Waylon! One Awesome Thing

by Sara Pennypacker

  Now, Neon flopped onto the end of his bed. “Hey. Play OAT.”

  “No. I don’t feel like it tonight.”

  Neon punched his foot. Fake hard. Not hard at all. “Play OAT.”

  “All right.” He sighed. “One Awesome Thing: this afternoon, I saw three ants carrying a peanut. A whole peanut. I looked it up—if humans were that strong, three people could carry around the Statue of Liberty.”

  Neon rolled over. “That’s better. And…?”

  Waylon knew what he was supposed to say now. He was the one who had invented OAT, and the one who insisted everyone say the same thing at the end, every time. He turned to the wall. “I can’t,” he whispered. “I don’t believe it anymore.” He imagined hot desert winds blowing on his eyeballs. This worked to dry the tears that were threatening.

  Neon punched him again. Still fake hard, but kind of hard for real, too. “Say it!” she growled, a pretend-furious dog now.

  Waylon lifted his hand and traced over the symbols at the bottom of the periodic table hanging over his bed. Usually the heavier elements made him feel better. But tonight, not even Np, neptunium, or Pu, plutonium, gave him any strength. “I can’t, Neon. Tomorrow’s going to be really bad. The team thing.” Saying it out loud made it worse. He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes.

  “It’s stupid not to cry, you know. Everybody cries.”

  Waylon knew this, of course. The Science of Being Human, Chapter Seven, “People Plumbing.” Still, he shook his head.

  Neon gave him one more punch, this time so soft it felt like some kind of present. “All right,” she said with a dramatic sigh. “Just this one time, I’ll say it for you: And…tomorrow is going to be Even! More! Awesome!”

  Waylon reached up and snapped off his lamp. “Sure. Even more awesome.”

  Monday morning, the Big-Bang, Everything-Is-Exploding-Away sensation was worse. Waylon’s new journal, tucked deep in his jeans pocket, felt like the only thing holding him together.

  The feeling didn’t disappear when he got to school. “You may sit down, Waylon,” Mrs. Fernman said at the end of the Pledge. “We’re finished.”

  “I’m not,” Waylon answered, his hand still over his heart, which felt like it could split apart if he didn’t hold it together. “I’m still pledging.” His words were as much a surprise to him as they seemed to be to Mrs. Fernman.

  “Excuse me?” she stuttered.

  “To the indivisible part. I think I need extra pledging about that. I’m feeling a little divisible today.”

  Mrs. Fernman tipped her head. She looked as if she were trying to translate what he had just said into a language she understood.

  “Divisible—you know, like a cell in mitosis? Like an atom—nuclear fission?” he explained. “You can get started with whatever’s next, and I’ll catch up.”

  “I’ve been teaching fourth grade for thirty-nine years, and I’ve never had a student need more time with the Pledge!” Mrs. Fernman gave her head a little shake and then walked to her desk. “Class,” she directed in a voice that still sounded a little confused, “please take out your geography books.”

  The feeling didn’t disappear during Geography, either. Half the kids had dozed off behind their books by the time Mrs. Fernman got to “Isthmus: a narrow bridge of land that connects two larger land masses.”

  A couple more kids’ heads hit their desks at that.

  Not Waylon’s. “That’s it!” he wailed at the top of his lungs. “I’m an isthmus!”

  That woke the sleeping kids, and they wanted to know what the still-awake kids were laughing about. Even Baxter Boylen had finally opened his eyes and was looking interested.

  Waylon slumped onto his desk and covered his head. Isthmus was a hard word to say, and it was a dumb thing to blurt out in a classroom. He knew he should try to explain, or laugh at himself—anything for damage control.

  But he couldn’t. He was too busy trying to absorb what he had just figured out: his sister and his parents were like two large land masses drifting farther and farther apart. So were the Shark-Punchers and the Others. And he was the only bridge between them.

  At recess, the Shark-Punchers and the Others retreated to opposite corners of the playground. While Waylon stood midway between, trying to decide what to do, Baxter came up to him.

  “What’s the deal with this Arlo guy?” he asked. “I heard about the team thing. How come he decides everything?”

  Waylon took a step away, but he answered. “Are you kidding? Look at him.” Waylon gazed at Arlo along with Baxter, trying to see him through a stranger’s eyes. It was pretty obvious: Arlo was big and strong and handsome, and he had that crown-hair thing going for him. “He’s great at everything. Plus, he’s nice. Even the girls like him.”

  “So how come you’re not on a team?”

  Waylon took another step away. “I will be soon. Arlo’s desperate for me to join.”

  “He is? So which are you, a jock or a brain?”

  Suddenly Waylon realized it wasn’t the jock or the brain that bothered him. It was the “or.” Why not an “and”? Why not a “but also”?

  “Neither,” he said. “I’m an isthmus, remember?”

  He turned his back and headed over to the Shark-Punchers’ corner. When he got near, he raised his hand to wave at Arlo.

  And Arlo turned away.

  Arlo, the king of the whole school, turned away.

  And at that instant, Waylon saw himself from the outside. What he’d done with his hand hadn’t looked like a wave at all—it had looked like the pathetic last reach of an isthmus, right before it’s swallowed up by the cold, dark sea.

  Baxter stood against the wall, watching him. And suddenly Waylon knew—whatever it took, he had to get back on Arlo’s team again.

  He started a line to go back to class, even though the bell wouldn’t ring for ten minutes. When the doors opened, he went straight to his desk and got to work on his Community Safety paper. His presentation was going to be great. So great that Arlo was going to say, I want another brain on my team! again. It had better be.

  When Waylon got home, his father handed him the phone. “It’s Mitchell,” he said. “He’s called three times already.”

  Waylon dropped his backpack, surprised. All year, he and Mitchell had had a deal. He had taught Mitchell the science behind baseball, and Mitchell had coached him through Little League. Waylon hadn’t seen him since August, though.

  “Hey, Science Dude,” Mitchell said. “We’re studying atomic structure this week, and I really, really, really need your help.”

  Waylon felt himself glow brighter with importance with each “really”—Mitchell was fourteen and a star athlete. “Sure,” he said, trying out a slightly deeper voice than normal. “Want to come over here?”

  For a minute, there was a silence at the other end of the phone. “Well…I would, but…Okay, the thing is: is your sister there? Because, Science Dude, I gotta say, this year she’s turned scary.”

  Waylon wasn’t surprised to learn that Neon was scaring people at school, too. But it made him feel sad. “She’s not scary,” he said. “She’s really nice.”

  “Sure. And a rattlesnake makes an awesome pet. Is she there, or not?”

  “She’ll be home soon,” Waylon admitted.

  “Okay, then can you just help me over the phone?”

  He could and he did. He explained protons, neutrons, and electrons and their orbits. All the time, though, he was thinking about his sister, orbiting away from everything she used to love.

  After dinner, the Zakowski family sat down to watch a movie. Neon’s spot on the couch seemed emptier than usual. When the show ended, Mr. Zakowski went in to say good night to her.

  “Mom,” Waylon asked, “do you miss the old Charlotte?”

  Mrs. Zakowski sighed. “She used to let me braid her hair for hours. All these crazy patterns.”

  “That’s what you miss most?”

  She sighed again. “I miss how
happy she used to be just hanging out with us. But she’s a teenager now, Waylon. She’s supposed to rebel—it’s in her contract. Listen, it’s a hard stage, but it’s just a stage. She’ll come through it.”

  “I keep thinking I should do something.”

  “Oh, no. Your only job is to be a good brother.” She reached out and scrambled his hair. “Which you already are.”

  Waylon went to his room and lay down on his bed. He hoped his mother was right, that it was just a stage. But she was wrong that there was nothing he should do.

  He was an isthmus. That was his job.

  A lot was riding on him. No matter how stretched out it made him feel, he was going to have to keep spanning the gulf between Neon and his parents. Because if he didn’t, his sister was going to end up an island.

  Tuesday morning, it was right to Art after the Pledge.

  Waylon liked Art all right, except for the dusty chalk. And the clay that wedged under his nails. And the paint that dried to an itchy crust over his fingers. Waylon didn’t like touching things that weren’t cool and dry, and there were lots of those things in the Art Room.

  Actually, there were lots of them in the world, too. Waylon pulled out his journal. Invent Teflon fingerskins, he wrote with a nod.

  “What did you just write in there?”

  Waylon hadn’t heard Baxter sneak up on him. “Nothing. There’s nothing in there at all.” He jammed the journal back into his pocket and scanned the room. If Arlo saw him talking to Baxter, it would ruin his chances.

  Arlo was staring right at him.

  Waylon grabbed a pack of cool, dry markers and hurried away from Baxter to a seat at the farthest table. He bit his lip and set to work drawing a poster that would show everybody, especially Arlo Brody, just how genius his Safety Suggestion was.

  At recess, Waylon headed straight over to where the Shark-Punchers were kneeling in a circle, rolling pinecones through a mud puddle.

  “Hey, Arlo, I was just wondering if you noticed I didn’t blurt anything out today,” Waylon said. “Also, I sure didn’t stick around when that Baxter started bothering me in Art.”

  “Uh-huh.” Arlo rolled another pinecone and added it to the stack.

  “What are they for?” Waylon asked, although he could guess.

  “Arsenal,” Arlo answered. “I told the Others to stock up too. It’s going to be cool.”

  Waylon said, “Wow, that sure sounds cool,” even though it didn’t. He wouldn’t want to throw sticky, muddy pinecones at any of his friends, and he sure didn’t want to be hit by any. “I can’t wait.”

  But Arlo never even looked up.

  When Waylon got home, he gathered his courage and knocked on Neon’s door. “Arlo Brody has ruined fourth grade!” he yelled as soon as she opened it. “The only thing worse than having to be on a team is not having a team to be on! It’s so stupid!”

  He steeled himself for Neon’s wrath, but instead, she slumped to the floor and patted her rug. Waylon sat beside her warily. He was stunned when she leaned her head on his shoulder.

  “I know.” She sighed. “And if you think fourth grade boys are bad, you should try eighth grade girls. What kind of jeans are cool, which boy is cute. Who sits with whom. Hairstyles and celebrities. I can’t stand that cabbage-head stuff!”

  “So what do you do?”

  “This.” She jumped up, turned on the Glare, and flicked her black hair spikes. “Oh, yeah, the cabbage-heads leave Neon alone. And then I can concentrate on my project.” Neon pulled some papers from her printer and clasped them to her chest. “Which is absolutely amazing. It’s about life, how everything is connected and—”

  “You’ve been writing a book?”

  “No, it’s more! It’s got visual art, too, and film.”

  “Like a screenplay?”

  “No, more. It’s also got music, and dancing. And vibrations, so people feel it, too. It’s about the Everythingness, so it has to take lots of forms.”

  Waylon tugged his hair at the temples, making room for what he was learning. “So…when you say everything is nothing, what you really think is that everything is everything?”

  “Uh…yeah.”

  “And you’re pretending to be someone you’re not—someone scary—so people will leave you alone so you can be who you are?”

  “Uh-huh. Exactly.”

  “Oh, wow! Batesian mimicry!”

  “What?”

  “Batesian mimicry—it’s really cool. It’s where a harmless species mimics a dangerous species to be left alone by predators. Like some species of moths that look like bees—nobody messes with them!” Waylon explained. “What about friends, though? Aren’t you lonely?”

  “Oh, I have friends. There’s a group of us. We sit together at lunch and we work on the project after school. I’m meeting them in a few minutes. Having a great project is wonderful, but if you had to do it alone, well…what’s the point?”

  Hearing this, Waylon felt a little better. But only a little. “You should tell Mom and Dad that this is an act.”

  “They’re our parents. They know. I mean, didn’t you?”

  Waylon stopped to consider it. “No. I wished it, but I didn’t know it. Mom and Dad don’t either. They know you’re okay, but they really miss you.” Waylon told her what each of them had said.

  Neon stretched out her arms and wiggled her black fingernails. “I put a lot of effort into all this, and it’s working.”

  “But Mom and Dad and me—we’re not cabbage-heads.”

  Neon shrugged on her tattered black jacket. “I’ll think about it.”

  An hour later, Mitchell called for another lesson on atoms. When Waylon told him Neon was gone until dinnertime, he heaved a huge sigh. “Okay, then, I’ll come over. As long as the coast is clear.”

  For a minute, Waylon was tempted to tell him the truth—that his sister was just pretending. Wouldn’t it be great if Charlotte could have a friend like Mitchell? All three of them could do stuff together….

  Then his mother’s words came to him: Your only job is to be a good brother.

  And right now, that meant telling a lie.

  “You’re right about Neon, Mitchell,” he said. “You should warn everyone to leave her alone.”

  “Wow, thanks, Science Dude. I will. See you in a few.”

  Mitchell only lived a few blocks away, so he really was there in a few minutes. Waylon started with the difference between electromagnetic force and nuclear force, and that went pretty well. But he had barely introduced quarks when Mitchell clapped his hands over his ears. “Stop! My brain’s exploding!”

  “Wait…seriously?” Waylon asked, trying not to sound too eager. He pulled The Science of Being Human from his shelf and thumbed it open to Chapter Six: “Beyond Bizarre.” “Maybe you have this: Exploding Head Syndrome. Are you hearing a really loud noise that isn’t real?”

  Mitchell laughed. “No, I just meant that’s a lot of hard stuff. Isn’t there anything fun about atoms?”

  Waylon thought that everything about atoms was fun, but he knew what Mitchell meant. “Actually…” he dropped his voice to imitate the Miracles of the Natural World host. It was the voice he always used whenever he told someone about this particular miracle of the natural world. “All the atoms that are here now have always been here. Since Earth was formed, four and a half billion years ago.”

  “There’s no new stuff?” Mitchell asked.

  “Well, once in a while, a meteor hits us or we pick up some space dust. But that hardly counts.”

  “And nothing leaves?”

  “We shoot a little bit of stuff into space, but otherwise, no. And that means”—Waylon paused dramatically to pull out a piece of lint from his pocket—“an atom in this lint might once have been in a dinosaur’s tooth. Or King Tut’s fingernail.”

  Mitchell’s eyes widened as it hit him. “Science Dude, do you seriously mean my bat might contain an atom from Babe Ruth’s bat?”

  “Sure.”


  “Or, even me? Like, my hair might have once been Joe DiMaggio’s hair?”

  “Why not?”

  Mitchell whooped and grabbed his hair. “I can never cut it! But wait…how can you tell if it is?”

  “Well, you can’t,” Waylon said. “It’s just a possibility.”

  At this, Mitchell’s face collapsed. Waylon felt that somehow he was personally responsible. After Mitchell left, he drew out his journal. Invent atom-history tracking, he wrote. Learn where all your atoms have been.

  Waylon held up his hand, trying to calculate how many atoms there might be in his body. There were ten million alone in a single fingernail. Ten million, each with its own secret history.

  No wonder he blurted things out. This world was so amazing, how could anyone hold it all in?

  The Shark-Punchers and the Others spent the entire ride to the police station shoving pinecones down each other’s shirts and silent-shrieking in outrage. Baxter, clamped beside Mrs. Fernman in the front seat, and Waylon, sitting alone at the back of the bus, were the only boys who weren’t a part of it.

  Waylon watched, suffering from another divisibility problem. There was nothing half of him would enjoy less than having a muddy, sticky pinecone stuffed down his shirt. And there was nothing half of him wanted more.

  When the bus pulled in to the police station, Mrs. Fernman stood up. “No horsing around inside,” she reminded everybody. “In thirty-nine years of teaching I’ve never canceled a field trip, but I will if I have to.” The class climbed off the bus quietly and lined up at the desk labeled DISPATCHER to be signed in.

  “Waylon Jennings Zakowski,” Waylon told the bored-looking officer when it was his turn. “Want me to spell it? For the medal?”

  The bored-looking officer looked up. “Medal?” she asked.