Frazzled #2

by Booki Vivat

  I wasn’t surprised. Adults never seem to think our problems are all that important, so they aren’t much help when it comes to solving them.

  I was ready to give up, but Jess had another plan in mind.

  She started explaining our situation to the office lady, Ms. Hayes, and somehow convinced her to help us! Everyone knew that the office was notoriously unhelpful, and yet . . .

  I had never seen anything like it. Was she some kind of adult-whisperer? Could she get them to fix it? For a split second, I thought this might work itself out—until Ms. Hayes looked up from her computer, lowered her glasses, and said,

  (I could tell by her pause that it was not good.)

  I think she said something about “sharing” too, but I didn’t feel like listening after that.

  The way I saw it, this was a sign. After all, the whole mix-up happened because there was some unexplainable glitch in the system when the lockers were assigned

  I had suspected for years, but this solidified it.

  The alphabet was out to get me.

  When I left school, all I could think about were my options—or rather, lack of options.

  I started thinking and walking and thinking and walking. Before I knew it, I was in front of Antonia’s Bake Shop! It was as if some kind of cosmic force had guided me there to try to make me feel better.

  Or it could have just been my stomach.

  Inside the bakery, Maxine and Logan were sitting at our usual table doing their homework.

  I must have been in bad shape when I walked in because as soon as they saw me, they instantly launched into BFF Comfort Mode.

  Istvan could sense it too. Before we left that day, he stopped by our table with a pastry to-go box in hand!

  Turns out, Istvan wasn’t just the world’s best pastry chef. He was a mind reader too!

  Inside was a perfectly baked chocolate tart—just for me.

  It was exactly what I needed.

  When I got home, I set the box down on the counter and turned my back on it for a second.

  But I was not alone. Nothing was safe anymore.

  Mr. Felix McSnuggles the Third was on the prowl, and a second was all he needed. . . .

  This time, he had crossed the line.

  I had no choice but to bring it up in our

  Mom got the idea for family meetings from some weird parenting book her friend bought her. At first, we all thought it was a joke, but Mom ended up liking them so much that family meetings became a permanent thing.

  If they were ever going to take my complaints about Felix seriously, it would be in a family meeting.

  The hardest part was figuring out how to bring it up. It didn’t help that I could feel Felix staring at me from across the room . . . taunting me with his manipulative, beady eyes.

  For some reason, this family meeting felt longer than all the others. It’s like we were in the Twilight Zone, caught in a looped discussion about chores and allowance and extracurricular activities.

  But then, I finally saw the chance to say something.

  They had to know the truth! I had to tell them!

  Felix clearly had it out for me, but the whole family just thought I was being paranoid.

  Aunt Lisa was usually on my side, but this time, I wasn’t so sure.

  After all . . . she was a “cat person.”

  Mom tried to make me feel better. . . .

  But I could tell that she didn’t really GET it.

  The problem was, no one was EVER around to see Felix terrorize me. He conveniently timed his attacks for when they weren’t looking.

  Felix was DIABOLICAL.

  Aunt Lisa was a big fan of family meetings, and she had her own unique take on how to deal with Felix.

  Though a bit unconventional, she was a VERY convincing person.

  Somehow she got us to try this new meditation technique with her.

  Still, it felt silly to imagine any of us being “one” with Felix.

  After a while, Aunt Lisa let us open our eyes and said,

  And, if I was honest, I really DID feel a little better. Maybe Aunt Lisa’s new technique actually worked. . . .

  Or maybe it was the fact that after all that, she brought out a surprise she’d been saving for dessert—a huge confetti cake baked from scratch for us, and some fancy cat treats for Felix.

  It wasn’t exactly the same as a fancy chocolate tart from Antonia’s, but it was still really really REALLY good. Plus, seeing Felix munching happily on his treats gave me a brilliant idea.

  At night, Felix liked to sneak into my closet and spy on me through a curtain of dresses and coats.

  Then, just as I was on the verge of sleep, he would bolt out of his hiding spot and pounce on my head!

  But NOT this time.

  This time, I slipped him a few extra treats before bedtime. My offering of savory fish-shaped snacks must have satisfied him enough to leave me alone for the rest of the night.

  SUCCESS!

  The whole cat snack experiment made me think that maybe Mom had a point—and, in her own way, maybe Aunt Lisa did too. I HAD to make things work.

  But it wasn’t going to be easy.

  I didn’t LOVE the idea of sharing a locker, but I wasn’t sure I could survive without one.

  Why did we need this many textbooks in middle school anyway? They weren’t just regular-size books either—they were GIGANTIC. Each one felt like a huge, boxy boulder that would crush me if I wasn’t careful.

  We didn’t even use them most of the time. We just had to bring them to class to prove we were “prepared.”

  The bottom line was that there was ONE locker and TWO of us. Somehow we had to coexist.

  Before school, I practiced giving my speech about sharing the locker and somehow making it work.

  But when I ran into Jess at school, she was already a step ahead. She had cleared out half the locker for me—no books and papers crammed into each other, no empty candy wrappers, no mysterious smelly package!

  Maybe I should’ve been happy about that, but instead, I just felt confused. Jess didn’t seem bothered by the fact that sharing a locker meant less space, zero privacy, and forced cohabitation with a total stranger. In fact, she seemed totally fine with the whole thing!

  How was she so okay with it? Then again, in the short amount of time I had known her, she also seemed like the kind of person who was okay with pretty much anything.

  So I decided to execute my own secret scientific study to try to figure her out. In class, Mr. Walters had been talking a lot about the scientific method—this fancy, official way of figuring out the truth.

  If I wanted real answers about Jessica Wyatt, maybe science really WAS the way to get them!

  Mr. Walters said that science was all about trying to “know the unknown,” and at this point, Jessica Wyatt was DEFINITELY an unknown.

  Maybe THAT was my real problem with Jessica Wyatt. No one knew who she was or what she was like. In many ways, NOT KNOWING was the worst part.

  I HAD to find out.

  Between sharing a locker and working as partners in science class, I had plenty of chances to test out my theories, make some observations, and gather data.

  The thing is, it all led back to the same baffling conclusion—

  Jess was not fazed by ANYTHING.

  We’d been spending a lot of time together in class, but I hadn’t managed to figure her out yet! From my research, I concluded the following points:

  She was pretty nice . . .

  not mean and snobby like the Spencer sisters . . .

  or sadistic and cruel like that bullying jerk Ryan Savage.

  She was sort of private and mysterious . . .

  but never in that creepy way Danny Andrews was when he stared at you from across the room for too long.

  She was very clever . . .

  only she never rubbed it in your face or got annoying about it like Alexis Bunker did when she knew the right answer.

  Jess Wyatt wasn�
�t like most kids at Pointdexter. She was hard to read, and even after all my scientific observations, I still didn’t know what to expect from her! Maybe I never would. . . .

  The last step of the scientific process was to report my findings, but the whole experiment was not nearly as informative as I had hoped it would be. When I told Maxine and Logan about it, they seemed more curious than confused.

  So curious, in fact, that Maxine went ahead and invited Jess to join us for lunch!

  Maxine was very impulsive, so it didn’t really surprise me when she asked.

  Jess, on the other hand, was VERY surprised. She didn’t hang around with anyone in particular and she didn’t exactly fit into one specific group at school. She didn’t really seem to WANT to either.

  From all the data I’d collected about Jess Wyatt, I came to the conclusion that she would probably say no. She seemed to prefer being on her own and doing her own thing anyway.

  But then she said . . .

  So I guess I really DIDN’T have Jess figured out.

  At first it was weird having someone new at our table. For years, it had always been just the three of us.

  We knew each other better than anyone else. Maxine and Logan probably knew me better than my own family, and I knew pretty much EVERYTHING about them.

  I knew that Logan hated polka dots.

  (They reminded him of a particularly traumatic case of chicken pox.)

  I knew that Maxine carried around a piece of old chewing gum in a tiny plastic box for good luck.

  (She swore it belonged to Julie Andrews.)

  Sometimes I thought I knew them so well that I could tell what they were thinking, even if they didn’t say it. But with Jess, I didn’t know anything!

  At first, I couldn’t help but wonder if this would turn out to be the most awkward lunch EVER . . .

  But it wasn’t.

  I thought it would be weird that we didn’t know anything about Jess and she didn’t know anything about us, but actually, NOT KNOWING made things kind of interesting.

  That day, we learned a lot about her—definitely more than I had through my secret scientific study.

  If someone had told me earlier that I would be sitting at a lunch table and sharing my chips with the kid who hijacked my locker, I would never have believed them. I guess that’s what Mr. Walters meant when he said that life is unpredictable.

  Considering how things started out between us . . .

  We actually got along okay.

  Even sharing a locker wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I had to admit, it had its advantages.

  One night I fell asleep doing homework.

  Felix sensed my guard was down.

  He knocked my history book off the table and hid it under the bed.

  I didn’t realize it was missing until I was heading to class the next day.

  Mr. Monroe was a stickler when it came to being prepared, so I knew that I was going to be in

  But then . . .

  problem solved!

  That’s how we came up with the idea to share books.

  We were already stuck sharing a locker. It didn’t make sense to have two copies of the SAME BOOKS taking up space, so we figured we might as well share those too!

  I had to admit, it was a pretty good idea.

  On the other hand, life with Felix hadn’t gotten better at all. It was almost WORSE.

  Felix caught on to my snack strategy and was no longer responding to bribery.

  In fact, he seemed almost OFFENDED by my attempts to control him and, out of revenge, launched a vicious campaign against me.

  He ruined EVERYTHING.

  It could have been a mortifying social catastrophe!

  Luckily, Jess came up with a temporary fix before anything bad could happen.

  She saved the day!

  It made me realize that, even if we were total opposites, Jess might not be such a bad person to have around.

  One day, Mr. Walters seemed more excited than usual to start class. There was clearly something he wasn’t telling us, and everyone was buzzing with rumors of what crazy idea he had in mind. He had a reputation for coming up with unconventional new ways of making science seem “cool and relevant.”

  When Peter had Mr. Walters as a teacher, his class went on a hike into the wild to collect and identify local vegetation for their biology unit.

  Half the class ended up trekking through a field of poison ivy . . .

  and the other half had a VERY close run-in with a wasps’ nest.

  Apparently Mr. Walters had considered it a “great learning experience,” so it was hard to predict what he could possibly have planned for US.

  Do your best?

  What if my best wasn’t good enough?

  What if my best wasn’t good at all?

  The more Mr. Walters talked about it, the more excited he got and the more convinced I was that this project was going to be a complete and total DISASTER.

  Not only did we have to invent something totally cool and new, we had to get onstage and present it to everyone!

  I thought that the class would erupt in protests and boycotts after Mr. Walters announced it, but actually they all seemed to feed off his excitement. I didn’t get it!

  I didn’t like big crowds or public speaking or stages, for that matter.

  Plus, I wasn’t an

  I just used things other people invented!

  I didn’t have any new ideas!

  I didn’t know how to make things work!

  But I did know one thing, and that was Murphy’s Law.

  There were so many things that could go wrong. Why didn’t anyone else see that? Even Maxine and Logan bought into the hype of the Invention Convention.

  Maxine was more excited about the idea of being onstage in front of a built-in audience than the actual “invention” part of things . . .

  BUT she was lucky enough to be paired with Alexis Bunker.

  I bet Alexis had mapped out their whole project before Mr. Walters even finished the lesson.

  Logan didn’t seem bothered by the assignment at all. If I was a boy genius, I probably wouldn’t be either.

  Plus, he was partnered with Mira Shahin, who was insanely smart and a natural science whiz.

  I later found out that, months ago, they had started running science experiments and building new inventions on their own—just for fun.

  Imagine what they could do if they REALLY tried.

  Unlike the others, Jess and I had

  Jess didn’t seem too worried, but I knew we needed to get to work. That day, we headed to my house after school to get started on it.

  On the walk home, I tried to warn her about what to expect.

  Of course, when I told her, she was not fazed at all.

  In fact, she thought all my stories about life at home were kind of funny!

  I wasn’t sure why.

  Jess was an only child and she had to move around a lot because of her dad, but even then, her family sounded pretty normal compared to mine.

  Most people who didn’t know my family tended to assume that we were calm and peaceful, but in reality, we were anything BUT—

  especially now that Felix was part of the family.

  The second we stepped through the doorway, Felix shot out from behind the sofa and pounced on me as if I were some kind of household intruder.

  And THAT was only the beginning. Mr. Felix McSnuggles the Third was in a particularly vindictive mood that day.

  We couldn’t get anything done!

  That was his plan all along. Maybe this was his way of punishing me for bringing a new person into the house without his approval. Or maybe he just had it in for me.

  Whatever the reason, he was making it difficult to even THINK about our invention.

  After a while, Jess said:

  She actually agreed with me! For once, someone was on MY side.

  When Jess started talking about her grandma’s cat, Mitzy, it occurred to me
that we might have more things in common than I originally thought.

  After that, things felt a little different between us. I guess this was what it felt like to find “common ground” or whatever.

  She was the only one who seemed to really GET IT.

  Maybe I needed to reexamine my original hypothesis about Jessica Wyatt. At first, I thought she was just a locker thief, my mandatory science partner, the new kid at school. I thought we would NEVER get along.

  But the more we worked together and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that we were starting to become friends—or at the very least, “almost friends.”

  Too bad being “almost friends” didn’t help much when it came to our science project.

  When Peter came home from soccer practice, we were in the middle of what seemed like our two hundred fifty-seventh bad invention idea.