The Handbook

by Jim Benton

  “And why’s that?” Big Mother demanded.

  “Because Maggie set the bombs that Marion brought with her in her backpack.”

  The General looked at Marion and smiled.

  “I’d be surprised if they don’t take out the entire block,” he said.

  Maggie held the rope as her mom clumsily slid down from the conference room to the sidewalk below. The Parents Agency had never been attacked before and the defensive security was a little sloppy. They hadn’t boarded up the window the Resistance had smashed through, or removed their ropes.

  “So happy they missed this,” Maggie said, wagging Marion’s backpack as she and her mom ran to their car.

  “Are you sure about this, Maggie?” her mom said. “I mean, setting bombs. Honestly, I don’t even like you to light the scented candles at home.”

  “Just drive, Mom. I’ll tell you exactly where to go.”

  Inside the Agency, alarms were going off. The security officers were running around in a panic.

  “Go in there and disarm those bombs this instant, young man,” Big Mother barked at the General.

  “Disarm them?” he scoffed. “I can’t even get near them. Once they’re armed, the slightest touch will set them off.”

  “I suppose that was your idea?” Big Mother said to the General. “Not a very good idea, young man.”

  “That was my idea,” Marion said. “The General added a remote control that you could use to shut them down safely from a distance.”

  Big Mother’s face brightened.

  “WONDERFUL! Where is it?”

  “I destroyed it,” Marion said. “And THAT was my idea, too.”

  Mike, Jen, and their dad pushed past them.

  “Hurry up!” they shouted.

  “Yeah. We only have a few minutes to get out of here,” Maggie’s dad said, and threw a handful of shredded paper at the Supervisor as he ran past.

  It was the check he had given to Maggie.

  “She’s too old for dolls,” he said, and then looked back and chuckled. “You probably should have known that. Kids. What are ya gonna do?”

  The Supervisor looked at the bits of paper blowing around on the ground.

  “I thought they liked them until they were fourteen or something,” he said. “I have sons.”

  * * *

  The tires on the minivan squealed.

  Maggie’s mom cranked hard on the wheel as Maggie gave her directions.

  “Turn here. Go all the way down to the light and turn left.”

  She opened the backpack and pulled out a detonator that looked exactly like the one she’d set at the Parents Agency.

  “Dear,” her mom asked gently, “is that safe?”

  “It’s safe, like, for a bomb, Mom. A bomb is kind of like the opposite of safe, wouldn’t you say? They aren’t very useful if they’re safe.”

  A black minivan roared up behind them. Maggie spun around to see agents raising their immobilizers.

  “We have company, Mom.”

  * * *

  People streamed out of the Parents Agency, running for their lives.

  Pretty soon, when they were safe a few blocks away, Jack and Mike stopped and looked back at the building.

  Big Mother and the Supervisor were staring back at it; they seemed utterly brokenhearted.

  Mike walked up to them and touched them lightly on their backs.

  “I guess things happen for a reason,” he said gently. Big Mother ran her fingers through Mike’s hair and smiled through her tears at him.

  “And the reason here is because you suck.”

  Just then a series of dull, thudding pulses echoed out of the headquarters.

  Their hair blew back slightly and they felt a low vibration in their chests.

  “Was that the bomb?” Big Mother asked.

  * * *

  Maggie’s mom’s car screeched to a stop and they jumped out and ran into the Resistance hideout.

  Electrical charges fired by the agents crackled past them as the agents pursued them inside.

  Maggie pressed buttons on the detonator as they ran down the hallways to the main control room. She locked the door to keep the pursuing agents out.

  “Okay, everybody,” she shouted. “Run for your lives!”

  The kids spun around and stared at her.

  “You know what this is.” She held the bomb aloft. “This is one of Marion’s.”

  She set it down in front of the main terminal and pressed the button to start the countdown.

  “It’s over!” she barked. “Everybody out!”

  The kids just looked at her, unimpressed.

  “That’s not a bomb,” one of the kids said. “That’s a magnetic pulse detonator. It will take out the computers, but it won’t hurt us.”

  Maggie walked calmly over to a fire alarm.

  “Yeah, but you know how much trouble you’ll be in for a fake fire alarm?” she said, and she pulled the handle.

  The alarms blared loudly. The kids remained seated.

  Maggie was at a loss.

  Her mom inhaled deeply.

  “EVERYBODY OUT!” her mom screeched, and the kids all stumbled to their feet and ran out the doors, just as the agents were running in.

  “IT’S A BOMB, YOU FOOLS!” she hollered at the agents, and they turned and tripped out after the kids.

  Maggie looked at her, amazed.

  “Yelling is kind of a built-in mom thing. You can’t learn it from a book.”

  As they drove away from the evacuated hideout, they heard the sirens of the fire engines approaching. The dull thudding pulse of the detonator fired and they could feel the vibration from it.

  “That will mess up their computers,” Maggie said. “And when the firefighters get there, they’ll clear out all the stuff that’s in their headquarters.”

  “Did the detonators destroy everything the Parents Agency had?” her mom asked.

  “No way,” Maggie said. “It caused problems for them, but I’m sure they had backups on everything.”

  Sean and Jessica played Whac-A-Mole as the racket of the Chuck E. Cheese’s clattered around them. Their families, along with Mike, Marion, and their parents, sat crowded around a table with Big Mother, the Supervisor, and the General. They smiled as kids ran past with armloads of tickets and smears of birthday cake across their faces.

  * * *

  “How long until all the parents destroy their copies of the books?” Jack asked.

  “Well, Jack,” Big Mother began, “it will take some time. We’ll send out the instructions, just as we agreed, but that magnetic pulse of Maggie’s wiped out a lot of our data, and at present, nobody is sure where we put the backup stuff to contact everybody.”

  The Supervisor shrugged sheepishly.

  “Kids are better at computer stuff,” he said. “I’ve said that all along. We should have hired some.”

  “So this will all take a while,” she continued. “But we’ll keep at it. I promise.”

  The Supervisor pointed his finger at the General and Marion.

  “And that Resistance of yours, you’re disbanding that, right?”

  “As long as you stick to the agreement,” the General said through a mouthful of pizza.

  Big Mother grinned and resisted the urge to tell him not to speak with his mouth full. Instead, she turned and wagged her finger playfully at Marion and spoke to her parents.

  “This girl of yours is a real firecracker,” Big Mother said. “If she can focus that intensity of hers, there’s nothing she won’t be able to do.”

  “It’s hard to believe that just a few hours ago we were enemies,” Marion said, reaching into her jacket. She pulled out an immobilizer and Big Mother froze.

  “I guess I should give this back,” Marion said, putting it on the table with a heavy thunk. “I kind of took it.”

  Big Mother quickly snatched it off the table and hid it in her purse.

  “We weren’t enemies,” she said. “Enemies hate each
other. Our conflict came from wanting to control each other, and that’s different from hate. If we all agree to just control ourselves, then maybe we can reduce some conflict. Do you agree?”

  The General thought for a moment.

  “If everybody agrees to that,” he said, “then I think this can work.”

  Jack’s mom said, “You’re going to let Mr. Wallace go, right?”

  “Yes, of course. I was wrong to have him shipped off,” Big Mother said. “I can see that we actually have a lot of things we’ll have to go back and have another look at.”

  Jack’s eyes popped open wide. “Did you just say you were wrong?”

  “Yes, Jack. Adults can do that.”

  For just a moment, Jack thought he had a glimpse of what Big Mother might have been like as a kid. He thought he probably would have liked her.

  The Supervisor noticed the General talking to Maggie and Mike. He leaned and whispered to Jack.

  “On the subject of having a look at things, you better have a look at the General over there. He’s chatting up your girl.”

  “She’s not my girl,” he said as he spun around and trotted quickly in her direction.

  “So, Maggie,” the General said, discreetly standing on his tiptoes, “we should stay in touch. You know, like hang out. You can text me or whatever.”

  Mike interrupted the General as Jack walked up.

  “That’s not going to work for us,” Mike said. “Maggie is Jack’s girlfriend, and also a little bit my girlfriend because we found her together. So, no hard feelings or anything, but no—no, you can’t have any contact with her for any reason ever. Unless you’d be willing to trade me for Marion. I’ll trade my half of Maggie for Marion. She’s a little gooshy now, but deep down, I think she’s still a pretty good woman.”

  Maggie slugged Mike hard in the arm.

  “I can talk to anybody I want to! Yes, you can call me, General.”

  “Great. But I guess I’m not the General anymore. I think I’m probably just plain old Billy now. Or Bill. It’s Bill,” he said, lowering his voice.

  “Right. Bill. Text me sometime, Bill,” Maggie said, and turned to Jack.

  “Can you believe him?” she asked, jerking her thumb at Mike, who was already off with his dad to order another pizza.

  Jack smiled. “A little bit his girlfriend,” he repeated. “I’m so sure.”

  Maggie’s big green eyes twinkled.

  “You’re not even a little bit his girlfriend,” Jack said, and he reached down and took her hand.

  The two of them followed their families out of the Chuck E. Cheese’s, stopping only long enough to wave good-bye and see Marion sharing a laugh with her parents.

  Alone together by a Pac-Man machine, the Supervisor and Big Mother waved good-bye.

  “So is this it?” he asked her.

  She nodded.

  “You know, we could always, you know, kind of … go back on the deal, for their own good,” he said.

  “No. This is the new reality. We have to settle for an uneasy peace. As long as we don’t do anything, she won’t post the book. As long as she doesn’t post the book, we’ll keep up our side of the bargain.”

  “What makes you so sure that they’ll stick to it?” the Supervisor asked.

  “A mother can tell,” she said. “Maggie’s a good girl. She’s honest. We can count on her. Jack, too.”

  “What about Mike?”

  “Oh, hell no,” she laughed. “He’s exactly like you when you were his age. But those other two can keep him in line.”

  The Supervisor patted her gently on the back.

  “It seems a little too easy to me. They agree, we agree. These policies were in effect so long; why were they so easy to dissolve?” he asked.

  “I was thinking the same thing. I think that sometimes wars end quickly because neither side really wanted to be at war in the first place. It’s a huge relief just for it to be over.”

  “I guess you’re right,” he said with a long, tired sigh. “I really won’t miss the job. It’s no fun being the bad guy. And I can always go back to my old job where everybody loves me—as a substitute teacher.”

  “Eventually,” she said. “But we saw what three basically good kids could do with the Handbook. Imagine what a bad kid could do with it. They could manipulate unprepared teachers, police, aunts, uncles.”

  The Supervisor watched a child take a piece of pizza away from his crying sister and throw it into a Skee-Ball target.

  “Every book has to be accounted for,” she said. “Every last one of them has to be destroyed. Until we have them all safely back, we’ll need to keep watching, but that’s all we’ll be doing: watching.”

  It was clear that she was emphasizing it in order to keep the Supervisor in line.

  “Watching,” he repeated back.

  Sometimes summer days roll past like a dirty, underinflated little beach ball, wobbling and wiggling, and then coming to a stop on its plastic nozzle, which somebody neglected to stuff up inside it.

  Other times, they roll past like a thunderous roller coaster, clattering and shaking with screaming howls of laughter exploding from the wild-eyed riders.

  And still other times, you’re on that roller coaster, and agents from secret organizations are shooting at you while you try to preserve and protect society for the benefit of future generations of kids and parents, and somewhere near the end of the ride, you make all the other riders promise to try their hardest to make the ride better for one another, or you’ll crash the roller coaster and that will be the end of the fun for everybody.

  Jack and Maggie sat on Mike’s lawn, tossing handfuls of grass at each other. They waved off mosquitoes and looked up at the darkening sky.

  Mike and his dad were both trying in desperation to sink even a single basket as Maggie’s mom and dad walked up and stopped on the sidewalk.

  “Getting late, sweetheart,” Maggie’s mom said, resisting the impulse to brush Maggie’s hair back from her face.

  Jack’s mom and dad and little sister, Jessica, waved from across the street.

  “Hey,” Mike said, “did Maggie tell you? My sister is going to have a girl, so I’m going to be an uncle.”

  “No—since it’s a girl, you’re going to be an aunt,” Maggie said to him, and he stopped dribbling the basketball for a moment to think about it.

  And he thought about it for a moment more.

  “You’re wrong, Maggie. I’ll still be an uncle.”

  Maggie giggled. She stood up and brushed off her shirt.

  “See ya, Jack,” she said. “Bye, Aunt Mike.”

  Jack ran across the street to his house.

  “Hey, I saw somebody looking at the Wallace house today,” he told his folks. “I hope they have a big dog for me to tease and then stick my fingers through the fence so it can bite them off.”

  His mom whirled around, about to shout at him, when Jack and his dad burst into laughter.

  * * *

  Maggie and her parents started walking slowly home. It was a beautiful summer evening, with crickets chirping and a gentle breeze playing through her wild hair.

  Maggie’s dad hugged her hard.

  “It’s been a couple weeks now, Maggie, and I’ve been meaning to ask you, exactly where did you learn how to upload a file so that it would automatically post at a certain time?”

  “I can’t do that,” she said with a smile.

  He stopped and stood and stared.

  “So, back when they had us at the Parents Agency, with the immobilizers and the agents, and you were about to be sent to a prison in Antarctica, you were lying?” he asked, his eyes wide with astonishment. “You weren’t really able to do that?”

  “Nope. But you told them that you had seen me do it. You were lying, too.”

  “Let’s call it bluffing,” he said.

  They laughed at each other.

  “But I really did have a backup,” she said. “I have the file saved on a flash drive tha
t I have hidden in my room.”

  “Maggie, sweetheart, eventually they would have found that,” he said.

  “No way, Dad, it’s hidden super-well. Nobody is that good at finding things.”

  Her dad smiled at her and turned to Maggie’s mom.

  “Hey, I know. Get Sean and let’s go out for late-night ice cream. You want to?”

  “Okay, great!” she said, and she poked her head in the door and called up to Maggie’s little brother.

  “Sean! You want to go out for ice cream?”

  “Yeah! Give me one second,” he called down to her from Maggie’s bedroom, which had always been his favorite place to snoop around when left alone for a few minutes.

  A mischievous smile curled on his lips at the flash drive in his hand, and he slipped it into his pocket for later inspection. He ran noisily down the stairs to join them.

  “Here I come!” he shouted happily.

  Jim Benton is an award-winning author and artist. You may know some of the other things he’s made, like It’s Happy Bunny, Dear Dumb Diary, Franny K. Stein, Victor Shmud, and more. He’s developed a TV series, written books, and produced a movie. He always did everything his parents told him to do. Pretty much.

  Jim lives in Michigan with his wife and kids and can be found online at jimbenton.com.

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  Copyright © 2017 by Jim Benton

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