by Eric Kester
“You and I have a lot to catch up on,” I said.
“Everyone paired up?” Mrs. Crooks shouted as she picked up a stack of photocopied lab instructions from her desk. Like all our lab directions, these were written out in longhand because Mrs. Crooks didn’t “believe” in computers. She marched up and down the aisles of desks passing out the lab instructions, licking her index and middle fingers before grabbing each sheet from the top of the stack. Not the best way to start your week, seeing that much of Mrs. Crooks’s lumpy purple tongue before nine A.M. on a Monday morning. It’s a sight you can’t unsee, and I needed to recover emotionally from it, so instead of listening to Mrs. Crooks recite all five hundred steps of the lab, I discreetly pulled out my busted old phone, positioned it between two pages of my physics textbook, and opened up Facebook.
This was a high-risk move—if Mrs. Crooks caught you on your phone, you had to go outside and run a lap down to Grayport Stadium, a journey that involved crossing a two-lane highway. So with extreme caution and minimal movement I slowly typed out Haley’s name in the app’s search bar. I was also careful to make sure I was typing in the correct spot. In the first of several major design flaws in the app, Facebook placed their search bar and status update bar directly next to each other, and the other day when I tried to search for Haley’s profile, I accidentally typed her name as my status and hit ENTER. It took me a while to realize my mistake, so for about two hours my profile had a published status update that read simply “Haley Waters,” leaving my entire network of friends with no mystery about the answer to the question, Which hot girl is Wyatt creeping on tonight?
Anyway, physics class was my first opportunity to peruse Haley’s profile since she had accepted my request. I have to admit it felt kind of weird doing this with Haley a few yards away from me, totally unaware that I was rapidly thumbing through every picture on her profile. I wondered if girls have a sixth sense, like a little shiver out of nowhere that makes them think, I feel like I’m being perused right now. Since Mrs. Crooks was yapping on and on about friction and velocity, I managed to scroll through several hundred photos of Haley. I mean, I was in deep.
And that’s when I made an absolutely ginormous mistake. Because flicking through photos on Facebook requires you to swipe right to left, it’s possible, if your thumb has the general size and dexterity of a Polish sausage, to accidentally (and catastrophically) hit the LIKE button in the lower left-hand corner of a photo. And that’s exactly what happened to me as I wiped my greasy paws all over Haley’s photos.
I unliked the photo of Haley during the millisecond it took for my heart to drop into the pit of my stomach. But it was too late. In another infuriating Facebook design flaw, a notification of the initial like was immediately sent to the owner’s phone. So at that very moment an official Facebook notification was traveling faster than the speed of light through the air of our stuffy classroom and dropping like a bomb onto Haley’s phone. When she next looked at her phone, she would see that Wyatt Parker had just liked a photo of her …
… in a bikini …
… from two and a half years ago …
… licking an ice cream cone.
Suddenly a sprint across the freeway didn’t sound so bad.
Ding.
I looked up and traced the undeniable sound of a mobile Facebook notification to where Haley was sitting. She didn’t reach for her phone yet. But she would soon.
While Mrs. Crooks continued her lecture, I urgently tugged on Nate’s sleeve.
“Look,” I hissed, and discreetly angled my phone so he could see the photo of Haley.
“I can’t tell if you’re more turned on by her tongue or the ice cream,” he whispered back.
“I liked it by mistake! She got a notification about it!”
Nate looked up from the phone to me. His eyes widened. “Yeah, that’s bad. Real bad.”
“I know!”
“How do you know she got a notification?”
“I heard her phone ding.”
“You’re going to look extremely pervy.”
“What should I do?”
“Well, the notification is on her phone now so you’re kind of screwed. The only way to delete it is from her actual phone.”
Together we looked over at Haley. She was leaning forward slightly on the counter of her lab station. Stuffed in the back right pocket of her skintight jeans, projecting halfway out like a column of toothpaste being squeezed out of an overfilled tube, was her phone. Nate and I looked at each other simultaneously.
“No,” I said.
“You can totally do it.”
“No.”
“It’s either that or she gets notified of how creepy you are, and the closest you’ll ever get to her will be the distance declared by the judge in the restraining order.”
“Way too risky to swipe it. My clumsy fingers are what got me into this in the first place! I’ll, like, accidentally grope her … well, you know…”
“Her butt?”
“Yeah.”
“She’d probably punch you in the face.”
“Probably.”
“You should totally try.”
“No.”
“You just have to be stealthy. Or wait for her to be distracted.” Suddenly Nate’s eyes lit up. “Wait, I have an idea.”
My body language senses were activating again. Sometimes when Nate had a good idea, like a really good idea, the type of idea you and I are lucky to come up with once a decade, he would radiate a barely perceptible energy in his posture. It’s hard to describe. Actually, it was a similar positive aura to what Brett wafted in the huddle whenever we needed a first down and he called a QB keeper.
Still, one always had to be a little wary when Nate got amped liked this. Sometimes his ideas blew up in his face—literally.
“Alright,” I said cautiously. “Let’s hear it.”
“We can distract her with the ‘Methane Mamba.’”
“No.”
“You don’t even know what it is.”
“Don’t care. It sounds ridiculous.”
“It is ridiculous. And that’s the beauty of it. Just follow my lead. You’ll know when Haley is distracted enough for you to snag the phone from her pocket.”
By this point Mrs. Crooks had finished explaining the lab, but neither Nate nor I had any clue what it was about. It didn’t matter, though, because we were engaged in a totally different mission. Nate ordered me to look in the cabinets for a large beaker the size of a two-liter bottle of soda and fill it with water. By the time I placed the beaker of water on our counter, Nate had lugged over a large canister of gas from the lab’s equipment area. The canister was labeled METHANE, and smattered across its surface was an aggressive number of warning stickers, including one that was a skull and crossbones.
I anxiously scratched the back of my neck. “This seems like a bad idea.”
“Well, methane is the same gas that’s in farts, so frankly I think you’re a bigger threat to the safety of the class than this canister.”
That shut me up good and allowed Nate to proceed with his plan. A thin rubber tube was attached to the nozzle of the canister, and he took the open end of the tube and plunked it into the large beaker of water. Then he turned the canister’s valve to release the gas.
Immediately a steady stream of small bubbles flowed out of the tube and floated to the top of the beaker. The bubbles clung to each other at the top, creating a layer of thick, sudsy foam.
“It’s begun,” Nate whispered to himself in a tone that was a little more mad scientist–y than I was comfortable with. He reached for the gas valve and turned it further right. The bubbles built up faster now, and soon the mass of suds extended past the lip of the beaker. But instead of toppling over the sides, the bubbles clung together like magic, the mass growing taller and taller, like a tower of foam building up toward the ceiling. Science, man. It’s wild. I watched the column rise and sway eerily like a mamba being summoned from a baske
t by a snake charmer.
“Methane Mamba,” I whispered in dorky awe.
Nate kept his hand on the gas valve. The tower of bubbles was two feet … now three feet … now four feet tall. I glanced nervously over at Mrs. Crooks, but as usual she was using this Monday morning lab time to chuckle over the obituary section of the newspaper.
By the time the tower of suds was six feet tall, a semicircle of classmates had gathered around our lab station. Haley was one of them.
“Get in position,” Nate whispered to me.
I casually moseyed over to the crowd and stood a little behind Haley. A few feet from my hand was her phone poking out from her back pocket, taunting me.
“Hey, Jeremy,” Nate said from the other side of the counter. “Pass me your lighter.”
“Whoa, how’d you know I had a lighter on me?” Jeremy said, passing it to Nate and unleashing a waft of marijuana odor that could kill a small cat.
The lighter had me seriously nervous. HIGHLY FLAMMABLE was plastered all over the methane tank, and all of those hundreds and hundreds of bubbles were filled with the gas.
Nate held the lighter in one hand. He held the palm of his other hand flat and then carefully slid it into the base of the tower of bubbles. He lifted his hand slowly, separating the column of bubbles from the beaker so he now held the entire Methane Mamba in his palm. The top of the column teetered, and Nate darted back to keep it centrally balanced on the palm of his hand. It steadied, and Nate slowly walked the Mamba to the center of the room. The bubbles were practically scraping the ceiling.
“Ready?” he said to the crowd. Then he ignited the lighter and slowly moved the quavering orange flame to the bubbles.
The Methane Mamba instantly whooshed into a column of fire that shot toward the ceiling in a dazzling inferno. It was such a mind-blowing sight to see my best friend, if only for an instant, morph into a fireball-wielding wizard that I almost forgot about the reason he was doing it.
I set my sights on Haley’s butt—er, phone. With the painstaking focus of a SWAT team officer disarming an active bomb, I slowly reached my trembling hand toward the phone. I pinched the top of it between my index finger and thumb, and gave it a small tug. It wiggled out of her pocket a little bit, so I pulled it again, harder this time. The phone slid out of the pocket entirely.
By this point the flame in Nate’s hand had burned out, but now everyone was staring at a patch of ceiling above him. Grayport classrooms were so old and decrepit that pink and spongy tufts of insulation sprouted forth from sections of the ceiling, and Nate’s flame had ignited one of these exposed swaths of insulation. I don’t think that was part of his plan.
People were yelling and cheering and laughing as Mrs. Crooks grabbed a fire extinguisher, stood on a chair, and sprayed white foam at the smoldering ceiling. Haley, meanwhile, had brought her hands to her mouth as she watched the chaos unfold. I looked at her phone’s screen, and to my horror I was confronted with a prompt for a password. I hadn’t considered this obstacle.
Damn Nate and his stupid Methane Mamba plan! Okay, focus, Wyatt—focus. Haley’s password … what could it possibly be? Think. Think!
Think harder!
Suddenly an idea came to me and I frantically tapped it out on the keyboard: “Wyatt.”
Incorrect.
I know, I know: Totally wishful thinking to imagine her password would be less than six characters and with no numbers in it. I tried a new one:
WyattWyatt69
Incorrect.
Haley+Wyatt4ever
Incorrect.
Time was running out. She was going to turn around any second; I could feel it. This was going to be my last attempt before I aborted the whole operation: Haley123.
IN! I couldn’t believe it. And even better than getting in, here was some concrete evidence that Haley and I were most definitely soul mates: We used the exact same password!
I looked down at the unlocked phone, and sure enough, there was a pop-up notification from Facebook waiting for her:
WYATT PARKER HAS LIKED ONE OF YOUR PHOTOS.
Underneath the message were two buttons: There was VIEW, which would open up the photo of her and that incredibly lucky scoop of mint-chocolate chip, and there was DISMISS, which I smashed repeatedly with my sausage finger. The notification vanished.
My relief was short-lived, though, as I watched Haley, who’d clearly noticed that unsettling sensation when your pocket suddenly feels less than whole, like it’s missing its soul—its constant—pat the backside of her jeans.
She spun around, her eyes darting from my flustered face to her phone in my hands. Here was another fatal flaw of Nate’s dumb, half-baked plan.
“Your phone fell out of your pocket,” I said, handing it to her.
I still can’t believe I thought of this fix on the spot. I guess Nate is correct when he says that even a broken clock is right twice a day.
“Oh jeez, thanks,” she said, inspecting the phone for any cracks before sticking it back into her pocket. “You and Nate are insane, by the way,” she said, shaking her head partly in concern, partly in impressed bemusement.
“Well, we’re always trying to make advancements in the scientific community,” I said. “I don’t know how much Mrs. Crooks appreciates it, though.”
We looked at Mrs. Crooks, who fired a few final puffs of extinguisher foam at the ceiling. The remaining embers of the fire fizzled out with a low hiss, and white foam mixed with ash plopped down from the ceiling in heavy glops. The small cloud of smoke hovering above Mrs. Crooks’s head looked like the product of her smoldering anger.
My stomach churned thinking about the wrath she was about to unleash on us. But just as she opened her mouth to torch us with an inferno of her own, a cacophony of yells and stampeding feet rumbled in the hallway outside our classroom. Mrs. Crooks scurried over to the door and poked her head out. Then, seeing whatever the source of the commotion was, she followed the horde of students and teachers bustling down the hallway. The rest of my class funneled out the door to see what was up.
A noisy crowd had surrounded the announcements bulletin board at the end of the hall. Nate and I were too far back in the crowd to read the message, so I tapped on the shoulder of a kid in front of me.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
“It’s an announcement from the mayor,” the kid said ominously. “She’s declared a state of emergency because of red tide.”
“So what does that mean?” Nate asked.
“It means that all our government funding will be redirected to help the families who’ve been screwed out of their income. It means any nonessential town programs have been postponed, including…”
He trailed off, but I didn’t need him to finish anyway. I knew the answer just from looking at the postures of the students and teachers gathered around the bulletin board. Their slumped shoulders, their tiny fidgets, and their twisted faces of disbelief told me everything. I knew this look. It was the look people get when they lose the one thing they always assumed would be there for them.
“Football,” the kid choked out. “It’s been canceled indefinitely.”
Nate and I looked at each other, each of us processing the news in our own horrible silence.
Then I saw it—or rather, felt it: the spark of energy radiating from Nate. This occurrence twice in one day was truly a marvel.
“You’ve got another idea,” I said.
“I do,” he replied quietly. “If we pull it off, we could save the football team and the town at the same time.”
“And will it blow up in our faces again?”
“Probably,” he said. “It’s a long shot. A Hail Mary.”
“I thought you weren’t religious.”
Nate sighed. “Not usually. But it’s all we have left.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY
The next afternoon, Nate and I stood among a small enclave of adults at the fifty-yard line of Grayport Field. It was one of those raw days
where the cold seems to rise from the core of the earth itself, bypassing all your warm layers by shooting up through the soles of your feet and clanging a hidden nerve in your chest that makes your entire body feel frail. Everyone stood silently, hands stuffed in pockets, impatiently shifting their weight from one foot to the other. All five of us were looking at the sky.
“You know, we’ll probably hear it before we see it,” Nate said.
No one responded. We kept our necks craned upward.
“Remind me again how you contacted these people?” Coach Stetson asked.
“Blind emails. Yesterday we combed the internet for the addresses of anyone in the company, and then we sent personal emails to nearly each one we found. Probably sent out how many, Wyatt? Twenty? Thirty? Didn’t get a single response, but I guess it makes sense they’d contact you guys first instead of us.”
I appreciated that Nate was taking the lead here, but I also kind of wished he would shut up. It felt inappropriate being so chatty with adults as serious as Coach Stetson, Principal Hobbs, and Mayor Pickney. I myself was still recovering from what happened earlier that day. The two of us had been sitting in physics, Nate frantically scribbling notes, me casually staring up at the burnt hole in the ceiling, when Principal Hobbs knocked on our classroom door and asked us to join him in the hall. I was convinced he’d heard about the Methane Mamba and had come to rip us each a new one the approximate circumference of said hole. But instead he showed us a printed email that Coach Stetson had forwarded him. He told us we had to go to the football field immediately.
Nate turned out to be right: The low, rolling purr of helicopter wings preceded the vehicles’ arrival by a good five minutes. Even when the helicopter finally came into view, it circled around the stadium four or five times, bobbing and weaving between the wooden light towers before settling over midfield. It wobbled down to us in a deafening whirlwind of sound and wind.
The pilot cut the engine, and the passenger in the back stepped out onto the field. She was wearing a sleek black coat with a white-and-brown fox fur that rimmed the top of the coat’s hood. Her glossy, golden hair may have been the brightest thing I’d ever seen in Grayport, and her skin was so smooth and tan she practically looked photoshopped. Draped over her shoulder was a large leather handbag that looked more valuable than my entire life.