we’re putting kids’ stories on SchoolStream.”
“On what?”
“You know. KidNet.”
“Oh. Yeah. What kind of stories?”
“Well, mainly about kids getting picked on. And stuff.”
“And stuff,” he said. He flicked his cigarette. “So,” he said. “What about me?”
“Huh?”
“Huh? Huh? What are you, stupid? What’d you say about me?”
I shrugged. “Nothing.”
“That’s what I heard,” he said. “Nothing. So what do you think you’re doing?”
“What?”
He cocked his head. “Huuh? Whuut? Listen, kid, I know you’re not retarded, but I’ll try to say this nice and slowly. You start telling the whole school about the bad kids—ooh, the mean kids—and you don’t say anything about me? Nothing?”
I blinked. “You want us to say something about you?”
He shrugged, smiling a little. “Well, hey. Who’s the most feared person in this school?”
“I guess you?”
“You guess. You guess. You were scared half to death.”
“Well …”
“Of course you were. So why don’t you put that on your KidNet?” He took a drag, crossed his arms, and waited.
I remembered what Elliot had said. I wondered.
“You said I could ask you questions.”
“Yeah.”
“So what if I did?”
“What if you did what?”
“Well, I could ask you questions—like, how do you get kids to be so scared? I mean, really. How do you do it?”
Richie nodded, with a half smile. “Not a bad question.”
“And what you say,
I mean your answers, I could put them on the Net. Like a profile. You are good at that stuff.”
“The best.”
“Sure. So will you do it?”
He shrugged. “Okay. But no questions I don’t like.”
“No questions you don’t like? What questions won’t you like?”
Richie smiled. “Maybe you’ll find out.”
“Oh. Great.”
“Tomorrow,” he said. He dropped his cigarette and ground his boot heel on it. “Activities block. In the boiler room.”
“The boiler room?”
He started walking. He was past the gas pumps.
“Be there,” he said, without looking back.
“O … kay,” I whispered to myself. I watched him go. I unzipped the backpack, reaching for my root beer.
My hands were shaking.
When my mom got home she said, “How was your day?”
“Pretty interesting.”
That night I got a message from Elliot:
Did you read in the paper that they’ve found a little dinosaur fossil with feathers? It’s so cool! They found it in China. It’s like a small fast dinosaur only it has feathers all over its body. It finally proves that small fast dinos evolved into birds.
I think we should have a slogan on The Revealer:
EVOLUTION HAPPENS
Well, I wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything. But Elliot had his own way of seeing things.
SICKOLOGISTS
Catalina got an e-mail answer from her mom. She called that night to tell me. She was really happy. I asked her about the Cat and the Rats thing. She said she didn’t care.
I said, “She’s trying to put us in our place.”
“Who is?”
“Bethany. Don’t you think she was behind it?”
“Oh, I guess so. Probably.”
“Sure. She wants people to see us as rats, or losers, so they won’t pay us any more attention. I bet she hates that we’re getting attention in the first place.”
“But does it really matter that much? I mean, next week people will be talking about something else.”
“Bethany’ll still hate you, though.”
For a second, Catalina didn’t answer.
“I used to think it meant something bad about me, that she acts that way,” she said. “Now I think a person like that just needs someone to plot against. She needs enemies. But really, so what? The whole world is not Parkland School.”
“Some people think it is.”
“Well, it isn’t.”
“Yeah.” And then I told her about Richie—about the boiler room.
“He says I can’t ask him any questions he doesn’t like.”
“What questions doesn’t he like?”
“I don’t know! What should I do?”
She chuckled. “Well, I don’t know. Ask about his home life. Ask about his friends.”
“I’m pretty sure Richie Tucker has no friends.”
“Well, what do you want to know about him?”
“I just want to know what’s with him. How come he terrorizes people in the first place? I mean, why do that?”
Another pause.
“That might not be the best way to start,” Catalina said.
“I know. I’m dead.”
“No, don’t think that way. My dad works in sales and marketing. He says you can talk to anybody—you just have to find something you have in common.”
“Something in common? Me and Richie?”
“Yes. Why not? There must be something.”
“We have him beating me up in common.”
“Well, there you go!” She started laughing, then she stopped. “But really. There must be something. I mean, more than that.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll find out. If I live.”
We had a project due for social studies that day, the rough draft of a personal essay on the subject “What I Think Anne Frank Was Really Like As a Person.” In class Ms. Hogeboom paired us up to conference on the drafts. Bethany DeMere got me.
She was outraged. After we pulled our desks together—actually, I pulled mine over to hers—she scraped her desk around so that it was angled away from me. Then, as she sat there, she caught the glance of one of her friends and rolled her eyes at the ceiling, and shook her hair. Her mouth was shut tight.
I liked that. Two weeks ago Bethany did not even know I existed. I guess she did now.
While I read her rough draft she gazed at the ceiling, sighed, and tapped her fingernails on her desk.
I’m very sorry but I do think Anne Frank was actually a fairly annoying person. I mean, she thought she was so much smarter than everyone else in that Annex, and she thought she was so attractive to all the boys when she was still in the school, even though in the pictures she has plain dark hair and looks very ordinary, if you ask me. But the main thing is she thought she was above everyone else.
She was writing about how cruel the Nazis were, which everyone knows they were, but she also kept writing how nasty and small-minded everyone was who was stuck living with Anne, too. I mean, I think the Nazis were terrible just like everyone else. But why does that have to make Anne Frank so wonderful? Just because she wrote all about herself and how sensitive she was. I do not think Anne Frank had the most attractive personality. Maybe you think I am terrible for thinking that. But I kind of do.
I took a deep breath. It wasn’t every day that a person got to comment on the deep personal thoughts of Bethany DeMere. My heart was thumping a little, but I was also psyched.
“Well … it’s interesting,” I said.
Bethany sighed. Without looking at me she held out her hand, palm up, like: Give it back, you paramecium.
But not yet.
“How come you say the most annoying thing about Anne was how she … let me see … ‘She thought she was above everyone else’? I mean, Bethany, nobody acts that way more than you do.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, come on. Everybody knows it. You have to be number one, and if anybody threatens that, you make them pay.”
She looked away.
I said, “You know who I’m talking about.”
She glanced at me quickly. I smiled. She crossed her arms and stared at the ceiling. “We’re supposed to be conferencing,” she said. “I don’t have to talk about anything else besides that.”
“Okay. If you’d been in that attic with Anne, and that boy was paying more attention to her than you, what would you have done to her?”
Bethany’s face flared. “Ms. Hogeboom,” she said.
“Bethany? Russell? Are you conferencing?”
“Yes,” I said.
“No,” said Bethany.
“Well … keep trying.”
Bethany snorted. “It’s not fair,” she said to me fiercely. “You’re a nobody who suddenly thinks you’re somebody. You and your friends. But that doesn’t give you the right to say nasty things about me or anybody else.”
She actually looked hurt.
“Huh,” I said. “So what gives you that right?”
She shook her head. “If you’re not going to talk about my draft, I don’t care what happens. I’m not talking to you.”
“All right.” I was reading the paper again. “Here, you say how Anne ‘wrote all about herself and how sensitive she was.’”
Bethany looked at me uncertainly. “So?”
“So do you think it’s so wrong if somebody writes the truth about who they really are? Do you think it’s so bad when other people read it?”
Bethany flushed a deep red. She grabbed her notebook, opened it, and scribbled furiously. She ripped out the page and slapped it on my desk.
I’m not talking to you ANYMORE, the paper said. I don’t care WHAT happens.
“Okay,” I said. I folded the paper and put it in my pocket. Then I leaned over and whispered, “But this isn’t over.”
She glared at me. “You bet it’s not,” she replied.
In the lunchroom line Elliot was picking up his tray with one hand while he leaned on both crutches held together. I caught up to him at the cash register.
“Hey,” I said, “I’ll take the tray.”
“No. Not today.”
“Why not?”
“Here,” he said, handing me one crutch. “Just take this.”
“Why?”
But he just leaned over and picked at his milk carton till it was open on top. Then he took off, poling himself across the floor toward the tables, holding his tray by one edge. I followed.
Among the center tables, Elliot came up to where Burke and Blanchette were sitting side by side. Blanchette glanced up and opened his big, half-mocking smile just as Elliot suddenly stumbled and his tray launched forward, tipping as the milk sloshed out. Everything landed and splashed all over Burke.
Blanchette grinned even wider. “Why, Geekowitz!” he said.
Burke stood up. He had milk, spaghetti, and butterscotch pudding all over his shirt and his pants. His face was turning very, very red.
“You slimy disgusting little jerkoff—I swear you’ll pay for this.”
“Hey, man, it was an accident,” Elliot said. “See, I’m hurt. I have to use these crutches. I have a lot of accidents.”
He turned and poled back expertly toward me. He had a bright look of pure delight. I handed him his crutch.
“Excellent menu today,” he said.
“They’re going to kill you.”
He shrugged. “They already tried that.”
The Darkland Revealer
The kid who’s after me has spit in my food in the lunchroom, stuffed me in a garbage can in the bathroom, stolin my clothes in the locker room, whipped iceballs at me on the playground, and thrown my backpack out the window of the bus. I don’t want to come to this school anymore. Every day I don’t want to come. I get stomickaches and headaches. But I have to come anyway.
The worst part is the kid always gets out of it. When he gets caught he’s such a good lier. The other day he was going to the shower in the locker room to throw my clothes in there and the jim teacher stopped him. He said he thought they were his clothes and he was only looking for a place to change with privissy, because the other kids were picking on him. He actually almost started to cry. The jim teacher believed him. The teachers always believe him. I know he will always get out of trouble, and he knows it too. So he knows he can do anything. And so do I.