Cool Beans

by Lisa Harkrader

  Base: Amelia M. Earhart Middle School office.

  Superpower: Teleportation. Has to be. The guy is everywhere, especially everywhere you don’t want him to be.

  Superweapon: Serious principal eyeballs that focus like a laser, never flinching, never wavering, drilling into your skull until before you know what’s happening, you’re spilling your guts about everything you have ever done wrong in your life and some things that weren’t wrong because suddenly you can’t stop yourself.

  Real Name: Vincent G. Petrucelli, Middle School Principal

  Twenty-five

  Art Club was turning into a new surprise every day.

  Today Spencer was waiting for me inside the door.

  “Your comic book’s working.” His voice was a whisper. “We recruited a new member.”

  “Really?”

  I thought about this. Owen Skeet had been reading my Beanboy page that morning. Owen wasn’t the first person who came to mind when you thought about ferocious athletes, but he was on the basketball team. Mostly he rode the bench. But still, this was a person who could throw a ball. And catch it without falling down. Usually. Owen Skeet was something the Amelia M. Earhart Middle School art room had never seen before. Owen Skeet was . . .

  . . . an athlete.

  “Where?” I said.

  Spencer motioned his stocking cap toward the corner.

  I turned. And stared at the heap of a person slouched at my desk, stretched out over it sideways, his beefy head propped up in one beefy palm.

  Owen didn’t have beefy palms. Owen didn’t have beefy anything. This person looked exactly like . . .

  Dillon.

  Zawicki. I swallowed. Dillon Zawicki was stretched all over my tilty-topped art desk. The universe was just messing with me now.

  Dillon caught me looking at him. He shrugged one lump of a shoulder. “Sam said I had to.”

  Case File: Dillon

  (That’s it. Just Dillon. It’s kind of like Elvis. You just have to say his first name and everyone knows who you mean.)

  Status: If you ask Sam, she’d say he’s a sidekick. Hers. Even though she doesn’t claim him half the time, and lately not at all. If you ask anyone else at Earhart Middle, he’s a supervillain. Definitely.

  Base: Patrolling the Earhart Middle School hallways.

  Superpower: Super strength.

  Superweapon: Great hulking size. I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but since his upper arms are as big around as basketballs, nobody’s ever been brave enough to find out.

  Real Name: Dillon Zawicki

  I nodded.

  Spencer leaned toward me. “This is good, right? I mean, we need new members and there’s”—he waved a nervous hand toward Dillon—“a new member. So that’s progress. Right?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I need to give it some thought.”

  I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to see someone lurking in the art room doorway.

  This time it was Owen Skeet, middle school athlete.

  As he hovered there, shoulders hunched, long skinny arms hanging down like he wasn’t sure where to put them, shaggy hair drooping over his eyes, and all of Art Club gawking, Owen looked like a trapped animal, a specimen we’d caught and brought back to the lab to study.

  His gaze darted around the room.

  And landed on Dillon, who was still stretched out on my desk, taking a nap, it looked like.

  Owen’s arms stiffened. His shaggy hair about stood on end.

  “Oh. Uh.” He took a step backwards. “Wrong door. I thought this was the, um, bathroom. Sorry.”

  He turned and shot down the hall.

  Twenty-six

  I slipped out of Art Club early, raced home, and tiptoed up the stairs to the MacBean Family Apartment—quietly, so I could take Sam by surprise and maybe catch her before she could stomp out.

  I carefully turned the knob and pushed the kitchen door open.

  There was Sam, leaning against the counter, arms crossed, watching the clock on the microwave. Parka zipped and snapped. Satchel already swung over her shoulder.

  The minute she saw me, she pushed off the counter and gave Beecher’s hair a ruffle.

  “See you, kid,” she said.

  “Oh!” I blinked. “So—”

  She pushed past me.

  “—I just wanted to ask—”

  She thundered out of the apartment.

  “—why you made Dillon—”

  The door slammed shut in my face. (One of these days she was going to bang it right off its hinges.)

  “—join Art Club,” I said to the door.

  Beech had been sitting at the table with a slice of peanut butter toast, with raisins poked into the peanut butter for a face, turning it one way and another, trying to figure out the best place to take a bite without hurting it.

  Now he let out a sympathetic sigh. “Tupid thing again.”

  I didn’t have time to decipher whatever Sam and Beech had been talking about. I wrenched the door open and bolted out after her.

  I caught her at the bottom of the stairs. She whirled on me, practically breathing fire, one fist gripping the doorknob, the other clenched tight at her side.

  “So, hey,” I said, in a completely friendly voice. I propped my elbow on the banister, like I’d just come down to chat. “Dillon’s in Art Club now, huh?”

  That was it, I swear. That’s all I said.

  She narrowed her eyes. “What, you think Dillon’s not good enough for your club?”

  “What?” I stared at her. “No. I didn’t—that’s not what I—”

  Man. Ask one little innocent question and this is what I get: blasted by a fire-breathing babysitter.

  “I thought you wanted more people in Art Club,” she said.

  “Well . . . yeah—”

  “So maybe you should thank me.”

  This was not going the way I planned. What I’d planned was that

  1. I would say—in a completely casual way—“So hey, Dillon’s in Art Club,” and then

  2. Sam—also completely casual—would divulge information, like why Dillon was in Art Club all of a sudden.

  It was as if my plan had never met Sam Zawicki.

  She twisted the knob and wrenched the front door open. She put her head down to push her way out into the wind.

  Then she turned back, eyes narrowed, chin jutted out.

  “Why can’t Dillon be in your club?” she said.

  “He can. He is. Nobody said—”

  “Because he’s got just as much business there as anybody. And he’s got to be somewhere. I can’t watch him all the time. It’s okay in the mornings, but I can’t be there after school because I’m here every day, and Dillon can’t just go around”—she flung a hand in the air—“unsupervised.”

  Boy, that was sure true.

  But I was still confused.

  “Isn’t your grandpa there?” I said.

  She pressed her lips into a narrow line. “Grandpa’s busy,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  I was no expert, but I’d always thought January in Kansas was probably the not-busy time for farmers. They even closed the farmers’ market downtown during the winter, and that’s where Sam’s grandpa sold his beets and potatoes and apples and stuff.

  “So vegetables grow this time of year?” I said.

  (And again, I need to point out that I was being completely friendly and conversational.)

  Sam speared me with a glare. “No, vegetables do not grow this time of year. It’s freezing. What is wrong with you?”

  I blew out a breath. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Something serious, I guess, because I actually thought maybe if I asked nice, you’d be nice back and tell me what was up. And I was going to thank you, because Art Club needs all the people it can get. So thank you for giving us Dillon. Also, I was going to ask you if there’s anything he especially wants to do in Art Club since he won’t talk to any of us, including Mrs. Frazee
.”

  I turned and marched back upstairs, the old wooden steps squeaking beneath my sneakers.

  Sam’s growl drifted up behind me. “He’s already had six detentions this year.”

  I stopped and turned around.

  She pushed the front door shut, blocking out the winter.

  “Six.” She crossed her arms over her army jacket. “You know what that means?”

  I looked at her. How would I know what that meant?

  “Um, no,” I said.

  Sam stared up at me. “Don’t you read your student handbook?”

  “Do you?”

  She shook her head. “That whole thing last year with Dillon and the missing milk forced me to read it.”

  Sam blew out a breath. By this time her rage had deflated, and she’d deflated along with it. She stood there, her back against our front door.

  “He’s the one who hung all that stuff up,” she said. “You know, in Mr. Petrucelli’s announcement? Dillon found gym shorts and shoes all over the locker room, and other stuff just left all over the school, so he took them and strung them up in the hall. To teach people a lesson. So next time they’d pick their stuff up and not leave such a mess.”

  Such a mess? I stopped for a minute to let this sink in.

  Dillon never even bothered to tie his mud-crusted size-sixteen sneakers. Just ambled along with his shoelaces dragging through the floor grit. And also, when he turned in his homework—if he turned in his homework—it was always a grubby gray mess from all the smears and eraser marks and general grime.

  “He thinks he’s defending Grandpa,” said Sam.

  I frowned. “Against gym shorts?”

  Sam studied me for a long minute, till it felt like she was studying a hole right through me.

  “The janitor messed up her knee,” she said finally. “And that big storm last fall flattened everything Grandpa was growing. We needed something, so Grandpa got a job before and after school, helping the janitor till her knee’s better.”

  “Oh. That makes sense.”

  She shook her head. “It’d make better sense if Dillon would wind down. One morning he found a desk one of the teachers had scooted out into the hallway and forgot to scoot back. Lucky I was there to stop him before he shoved it up on top of the trophy case. He says Grandpa’s job’s hard enough already and he doesn’t need extra work.”

  I thought about this, about Sam’s grandpa, a really nice white-haired man with arms as tough as rope from all that farming, and with boots so worn out he had to duct-tape them together, a man who always made the extra effort to squat down and talk to Beecher face to face every time we showed up at the farmers’ market, even though his work-worn knees crackled in protest all the way down and all the way back up again.

  I couldn’t believe I was actually about to agree with Dillon Zawicki, but suddenly there I was, with these words coming out of my mouth: “He has a point.”

  Sam shot me a sharp, surprised look. “Yeah. But do you think he could do something useful with it? Like, I don’t know, help? No. He just makes life harder for everybody, mostly for Grandpa, but also for me, because I’m the one who has to worry about what he’s doing when I’m not there to stop him. Dillon could get kicked out of school, and Grandpa could lose his job. They find out about Dillon, they’ll think my grandpa’s an accomplice.”

  “Well, now that Dillon’s in Art Club,” I said, “maybe he won’t have time to get your grandpa fired. Plus that’ll give us one more person, even if he never talks to us.” I gave her a shaky thumbs-up. “Win-win.”

  She looked at me, to make sure I wasn’t kidding.

  “Okay then,” she said.

  “Okay then,” I said.

  She turned the doorknob. “You tell anybody any of this, Beanboy, you will be sorrier than you’ve ever been in your entire miserable life.”

  I nodded. “Understood.”

  Twenty-seven

  When Noah and I arrived at school in the gray early-morning hours, we didn’t figure this time would be any different from any of the others.

  After we taped up my Beanboy page, we swung back around to the electives hallway, passed the completely annoying girls’ basketball display sprawled all over our stolen bulletin board, started past the art room, and saw a sheet stuck to the art room door.

  I stopped. Put it in reverse. Peered at the paper.

  Canceled? Spots floated before my eyes.

  “It’s happening,” I managed to choke out. “Just like the yearbook said it would.”

  Through the floating spots, I saw Noah crinkle his face into a frown.

  “What are you talking about?” He poked a finger at the bottom of the sheet, to the rest of the note written in smaller letters.

  “Oh.” I sagged in relief. “Mrs. Frazee’s just sick. That’s good.”

  Noah shook his head. “The flu’s nothing to mess with. I’m sure Mrs. Frazee feels like roadkill about now.”

  I was a horrible person. I hadn’t even thought about poor Mrs. Frazee, lying in her sick bed, feverish and miserable, too sick to drag herself to school, until Noah pointed it out.

  I hadn’t thought about Mrs. Frazee because I was thinking about my Beanboy page, about what would happen if she wasn’t there to copy and tape it, and then I was also trying to figure out how long it took a person to get over the flu and back to copying and taping.

  I hoped Mrs. Frazee never found out.

  But at lunchtime, as Noah and I inched our way through the line outside the cafeteria, I stared at the wall.

  It was gone.

  My Beanboy page was gone.

  I tried not to get my hopes up, but when Noah and I ambled into Earhart Middle the next morning and stopped inside the door to unfog and thaw, I sneaked a peak down the hall.

  And there, among the morning rumble and chaos of the Amelia M. Earhart Middle School hallway, were approximately three zillion copies of my Beanboy page, taped to walls and doors, lockers and windows.

  Mrs. Frazee was home sick with the flu. But the Phantom Photocopier copied on.

  One voice, shiny and clear, floated above the rumble of the hall: “I don’t know who’s drawing these, but whoever it is, he’s pretty cool.”

  I stopped dead.

  I’d finally heard it, the word nobody had ever used to describe me before.

  Cool.

  And the person who said it?

  Emma Quinn.

  Twenty-eight

  Emma Quinn thought I was cool.

  I dumped my health book on my desk and slapped my notebook down beside it.

  The shiniest girl in all of Wheaton thought I was cool.

  Well, not me particularly.

  Not Tucker MacBean, Real Live Person.

  But Tucker MacBean, Comic Book Genius.

  “So. Have you told them yet?”

  I looked up, startled.

  Noah was already settled into his seat in front of me. He positioned his health book on the scarred desktop, then placed his notebook, pencil, and eraser in a parallel row beside it.

  He turned around. Raised a questioning eyebrow.

  I shook my head. “Not yet.”

  “You’re running out of time.”

  “I know. I have a plan.”

  He kept looking at me.

  “I do.” I scooted into my seat. “Really.”

  I did have a plan. Squarely tucked in my shoe. I’d worked on it all through social studies and put the final touches on during math.

  You may have noticed I’m not very good with words. In person, anyway. When I’m drawing a comic book, the words come out perfect. My superheroes know exactly what to say. They have speech bubbles above their heads that take care of it for them. If I, Tucker MacBean, Real Live Person, could walk around with a speech bubble over my head, I’d know what to say too.

  I might even know how to tell Art Club that—surprise!—they were dodgeball players.

  Coach Wilder rubbed his hands together, clearly psyched about t
he fascinating health topic of the day: abrasions, or as he called it, When Knees Become Hamburger.

  I flipped to a clean page in my health notebook.

  “Anybody going out for track this spring?” Coach Wilder paced around the health room. “Thinking about running hurdles?” He gazed over the sea of middle-schoolers and gave a knowing nod. “You’ll find out about hamburger pretty quick.”

  Coach Wilder began spouting abrasion facts and figures. Around me, fellow Earhart students sighed, propped their heads on their hands, and began scratching notes, trying their best not to lapse into a coma from sheer boredom.

  (Except Noah, of course. He was sitting straight as a stick, logging every health fact in faithful detail and, knowing Noah, adding a few facts of his own, facts he would thoughtfully share with Coach Wilder later.)

  The other Art Club members kept themselves awake by drawing sketches and doodles or, in Spencer’s case, new knitwear designs for Great-Aunt Bernice.

  “Step one”—Coach Wilder held up one sausage of a finger—“clean the wound. Step two—”

  A sharp rap echoed through the room.

  Coach Wilder glanced up. All of health class turned to stare at the back of the room.

  The door rattled open, and there, slouched in the doorway, was Wesley Banks—the office aide this hour.

  He swaggered into the room. “Sorry to interrupt.” He cocked his chin at Coach Wilder, like he knew that wherever he went, whatever he did, it was never an interruption. “Official business.”

  He held up a sheet of paper. A sheet of pink paper. A sheet of paper that looked frighteningly familiar.

  I closed my eyes. This couldn’t be good.

  “Oh, hey, there you are . . . Tut.”

  Wesley locked his gaze on me. His face hardened into a cold, hard smirk. He strutted down the aisle and stopped in front of my desk.