My brother-in-law shook his head in disbelief. “I knew he was smart, but I never dreamed he had guts like that. You could learn a thing or two from him, Donnie.”
“I learn new things from him every day,” I said through clenched teeth.
“See, Tina?” Katie cooed to the baby in her arms.
“That’s your Uncle Noah. He’s a hero.”
Tina gurgled and spit up a little.
I wracked my brain but couldn’t remember my sister telling her daughter anything good about her Uncle Donovan.
“Next time he comes over,” Brad decided, “I’ll talk to him about a career in the Marine Corps.”
Oh, perfect. Noah, whose lack of physical control sent one of his fellow cheerleaders to the emergency room, would be great behind the controls of an M1 tank.
The press conference ended to tremendous applause, a lot of it in my own living room. I had to admit that it bugged me. Not just that Noah was taking credit for something I did. After all, it wasn’t as if I could take credit for it myself. But how could my family be so quick to believe all this? They knew Noah!
Worse, it was like they were comparing him to me. It went without saying that I wasn’t as smart as Noah. But now I wasn’t as bold, gutsy, and decisive either. Ditto noble, gallant, and self-sacrificing. And his ability to make things happen? I couldn’t even come close.
Katie said, “I can’t believe I never saw that in Noah before. He always seemed so . . .” She searched for the right word.
“Dweeby?” I suggested, annoyed. I had others—lying, double-crossing, shifty, back-stabbing . . .
“Cerebral,” she concluded.
“Inner strength, that’s what it is,” Brad chimed in. “A hidden reservoir he can tap when things are really desperate.”
Mom said, “Such a wonderful boy. What’s wrong with you, Donnie? How come it’s been so long since he’s been over?”
“Noah’s pretty busy these days,” I explained. “He joined the cheerleading squad.”
“Seriously?” Brad echoed, struggling to fit cheerleading into the role he pictured for Noah in his beloved Corps. Pom-poms clashed with dress blues.
“Relax,” I soothed him. “Noah might be the worst cheerleader in the history of the world. He won’t be shaking his booty for the Dallas Cowboys anytime soon.”
“I’m sure Noah is just fine,” Mom said pointedly. She turned to my sister. “Katie, you were a cheerleader in high school. I’ll bet you could give Noah some pointers.”
Katie nodded enthusiastically. “I used to really bring it back then.”
“If you can teach that guy how to cheerlead,” I told her, “then we won’t have one superkid. We’ll have two.”
“That’s unkind,” my mother clucked disapprovingly. “Set it up, Donnie. It would be nice for all of us to express to Noah how much we appreciate what he’s done for the town.”
“And it’ll give Tina a chance to spend some time with her favorite uncle,” Katie added.
I took that personally.
My father shook his head. Could it be? Someone finally coming to my defense?
He announced, “I just can’t believe that the superkid would be friends with a guy like you!”
I called Noah all afternoon and well into the night. Again and again, his voicemail came up: “I’m unable to take your call for any one of hundreds of thousands of possible reasons predicted by chaos theory. So leave a message at the beep.”
“It’s Donovan,” I snapped after the tone. “Call me.”
He never did.
I gave up on the phone and went over to the Youkilis house. The place was jumping. When I got there, Noah was taking a call from our state senator. I actually had to wait behind the owner of Hardcastle Lanes. He’d been there for an hour, he said, waiting to have his picture taken handing Noah a giant coupon awarding the entire Youkilis family free bowling for life. According to Noah’s dad, it had been going on all day—local businesspeople lining up for a photo op shaking hands with the superkid.
Eventually, I snuck in the back door and cornered Noah when he was on his way to the bathroom. He seemed genuinely thrilled to see me. “Hi, Donovan. Guess what?”
“I don’t have to guess what!” I hissed. “I know what. The whole town knows. What I don’t know is why would you do such a thing?”
He seemed mystified. “I did it for you.”
“For me? How do you figure that?”
“You were so scared that someone might figure out it was you,” he explained. “Logic dictates that no one will look for the superkid if the superkid has already been found. And now you’re safe.”
I was honestly and truly speechless. I’d heard a lot of brilliance from Noah, and a lot of stupidity too. This seemed to be both at the same time.
“You’re welcome,” he added sincerely.
“Yeah—uh, great. Thanks,” I stammered. “It’s just that—well, what if nobody believes you?”
No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I realized what an idiotic question that was. Everyone believed him already. How else could you explain the lineup downstairs, the press conference with the mayor, and the love-fest in my living room?
“Why wouldn’t they believe me?” he asked.
Where would you even start? From the vaulting horse he had to be thrown over to his performance as a cheerleader, there was no bigger klutz than Noah. And klutzes couldn’t dive in through the windows of moving trucks. Didn’t he think that sooner or later, someone would connect the dots?
Then again, this was the guy who believed you could learn to be a wrestler from YouTube, so maybe I had my answer.
He went on. “I have the driver’s St. Christopher medal. I was there, so if anyone asks questions, I know exactly what happened. I fell in the pool too, so my parents can confirm that I was wet when I came home that morning. It’s foolproof.”
I looked him up and down, tracing the arc of his praying-mantis posture. “Well, that kind of depends on your definition of fool.”
“And now you don’t have to worry about being caught in Hashtag’s neighborhood,” he finished. “It’s the least I can do after all the help and support you’ve given me since we met.”
He was 1000 percent serious—and 1000 percent convinced he was doing me a great favor. It was a ridiculous sham, but what choice did I have other than to go along with it? Noah getting found out meant me getting found out. And since the whole story was so huge now, that would put ten times the attention on Beatrice being a dangerous animal.
I was stuck with it. My only hope was to coach Noah into acting like the hero he was supposed to be. We were partners in the biggest lie since I’d pretended to be in the gifted program.
Somebody once said, “The truth will set you free.”
That was so wrong. All it could do was sink us.
11
SUPERGRATEFUL
MEGAN MERCURY
Who knew?
Of all the people I thought might have turned out to be the superkid, Noah Youkilis was dead last on the list. This went far beyond not judging a book by its cover. You couldn’t judge this book by its cover, pages, about-the-author section, or even the bar code and ISBN number on the back. There was nothing good about this book—not even if the store put it on special sale where they paid you to take it off their hands.
But there was no denying it. Noah had saved our lives and our home. He may have been the worst cheerleader in the history of humanity, but I owed him . . . everything.
Two, four, six, eight, who do we . . .
Even in my head, I couldn’t force myself to finish the line.
Appreciate! Appreciate! What’s your problem, Megan? No sentence is more familiar to a cheerleader!
But the appreciating wasn’t the issue. It was the person getting appreciated.
When we went over to Noah’s house to thank him in person, I tried to work up some of the emotions that I should have felt for him—gratitude, admiration, friendship. But
one look at him and it just wasn’t there. He was still the clumsy oaf who had single-handedly ruined my cheerleading squad. I strained to notice something positive about him that I hadn’t seen before. Maybe his shoulders were broader than I remembered (they weren’t). Or his voice was deeper (it wasn’t). Or he was taller (oh, please) or more clear-eyed (he had conjunctivitis from severe seasonal allergies). Face it, if he’d kept the Hindenburg from exploding instead of one little propane truck, he’d still be Noah.
Mom, Dad, and Peter took turns hugging him, so I had to do it too. It was awful.
I told Noah, “I’m very grateful,” because at least that part was true.
He said, “I’m glad it was your house.” I know he meant it in a good way, but it made me want to punch him.
Positivity, I reminded myself.
I thought everything would be less painful once we were back at school, but that turned out to be wishful thinking. Principal Verlander called an assembly so we could all congratulate the superkid, and I had to hug him again—this time in front of nine hundred people. In the crowd, Ms. Torres kept gesturing at me, pointing to the sides of her mouth. That was the signal for more smiling, but I just couldn’t pull it off. I was a cheerleader, not a wizard.
Wherever Noah walked in the halls, a buzz of excited conversation followed.
“That’s him!”
“That’s the superkid!”
“He saved Megan Mercury’s life, you know!”
I got so sick of hearing it that I snapped. “He didn’t save my life; he saved my house!” I hissed at the bewildered seventh grader. “And for all we know, the propane might not even have exploded!”
“Yeah, but if it had, then your house would have been on fire,” he mused. “And maybe you wouldn’t have gotten out alive.”
“I would have made it,” I insisted.
I thought I was keeping my voice low, but I guess I was too emotional. We were the center of attention. Worst of all, Noah himself was there, listening with keen interest.
“Oh, hi, Noah,” I said, my face twisting. “We were just talking about what a great thing you did.”
At lunch, I emerged from the food line to find my usual table completely full. All my friends and fellow cheerleaders were gathered around Noah—even Vanessa, who still had a bandage across the bridge of her nose. Noah was recounting the story with the propane truck, and they were hanging on his every word, worshipping the boy wonder.
“Weren’t you scared?” asked Vanessa in a somewhat nasal tone.
“There wasn’t time to be,” Noah replied. “Protecting Megan’s house was all that mattered. Of course, I didn’t know it was Megan’s house then. I just saw people in danger and realized I was the only one who could help them . . .”
I stood there balancing my tray and clearing my throat meaningfully. Nobody so much as glanced in my direction except Noah himself. He looked up and said, “Everybody move over and make room for Megan.”
Suddenly, the idea of having to thank Noah again became just too much for me. “That’s okay,” I told him stiffly. “I’ve got a lot of homework to do before sixth period.”
I selected a table on the opposite side of the cafeteria and sat down to eat. Every bite tasted like cardboard.
“Wow!” came a voice. “Megan Mercury’s all alone in the lunchroom!”
I groaned. Daniel Nussbaum, my second favorite person in the whole school. There he was, with his best friend Daniel Sanderson—Tweedledum and Tweedledumber.
“Hey!” Sanderson exclaimed. “If we eat lunch with the head cheerleader, do you think we can become as cool as she is?”
“We’ll never be as cool as the superkid,” Nussbaum admitted. “But maybe we can make it up to Megan’s level.”
I glared at them. “Fine. Bust my chops. Get it over with quick so we can all eat in peace.”
Sanderson slid across the bench next to me and took a mighty bite of his egg salad sandwich. “You seem kind of cranky for someone who’s just been saved from the jaws of death.”
I didn’t answer. These creeps were like a black hole that sucked up all my positivity. Maybe if I ignored them, they’d go away.
“Hey, guys, is that Noah sitting in the middle of all those cheer—”
It was Donovan Curtis. The minute his eyes fell on me, the word “cheerleader” died on his tongue.
“Noah’s so popular now,” Nussbaum exclaimed. “Who would have thought he’d turn out to be the superkid, instead of, you know, somebody else?”
“He never struck me as the stop-a-runaway-truck type,” Sanderson agreed.
“It just shows how wrong you can be about a guy,” Donovan replied, his words clipped.
I felt like they were saying one thing and meaning another. I could have asked about it, but that would have meant that I cared what these three idiots had to say. And believe me, I didn’t.
“Noah deserves all the attention he’s getting.” So help me, they were making me crazy to the point where I was actually saying nice things about Noah. “Good for him.”
“I guess Noah’s going to be the guest of honor at your big birthday pool party this year,” Nussbaum prodded, “seeing as how you’re so grateful to him.”
I dropped my fork. In all the excitement of the near disaster, I’d totally forgotten my party was coming up in a couple of weeks. How could I get away with not inviting the guy who’d made it possible for me to have another birthday in the first place?
“Well—” I stammered, “the—uh—invitations have already gone out—”
“Mine must have gotten lost in the mail,” Sanderson concluded.
“—and the guest list is already set,” I rambled on. Ever since elementary school, my annual birthday party had been the ultimate bash for kids in our grade. It was always the first pool party, right when the weather was starting to warm up. Best of all, I only invited cheerleaders, athletes, and the other cool people—which explained why Tweedledum, Tweedledumber, and TweedleDonovan never made the cut. And if the encyclopedia had a heading under Least Likely to Be Invited, there’d be a picture of Noah at the top of the page. It wasn’t as if I’d decided not to invite him. It just never would have even crossed my mind for the billionth of a second that it would have taken to say no way.
But now . . .
“Of course Noah’s on there,” Nussbaum announced. “Can you imagine the kind of jerk Megan would look like if she didn’t invite the guy who saved her life?”
“I might not have died!” I blurted. Then I covered up by adding, “And obviously Noah’s invited. How shallow do you think I am?”
My appetite gone, I dumped my tray into the garbage and marched over to my usual table, where the superkid was still holding court.
“Hey, Noah,” I called, “you’re coming to my birthday party, right?” And I stormed out of the cafeteria without waiting to hear his answer.
Maybe his family would be out of town that weekend. A girl could dream.
It had been a lousy day, but at least I had a lacrosse game to look forward to that afternoon—at home against Rutherford Junior High. And when Noah didn’t show up at the field house before the start, my heart soared. Could it be that the superkid was too important and too busy to be a cheerleader anymore? Maybe he had interviews to do, or calls of congratulations from the president and the queen of England. Maybe he was being measured for his wax figure at Madame Tussauds. I didn’t care, so long as it kept him away from my squad.
Rutherford were our neighbors and division rivals, and that always attracted a lot of students from both schools. The stands were full and the atmosphere was rowdy. I was balanced at the top of our human pyramid, when all at once, the crowd noise swelled to a roar. Everyone—even the Rutherford kids—were stomping on the metal bleachers and screaming. I threw my arms up in a gesture of triumph, but nobody was watching me. Nobody was watching any of the Lady Hornets, even though we trained as hard as the athletes and had made it to the middle school state cheerleading finals
two years running.
From my vantage point at the apex, I saw what all the fuss was about. He had arrived. He jogged out onto the field in his clumsy, butt-battering style.
I screamed, “Abandon pyramid! Let me down!” because Noah was heading right for us, and for sure, he would take out the formation and send us all flying.
My dismount wasn’t graceful, but at least I landed on my feet and not my head.
He blundered into our midst and the girls crowded around, high-fiving him. The audience went nuts, and it was pretty obvious that this was more than the usual ovation that he always got for falling flat on his face.
A chant rose from the stands: “Su-per-kid! . . . Su-per-kid! . . .”
My cheeks burned hot. I’d put my heart and soul into creating the greatest cheers and the best routines in the whole county, but all anybody wanted to look at was the guy with two left feet.
Noah was pushing his way through the squad toward me, shouting something that I couldn’t hear over the crowd noise.
“What?” I demanded.
“Yes!” he replied.
“Yes, what? What are you talking about?”
“Yes, I’m coming to your party!”
All at once, the crush of people on our sideline parted and Hashtag stepped out in front of us. I was stoked. If there was one kid who appreciated Noah even less than I did, it was Hashtag, whose arm was still in a sling, thanks to a brouhaha Noah had been mixed up in. If anyone could knock the superkid down a peg, it had to be the town’s top athlete.
The crowd grew quiet as the two of them confronted each other. Suddenly, Hashtag broke into a grin. With his free hand, he grasped Noah’s wrist and raised his arm above his head, championship-boxer style. Fans of both teams went absolutely berserk.
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