The Boy Who Knew Too Much

by Commander S. T. Bolivar, III

At least Mattie assumed it was a scream. From out here, he could only hear the faintest Aiiiieeeee! but he was pretty sure it was a scream, just as he was pretty sure Number 4 didn’t like the sound of the scream because it took off, feathers flying. Numbers 1 and 2 followed. Headmaster Rooney burst through the doors and skidded to a stop. He blinked at the chickens and at the still-shrieking Mrs. Hitchcock.

  Aiiiieeeee! the boys heard again. Carter laughed. He laughed so hard he wheezed like a broken accordion. He laughed so hard he almost fell out of the tree.

  Headmaster Rooney, however, was not laughing. Rooney was running. He ran after Number 4, and Number 4 ran after Numbers 1 and 2. As they streaked past the closest window, Mattie heard Rooney yell, “For God’s sake, woman! There are four of them! Find the other one!”

  Carter knew perfectly well there wasn’t another chicken and that Headmaster Rooney and Mrs. Hitchcock would just waste their time looking. Carter wiped tears from his eyes as Rooney dashed after Number 1 and missed, and dashed and missed, and dashed and missed. Carter laughed harder and harder and then, very suddenly, Rooney stopped running. He stood up straight. He stared right. He stared left. He stared out the window and Carter stopped laughing.

  “Time to go.” He scooted off the branch and hit the patchy grass below at a dead run. “You better move it, Fido.”

  CARTER LAUGHED THE WHOLE WAY BACK to the gardens. He laughed the whole way across the courtyard. He even laughed the whole way up the stairs. In fact, Carter was still laughing when they reached the administrative hall.

  Mattie, however, wasn’t laughing at all. They were awfully close to being late for their tutoring session with Mr. Larimore. Mattie wasn’t sure where tardiness fell on Headmaster Rooney’s plans for cloning students, and he didn’t want to find out. He dragged a snickering Carter all the way to Headmaster Rooney’s office, where they both stood in front of Miss Maple’s desk and waited for her to return. It didn’t take long.

  “Hello, Mattie! Hello, Carter!” Miss Maple wore pale blue high heels today. They matched her eyes. When she walked in them her feet moved so smoothly it was like she was on wheels.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” Miss Maple said. “There was the most dreadful commotion in the dining hall. Someone let four chickens loose! Can you imagine?”

  “No,” Mattie said as his stomach dipped toward his feet.

  “No,” Carter added as he wiped tears from his eyes. He stood up straighter as Miss Maple passed.

  “You better hurry if you want to be on time for your father,” Miss Maple told them as she sat down at her desk and heaved her purse onto the chair next to Mattie. Maybe that’s why he looked down—because it was close to him, because he could, and because, well, why not? Mattie looked down and saw Miss Maple’s purse was bursting with calculators and graph paper.

  And pens.

  She must really like pens, Mattie thought just as her manicured hand heaved the bag away.

  “Did you lose something, Mattie?” Her voice was chilly, sounding nothing like it had ever sounded before.

  “No, Miss Maple.”

  “You’re going to be late.” She looked at Carter, who was looking at Miss Maple with that stupid, glassy expression he got whenever she was around. “You two better get inside. I have important things to do.”

  “Yes, Miss Maple,” they both said and hustled into Rooney’s office. They sat at the big wooden desk where the computer had been turned to face them. Mattie sat in the closest plushy chair and squished around trying to get comfortable. It didn’t work. His feet didn’t reach the ground and his back started to hurt immediately and then there was a smell, like hair burning.

  Mattie shuddered.

  “You aren’t seriously cold, Martha?” Carter asked. Sweat had popped up on Carter’s forehead and Mattie understood why. Headmaster Rooney had the heater on full blast, and both of them were already hot.

  “No! It’s just…” Mattie trailed off, unsure what to say next.

  “Do not start with that robot stuff again,” Carter warned.

  “But you have to believe me! Look—” Mattie jumped off his chair. “I’ll show you the door and then—”

  Mattie reached the closet door in two bounces. He grabbed the doorknob, he turned it, and it was locked. Mattie tugged once, twice. His heart sank.

  Carter came to stand next to him. “It’s right behind here,” Mattie told his brother, who nodded like he understood and then flicked Mattie’s ear. Hard.

  “Ow!” Mattie rubbed his ear. “I just—”

  Carter flicked him again. “You just what?”

  “Nothing,” Mattie said at last.

  “Exactly.” Carter turned back to the desk and tapped their names into the computer, notifying their father that they had arrived. A large image filled the screen.

  Mattie leaned forward. What was that? It was shiny and kind of white—it was an eyeball!

  “Well, boys, what do you think?” Mr. Larimore boomed. Their father sounded delighted so Mattie was pretty sure he knew the answer.

  “It’s cool, Dad!” Mattie hesitated. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in my office! This is Larimore Corporation’s latest invention! Computer eyeglasses!”

  Mattie sat back and kicked his feet a few times as he thought about this. Their father’s eyeball was huge and glassy and gross, taking up almost the entire computer screen.

  Every time it rolled, Mattie thought he was going to be sick.

  “I think you have a crusty in your eye,” Carter said.

  An equally enormous finger appeared and fished around in the corner of the eyeball. Mattie knew he was going to be sick.

  “Thanks to these glasses, I can have a conversation with you two while sitting at dinner with your mother and get both things done at the same time. It’s genius!”

  It was something, Mattie thought. He wasn’t sure if it was genius though.

  It made him think of all those Larimore wires and pipes and cables underneath the school. The more Mattie thought of them, the more his stomach clenched. Maybe he shouldn’t have told Carter. Maybe he should’ve just told Mr. Larimore.

  Mattie sat up. “Dad?”

  “Yes, Mattie?”

  It was now or never, Mattie thought. And for the first time he realized his mistake with Carter: he had just jumped right into it. But he wouldn’t do that this time. Nope, this time Mattie would ease his dad into discussing the clones…robots…whatever they were.

  “Do you ever worry about how people use our products?” Mattie asked.

  “What do you mean?” Mr. Larimore asked the question innocently enough, but Mattie could see how his father’s eye went glinty. Flinty. For some reason, it made Mattie think he wasn’t going to get an answer to his question.

  “Wrap it up, Eleanor,” Carter said under his breath.

  The eye cut to Carter and narrowed. “Did you have something to say, Carter?” their father demanded.

  Mattie squared his shoulders and tried again. “What if someone were to buy something we make and use it to hurt someone else?” he asked.

  His father’s eye blinked. “Well, Mattie, that’s a very interesting question. Now let me ask you a question.”

  Mattie sat up. Mr. Larimore rarely asked anyone’s opinion on anything. Mrs. Larimore said it was because Mr. Larimore always knew his mind. She said he hadn’t changed it in the twenty years she had known him.

  Mattie’s father cleared his throat, making the huge eyeball water and tear up. “Mattie, would you blame a pencil for misspelling a word?”

  “Well,” Mattie said slowly. “I guess not. It’s not the pencil’s fault. It’s the person writing with it.”

  “Exactly!” Mr. Larimore’s eye rolled. It seemed happy. “You blame the person using the pencil. At Larimore Corporation, we create products. Whatever people decide to do with those products is not our fault.”

  “It isn’t?” Mattie asked.

  “Of course not!” The eyeball blinked again. “So you
understand now? Are we clear?”

  Mattie stared at his father’s eyeball. It didn’t feel clear at all. In fact, it was just like Caroline said before, it kind of made everything more complicated, but Mr. Larimore was waiting for Mattie to say yes and Mattie usually would say yes, but…

  “There are robots in the basement, Dad!”

  The eye blinked and Carter sighed. Mattie ignored him and leaned forward, gripping the arms of the chair with both hands. “They’re replacing the kids with robots or clones—I don’t really know which it is, but it’s happening and you have to do something because Carter’s going to be next.”

  The eye swung toward Carter and narrowed. “Why is Carter next?”

  “Because of the chickens!”

  “WHAT?”

  Mattie started to sweat. That might’ve been the wrong thing to say. He decided to switch subjects. “They’re using Larimore Corporation materials to make robot children!”

  The eye stared at Mattie and then turned slowly to Carter. “How long has he been like this?” Mr. Larimore asked Carter.

  Carter hesitated. “Not long. It’s not his fault. Some kid probably told him about The Stepford Wives and you know how his imagination—”

  Mr. Larimore blinked. “The one where they turned all the wives into robots? That was a terrible movie.”

  Carter shrugged.

  “Maybe I should speak to Rooney,” Mr. Larimore wondered. “Maybe Mattie should be seeing a psychiatrist.”

  “You can’t talk to Rooney!” Mattie jumped to his feet. “He’s behind it! Please, Dad! Please, please, please believe me!”

  His father made a choking noise, and the skin at the corner of the giant eye began to spasm. “Stop it! Stop it at once, Mattie! You’re hysterical. Do you know what that means?”

  Mattie slumped in his chair. “It means you get to call me names.”

  “No, it means your voice is high and screechy, and you’re making no sense!” Mr. Larimore’s voice rose until the computer’s speakers crackled. Mattie and Carter both winced. “I’m disappointed in you, Mattie. I expect this nonsense from Carter, but not from you. What do you have to say for yourself?”

  Mattie had nothing to say. Why was disappointing his parents so much worse than making them angry? Why was it that whenever he tried to do the right thing it ended up being the wrong thing? Why wouldn’t anyone believe him?

  But, of course, Mattie couldn’t say any of that so he continued to say nothing until the giant eyeball flicked away from him.

  “Now on to today’s subject,” Mr. Larimore said with a harrumph.

  Next to Mattie, Carter groaned.

  The eye snapped toward him. “I heard that, Carter.”

  “Heard what?” Carter asked.

  The eye narrowed. “Today’s subject is about customers: how you get them and how you keep them.”

  Mattie lifted his pencil to his notebook and found himself studying it even as he asked, “And how do you do that, Dad?”

  “You have to win them over,” Mr. Larimore explained. “Sometimes people don’t know their own minds so you have to tell them what to do, protect them from themselves.”

  Mattie studied his father’s eyeball and then studied his brother’s face. Carter had that look again, the one where he seemed to be sleeping with his eyes open. It was only a matter of time before Mr. Larimore noticed and Carter got in trouble. Again.

  Carter was definitely not a customer, but he did need protecting. Maybe Mattie’s brother didn’t know his own mind. That might be okay, though, because Mattie definitely knew his own mind, and he knew he didn’t want his brother to get made into a clone.

  So how was he going to save him?

  BUT NO MATTER HOW HARD MATTIE THOUGHT, he couldn’t come up with a way to save his brother. Carter had stalked off as soon as Mr. Larimore’s eyeball disappeared from the screen, leaving Mattie to power down the computer and collect his book bag. Mattie was so lost in his own thoughts that he didn’t see Caroline in the hallway outside the headmaster’s office until they were nearly toe to toe.

  Caroline had a tiny smudge of dirt on her cheek and smelled like a hamster cage. She eyed Rooney’s office door with interest. “What were you doing in there?”

  “I have to video chat with my dad,” Mattie explained as he tugged the door shut. The little desk by the office was empty. There was no sign of Miss Maple or her purse anywhere. “My dad’s teaching me how to run our family business.”

  “I’m sorry,” Caroline said and reached into her red Munchem sweater to scratch herself.

  Mattie stared and then realized Caroline wasn’t scratching herself; she was scratching Beezus. The rat was tucked under her uniform. It wiggled with joy as she scratched, making the front of Caroline’s sweater twitch.

  “Why are you sorry?” he asked at last.

  “It doesn’t sound like much fun,” Caroline explained as Beezus crawled up her side. “It doesn’t sound like you either.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “No.”

  Mattie thought about this. He knew—he knew—he shouldn’t ask Caroline anything else, but sometimes he just couldn’t help himself. “Why doesn’t it sound like me?”

  “Because it doesn’t.”

  “My parents think it does.”

  “My parents think I should work for their company too,” Caroline said. Underneath her sweater, Beezus climbed higher. His head poked out from underneath her collar, and he nuzzled the ends of her dark hair. “But I don’t want to work for them. I want to be a scientist.”

  “I thought your parents had a lot of laboratories.”

  “That’s their kind of science. I don’t want to make better eye shadow and lipstick. I want to study why diseases do what they do.”

  “Like eat people’s faces?”

  Caroline nodded. “Pretty much.” She considered him for a minute, squinting like she was thinking through a math problem. “You really want to run your dad’s company?”

  Mattie relaxed. He might not know what to do with the clones in the Munchem basement, but he knew how to answer this question. In fact, he’d been answering it for as long as he could remember. “My parents think it’s best for me.”

  Caroline petted Beezus’s head before he disappeared inside her sweater again. “But what if they’re wrong?”

  Mattie blinked. “But they’re not. Our parents know what’s best. Ask them. They’ll tell you.”

  “But what if they don’t know?” Beezus was crawling around inside Caroline’s sweater again, making it look like she had a twitchy potbelly.

  Mattie started to explain how Caroline was wrong—enormously wrong—and realized he couldn’t. He didn’t have the right words, and Mattie always had the right words. It was one of the things that made his parents so proud.

  “Who do you want to be when you grow up?” Caroline asked as Beezus’s tail poked over her sweater’s collar. It curled around her chin and under her nose.

  “I want to make my parents proud,” he said finally.

  Caroline scratched her cheek. “Oh, is that the same thing?”

  “You never make any sense, Caroline. Do you know that?”

  Caroline shrugged. “It makes sense to me,” she said and pushed past him to go wherever Caroline was headed. Probably the science building, Mattie thought. Mr. Karloff was supposed to get a new order of frogs.

  Mattie spun on his heel and went in the other direction—down the dusty hallway with the ugly portraits, up the stone steps, and through the overgrown courtyard. At first, Mattie stomped because he was mad (although he didn’t quite know why), then he stomped because he had ants in his shoe (although he should’ve known to pick his feet up).

  By the time he reached the door to 14A, he was grouchy, sweaty, and itchy. He was also locked out of the dorm, but Mattie didn’t know it until he tugged on the door handle. It wouldn’t budge. He banged on the door and a mouse nest dropped on his head.

  Mattie kicked the wall, and when t
hat didn’t make him feel any better, he kicked it again. He still didn’t feel better, but it did leave a nice Mattie-shaped shoe print on the cream paint, and the door bumped open. It hadn’t been locked. It had only been jammed, and unjamming it was ever so briefly satisfying until the realities of science homework set in.

  Mattie sat at the small desk by his bed and tried to concentrate. He finished his science homework. He finished his math homework. He tried to finish his essay, but only managed to write a couple of paragraphs about how Munchem had taught him the value of a stiff toothbrush when scrubbing crusty toilets.

  Which wasn’t the point. Clearly. Mattie crumpled the notebook paper and tossed it in the trash. He wasn’t getting anywhere. Caroline’s words kept echoing through his head like they were looking for places to grow. The words were worse when Mattie tried to go to sleep.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about them, especially what Caroline had said about him. All that stuff about Mattie knowing what Mattie wanted? He knew. He’d always known. He wanted to be a good kid. He wanted to make his parents proud.

  He also wanted Carter to like him, and Mattie wasn’t sure he could have both. Actually, he was quite sure he couldn’t have both.

  Maybe that’s what he should say in his essay. Munchem Academy helped Mattie realize what he wanted.

  Only in order to make Carter happy, Mattie would have to cool it about the machine and Headmaster Rooney and what Headmaster Rooney was doing to the students.

  Mattie wasn’t sure he could do that.

  Honestly (and Mattie tried always to be honest), he wasn’t sure he could stay quiet at all. Because what kind of a person did nothing when they could do something?

  Mattie sat up in his New Kid bunk. He could barely see. Room 14A was still dark, and the boys’ beds were lumps in the shadows, but Mattie knew what he needed.

  Well, who he needed.

  Mattie kicked his legs out from under the covers and put his bare feet on the floor. They stuck a little to the dirty carpet—maybe more than a little—but he ignored that. Mattie tiptoed to Eliot’s bed and shook his friend’s arm.

  “You awake?” Mattie whispered, putting his face inches from Eliot’s.