Troublemakers

by Gregg Maxwell Parker

  “We did!” I said. “Everything’s back to normal!”

  “Everyone’s trash cans are out on the curb,” said Carlos. “They weren’t out yesterday, or the day before.”

  “And the graffiti is gone,” said Tina. “Now that wall doesn’t say anything about hoes.”

  Bizarro’s was different too. This time, there were all sorts of weird old products. I mean, there always are, but this time we noticed them.

  “Surge? Clearly Canadian?” said Carlos.

  “3-D Doritos?” said Tina. “What is this stuff?”

  There were a few bags of Muy Anaranjado, but they weren’t discounted, and Carlos and Tina refused to give me money, so I was forced to spend my 21 cents on some incredibly cheap candy cigarettes that must have been outlawed in like the 1900s.

  The walk to school was different too. The neighborhood seemed deserted. No guy pushing his car, no kid on a hoverboard. We walked by the lot, and kids were skateboarding.

  “Ten bucks this next guy falls,” said Tina.

  We watched the kid glide toward the concrete thing and attempt an ollie. He easily cleared it and landed perfectly.

  “I’m not paying you anything,” said Tina.

  Then we passed by the elementary school. The bell rang, and all the kids rushed inside. We continued on, but then the recess helper lady leapt out of nowhere and accosted us.

  “Why are you three so late?” she demanded.

  “We… this isn’t our….”

  “Come on,” she said. “Get inside. This is a daily occurrence with you kids.”

  We looked at one another, shocked.

  “Let’s go!” she said.

  We followed her inside, through our old school from the year before. She walked with us down the hall and pointed to the fifth-grade classroom. We went in because we didn’t know what else to do. The lady yanked at Tina’s backpack.

  “Put these in the cubby and get to your desks,” she said.

  “But my weapons!” said Tina.

  The lady pushed us toward three desks in the back and we sat down. The rest of the class ignored us, including the student teacher, who passed out papers like everything was normal.

  “What are we gonna do?” whispered Carlos.

  “I’m about to crush this long division quiz,” I said.

  “This is your fault,” said Tina. “You and your stupid sneezing.”

  “You sent us back too far!” said Carlos. “Now we’re in fifth grade again!”

  “Yup,” I said. “This will be our lives now.”

  We got yelled at for talking and separated to the far corners of the room. I failed the long division quiz. We couldn’t talk for a long time, because in elementary school, you don’t get to walk through the hall every 42 minutes.

  I’d kind of forgotten what fifth grade was like. It has its positives. You get recess, there’s very little homework, and since the whole day is spent in one classroom, you can keep contraband in your desk for easy access. We even got a half-hour break while the prac teacher read to us out loud from Ferret in the Bedroom, Lizards in the Fridge.

  “I got to say, I’m enjoying this,” I told the guys while we waited in the lunch line. “I mean, yes, we’re living in a crazy time warp, but was fifth grade so bad?”

  Just then a couple fourth graders shoved us and smacked our trays to the ground.

  “Oops! Sowwy!” they cackled.

  Tina scowled.

  “Yes, it was bad. We got bullied by babies in this school. We need to get out.”

  “Okay, so how?”

  “We have to make Byron sneeze again,” said Carlos.

  “Not a problem,” said Tina. “I brought some tweezers. I’ll pull out your nose hair until the job is done.”

  She reached forth to yank out my brains.

  “Wait,” I said. “If I keep sneezing, we’ll just keep going backward.”

  She stopped.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Carlos. “I guess that’s true.”

  “What if we accidentally go so far back, we end up before we were born?” I asked. “I swore I’d never go back to the womb, and I intend to keep that promise.”

  After getting humiliated at tetherball and a disastrous spelling test, we regrouped at Tina’s house after school. Carlos drew a time travel diagram on Tina’s wall in permanent marker so we could think through the proper chronology.

  “Okay,” he said. “So, we want to travel forward in time. We know chips plus sneezing equals going backward, and how far we go depends on how much you sneeze. We need to do the opposite of that.”

  “Opposite of eating is barfing,” said Tina.

  “Not a problem,” I said. One of my many talents is the ability to puke on demand simply by shoving my fingers down my throat. Barfay diem.

  “Okay, so now we just need a reverse sneeze,” said Carlos.

  “What’s the opposite of a sneeze?” I asked. “A fart?”

  “How is a fart the opposite of a sneeze?” said Carlos.

  “Oh, you know everything now? You’re the knower of all things? I’m the Time Master here.”

  “I think the opposite of a fart is a burp,” said Tina.

  “We’re not talking about the opposite of a fart!” said Carlos. “We want the opposite of a sneeze.”

  “Wouldn’t that be putting liquid back up your nose?” she said.

  It was determined that this would be the thing to try.

  I don’t totally know what waterboarding is, but it’s probably something like having Carlos and Tina hold you down with your head in the sink and the water running up your nose. I almost drowned.

  After I dried off, we waited, but nothing really happened.

  “I guess we just have to wait and see what happens tomorrow,” said Carlos.

  “So what do we do with the rest of today?” asked Tina.

  “I have ideas,” I said.

  We made great use of our knowledge of the future by standing next to the entrance to the movie theater. Then, when people walked past us to go in, we loudly shouted spoilers for the next three MCU movies, plus a few lies about Star Wars since they wouldn’t know we were making it up anyway. Then we laughed.

  “I have to say,” said Tina on the walk home, “using a superpower for evil is definitely the way to go.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but you know what? This whole thing has got me thinking. Life is short, and once a day has slipped by, you don’t get it back. If we’re not careful, we’ll end up like our parents: old and annoying with nothing to live for. These fleeting moments of our youth are precious. Soon this time will be gone, and we’ll wish we’d done more with it. We’re getting a second chance, and we shouldn’t waste it. It’s time to get serious about school, about planning for the future, about helping others, about YOLO and all that. I think I’m having a bit of a, um… a….”

  “A change of heart?” said Carlos.

  “No, hold on. I’m okay. A….”

  “A moment of truth,” said Tina.

  “A….”

  “What? What are you trying to say?”

  ACHOOOOOOOOOO!

  “Uh-oh,” said Carlos.

  BA-CHOOO!

  KA-TCHEW!

  PA-TOOOOOOO!

  The world stopped for a moment.

  “It’s okay,” said Carlos. “This is fine. We can deal with—”

  THA-CHOOOOO!

  THA-CHOOOOO!

  THA-CHOOOOOOOOOO!

  Ooh, those were wet ones.

  “Well,” said Tina. At least we—”

  ACHOOOO!

  ACHOOOOO!

  ACHOOOOOOO!

  ACHOO!

  ACHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

  …

  …

  …

  “Buttmarsh.”

  __________

  Day New Mom

  So there we were, in kindergarten, working on the letter E. I tried to be fancy and write the last line in cursive for extra credit, but it was considered wron
g, so I got Mean Mr. Marker instead of a smelly sticker. Then we got to color!

  “This is actually pretty relaxing,” said Carlos. “No pressure in kindergarten.”

  “Yeah,” said Tina. “We don’t get nap time in middle school. I mean, I nap all the time, but here there’s pillows.”

  After milk, during recess, we got down to business.

  “Okay,” said Tina. “Option 1: we chop off Byron’s nose.”

  “Absolutely not,” I said. “The last time I let you guys chop something off, I got in a ton of trouble and my allowance went to those hospital bills forever.”

  “Fiiiiiiine,” she said with a groan.

  “How about this,” said Carlos. “Option 2: we stop up his nose using rubber cement, so there’s no way a sneeze could escape.”

  “That sounds good,” said Tina.

  As soon as that little brush hit my nose, I immediately sneezed ten more times and we got sent to time out for touching supplies when we weren’t supposed to.

  “Well, now what?” said Tina.

  “What if I just keep sneezing?” I said.

  “I don’t want to be in kindergarten forever,” said Carlos.

  “Yeah,” said Tina. “You can’t even stab people with these scissors.”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, what if I sneeze way more? Like, if I sneeze a ton, all day long, maybe we’ll loop back around in time. We’ll go back past when we were born, back through the dinosaur ages, then circle back around to the future, and if we keep going, we’ll eventually end up back here.”

  They stared at me.

  “That’s like so smart,” said Tina.

  “We’ll probably wake up tomorrow like 80 years old,” said Carlos, “and then we just continue the process and fine-tune it until we’re 18 and done with school.”

  “No, 21,” said Tina. “That’s the age you can get into Dave & Buster’s unaccompanied.”

  “No, 25,” said Carlos. “We might want to rent a U-Haul.”

  “I think that’s 23,” I said.

  “Okay, but what if I want to run for Congress?” said Carlos.

  “25 it is,” I said.

  One bright spot of kindergarten is the day ends at 1:00, so we had plenty of time. The plan was to go to the store and buy some pepper and feathers and stuff, then make me sneeze until the mobius strip of time reached its exact conversion point in the quantum realm based on our estimation of how all that worked.

  We were walking down the street, past our future middle school, when a U-Haul screeched to a stop right next to us. Then a gross man-boy who looked a lot like Isaac got out and yelled at us.

  “Get in the car!” he shouted.

  “What are you doing here?” I said, confused.

  “Yeah, shouldn’t you be in school?” said Tina.

  “And way younger?” said Carlos.

  “You look kind of big for a ten-year-old,” I said.

  “That’s just ‘cause you’re only five,” said Tina.

  “Five and three quarters,” I said.

  He marched over to us and put his hands on his hips like an old lady.

  “The truancy officers are looking for you guys. They know you haven’t shown up for school in two days.”

  “What?” said Carlos.

  “No, no, no,” I said. “You’ve got it all wrong. We were in school, just a different one because we traveled back in time.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Isaac, annoyed.

  I explained to him how every time I sneezed following a meal of delicious disgusting chips, we repeated the same day, and then eventually traveled farther back in time so that now we were all five years old and he was in fourth grade again. He took a moment to process this, looking up at a nearby tree in contemplation.

  “That’s… literally the most insane thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “You guys are stupid on a cosmic level.”

  “We were caught in a time loop!” I said. “The Dodgers lost every night!”

  “It’s October. Of course they did.”

  “But Tina broke Mom’s vase! And then in the morning, it was magically fixed.”

  “It wasn’t magically fixed. I glued it back together so you wouldn’t get in trouble.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Thank you.”

  It was around this time that I noticed several kids I recognized from our sixth-grade class walking back and forth between the portables, listening to music on AirPods, which is something they didn’t usually do when we were in kindergarten, since AirPods didn’t exist then, and our classmates weren’t in middle school when we were five.

  “I don’t think you understand,” offered Carlos. “This entire week, every day has been exactly the same. Teachers say the same things to us, everyone makes the same jokes, and all the boring stuff we do is just repeated over and over.”

  “Yeah, that’s school for you,” said Isaac with a nod.

  “We got the exact same homework three times!” said Carlos.

  “That’s because you three are in the dumb class where they have to make you do the problem sets ten times before you understand them.”

  “But we were transported back to fifth grade! A lady told us to go in there!”

  “I’d mistake you for elementary school kids too. You look like you’re nine, tops. And you act like idiots.”

  “But Byron sneezed a ton yesterday, and this morning, we were in kindergarten.”

  “Did you get put in that class, or did you just walk into a kindergarten room and start finger painting?”

  “Um….”

  “Okay,” I said, “but how do you explain what happened at home? Every night, Mom said she bought muffins, but they were always gone by morning.”

  “I’m 16. I need food.”

  “You haven’t changed your clothes all week.”

  “I’m on vacation. Leave me alone. You sound like Mom.”

  “You were sitting there watching the same videos and playing the same game and drinking the same horchata and having the same stupid conversation with that girl and asking Mom for money.”

  “Okay! I’ll get a job next summer! Glorb!”

  “Hold on. Yesterday, you weren’t there, and you weren’t there this morning when I left.”

  “Yes I was. You were ignoring me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I admit, this is starting to add up.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” said Tina. “Are you saying we’re not currently engaged in a hilarious adventure through spacetime?”

  “Yes,” said Isaac. “That is what I’m saying.”

  He shoved us into the U-Haul, which was definitely not designed for four people.

  “I thought you had to be 25 to rent one of these,” said Carlos.

  “No, that’s a normal rental car,” said Isaac, climbing in. “I had to rent this because I’m only 16. You’re lucky my stepmom gave me her credit card for emergencies.”

  He put on sunglasses that made him look like a merp.

  “Now I have to take you guys to the doctor to get a note that explains why you’ve been away from school so they won’t call Mom,” he said, buckling his belt. “Thanks for wasting my afternoon.”

  “No problem,” I said. “We’re well-versed in faking sick.”

  “Do you want stomach flu, or norovirus?” asked Carlos.

  “I do a very convincing bronchitis hack,” said Tina.

  “One time I had Tina cough into a tissue, and then I swallowed it so I could beat the strep throat test,” I said. “The key is to barf up the tissue at the exact moment they’re sticking the swab in your mouth. It didn’t work, but I think I can do better this time.”

  “The note is just to prove you went to the doctor,” said Isaac, pulling out into traffic. “Just say your stomach hurt all day yesterday, but today it’s a little better.”

  “I refuse,” said Carlos. “That’s an insult to my skill as a performer.”

  Isaac looked at us and shook his head.

  “You guys
have done some dumb stuff before, but I think believing you went back in time is possibly your crowning achievement.”

  “We’re only in sixth grade,” said Tina. “We have many years ahead of us to beat this.”

  “Fifth grade,” I said.

  “No,” said Carlos.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “I forgot.”

  We drove in silence for a moment while I considered the situation.

  “I’m still not convinced,” I said. “There were a couple times when I had money in my pocket, but in the morning, it was gone. If we didn’t travel back in time, what happened to my money?”

  Isaac pursed his lips and glanced around suspiciously.

  “Hmm,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe, um… maybe you lost it. Or maybe… maybe it disappeared! That’s a good mystery! Yeah, we should investigate and try to figure out where it went!”

  “Yeah,” I said, keeping my eyes on Isaac. “We’ll have to solve that one.”

  The doctor squared us away. It turns out all the barfing and sneezing I did made it so we didn’t even have to lie that much. And it was already after four by the time we got done, so it was too late to have the school ask teachers for our homework. Free weekend.

  “Hey, Isaac,” I said as we walked back into the house. “Thanks.”

  “No problem,” he said. “You’re my little bro. I got you.”

  He settled back into the couch with his controller, probably under the belief that helping us would make me forget about my missing quarters, which is why he’s a fool.

  While we may not have actually traveled through time, we did have the sensation of being in a time loop, so the experience was mostly the same on our end. I’d like to tell you I’ve come to a lot of conclusions about the nature of existence and the meaning of life and walked away a wiser person and all that, buuuuuuuuut I don’t think I did. I mostly just learned that it’s hard to make money even when you know exactly how things are going to go, and if you do come into some cash, you’ll probably waste it on ice cream, or some freeloader will take it from you while you’re sleeping.

  I’m not stupid. I know Isaac stole my money. That’s okay. I know how to get back at him. See, I know a lot about women. I know what they want to hear. And I know what Nadine definitely does not want texted to her from Isaac’s phone at two in the morning. To be fair, if you use “000000” as your phone code, you deserve to have bad things happen to you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I believe there’s a twenty-cent bag of Muy Anaranjado calling my name….