Mr. Wilde clapped his elegant, labor-unbothered hands. “So who would like to begin things?” the foppish man asked, scanning the black-lit faces in the room.
Milton knew, as captain—a position he’d neither asked for nor felt he deserved—that he should be the first one to enter the dome. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Moses Babcock stir, his hand twitching at his side. Instantly, like a quick-drawing cowboy in a Wild West showdown, Milton raised his hand, leaving Moses behind in the dust.
“Excellent reflexes, Mr. Fauster,” Mr. Wilde said with a smirk. “You’ll lead the Glue team with Clem Weenum and Roberta Atrebor.”
Mr. Wilde handed the children their Paint-Brawl masks and three vests. Milton slipped the vest on over his shirt. It was incredibly sticky and, once in place, seemed to grip him tightly like a python.
“Now for the Rubber team. Winifred Scathelli, Mordacia Caustilo … and for the leader …”
Moses Babcock stepped forward. “I am the most qualified to lead the team,” the boy said, staring Milton down peripherally while somehow maintaining eye contact with the teacher.
Plus you really, really want to hurt me, Milton thought as Mr. Wilde handed Moses, Winifred, and Mordacia their Paint-Brawl masks and rubber vests.
The inside of the Disputation Dome was coated with a highly reflective film. It looked like the inside of a colossal bag of Jiffy Pop popcorn.
Mr. Wilde poked his head through the door. “This bout will simply be an exhibition match. A chance for you to get a feel for real verbal combat. The topic will be ‘advertising for children.’ Moses, you will take the ‘Pro’ position.”
Moses Babcock slipped on his Paint-Brawl mask and spun toward Milton. “Advertising gives children the skills they need to be responsible consumers when they grow up!”
A burst of bright purple paint shot out of the boy’s mask, hitting Milton in the chest. Milton doubled over in pain. The sting of the paint seeped inside him as he knelt on the floor of the inflatable arena.
“No jumping the gums, Mr. Babcock!” the teacher shouted.
“You didn’t … say it would hurt,” Milton managed as he rose from the floor.
“You didn’t ask,” Mr. Wilde said. “Wasp venom, courtesy of Miss Dickinson. It puts the ‘pain’ in ‘paint.’ Rubber versus glue! Five minutes. No one leaves until it’s through.”
Moses singled Milton out yet again. Milton could see the boy’s face crinkle into a grin from behind his mask.
“Banning advertisements is a restriction upon freedom of speech!” the boy shouted, shooting a blotch of paint at Milton’s shoulder.
Milton dodged the point, then lobbed one of his own.
“That’s not the issue. What advertisers really want is the freedom to exploit children. To brainwash them into becoming good little consumers who think happiness can only be purchased!”
The paint shot out of Milton’s mouth and hit Moses squarely in the chest. He was thrown back, yet the point bounced right off him, hitting Clem Weenum. The little boy squealed as he fell.
“This isn’t fair!” Milton yelled. “They’re wearing rubber vests that deflect the paint!”
Mr. Wilde pressed his head against one of the clear plastic windows. “They’re rubber. You’re glue. Whatever you say bounces off of them and sticks to you.…”
“But—”
“What are you going to do, Milton?” Winifred said. “Cry?”
A small blob of paint shot out of her mask and hit Milton in the stomach. The impact didn’t hurt much, but the wasp venom stung regardless.
Milton sighed. He had to somehow survive the next few minutes—as well as protect his team—and do it wearing a vest covered with glue.
Roberta trained her mask back at Winifred. “Don’t worry, Winifred,” she replied. “It’s Be Kind to Animals Day, so we won’t get angry at you.”
Roberta’s slur hit Winifred in the ribs.
“Oww!”
Moses stalked toward Milton.
“They’re so slow they couldn’t even catch their breath!”
Milton jumped. The blob of purple paint whizzed beneath his feet as he hit the ceiling, stuck fast by his glue vest. Milton tried to wriggle himself free.
Clem stepped up to face the Rubber team. “Oh yeah?” he spat. The boy’s spray of paint barely made it across the Disputation Dome.
Moses smirked. “That’s right—it’s team against team,” he murmured to Mordacia and Winifred. “So let’s start with the runt of the litter.”
The Rubber team surrounded the little boy.
“Without ads, most of your favorite shows couldn’t afford to be made!” Moses yelled.
“B-but … what about public tele—” Clem sputtered.
“Ads don’t have some magic power to make you want things!” Mordacia shrieked.
“Yeah,” Winifred added. “You can’t blame them for bad parenting!”
Clem was doused in purple paint. He screamed in agony, rolling across the floor as the wasp venom seeped into his tiny body.
Milton freed himself from the ceiling and fell to the jouncing floor. The Rubber team closed in for the kill.
“Ads teach kids how to manage their finances,” Moses spat, “which is an important skill to have when you’re grown up!”
Milton threw himself in front of Clem.
“They show you something cool so you have to save and learn the true value of money!” Moses continued, spewing paint and venom.
“Aaaarrrgghhh!” Milton screamed as he absorbed the full brunt of the Rubber team’s verbal assault.
The venom burrowed its way through Milton’s clothes and into his skin. The poison seemed to gnash at his nerve endings with waves of sharp, burning pain.
Milton looked up at Moses, Mordacia, and Winifred gazing down upon him. Their eyes were sparkling with merry mischief: never before feeling as in their element as they did now, in this coliseum of cruelty filled with sharp-tongued boys and girls learning how to be even more so.
Roberta helped Milton to his feet.
“We’ve got to shoot below the belt!” Roberta said. “Beneath their rubber vests.”
“I don’t play like that,” Milton said. He locked eyes with Moses. “But I could. And it would devastate him.”
Milton could see a lump traveling down Moses’s throat.
“And he knows it.”
Milton looked down at Clem. The boy’s dark brown eyes had rolled back into his head. He was seizing.
“Get him out of here,” Milton said. “I’ll cover you.”
Roberta nodded as she hooked her hands underneath Clem’s arms and dragged him across the inflatable floor.
“Oh, boo-hoo,” Moses taunted. “If we said anything to offend you, it was purely intentional!”
“Yeah, he’s so weak he can’t even hold up his end of a conversation!”
Roberta pulled Clem from the Disputation Dome. There was so much purple paint flying that Milton couldn’t even see the door through the spray.
Moses stalked toward Milton. “It’s over, loser,” he said with a painful snort of purple paint that slashed at Milton’s neck. “But you’re probably too dumb to realize that. In fact, you’re so dumb you probably can’t even spell IQ.”
Milton spun around as fast as he could. “Advertising aimed at children encourages negative social consequences, such as eating junk food!” he shouted, spewing paint. “It’s unethical, because most kids don’t have money and have to pester their parents to buy stuff for them, leading to hostility in the home!”
Milton ducked to avoid the paint rebounding off of Moses’s chest.
“And children are more susceptible to advertising, as most kids haven’t developed the tools to view advertising critically!” Milton shouted. The globs of stinging paint bounced furiously between Moses and the wall, slamming into him as if he were the paddle in a game of paddleball.
“Owwwww!” Moses roared as he was beaten back, clutching his chest.
Milton
took a deep breath as he stood before Moses, with Mordacia and Winifred stricken dumb beside him.
“You’re just jealous because you know I’m a better leader than you,” Milton said, a pure ball of paint spewing from his mouth, hitting Moses square in the heart, piercing his rubber vest and hurling him backward against the wall.
A buzzer went off outside the Disputation Dome. Mr. Wilde unzipped the portal. He surveyed the dripping splotches of purple coating the inside of the bouncy structure. It looked like someone had made a Barney smoothie and forgot to put the top on the blender.
“My, such … colorful language,” Mr. Wilde said. He walked over to Moses and helped the moaning boy to his feet.
“The truth hurts, doesn’t it, Mr. Babcock?”
Milton emerged from the inflatable arena feeling like he had taken a bath in a tub full of thumbtacks and Tabasco sauce. He saw Roberta wiping paint off Clem with a paper towel.
“How did you find the door so quickly?” Milton asked. “There was so much paint flying I couldn’t see anything.”
“It was easy,” the dark-haired girl replied. “When I came inside, I took thirteen steps forward, turned left for another four steps, and then fell back six steps. So I just did it all backwards.”
“Right,” Milton said with a smirk. “Easy.”
Mr. Wilde dragged Moses out of the Disputation Dome and set him against a stack of gym mats. The teacher turned to Milton with a dramatic swish of his waistcoat.
“While you played well, Mr. Fauster, two of your team members left the dome before the end of the competition. So this first bout goes to the Rubber team.”
Moses, Winifred, and Mordacia let out a trio of halfhearted “yays” through their swollen, purple-stained lips. The rest of Team One stared at Milton with a quiet, grudging awe.
While Moses may have won the bout, it was clear to Milton—and everyone else in the Grimnaseum—that Milton had won something far more valuable: the trust of his team.
“You can’t afford to be so selfless in the War of the Words,” Mr. Wilde cautioned, sweeping his dark-brown, shoulder-length hair out of his face. “Nor can you ignore any chance to defeat your opponent with a below-the-belt blow.…”
A soft fog seemed to settle over the man’s light-gray eyes, normally so bright and quick.
“It’s between you and your sister, Mr. Fauster, plain and simple. One of you will win—big-time—and one of you will lose in the worst way possible. You must do everything you can to make sure that losing person isn’t you. Because you can bet your finest china that that is exactly what she is doing right now.…”
16 · GETTING THE
HANG OF IT
MARLO YAWNED SO widely that she felt like a human Pez dispenser, dispensing nothing but sour, exhausted confusion. She had been roused from a fitful sleep by Miss Parker to participate in some special club—an unauthorized club—to help her and Team Two hone their debating skills. Apparently a debate, thought Marlo, is more than just arguing with rules.
Miss Parker sat by a stack of foam mats piled in the corner of the Grimnaseum. She crossed her arms, managing to look stern despite balancing upon a sagging Exorcize Ball.
“I was never wildly famous. My name was never writ large on the roster of Those Who Did Things,” Miss Parker said, leaning into the children. “Most of the time, I didn’t do anything. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that anymore … especially now that they’ve stopped growing. But I do know the power of words, and I can teach you a few pointers before you do battle at the War of the Words. This will be a match with winners and losers, not whiners and snoozers. The stakes will be both as high as Heaven and as low as … down there. I can’t stress to you enough that this is serious. It’s not a game.”
“So how are you going to teach us, then?” Marlo asked.
“With games.”
A little Asian boy named Mungo Ulyaw pointed at the small mountain of white and silver vinyl drooping listlessly in the corner. “What’s with the deflated bouncy castle?” he asked.
“It’s for Mr. Wilde’s group,” Miss Parker replied, rubbing the bags under her tired eyes with her fingers. “Team One holds their own Spite Club meetings late at night while we hold ours early in the morning. You will be kept apart from them as much as possible until the debate. Now, from what Mr. Wilde tells me, Team One is a group with some serious language and logic skills. But Mr. Wilde wants to loosen their uptight tongues. You children, though … you don’t really have that problem. Speaking without thinking is second nature to you. I want to ensure that when you shoot your mouths off, every shot hits its mark.”
Miss Parker pivoted atop her Exorcize Ball and reached down for a large, flat box.
“We’ll start things off with a leisurely game of Squabble.”
The teacher laid out a checkered board on the unvarnished floor and poured four small mounds of wooden tiles on each of its four sides.
“Um … you’re having us play Scrabble?” asked Mack Hoover, a strong-jawed boy who looked perpetually peeved.
“It’s Squabble,” Miss Parker clarified. “Scrabble with some sauce. Now, Mack, I’d like you, Annabelle Graham, Ahmed Crump, and Marlo Fauster to come up here, please. I’ll show you how it’s done.”
The four groggy children dragged their feet across the Grimnaseum floor and sat cross-legged at each corner of the board. They looked over their letters carefully and arranged them to their liking on the slender wooden racks.
“Miss Fauster, you may start,” Miss Parker said as she knelt awkwardly on the floor.
Marlo placed four letters vertically on the left-hand edge of the board.
D-O-V-E
“ ‘Dove,’ ” Miss Parker read aloud. “Unambitious, but what the hay. Now, when you spell a word, you have to defend it. Make a case for what is ‘right’ about your word, and the next player—going clockwise—will oppose your word by bringing up something bad about it. Understand?”
Marlo nodded. “Yeah, I get it … okay, um … doves are a symbol of peace,” she said.
“Good,” the teacher said. “Now your turn, Mr. Hoover. Argue against Miss Fauster, then add your word.”
The boy squared his tense jaw in contemplation. “Doves are basically pigeons, and I hate pigeons,” Mack Hoover explained in a husky, impatient tone. “The way they strut around with their chests sticking out as though they own the place. I hate the way they hang around parks and poop everywhere. They’re dirty, mean, attract rats, and still lonely old people insist on feeding them bread crumbs so that we get even more pigeons.…”
Miss Parker nodded, impressed. Mack Hoover built a word horizontally from the “V.”
V-A-I-N
“Vain, it means conceited, but … um … maybe it makes you so obsessed with how you look that you find a cancerous mole or something and get it removed before you die.”
“But it also means futile,” Annabelle Graham interjected with a shake of her plain, brown tomboyish hair.
“And useless, ineffective, fruitless,” added Roget Marx Peters.
“No helping,” Miss Parker scolded.
Annabelle put her letters out onto the board in a vertical stack ending on the “N.”
G-R-A-I-N
“Grain … you can also make ‘A GRIN’ and ‘A RING’ out of the letters,” explained Annabelle. “Grain is good and nourishing—”
“And an allergen,” Ahmed Crump added with a scowl, spelling out R-E-D horizontally from the “R.”
“Red is the color of blood, which you need to live,” the grumpy boy said.
“And it’s also the color of a grisly crime scene,” Marlo countered while laying her tiles on the board, building up from the “D.”
Q-U-I-D
“I think it’s some kind of British money. And money is good.”
“Or bad sometimes, if you buy bad things with it,” Mack Hoover countered. “Plus it’s squid with its ‘S’ cut off. And it shouldn’t even count because it’s British slang
.”
“Duly noted,” Miss Parker said as Mack spelled out “Q-U-A-I-L” horizontally from the “Q.”
“Quail are, I don’t know, a bird,” he explained. “Which I guess you could eat. But they’re kind of like pigeons, which are really gross, and filthy—”
“We know your position on pigeons, Mr. Hoover,” Miss Parker said. “Plus you just argued against yourself.”
“Thanks,” Annabelle said brattily as she spelled “L-E-A-F-Y,” dangling down vertically from the “L.”
“Leafy … like healthy salad.”
“Or like the yard in fall when you have to waste a Saturday raking and not even make minimum wage,” Ahmed said as he spelled “F-E-T-I-D” horizontally from the “F.”
“Fetid is a, um … cheese, I think.”
“That’s feta. Don’t be a dork,” Marlo said.
Miss Parker frowned. “Good arguers don’t resort to name-calling, Miss Fauster.”
“I wasn’t arguing. I was simply pointing out that I’m right about him being wrong. Fetid is like something that really stinks.”
“Like Limburger,” Ahmed added with a frown. “Which is a cheese.”
“Let it go, Ahmed,” the teacher said with a smirk.
Marlo laid out two tiles on either side of the “I.”
Z-I-T
Marlo stared at the tiles fixedly.
“Go on,” Ahmed goaded smugly. “Let’s hear your ‘Pro-zit’ argument.”
“Well,” Marlo said, rubbing her chin for inspiration, as that was where zits usually reared their ugly heads, like pus-filled prairie dogs peeking out of their burrow, “when you get them, that’s because your hormones are going crazy, and that means you’re maturing, which is a good thing.”
“You can’t make zits a good thing!” Ahmed complained. “They are ugly and disgusting!”
“Like pigeons,” Mack muttered.
“See? You can argue over just about anything,” Miss Parker said, packing the game back into its box. “Now that we’ve warmed up our wits with zits, we’ll move on to stronger stuff: Hangman.”
The children laughed with disbelief.
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