Chadwick's Epic Revenge

by Lisa Doan

  “I think I’ll just go have a look at the inventory,” Rory said, gazing lovingly at the Snack Shack.

  “Don’t go yet,” I said. The next part of my plan to creep into Marilee’s overlap was to do a typical guy move in front of her. I had watched her guy friends last year and they were always throwing themselves into the water and roughhousing. She seemed to appreciate their efforts.

  I shoved Rory and said, “Beat you into the water!”

  “No you won’t,” Rory said, pushing past me and jumping in the pool. I was right behind him, determined to make a decent splash.

  I belly flopped into the water and felt as if I had been hit with a stun gun. I should have realized why nobody else was swimming—it was one degree short of an ice cube.

  Rory clawed his way to the surface and let out a little scream. I bit down on my tongue to stop myself. Marilee was looking right at us.

  Rory dog-paddled to the side, heaved himself out, and lay on the cement, panting and soaking up the heat from the pavement. I desperately wanted to get out, but I didn’t want it to look like I hadn’t meant to jump into the Arctic Sea. Not while Marilee was watching.

  I pretended I couldn’t care less that it was cold and started swimming around in circles with a frozen smile on my face.

  I noticed I was starting to draw attention. I supposed Rory and I were the only ones who had not known the pool was thirty-three degrees. Just when I decided I had done enough to convince all these onlookers that I could handle it, Jana cruised in with Bethany and Carmen trailing behind her.

  She looked at me and then pointed me out to her friends.

  Jana Sedgewick was noticing me. I felt like I better do something interesting. I did a handstand at the shallow end, then I pushed off and swam underwater all the way to the deep end to show how long I could hold my breath. I did a lap of backstroke.

  I had thought I would warm up as I got used to the temperature, but instead I was starting to feel paralyzed and was possibly drowning.

  As I began to sink, I used the last of my strength to flail to the side of the pool. I casually whispered to Rory, “I can’t feel my arms.”

  Rory dragged me out, with a lot of complaining about how I was dead weight, but my arms weren’t all that powerful even when they were working properly.

  I struggled to my feet and noticed that my legs had turned a sickly white, as if all the blood had raced somewhere deeper in my body in revolt from the frigid pool water. They wobbled underneath me like all the bones had been surgically removed.

  I attempted a look of stoicism and glanced around me. I couldn’t tell if Jana had realized I was about to drown. Or whether Marilee had seen it. Jana and her friends surrounded Marilee, just like they always did on the bleachers. I supposed I’d find out eventually if Marilee had seen what happened—it would make its way into her news briefing. “I saw, with My Own Eyes, Musselman drown in the pool because he didn’t check the temperature.”

  “I’m not going back in there until July,” Rory said.

  I staggered to my towel while Rory followed me saying, “Why did you stay in there so long? You can hardly walk. Didn’t you notice it was cold?”

  Just then, Marilee rose majestically from her lounge chair and her friends all sat down around her. I collapsed onto my sun-warmed towel and pointed at her so Rory would stop asking me why I had stayed in the pool.

  “Ground rules for the summer, people,” Marilee said. “If you want to hang out and hear what I have seen with My Own Eyes, that’s cool, as long as you bring me snacks. My personal friends—you know who you are—don’t have to bring me snacks, but my onlookers do.”

  Marilee paused. I grabbed my wallet. Rory and I were definitely still onlookers. One towel placement did not make somebody part of an overlap. It would take more time and effort than that. Campaign Lurk and Creep involved days and days of casually creeping closer. Eventually, we’d slip over the border of the overlap, but it would be so slow that it would seem like we’d always been there.

  “What are you doing?” Rory asked.

  I had struggled to my feet. “We’re the onlookers,” I whispered.

  I walked as quickly as I could to the Snack Shack, using all my strength to hide the fact that my legs had turned into rubber. I bought a frozen Snickers. I had seen Marilee with a Snickers already, so it was a safe bet. There was too much at stake to make a gamble on a Three Musketeers or Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups only to find out she hated them or was allergic.

  I staggered to her chair and held out the frozen candy bar like it was an offering to an Aztec altar.

  Marilee nodded graciously and took the candy bar. “Thank you, Chadwick,” she said.

  I attempted a dignified walk back to my towel, thrilled that Marilee Marksley knew my name. “She knows my name,” I whispered to Rory as my legs gave way underneath me and I crashed down on my towel.

  “She’s Marilee,” Rory whispered back, “she knows everybody’s name. Why would you give her a candy bar when you’ve seen my food situation at home?”

  “Now,” Marilee said, “I shall reveal two breaking news stories. First up, just twenty-four hours ago, Mitchell Grand’s mom gave him a military haircut. Mrs. Grand, I heard with My Own Ears, said it would be cooler in the summer. As you may recall, the sun was out all day yesterday. There was a basketball tournament at the YMCA. Outdoors. Can you put it all together, people? Mitchell Grand’s whole head is severely sunburned and is now peeling off in sheets. In. Literal. Sheets. He was just spotted in the Walmart parking lot pulling off whole strips and throwing them on the ground. Birds are eating them as we speak. Mrs. Grand remains inside the store, talking to the pharmacist about what to do about it.”

  “Ew,” Jana said. “I thought I might like him, but not if he’s bald and pulling slabs of skin off his head to feed the birds. That’s just gross.”

  “Ew indeed, Jana,” Marilee said. “Ew indeed.”

  Jana was already considering who she liked? I silently thanked Mitchell Grand’s mom for her incompetence.

  “Now, on to the next story,” Marilee continued. “Terry Vance, the student who was involved in the face-flushing incident that led to the disappearance of our principal, has flunked the fifth grade. I saw it with My Own Eyes.”

  “How did she see Terry flunking?” Rory whispered.

  I didn’t answer. Marilee’s words were almost too much to take in.

  “Terry claims,” Marilee continued, “that Principal Merriweather changed all his grades to Fs before fleeing to Thailand. Why is this newsworthy? Only because Terry Vance will become the tallest fifth grader in the history of Wayne Elementary and we will be there to witness it.”

  Terry Vance had flunked. He would stay in fifth grade. Not go to sixth grade. It was going to be the best summer ever. I was leaving the Nile crocodile behind—the tyranny of pranks was finally finished.

  Marilee bowed her head and unwrapped the Snickers I had given her. The briefing was over. It had been the greatest briefing of my life.

  I would be a sixth grader and Terry would still be a fifth grader. The sixth graders ruled the school. We had our own lounge, exclusively for sixth graders. We had special field trips. We had T-shirt day, when all the sixth graders wore wacky shirts. We even got a row of cafeteria tables right next to the windows. (I doubt that one was a school rule, it was just known.)

  I would have one magical year of being on top before moving up to junior high and starting over at the bottom. I would be on top without Vance. The apex predator had just been demoted. As a lowly fifth grader, he was clawless and toothless. I would no longer be a flamingo wading along the banks of Wayne Elementary, wondering when my spindly legs would be snapped by his powerful jaws. I would leap over the crocodile’s river and make my way to the safety of the sixth-grade savannah. Now I could focus all of my energy and concentration on creeping closer to Jana, without having to look over my shoulder for Terry Vance.

  With any luck, Vance would keep flunking an
d never catch up to me. I felt like my chances were pretty decent. I could easily imagine how he would settle into the fifth grade, each year growing bigger and finding the easy prey too delicious to leave behind. There would come a time when Terry would be the only fifth grader to drive himself to school, probably in Principal Merriweather’s stolen Ford Fiesta, running stop signs and swerving onto sidewalks all the way.

  “Do you see what this means?” I asked Rory.

  “Yup,” Rory said. “Mitchell Grand will have to wear a hat for the whole summer. Supposedly, once you get one bad sunburn you have to be really careful and slather on the sunscreen.”

  “No,” I said. “Vance. The Nile crocodile. He won’t be able to torture me anymore. I’ll be in a higher grade. Not even Vance would dare breach the time-honored tradition about who is in charge. We’ll be in charge. He’ll just be a fifth grader. We’ll be upstairs and he’ll be downstairs.”

  Rory considered this. “That’s good, Chadwick. Now you can finally let it go. This whole obsession with Terry was starting to take over your life. And take over my life.”

  “It’s over now,” I said, high-fiving Rory. “It’s finally over.”

  * * *

  Finding out I was free of Terry Vance began to change my whole personality. It started small, like I noticed that I had developed a swagger when I walked around at the pool. It was the kind of swagger I had noticed on popular guys that said, “That’s right, I’m here, any questions?”

  Each day, I inched our towels closer to Marilee and Jana. So far, Jana had not said anything about it. That meant that if she had noticed, then she was for it. If she hadn’t noticed, then it wasn’t bothering her. Either way, it was all good.

  When I went shopping with my mom for new swim trunks, I picked out a plaid print. Every other summer, I had only gotten as daring as a navy blue solid, but now I felt like I could pull off plaid. The trunks had a casual Ralph Lauren vibe and you couldn’t tell that we bought them at Kmart.

  I even started to feel like I had more muscles in my arms. Maybe it was the tan, I don’t know, but there was a definite improvement. I had been so used to being the scrawny kid next to my King Kong brother that it was surprising to see this new me in the mirror. I was never going to have muscles ripping the seams of my shirts like Mark did, but my arms didn’t look like toothpicks either.

  Once, instead of handing Marilee her frozen Snickers, I shouted, “Heads up, Marksley,” and threw it to her. She caught it and laughed and I stood there thinking, Who are you, dude? That inspired me to really go for it the next day. I bought two candy bars and threw them at Marilee and Jana. Marilee caught hers, but my candy offering took Jana by surprise. So yes, technically, I hit her in the face, but she ended up eating it. I took that to mean: message thrown and message received. The next move in Campaign Lurk and Creep was to actually say something to Jana.

  I thought long and hard about what I would say. I could compliment her hair and compare it to a forest fire or Mars the red planet, but then she’d probably heard those a million times already. I could point out something original, like how one of her earlobes was slightly longer than the other one. But then I began to question whether it would be weird to be an earlobe noticer. I could accidentally run into her and we could laugh as we hit the pavement, but then you could never be sure how somebody would feel about getting knocked to the ground. In the end, I decided that saying something to her right off the bat was not going to be my style. Lurking and creeping closer to her overlap clique was working. At heart, I was a natural-born lurker.

  I laid out my plan to my brother, Mark.

  “What do you mean, creeping and lurking?” he asked.

  “I will just be there, nearby. I’ve been doing it all summer at the pool. I’m slowly joining her overlap group without anybody really noticing. If I lurk around her enough, liking me will creep up on her all slow-like. Heck, for all I know it’s already happening.”

  “So,” Mark said, “you plan on just always being nearby. Silently nearby.”

  “And creeping closer,” I said.

  “How is she supposed to know you are liking her and not stalking her?”

  “Because I don’t look like a stalker,” I said. “I look like a liker.”

  Mark folded his arms and stared at me. “Chadwick, girls aren’t robots and they won’t suddenly start liking you just because you’re nearby. Take my advice on this one.”

  “First,” I said, “I didn’t say she would suddenly like me, I said it would creep up on her. Second, I threw a candy bar at her and she ate it. Third, your advice isn’t always so perfect.” I pointed to the scar on my left knee from some recent bad advice from Mark involving my newfound confidence, my bicycle, and a home-built ramp. “Apparently, you don’t know as much about the physics of flight as you thought you did.”

  “I don’t know anything about the physics of flight,” Mark said. “That’s why I had you go first. But I do know something about girls. Cheryl and I have been dating for seven whole months. And I repeat, do not go with the lurking strategy. It will never work.”

  I decided to ignore Mark’s advice. For one thing, Cheryl is the only sort-of-a-girlfriend he’s had in his whole life. She shrugs more than speaks, and I’m not sure she actually knows she’s dating him—she might just think he’s a taxi service. For another, lurking and creeping were playing to my strengths—I was practically at the border of the overlap.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Straight to the auditorium,” Ms. Carson yelled over the waves of kids pouring out of buses.

  It was the first day of school and we were heading into an assembly. There were no assigned seats in the auditorium so that meant it was go time on casually lurking around Jana Sedgewick at school. By the last day at the pool I had made it just inside the overlap. Now I had to transfer all that success to a different location.

  School lurking would be a whole new ball game. The pool was a contained environment, but school was a moving target. I would have to be constantly alert to figure out where she would be and how I could casually be there, too.

  Passing through the front doors, I noticed the school smelled just like always—a mix of chalk, magic markers, and bologna sandwiches. It felt different, though. As a sixth grader, I was king. The younger kids cautiously made their way inside. Those kids looked at me and Rory like we were highly important, and who was I to say they were wrong? I put on my pool swagger and swaggered down the hall.

  Despite our kingly sixth-grade status, Rory and I were carried along by the crowd of students funneling into the hallway that led to the auditorium. It felt like we were a school of fish being driven into a net.

  “My dad says it’s confirmed—Merriweather is gone for good. He doesn’t know if they found a new principal yet,” Rory said.

  “The school board had the whole summer to find one,” I said over my shoulder. “They probably hired a Navy SEAL.”

  “Why?” Rory said.

  “Because our last principal went insane. They need a ‘take no prisoners’ kind of guy. A SEAL will slam the crocodile’s hand in a locker if he acts up.”

  “We don’t know what Terry did to Principal Merriweather,” Rory said, “or if he even did anything. Marilee’s report was pretty flimsy, even for Marilee.”

  “We don’t know the exact details of what he did,” I said. “But whatever it was, it was a glimpse into the Nile crocodile’s black soul that drove our principal to madness and forced him to move to Southeast Asia.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Yes, we do. I am only glad that, thanks to his poor study habits, Terry is not my problem anymore. We are sixth graders and really don’t have time to care about what he will be doing in the fifth grade for the second year in a row. He remains downstairs middle management, while we are the new upstairs chief executive officers. Didn’t you notice how I totally ignored him on the bus? Like he was invisible?”

  “You always ignore him on the bus,” Rory s
aid.

  “I used to ignore him so that he wouldn’t notice me,” I said. “Today, I ignored him like he was invisible. Didn’t you see the difference?”

  “Not really,” Rory said. “I was too busy trying to convince Jennifer Johnson to trade her peanut butter sandwich for my lettuce wrap. But then she found out the filling was lettuce too and she said no. What say you to a trade, my good man?”

  “No,” I said. If Mrs. Richardson made it, it was not just full of vegetables—there was probably even seaweed and a sprinkling of flaxseeds in there.

  I burst through the auditorium doors and stood on my toes, searching for Jana. The place was packed, but Jana’s red hair sticks out like a bonfire. (Another amazing benefit of a girl with red hair: you’re never going to lose her in a crowd.)

  She was down in the first row, sitting between Carmen and Bethany. I shoved and squeezed my way through the crowd, leaving Rory behind. I got a seat behind Jana. It wasn’t right next to her, but it was my first attempt at lurking at school so I will call that a victory. And really, it was way closer than I ever got at the pool.

  I casually leaned forward and smelled her hair. It reminded me of grass, sort of like a mowed lawn. Jana whispered to Carmen, “Can you believe it? I just looked at him and said, ‘Whatever.’”

  Carmen nodded. “I knew he was crushin’ on you.”

  I sat back. Who were they talking about? It wasn’t me—Carmen Rodriguez didn’t know my name. She just knew me as the lurking candy thrower.

  Who else was trying to lurk near Jana? Hopefully, it was somebody like Clarke Crandall—an individual who owned a T-shirt that said, “Mathematicians make better pi.” Every time he wore it he walked down the halls saying, “Get it? Pi like 3.14159 and pie like apple?” I could look like an excellent choice next to Clarke.