Adam Canfield, Watch Your Back!

by Michael Winerip

  Adam was out front in the running club race, heading down the homestretch. Not a cloud in the sky, and he’d never noticed, but today, every blade of grass on the track’s infield was perfectly trimmed, like a putting green. The white lines separating each running lane were exact, right down to the last white-chalk molecule, which, come to think of it, Adam could see clearly now, thanks to his new microscopic vision. It was fun having microscopic vision, and he was glad his parents gave it to him for Christmas.

  He had about a hundred yards to go, when the second-hottest runner started closing the gap until the boy was right on Adam’s heels. Speaking of heels, his new microscopic vision had detected tiny clumps of caked mud on the bottom of his running shoes. Adam was trying to clean the shoes and run at the same time, when the second-hottest runner whizzed by, then the third-, fourth-, and fifth-hottest. The race was over. Adam was last.

  Head down, he waited for someone to say that he had nothing to be ashamed of, but nobody did, and Adam started limping a lot so everyone could see that finishing last wasn’t his fault; it was his leg’s fault.

  And then, with no warning, in the center of that perfectly clean infield came a mammoth explosion, and there stood a terrible vision. It was curvy and shaggy on top, and was gleaming so brightly it appeared to have just climbed out of the bath tub. There were fiery green eyes, and each one had a blinding beam pointed right at Adam. And the beast bellowed, “You’re obviously a pig. You tracked mud onto my clean infield — prepare to die!”

  Adam searched for some way to fight back, but the infield was so clean, there wasn’t even a twig. Desperate, he could think of just one thing. He yanked off his running shoe and heaved it with all his might toward the fiery green eyes.

  Adam crouched, covered his head, and, as instructed, prepared to die. There was a roar and shriek. “No, no! Not those tiny clumps of caked mud!” the beast bellowed. Adam peeked up. The beast teetered, then collapsed, falling to the ground with a deafening thud.

  The room was dark; the covers were on the floor. For a long time, he lay still, waiting for his breathing to return to normal. What a dream. He must be losing his mind. He had a feeling there was an important hidden message — that beast seemed awfully familiar — but then his head got heavy, and he was asleep again.

  Next afternoon, the lines to vote in the bully survey snaked out of Room 306 and down the hallway. There was such a crowd, Mrs. Quigley assigned a security guard to the third floor. She said the last thing she wanted was kids bullying other kids about who should be worst bully.

  The voting took longer than expected, and it wasn’t just the large turnout. Kids spent a lot of time writing their favorite bully story. Some needed both sides of the ballot.

  The coeditors had planned to have the voting in 306. But when the line backed up to the down stairway, they decided to hand out ballots to everyone waiting in the hall.

  Kids sat right on the floor and filled them out.

  To make sure everyone voted just once, the coeditors assigned Phoebe and Shadow to be voter monitors. The two carried official Harris Elementary/ Middle School clipboards, which, for Phoebe and Shadow, was nearly the same as having super powers. As students handed in the folded ballots, the monitors checked off the names from the school attendance list and asked for each voter’s birthdate to confirm that no one was using another kid’s name.

  More than half the school voted. While Adam still thought the survey was a bad idea, even he got caught up in the excitement. Slash staff members felt on the inside of something very big. They loved walking in and out of 306 whenever they felt like, without having to stand in line.

  Phoebe would deny it to her grave, but Adam calculated that she had walked in and out of 306 a total of 107 times, just for the power of it. At one point, to torment her, Adam suggested that she stay in the hallway and they’d let her know if she was needed inside 306.

  “Can’t do that,” Phoebe said. “I’m on strict orders from your coeditor, Jennifer, to make sure that all is going smoothly on both sides of that door,” she said, pointing to 306 as if it was Saint Peter’s gate. “If you have other orders, please clear them with Jennifer, the Slash senior coeditor.”

  Senior coeditor? Phoebe really was cheesy. Adam could not let her get away with that. “As a matter of fact,” Adam lied, “Jennifer herself told me she wanted you to stay out here in the hall. Jennifer said.”

  “I’ll need that in writing from Jennifer,” said Phoebe. “A lot of rumors are going around, and as Jennifer herself told us during our monitor briefing, we don’t want to be faked out by some quote-unquote idiot. No offense.”

  In the end, Phoebe got hers.

  Her official comonitor nearly drove her mad. The two were constantly bickering over who got to check off each voter.

  “I saw her first,” hollered Phoebe, racing to grab a fourth grader’s ballot. Phoebe had taken off her shoes and slid the last ten feet down the hallway, narrowly beating Shadow to the girl.

  “The coeditors said monitors are supposed to take turns,” said Shadow, snatching the ballot from Phoebe. “You had the last turn. So I have this turn. Taking turns means you have a turn, then I have a turn. It does not mean you have a turn, then you have a turn, then I don’t have a turn.”

  Finally Jennifer had to pull them aside and threaten to take away their clipboards. “I don’t know if I can trust you with official school property,” she said.

  “That’s not fair,” said Phoebe, holding up hers. “I care! You see all these neat flower and butterfly stickers I put on mine? I’m not some kind of jerky person,” and she stared at Shadow so there was no question which jerky person she meant.

  “Neither am I some kind of jerky person who doesn’t care,” said Shadow.

  Jennifer ordered them to keep track of how many each registered and make sure they did exactly the same number. “It would mean a lot to me,” she said.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Shadow shadowed Phoebe everywhere, reading off the totals after each ballot was collected. “That’s 87 registered for you and 86 registered for me,” Shadow announced. “Eighty-seven is one more than 86. So I register the next one. Then I will be 86 + 1, 87, and you will be 87 + 0, 87, exactly the same. And it will really mean a lot to Jennifer.”

  When the voting was completed, the Slash staff wanted to count the ballots immediately, but the coeditors nixed that. Adam and Jennifer worried that if all twenty-four did the counting, results would leak out prematurely. They said they would tally the ballots themselves, pick out the strongest bully stories, and report to the staff.

  Adam and Jennifer each took half the ballots home. Adam couldn’t wait to see the results. He brought the ballots to his room, closed the door, and dumped them on the floor. He would not have admitted this to Jennifer, but it was very exciting. There was a piece of him that really wanted these kids to be humiliated for being jerk-faced bullies. He was looking forward to calling Jennifer as soon as he had the totals. He wanted to see if they both got the same top ten. Then they’d add the votes together.

  After the first couple of dozen votes, a clear leader emerged and as far as Adam was concerned, it was a great choice. This boy was awful. Part of what made his bulliness so aggravating was his phoniness. On the surface, he sounded great. He was tall and wide — muscular, not fat — a star on the football and wrestling teams. His folks owned a gas station and convenience store in town plus a copy store, and they were big deals in the Chamber of Commerce. Adam was always seeing their photo in the Citizen-Gazette-Herald-Advertiser, getting some kind of plaque.

  Even so, this kid was the essence of snaky bulliness. He wasn’t running around beating the crap out of everybody every second. It was more that he was constantly reminding kids, in quiet ways, that he could do whatever he pleased. He’d cheerfully mention that you were in his seat at the lunch table and make you move. Or he didn’t want you sitting in the back of the bus just for today because he was saving seats for his friends. Or he’d p
ass in the hall, giving you a big smile and a playful punch on the arm that left a dark bruise.

  Adam himself had voted for the creep.

  But the pure joy of seeing a bad kid exposed had disappeared by the time Adam was half done counting.

  One of the top ten vote getters — toward the bottom, maybe ninth or tenth, but still top ten — was Shadow. At first Adam thought it was a mistake, that kids put his name down because he’d collected their ballots. Then Adam had a moment of panic, worrying there was a side of Shadow he didn’t know. After all, Shadow was strong — the work for Mr. Johnny Stack made the veins in his arms stick out. He was always lurking around. Maybe he had a crazy side Adam didn’t know about.

  But then Adam read the comments. Room 107A drools the world, one kid wrote. Retard for president, wrote another.

  Shadow was their joke vote.

  There was more discouraging news. A lot of kids got at least one bully vote, including Adam, who got three. He didn’t know for sure, but he could guess which star third-grade reporter cast one of them. And while three votes was nowhere near enough to make top ten, he felt terrible. One kid wrote: This whole bully vote is to scare kids because you’re a chickenshit who called the cops for no good reason. Forty bucks is a joke!!!

  And there was worse news.

  In second place when Adam stopped counting was Tish Osborne.

  Tish, who made sure Adam got picked that Saturday on the Rec courts. Tish, who got Adam’s basketball back and didn’t hang around to be thanked. Tish, who helped at church. Adam was beside himself. These people who voted — they didn’t understand a kid like Tish. They just saw the surface stuff. They were the jerks.

  Adam kept thinking about what it would be like telling Tish that he’d been voted Harris’s number-two monster.

  He could not count another ballot. He didn’t want to know the results. For a moment, he thought about ripping them all up and chucking them out.

  He hoped Jennifer was happy. He’d told her this bully vote was a mistake. But did she listen? No one listened to him. She’d manipulated the whole Slash staff against him. Fine. Let her break the happy news to Tish. And Shadow — she could tell Shadow, too. That would be a great moment in modern journalism. Shadow didn’t have enough problems.

  Adam hated this. He felt some of it was his fault. If only he hadn’t invited Shadow to join the Slash. If Shadow hadn’t been collecting the ballots, kids would never have thought to vote for him.

  Adam went into his closet and pulled out a shoe box full of basketball cards. He dumped the cards into the third drawer of his bureau, his sports shorts drawer. Then he scooped up the bully ballots, stuffed them into the empty shoe box, fastened the top with rubber bands, and shoved the box into the back of his closet, where no one ever looked, behind his black tie shoes.

  Adam had been looking forward to screaming at Jennifer about the bully survey. He wanted to yell real loud for about fifteen minutes until she got down on her knees and admitted in cold blood that she’d been wrong.

  But when he actually got the chance, there was no joy in it. Jennifer was as miserable as he was.

  “What are we going to do?” she kept saying, and each time, there was a noise that sounded sniffly to Adam.

  Adam couldn’t be sure it was sniffly. The boat dock was dark, and with the river lapping against the shore, and the dune grass rattling in the night breeze, he might be mistaken.

  He was sure of this: the last thing he needed was a sniffly Jennifer. Jennifer was the rock in these life-or-death situations. She was the one who’d pulled Adam through those bleak days with Marris. She was the one who’d kept her cool when Mrs. Boland cornered them in 306.

  “Why didn’t I listen to you?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” said Adam.

  “We never should have done the bully survey.”

  “I know,” said Adam.

  “You tried to tell me, but did I pay attention?”

  “You did not,” said Adam. “Nope.”

  “I feel like a total failure.”

  “I bet you do,” said Adam.

  Adam waited for Jennifer to say the next stupid thing she’d done, but instead, she kicked him hard with her hiking boot.

  “Ow!” he shouted. “That hurt.”

  “I hope you’re bleeding,” she said. “You’re supposed to be supportive. We’re coeditors. I’m doing my best here.”

  “I was being supportive,” said Adam. “Everything you said I agreed with.”

  Jennifer was ticked. “You really are an idiot,” she said. She looked at him and how the wind was blowing his hair. “We have a more basic problem here. You know what my mom says about middle-school boys? ‘UPS never delivers the complete package. It can take years before the entire shipment turns up.’”

  “We use FedEx,” said Adam.

  “I rest my case,” said Jennifer.

  Unfortunately, they did agree on one thing: this was an impossible mess. If they printed the bully poll, it would be unfair to Shadow and Tish. But if they didn’t print the poll — it was like they were censoring Harris students, throwing out a fair election because they didn’t like the results.

  They needed a plan fast. While the bully poll wouldn’t come out until the combined March/April issue, the Slash staff was demanding to know now. Phoebe alone had written seventeen e-mails marked URGENT RESPONSE REQUESTED. Just finished brushing and flossing and thought I’d check once more before bed, Phoebe wrote in e-mail number fourteen. ANY NEWS??!! And when Jennifer answered, Not yet, Phoebe e-mailed again in twenty minutes. Decided to trim toenails and Q-Tip wax from ears. ANY NEWS??!!

  That’s why they were sitting on the dock in the dark. Even Phoebe wouldn’t bother them there. They’d started at Adam’s house, then walked up his street and along the river, stopping at a dock that belonged to summer people who weren’t around.

  Everything they considered had a bad side. They thought of destroying the ballots; removing students from the top ten list they felt weren’t real bullies; naming only the first-place bully.

  Maybe they could secretly ask Mrs. Quigley to kill the story. Hadn’t she said she might do it on her own? And then they could deny asking her.

  They discussed running a story admitting they made a terrible mistake and then not printing the bullies’ names. Or they might admit they made a mistake and print the names.

  Every choice had a terrible side. Destroy ballots? Alter results? Lie? That’s what people like Mrs. Boland and Devillio did, not the coeditors of the Slash. Adam and Jennifer were supposed to be good guys. If they started messing with the facts, someone at Harris would have to start a second newspaper just to investigate them.

  The Daily Phoebe.

  Adam could think of only one way out.

  What if he resigned as coeditor?

  That alone would cut his To-Do list in half. He could see living the resigned life, full of lazy spring afternoons, running through fields teeming with dandelions and butterflies.

  “Maybe I should resign,” said Jennifer.

  What? Did he just hear that? Had Jennifer read his mind?

  “This bully thing was my idea,” she continued. “You were against it. There’s no reason for you to take the blame. If I resign, it gives us a way out. I could write a story saying I made a terrible mistake; I never dreamed the survey would turn out so mean; and instead of hurting innocent people, we decided to kill the story and I was resigning.”

  Adam shivered and it wasn’t the river breeze. Jennifer resign? He’d thought of it first; he just forgot to say it out loud. Things were getting out of hand. One second he was dancing through fields, happily resigned, and now he was alone at the helm of that barge on the river, the rudder gone, fishtailing from bank to bank in the dark.

  Run the Slash himself? In a week he’d be in prison for murdering Phoebe.

  “Jennifer!” he yelled. She was running up the boardwalk and over the dune. “Jennifer!” Those maybe sniffles were definite sobs
. She was ahead of him on the path, barely visible.

  Jennifer was fast, but Adam was fast and desperate. He wasn’t going to let her get away without straightening out this resignation mess. He caught her along the path but was so winded, he couldn’t talk. “Wait . . . please . . .” He put up his finger and gulped for air.

  She ran off again. Adam was pissed. Jennifer wasn’t like this. He was like this. She was the responsible one. He was supposed to be running off. Adam had no intention of letting everything get switched around. She was going to get back to her responsible self and help him figure a way out of this.

  A block from his street he caught up, but this time, he wasn’t getting faked out. He dived, grabbed her knees, and executed a jolting tackle that knocked her off her feet. The two of them rolled, coming to rest against the dune, gasping for air.

  For a while, they just lay there, catching their breath and gazing at the sky. Finally Adam said, “You’re not running away again?”

  “No,” Jennifer said, and she was laughing. “It’s hard running on two broken legs.”

  “I only did it because you deserved it.”

  They knew what they had to do. They had to write the story and say that the survey was a mistake and apologize. They had to print the best bully stories kids wrote on the ballots. They had to point out that an amazing number of kids got a least one vote — seventy-five altogether — meaning that bullying was more widespread than they’d ever thought and that a person who seemed like a bully to some might be a model human to others. (Adam was sure he was a perfect example of this.)

  And then they had to do the hardest part. They had to go to Shadow before they told anyone about the results and give him fair warning. And Tish, too.

  And finally — there was no way out — they had to print those stupid results.

  It was good to have a plan and for a while they lay there, happily looking at the stars and discovering new constellations. “Those two stars,” Adam said. “That’s Orion tutoring Ursa Major for the state math test.”