Cool Beans

by Lisa Harkrader

  “Hey.” I gave him an encouraging fist bump to the arm. “It wasn’t that dumb.”

  He stared at a blob of tempera paint on the concrete floor. “But it doesn’t really fit in anymore. These don’t fit now, either.” He started to crumple the papers in his hand.

  ATTENTION, ART CLUB

  To kick this thing up a notch, give it some real PUH-ZING, we need the following:

  1. A new twist on the traditional pom-pom: special artistic KNITTED pom-poms (just say the word, and my great-aunt will be on it.)

  2. A catchy Art Club theme song we could sing while doing our kick line—so catchy it gets stuck in everyone’s head so the whole school will walk around for days afterward humming the tune and thinking about Art Club.

  3. A grand finale for our human pyramid: At the end, we’ll toss the top layer (which, in case anyone has forgotten, consists of Tucker) into the air (the higher the better for maximum visual impact), then catch him. This will give new meaning to the Amelia M. Earhart Middle Scool Fighting Aviators.

  “No, wait,” said my mouth (because, seriously, you can never trust it to just shut up). “Let me see.”

  He opened his hand. I took the papers and smoothed out the crumples.

  Spencer had typed it neatly on his computer and printed enough copies for everyone in Art Club.

  “Some of this might still fit in,” I said.

  Spencer looked up, hopeful. “Like the knitted pom-poms?”

  “Well, no. But this”—I tapped on #2—“a theme song. This could work. We probably wouldn’t want to sing it because we’ll be pretty busy doing other stuff.”

  Plus, I’d heard Art Club sing, and it didn’t fit in with anything in the known universe.

  “But we’ll need a theme song playing behind us,” I said, “backing us up.”

  Spencer’s shoulders de-slumped. His stocking cap puffed up.

  “That would fit in,” he said.

  “It would more than fit in,” I said. “It would give us puh-zing.”

  Eleven

  We got help from Audiovisual Club, borrowed spotlights from Drama Club, and talked Coach Wilder (football coach and health sciences teacher) into letting us use his sound system.

  He was nervous about turning middle-schoolers loose with expensive electronic equipment, so when we borrowed the system, we sort of borrowed Coach Wilder along with it.

  At first he just hovered around us as we worked, making sure no one accidentally stuck a tongue in a light socket or something.

  Once he got a whiff of what we were trying to do, he started tossing out suggestions—suggestions that were surprisingly good for a guy whose brain spent so much time cooped up in a mildew-infested locker room.

  “Squirrel-cage fans,” he growled. He was standing beside the sound system, beefy arms folded across his chest like giant sausages squeezed into a gray sweatshirt. “What you need are squirrel-cage fans. And footlights.”

  We frowned, nodded, and gave one another confused looks. What the heck were squirrel-cage fans?

  “Don’t worry about it.” Coach Wilder pulled a stubby pencil from behind his ear and a small, grubby notebook from the pocket of his workout pants. “I got connections.”

  He worked his jaw for a minute, licked the pencil lead, scribbled something in the notebook, and gave a solid, football-coach nod. He tucked his notebook back in his pocket.

  The next day, when we got to Art Club, there they were: four huge metal fans that looked like enormous hamster wheels and a row of small, portable lights, lined up along the floor.

  Coach Wilder was right. They were exactly what we needed.

  I dragged Noah into the action. He wasn’t a member of Art Club, but we needed a theme song, and Noah knew everything about music.

  (Everything about everything, really. If Art Club decided to recite medieval poetry or launch a satellite into space, Noah Spooner would be our man.)

  Case File: The Wild Man

  Status: Sidekick, apparently—to The Spoonster, a.k.a. my best friend, Noah Spooner.

  Base: The Amelia M. Earhart Middle School boys’ locker room.

  Superpower: Able to endure the stench of recently worn gym shoes without a flinch.

  Superweapon: Access to equipment: helmets, pads, tackling dummies, fans, ladders, duct tape, elastic bandages, spare spotlight parts—if you need it, Coach Wilder can get it.

  Real Name: Ronald T. Wilder, Head Football Coach/Health Sciences Teacher

  Once Noah and Coach Wilder put their heads together, they were like the Dr. Frankensteins of the anti–pep assembly soundtrack. Coach had a whole collection of stadium jams. They riffled through to pick the best tunes. They collected drumbeats. They recorded sound effects. They hooked Noah’s laptop into Coach Wilder’s system and mixed and taped and edited and calibrated and pieced the parts together into a monster of thundering sound. Noah, like a true mad scientist, documented every step in his logbook.

  Finally, when the monster was ready, they flipped a switch and let it roar.

  Art Club shot one another raised-eyebrow looks, mouths open.

  Because it was perfect. Their monster soundtrack instantly took our anti–pep assembly to a whole new level.

  Spencer shot me a thumbs-up. “Puh-zing,” he mouthed.

  I nodded.

  By the time Friday rolled around, Art Club was ready.

  Twelve

  I inched the door open and pressed one eye against the crack. Art Club squeezed in behind me in our dank, dark hole (a.k.a. the boys’ locker room), trying to steal a glimpse of the packed gym beyond.

  Talking, laughing clumps of Earhart middle-schoolers had begun filing in. Their sneakers squeaked against the gym floor and thudded up the steps as they filled the bleachers. The rumble of voices swelled to fill every space in the gym, and the locker room door fairly quivered with the noise.

  I sucked in a breath of the cool gym air that wafted through the crack and tried to push my pounding heart back into my chest. It had already siphoned all the blood from my brain, so now my head sort of floated above my body, numb and useless.

  The video screens we’d built—the enormous main screen in the center, with two smaller screens on each side—were suspended securely from the gym ceiling, thanks to a very tall ladder, Coach Wilder, and some cables he’d rustled up from somewhere. He’d cranked the basketball goals up to the ceiling to make room. (And pulled down three pairs of dangling gym socks and a backpack while he was at it. It was getting weird. Almost every day something was hanging from the ceiling somewhere.) Once the gym lights went down and our video was beamed out, nobody would notice our amazing screens were just white paper enforced with stapled cardboard frames.

  We’d placed the Drama Club spotlights at strategic points in the gym. Audiovisual Club had taken up their post behind the projectors at the top of the bleachers. Mrs. Frazee had appropriated my clipboard and now stood off to the side, where she could follow the action and get the whole thing back on track if it jumped the rails. Noah and Coach Wilder were stationed behind the sound system at the scorer’s table on the opposite side of the gym, ready to put the whole thing in motion.

  As I stood there, waiting, I heard the first glimmer of music. It started low, so low I doubt the rumbling herd in the gym even heard it at first. It grew louder—gradually—till by the time the crowd realized what they were hearing, it had become part of the very air around them.

  This was no cheery marching band tune. This was darker, with a thundering beat. More tortured superhero than perky pep squad.

  The music swelled, louder and more insistent, till it blanketed the gym in a layer of sound. Voices dwindled as the crowd stopped talking and began listening. Exactly as Noah had predicted. The drums beat louder. Faster. Then—

  BAM!

  —the music stopped.

  The gym went black.

  Silence echoed through the dark.

  As the crowd gasped and a few nervous giggles pierced the cavernous darkness
, Art Club slipped silently from the locker room and stole along the edge of the gym. I led the way, head still numb, heart still pounding, my feet laced snug inside black combat boots.

  I am normally not a combat boot sort of person. A basic pair of all-purpose sneakers takes me anywhere I need to go. But yesterday, after I’d gotten home from Art Club, after Sam had thumped out of our apartment and down the stairs, I’d headed to my room to dump my backpack—

  —and found this pair of boots standing at attention in the hall outside my door, spit-polished and gleaming.

  Beecher had motioned his head toward the boots. “Sam.” That’s all he’d said.

  Now as I paced through the blackness of the gym, the heft of the combat boots swinging with each step I took, carrying my feet along almost without effort, I understood why Sam wore them. They made me feel taller somehow. Steadier. More powerful.

  I took my place behind the row of footlights spaced along the edge of the gym floor. Art Club lined up beside me, and the music grew softer till it was merely a background for the sound effects: the roar and pop of a fire.

  The footlights surged on, glowing orange and yellow. Coach Wilder’s squirrel fans whirred. We’d cut flames from tissue paper and taped them to the front of the lights, and now the fans whipped them straight into the air. The tissue flames danced before the glowing lights, and suddenly the whole side of the gym looked like it was ablaze.

  The crowd gasped. Art Club strode forward, calmly, through the flames. We didn’t run. We didn’t try to get through quickly. No. We stalked through fire itself, almost in slow motion, as flames licked our boots, our fingertips, our black cargo pants.

  And as we strode through the flames, Audiovisual Club projected the video of it directly onto our giant screen, with close-ups on the smaller screens at the sides, so that no matter where you looked, Art Club was rising from the flames.

  The music grew louder and we strode to our assigned positions. I took my place behind one of the spotlights.

  A giant image of Gretchen Klamm’s best woven belt beamed onto the center screen, with video of her weaving it on the smaller screens, with dramatic lighting, quick cuts between shots, and music thundering.

  I swung my light around. Beamed it directly onto Gretchen, standing beside a display of her art, so she was in the spotlight at the same moment she was on the screens, a lone Art Club member lit in stark contrast to the surrounding darkness.

  New artwork played on the screens: Martin Higby’s souped-up drawings of his dream racing machines. I dimmed my light as one of the other spotlights shone on short, round Martin, the last kid in the world you’d picture inside a race car.

  The cars dimmed and new artwork filled the screens. Another spotlight shone on the artist.

  Our black silhouettes were visible so the crowd could see we were in charge, moving the lights, directing the action. But the main action happened on the screens, with the photos and videos we’d put together—artwork, field trips, dazzling shots of paintings we’d seen at the Wheaton University Art Museum.

  I stood behind my light, operating it smoothly, the way we’d practiced.

  Still, I managed to sneak a peek at the bleachers.

  And you know what?

  Earhart Middle was watching. Sitting forward, eyes locked onto the screens, watching as images flashed and faded. I looked for Emma. Looked to see if she was sitting forward, eyes locked on to the screens too.

  I couldn’t find her but I saw another kid, a kid so entranced, so captivated, he had his hands clasped tight together and was holding them to his chin, so tight, so stiff, he was practically shaking.

  I blinked. I knew that shake.

  It was Beecher.

  That shaking kid was Beecher.

  And he was sitting beside . . . my mother. She saw me looking at her and gave me a wave and a giant really-proud-mom thumbs-up.

  The music thundered. The video changed.

  That was my cue.

  I swiveled my spotlight and shone it directly on Spencer, whose coil pots were playing on the screens.

  We were almost at the halfway point, almost to the part about my comic book, the part where Art Club would beam their spotlights on me, ending with an animation that Audiovisual Club had helped put together, of Beanboy (the real Beanboy, not me) soaring through the skies above Amelia M. Earhart Middle School. It was really nice of them to do that. Extreme, as Noah would say. It was completely extreme.

  And standing there in my combat boots, holding my spotlight steady, I started to relax a little. I don’t know what I’d been so worried about. I’d spent all that time convinced that this pep assembly thing would hurl Art Club down the middle school toilet of humiliation, and instead it might be the answer to everything.

  It could get kids to sign up for Art Club.

  We could become visible in our own school. We could get our bulletin board back. And Emma—I flicked another covert glance toward the bleachers—maybe next time Emma said, “Hey, Tucker,” maybe I’d actually—

  Bam!

  The music screeched to a stop.

  The video screens went dark and our spotlights faded to black.

  Then the gym lights snapped on, full power.

  As the entire school blinked under the glare of the suddenly bright gym, the cheerleading squad bounced onto the floor, chanting and shaking their pom-poms.

  Thirteen

  Mr. Petrucelli bounded onto the floor, swiping the microphone from Coach Wilder’s sound system as he jogged past.

  “Thank you.” He held up a hand. “Thank you.”

  His microphone squealed. The cheerleaders stopped cheering. They still bounced and shook their pom-poms (they were cheerleaders; they couldn’t help themselves), just not as noisily.

  I stood there gripping my spotlight, stupidly flipping the switch back and forth, as if our anti–pep assembly would magically start back up again if I could just get the dang light to come back on.

  I guess we all thought that. Noah tapped furiously on the keys of his laptop. Audiovisual Club jiggled their projectors. Coach Wilder squeezed out from behind the sound system, Mrs. Frazee threw down her clipboard, and the two of them stalked across the gym floor, aimed like lasers straight at Mr. Petrucelli.

  Mr. Petrucelli didn’t seem to notice. “Very nice. Let’s give them all a nice round of applause.” He flashed his wide principal smile and waved an arm in the general direction of Art Club, who mostly stood paralyzed, mouths open in shock. Earhart Middle, still squinting under the bright gym lights, clapped politely.

  Mr. Petrucelli got down to business. “We don’t want to waste precious learning time on just one club, so this afternoon we’re combining the Art Club assembly with an end-of-season pep rally for our basketball teams. Give it up for the Earhart Middle School Fighting Aviators.”

  Before we knew what was happening, the pep band marched into the gym, blaring the school fight song. About mowed down Coach Wilder and Mrs. Frazee, who had to scramble for their lives. The cheerleaders danced, revved up now to maximum cheering fervor.

  The side doors banged open and a thundering pack of basketball players bounded onto the floor, Wesley Banks leading the boys from one side, the Kaleys leading the girls from the other. As I watched in horror, I realized both lines were barreling straight toward the screens.

  And they didn’t stop.

  Didn’t slow down.

  They charged right toward the screens, our screens, the screens we’d spent an entire week constructing—

  —and crashed through.

  I stared at the shreds, at the wobbling frames.

  The toughest kids in our school had just beat up paper.

  Our paper.

  Earhart Middle erupted in cheers.

  I stood there in my combat boots, the noise and glaring gym lights spinning around me, and clutched my spotlight.

  Fourteen

  Mr. Petrucelli’s voice boomed through the microphone. “These teams worked hard, both the bo
ys and the girls, and even though their seasons may not have turned out the way they planned, they deserve our support for a job well done.”

  Earhart Middle cheered.

  I glanced up at the bleachers.

  At my mom, who was standing up, standing straight up in the sea of middle-schoolers, beaming all her fury at Mr. Petrucelli’s head.

  Part of me wanted her to come charging across the gym, rip the microphone from Mr. Petrucelli’s hand, get the anti–pep assembly going again, and make everything go the way it was supposed to go. Maybe even wrap her arms around me and give me a really hard hug.

  That part of me was still three years old.

  The other part, the part that was thirteen, wished my mother didn’t have to see what a pathetic loser I was and feel sorry for me.

  Beecher stood at her side. All he looked was confused.

  I rolled my spotlight toward the edge of the gym, picking up the cord as I went so I could unplug it once I got to the electric socket in the corner.

  Behind me, the microphone squealed again.

  “As you all know”—Mr. Petrucelli’s voice blared—“the school carnival is coming up in a few short weeks.”

  Earhart Middle cheered. Again.

  “That’s right. That’s right.” Mr. Petrucelli waited while the gym quieted down. “It’s one of the biggest events of the year, and I know our teams and clubs will be spending these next weeks getting their booths and games ready.”

  Art Club didn’t have much to get ready. We were doing face painting. We always did face painting. We were Art Club. People expected face painting.

  “And of course I know you’ll all be flexing your throwing arms for the one carnival event everyone looks forward to—Amelia M. Earhart Middle School’s annual Last Player Standing!”

  The gym exploded in cheers. Earhart Middle pounded their feet against the bleachers. Cheerleaders shook their pom-poms and kicked really high. One of the tuba players blasted out a rumbly toot.