The Great Interactive Dream Machine

by Richard Peck

  8

  How Bad Can It Be?

  Something about the next morning didn’t feel right. Something was missing, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  It wasn’t Aaron. When I dragged a shopping bag full of Hulk’s dress code downstairs, Aaron was on the curb with a shopping bag full of Stink’s stuff. “Getting all this back will be the only tricky part,” he said, “probably.” Then the bus pulled up.

  At school, half the eighth grade was on the front steps, making a circle around Daryl. He had a bandage on his head. “I was concussed,” he told them. “It wasn’t soccer. It was a mugging.”

  We went on inside. The halls were jammed. “Upper-school locker room,” Aaron said, “and step on it.”

  We crept into the locker room like a couple of small bag ladies. Nobody was around. We made our drop and left. On the way to homeroom I said, “How do we get our own clothes back?”

  “We probably don’t,” Aaron said. “We’ll have to tell our moms we outgrew them.”

  Then in homeroom an announcement blared on the P.A.:JOSH LEWIS AND AARON ZIMMER:

  REPORT TO THE HEADMASTER AT ONCE.

  “Whoa,” everybody said, and looked at us. Buster Brewster ran a finger across his throat. Buster has to report to the counselor every day because he’s behaviorally disabled. But even he’s never been to the headmaster. Some people don’t even think he exists.

  We went.

  As we walked the last mile, Aaron said, “It can’t be about Daryl’s mugging. They definitely can’t finger us for that. A couple of complete strangers did that.”

  The secretary in the headmaster’s outer office looked over her glasses and nodded us to his door.

  We went in.

  It was a big, square room with class pictures on all the walls. The whole place smelled of fear. There were two items on a big polished desk. Behind it was the headmaster. He’s an oldish guy, maybe eight, maybe ten feet tall, sitting back in his big leather chair. A shaft of morning sunlight glinted off his bald dome.

  “Come forth.”

  We went forth with hung heads.

  “Examine the evidence on the desk.”

  We looked, and there they were.

  Our wallets.

  That’s what I’d missed this morning. When we’d put our clothes in Stink’s and Hulk’s lockers, we’d left our wallets in our pockets. With I.D. Home addresses. Next of kin. In Aaron’s case, his A2Z e-mail handle. Full disclosure.

  Aaron smacked his forehead.

  “Explanation for this prank?”

  Prank? I guess you could call it a prank. In fact, you might as well.

  But we didn’t have an explanation. Aaron was out of answers and as quiet as a tomb. I thought about pleading insanity.

  “Claim your property,” the headmaster said after a year.

  We pocketed our wallets.

  “About-face.”

  For one precious moment we smelled freedom. But two people were standing there when we turned around. I looked up six feet of backup dress code, and there stood Hulk Hotchkiss. Aaron looked up Stink Stuyvesant. If you ever wanted to make anybody feel small, this was the way. I hung my head. There on the floor in front of Stink and Hulk were our yesterday’s dress code in little clumps. Everything but shoes.

  “Apologies,” the headmaster prompted behind us.

  “Sorry, Hulk,” I piped.

  “Sorry, Stink,” Aaron said, half alto, half baritone.

  You couldn’t blame Hulk and Stink if they were steamed at us. After all, they’d probably had to go home yesterday in shorts. But they’re deeply committed preppies, and both of them are headed for Yale. They just put out big square hands for us to shake. Besides, what could they do to us without endangering their college admissions? Hulk’s grip nearly broke every bone in my hand, though.

  “Now pick up your own clothes and go,” the headmaster said behind us. “Stink—I mean Stuyvesant’s and Hotchkiss’s dress codes have recently reappeared in the upper-school locker room. Otherwise we’d have to handle this as a theft instead of a ... puerile prank.”

  Again we smelled freedom, until we got to the door. “And report back to this office immediately after school.”

  Homeroom was practically over anyway. We decided to take our yesterday’s dress code straight down to the Black Hole and stash it with our shoes.

  “What’s puerile mean?” I asked.

  “In our case, it means they got us on a misdemeanor, not a felony. How bad can it be? A few days of detention? They don’t expel tuition payers. Maybe we can serve our time in the Black Hole. Maybe they’ll release us in Mrs. Newbery’s custody.”

  Aaron was still looking on the bright side. But knowing that we had to report back to the headmaster’s office really made the day drag.

  Rumors about us swirled through school. But the only thing everybody knew for sure was that we’d seen the headmaster and survived. We got some respect for this. Daryl let us eat lunch for the entire period. Buster Brewster wanted to be our friend—the worst kid in our grade wanted to bond with us.

  Then we hit History. We made sure to get there on time. I made sure I went in behind Aaron. Mr. Thaw was taking roll already. He starts early. He looked up and said, “Zimmer. Freeze.”

  Mr. L. T. Thaw is Huckley’s hardest teacher and the oldest. He should have retired long ago and gone to the Old Teachers’ Home. But he thinks he owns the school.

  Aaron stopped dead, and I walked up his heels.

  “Number one,” Mr. Thaw said, “you were absent without leave yesterday. You too, Lewis,” he added, seeing through Aaron to me. “Number two, Zimmer, you were missing on the very day you were to give your oral report—a strange coincidence.”

  Come to think of it, this was true. Everybody in class had been assigned a U.S. president. We’d been giving oral reports on them all year long. I’d already done Chester A. Arthur. Now we were up to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  But Aaron had forgotten. We’d both had a lot on our minds.

  Mr. Thaw’s old eyes pierced him from under craggy brows. “So I suggest that you make up for lost time, Zimmer, by giving your report now.”

  There Aaron stood, defenseless, not a note in his hand, not a printout on his person.

  “Whoa,” the whole class said.

  “Now?” Aaron said in a small voice.

  Mr. Thaw nodded. He meant to hang Aaron out to dry, and the whole class settled down to watch. I slipped into a seat. Aaron shrugged and strolled to the front. People in the back of the room stood up to see. Every eye was on him. He looked back.

  “Picture it,” he said, borrowing a gesture or two from Stink Stuyvesant. “The American nation on its knees from the Market Crash of twenty-nine and the Great Depression. Breadlines and banks closing, Hooverville shantytowns blossoming in every vacant lot. Onto the scene for the election of 1932 comes Franklin Delano Roosevelt, son of an aristocratic Hudson River Valley family and distant cousin of Theodore.”

  Here Aaron nodded down a row to Fishface Pierrepont, who had already given his report on Teddy Roosevelt.

  “F.D.R.,” Aaron said, plucking facts out of the classroom air, “unhappily married member of the Harvard class of ought four, served as New York state senator and assistant secretary of the Navy, and was governor of the state during the first of his four successful runs for the presidency. Moving right along, we come now to the New Deal, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and—”

  “Very well, Zimmer,” Mr. Thaw said in a weary voice. “Resume your seat.” He squinted down the rows. “Who’s doing Truman?”

  I was impressed and annoyed. When Aaron resumed his seat, I gave him a poke. “How do you do that? How can you call up all that data?”

  “It’s common knowledge,” he muttered back.

  Aaron got us through History, and we hadn’t been missed in Math yesterday. Coach Renwick hadn’t minded us cutting soccer. Then we came to the end of the day, and it was time to report back to you-know-who.
/>   “Look, how bad can it be?” Aaron was still saying as we slumped down to the headmaster’s outer office.

  The secretary was at her desk. Two other ladies were sitting along the wall. My head was hanging, but I looked up.

  “Mom,” I said.

  “Mom,” Aaron said.

  Our moms were there, and they had the look of parents who’d already seen the headmaster.

  “Josh,” Mom said, “I’ve had to take time off from work.”

  “Aaron,” Mrs. Zimmer said, “this was my court time at the tennis club.”

  We both smacked our foreheads. We were being released in the custody of our moms.

  And another thing. We got our quizzes back on Time and Again from Headbloom that day. I got a B. Aaron got a B plus.

  9

  The Threshold of a New Frontier

  Older guys beginning to hang around Heather and the house?

  Me turning into a troubled kid pulling pranks at school?

  Dad still out in Chicago?

  With all this, Mom had a lot on her mind. She and Dad speed dialed all weekend. Then on Sunday night he gave me a jingle. Usually I wait for his call. That night I wasn’t so eager.

  “Josh, what’s this prank you pulled at school all about?”

  “Dad, I’m thinking puberty.”

  He sighed all the way from Chicago. “You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking you’re acting out because I’m not there.”

  “That’s a good thought, Dad. Come on home.”

  But he said he couldn’t do that. He was working around the clock on the Lucky Mutt account.

  The whole situation was left up to Mom. She said I was grounded until I could come up with a complete explanation for swapping senior dress code for my own—full disclosure.

  If you ask me, a sixth grader is grounded most of the time anyway. In my case it meant cutting down to an hour of TV every night, so I was in my room a lot. I may be the only kid at Huckley without TV in his room.

  I didn’t see that much of Aaron, but we probably needed to take a breather from each other. At school he was in the Black Hole. Then he’d tear home to his technopolis. He basically grounded himself, but he’d call me up from his room in the evening.

  “Picture it. When I foolproof this formula, look what we’ve got.”

  “What? Free trips to the Hamptons and the headmaster’s office?”

  “Think bigger, Josh. We’re standing on the threshold of a new frontier, and I’ll be a shoo-in for a Westinghouse science scholarship. Most of the great discoveries in science are accidental. What I’ve stumbled onto here is essentially a new formula. Once I’ve got it vaccinated for viruses, we can dial ourselves into the cosmic Internet and go with our every need. Past, future, even lateral moves. This could rank right up there with the discovery of radium and call waiting. Josh, what we may have here is the Great Interactive Dream Machine.”

  Aaron was so pleased with himself and his new discovery, it was too late to confess I’d helped. “What about your old formula? The one that does schematics of dinosaurs to send you to computer camp?”

  “I’ve got that on the back burner.” Aaron sounded vague. “I’ll get back to that.”

  I let him rave on about his dream machine. What choice did I have?

  I was leading a pretty quiet life, but Heather dropped in one night. Being grounded didn’t mean I could keep her out of my room. I was in bed reading when she barged in and flopped down. Her eyes were bright and beady, but worried.

  “Two words,” she said. “Hulk Hotchkiss.”

  The R. L. Stine jumped in my hand. I marked my place in it.

  Heather moped. “Muffie’s beginning to get letters from him.”

  “She lies,” I said without even thinking about it.

  “Muffie would never lie to me,” Heather said. “Do you think she’s lying?”

  I nodded.

  “How would you know? She says Hulk’s letters are pure poetry.” Heather gave herself a hug. “He can’t wait for summer either. It’ll be the two of them under the stars on the same dune. Her mother will hate it. Perfect?”

  “Too good to be true,” I said.

  Heather sighed. “So I was wondering... do you ever see anything of Stink Stuyvesant?”

  I shrugged. “I haven’t seen a lot of him lately.”

  Heather swung her combat boots off my bedspread and started for the door. “Well, the next time you run into Stink,” she said somewhat hopelessly, “tell him... like hi.” She hung on the doorknob. Then she left.

  I read until my light began to flicker and dim and go on and off. So Aaron was still awake, up in the penthouse tinkering his technopolis. I closed my book and decided to call it a day. R. L. Stine has given me some of my all-time most exciting and interesting dreams.

  The big bombshell of the week didn’t go off till after dinner the next night.

  I was in the living room, selecting from TV Guide for my sixty minutes of viewing. Mom was there on the sofa, making a stab at conversation.

  “So what’s been happening, Josh?”

  “Mom, not a lot can happen to you when you’re grounded,” I said. “I think that’s the point.”

  The doorbell rang, and Heather rocketed from her room to answer it. Mom and I waited.

  Heather came back, something stunned in her eyes. Filling the doorway behind her was a guy about six four. Well-gelled blond hair slicked back. Good tan for this time of year. Shoulders out to here. He was wearing three shades of Banana Republic beige over a muscle shirt.

  I heard Mom swallow.

  He loomed into the room and stuck out a hand like a shovel. “Mrs. Lewis? Trip Renwick here.”

  It was Coach Renwick. I knew that. But he wasn’t wearing his whistle and Dartmouth sweatshirt. And what was he doing here, anyway?

  Coach Renwick is a good-looking guy, but I never noticed how good-looking till I saw him impacting Heather and Mom. Heather was still weaving in the doorway. Trip had to remove his hand from Mom’s clutch. “Hey, er—Josh, how you doing?” he said, scanning over my head.

  To fill up his soccer camp, he was making calls on parents. He was conducting a house-to-house search. And he was really scraping the bottom of the barrel if he wanted me. Also, what woman could say no to him?

  Mom was beginning to recover. “I understand that Josh is turning into a very talented player,” she said.

  Coach Renwick looked puzzled. “Josh? I mean sure, he’s beginning to show... some stuff. A full summer of soccer, and he’ll—”

  “I’m afraid Josh can’t go to soccer camp,” Mom said.

  I blinked.

  “Ma’am?” said the coach.

  Mom reached over and patted my hand. “I’m sorry, Josh. I know what this means to you.”

  She turned to Trip, who was mentally checking me off his roster. “As you may have heard,” Mom said, “Josh has had a minor discipline problem at school. His dad and I mean to nip this in the bud. Josh is going to have to earn my trust back. I mean to keep an eye on him this summer.”

  Heather snickered.

  Trip was trying to think. “Well, ma’am, we take discipline cases at soccer camp. Buster B—”

  “You won’t be taking Josh,” Mom said. “He’ll be staying in the city. He’ll be going to summer school.”

  Heather snickered.

  “So you see, Coach Renwick,” Mom said, “Josh’s summer is sewed up.”

  Trip Renwick was getting up to go. Relief was flooding through me. Give me summer school any day. You come home at night.

  Heather showed Trip the door and came back. “Send me to soccer camp,” she said. “What a stud.” Then the phone rang, and that would be Muffie, so Mom and I were alone. The TV Guide was still in my hand.

  “Not too disappointed about soccer camp?”

  “Mom, I’ll take my medicine.”

  “We’ve got another problem,” she said. “Major. Heather’s going to Pence summer school.”

  “Whoa, Mo
m. She’s planning to spend all summer in the Hamptons with Muffie McInteer. I vote we let her.”

  “Heather’s not ready for the Hamptons,” Mom said, “and she needs summer school. Her grades are terrible.”

  “I can believe it, Mom. Heather thinks the Gettysburg Address is where Lincoln lived. She thinks grammar is your mother. But I don’t want to be around when you tell her.”

  “Neither do I,” Mom said, “but it’s got to be done.”

  “Tonight?”

  Mom nodded and ran a weary hand around the back of her neck. “I’ve put it off as long as I can.”

  “I think I’ll turn in early,” I said.

  In my room I gave Aaron a jingle. “Seen anything of Trip Renwick?” I said when he picked up.

  “He was around earlier,” Aaron said, “but I answered the door and headed him off. The guy must be desperate. What’s that screaming in the background?”

  “Heather. Mom’s just told her she isn’t going to the Hamptons. She’s going to Pence summer school. I’m going to Huckley summer school, so I don’t have to go to soccer camp.”

  “How’d you work that?”

  “By rifling Hulk’s locker and getting caught, basically.”

  “Cool,” Aaron said. “Speaking of summer, I’m not going to computer camp.”

  More relief flooded through me. “How come?”

  “I missed the deadline for applying. We’ve been so busy lately, it got right by me.”

  This happens to Aaron. He’s so busy thinking, he doesn’t think. This happens a lot.

  “Forget about it,” I said. “Go next year. Do summer school with me.”

  “Might as well,” Aaron said. “So what else?”

  “Muffie says she’s getting letters from Hulk.”

  “But in her head you are Hulk.”

  “Believe me, I’m not writing them. Muffie’s either writing them to herself or telling big fibs to Heather.”

  “Women,” Aaron said.

  When Heather finally stopped screaming, I crept out of my room. She was barricaded behind her door. Mom was in the living room, just sitting. She’s pretty even when she’s tired, and she looked pretty tired.