by Dave Barry
It turned out that “some” meant “about 263 million.” They, wanted to know everything about how I ended up decking the president, starting basically with my birth. They were especially interested in everything I could tell them about Woltar and Lemi—how I met them, everything they did and said, why I was inside their dragon kite. They asked what I knew about the fake Brevalov. They wanted to know all about the throwing fork, and they had many, many questions about the laser jammer. They asked me the same questions over and over again, changing them just a little. Every now and then they would ask me if I was okay, and I’d say yes I was okay, but I wanted to talk to my parents. But they’d just go right back to asking me more questions.
After a couple of hours they left, and a soldier brought me lunch. When I finished eating two new guys came in, both wearing suits. They didn’t tell me who they were with, and they didn’t answer any of my questions; they just asked me more questions, and more questions, and then more questions. By that point I was feeling like, okay, put me in jail or shoot me or whatever you’re going to do, just please stop asking me questions.
Finally they left, and the doctors came back to check on me. They didn’t tell me much, but it seemed like they had decided that I was basically fine.
Then they left, and I was finally alone. There was no clock, and I didn’t have my phone, so I don’t know how long I was alone, but it felt like hours. I tried to sleep, but I was too nervous, worrying about what was going on out there in the world, and what was going to happen to me.
Then the door opened. I was expecting that it would be either a soldier with dinner, or the doctors again, or, worst case, people in suits coming to ask me more questions and not tell me anything.
But it was none of those people.
It was the president of the United States.
With his arm in a sling.
“Hey, Wyatt,” he said. “Thanks for saving me, but next time could you try to land on the bad guy?”
So here’s what had happened while I was in the hospital:
The flying dragon attack and the injury to the president immediately became the top news story in the world. Every television station showed the video in a loop pretty much nonstop.
The news media went nuts covering the story, with experts providing hour after hour of informed speculation, pretty much all of which was wrong. At first everybody focused on the flying dragon, which a lot of experts speculated was part of an assassination plot aimed at either the president or Brevalov, or both. There was no mention in any of the early reports about the deadly Gadakistan mountain snake.
I immediately became the most famous eighth-grader on the planet Earth, except for maybe Justin Bieber when he was thirteen. The only thing the FBI was saying about me was that I had been taken to an undisclosed location for questioning. There was a lot of expert speculation about how I might have been recruited to be a terrorist. There was also a lot of speculation about the identity of the man who fell from the dragon and landed on the Secret Service agent. The FBI said only that he also been taken to an undisclosed location for questioning.
In Miami, a giant crowd of news media people surrounded my house and pestered my parents for a statement about how their son came to be mixed up with what appeared to be a terrorist assassination plot. Finally my dad came to the door and told them that he and my mom didn’t know anything except what they saw on television, and they were trying to make arrangements to fly to Washington, and they would appreciate it if the media would leave them alone. But the media kept ringing the doorbell and asking for statements, until finally my mom—I believe I have mentioned that she is Cuban—opened the door and broke my dad’s golf umbrella in two by whacking it on the head of a Channel Seven TV reporter. This made international news, but also backed them off for a while.
While all this media speculating was going on, the FBI was conducting a really intense investigation, with help from the Secret Service, the CIA, and the Washington, D.C., police. They quickly picked up Suzana, Victor, Cameron, Matt, Woltar, and Lemi, who were identified by witnesses at the kite festival as having been involved in launching the dragon. They detained everybody—kids, teachers, and chaperones—who was part of the Culver class trip. They also picked up Mr. Barto, who had finally managed to talk the TSA into releasing him from custody at the Washington airport, only to be taken back into custody by four FBI agents and whisked off to an undisclosed location.
They questioned everybody, but the important people were Woltar and Lemi. They told the FBI about the fake Brevalov with the non-notched right ear, and they were convincing enough that the FBI decided to check it out. That was a good thing, because the fake Brevalov and his fake interpreter were already headed to Dulles International to get a flight out of the country. The FBI caught them at the airport. They refused to talk, but by then it was pretty clear that they were not who they claimed they were.
Meanwhile FBI crime-scene investigators were going over the site of the dragon crash, and of course they found the corpse of the deadly Gadakistan mountain snake. Then they looked at a bunch of video in slow motion and saw how the fake Brevalov tried to dump the snake on the president just before I threw the throwing fork.
So it took a while, but they finally figured everything out and realized that Woltar, Lemi, and the rest of us were telling the truth. They reported everything to the president, who decided he needed to go on television and address the nation, to clear up all the rumors and assure America that everything was okay.
But first he wanted to thank me.
Which is how I ended up having a ten-minute conversation with the president, just the two of us. I don’t remember that much of it; I was mainly happy I wasn’t going to jail. The president said he would take me and my family and the whole Culver class on a personal tour of the White House after my parents got to Washington. I said a tour sounded great, assuming my mom didn’t kill me first. He laughed. Because he didn’t know my mom.
A whole lot of stuff happened after that. In fact, a lot of stuff is still happening. I’ll summarize the highlights:
My mom did not kill me. I think she had been considering it, but a lot of people were telling her she must be very proud of me for saving the president, so she finally decided to go ahead and not kill me, although she told me that if I ever again did anything as stupid as attacking the White House in a kite, she definitely would.
Woltar and Lemi got into trouble for violating a bunch of laws, including buying the stolen laser jammer. But as many people pointed out, they had to do these things because nobody believed them when they tried to tell the U.S. government about the assassination plot. The truth is, they were the real heroes, and in the end they were not charged with anything.
On the other hand, the fake Brevalov and his fake interpreter were charged with a bunch of things. They haven’t been tried yet, but they definitely will not be going back to Gadakistan any time soon.
Speaking of Gadakistan: when people there found out that the real Brevalov had been lying about being friends with the United States, he got chased out of office by an angry mob. He wound up hiding in the mountains, and just recently there was a rumor that he died after he got bit by a snake. Guess what kind.
The taxi driver turned out to be a guy from Nigeria named Ogochukwoo “Ogo” Adebayo. He was questioned at length by FBI agents, who ultimately decided that he had not done anything illegal except fall on a Secret Service agent, which was not really his fault. You will probably not be surprised to hear that when they told him he could go free, he asked them where I was, because he still wanted his money. I’m glad to report that he finally got it, from my dad, who added a twenty-dollar tip, which didn’t seem like a lot to me after everything Ogo had been through. But Ogo was more than satisfied. He just wanted his money.
Miss Rector and Mr. Barto were not thrilled when they found out all the stuff that Suzana, Matt, Cameron, Victor, and I did while we were supposed to be under their supervision. Mr. Barto was especial
ly upset about us getting him busted by the TSA for the gun-shaped cigarette lighter. There was some talk of discipline, maybe even suspension. But in the end the school authorities decided that it wouldn’t look right, punishing what the Miami Herald, in a front-page story, called “The Kids Who Saved The President.” It helped that the president made good on his promise to host the whole class trip on a special tour of the White House, which was pretty cool except for the part where my mom decided to give the president, in the Oval Office, a lecture on all the things—she had an actual list, which she pulled out of her purse—that he was doing wrong. He took it pretty well and even joked that maybe he should appoint my mom to his cabinet. My dad and I gave each other a look that said Don’t give her any ideas.
As for me, I have to say it was pretty great, being one of The Kids Who Saved The President. Suzana, Matt, Cameron, Victor, and I got a ton of attention—people wanting to have us on their television shows, interview us for newspapers and magazines, stuff like that. We got all these offers of free stuff, including trips to Disney World. People wanted our autographs. Our faces were everywhere. In a couple of hours I went from two Twitter followers (Matt and Cameron) to 4.7 million followers, even though in my entire Twitter career I had tweeted a total of three things, one of which was actually a retweet of a fart joke from Cameron. It didn’t matter. Everybody loved us.
So that was all pretty exciting. But sometimes it was also kind of awkward for me, because I was the one who flew the dragon, so I got more attention than anybody else. I got called “hero” a lot, which really bothered me, because I knew it wasn’t true. Heroes are brave people who do dangerous things on purpose. Everything I did was a result of being either completely terrified or unbelievably lucky. I always told the interviewers this, and I always stressed how most of the credit belonged to Woltar and Lemi and the other kids, especially Suzana. But I think it bothered Suzana, me being singled out. She never said anything, but I think deep down inside she wished it had been her flying the dragon.
Anyway, after a couple of weeks of complete craziness we started settling back into the normal routine at Culver Middle. That’s where I am now, getting near the end of eighth grade. The kids at Culver aren’t talking about what happened in Washington much anymore. Everybody’s more interested in stuff like who’s going to what high school. Also we talk a lot about the eighth-grade prom. Its official name is the Eighth Grade Banquet, I think because the school administrators think we’re too young to have a prom. But everybody calls it the prom.
You don’t have to have a date for the prom. Everybody goes, and a lot of kids go solo. Pretty much all the nerds do. So I figured I would. I’d hang around with Matt and Cameron and the other nerds, and it would be fine.
Except the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t want to go solo.
I wanted to go with Suzana.
The problem was that if I asked her to the prom, I figured there was an excellent chance she’d say no, because even though she acted friendly to me in school—a lot friendlier than she was before we went to Washington—she was back to spending most of her time inside the Hot/Popular clot, which included J.P. Dumas, who was still tall, and still Suzana’s boyfriend, as far as I could tell.
But I didn’t know for sure.
And the only way to find out was to ask her.
It took me five days to work up enough courage to do it. I knew exactly where Suzana would be between classes, and when the bell rang I would sprint to a spot by the cafeteria and sort of hover around trying to look casual until Suzana walked past, usually in the middle of a pack of hot girls, and instead of walking up and saying, “Suzana, will you go to the prom with me?” I’d wave a stupid little wave and say, “Hey.” That was what came out Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday: “Hey.”
So it came down to Friday. The bell rang; I sprinted to my cafeteria hover spot and tried to look casual. The hot-girl pack came drifting my way, Suzana in the middle. This is it, I told myself. Now or never.
I opened my mouth.
And I said, quote, “Hey.”
Idiot.
Suzana waved and kept walking.
I stood there, feeling like the world’s biggest loser, watching the hot girls walk away.
Then Suzana stopped.
She turned around and walked back to me.
“Wyatt,” she said. “Do you have something you want to say to me?”
“No,” I said, adding, “Yes.”
You are SUCH an idiot.
“Okay,” she said. “What is it?”
“Um,” I said, getting off to a solid start. “I was thinking. I mean wondering. I mean I was thinking about if maybe you…I mean, I realize probably not. You and J.P. are still dating, right? I mean each other?”
“Wyatt,” she said. “Are you trying to ask me to go to the prom?”
“Um,” I said. “Can I ask you if you would like me to ask you to the prom? I mean, how do you think you’d feel about it? If I asked you?”
She stared at me for several seconds.
“Wyatt,” she said. “If you don’t ask me to the prom, I will kick your butt. I will hong fo you right through the cafeteria wall, here and now. And you know I can.”
I knew she could.
“Okay,” I said. “Will you go to the prom with me?”
“I would love to,” she said.
And then she kissed me right on the mouth.
She had to lean down a little to do it.
But not too much.
I’m definitely catching up.
DAVE BARRY is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author of more than two dozen books. Along with Ridley Pearson, he is the co-author of the Peter and the Starcatchers series and Science Fair. Dave, his wife Michelle, and their family live in Miami, Florida.