Here Comes Trouble

by Kate Hattemer

  We tromped back inside, pushing sweaty reefs of hair off our foreheads, jangling into a line for the water fountain. Everyone was happy and excited but me. I hung to the back.

  “HE’S REALLY GOOD,” I told Alex when we video-chatted that night. It was the first time we’d talked since school started. “He’s way better than the rest of us. Which could be bad, but he’s not a ball hog.”

  “At my new school there’s not enough playground space for soccer,” said Alex. “Everyone just hangs out by the fence.”

  “There aren’t monkey bars or anything?”

  “Well, there are, but sixth graders are too old.”

  “That’s a school rule?”

  “No. That’s just what everyone says.”

  It sounded awful. “Do you miss us?” I said. “I mean, Camelot?”

  Alex scowled. Our Internet was being slow, so she got all jerky whenever she moved. “Well, obviously.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “My new school’s a lot bigger. There’s like three hundred sixth graders. I only know a few people.”

  “Weird.” I knew all the kids at Camelot. I knew their birthdays. “Do you have any friends?”

  “Kind of.” She adjusted her screen. Her face turned into a pixelated mess. “Mostly people don’t even know my name. I’m just the new kid. But there’s this nice girl who’s in my reading group. Her braid’s so long she can sit on it.”

  Seemed to me that could cause trouble on the toilet. “Cool.”

  “I’m going to see if she wants to be my new pranking partner.”

  That made me feel weird. It wasn’t like I wanted Alex to be alone, but I didn’t want to be replaced that fast. “What are you guys going to do?”

  “Probably we’ll start with some good old-fashioned Post-it-ing.”

  “Classic.” We’d done it to Ms. Hutchins last year. What you do: You take a couple of packs of Post-its and you cover the teacher’s whole desk, like it’s a fish and the Post-its are scales. Cover the chair, too, if you have enough. And the lamp. Everything. It looks hilarious. Even Ms. Hutchins had laughed. “That’s nice that you get to do all of our old pranks over again.”

  “It’s the only good thing about moving.” She pushed her glasses up her nose. She’d gotten new ones, purple and thick-framed. “I’d be really bummed out if it weren’t for that.”

  I almost told her I wished she’d move back—like, I really wished that, all the time—but I figured (a) she knew and (b) it wasn’t like she got any choice in the matter. So instead I said, “Everyone’ll know your name as soon as you do a prank.”

  She straightened and smiled. “True.”

  “I think I’m retired from pranking, myself.”

  “What? Soren! No!”

  “It’s no fun without you. And too hard.”

  “Have you even tried anything?”

  “I need a new team first,” I said. “Or at least a new partner.”

  She frowned, her eyebrows blundering down in slow motion. Stupid Internet. “Who? One of the soccer guys?”

  I remembered how Freddy and Soup and Jéro had reacted to my idea with the Mexican jumping beans. “I don’t think so. No.”

  “The Andrezejczak triplets?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They like making trouble. And they live next door to you.”

  “But they’re mostly friends with each other.” Not to mention, they were intimidating. They moved in a pack and had their own language made up of eyebrow raises and weird acronyms. It was common knowledge that you didn’t want to find yourself on their bad side. Get one Andrezejczak, get gotten by all three.

  “Well, you should find a new partner. You’re not going to feel like yourself unless you’re pranking.” She was being so encouraging. It was the total opposite of my automatic jealousy of Nice Butt-Braid Girl. “What about your cousin?” she said.

  “Flynn?”

  “Could he be your new partner?”

  “Soren!” yelled Mom from the other room. “Time to get off the computer!”

  “You said I could have it till eight!”

  “Flynn needs it for homework,” she called. “You know the rule.”

  This is the rule, which is terrible: whenever someone needs to do homework, they can kick you off immediately. What Ruth does, she does five minutes of online math and then switches to a game, and unless you stay to watch over her shoulder you don’t even know.

  “But we don’t have any computer homework!” I yelled.

  “At my new school,” Alex said from the screen, “we always have computer homework.”

  Flynn appeared in the doorway. “I want to type my Language Arts answers,” he told me.

  “Mom! He could just write them! I’m talking to Alex!”

  “It’s the rule, Soren!” called Mom.

  “I like to go above and beyond,” said Flynn. “Typing is more professional.”

  “You know that question you just asked?” I said to Alex. What about your cousin? Could he be your new partner? “The answer is no.” I x-ed out of the chat and left the computer, and the room, without meeting Flynn’s eyes.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN WE WERE in third grade, Alex and I were caught planting plastic ants all over the teachers’ lounge. Mean Ms. Rue was the one who discovered us, and it turned out she had an ant phobia. We got dragged, actually dragged, to Principal Leary’s office.

  Want to know what kind of friend Alex was? “It was all me, Principal Leary,” she said. “My idea, my ants. Soren was in there because he was trying to stop me.”

  I started to protest. She pinched me under the desk. “I take all the blame,” she said.

  Later, she didn’t even let me thank her. “It was the sensible move,” she said. “One of us should have a clean record.”

  “I’ll pay you back someday,” I said, but we were never caught again, so I never had the chance. Now I probably never would.

  That was Alex. My best friend. Nobody would ever replace her. Nobody would come close.

  “GUYS! GUYS! SIXTH GRADERS!” Ms. Hutchins is nice, so nobody’s on best behavior in her class. “Sit down, Kiyana! Marsupial, now is not the time to hop around the room!”

  She finally got everyone settled. Fanning her armpits, she said, “What’s our theme for the year, class?”

  “ ‘Think Like a Scientist,’ ” read Emily and Poppy from the banner above the board.

  “Precisely!” said Ms. Hutchins. “And to practice the scientific method, we’re going to do a class experiment where we’ll all investigate this question.”

  She clicked on the projector.

  DO PLANTS GROW TALLER WITH WATER OR WITH COKE?

  We got with our lab partners to make hypotheses. “What’s our background information?” said Flynn.

  Finally. Something I knew more about than he did. “Once I saw Ms. Hutchins and her wife at the grocery, and they were buying fifteen pounds of kale. Plus a bag of carrots so big Mr. Karlssen was keeping it with the livestock feed.”

  “So?”

  “They juice.”

  “And?”

  “Ms. H is a vegan foodie health nut. There’s no way she’d have her class do an experiment that makes Coke look good.”

  “That’s your background information?”

  “Mark my words. The plants that get water are going to do way better. Look at her desk! Just look!” Among the bazillion photos of her dog and her wife, Ms. Hutchins had two huge metal water bottles. One said FOR THE PLANET and the other said BECAUSE PLASTIC WILL KILL US ALL.

  “A pure scientific experiment,” Flynn began, “is unbiased, not going for one outcome or another….”

  I snorted. “So you want to hypothesize that Coke is better for plants?”

&nb
sp; “Well,” said Flynn, backpedaling, “all that acid in soda, it can’t be good for their roots.”

  “Great. We agree.” I grabbed our worksheet and wrote, Hypothesis: Coke will kill the plants, but water will make them grow big and tall.

  “When you’re done, guys,” yelled Ms. Hutchins above the din, “come fetch your seedlings!”

  The baby bean plants were growing in cardboard egg cartons. Each lab group got two to repot in cottage-cheese containers. The classroom became pleasantly chaotic. Dirt was flying everywhere. Flynn labeled masking-tape strips COKE and WATER. He had cool handwriting. He even gave the letters little feet, like a font on the computer. “Decision time,” I said. “Which plant do we doom with Coke? And which plant gets to thrive with water?”

  “Technically, we shouldn’t know which is which,” said Flynn.

  Soup poked me with his ruler. “What’d you guys put for your hypothesis?”

  “Duh,” I said. “Water.”

  “We put Coke,” said Jéro, his partner.

  “Coke had better win,” said Soup. “Then my mom’ll have to let me drink pop all the time.”

  “Um, humans aren’t plants,” said Flynn.

  “Yeah?” said Soup.

  “So you can’t take a plant-based experiment and apply the results to humans. By that logic, we’d do best if we stood around in dirt, facing the sun.”

  “Plenty of people spend recess that way,” I said.

  “Take your initial measurements!” Ms. Hutchins shouted. “Be precise!”

  Everyone hunkered down over their plants. Flynn and Soup and Jéro could think what they wanted, but I knew Ms. Hutchins, and right now, that was way more important than knowing about sugar or acid or photosynthesis. She’d never do an experiment that made Coke look healthy, and she wouldn’t care that it was just plant-based, either. We’d probably have to write a whole paragraph on the prompt “If Coke can kill a hardy bean plant, what do you think it can do to you?”

  Unless.

  Unless the experiment somehow turned out the other way.

  “Soren!”

  I jumped. My eyes had gone out of focus. Flynn gave me a strange look. “I said your name like six times!”

  “Sorry. Daydreaming, I guess.”

  “Here.” He handed me a beaker. He’d just returned from the fluid station with our two-ounce allotments of Coke and water. “Let’s feed these guys.”

  “Wait,” I said quietly. “Wait.”

  * * *

  —

  HERE’S HOW IT would have gone with Alex.

  Me: “Wait. Wait. I have an idea.”

  Alex: “Oh. Oh!”

  I wouldn’t have even had to explain. It was an obvious prank. Simple and brilliant. We’d sneak into the classroom and sabotage the plants. We’d make the Coke plants grow, feed them water and fertilizer. We’d slowly kill the water plants. Pinch their stems.

  I could imagine the whole thing: getting all nervous and excited and heart-poundy while we sabotaged, trying not to laugh in class when we heard things like “I don’t know why my water plant is dying so fast!” and “Wow, Ms. H, plants really like Coke, huh?”

  It would have been amazing.

  * * *

  —

  I GUESS I was tricked by how amazing it would have been, because even though I 100 percent knew it wouldn’t work, I tried it out on Flynn.

  “Sabotage?” he said. “Sabotage?”

  “Keep your voice down, okay?”

  “But—Soren—this is science!”

  “Shush!”

  Ms. Hutchins was roaming the room like a hungry vulture, on high alert for illegal activity. “Milton DeVoe!” she yelled. “That Coke is for your bean plant, not for you!”

  Flynn waited for her to pass. There were blotchy pink splotches on his cheeks. He gestured at the banner. “Think like a scientist, Soren. Science is about truth! What would happen if scientists faked experiments?”

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “Medicine! Engineering! Food! Technology! We wouldn’t be able to rely on anything! The modern world is built on trust in science—”

  The splotches were getting worse. “I get it,” I said quickly. I didn’t want Ms. Hutchins to catch wind. “It was a bad idea.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “It was a bad idea.”

  Flynn groaned. But even that only cheered me up a bit. What I was thinking as I counted leaves: How had everything changed so fast? I used to have a best friend who’d have happily killed plants with me, but she was gone. As far as my life was concerned, she was a bunch of choppy pixels on a screen I wasn’t even allowed to use very often. She was off in Minneapolis with a new pranking partner, and me? I was here. I was here with Flynn.

  IF YOU’RE A bug, the last thing you want to do is fly past a hungry frog. Well, that was me walking through the kitchen on block-party day. Mom flicked out her long tongue and I was stuck.

  “You can either peel the oranges or open the cans of pineapple,” said Mom. “But you have to do one.”

  “Pineapple.” At least opening cans involves a cool gadget. Peeling oranges is death to my thumbnails. “What are you making?”

  “What are we making. Jell-O salad. A lot of it.”

  Jell-O salad, in case you don’t know, is the best salad, because there’s nothing green in it (unless you’re making lime). It’s basically a lot of canned fruit suspended in Jell-O—like those insects that got caught in amber at the end of the dinosaurs—that you douse with whipped cream. “Did you get Reddi-wip? Can I do the spraying?”

  “If we ever get to that point,” said Mom, who was boiling three pots of water. “I’ve never made Jell-O salad for a hundred. But how much harder can it be than making it for ten?”

  “Probably ten times harder.”

  “Thanks, Soren. Very helpful. Hey, where’s your cousin?”

  “No clue,” I said morosely.

  “What’s all this?” Mom always picks up on tone. Sometimes it’s nice, like if you want some attention and your other parent is busy keeping your baby brother from eating a matchbook. Sometimes it’s annoying. “Something on your mind?”

  “Nope.”

  “School okay?”

  “Yep.”

  “You’ve done your homework for the weekend?”

  “Of course…”

  She turned on the faucet to run cold water.

  “…not,” I whispered.

  She turned off the tap. “How’s school treating Flynn?”

  “He loves it,” I said. “And it loves him.”

  “Good. Here. Stir.” She dumped in the boiling water, and I stirred in the powder. We were making the Jell-O in the biggest pot we had. It was practically a cauldron. When Ruth and I played Baba Yaga with Ivan, we made him sit in it so we could pretend to cook him. “This year must feel very different to you.”

  “Yeah. Even though I have the same teachers.”

  “Sometimes when things stay the same, the big picture feels even more different.”

  How did she know? “Maybe.”

  “Is Alex planning a visit soon?”

  “I don’t think so. Because of her mom’s job.” Mrs. Harris cuts hair. Here in Camelot she’d worked in a salon, but the reason they’d moved to Minneapolis was so she could start her own business giving haircuts in people’s homes. It was called Ubercut. There was an app and everything.

  “Right,” said Mom. “It’s hard to take time off when you’re just starting. Have you talked much with Alex?”

  “We were talking. But the computer got snatched. We haven’t been online at the same time since.” I gave the Jell-O water one last stir while Mom ripped open a huge bag of ice. “It’d be a whole lot easier to keep in touch,” I added, “if I had a phone.”
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  “Not a chance, whippersnapper. Nice try.”

  “Flynn has a phone.”

  “That’s his mother’s decision. Your mother says no.”

  “Mo-om…”

  “You see that contraption on the counter over there? Black? With the buttons? Specially engineered to fit from ear to mouth?”

  “Mo-om.”

  “Free to use, anytime you want.”

  “That’s not a real phone.”

  You’d think Mom would be pro-technology, given that she designs websites for a living. She tossed in the ice. The Jell-O water sloshed and overflowed. “Darn it,” she said, grabbing the spoon. “That’ll be sticky. Listen. Soren. Your whole life doesn’t have to change just because Alex moved. I’d bet you she’s still doing the things she likes to do down in Minneapolis. And you can keep doing what you like to do up here.”

  What Mom didn’t get was that to do the things I liked to do, I needed Alex. I couldn’t pull off a massive prank alone. I couldn’t even pull off a micro prank alone. And nobody wanted to work with me. Look how fast Flynn had shot me down on the first day of the plant experiment.

  “It’s okay to be sad. Someone’s gone who was a big part of your life, and now your life’s different. That’s tough, honey.”

  Things had been weird the past few months. I guess tough. Nothing was wrong, but nothing was that fun, either. Like a Pop-Tart with no frosting or sprinkles. Better than nothing, but.

  “Give me back that spoon,” I said. “I can stir.”

  “First,” said Mom, “come here.”

  She squished me in to her. It made me feel like a little kid again. Mom doesn’t touch us much. Which I appreciate, honestly, because so often as a kid you just get prodded, patted and petted and poked, so it’s nice to have someone who gets that even though I’ve got a mini body, it’s still my body.

  But the occasional Mom hug is gold. It always makes me cry. And the other great thing about being hugged really tight is that you can wipe your eyes and/or nose on the person’s shirt and they never even know.

  “Okay,” she said. “That’s enough. Stir.”