Waylon! One Awesome Thing

by Sara Pennypacker

  Waylon’s dad leaned forward. “Well, here’s the crazy thing: once word got out that I was making a movie, every single kid who wouldn’t let me on his team before suddenly wanted to be part of it.” He patted Waylon’s foot and then got up. “See, buddy, being passionate about something attracts people. Does that help?”

  “Sure, Dad,” Waylon lied. “’Night.”

  Mr. Zakowski left, and for a long while afterward, Waylon lay awake, staring into the darkness. In galactic time, his father wasn’t that much older than he was—only about thirty years. But in terms of helping with fourth grade problems, he might as well be from the Jurassic Period.

  On Saturday mornings, everyone was supposed to pitch in so that the Zakowski home wouldn’t look, as Mr. Zakowski put it, like a poster for a cheesy disaster movie. Each week, he gave this imaginary disaster movie a new title: Attack of the Towering Dishes; Avalanche of Litter; Laundrogeddon!

  Actually, all Waylon’s father really wanted was a clean kitchen. His writing studio was a little room with a glass door off the kitchen. In it, he typed drafts of his screenplay. One day this screenplay would be made into a blockbuster movie: a thriller, a drama, and a comedy—a thramedy—all in one. It would be so powerful, audiences would leave theaters shaking their heads in awe and saying they would happily have paid twice the ticket price to see a film that terrific.

  First, though, he had to finish his screenplay. To do that, Waylon’s father needed a tidy kitchen. Because seeing a mess when he happened to turn his writer’s chair, he said, made it impossible to create.

  Waylon hurried out of his pajamas. While he dressed, he heard the sounds of his family already at breakfast. As he wandered into the kitchen, though, it went silent. Not the good kind of silent, the kind that meant everyone was happily tucking into their food. The bad kind, the kind that makes you think the air will shatter like glass and shear your ears off.

  Waylon shook out some cereal and ducked low over the bowl. He peered around warily.

  His father was at the sink, rinsing a plate. His mother stood beside him, pointing to the trash can. Neon was hurling the Glare at them both, chipping black nail polish off her thumbnail with her front teeth.

  “The trash, Charlotte,” Mrs. Zakowski tried brightly, as though Neon were still a normal, helpful kid who answered to her real name these days. “It’s your chore this week.”

  “What,” Neon muttered after spitting some nail polish specks onto the back of her wrist and studying the effect, “is the point?”

  “We don’t want this place to look like a poster for Revenge of the Rotting Rubbish,” Mr. Zakowski answered with a hopeful chuckle.

  “But what,” she asked with a long sigh, “is the point?”

  “So we don’t attract rats, is the point!”

  Waylon looked up. Had his mother’s voice just cracked?

  “Right. So they don’t overrun this place and gnaw off our feet while we’re sleeping is the point,” Mr. Zakowski tried, with a longing glance into his writing room.

  Normally, Waylon loved imagining possibilities. But discovering that his feet had been gnawed off to bloody nubs while he was sleeping was an exception.

  Still, he kept silent, munching his cereal and hoping that just this once, Newton’s Third Law of Motion wouldn’t kick in.

  Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that Every force has an equal and opposite force in reaction. Neon was a force, all right. When Mr. and Mrs. Zakowski pushed back against this force, the argument could go on for a while. But ultimately, both parents’ equal and opposite reaction to Neon was to run.

  Newton’s Third Law held.

  Mr. Zakowski crumbled first. “Hmmm…overrun by rats…middle of the night…” and he backed into his studio as if an idea this fresh had to be added immediately to his screenplay. Which now, Waylon figured, might actually be a cheesy disaster film.

  Mrs. Zakowski was right behind him. Her eyes got the faraway glaze that meant she was dreaming about the nice, obedient medical robots in her lab. She turned to Waylon, silently begging him to take out the trash.

  Waylon got up and tugged out the trash bag. Because sparring with their parents was only a warm-up for Neon, and as Newton had discovered centuries ago…what was the point?

  After he’d taken out the trash, Waylon made his regular Saturday morning call to Joe. “What time should we take Buddy to the park today?” he asked.

  There was a minute’s silence at the other end of the phone. “Well…um…you know the rules.”

  “What rules?”

  “Arlo’s rules. If you’re a Shark-Puncher, we can’t hang out anymore.”

  “Oh,” Waylon said. There was another long minute of silence before he spoke again. “Well, can I take Galaxy to the park by myself?”

  “Sorry,” Joe said. “Galaxy knows the rules, too. So, ’bye.”

  Waylon dialed Matt next. “Can we feed the penguins today?”

  “I’m going to the aquarium later,” Matt said. “But…um…you’re not on the list.”

  “The list?” Waylon asked.

  “Arlo’s list. The Shark-Punchers.”

  “I’m not on it? That’s just a mistake.”

  “Maybe,” Matt said. When he hung up, the click hurt Waylon’s ears.

  On the way to the office supply store on Saturday afternoon, Mrs. Zakowski asked Waylon why he needed a journal. He told her.

  Recording scientific accomplishments was something Mrs. Zakowski understood. She smiled. “Ah. Discoveries. Like Archimedes!”

  Waylon skidded to a stop. “No, Mom! Definitely not like Archimedes!”

  “Why not? He was one of the greatest scientists of all time. He was famous.”

  “He was famous all right—for being naked! Don’t you feel sorry for him? He figured out an important principle in a bathtub, and he’s in all the history books running through the streets naked. I’m going to be famous too, but I am not going to discover anything in a bathtub.”

  “Well, technically, you take showers,” his mother pointed out. “And you can never predict when a big idea is going to hit you. So, what kinds of discoveries will you be putting in this journal?”

  “Everything. I’ve got lots of ideas. Lately, I’ve been concentrating on gravity.”

  “Gravity?” Mrs. Zakowski looked puzzled. “But Newton and Einstein have already covered that pretty thoroughly.”

  “Well sure, but don’t you think gravity’s got potential? What if you could counteract it, or turn it off and on, or tell it where to go?”

  Waylon started imagining some of the things he could do if only he could get gravity to loosen its grip. Like make the ball come to him in any sport. And couldn’t he attract as many cupcakes—chocolate with marshmallow frosting, three dollars each—as he wanted? Best of all, Neil deGrasse Tyson, greatest living scientist—and probably greatest living human being—in the whole world, would probably want to meet him if he could control gravity. He was so excited about this last possibility that he almost missed what his mother said next. Almost.

  He skidded to a stop again. “What do you mean, ‘Gravity is enough by itself’???”

  “I mean, gravity is. We factor it in to everything we do, every minute of every day. Look.” She pointed to a roof overhang in front of them. “See those pigeons? We’re going to walk around that ledge and not under it because we know that things fall down. What more do you want?”

  Waylon started walking again. His mother studied how things were. He wanted to explore how things could be. They were worlds apart. But then it struck him: in that space between them was a perfect Community Safety Suggestion.

  He looked back at the pigeons. Yes. A safety suggestion that would not only avert minor accidents, but also serious injuries. It could maybe even save lives. Actual lives. People received medals for doing that, and got television interviews.

  Waylon didn’t want a medal. But a television interview would go a long way toward making him famous. And not in a bathtu
b naked.

  When they got to the store, Mrs. Zakowski left Waylon alone, pretending she needed to pick up some stuff for her lab. Waylon knew she was pretending because he’d seen her lab. Everything in this store must look like an antique to her. But he appreciated the privacy.

  One by one, he picked up every journal and studied it.

  And finally he found it.

  The journal was gray—a good, serious color.

  It was just the right size—narrow enough to fit into his pocket, but thick enough to hold lots of ideas.

  The cover was fake leather, which was good for two reasons: First, he didn’t want to feel guilty about any cows dying. Second, fake leather was waterproof. If he had the bad luck of being in the shower when he had the good luck of discovering something great, at least he wouldn’t have to worry about getting it wet.

  But the best thing about this journal was the little brass lock on the cover. Waylon’s ideas were extremely powerful, and who knew what could happen if they fell into the wrong hands.

  He strode up the aisle and laid it on the counter along with two ten-dollar bills. “This is my journal,” he told the clerk.

  The clerk took Waylon’s money and handed him back some change. “It is now,” he agreed.

  That night, Waylon went to his room as soon as Miracles of the Natural World ended. He opened his new journal and filled three pages with idea after brilliant idea.

  Through the wall, he could hear Neon typing away, and that made him nearly as happy as writing in his journal did. Even if she didn’t know it, they were still doing something together.

  On weekends, Mr. and Mrs. Zakowski switched places. Waylon’s father went out to work, while his mother stayed home.

  Once Mr. Zakowski had made the big mistake of calling Saturday and Sunday his wife’s days off. “Days off? Days OFF???” she had sputtered. That particular weekend had involved a bottle of scarlet nail polish spilled over a new white couch; tadpoles dumped into a toilet; a kid running away to the Boston Public Library; and, she claimed, close to a hundred diaper changes.

  Waylon didn’t like hearing about that time, since, as the younger kid, he had been responsible for only the diapers. But he did like switcheroo weekends. First of all, it was nice to have his mother home. Even better, his father usually invited Waylon to come along when he went to work, and Waylon always did. Mr. Zakowski’s motto was Monotony is the enemy of creativity, so his jobs were always really interesting.

  This weekend, Waylon hoped his dad was going to be a living statue in Boston Common. Of all his father’s jobs, Waylon liked this one best, because the park was always full of dogs.

  “Ben Franklin?” Waylon asked at breakfast Sunday morning.

  “Yes, I’m feeling like Ben today. Two o’clock good, partner?”

  “Two o’clock,” Waylon agreed. He looked over at his sister, hunkered over her toast. “Want to come with us?”

  Neon didn’t bother What’s the point?-ing him. She only glowered and took her plate into her room. In a minute, Waylon heard the quiet but sharp clicks of her keyboard.

  Waylon’s father gazed at Neon’s empty place at the table. From the look on his face, Waylon suspected that he missed Charlotte Brontë Zakowski just as much as he did. On the way to Boston Common, Waylon asked him about it.

  Mr. Zakowski smiled, but he rubbed the little bald spot on the back of his head, which, Waylon knew, meant that he was sad. Waylon reached up and patted his arm.

  “She doesn’t play Lonelyville anymore. Remember how hard she used to laugh when she played Lonelyville?”

  Years ago, Mr. Zakowski had written a script for a TV movie called Return to Lonelyville. In it, a mean woman’s doctor told her she was dying. Louise Pembleton decided to be nice so she could get some friends before she died. But it turned out the doctor was wrong; Louise wasn’t going to die after all. She told all her new friends she wasn’t going to die, thinking they’d be happy since now she could have a long life with them. But instead, they got mad because they thought she’d tricked them, so they left her alone again. Which made her mean again.

  Lonelyville was a pretty terrible movie, and Mr. Zakowski said it had a lot of lines he’d just as soon forget he’d written, but the Heartstrings Channel showed it often because it was such a tearjerker. So often that Waylon and his sister could recite whole scenes of dialogue, which Mr. Zakowski did not find hilarious, but which Neon sure did.

  “Really? Her playing Lonelyville? That’s what you miss most?” Waylon asked.

  “No, it’s just what I happened to think of at this minute. I miss everything.” He stopped, a serious look on his face. “Charlotte is going through a perfectly normal transition. It’s like in a screenplay—by the end of Act One, the main character has to take on a new aspect of her persona in order to deal with the big challenges coming in Act Two. You understand?”

  Waylon didn’t—he almost never did when his dad got all writery—so he changed the subject. “What do you think about gravity?”

  Mr. Zakowski gave Waylon the same puzzled look his mother had given him at the question. But after a minute, he said, “You know, it’s a great metaphor. About the pull we can feel toward people. In fact, I think I’ll put it in my screenplay. Dallas can tell her co-worker, ‘You’re affecting my gravity. I’m wobbling off course.’ Or no, even better! In the love scene, Roberto will say, ‘Your attraction is so strong, I’ll orbit you forever!’”

  Waylon knew his father was off, and there was no pulling him back—not without extra gravity, anyway. He picked up his dad's suitcase and headed into the park.

  At a promising intersection of two busy paths, Waylon helped his dad get into his costume: tugging the skinny kneesocks up to the baggy britches, buckling the shoes, buttoning the hundreds of buttons on the vest and greatcoat. All the clothes had been spray-painted the same marble-gray color.

  He carefully painted his dad’s face and hands with marble-gray makeup, then watched while Mr. Zakowski put on a marble gray–painted wig and a marble gray–painted tricornered hat and marble gray–painted spectacles.

  The effect amazed Waylon every time. “Dad?”

  “Still in here.”

  Then Mr. Zakowski climbed onto a marble gray–painted box and struck a pose.

  The trick to being a living statue isn’t holding perfectly still. Anybody can do that with a little practice. No, Waylon had noticed that the trick is knowing when to move for maximum effect. A well-timed wink could make people passing by jump and laugh. And then gather around and dig in their pockets for tips. You’d be amazed at how much money people will pay someone for standing around doing practically nothing.

  His father bowed at a baby in a stroller, and the baby’s parents jumped. Then they laughed and dropped a dollar into the hat beside the box. Before half an hour had gone by, the hat was brimming. Waylon emptied the money out, leaving a couple of singles and a five to give people the idea that this wasn’t some nickel-and-dime show, and then took off to find a good place to play Want This Dog?

  Waylon stretched out on an empty bench with a view of the park. He would never have a dog—ever—because his mother was deathly allergic. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t pretend. Whenever a dog went by, he imagined that its owner was trying to give it away. No thanks, he imagined himself saying to a woman with a poodle. Too fluffy.

  No, he thought when a teenager tugged a Saint Bernard past his bench. Too slobbery.

  Playing Want This Dog? made him both sad and happy at the same time. It hurt to see all those dogs he could never have. The truth was, he would have loved to take any of them. Still, it made him feel strangely happy that in all the times he’d played, he had never imagined himself answering Yes.

  If he didn’t know better, he could believe that the perfect dog—the one meant just for him—was waiting out there. But waiting for what, he couldn’t imagine.

  That night, Waylon had a hard time falling asleep. He’d ignored the whole team problem all week
end, but tomorrow it would be back. Arlo was either going to put him on the Shark-Punchers, which he would hate, or he wasn’t, which somehow he would hate more. Even worse, what if Arlo put him on a team with Baxter? Worst of all, what if Arlo decided that both he and Disaster Boiling shouldn’t be on a team at all?

  He flipped on his lamp to study the History of the Universe poster across the room. Usually, looking at it made him feel happy. On the left was the Inception—what most people called the Big Bang. All that energy bursting out at once must have been pretty thrilling, and Waylon was really glad it had happened.

  Tonight, though, it struck him: he was living through his own personal Big Bang. Arlo had divided the fourth grade boys. Neon was shooting away from the family. When he could see himself from the outside, he even felt as if he might be separating from himself. Everything in his universe was exploding away in different directions.

  He looked at the tiny image in the far left of the poster. He had never before wondered how the singularity—the compact ball of matter that was the universe before it expanded—had felt when the Big Bang happened.

  Did the singularity feel lonely from all that whizzing away?

  Because he sure did.

  Did it wish everything would go back to the way it was before?

  Because he sure did.

  Just then, he heard a scratch at his door and a “Woof!”

  Waylon smiled. Neon hadn’t played Dog for a long time. Actually, Neon had never played it. Dog was strictly a Charlotte game.

  When he was little he’d wanted a puppy so badly, his whole body had ached. Mrs. Zakowski had tried, but when they’d walked into the shelter, she’d had such a sneezing fit that she set all the animals to howling.

  And that was when he’d really understood. No dog. Ever.

  That night, Charlotte had scratched at Waylon’s door. She’d bounded into his room on all fours and barked and rolled over. Waylon had laughed so hard he’d finally stopped crying.