“Oh. Yeah,” she said. “You know how before games they hold up a giant paper banner and the team runs out and crashes through it and everybody cheers? Whoopee. The biggest guys in our school can beat up paper.” She narrowed her eyes. “You better not do anything that sorry.”
Especially since there was no guarantee Art Club could beat up paper.
“But”—I looked back at the list—“if we take out all this stuff, there’s nothing left. Except my posters, which are excellent, I admit, but they won’t make much of a bang at a pep assembly.”
“You’re such a Beanboy sometimes.” Sam forced out a breath. “You art people are supposed to be creative, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So create. You think anybody’s going to pay attention if you do all that cheer stuff anyway? They’ve already seen it a hundred times, done by people way more coordinated than Art Club. You want them to pay attention, you can’t do the same things cheerleaders do only pathetically worse. You have to do things different.”
“But see?” I said. “That’s the point. Art Club does do things different. Way different.” I pasted the sticky note back on the table. “We’re not pep assembly material. We’re more like . . . anti–pep assembly material. If you want to help, make a list of how to convince them how stupid this whole assembly thing is. They’re all hyped up about a human pyramid. I have to figure out how to talk them out of it.”
Sam stood there looking at me, not even glaring, just standing there with her mouth open and nothing coming out.
Something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime.
“So that’s it?” she said finally. “You’re not doing the assembly? You’re just going to wimp out? On your own club?”
Beecher chewed his apple and watched me.
“What? No,” I said. “I’m not wimping out. I’m facing facts.”
“That’s what wimps say.”
I blinked. What was wrong with her? Nobody hated school spirit more than Sam Zawicki. She really hated pep assemblies, and now here she was, yelling at me about doing one. It was like the planet had hit some turbulence and now we were all spinning in the wrong direction.
She shook her head. “I figured this would happen.”
She hoisted her satchel onto the counter and unfastened the flap.
“I did some stuff of my own,” she said.
She pulled out a stack of tall, thin library books and set them on her satchel. She opened the top book, riffled through till she found the page she wanted, then shoved it at me.
I balanced the book in my hands and studied the shiny page of black-and-white photos. It was a yearbook. I turned it over to see the cover. Amelia M. Earhart Middle School. An old one from a long time ago, like fifteen years, before I was born, even.
Sam planted her fists on her hips. “So? What do you see?”
I scrutinized the page. “The top one is a picture of Stamp Collecting Enthusiasts. Below that is Marble Club, posing with their favorite marbles, it looks like.” I glanced at the opposite page. “Science Fiction Book Club. And—wow—Square Dance Club? Who wears clothes like that on purpose?”
“Yeah. Embarrassing. Keep going.”
I turned the page.
And stopped dead.
“Comic Book Collectors?”
I stared at the photo at the top of the page. Mostly guys, with a couple of girls, all clustered around a bulletin board, holding comic books. A tall guy clutching a Wonder Woman comic book looked kind of familiar, but I couldn’t figure out why.
“Earhart Middle had a Comic Book Collectors Club?” I said. “Why didn’t anyone tell me? I would completely be in a club like that.”
“How many members?”
“What? I don’t know.” I counted the kids in the photo. “Fifteen. Why?”
She didn’t say anything. Just slid the next yearbook off the stack and handed it to me, opened to a page of pictures.
“Hey.” I tapped my finger on a photo. “Here they are again.”
“That’s the next year. How many members?”
I counted. “Eleven.”
Sam slid another yearbook onto my stack, open to Comic Book Collectors. “This is the year after that.”
“Nine,” I said.
She handed me the final yearbook. I paged through it. Paged through again. Then again, scrambling the pages this time.
“Where did they go?” I said, sort of frantically. “What happened to the Comic Book Collectors?”
Sam held up her hands. “Who knows? They had nine members that last time. Then the next year—gone.”
“Gone? Are you sure?” I shuffled through the pages one more time. “Did they ever show up again?”
“Have you noticed a Comic Book Club at school?”
I shook my head.
“They’re gone.”
“Oh, man.” A sudden thought hit me. I slumped back against the refrigerator, open yearbook against my chest. “Art Club only has nine members.”
“No kidding. Notice anything else?”
She pulled the next-to-last yearbook from the stack and jabbed a finger at the Comic Book Collectors picture, the one with only nine members. But she didn’t jab at the kids. She jabbed at the background.
A background that looked familiar.
“Oh, man. Oh, no.” I stared at it.
The Comic Book Collectors stood on both sides of the bulletin board, holding comic books: H2O, Batman, Captain America, even Archie. A bent part of the metal bulletin board frame twanged cockeyed off to the side.
“That’s our bulletin board,” I said. “Art Club’s.” I peered at the picture. “It used to belong to them? To Comic Book Collectors?”
Sam nodded.
I closed my eyes. “Art Club is doomed.”
Sam closed the yearbooks and slid them back into her satchel. “And you’re just going to wimp out on them.”
Beech nodded. “Wimp out.”
“What? No. I’m not.”
“So you’re doing the pep assembly,” said Sam.
“Well, yeah. I mean, I guess I have to.” I narrowed my eyes. “And anyway, why are you so worried about it?”
“What?” Sam pulled her chin back. Gave me a weird look. “I’m not worried. It’s not even my stupid club.” She heaved her satchel over her shoulder. “But I stuck my neck out this morning. I made Mr. Petrucelli say he’d give the bulletin board back if you dug up more people. I’m going to look stupid if you don’t step up. And I will not look stupid. Got it?”
She shot me one more burning glare and snapped her green winter parka from the hook by the door.
“Now I have to take care of whatever stupid thing Dillon’s been up to,” she muttered as she banged out of the kitchen and down the stairs.
Nine
Different. Art Club was different.
As the echo of Sam’s boots faded away and the front door downstairs slammed shut behind her, I thought about this.
We couldn’t do the same things cheerleaders did. We had to do different things.
I wiped apple slime off Beech’s hands. And mouth. And eyebrows. Then I bundled him up in his winter coat and snow boots and dragged him through the cold and slush, back through the park toward Quincy Street.
The main difference between Art Club and cheerleaders: Art Club didn’t work in front of a crowd. We didn’t jump up and down. We didn’t do art in your face. Well, maybe Spencer. But mostly, we worked in private. That’s what we were good at. If this pep assembly—no, this anti–pep assembly—had even the slimmest chance of working, we had to do things we were good at.
We finally reached Caveman Comics. Beecher stopped dead in surprise.
“Superhero.” His awestruck whisper floated out on a puff of white breath. “Tool.”
The stairway at Caveman Comics was the only set of steps in the whole world of Beecher MacBean that he would willingly walk down without screaming. He wrapped one mittened hand around the railing, the other around my wrist—about
cut off my circulation—and trooped down the steps, dragging me along with him.
We reached the bottom and pushed through the door. The bell jangled against the glass.
Caveman didn’t look up, even though we barreled in on a blast of chill wind that ruffled the covers of his comic books. He was planted on the stool behind the back counter, hunched over a graphic novel. He never moved from that spot. Never came out from behind the counter. I was pretty sure he had legs, but I’d never seen them.
Beech shot like a bullet toward a Batman display. I scuffed across the thin, wrinkled carpet toward the rack beside the cash register. One of Caveman’s homemade signs was thumb-tacked above it:
I scanned the rack. Batman. Superman. Avengers. Spidey. No H2O. No big introduction of H2O’s awesome new sidekick, Beanboy. I ran my finger down the printout Caveman had tacked up beside the rack:
Still no H2O. I glanced behind the counter. Except for a slight flutter of his shaggy black hair when he breathed, Caveman hadn’t moved. You wouldn’t know it by talking to him, since his main form of communication was a reluctant grunt, but if you needed to know anything about any comic book anywhere, Caveman was your guy.
You just had to work up enough courage to ask him.
I casually leaned against the counter. “So. Hey,” I said.
He didn’t look up.
“I was just wondering if you had any idea when the next H2O comic book would be here. Episode Ten in the H2O Submerged series, with his new sidekick, Beanboy. That one.”
He still didn’t look up. He just jerked his sausage of a finger toward the COMING SOON printout.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “But it’s not on the list.”
Caveman licked his finger and turned a page in his novel.
Which probably meant the conversation was over.
“See, the thing is,” I said, “I really need to know.”
He didn’t move.
“I’ve got this, well, situation. At school. See, I’m in Art Club, and we really need to impress people. At an assembly. The comic book contest would be really impressive, except nobody knows about it, and probably they wouldn’t believe me even if I told them. Unless I had the actual comic book in my hands. But I don’t know when it’ll be out. The comic book company hasn’t told me, and I don’t know who to ask. And now that we lost our bulletin board—”
Caveman’s head popped up. He peered at me from under his one long dark ledge of an eyebrow (which partially explains his name). I jumped back, startled. He’d never actually looked me in the eye before.
“You lost your bulletin board?” he said.
I blinked. That was the longest sentence I’d ever heard him utter. For a few seconds I didn’t know what to do.
“Um, yeah,” I said finally. “I know it probably doesn’t sound like a big deal, and it’s not even that great a bulletin board, with the frame all bent like it is—”
“Bent?”
I nodded. “But it turned into this whole big thing—”
“It always does.”
“Yeah.” I frowned. “But the thing is, if I could get my hands on that comic book, I mean, really soon, like, what do they call it, an advance copy or something—”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
I stopped. He’d see what he could do?
I guess the conversation was truly over then, because he buried his head in his novel again, and his shaggy hair didn’t even flutter.
“So, okay,” I said. “Thanks. Any idea when that might be?”
Nothing.
“I mean, I was just kind of wondering. So I could plan my schedule around it.”
Still nothing.
Beech had trotted over while I was lounged against the counter, and now he held up a set of shiny plastic Batarangs. He didn’t say anything. Just held them up.
The way he was looking at them, with utter love—not as much love as he had for the batting helmet, of course—and with his eyes all big with hope, I couldn’t even bring myself to try to talk him out of it. I just dug my emergency relief fund from my shoe and slapped the money on the counter.
Caveman deposited it, slid the Batarangs into a plastic bag, and handed me the receipt, all without taking his eyes off his graphic novel. I handed Beech the bag and we headed out of the shop.
As we started up the steps, I turned and glanced back through the dusty glass door. Caveman was holding his place in his graphic novel with his finger. But he’d lifted his head again and was staring at his COMING SOON list and chewing his lip in thought.
Ten
I swallowed the hard lump in my throat. “So that’s the plan,” I said.
I stood before Art Club, my page of ideas clamped to a clipboard I’d rustled up from my mom’s desk to give it a more official look. And also to keep my hands steady. I’d laid everything out for them, tapping each item on the list for emphasis: the anti–pep assembly, doing the opposite, creating most of it here in the art room ahead of time, being there at the pep assembly to direct the action and look totally cool, but letting our work stand for itself.
Plus no pom-poms.
Art Club stared back at me. Dead silent. Even the papier mâché Fighting Aviator looked stunned. Spencer sat perched on the edge of his tall art stool, not moving, a stack of papers clutched between his hands.
Gretchen Klamm, who spent her Art Club time weaving artistic belts, sank back in her seat. I knew why—she had collapsed from sheer disappointment.
Then she threw her fist in the air. “Yes! Thank you!” She turned to the rest of Art Club. “I’m sorry. I know you guys wanted to lead the school in art cheers and everything, but the more I thought about it, the more lightheaded I got. If I have to stand out there and do those dance kicks we were trying to make up, I’m serious, I would pass out.”
“No kidding,” said Martin Higby. “Just thinking about it makes me dizzy.”
Art Club all started talking at once.
“I thought I was going to throw up.”
“I broke out in hives.”
“Last time we tried the human pyramid, I think I sprained my armpit.”
Now I was the one who was stunned. Art Club was happy about the anti–pep assembly. Mrs. Frazee got so excited, she about knocked herself unconscious with her jangly earrings.
“Tucker. You realize what you’re suggesting, don’t you?” She clapped a hand to her chest. Her bracelets clanked with joy. “Performance art!”
She swooped to the shelves behind her desk, rummaged through, and, in triumph, pulled a large book from one of the piles. She blew dust from the cover and settled it on the center worktable, then opened it to a page of shiny photos showing people doing things that were, well, odd but also pretty interesting. Bald guys with their heads painted blue on a stage with some . . . plumbing, it looked like, only it was kind of like sculpture, too. And another bunch of people wearing brightly colored tights, squeezed into different small spaces, like doorways and windows and stuff, till they almost looked like a painting. A living painting.
“Performance art.” Mrs. Frazee fairly breathed the words. “Combining visual art, the kind we do right here in Art Club—painting, drawing, sculpture—with dramatic performance. You can use all kinds of different media—music, film, TV screens, computers—nearly anything you can think of to convey your idea to the world.”
As she stood beside the worktable, explaining, Mrs. Frazee practically turned into performance art herself. Her wild red hair danced like a moving sculpture. Her handmade jewelry jingled, and her hand-dyed scarf swished in musical accompaniment. Her voice rose dramatically till it filled the art room.
“You can do performance art anywhere. On stage, in public places, or”—she paused for dramatic effect—“in a middle school gymnasium.”
Case File: The Fraze
(Okay, I made that up. No one calls her The Fraze. She’s plain Mrs. Frazee, but she deserves a way jazzier name than that.)
Status: Superhero of art.
&n
bsp; Base: The Amelia M. Earhart Middle School art room.
Superpower: Complete and total enthusiasm for all things artistic.
Superweapon: A haphazard stack of books, magazines, and videos containing the art knowledge of the world, collected over a lifetime and vigilantly maintained on the shelves behind her desk. (Although the books and stuff are just a handy backup. She already has most of that knowledge archived in her head.)
Real Name: Lila Frazee, Art Teacher
Mrs. Frazee gushed on about performance art. I was still stuck on the first thing she’d said: Convey your idea. That’s exactly what we were trying to do: Convey the idea that Art Club was important. That we still existed. That we deserved a bulletin board just as much as the basketball team.
Maybe we were doing performance art.
Accidentally.
Mrs. Frazee closed the book with a thud. The rest of Art Club scrambled to get started on our anti–pep assembly.
I stood there, in the middle of the art room, thinking maybe my mouth had known what it was doing when it blabbered to Mr. Petrucelli about a pep assembly . . .
. . . and gazed right into the eyes of Spencer Osterholtz.
He still sat on his art stool, clenching his papers. His hand-knitted stocking cap drooped over his ears. He attempted a smile, but it was pretty weak.
“I was right,” he said. “You did have a plan. I knew you did, because you wouldn’t volunteer us for a pep assembly if you didn’t, right? So you were just waiting to show it to us till you’d spiffed it up, given it that extra puh-zing. And wow, did you give it puh-zing. I couldn’t even imagine that much puh-zing. An anti–pep assembly that turns out to be performance art and turns into a whole new lesson plan for Mrs. Frazee. Wow.”
He took a breath. He tried to act all positive and cheery. But his shoulders had slumped. His stocking cap was deflated.
“All I came up with was that dumb human pyramid,” he said.
Cool Beans Page 4