“Ignore him, Josh,” Lloyd said.
“I obliterated that test,” Quentin said. “A near-perfect score. There’s no way you’re going to beat me.”
Lloyd leaned toward my backpack, where IAmAWeenieBurger’s eye sat in a baggie in the side pouch. “In case you were wondering what a donkey-butt jerk looks like,” he said, aiming the eye directly at Quentin, “there’s the one we’ve been telling you about.”
Kaitlyn Wien-Tomita was there with her camera, and she tried to interview Quentin. “Quentin, can I ask you a few questions about your performance? That was truly amazing!”
“I don’t know, Kaitlyn,” he said. “How many subscribers do you have?”
Kaitlyn seemed flustered. “Subscribers? Well, I’m kind of just starting, but I got nine hundred views last night, so—
“Call me when you get your first ten million,” Quentin sneered. “I don’t want to mess up my chance of granting an exclusive interview to the Channel 8 news.” Then he leaned right into her lens and added, “I do not grant permission for release of any footage of me in any digital medium, in perpetuity.” After that, he blocked his face with his backpack and marched away from her.
Kaitlyn looked distressed, and I could see in her expression that she was going to be a great reporter someday. She had the exact same look on her face that all reporters do when they’re in the middle of a story and a pedestrian walks up behind them and jumps up and down, shouting, “Woo-hoo! I’m famous!”
Principal Hartley stood on stage and addressed the two dozen hopefuls seated in front of her. “I assume no one else is trying out for Super Brain, naturally,” she said.
“Actually,” Lloyd called out, pushing me to the front of the room. “Quentin is about to go down in flames!” Everyone gasped, no one louder than Principal Hartley. Kaitlyn was now filming us as Lloyd shoved me up on stage. “And he’ll grant you an exclusive, Kaitlyn. Get ready to meet your new Super Brain, the smartest guy in school, Josh McBain!”
“Um,” I stalled. Everyone was staring at me. It seemed like I should say something smart, so I gave it my best shot. “So, like, E equals MC squared!”
“All right, let’s get this over with.” Principal Hartley sighed. She took a seat and pulled out a sheet of test questions. Kaitlyn followed me with her camera, closing in on my awkward, terrified face. My own principal couldn’t even pretend she thought I had a chance, but who could blame her? I was wasting everyone’s time here, and we all knew it.
Lloyd leaned in to whisper a final word of advice. “Remember, if you don’t know the answer, just make something up. There’s always a chance you’ll be right.” It was pretty much the worst advice ever. There was a one in a million chance a random guess might pay off once . . . but for all twenty questions on the test? The odds were about as good as me winning the lottery every day for a month while simultaneously being attacked by wild badgers.
Principal Hartley handed me the Super Brain hat, and I tried not to vomit or die from embarrassment as I put it on. I took my seat at the front of the cafeteria, and every eye in the room was on me, including IAmAWeenieBurger’s eye. Lloyd was holding my backpack for me, making sure the eye was pointed right at me at all times. Talk about pressure!
“Question one,” Principal Hartley said. “Math.” What a relief! Math was my best subject. “Name every prime number whose square root is an integer.”
She looked at me, along with everyone else, and the room fell totally silent. I could hear the clock ticking. I’m not sure exactly how long the silence lasted, but I’d guess it was somewhere between five seconds and five years.
“I’ll need an answer,” Principal Hartley insisted.
I took a deep breath as the words swirled in my head. “Prime number . . .” “square root . . .” “integer . . .” I knew what those terms meant on their own, but when you put them all together like that, it was like another language.
I needed more time. “Just one . . .” I started to say, but I couldn’t even come up with the next word of my request. One second? One moment?
“Correct!” Principal Hartley replied, sounding shocked. “One is the only prime number whose square root is an integer.”
Lloyd pumped his fist and gave me a thumbs-up. Quentin rolled his eyes and muttered under his breath, “Easy.” It felt so good to get one right, even if it was a complete accident. Maybe I could quit now. I wouldn’t win, but at least I’d end with a perfect 100 percent on the questions I’d been asked so far.
“Question two,” Principal Hartley read, “History.” I gulped. History was my worst subject. I knew that important things happened in 1492 and 1776, but that was pretty much it. “Who was the first natural-born US president?”
Natural-born? What did that even mean? Were some of our presidents hatched? Well, at least there were a limited number of possible answers. All I had to do was name a president, and I’d have a one-in-however-many-presidents-there-have-been chance of being right.
Who was I kidding? I could only name about five presidents without looking them up. George Washington. Abraham Lincoln. I knew there were two Roosevelts . . . Franklin and . . . Bobby? Justin? No, Justin Roosevelt was a kid in my karate class when I was nine. Man, I couldn’t even think of the second Roosevelt’s name. All right, so I wouldn’t guess him.
“Time’s running out, Mr. McBain,” Principal Hartley warned.
I had to say something. Lincoln seemed like a good guess. It probably wasn’t right, but at least I knew for sure he was a president, so I wouldn’t look too dumb. I glanced back at Lloyd, and this time, I made contact with IAmAWeenieBurger’s eyeball. I stared deeply at it and decided to shout Lincoln as confidently as I could.
“Martin Van Buren!” I said. What? Where did that come from? I had forgotten all about that guy. Why would I have called out his name instead of the one I was actually thinking?
I could tell from the stunned look on Quentin’s face that I got it right. Principal Hartley was so shocked she double-checked her answer sheet. “Um . . . yes!” she announced.
“Really!” I said. “Are you sure?” Lloyd pumped his fist in excitement, while Quentin sat forward in his seat, skeptically. Seeing the pride on Lloyd’s face felt good, but even better was the annoyance on Quentin’s. He scowled at me, with his arms folded across his chest, daring me to keep my winning streak going.
I couldn’t explain it, but I wasn’t going to argue with a correct answer. Maybe I was smarter than I thought.
“Question three. Grammar. Answering this question is easy. Just name what part of speech the word ‘answering’ is in the previous sentence.”
This time, I didn’t even hesitate. “A gerund!” I announced, clearly and confidently.
“Correct!” Principal Hartley cheered. She shot me a huge smile. “Very impressive, Mr. McBain.”
Lloyd was practically doing a jig around Quentin’s chair. He was so excited—and Quentin was so annoyed. But I had a nagging feeling that something was wrong. For starters, I had never heard the word “gerund” before in my life. That’s a part of speech? We never studied that in class. How could I possibly have known that was the answer?
I felt bad for a second or two, and then I felt great again, because getting answers right was awesome, and it was more fun to focus on that feeling than the guilt or confusion.
“Question four. Astronomy. Which planet has the most moons?”
Once again, the answer came to me in a flash. “The planet with the most moons is X4-Furg88 in the Galbutron galaxy, with 9,487.”
The room was silent. What did I just say? Suddenly, I realized where the answers were coming from. I gazed at my backpack, and I saw the eye trained right on my brain.
“IAmAWeenieBurger!” I shouted.
Principal Hartley seemed flustered. She flipped through the answer sheet. “Well, a weenie burger wouldn’t have gotten those first three questions right. But if you’re saying you want to change your answer for this one, you have ten seconds left.”
&nb
sp; I forced out a chuckle. “I was just kidding! You mean this solar system, right?” I looked back at the eye, and it seemed to beam the answer directly to me. “Obviously, that would be Jupiter, with sixty-three discovered so far by lackluster Earth astronomers.”
Principal Hartley checked her answer sheet. “Correct!”
I felt queasy. I had never cheated on a test before. My conscience told me to stop, but everything else was telling me to keep going. The shock on Quentin’s face. The pride on Lloyd’s. The thought of telling my parents I’d won. And, of course, the severed eyeball that was helping me cheat. The aliens were an advanced race, after all. Who was I to argue with them on what was the right thing to do?
I didn’t get a single question wrong for the rest of the quiz. Not only that, I answered them in record time. I even answered Principal Hartley when she said, “Aren’t you just the smartest kid in school?” with an unqualified, “Yes!” Quentin went through a range of emotions. At one point, he just sat there frozen, with his jaw hanging open. Later, he became a whimpering mess. But when Principal Hartley announced that I would be the new Super Brain, his expression changed instantly.
He was furious.
Everyone in the room stood up and cheered for me. Kaitlyn came racing up with her camera for a close-up. Quentin was so enraged he cut her off before she got to me. “I’d like to say a few words on the record,” he hissed.
“Sorry,” Kaitlyn said, weaving around him. “I want to talk to the winner. Josh, how did you do it?”
I waited for another perfect answer to nuzzle its way into my brain, but this time, IAmAWeenieBurger left me on my own, with the blinking light of the camera petrifying me into stupidity. “Well, me do good smart answers,” was all that came out.
Thankfully, Principal Hartley rescued me from the awkward moment. She stood up and enthusiastically shook my hand. “I never knew there was anyone in our school as smart as Quentin,” she gushed. “Let alone someone even smarter! Perhaps we should call you Josh McBrain!”
Quentin was a bit less noble about my victory. “Wow, congratulations, Josh,” he said. “It’s almost as if you had a copy of the test in advance.” Now, Kaitlyn pointed her camera at him, but he was too absorbed to realize his meltdown was being caught on video.
“Sorry, Quentin,” Lloyd said. “Josh won fair and square. Now we all know who the real Super Brain is around here.”
“Impossible!” Quentin spat. “No one’s smarter than me! I know you cheated. Cheater! CHEATER!” He shouted as loudly as he could, but everyone else mostly ignored him. His face grew red with fury, and a huge vein started bulging out on his forehead. Snarling like a bull, he jumped up on a table and stomped his foot to get people’s attention. “This Super Brain competition has been tainted by LIES! Josh cheated, and I’m going to find out how!”
“Good luck,” Lloyd said, leading me out of the room. “Too bad you’ve been having so much trouble coming up with answers today.”
Lloyd and I hurried away triumphantly, but we made sure that as we left, we laughed loud enough for Quentin to hear.
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
I could tell from the look on Kaitlyn’s face that she thought this was going to be another kick-butt video.
CHAPTER 10
The celebration for my victory lasted about five minutes, and then Lloyd reminded me that we were supposed to talk to Mr. Mudd. Of course, before we could have that conversation, I had to lie to an eyeball. “That was really amazing how you helped me become the Smart-Off Super Brain,” I whispered into the mesh pocket of my backpack as I shoved it into my locker. “But now, I have to . . . um . . .” I looked to Lloyd for help, and as usual, he knew just what to say.
“He’s gonna make a celebratory poop. Earth tradition.” It’s hard to tell whether IAmAWeenieBurger believed him, because his eye couldn’t actually respond, but we had to get to Mr. Mudd’s room before he left for the day. So I slammed the locker door shut, then Lloyd and I hurried down the hallway. “Let me do all the talking,” Lloyd said. As if there was any question.
It was half an hour after school ended, so my heart sank when I saw the lights in his classroom were off. “Maybe we can catch him in the parking lot,” I said.
Lloyd shook his head. “No, this is what he does. Come on.” He waved me over to the door, and we peeked in the window to see what was going on.
Mr. Mudd was there, all right. The lower half of his body was bent over the radiator near the windows. The top half of his body was buried underneath the shades, moving around in a regular pattern. “What’s he doing?”
Lloyd reached for the doorknob as he explained. “You ever see those flashes of light across the soccer field around this time of day? I think this is where they come from.”
We slowly opened the door and let ourselves into Mr. Mudd’s room. Before doing whatever he was apparently doing now, he must’ve been eating. There was a nearly finished burrito, a big bowl of chili fries, and two cans of Mountain Dew on his desk. I had a feeling he wouldn’t have wanted us to see any of this, but Lloyd didn’t seem concerned.
It’s weird to walk up behind somebody who has no idea you’re there. I wasn’t sure what to say to let him know we’d entered the room. As it turned out, he was the one to make the first sound.
FRRRRRRRRT!
Yes, my teacher farted, with Lloyd and me just a few feet away. It seemed like a good reason to retreat quickly to the hallway, but before I could, there was another sound . . .
Lloyd laughing. Loudly.
“HEH-HEH-HEH-HEH-HEH!”
The next thing I knew, there was a blinding light in my face, as the window shade shot up and flapped around the roller with a sound as loud as a machine gun. BAP! BAP! BAP! It took a moment for my eyes to focus and see that Mr. Mudd was holding a reflecting board covered in a hundred tiny mirrors. It was bouncing sunlight off every surface in the room, right into my face. “I knew you’d come!” he shouted.
Once I was able to focus, I saw Mr. Mudd looking stranger than he ever had before. He was wearing a face mask with green-tinted goggles and a hat made from tinfoil. He looked almost like an alien himself.
Apparently, it was around then that Mr. Mudd was able to focus as well. “Boys!” he said. He stashed his mirror board on a shelf and ripped his face mask off. “I thought you were them!”
“Them?” I said.
“You know . . .” Mr. Mudd pointed out the window, up to the sky. “Them!”
“Right,” Lloyd said.
“You probably think I’m crazy,” Mr. Mudd sighed.
“Not at all!” Lloyd said. “In fact, we have some questions. About ‘them.’”
“You do?” Mr. Mudd said. “Really? You want to talk about aliens?” He had this huge smile on his face, the way my two-year-old cousin gets when I agree to play trains with him. “Have a seat! Tell me. Have you met aliens? Seen a UFO? Received telepathic brainwaves from beyond?”
“Uh, none of those,” I explained. “We’re just curious.”
“I see,” Mr. Mudd responded, disappointed. “What do you want to know?”
“Well, you always talk about how dangerous aliens would be, how they’re spying on us, how they’d want to take over or blow up the Earth for fun. But Earth’s a pretty cool planet, right?” Lloyd said. “So we were just wondering if maybe you have it wrong. Maybe aliens would come here just to, like, hang out.”
“You fool!” Mr. Mudd exploded. Then, he caught his breath and calmed himself down. “Sorry, boys. Maybe I got a little carried away just now.”
“Yeah, kinda,” I replied. “I think Lloyd has a point.”
“FOOL!” Mr. Mudd shouted again. Then again, he calmed himself down. “Sorry. Boys, let me explain something. This planet we live on is a one-in-a-universe kind of gold mine. Breathable air, plenty of water, a livable climate. If aliens are exploring space, it’s because they’re looking for those things. They want what we have, and in all likelihood, they have the means to get it, so
we’re all doomed! DOOMED!” For the third time, Mr. Mudd had become so worked up that he had to stop and catch his breath.
“Oxygen is nice,” Lloyd said. “But so are video games, right?”
“Video games?” Mr. Mudd repeated. When he heard those two words, his entire expression changed. It was like we had said the magic words. “Are you sure you haven’t met any aliens?”
“Positive,” I said. I pulled on Lloyd’s shirt and started to back up toward the doorway. Something about Mr. Mudd’s face got me very nervous. “We should probably go.”
“Listen, boys,” Mr. Mudd continued. “Even if aliens say their intentions are innocent, they shouldn’t be trusted. All it would take is one provocation and they might choose to invade. Be vigilant. Always be vigilant!” He yanked the window shade down, plunging the room back into darkness. Lloyd and I got out of there as fast as we could.
Once we were in the hallway, I could see that Lloyd was just as concerned as I was. “Did you see how he got when I mentioned video games?” Lloyd asked.
I nodded. “Oh my God, Lloyd,” I said, just having a revelation. “That explains his food. Burritos, chili fries, soda. He meant to fart like that.”
“What?”
“He was shining a light at the sky and farting. He was talking to them!”
“Whoa, maybe he does know what he’s talking about,” Lloyd said. “Maybe those buttheads aren’t so nice after all.”
I looked at my watch. “We’d better get IAmAWeenie-Burger’s eyeball out of my locker before he gets suspicious.”
Lloyd followed me back to my locker. We were in such a hurry that we didn’t even see that someone had been standing outside Mr. Mudd’s door the whole time, listening to our conversation.
CHAPTER 11
Until we knew for sure what the aliens were up to, Lloyd and I decided we should at least pretend that everything was fine. As we walked home, we kept thanking IAmAWeenieBurger’s eyeball for his help in defeating Quentin. “You did it!” I shouted. “Quentin was so furious!”
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