Dinosaur Boy

by Cory Putman Oakes

  “Stegosaurus was an herbivore,” Elliot explained, presumably for Sylvie’s benefit.

  “So you haven’t always been part dinosaur?” she asked me. Without waiting for an answer, she picked up a Pixy Stix, tipped her head back, and dumped the entire contents into her mouth.

  “Oh no, Sawyer was totally normal last year,” Elliot answered, and then smiled an apology. “Sorry, man. You’re still normal. I just mean—”

  “No, he’s not,” Sylvie interrupted, through a mouthful of sugar.

  I looked over at her, feeling surprised and hurt. So she did think it was weird. I guess I couldn’t really blame her.

  Sylvie shrugged unapologetically.

  “Well, you’re not. Normal, I mean. My dad always says that no one is normal. Not once you get to know them.”

  She smiled at me then, and there were sugar crystals stuck in her teeth.

  “I guess you’re right,” I said, feeling a little bit less hurt than I had a moment ago. “But most people can hide their weirdness a little bit better than I can.”

  “Yeah, that’s true.”

  Sylvie opened a tiny package of Twizzlers. She pulled them apart, one by one, and dangled them into her mouth like worms.

  Elliot looked over at me. He had part of a red pepper dangling from his bottom lip, and his eyes were very clearly saying, “Is this girl for real?”

  I shrugged.

  Whether she was for real or not, Sylvie had definitely found her table.

  The one closest to the bathroom. With us.

  Ring Toss

  Sylvie’s arrival distracted Allan and his crew from the fact that there was a part-dinosaur in their midst for one entire day.

  Once that day was over, their attention turned back to me. With a vengeance.

  By the next morning, I could tell something strange was going on. Ms. Filch was telling us about the Plymouth Bay Colony, but I kept getting distracted by a strange sensation in my uppermost plates. Kind of like someone was tapping me on the shoulder, trying to get my attention.

  But every time I turned around, no one was looking at me.

  The third time it happened, I tried to whirl around really quickly, to catch the culprit. Unfortunately, I was packed so tightly in my chair that the only thing that actually whirled was my tail. It moved so quickly that one of my tennis balls hit Emma’s chair leg and slid off the end of my spike. But my tail kept going, and the exposed spike sliced right through Brad Rivera’s backpack.

  Brad, a short, red-haired, immensely freckled kid who sat next to Emma, gaped down at his eviscerated backpack. Then he glared at me.

  “Watch it, Butt Brain!” he exclaimed, then reached down to pick up the discarded tennis ball. He threw it at me, hard, so that it hit me squarely in the chest before I could catch it.

  “Brad!” Ms. Filch admonished. “Apologize to Sawyer this instant.”

  “Sorry, Butt Brain,” Brad muttered.

  Instead of responding, I fumbled with the tennis ball, trying to keep it from rolling off my lap. Part of me couldn’t really blame Brad for being startled. After all, if my spike had hit his leg instead of his backpack, it might have cut off his foot. What was I going to do if something like that ever happened?

  I was going to have to try harder to avoid sudden movements.

  Slowly, deliberately, I leaned down to screw the tennis ball back on its spike. As I did, Brad leaned his head down beside mine.

  “You’re going to pay for that, freak.”

  • • •

  The weird sensations in my plates continued. But there was no way I was going to risk turning around again. So I just tried to ignore it.

  My only hint as to what was going on was when I spotted something roll underneath my seat. I managed to trap it with my right foot. And when Ms. Filch wasn’t looking, I reached down (carefully) to pick it up.

  It was a yellow diving ring. The kind you find on the bottom of swimming pools.

  This didn’t make any sense to me until we were walking to lunch, and Elliot handed me three more rings: one red one and two blues.

  “These were stuck on your plates,” he explained. “Allan, Cici, and a few others were throwing them at you all morning.”

  My face burned as we entered the cafeteria and walked to our table.

  “Why would they do that?” I asked, yawning. I had spent a long night on the Internet, searching for any hint of a cure for the dinosaur gene. I hadn’t found a thing. So today I was both tired and grumpy.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s for points,” Sylvie answered, appearing out of nowhere, dropping down into her seat and pushing a sheet of paper toward me. “I stole this out of Allan’s desk just now.”

  NAME

  RING COLOR

  POINTS SCORED

  Allan

  Red

  X (Tail)

  CiCi

  Blue

  X (Tail)

  XX (Upper Plate)

  Brad

  Yellow

  Ernie

  Green

  A game. They had made a game out of me and my plates.

  “Principal Mathis is going to kill them,” Elliot predicted, unwrapping his sandwich. “Didn’t they see what happened to Parker?”

  “Who’s Parker?” Sylvie asked, pulling a handful of candy out of her sweatshirt pocket. She was wearing the same orange sweatshirt she had worn the day before. But today, all of the candy in it appeared to be Tootsie Rolls of various colors. She laid them on the table in front of her and started unwrapping them.

  “The kid who used to sit in your seat,” Elliot answered, watching Sylvie with interest. Eventually, his attention wandered to her unopened lunch sack. “Are you going to eat your lunch? Want to trade again?”

  Sylvie passed him the bag.

  “Go for it. I don’t need to trade. It’s tamales today, by the way.”

  “Nice!” Elliot dove into the bag.

  I motioned to the pile of naked Tootsie Rolls.

  “Are you going to eat any of those?” I asked, honestly interested. I had never met anyone who was as weird about food as Sylvie.

  “Eventually,” she assured me. “Why do I have Parker’s seat?”

  “He got kicked out of school,” Elliot told her, around a mouthful of tamale. “Principal Mathis caught him making fun of Sawyer, and we have a zero tolerance policy here.”

  Sylvie nodded, gathered up all of the Tootsie Rolls, and started squishing them into a giant ball between her hands.

  “We should give the paper to Principal Mathis,” she said finally, nodding to the score sheet in front of me. “It’s evidence. Now she’ll be able to kick out Allan and Cici. And the other two…”

  “No,” I said. Rule Number One, and all.

  Elliot pried his eyes away from the sticky mess in Sylvie’s hands and looked at me. There was a surprised look on his face.

  “Why not?” he asked. “They’re awful. Not just to you—I mean, especially to you—but they’re mean to everybody! We’d all be better off without them here.”

  I knew he was thinking about last year, back when he had been their target.

  “I’m not a tattletale,” I explained.

  “But—” Elliot started to argue with me, but he was cut off when Brad walked purposefully up to our table.

  He veered slightly to the left as he approached us, as though he was headed toward the bathroom. But at the last second, he executed a wildly exaggerated fake trip. Stumbling over nothing, he flailed his arms and fell toward our table.

  He caught himself on the edge with one hand. He used the other to knock my water bottle into my lap.

  “Oops,” he said loudly. “Sorry about that!” Quietly, he added, “You little dinosaur turd. Keep your tail to yourself!”

  Brad continued on to the bathroom, pausing only to tur
n and throw a conspiratorial grin back to the table by the door. Allan, sitting at the head of the table, returned the grin and gave Brad a not so subtle thumbs-up.

  I used my one and only napkin to mop up the water in my lap. It was soaked instantly. Silently, Elliot and Sylvie both handed me theirs.

  I blotted my damp lap with a sigh. For the rest of the day, it was going to look like I had peed my pants.

  “You know,” Sylvie said, tossing her Tootsie Roll ball back and forth between her hands, as though she was contemplating throwing it, “for a dinosaur, you don’t have much of a backbone.”

  “Thanks for the support,” I snapped. Suddenly all of the anger I had toward Brad was directed at Sylvie. Why had she decided to sit at our table if she was just going to make things worse?

  “I’m sorry, but I’m just telling the truth,” Sylvie said, not sounding sorry at all. “Sawyer, you’ve got to do something when that sort of thing happens. You have to stand up for yourself.”

  “What’s he supposed to do?” Elliot demanded. “Stab Brad with his tail spikes? He’d just say that spilling the water had been an accident. And Sawyer would be the one who ended up in trouble.”

  I had been thinking the exact same thing. I’m pretty sure that’s why Elliot and I are such good friends.

  Sylvie, however, seemed to have her own way of thinking about things.

  “I don’t think you need to be that dramatic about it,” she said. “Stabbing seems a little bit extreme.”

  “Then what?” I asked.

  Sylvie shrugged and took a bite of her Tootsie Roll ball.

  “We’ll see,” she said thoughtfully.

  • • •

  That night, I picked up my computer and pulled up my email.

  Nothing. My grandfather had still not responded.

  After that, I drifted off into an uneasy half-sleep where I had mixed-up dreams about dinosaurs diving for rings in a really big pool.

  • • •

  Sylvie’s swiping of the score sheet did not prevent the ring toss game from getting even more popular. Over the next couple of days, an increasingly diverse array of colored rings whizzed and rolled past me. So many, in fact, that Allan probably had to make a new score sheet anyway. Just to keep track of all the new players.

  The game always got particularly intense during science class. The science lab had tables and stools instead of desks, which was both good and bad news for me. Good news because it meant my plates got a break from being squashed against the back of my chair. Bad news because my stool was in the front row of the classroom, and all my plates were exposed and vulnerable to everyone sitting behind me.

  I was a sitting duck.

  That afternoon, Dr. Cook was talking to us about the upcoming science fair. He was so excited that he was particularly distracted, and he turned his back on us frequently to write on the whiteboard at the front of the room.

  Every time he did, it was game on. Every couple of minutes I felt another thump on my back. Or, when they missed (which was often), the thump was on my head, my stool, or even my tail.

  “The science fair is the perfect opportunity for you to really get into the spirit of the scientific method,” Dr. Cook explained, and turned to write “S-C-I-E-N-T-I-F-I-C M-E-T-H-O-D” on the board.

  Thump.

  “Let your curiosity run wild!”

  Thump.

  I tuned out Dr. Cook and thought about what Sylvie had said.

  Thump.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to stand up for myself. Of course I did. But what would I do? Stand up and yell at them to quit it? I could just picture the grin on Allan’s face if I were to do that. For one thing, my yelling would not make them stop. And once I did that, they would know without a doubt that I knew what they were doing. They would know that I wanted to stop them, but couldn’t.

  Thump.

  At least when I ignored them, I wasn’t giving them the satisfaction. As long as I didn’t acknowledge them, they wouldn’t know that I cared.

  Dr. Cook bent to retrieve something behind his desk. Whatever it was, he seemed to be having some trouble finding it because he disappeared from view for almost a full minute. This was the best opportunity any of the ring toss players were going to get, and they knew it.

  Thump thump thump.

  “Score!” I heard Allan stage whisper behind me.

  I had just started to relax when I felt another ring hit me. Whoever had thrown it was a terrible shot. It hit the back of my head and then landed on the next lab table over, right in front of Sylvie, with a loud THUD.

  Dr. Cook must have heard it, because his head of untidy gray hair suddenly popped up over the top of his desk.

  Sylvie quickly grabbed the ring and pulled it underneath her desk. I was only barely able to see that it was purple.

  “Everything all right?” Dr. Cook asked.

  Purple? I didn’t remember seeing a purple ring before. This must be a new player.

  “Yes, Dr. Cook,” we all chanted.

  He nodded, only a bit suspiciously, and disappeared back behind his desk.

  Sylvie turned around. She reached over Ernie, who sat directly behind her, and carefully handed the purple ring to Nora Phillips, two tables back.

  “Here you go,” she said.

  “Uh, thanks.”

  When Nora reached up to grab the ring from Sylvie, I saw two other purple rings looped around her wrist. I seemed to recall that the rings usually came in packages of three.

  Nora brushed one of her two blond braids over her shoulder and smiled at Sylvie. Sylvie smiled back, and then turned around in her seat without looking at me.

  At least now I knew who the purple rings belonged to. But I was really more concerned with Sylvie’s betrayal.

  Maybe she didn’t like sitting at our lunch table after all. Maybe a lack of backbone was a deal breaker for her, as far as friends were concerned. Maybe she had decided to use the ring toss game to get in good with the popular kids.

  “Sorry about that, everyone,” Dr. Cook said, emerging from behind his desk with a typical, three-paneled, foam core science project display. “Here we are. Now, this was one of the winning projects from last year’s fair. As you can see, this student paid great attention to detail and made a nice use of color…”

  I stared miserably at the table in front of me. I had liked Sylvie, right from the beginning. And not just because she smiled at me and said she thought my dinosaur plates were “cool.” There had been something about her that I thought I recognized. She was weird, that was for sure. With her sweatshirt and her candy and all of that. But there was something about her that I thought I had understood. It was the same sort of something I felt around Elliot. I had hoped that the three of us could be friends.

  Now I found myself wondering what color rings Sylvie would choose, once she officially joined the game. That is, if her name wasn’t already on the score sheet.

  I realized that everybody around me was pulling out their notebooks. Numbly, I did the same.

  “The eight headings that you must include in your display are as follows,” Dr. Cook was saying, writing on the board as he said them aloud. “Abstract. Question. Hypothesis. Background. Meth—”

  “Ow!” came a voice behind me.

  Dr. Cook turned away from the board. “Nora? Was that you? Is something wrong?”

  “No, it’s nothing. OW!”

  Dr. Cook put down his dry erase marker and hurried to Nora’s side. I turned on my stool to get a better view.

  “What’s going on, Nora?” Dr. Cook asked. He looked concerned.

  “Nothing!” Nora smiled brightly. So brightly that she looked kind of insane.

  Dr. Cook’s concern converted to suspicion, faster than water converts to hydrogen and oxygen.

  “Let me see your hands,�
�� he commanded.

  Nora’s smile faded. Her hands were hidden beneath her desk, and she made no movement to bring them out.

  “I’m really fine now,” she told Dr. Cook. “All better.”

  “Hands, Nora. Now.”

  Nora cast a helpless glance around the room, and then put both hands on the desk in front of her.

  There were still two purple diving rings around her right wrist. The third was clenched in her right fist.

  Dr. Cook put out his hand.

  “Give those to me,”

  “I can’t,” Nora said miserably, tears forming in her eyes. “It’s stuck!”

  Dr. Cook took Nora’s wrist and tried to pull the ring out of her hand.

  “Ow!” Nora howled.

  “It is stuck,” Dr. Cook said incredulously, examining Nora’s hands more gently.

  Suddenly, as though he was emerging from a dream, Dr. Cook’s head snapped up. His eyes went to the floor and traveled up the trail of multicolored diving rings that led to my lab table.

  “Ernie,” Dr. Cook said quietly. “Please go get Principal Mathis. Tell her she is needed here immediately.”

  “Yes, sir!” Ernie, eager to obey as always, ran for the door.

  Dr. Cook returned to the front of the room. He leaned against his desk and crossed his arms, watching us like a hawk.

  “The rest of you will sit quietly until Principal Mathis arrives. Do you understand?”

  We all nodded.

  “Hands on your desks,” he ordered.

  We all hastened to obey. I had never heard Dr. Cook sound so severe. The look on his face was scary. Even to me. And I was pretty sure that I wasn’t the one in trouble.

  “No moving,” he warned us. “Not one muscle.”

  We sat in total silence.

  I’m not sure how long we would have stayed like that. At some point, somebody, probably Allan, would have gotten over their fear enough to crack a joke or scratch an itch or something. That would have broken the spell. But it wasn’t very long at all before I heard the classroom door open behind us and the sound of Principal Mathis’s heels squeaking on the tile as she walked to the front of the room.