The (Almost) Perfect Guide To Imperfect Boys

by Barbara Dee

  On Wednesday morning, I scribbled Mom and Dad a note to say I needed to get to school early “for my science project.” Then I peeled a banana for breakfast and checked on Prong. Somehow he/she had made it through the night, even without sampling any fly cuisine.

  Well, I told Prong as I put the jar back on the kitchen counter, I hope you like pet-store bugs better. And spring is just a few weeks away, so hang in there, okay?

  On the way out, I grabbed all dozen boxes of flypaper and crammed them into one of Mom’s cotton tote bags.

  By the time I got to school, Maya, Olivia and Hanna were waiting at my locker. Surprisingly, Dahlia Ringgold and Sophie Yang were there too.

  “They want to join the festivities,” Maya explained, grinning. “I told them there were warts involved, and they just said, ‘Yay, we love warts.’ ”

  “We did,” Sophie insisted. “We do.”

  “And the boys, it’s really so obnoxious,” Dahlia added. “It’s just like, I don’t know. The way they’re acting.” She shook her head.

  “Great,” I said. “The more the merrier. Except we’re not doing the warts.”

  Maya’s face fell. “Oh no. You couldn’t make them?”

  “No, I could. I even baked a whole batch. But I thought of something even better. Voilà.”

  I dumped the boxes of flypaper on the floor.

  “We’ll decorate lockers,” I said. “With sticky, gross-smelling flypaper. Which catches bugs exactly like a frog tongue,” I added, in case anyone wasn’t following.

  “Whoa,” Olivia said. “That’s definitely payback.”

  And Dahlia said, “I mean it’s just so incredibly . . .” Her eyes popped.

  “Um, Finley?” Hanna said slowly. “Not to wimp out on you or anything, but don’t you think this may be a little . . . extreme?” She exchanged glances with Olivia. “I mean, except for the water bottle, which I agree was totally over the line, all the boys did was croak and ribbit. And wear green clothes and goggles. But seriously, flypaper . . . ?”

  “They dumped a frog on my front step,” I announced. “A cute little helpless frog, Hanna. In a dirty old pizza box.”

  “What?” Maya said.

  “Yesterday afternoon. We put it in a jar.”

  Maya was literally jumping. “That’s APPALLING.”

  “I know, right?” I said. “My baby brother named it Prong. It’s extremely adorable, by the way.”

  “Okay,” Hanna said. “Dumping a frog was wrong, I’m not arguing. But the thing is, you guys, I agreed to warts. I thought of warts. And putting that flypaper stuff on people’s lockers is sort of vandalism.”

  “Oh, but it’s not,” I protested. “It’s actually the opposite of vandalism; if it attracts bugs, it’s helping the janitors clean the school, if you think about it. Plus this flypaper is one hundred percent safe, organic, and nontoxic,” I added, pointing to the box.

  “Except to the bugs,” Olivia said.

  “Well, yes. Except to the bugs.”

  “I don’t know,” Hanna said, sighing.

  “Well, you don’t have to decide anything right now, anyway,” I said. Before anyone else, specifically Olivia, could agree with Hanna, I explained that it didn’t make sense to attach the flypaper before the end of the school day; if we wanted maximum bug attraction, it needed to work overnight.

  I unzipped my backpack and revealed a box of graham crackers, some marshmallows, and some Hershey bars, all the leftovers from the s’mores. After we’d decorated certain lockers with flypaper, I said, we’d sprinkle a few crumbs on the sticky surfaces for good measure. Because one thing I’d remembered from Green Girls campouts—bugs appreciated sugar as much as we did.

  “Hee hee, fabutastic,” Maya said. “This is so sick, Finley. I love it!” And then she did a perfect cartwheel.

  • • •

  The real challenge was getting through the school day without letting the boys know anything was up. So when they croaked at us—which they did constantly, sometimes softly, sometimes loudly, especially in the hallways—we had to act like we couldn’t hear, didn’t notice, didn’t care. And I know people say, Oh, just ignore it, when someone teases or bullies, but that’s pretty worthless advice, if you ask me. When almost the entire grade of boys is ribbiting whenever you walk past, ignoring is not an option. But you can pretend to ignore it—at least, you can fake-ignore it for a few hours.

  Plus I could tell Zachary was waiting for me to say something about yesterday’s frog delivery—confront him, maybe yell at him, try again to “talk.” But I resisted all of the above. I had to sit next to Zachary in science and Spanish, but I didn’t have to look at him, I told myself. Or smell his laundry detergent. Or peek at his drawings. Or even listen to his foot going tap-tap-tap and wonder if he was nervous about something, and what that something could be. Considering he was the Croaker hero, general of the Croaker army, it was pretty hard to imagine what he could be nervous about. Not that I cared, anyway.

  • • •

  At basketball practice, Sabrina Leftwich said it was her duty as captain to give the team a pep talk. Except it wasn’t a pep talk at all. It was more like a rant: It’s really upsetting to me, you guys, when I feel like I’m the only one who’s giving my all at practice, while some of you—here she made eye contact with me—are not totally committed to the team, lalala. Sophie Yang (who up until this morning I’d assumed was a generic Chloe-team follower) made a noise like barfing. And it was really impressive, because she did it without moving her mouth or even changing her expression.

  When Sabrina finally finished ranting, Sophie, Dahlia, and I raced to the lockers. Hanna had decided not to do the flypaper; she’d be the lookout, she said, which I realized was a good idea. The school was surprisingly busy at that hour, and we needed to be sure no one would walk by while we decorated.

  Meanwhile, Maya was wrestling with the flypaper boxes. “Finally!” she shouted at us. “What took you guys so long? I’ve been trying to open these without getting stuck.”

  “Slow down,” I told her. “First we should probably decide which lockers we’re decorating.”

  “Zachary’s,” Maya said right away.

  Everyone nodded. Ooh, yeah. Definitely Zachary’s!

  “Drew and Ben,” Olivia said. “Jarret and Kyle.”

  “Jonathan Pressman,” Dahlia said. Then she laughed. “Wyeth Brockman.”

  “What? No,” I blurted.

  “No?” Maya squinted at me. “You’re vetoing Wyeth? Seriously?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll explain later, okay?”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “Fine. Then I’m vetoing Dylan.”

  I would have said, Oh, but Dylan is different from Wyeth. Wyeth is not a crush; he’s just a nice kid who was nice to me when I needed niceness. But we didn’t have time for one of our big Finley-Maya arguments. I carefully ripped open a box.

  “Gug,” Olivia said, her face pinching. “That stuff smells like nail-polish remover.”

  “To me it smells like rotting apples,” I said cheerfully. “Let’s start with Zachary.”

  The hard part was figuring how to attach it. Flypaper, it turned out, was supposed to be suspended from the ceiling, just sort of fluttering in the breeze as bugs drunkenly crashed into it. And we definitely wanted that bug-catching effect, but we also wanted to wrap the door of Zachary’s locker, the way I’d wrapped Maya’s for her birthday. So in the end what we did was coil five flypapers into a big messy blob and make a sort of abstract art-sculpture thingy, a tangle of rotting-apple stickiness that would need to be pried off with an ice pick. Really, it looked so impressive that I was sorry I hadn’t brought my camera.

  The other boys’ lockers we did much faster—just one flypaper roll per locker door, twisted in a sort of free-form squashed pretzel. And we had just finished Jarret’s door when I realized that Maya wasn’t standing with us there to admire it.

  “Where’s Maya?” I said.

  “She said she needed
to step out for a minute,” Hanna answered. Her eyes darted down the hallway. “Please hurry up, you guys, okay? My mom just texted. She said the roads are getting slippery and she’s coming to get me.”

  I thought it was odd that Maya had taken off without explaining, but it wasn’t the most unpredictable thing she’d done lately. We waited another five minutes for her to return, but when we heard teacher voices in the hallway—and one of the voices belonged to Señor Hansen—we decided we couldn’t hang around any longer. It was too dangerous. Our lookout was leaving. The roads were getting bad. And truthfully, by then the smell of rotting apples was pretty nauseating.

  CHAPTER 22

  In Fulton it snows a lot. It doesn’t bother us, usually—we plow the roads, shovel our driveways, dress in plenty of layers. And because we’re all so expert at dealing with snow, we never get snow days. Except that Thursday they declared an ice day, on account of slippery roads that the school-bus company called a hazard.

  To me this was torture. For the first time ever in the history of school attendance I was desperate to go—but I consoled myself with the thought that the extra day meant extra bugs on the boys’ lockers.

  That morning my cell rang four times. First Olivia called to repeat everything that had happened yesterday (“And wasn’t it smart for Hanna to stand guard at the lockers? And wasn’t it weird how Maya just disappeared?”). Then Drew Looper called to croak, followed by Zachary and someone who snickered like Jarret, so that meant it was either Jarret or Kyle. Possibly both. How weird the world has gotten, I thought. Ice day in Fulton. Zachary croaking with his former nemesis. Nemeses, if that was the plural.

  “Aren’t you guys sick of croaking?” I said to them. “Can’t you come up with anything more creative? I mean, seriously, it’s like you’re not even trying.”

  No answer.

  So I hung up.

  Then Maya called.

  “Ice day,” she said happily. “Can you believe it, Finley?”

  “I’m capable of believing anything at this point,” I told her. “Zachary and Jarret just called me together, which I’m pretty sure means it’s the Apocalypse.”

  “They called you?”

  “Just to ribbit. So where did you go yesterday?”

  “It’s a surprise,” Maya answered.

  “It is? You mean for me?”

  “Not for you, but I’m sure you’ll like it. Can I say something?”

  “No one could stop you, Maya.”

  “True.” She breathed into the phone. “Okay. So when we were decorating the lockers yesterday? It made me think how I trashed your birthday collage. But I only did that because you hurt my feelings.”

  “I know,” I said. “I wasn’t even mad about it. Besides, it was time. The paper was getting all scraggly.”

  “Yeah, a little. But I’m still sorry I threw it in the trash. It was beautiful.” She sighed. “Anyhow, I’m just so glad we finally stopped fighting. And that you stopped being such a boy wimp.”

  Here we go again, I thought. A hug and a pinch. Maya acting superior.

  On the other hand, I realized she was right—I’d been a sort of boy wimp, boringly sitting on my lily pad. And now here I was devising payback. So what she said was actually a compliment.

  “Um, thank you,” I said.

  “Um, you’re welcome,” she replied.

  Then my text-message sound went off. It was from Zachary and it said: ribbitribbit.

  • • •

  On Friday morning, Mrs. Lopez drove Maya and me to school. We wanted to be sure to get there early, so we wouldn’t miss anyone’s reaction. I even brought my camera, because something told me the boys wouldn’t be doing generic yearbook-type expressions when they witnessed their sticky lockers.

  And I can’t say that I expected Zachary to greet us with a white flag, surrounded by his Croaker army, all of them declaring in unison: Okay, you won, we acknowledge your superior prank-itude, we hereby end this stupid competition, we even forgive you for your stupid notebook. Followed by all of us—not just me, but Maya, Hanna, Olivia, Sophie, and Dahlia—helping the boys pry off the flypaper. Maybe even followed by a yummy snack of s’mores.

  Instead we were greeted with this: Mr. Lundquist, the school janitor, scraping Zachary’s locker and muttering under his breath. Señor Hansen standing to the janitor’s right, making a unibrow. Ms. Fisher-Greenglass to the janitor’s left, typing into her phone.

  As soon as we walked in, she looked up and smiled tightly. “Good morning, girls. Welcome back. Did you have a nice day off?”

  Maya and I nodded.

  “Good,” she said. “So. Do either or both of you girls know anything about these locker doors?”

  “Miss Lopez does,” Señor Hansen sneered. “She sneaked into my classroom with the same vile material.”

  “What?” I said.

  Maya glanced at me. Her face had splotched pink.

  “I believe the intent was to vandalize my desk,” Señor Hansen declared in a weirdly formal voice, as if he’d morphed into Sherlock Holmes. “As it happened, I was working late that afternoon, grading quizzes. But I stepped outside my classroom for a moment, and when I returned, Miss Lopez was standing at my desk. She made an excuse about needing a Spanish-English dictionary, which I found difficult to believe. Then she ran out, as if she was trying to flee, so I took the opportunity to inspect my classroom.” He waved one scary-hairy hand at Zachary’s locker. “And discovered this same extremely unpleasant material on the seats of two classmates.”

  “You said Chloe and Sabrina,” Ms. Fisher-Greenglass said, typing.

  “Miss DeGenidis and Miss Leftwich,” he repeated. “Exactly. Miss Lopez has had some friction with these girls in the past. As you are well aware she has had with me.”

  “Yes, I’m aware.” Ms. Fisher-Greenglass looked up; her eyes were serious, almost sad. “Maya, let’s take a walk to my office, shall we?”

  “You mean right now?” Maya asked faintly.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll inform your homeroom teacher.” The principal clamped her hand on Maya’s shoulder, and the two of them left the lockers.

  All I could do was stand there hopelessly, listening to the scrape-scrape-scrape of Mr. Lundquist’s knife. And maybe because I was in shock, I peeked at the flypaper on Zachary’s locker—which seemed housefly-free. It hadn’t even worked, apparently. But it still smelled horrible.

  “Tu amiga tiene una problema grande,” Senor Hansen said. He smiled fiendishly, flashing his teeth.

  It was the first Spanish sentence I ever understood perfectly.

  • • •

  Maya didn’t show up for homeroom, or for first-period science, or for any other class that morning. She was clearly in trouble—grande trouble, because this was her second offense against Señor Hansen, and it involved not only lockers and chairs, but also Señor Hansen’s desk. (That is, according to Señor Hansen.)

  Of course I realized I was in trouble too. So were Olivia, Hanna, Sophie, and Dahlia, but maybe not as much trouble as me.

  Although me not as much as Maya.

  Who beat me in everything, it seemed. Even trouble.

  I admit I was mad at her for not sticking to the plan. The flypaper was supposed to be for frog payback, not Señor Hansen payback, or Chloe-and-Sabrina payback. And running off by herself to Señor Hansen’s classroom was incredibly risky. It almost seemed as if she was asking to be caught. Asking us all to be caught.

  And taking on Señor Hansen, of all people? Again?

  Was she insane?

  All signs pointed to yes, absolutely. And incredibly dumb, too—because as soon as Maya’s parents found out about the Señor Hansen business, they’d yank her out of gymnastics, which she cared about more than anything.

  But.

  I still felt responsible. The flypaper had been my idea. The Life Cycle had mostly been mine. And if it hadn’t been for my stupid carelessness, Chloe wouldn’t have stolen my notebook, and nobody would have heard ab
out what I’d written, and then Zachary wouldn’t have started his war against us, and I wouldn’t have had to come up with froggy-themed payback.

  Plus Maya was anti–Life Cycle—but even so, she’d told the class she’d cowritten all the entries; she’d rescued the notebook from Chloe and Sabrina; she’d joined my side the second the boys started their croak-calling. She never hesitated; she always had my back.

  And there was this, which I hadn’t let myself think about before, but which I needed to now: Way before everything got messy and complicated, Maya liked Zachary. I mean, we never discussed it, but it was obvious. And when she thought that I possibly liked him too, she stepped aside. She even did what she could to help me—she set me up to take his photo, to go with him to Chloe’s party. Of course, I didn’t appreciate her interference, but that wasn’t the point—what I needed to remember was that she’d been looking after me.

  The thing was, Maya and I had been through a lot these past two weeks—one kerfuffle after another. But we were best friends. That would never change—not in middle school, not in high school. So I couldn’t abandon her now, with her problema grande.

  The only question was: How could I help her?

  I could think of just one way. It wasn’t brilliant, and it probably wouldn’t work, but it was the single idea my brain could come up with at that moment.

  So at lunch I escaped from the building.

  • • •

  Mom was in the kitchen reading The Sneetches to the Terribles when I burst into the house.

  “Finley? Is that you?” she called.

  “Just forgot something,” I panted, clutching my science notebook. “Mom.”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you possibly—would it be possible?” Oh great, now I was sounding like Dahlia Ringgold.

  “Yes?” Mom looked alarmed. “Could I what?”

  “Drive me back to school? Now?”

  I must have had a demented expression on my face, because she didn’t even ask what was going on. She just plopped the Terribles into their car seats and pulled the Toddler Mobile out of the driveway.