by Lisa Doan
* * *
I cornered Skip in the hall between second and third period. I slipped him my editorial and whispered, “The scoop of a lifetime—the real, exposed truth.”
Skip grabbed my arm. “You found the gangs? Where? Who? How?”
“No!” I said. “The real scoop about me and the Nile crocodile.”
“Oh.”
I hoped that meant Skip would run my editorial, despite his lack of enthusiasm. I needed the truth to come out fast. I practically had to run to group—it was like the whole herd had turned on me and was driving me across the plains.
I dodged Rakeesha Jones, who wanted to alert me to the fact that she had reported my act of voter fraud to the Federal Election Commission. Natalie Littman informed me that I had compromised the integrity of the queen-and-king nominations. Then she pinched me and said that compromised integrity made her really mad. I finally made it to Mr. Samson’s classroom and threw myself into a chair. I had outrun them, for now.
Mr. Samson scanned his list of prompts. He said, “Right, here we go. Do you ever feel that you deserve more attention than you get?” Mr. Samson leaned back in his chair and said, “As a matter of fact I do, thank you for asking. Next.”
Bethany waved at Mr. Samson.
He pointed at her and said, “Go.”
“I was robbed of the nomination for queen of the fall dance. The injustice of it will haunt me for the rest of my life. I’m thinking about flunking so I can try again,” she said.
“How do you feel about that?” Mr. Samson asked.
“Like I was robbed and feel like flunking,” Bethany said, like she wondered how he hadn’t heard her the first time.
“We should really be asking Chadwick about needing attention, Mr. Samson,” Terry said. “Mr. King of the Dance here was obviously trying to get attention by voting for himself.”
“Exactly,” Jana said to me. “You were caught red-handed.”
“No, I wasn’t!”
“Seriously, Chadwick,” Suvi said, “just admit why you rigged the nominations. Marilee said you were dared by your gang members. She heard it with Her Own Ears.”
“She did not hear that with Her Own Ears. I have never even thought about joining a gang, and I did not stuff the ballot boxes,” I said. “Vance did it. I was with Rory the whole time.”
“Yup,” Rory said. “Well, except for when he went to the bathroom, but that was only like five minutes.”
“And BOOM!” Terry said, slamming his fist into his palm. “There you go. He had five whole minutes to stuff the ballot boxes.”
“Really?” I said. “What were you doing? How come you didn’t notice me putting all those votes in the boxes?”
Terry looked stumped. I should have thought of that argument in the first place.
He ran his hand through his hair and said, “I had to take a call from my mom. She was helping my dad, ’cause she’s his hands now, and she couldn’t figure out how to do something.”
Jana glared at me. “You would really sink that low? Taking advantage of Terry supporting his mom?” she said. “That is just disgusting.”
“Plus,” Terry said, “yesterday Chadwick tripped an old lady who was crossing the street. She was nearly run over by a car and her knees were all scraped up. He just laughed.”
“I never tripped an old lady,” I shouted. “Stop gaslighting me!”
“Looks like we have feelings all over the place today,” Mr. Samson said.
I stared right at Terry. “You are just making things up as you go, but it’s all coming to an end. I wrote an editorial for The Eagle’s Eye that exposes all your lies. When it comes out, everybody will know the real crocodile is you.”
“You are such a bitter and spiteful person,” Jana said.
Hopefully Jana would change her mind about my bitter spitefulness after she read my impassioned plea for justice. She would see that I was a nice-to-dogs-and-old-ladies, fungus-free, sane individual who would never grill a squirrel.
* * *
Twenty-four hours later, Skip was in the hall, handing out his newspaper. Kids were grabbing copies and reading it as they walked to class. I took my copy and stuffed it into my backpack, then paused and leaned against a locker so I could see everybody’s expressions as the truth about Terry Vance was finally revealed to them.
“How dare you drag my name through the mud,” Jana shouted at me from across the hall.
A kid I hardly knew shouldered past me and said, “My dad lost a finger in a chain-saw accident—are you saying he’s a liar too?”
Bethany came up behind me and smacked me on the back of my head with a textbook. “My hair looks weird? Really?”
My impassioned plea for justice wasn’t going over the way I had hoped.
I staggered into social studies and pulled the newspaper out of my backpack. What had Skip done to my editorial?
It’s Rigged!
In the developing story on the rigged queen-and-king-of-the-dance nominations, this reporter has made contact with the accused. Here’s what Musselman has to say in his defense:
I, Chadwick Musselman, have been wrongly convicted of stuffing the ballot boxes with votes for myself. I was framed by Terry Vance, the Nile crocodile. (Which everyone should call him from now on, unless you like the assassin or the deathstalker scorpion better.) The evidence of MY total innocence and HIS total guilt is as follows:
FACT: Terry Vance made up the whole story about a Jeep accident and his dad losing all his fingers so he could look tragic and get Jana Sedgewick to like him. I doubt he even likes Jana, but he is obsessed with getting revenge on me. (A long story.)
FACT: Mr. Vance Sr. has the hands he was born with—eight regular fingers and two regular thumbs, equaling TEN, so there was never a falling Jeep. Here’s what really happened on the fateful day of the queen-and-king nominations:
FACT: Vance used me as a pawn to distract people from wondering how he, just weeks ago known as a brooding loner, could possibly be nominated for dance king. He knew I was onto his fake story, so by framing me he gets rid of a problem, AND he gets to stuff the ballot boxes with his own name without arousing suspicion, AND he gets to try to make me go insane by making Jana think that I already am.
FACT: Vance stole my essay on why video games are great so that he could copy my handwriting, then when he and Bethany were taking the nominations to the principal, he gets rid of Bethany by saying something like, “Your hair looks weird,” and she runs to the bathroom to see what happened to it. (Nothing happened to it, it was just a ruse.) Then, when he is alone with the boxes, he puts all the fake ballots into them. Terry Vance had MOTIVE and OPPORTUNITY. FACT.
Further, just to clear up any rumors that might be going around, I have never grilled a squirrel, or kicked any dogs, or tripped any old ladies, and I don’t have a fungus. These are some of the diabolical lies that Vance has made up about me. For your own safety, be careful around this individual. If you accidentally cross him, you will find yourself locked in a never-ending death spiral. FACT.
That is the huge amount of evidence and it clearly leads us to one conclusion and one conclusion only—Terry Vance, the Nile crocodile, is guilty as charged! TOTAL FACT.
I didn’t get it. My editorial was flawless.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rory walked by my seat on the bus and winked. He sat three rows behind me. I turned around to see what he was doing, but he shook his head and ducked. Halfway home, a paper airplane landed in my lap.
Tiny printing filled up the wings. “Act casual, like I’m some guy you barely know. I’ll follow you like I don’t know you either.”
So now my own best friend was afraid to sit with me on the bus. I was probably in his notebook. I supposed this was part of the crocodile’s scheme. Isolating me from Rory was just one more way to inch me to the edge of insanity.
I spent the ride home listening to Terry, Jana, and Bethany rewrite my editorial. “FACT—it’s official, he’s lost his mind,” Terry sa
id.
“FACT—tell the squirrel nothing happened on that grill,” Jana said.
“Fungus—TOTAL FACT,” Bethany said.
I ran off the bus while Rory casually followed me like it was just a coincidence that we got off at the same stop. He caught up with me after the bus turned a corner. I unlocked the front door and he said, “Dude, you’re not safe to be around. Hiram Heskell asked me if I was friends with the guy who committed voter fraud and then tried to exonerate himself with an editorial, and I had to say I never saw you before in my life.”
“How would that even be possible?” I asked. “We’ve been seen together every day since kindergarten.”
“I don’t know,” Rory said, “but he looked like he bought it.”
“I was sure the editorial would prove my innocence,” I said.
“Why would you say Bethany’s hair looked weird? You should never say anything about a girl’s hair except it looks good. Remember when your mom got that short haircut and you said, ‘What happened to you?’ And she cried right in front of us?”
I did remember that. There are some things you feel guilty about for the rest of your life, no matter how hard you try to forgive yourself or blame it on somebody else. That was one of them. To my credit, since then she had gotten a perm that made her look like she had been struck by lightning, but I had caught myself in time and told her she looked extremely interesting.
“Okay,” I said, “the ‘hair looks weird’ angle was a mistake, but I was just speculating on how Terry had pulled it off.” I leaned back in my chair. “I need a new plan.”
“Stop with the plans!” Rory said. “Your plans make everything worse. Just give people a chance to forget about it. While we’re waiting for that to happen, I’ll meet you at the front of the school at lunch.”
“What are we going to do there?”
“Sneak out the door and eat behind the teachers’ cars. It’s too dangerous to be seen with you in public.”
Rory bent over his phone and started typing.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Googling malls. You could change schools, go wherever Ben Bailey went, and then we could meet on the weekends at malls that are really far away. People will forget you ever existed.”
I felt like Rory was planning to put me into the witness-protection program.
“There’s a mall in Exton, it’s seventeen miles from here. We could probably find a bus to get there. I doubt we’d run into anybody we knew.”
“Great,” I said. “But I’d rather fix my problems than ride a bus to a far-off mall to avoid them.”
“That’s not very realistic,” Rory said. “You’ve got a lot of problems to fix. Hey, did I tell you that my big problem is about to be over?”
“No,” I said. “Wait, what big problem?”
“The kale problem,” Rory said, looking at me like I was an idiot for forgetting his dire food situation.
“Your mom finally gave up the health kick?” I asked. That would be good news, as it had gotten a little frightening to go to Rory’s house. There was no telling what his mom might put on the table. The last time I’d spent the night, we’d had baked eggplant with sliced tomato on top for dinner. I had thought it was a side dish, something my mom would use as an opening gambit, so I’d asked her what the dinner would be. She had looked really disappointed and whispered, “Eggplant is the dinner.” She hadn’t been kidding either. Eggplant was the dinner. When I got home the next day, I had to eat a whole box of Froot Loops just to recover.
“No, she’s worse than ever,” Rory said. “This morning, she got our hopes up by saying we were having vegetarian bacon. I thought, well, the vegetarian part isn’t good, but how far wrong could you go with bacon? Guess what it was? Baked coconut flakes with some seasoning on them.”
I silently gave thanks to my cereal drawer. It was comforting to know that if I had to eat at Rory’s house, I could always come running home to Cap’n Crunch, Froot Loops, and Lucky Charms, my sugary old friends.
“But I don’t mind the coconut flakes,” Rory said, “because it turns out my dad’s a genius. He’s been building a new cabinet for our television in the basement. I thought that was weird because he’s never built anything before. I figured he was just having some kind of breakdown from starvation.”
“He wasn’t?”
“No!” Rory said. “He built a secret cabinet behind the television. A secret cabinet for snacks.” Rory rubbed his hands together. “How awesome is that? Now we can stop saying we’re going to the car wash when we’re really going to the Wawa to eat potato chips in the parking lot and then brush our teeth in the store bathroom. I won’t have to sneak out to the driveway to get the candy bars he leaves in the back seat of the car. Me and my dad will hang out in the man cave watching sports, and everything we need will be conveniently right there. The basement stairs are creaky, so that will be like an early-warning system. If we hear her coming, we just shove everything back into the cabinet.”
“Wow. Your dad has really put a lot of thought into it.”
“Yeah,” Rory said. “He drove me to school this morning so we could swing by Dunkin’ Donuts for a real breakfast. He told me the plan while we ate a box of donut holes in the car. We’re gonna pull it off the next time my mom goes for a tennis lesson. She’s always gone for at least two hours, so we’ll move all the food in while she’s gone. My dad’s calling it Mission Save Ourselves. You want to come? It should be fun—my dad said he would fill his whole trunk with stuff. I doubt it will all fit into the cabinet, so we’ll have to eat a lot of it before my mom even gets home. And then hide the wrappers and brush our teeth.”
“Uh, sounds good,” I said.
* * *
I spent the weekend obsessively scanning all social media platforms for any mention of me—there was a lot, none of it flattering—and then just as obsessively ignoring it. On Monday, I slipped in and out of my classes with the stealth of a CIA spook. I hid out in various bathrooms, and Rory and I crept into the library and ate lunch in a lonely row of books about language. (There were whole books about adverbs. Nobody would ever look for us, or anyone, there.) As I waited for the bus that afternoon, watching Rory pretend he didn’t know me, I suddenly remembered I had left my social studies homework in my locker. I ran back into the school.
The hallways had emptied out. I careened down the main hall, then hung a left. Somehow, my locker is always the farthest away from the bus line. I got the combination open and grabbed the sheet of paper. As I slammed the locker shut, I was thrown up against it.
Terry Vance whispered in my ear, “Watch it, Mussel-man. One more editorial and I will beat the crap out of you and blame it on the old lady you tripped.”
Just then, Principal Grimeldi’s voice called, “Boys? What’s going on?”
Terry spun me around so that his back was against my locker. He held my shirt so I couldn’t move, then grabbed my right hand and banged it against his cheek like I was hitting him. He smashed his face into the locker grill and then shoved me away.
“Principal Grimeldi,” Terry said, running over to her. “I’m being bullied.”
Wait. What?
Principal Grimeldi peered at the grill marks on Terry’s face. “Chadwick, go to my office.” She held Terry by the shoulders. “Are you all right? Maybe we should have the nurse take a look at that.”
“No,” Terry said. “There’s no blood. This time. Chadwick’s violence could have been way worse.”
“My violence?” I shouted. “You were the one—”
“I’ll contact your parents,” she said to Terry.
“He’s twice my size!” I said.
Principal Grimeldi turned to me. “Chadwick, to my office. Now.”
I trudged to the principal’s office. I was getting framed again. The way this was going, I wouldn’t be that surprised to someday find myself in handcuffs and on my way to federal prison for some white-collar crime I didn’t commit. I would be convic
ted of embezzlement while Terry spent the stolen money on a vacation retreat in the Bahamas.
* * *
I explained to Principal Grimeldi that Terry had staged the whole scene to frame me. He had been the one threatening me, and then when she showed up he had pretended I was beating him up. Which, if she would stop and compare our sizes, was not very realistic.
She had just shaken her head and talked about taking responsibility for one’s actions while dialing my mom’s cell number.
Two long hours later, Principal Grimeldi said, “As you know, Mr. and Mrs. Musselman, this is extremely serious.”
“I find it hard to believe that Chadwick has been a bully,” my mom said. “Further, isn’t this Terry Vance the same kid who drove Principal Merriweather to flush his face in a toilet and then flee to Thailand?”
Go Mom! Tell it to her straight!
“Marilee Marksley,” Principal Grimeldi muttered, staring down at her balled-up fists. She looked up at my mom and said, “That was just an unfortunate rumor. The board has assured me there was no face flushing and we have no evidence to suggest that Principal Merriweather relocated to Southeast Asia. The fact remains, Mrs. Musselman, that while Chadwick is the smaller boy, I saw what I saw. Terry sustained an injury and Chadwick did not.”
“So you’re saying that my son tracked down another student and started a fight?” my mom asked.
My dad snorted. “Chadwick can barely track down his own socks in the morning.”
“This doesn’t sound right,” my mom said. “Chadwick avoids this particular kid. He calls him the angry alligator.”
“The Nile crocodile,” I said.
“The good news is that Chadwick will not be expelled,” Principal Grimeldi said. “Your son will be suspended for one week, during which time I highly suggest you locate a good therapist. It’s best to nip aggressive tendencies in the bud before they lead to permanent consequences. When he returns to school, Chadwick will be put on probation so that we may monitor his progress.”
Principal Grimeldi leaned toward me and said, “Chadwick, you have made a very big mistake, but that doesn’t mean you can’t recover from it. It will just require some effort on your part.”