The Seventh Level

by Jody Feldman

  “And who’s your teacher?”

  “Ms. Skrive.”

  “The same Ms. Skrive whose classroom is not near the second floor bathroom where Mr. McKenzie saw you? Travis,” she says, “they know which alarm was pulled.”

  I slump into her chair and shake my head. “Just because I didn’t go to the nearest bathroom doesn’t mean I did it. If I did, would I be here? Besides, why would I do it when I know I’d get kicked out of life the next time I did something bad? I may not be as smart as a lot of people, but I’m not stupid either.”

  Mrs. Pinchon ekes out a piece of a smile. “No. You’re definitely not stupid.”

  At least that’s something. Now if she’d only quit staring at me.

  “Before I excuse you,” she says, finally glancing away, “I’m curious. Do you know anything about bubble gum in the cafeteria?”

  Uh-oh. What would a normal kid say? “There’s bubble gum for lunch?”

  “No.” She twirls her mirror ball. “Someone claiming to be from The Legend brought in gum for the sixth graders. Though, with the fire alarm, it wasn’t all handed out.”

  Not my fault, but I can’t worry about that now. I need to worry about my next normal-kid line. “Someone from The Legend? Who?”

  “It doesn’t matter who.”

  I smile. “That’s okay. I’ll find out at lunch.”

  “Which, you’ll also find, is mostly in the gym for you seventh graders. We need to give the sixth graders time to buy and eat their lunches,” she says, putting on a very serious face. “And you know what that means, don’t you, Mr. Raines?”

  I shake my head.

  “We’ll need to pay the janitorial staff overtime to get all the crumbs and grease and sticky jelly bits off the gym floor.”

  I think about Mr. McKenzie and his expensive car and the extra money he’ll get from the overtime. And the missing soap. And him snitching on me being in that part of the building.

  Did he pull the fire alarm? And if he did, why would he want to frame me?

  CHAPTER 21

  I’m walking with Matti and Kip to the bicycle rack after school, and they’re wondering why we don’t practice on Fridays, when we have two extra days to do homework.

  I keep my mouth closed. If I open it, I’ll blab about bubble gum and fire alarms and blue envelopes. I want to tell them everything. They’re the ones who kept me sane when I misheard my dad’s phone conversation and thought we were moving to Australia. They were my alibis when someone put Whiskers the rabbit in the gym. They always have my back. But they won’t have it unless I tell them what’s going on. And I can’t.

  I can complain about Mr. McKenzie without spilling anything. “Why is he always around when I get into trouble?”

  “Think about it, Travis,” says Matti. “You do seem to cover every part of the school in the course of the day. And the halls are his turf.”

  “But it’s a big school,” I say. “Why can’t he catch me doing something good?”

  Kip and Matti both look at me.

  “Okay, okay.”

  “Besides the fire alarm and the toilet paper,” says Kip, “he hasn’t caught you.”

  “He wasn’t around when you went up on the roof,” Matti says. “He didn’t see us lock you inside your locker last year. He didn’t blame you for the marble incident.”

  “What marble incident?”

  “This morning? The bucket of marbles rigged to dump all over the gym? Coach Ford finding it before it spilled? How did you not hear?”

  I lean over to unlock my bike. “Probably because I didn’t get blamed.”

  “Exactly,” she says. “Mr. McKenzie didn’t blame you.”

  I shake my head. “Still, he seems to be all around me ever since—”

  “Ever since what?” Kip asks.

  My first blue envelope? Can’t say that. “Ever since I went onto the roof.”

  “Maybe,” he says, “Mrs. Pinchon asked him to watch you.”

  We pedal off, and I wonder if the assistant principal in charge of discipline really did assign a janitor to watch out for me. I can’t be that bad. I’m still getting envelopes.

  I ride home, sling my bike into the garage, grab some dog treats for Curry, fill her water bowl, and sit in the living room to open my envelope. My parents won’t be here for a while.

  First, there’s a blue note paper clipped to the bigger sheet of paper.

  LOL, Travis! Bodily nails! Bravo!

  Bravo? All right! Let me at this next puzzle.

  If May 7 July 19 = eggs, then

  February 21 March 11 May 20 =

  Please slip a representative underneath the teachers’ lounge door by the beginning of school on Tuesday.

  Here we go again. Brain freeze. It’s gonna get stuck on eggs and calendars, and they probably aren’t part of the answer. But what if they are this time?

  I start with eggs. What do I know about them? Birds, reptiles, and amphibians lay them. So do fish. Mammals have them but not like you’d normally think. People put them in cakes and other dessert stuff. And I don’t love them all that much except for those chocolate and marshmallow ones I’ve had at Kip’s, which taste light years better than last night’s moon cookies. Too lemony.

  I grab the cordless and call Kip. “Isn’t this the chocolate egg time of year?”

  “Yeah. Come over if you want.”

  “Uh…”

  “Oh,” he says. “You’re not even supposed to be on the phone, are you?”

  “Yeah. See you on Monday.”

  Fine. Back to the puzzle. I move my mind from eggs to the calendar and check ours to see if the dates on the puzzle are holidays. Nope. The closest is February 21, which could be Presidents’ Day some year. The others could be made-up holidays like National Kiss Your Elbow Day or Balance a Lucky Penny on Your Head Day, but that’d be stretching things.

  So I have nothing but a worthless calendar in one hand, a nonsense puzzle in the other, a fourth coin ready for my drawer, and a blue envelope on my lap. I take a tenth look inside the envelope to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I didn’t. And—

  Curry starts barking, runs to the door, and the bell rings. Doggie ESP.

  I stand on my toes to look out the peephole. Kip! I open the door.

  “Delivery,” he says through the screen part. He holds up a plastic baggie with four of those candy eggs in it.

  “You’re the best!”

  He reaches to open the screen, and I do, too, until I realize what’s in my hand. I quick-shove the blue envelope and the coin behind the window curtains next to me. Not that Kip would recognize them, but I don’t need anything else complicating my life. And I don’t want to lie to the friend who would pick up and come over with four chocolate eggs.

  So I especially don’t want him to see the puzzle on the couch. I steer him to the kitchen and we both devour an egg then go out to kick the soccer ball and talk about soccer camp and how afterward he’s going to basketball camp while I do nothing the rest of the summer. And pretty soon the next-door neighbor’s car pulls in. Ricky and Charlie, who are about three and five, spring out the door and start chasing our ball. Sort of an on-the-ground keep away.

  Mrs. Barron opens the trunk and pulls out some groceries. “Ricky! Charlie! Leave those poor boys alone.”

  “It’s okay,” I call back. “Okay with you, Kip?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “This is actually more fun.”

  “If you don’t mind watching them, I’ll be right out once I’ve put these away. Yell if you need me before that.”

  By the time she comes back, we’ve pretty much ditched the ball, and we’re rolling in the dirt, all five of us: Curry, too. Probably not what a mom wants to see, but she laughs. “I guess it’s bath time,” she says. “C’mon, boys!”

  “We wanna play wif Travis and the big boy some more,” Ricky says.

  Mrs. Barron comes and takes them each by the hand and walks them toward their house. “Travis will play with you again t
omorrow.”

  I will?

  “He’s helping us dig in the dirt and plant our new flowers.”

  I am?

  She turns back and smiles at me. “About ten in the morning?” she calls.

  “Sure,” I say, wondering when I agreed to that.

  Ten minutes after Kip leaves, my mom gets home. I hear her but stay in my room and pin the puzzle to my dartboard over the ugly picture of Randall, the one from the sixth grade yearbook I blew up at the copy center the day after he kicked a soccer ball into my nose.

  I throw my first dart. It hits below the writing. I aim the…

  Am I stupid? What if I totally decimate the puzzle and never get it solved? What if there’s a secret code in the fiber of the paper and I ruin it?

  Okay. I doubt that. Still. Mistake. I take off the paper and look at it again until my mom calls me downstairs.

  “What have you been doing?” she asks. She points to the little rug that sits inside the back door from the kitchen.

  “Wiping my feet?”

  “Looks like you wiped ten people’s feet.”

  Just two people’s, I’d say if I wouldn’t get into trouble. Kip came in and ate six moon cookies. He liked the lemon. “I was rolling in the mud with Ricky and Charlie,” I say. “And I think maybe someone here volunteered me for something and didn’t tell me about it.”

  “Oh yeah.” My mom pulls the lettuce from the refrigerator. “I thought you’d rather help Mr. Barron plant flowers and bushes instead of doing my boring chores.”

  “You might have asked me first.”

  “Yes, and you might have asked me before you hung over the edge of the roof.”

  “Aren’t I still paying for it?”

  “Exactly.”

  I shake my head and give her a smile. A nasty one, though, and she knows it. “I think I’ll keep quiet and set the table.”

  “I think that’s a good idea.” She tears into the lettuce, tosses pieces into the salad spinner, then pushes the spin button extra hard before she looks up. “What’s the deal, Travis?” she asks. “On any normal day you would have celebrated if I arranged for you to play in the dirt.”

  I don’t want to talk about any of it, but that’s suicide around here.

  “It’s nothing,” I say, getting out three napkins. “I got blamed for other things I didn’t do.”

  “What?”

  “Someone pulled the fire alarm when I wasn’t in class. I had the bathroom pass.”

  “And you didn’t do it?” she asks.

  “You know I wouldn’t.”

  “You wouldn’t.” She takes a piece of chicken from the bowl and shakes off the extra marinade. “What else? You said, ‘other things.’”

  I tell her about the toilet paper and the soap, and I’m surprised Mrs. Pinchon never alerted her. Maybe there’s hope. Maybe Mrs. Pinchon believes me. Either that or she believes I’m totally guilty and wants me to get overconfident so she can catch me once and for all.

  When I finish, my mom looks straight at me and I feel even smaller than my puny self. “Honest, Mom. I didn’t do any of it. I don’t do mean stuff.”

  She almost nods. “You may get into trouble, but you’ve always had a conscience. You’ve never done anything malicious.”

  I should feel better, but she’s still looking at me.

  “Here’s the problem,” she finally says. “You’ve put yourself into a position where people believe you’re capable of masterminding everything that goes wrong. You can’t have a happy future that way, Travis. You have to change.”

  She turns on the stove and puts the grill pan on the flame. And she doesn’t lump on any more punishment. At least not any real punishment. I walk upstairs to my room, and those words about the future feel worse than getting grounded.

  How can I make everything right? Maybe I should’ve asked my mom, but I didn’t and I know why. This recent trouble started with the envelopes. If I ignore them, the trouble will stop.

  But no way I’m ignoring any envelope.

  CHAPTER 22

  After dinner I decide there’s only one thing to do. Fast-forward through the puzzles.

  If May 7 July 19 = eggs, then

  February 21 March 11 May 20 =

  I need to forget eggs and calendars. They’re not part of the answer, like hats and crackers had nothing to do with the second puzzle.

  That puzzle was pure weirdness at first, but the weirdness helped me solve it. So, what’s weird about this one? For starters, no punctuation between the dates. That has to mean something. So does the reason they chose those dates.

  That’s all I have except legs that need to move. So I knee-jump on my bed. May 7 July 19. May 7 July 19. Two months, two dates. Two and two equals four. Kip brought over four eggs. Four letters in the word “eggs.” Eggs. Eggs. Should I eat the last two eggs? I bounce higher. Harder. I do not need more sugar, not after brownies for dessert. Okay. The puzzle. May 7 July 19. May 7 July 19. Four eggs. Four letters.

  I stop. Why am I suddenly obsessed with the number four? Two dates. Two pieces to each date. One answer. Four letters. Idea! But can it really be this easy? I write myself a key.

  A B C D E F G H I J K L M

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

  N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

  14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

  May’s the fifth month, and the fifth letter is E. May what? May 7. Seven equals G. July’s the seventh month. G again! And nineteen? EGGS!

  Let’s do this. February’s the second month. B’s the second letter. Letter 21? U. March 11. C. K. May 20. E. T. Now, what can I slide underneath the teacher’s lounge door besides a boring picture of a bucket?

  I keep wondering while I’m digging at the Barrons’ house. I could tape a handle onto a collapsed origami cup—we made those in fourth grade—but I don’t remember how to fold one, and the computer’s still off-limits. I could draw a picture of a deer with big antlers, then a plus sign, then a first-aid kit like one of those rebuses—buck + kit—but my deer would probably look like a puddle attached to some plankton.

  By the time Charlie comes to help me dig, I’m sort of resigned to the fact that I’ll have to draw a bucket good enough that they don’t mistake it for a purse.

  With Charlie the digging’s going slower, but I guess it’s okay because Mr. Barron thanks me for letting him help. So, there’s Charlie in one part of my mind and the bucket in the other. And when I get home, I pull out my mom’s old copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I’m right. The kid’s last name is Bucket.

  I tape the book jacket to the window, tape a piece of plain paper over it, and trace the thing with a pencil, including the title, the little Willy Wonka guy, and what I’m hoping are Charlie’s eyes. I might not be a good drawer, but I’m a good tracer. And so they understand what I’m thinking, I draw a red arrow pointing to the kid’s eyes. At the end of the arrow I write, His last name. Then I put the paper into my backpack.

  I’m at school on Monday right when the doors open. I slide the tracing into the teachers’ lounge with no eyes around. None at all.

  By lunchtime I haven’t gotten into any trouble either. Not even little trouble as in “Travis, are you paying attention?” trouble. Then Katie and Matti keep cracking jokes, and I almost blow milk through my nose. And I’m feeling really good, going to my locker to grab books for my afternoon classes. Then I see a regular blue envelope. Even better! Any envelope gets me closer to the end. I duck into a bathroom stall.

  Travis,

  The principals think you pulled the fire alarm, which should be enough to kick you out. But without proof, we’re giving you another chance. Dig up two of those yellow flowers you planted yesterday and put them back in their pots, which we saved from the trash and which are on the side of your house. Put one pot outside of Mrs. Pinchon’s door and one outside of Principal Wilkins’s door with a note that says you’re sorry. Tomorrow before school.

  The Legend of Lauer

&nb
sp; I kick the toilet seat. It flies up and crashes down. I unlatch the door and kick it open.

  I can’t dig up those flowers. I can’t. It’s not that I spent four hours over there planting them. I just don’t steal. Period.

  CHAPTER 23

  I don’t hear anything my teachers say the rest of the day. I strike out every time I’m up at bat. I drop two routine pop flies in the outfield. I apologize to Coach and Matti and Kip and whoever else is listening at the end of the game. Then I pedal my bike out of there like a madman, trying to figure out how to steal flowers without getting caught. Or if I should even try.

  Why would I want to be in a group that asks me to do something so wrong? But The Legend isn’t. The Legend tries to make things right. That’s why those seven kids started—

  My brain kicks into overdrive. My legs stop pumping quite so hard. That’s it!

  The website! How The Legend started! Kids doing things wrong for all the right reasons. The note asked me to do something right, but in a wrong way. This has to be a sort of puzzle. An extra test to see if I can figure out the right way to apologize even though I didn’t do anything wrong.

  I ride straight to the Barrons’ and knock on their door.

  Ricky and Charlie are yelling my name from the other side. Mrs. Barron opens up, and the boys push past her and beg me to play soccer again. If I can stop panting long enough to ask my question then get the answer I need, I’ll do anything.

  I make my neck work overtime and look Mrs. Barron in the eye. “I can’t tell you why,” I say between breaths, “but how mad would you be if I dug up two of your yellow flowers today if I promise to replace them with my own money as soon as my mom or dad can take me back to the store where you bought them?”

  She gives me that what-are-you-talking-about look they must teach all parents. “I suppose it’s okay, Travis,” she says finally.

  “Thank you so much,” I say. “I promise I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m trying to do everything right, and that’s why I’m asking.”