by Ben Mezrich
Spread across the basketball court were a dozen long rectangular steel picnic-style tables, with circular stools attached along each side. The stools were green, blue, and yellow, in no particular order. For some reason, the guys usually preferred the green and blue stools, while the girls preferred the yellow. Charlie had his theories, but he’d never tried to analyze the preference scientifically, though he was sure his mother would have attacked the problem with statistical fervor, compiling data charts and conducting blind polls. For Charlie’s part, he didn’t really care about the color of his stool. His main goal, like most of the other kids, was to get through lunch as fast as humanly possible.
As Charlie moved out of the food dispensary and past the first few steel tables, he could see that most of the other kids in his grade were already way ahead of him; the tables closest to the food were already full, the kids hunched over their trays, focused on shoveling the nameless slop down their throats. Many of the kids hadn’t even bothered removing their heavy coats, scarves, and even gloves, because lunch bled into recess. The faster you ate, the more free time you got to hang out with your friends in the much more preferable indoor/outdoor playground that was attached, via a side door, to the lunchroom. The playground was pretty state-of-the-art—an indoor section full of donated toys, electric trains, puzzles and board games, and a nicely manicured yard dominated by a prefab plastic jungle gym contraption with built in slides, swings, and climbing apparatus, all connected by tubes that were designed to vaguely resemble some sort of space station. From afar, the jungle gym looked more like a habitrail built for giant hamsters, but nobody was complaining—it beat the aging tire swings and warped steel slides that had previously littered the play area.
Beyond the habitrail/space station, there was a field for pickup soccer next to a triangle for either baseball or kickball—but Charlie and his group usually avoided those high-risk areas. With Dylan’s crew continually roaming that part of the recess geography, it was much safer to stay near the front of the playground, in full view of the open doorway leading back into the indoor section of the recess area. Mrs. Patchett, who had been drawing recess proctoring duties since the school year began, never actually set foot outside the indoor section, but even though she looked to be in her mid-hundreds, she had eyes like a hawk. Dylan wouldn’t bother anyone within range of her seemingly bionic vision; he was content lording over the fields, if not all the flies.
In short, lunch was really just the opening act for recess, which meant you got in, you got out, and if you were lucky, nobody got hurt in the process.
“Ah, the other inmates are already plotting our jailbreak. Sharpen your spoon, Charlie, we go over the wall as soon as we choke down our radioactive mystery meat.”
Charlie followed Jeremy’s gaze and spotted their group at their usual place—the last table, farthest back in the room, tucked into a corner on the left side of the basketball court. The far edge of the table was positioned right up against a locked door that used to lead to the old boys’ locker room, and the center stool—green, at the moment empty and waiting for Charlie—was directly beneath a fluorescent ceiling panel that had gone dark at least four years ago. Charlie had once heard that the bulb that had flickered inside the panel had been recalled for leaking unnamed chemicals; Bobby, the school janitor, had assured him the yellow goo that Charlie could still sometimes see pooling in the corners of he ceiling panel was perfectly innocuous. Even though Bobby had never graduated high school, Charlie wanted badly to believe him. Better a little noxious chemical than giving up the table he and his friends had spent most of their lives around.
It wasn’t exactly preferred real estate, but it was home. Since third grade, Charlie and his friends had been eating together at that table, and even though now they were in middle school, there didn’t seem any reason why they should shake things up.
“Looks like Crystal is way ahead of you, Jeremy. She’s distilling the bread down to its acids and bases, and she’s going to use the runoff to tunnel our way out.”
Crystal Mueller, the only girl at the table, looked up from her tray as Charlie came around the corner and chose the free green stool next to her. Jeremy took the seat directly across from him, his back to the rest of their class, and pointed at the impressive contraption Crystal had built across two of the plastic compartments of her tray. From Charlie’s vantage, it looked like she’d cut a plastic straw in half, attached one end to a rubber party balloon, and placed the other end in two spoons that looked like they’d been melded together under intense heat. Everything on her tray had come from the lunchroom, but seeing it all put together like that was bizarre—if you didn’t know Crystal Mueller.
“Is Charlie right?” Jeremy asked once they’d settled into their seats. “Are you building a still?”
Crystal’s cheeks flushed as she pushed her brown bangs off her forehead, then steadied her chunky, zebra-rimmed glasses on her nose. She was constantly readjusting those glasses—a nervous tick that Charlie found equal parts charming and annoying, depending on his mood. Then she rolled her eyes behind the quarter-thick lenses.
“It’s nothing of the sort. It’s a simple pipette and a vinegar well. I’ve siphoned the vinegar out of some salad dressing, and now I’m going to test the corn bread for calcite deposits.”
Charlie stifled a laugh, because with Crystal, it was impossible to know if she was joking or completely serious. He’d been friends with her since second grade, and her obsession with geology sometimes seemed to bleed into every aspect of her daily life. She’d been collecting rocks for so long that she’d run out of room in her bedroom to display them, so she kept boxes in all their lockers. As the only girl in their little group, they gave her a fair amount of slack—even though Charlie would have been the first to admit that she was quite possibly the smartest of them all. But he’d never have told her so to her face; he wasn’t that shy a person, but with girls, he often clenched up like he was trying to swallow something particularly large. Usually, he didn’t think of Crystal as a girl, but sometimes, when she did something particularly impressive, or when he noticed her pretty features, her little nose and brown doe eyes, he found himself losing words. Then again, more often then not, he thought of her the same way he thought of Jeremy and the rest of them. After all, he’d seen her rock collection.
“I read somewhere you can use the same trick to identify warts,” Kentaro Mori mumbled from the far end of the table as he stuffed his mouth with his own piece of bread. “Maybe you should spray some of that stuff on Marion. He’s looking a little froggy today.”
Crystal shot Kentaro a look, then turned back to her makeshift pipette. Kentaro was a head shorter than Crystal and weighed even less than Charlie. Compared to Jeremy, he was the size of a toddler. It wasn’t his fault, really; he was the youngest of the group by far, only ten years old. He’d been skipped forward twice already, and if his parents hadn’t been concerned about the social results of bouncing the only Japanese kid at Nagassack Middle School into an even older class, he’d have been on his way to high school before any of them knew it. Rumor was, he’d been reading in five different languages before he was out of kindergarten. He’d won two state spelling bees in consecutive years and had also placed in a regional Scrabble tournament while still too young to play peewee soccer.
“They aren’t warts, they’re hives,” Marion Tuttle sniffed from next to Kentaro, completely missing the joke. “I think there might be cantaloupe in the bread.”
The last of their gang, the unfortunately named Marion, had always been plagued by allergies. Ever since Charlie had met the kid at a neighborhood playground, he’d been suffering from one breakout or another. Sometimes it was as simple as a rash covering his face, arms, and legs because of something he’d eaten. Other times it was worse, an asthma attack or a weird near-seizure, which meant a trip to the school nurse, and sometimes a quick ride to the nearest emergency room. In fact, by sixth grade, Marion knew the nurse so well, he called her b
y her first name, and more than once a week she drove him home so he wouldn’t have to brave the uncontrolled atmosphere of the bus. Life, for Marion, was a constant battle with the elements. There was an EpiPen in his book bag and a chart taped to the inside of his locker door listing all the medicines he was on and who to call in case he, say, swelled up like a blowfish.
Marion was also an incredible artist; give him a piece of chalk and a blank board, and soon you’d have the Sistine Chapel in chalk dust. As long as he managed to avoid the errant peanut, wisp of gluten, essence of shellfish, or twist of coconut, Charlie was certain Marion would one day be designing a new wing of the Museum of Fine Arts.
And then there were Charlie and Jeremy rounding out the table. This was the only group of people that Charlie had ever really called best friends. To be sure, Charlie had other groups of friends. There were kids who lived in his neighborhood who he’d grown up with: Johnny and Michael Massweller from next door whom he played kickball on the lawn with and chased lightning bugs after barbecues; Davey Colbert, who was in his swim class at his father’s gym, who came over after school once in a while to play video games; but those friendships had never really transformed into anything deeper than a series of scheduled playdates. Charlie thought of them as surface friends; from a mathematical perspective, there was no deeper connection between him, Johnny, Michael, and Davey than there was between the numbers on a ruler.
But Jeremy, Crystal, Kentaro, and Marion were something much more. To the rest of the school, they were known as the Geek Squad, or sometimes the Dork Brigade, or even the Nerd Herd. Charlie’s parents called them the Whiz Kids, which seemed extremely dated but was at least a little kinder than the other nicknames. To his parents that was a good thing, and sometimes even to Charlie and his friends, it really was. None of them feared tests or homework or the random gaze of a nearby teacher. But day to day, their reputations were a continual challenge.
Charlie had no illusions as to his own personal social standing at Nagassack. He was skinny, clumsy, horrible at anything involving kinetic motion of any kind. But he was also the kid most likely to use the word “kinetic” in common conversation. His parents had been calling him a genius since he was three years old, and though he never thought of himself in those terms, he knew that his mind worked fast, and that he was especially good with numbers. At four, he had been able to do long division, and by seven, he’d been joining his dad in the MIT engineering department, observing and sometimes participating while his dad puttered away at some odd circuit board or digital device. And day to day, he knew he was different; he really did often think of the world in terms of numbers. Waiting for the bus each morning, he’d watch the cars go by, and unconsciously calculate each vehicle’s deceleration time as it approached the stop sign by his house. On the rare occasion he was forced to play kickball with Johnny and Michael, every pitch was more than just a big rubber ball rolling across grass; it was a mathematical formula come to life, a lesson in rotational physics. Even the flight of a lightning bug could freeze him in his tracks, an incredible study in lift, aerodynamics, and chaos theory.
Everyone outside of the Whiz Kids had started calling him Numbers, a nickname he’d earned after getting a perfect score on a national math test that had been targeted at ninth graders, but had mistakenly been handed out on the first day of fourth grade by a language-impaired substitute teacher. To Charlie, the Numbers name always evoked nothing more than the feeling of being a prison inmate—just another number.
But the truth was, he wasn’t. Nor were any of the other Whiz Kids. Even the location of their lunch table was a function of their brain power and their social status. They certainly hadn’t chosen it because it was in the far back of the lunchroom, located under a poison-spewing, busted light tube by a door that smelled of ancient sweat and liniment oil. They’d chosen it because it was the table closest to the where the teachers ate. Fifteen feet away, on a low dais that had once housed a gymnastics area, squatted a circular table with chairs instead of stools. At the moment, as usual, there were four teachers at the teachers’ table: Mrs. Fawler, who taught sixth-grade English lit; Mr. Doughtry, who taught both algebra and physics; Mrs. Collier, French and Spanish; and Mr. Tom, who taught shop. The teachers had trays, just like the kids, but instead of little cartons of milk or juice, they had coffee mugs and Styrofoam cups. The mugs were self-evident, but nobody really knew what was in the Styrofoam cups, something that had been the subject of debate for many years.
For the most part, during lunch the teachers kept to themselves. At the moment, the four teachers were huddled around a laptop that one of them had brought along, probably watching a movie or a television show. Having parents who were professors allowed Charlie to see a bit behind the curtain, and he knew better than most that when teachers weren’t teaching, they were kind of like everyone else.
“I’m not going to waste my good vinegar on Marion’s nasty warts,” Crystal said, slowly spreading drops from the pipette on the orange bread. “I’m only interested in the advancement of science.”
“Our own little Madame Curie,” Jeremy said, digging into his meat with a fork that was shaped like an L.
Charlie was about to chime in and point out that Curie was a physicist and a chemist, while Crystal only cared about rocks, when he suddenly saw a flash of motion over Jeremy’s right shoulder. In that split second his mind went into reflexive overdrive, calculating angles and arcs, comparing the bulky white thing that was spinning through the air—on what he instantly calculated was a collision course with the back of Jeremy’s head—with a meteor charging toward the earth, but before he could say anything, the thing slammed into Jeremy and exploded in a rain of mushy brown globs.
“What the heck?” Jeremy shouted, reaching back with his hand. He pulled the thing off his neck, held it in front of them, and groaned.
It was a diaper, sprung open by the impact. Dripping down his wrist, and smeared all over his neck, shoulders, and hair, were mounds of rice and beans. Jeremy’s cheeks turned bright red as he dropped the diaper onto his tray.
Laughter broke out from the tables closest to their own, and Charlie couldn’t help but glance past his embarrassed friend at the row of kids who were pointing and high-fiving one another as they enjoyed the moment. Of course Dylan was in the middle of the pack, half off his stool and pointing with a thick finger at the mess covering Jeremy’s shoulders.
“Direct hit!” he shouted. “That’s gotta hurt!”
Charlie glanced back at the teachers’ table, but none of the teachers had even looked up from the computer screen. They weren’t likely to do anything, anyway. Sure, bullying was wrong and even illegal in many states, but it was also a constant reality. Charlie was pretty sure smart kids had been getting picked on by athletic kids since the dawn of time. The caveman drawing pictures on the cave walls probably had to dodge rocks thrown at him by the bigger cavemen who went out hunting every morning. It was another curve on the circle of life.
“He’s such a jerk,” Charlie said as Jeremy picked rice out of his shirt collar.
“Yeah,” Kentaro added, helping sweep beans off the table. “Nobody thinks he’s funny.”
Jeremy pushed his tray back, then shrugged.
“Yeah, well, the joke’s on him. I was going to go back for seconds, and he’s just saved me the trip. He turned in his stool and shouted back toward Dylan’s table. “Thanks, Dylan—”
And then he paused midsentence. Charlie looked past his friend to see what had stopped him, and then his eyes went wide.
To his utter shock, he saw Finn and Magic strolling right up behind where Dylan was still half standing. In Finn’s hand was a tray fully loaded with food. Mounds of the radioactive looking meat, moguls of beans and rice, and a pile of the orange bread. As Finn passed Dylan, he tipped the tray ninety degrees—spilling the food all over Dylan’s oblong head.
“Hey! What the hell!”
Dylan sputtered, grabbing at the chunks of meat that w
ere now running down his face. He whirled and found himself staring up at Finn, who opened his mouth in mock concern.
“Oh, man, I’m sorry, I can be so clumsy sometimes.”
Dylan’s table went silent. The other nearby tables were all staring as well.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” Dylan finally managed.
“You’re absolutely right,” Magic butted in. He dropped his own tray on the table in front of Dylan, sending more meat and rice spraying into Dylan’s lap. “Can you bus this for us? Thanks, we owe you one.”
The two seventh graders kept on walking. Dylan stood there, his skin beet red, as he pawed the food from his cheeks. The other kids nearby were still staring. A few laughed, but most just seemed in shock. Seventh graders didn’t eat until the next period, and they never came in when the sixth graders were still in the lunchroom. And no one had ever shut Dylan down in the middle of his antics before.
Charlie was just as shocked to see the two seventh graders as everyone else. They were completely out of place in the lunchroom, and yet neither of them seemed at all uncomfortable. Finn was still in his leather jacket, slung over a denim button-down shirt with a high, stiff collar, and there was a pair of sunglasses jutting out from his shirt pocket. Magic was wearing one of his signature tie-dyed shirts and his regular cargo shorts, but he’d exchanged his flip-flops for what looked to be moccasins. Both of them were smiling as they suddenly approached Charlie’s table.
Charlie threw another glance toward the teachers’ table, but none of the authority figures in the room seemed to have noticed the older kids, or the interruption. They were still bending over the laptop, watching whatever was on the screen.
“Is that Finn Carter?” Crystal finally said, breaking the silence. Her brown eyes were wide behind her thick glasses. “And is he coming over here?”