As I reached the ladder, the kids noticed and started whispering to each other. I saw Erika Dixon, just a few feet away. I nodded awkwardly at her, having nothing to say, as usual.
“He’s gonna do it!” she hissed to her friend. She sounded impressed. It should have made me braver, more determined, but it just made my heart pound more—like in a heart-attack kind of way.
I hesitated before putting my foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. I hesitated at the top of the ladder—and again in the middle of the platform. I hesitated until there was no more room to hesitate and the platform ended. My toes curled over the edge, the sandpapery-grippy stuff cool under my feet. Standing on the brink, I thought of my mom and all the crazy things she’d done. In comparison, diving was nothing.
Kids pressed into the chain link fence and those in the pool swarmed into bunches on the floating plastic divider that roped off the deep end. All of their faces were turned up to me, mouths open. I suddenly felt very, very important. I felt, well, I felt pretty good.
Too bad I had to dive and couldn’t just quit while I was ahead.
My brother looked tiny from up there, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with some older guys, blocking the restroom door. I could hear the Lifey shouting inside.
The weirdest thing, though, was that, for just a moment, I thought I saw my mom. She was standing next to the pop machine, wearing this weird red cape that billowed in a breeze that wasn’t there. I shook my head to get a hold of myself and when I looked again, she was gone.
It was a sign. Today the pool; tomorrow: The Incredible.
I took a deep breath and did it. Really. I didn’t back down. I didn’t run away.
I.
Did.
It.
Chapter Three
I jumped off the platform and my body went into the shape of a perfect arrow, slicing through the air and into the deep water.
Cheers erupted as I surfaced, swam to the edge, and climbed out to take my bows. I was entirely out of the water, facing my adoring crowd when I realized something was wrong.
Everyone was suddenly quiet, for one thing. Erika was a few feet away, staring at me, eyes wide in amazement. Or was it some other emotion? She might have looked kind of afraid. Our eyes locked for what seemed like a minute, but was probably only a split second.
That’s when a kind of group gasp came from the crowd.
That’s when everybody’s heads swiveled to the pool, where a wadded-up piece of red cloth was swirling just below the surface. All heads turned back to me. I could feel my eyes growing as big as pie plates as I took in the situation from wherever my inner Ryan had run to.
And that’s when I looked at Will in the corner, a big, stupid grin slowly taking form on his face.
All of the town’s kids, all still and quiet, watched in horror as Will’s two-sizes-too-big swim trunks floated to the surface of the pool.
After that, I could have stayed in my room all summer. Maybe for all time.
I was in a state of permanent embarrassment, with a full-body blush radiating heat like a terrible sunburn. I could still hear the sound of the kids laughing as I ran to the shower room. I could still see Will’s crooked smile.
Will. He had done it all on purpose. The diving practice, the kind words, giving me his shorts that were too big—it was all a huge set-up that I should have seen coming. It was my fault for forgetting that he was pure evil.
A dirt bike. I scoffed out loud. Dad wouldn’t buy him a dirt bike to be nicer to me. But it was the perfect line to convince me. He’d known I wouldn’t believe he’d be nice to me for nothing. What a liar.
Before this, the most embarrassing thing that had happened to me was in fourth grade when I’d spilled my lunch tray in the cafeteria and slipped on the mashed potatoes. It had been bad. Everyone had laughed at me. The next day, I’d tried to stay home sick. But that was nothing compared to this. How was I ever going to recover after the whole town had seen me—well, naked? Yes, naked. There was no other way to put it. And I didn’t even like taking my shirt off at the pool!
I thought briefly about the possibility of being home-schooled. But who was going to teach me? Dad? That wasn’t going to happen. Maybe I could convince Dad to send me away to boarding school? No, it was hopeless.
I was lying facedown on my bed when I heard Dad’s car pull into the driveway. He was hardly through the door before I heard Will’s voice filtering up the stairwell. The only things I caught were: “Can’t believe he…” and “Outta there so fast…”
I thought I heard a small chuckle from Dad.
I buried my face in the pillow when Dad came up the stairs to my room.
“Hey!” he called through the door. “Big diver, you in there?”
He came in without waiting for me to answer. I kept my eyes squinched shut, still as a rock. A Ryan Rock, I thought. Here I’ll lie, until the end of time. Still, silent.
“Hey, kid, you okay?” he asked, tapping the leg of the bed with his toe.
“Yep,” I said, louder than I’d meant to. “Fine.”
Archeologists will someday use a mallet and chisel to break me open and find a petrified boy inside, scrunched up in a ball.
“I, uh, I heard what happened at the pool today,” Dad said. “Jill in Accounting told me about it. Her daughter was there.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, but I said nothing. I kept hoping he’d realize that his son had fossilized and just leave.
“I’m glad you dove, Ry,” he said, sounding sincere, “but maybe it’s time we buy you some shorts that fit—no more of this ‘room-to-grow.’ I heard you gave them quite a show!”
His forced chuckle died quickly.
“Look, let me start over,” he said slowly, but I interrupted him with a mumble he couldn’t make out.
“Look at me, Ryan. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”
I sat up and Dad looked surprised at my puffy eyes. “I said, ‘They were his shorts.’ Will did it on purpose.”
“Don’t be so dramatic, Ryan. You’re gonna live through this. It’s not the end of the world.”
My fingers clawed into the bed at that line. Because, really, it kinda was.
“Dad, he planned the whole thing.”
“Look, Ryan,” he stood up, the amused sympathy in his voice turning to exasperation. “You’re going to stop your victim stuff right now. I don’t know why you think that—”
“No, Dad,” I said, jumping up to face him. I’d finally had enough. I was a time bomb, seconds from exploding. I was a volcano, about to burst hot, burning lava. I was that two-liter bottle of soda that Eli and I shook for a full hour before throwing it into the street where it shot seventy-five feet into Eli’s yard, barely missing Mark Twain, his cat.
“Will is—” Should I have dared? I dared. “Will is the lousiest, rottenest, scum-coated, back-stabbing, meat-brained, two-faced zit farm and I wish—”
“Ryan!”
“And I wish he was dead.” Boy, I was on a roll and I hadn’t even gotten started yet.
“You lose your own shorts in your messy bedroom and suddenly Will is to blame? I don’t believe this.”
“You never take my side, no matter what he does!” My voice rose with each word until it cracked in that way I hated. There I was, arguing like an adult and suddenly crack! I’m a kid again.
“You’re pushing it, Ryan,” Dad said in a warning tone.
“Don’t you think me—naked—in front of every kid in town is pushing it?” I bellowed. I was an out-of-control train. I had jumped the tracks. “He hid my trunks so I’d have to wear—”
“Oh, he did not,” he snapped back.
“Yes, he did!”
Dad scowled and looked at his feet, but I wasn’t done.
“Mom would never take Will’s—” I
started, but that was the wrong way to begin a sentence.
“Enough!” Dad roared so loudly that I took a step back. He looked like one of those sharks you see on the nature channel, waiting to tear apart a diving cage like it was a gingerbread house. All mouth and teeth.
“Are you going to listen or what?” he growled.
My face was throbbing with anger. Nothing is worse than when a parent tells you to listen and you know whatever they’re going to say won’t matter one bit. But the sooner you shut your mouth and pretend like you’re listening, the sooner you’ll get your chance to tell them why they’re wrong.
“So you finally went off the high dive!” Dad was practically shouting. “It was about time, too. I thought I was going to have to throw you off myself. And you don’t even thank your brother for helping you? You can’t blame everyone else whenever things go wrong. Just like your mother leaving—there’s not some big conspiracy around it. She’s accountable for her own actions, just like you are. When are you going to take responsibility for your mistakes? Poop Lip, it’s time to grow up.”
I was silent. He’d said It. My own father had called me Poop Lip.
“I’m done here,” Dad said, heading for the door. “I don’t want to hear from you for the rest of the night, got it?”
He slammed the door behind him.
After that, I wasn’t much interested in lying hopeless and ruined on my bed. I had enough anger to fuel a rocket to Neptune. I was pacing my room when Eli called me from eCamp.
“Why are you calling me? Is this 1995?”
“I dunno,” Eli mused. “I thought using a telephone for actual talking would be kinda old-school. Anyways, I heard about the pool. That’s rough.”
“You heard about it?” I sputtered into the phone. “It just happened! And you’re all the way at camp!”
“It’s all over the FaceChats and SnapBooks and all that, Ryan. You’re lucky; I don’t know how there weren’t any pictures.”
“So pretty much every single person in Brenville knows—”
“And all their friends and families,” Eli added helpfully.
“Right. Oh, man,” I said, lying down on the floor, my face in the carpet. Maybe I wasn’t done being wrecked. “I can’t believe Will did this to me.”
“Wait—Will did this to you?”
“His shorts,” I said. “He rigged his shorts.”
“Diabolical.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I think leaving now is your best bet,” Eli said. “Without Will.”
“Mmmph.” I turned my face so I was looking into my closet, where my plans were hidden in the floorboards under my winter boots.
It was Eli who’d said we needed to keep our paper evidence hidden and to a minimum. That way, when it came time to leave, we could easily destroy it. So we couldn’t be tracked. All we had was a map, a thumb drive, a notebook, and a list of disposable, single-use email addresses that we used and then crossed off, one by one. And my packing list.
Funny how back in the day, we might have had a whole tree-house fort filled with maps and atlases. Maybe a bulletin board with photos of Bartholomew and his gang, yarn connecting one person to another until we had an actual nest of villains. Yet, our evidence—I could carry it in one hand and just drop all of it into the dumpster behind the Sno-Cap on main street and it would poof.
Disappear.
“Come on, Ryan,” Eli said. “A man can’t go on living like a normal person after something like what happened at the pool. But if you rescue your mom and stop a crooked circus, nobody’s going to remember how you completely self-destructed and humiliated yourself in front of all your peers. Everybody might even forget they saw your—”
“Mmmph,” I interrupted, closing my eyes.
“Look, I can find out where she’s performing now,” he said. “We don’t have to wait for San Francisco. You know how people scalp those tickets online. Just let me do some searching.” He trailed off and we were silent for a moment. I could hear him clacking away at his computer.
“You really think we’re ready?” I finally asked.
“Come on, we were ready months ago,” he said. “You know, I’m kinda glad the diving board happened. Get you off your—”
“Shut it!” I exclaimed, jumping up. “Never be glad that happened to me. Ever. I’m barely alive.”
“Easy, there,” Eli said. “I take it back. Geez. Hey! I found it.”
Please not the East Coast. Please not the East Coast.
“Not bad. They’re in Albuquerque right now.”
“Albuquerque? As in Mexico?”
“New Mexico, genius.”
“Oh. Is that good?” I mean, sure, it was great that she wasn’t in Florida or something, but New Mexico? I had known I was going to have to travel a bit, but this was ridiculous. That was like, what? How far?
“It’s okay,” Eli assured me. “It’s like California. It’s just twenty-three hours away by car.”
“Twenty-three hours!” My jaw dropped. “That’s twice as far as it was to California!”
“Hey, it’s still basically on the West Coast. And really, what’s the difference to you, right? What else do you have going on? You going to let a few measly hours stop you?”
“I guess not,” I grumbled. He had a point. He always had a point. “When are the shows?”
“They’ve got one tonight and then again Friday and Saturday. You can make the Saturday show for sure.”
“And what about Carl?” I asked. I’d never met Eli’s older cousin Carl, but early on he promised Eli he would give me a lift to Bend, no questions asked. I just had to meet Carl in the middle of nowhere, so no one would see me get in his truck. Lucky for me, the middle of nowhere is all around us in Brenville.
“He says he’s ready whenever. I just texted him and—”
“You what?”
“—and he’ll pick you up tomorrow at five in the morning.”
“Jeez, Eli,” I said, covering my face with my free hand. I wasn’t sure I was ready for this.
“He still doesn’t want to know why you’re doing this, so that’s good,” Eli said. That was a slight relief. We had been worried Carl would ask questions, but he insisted on us not telling him anything so he couldn’t get in trouble.
“He’ll drop you off in Bend at an internet café he knows about,” Eli continued, “which is probably the last internet café in North America. Anyway, they have computers. Then we’ll rendezvous online.” He always said it like it was spelled: ren-dez-voos.
“Then what?” I asked. You had to press Eli or he wouldn’t tell you anything.
“Then I’ll find you a way to Albuquerque,” he said. “Trust me.”
“Right.”
“Just leave it to me. I’m gonna get to work on the logistics tonight—oh, and remember your suit. You never know when you’ll need a nice suit.”
“Want me to pack a set of martini glasses, too?” I asked, looking out the window as the sun set. It was starting to feel less like a game now. It was beginning to feel real.
“Ha. Funny. No, seriously: pack the suit. You can be anyone in a suit.”
He had a point.
Talking to Eli always got me back on track. Sometimes I thought I was going crazy if I thought about the rescue mission too long on my own, but Eli always reminded me how much sense it all made. Honestly, if it hadn’t been for him, I don’t think I ever would have put all the pieces together.
I jumped into action. First, I pushed my dresser in front of my closed bedroom door, just in case. Then, I went to the back of my closet and pushed my boots to the side. There was a place where the carpet didn’t quite meet the wall. If you knew just where to tug at it, a small square would come up, exposing a cubbyhole underneath. Mom had shown me this
tiny hiding place just before she disappeared.
“Don’t tell Will—or your dad,” she’d whispered. “I thought that you could use a place to keep secret things. Stuff you don’t want them to find.”
At the time, I had thought it was a little strange that she would want me to hide things from Dad. Later, though—it became crystal clear.
I forgot to mention this earlier, but my dad? Yeah, he considered my room to be his room. My things were his things. He regularly came in and took away things he didn’t like—a poster of my favorite band, The Angry Lindas. This cool silver talisman I’d secretly ordered from the back of a Farmer’s Almanac (Dad gave it to Will to dispose of; Will gleefully melted it down with Dad’s welding torch). Dad tore up postcards I’d written to Mom where I complained about Dad’s cooking. He also found where I had hidden my journal—I’d tucked it under my mattress, like an idiot—and he lectured me that “there are no secrets in our house.” More important, he said, I wasn’t allowed to write about “our family’s dirty laundry.” So my journal lived where Dad placed it—on my nightstand—and I never wrote in it again.
If only my secret cubbyhole weren’t already packed to capacity with rescue mission stuff.
I got my packing list. Then I pulled out my backpack and laid it open on my bed.
First, I packed two t-shirts (both black), jeans, a blue hooded sweatshirt, and the dark suit and tie I’d worn in my cousin’s wedding a month ago (I had been the oldest ring-bearer ever). Then, I packed the essentials: a heavy-duty flashlight I’d gotten at the army surplus store, a magnifying glass (for making a campfire), some rubber bands (they’re just very useful), my pen with disappearing ink (for secret messages), two pairs of underwear, my camouflage paint, a stethoscope (also courtesy of Eli’s dad), a ball of string, a mini-screwdriver set, all the postcards, five issues of Captain Fantastic, and—
I was running out of room.
Once when Will had had the flu, I had felt sorry for him, listening to him barf all night, so I brought him a stack of my comic books to keep him company. He’d looked grateful at the time, but later, he filled in every o and zero with colored markers and gave Captain Fantastic boobs and a mustache in every single frame.
Spartacus Ryan Zander and the Secrets of the Incredible Page 4