Now it was in the middle of the floor, with the lid hanging open. Dusty patterns lay in a circle around Sam. She picked one up, squinted at the picture, picked up another, then hunched over to erase something on her drawing.
Erased and erased. And erased. And I could have told her what was going to happen: She erased a hole right through the paper.
“Unh!” She tossed her pencil. “I don’t know why I thought I could do this.”
Beech elbow-crawled under Mom’s desk and retrieved the pencil. He crawled back and handed it to her. “Tut draw, too. He really good.”
“I know.” Sam crumpled her drawing into a ball. “He draws his little stupidheroes all over everything.”
Now that was just insulting. Because no, I didn’t. Not on everything. Just the Bristol board from Mrs. Frazee. And my health notebook. And sometimes, in an emergency, a napkin during lunch. And once, accidentally, the cover of my algebra book, but I erased it.
And not only that, superheroes weren’t stupid. Well, maybe Captain Hygiene.
“Not stupid.” Beech gave Sam his one-eyed, scrunched-nose thing. “Super.” He looked at her hard so that she’d understand the difference.
And right about now, you’re probably thinking, Hey, that invisibility thing comes in handy. You find out stuff you wouldn’t know any other way.
Like, at that very moment, I found out that even though Beecher’s brain had been sucked into the Zawicki Mind-Warp of Unbelievable Weirdness, when pushed to the wall, he was still Beech. He’d still make a stand for his brother and for the one thing we both believed in: the superness of the superhero. Kind of made my heart thump, in a good way.
Then the dark downside of invisibility smacked me in the face: You find out stuff you wouldn’t know any other way.
Because Beech was still looking at Sam, nose scrunched, trying to make her see the difference between stupid and super, counting off superheroes on his fingers. “Spidey super. Batman super. Eight-two-oh super. See? Super.”
And Sam, all prickly with her hard elbows and clenched shoulders, looked down at him—and did the weirdest thing.
She smiled.
Like she didn’t want to, and tried not to, but couldn’t help it. He did look pretty goofy, all scrunched up and serious like that.
Still. What was wrong with her? With everyone else in the known universe, Sam Zawicki was this evil alien life form bent on destruction. With Beech, she was almost a . . . person. Like maybe she hadn’t been hatched from a shriveled gray space pod. At least, not a hundred percent.
She pushed Beecher’s glasses up. Her eyebrows smoothed out. I swear even her hair unstraggled a little.
I could’ve lived my whole life without seeing that.
Beech unwadded Sam’s drawing and tried to smooth it out on the rug.
Sam pulled it away from him. “Don’t worry about it, kid. It’s almost five o’clock anyway.” She tossed it into Mom’s trash can under the desk. “Let’s get this stuff picked up.”
After Sam had snatched her babysitting money from my hand and stomped out, and Beech had gone back to eating his cold, dead pancake, I crept back to Mom’s room.
I pulled the drawing from the trash and smoothed it out. Turned it one way, and then another. Until I figured out what it was supposed to be: a dress. Or maybe a bathrobe. No, I was pretty sure it was a dress. There were straps involved, and I’m no expert, but I’d never seen a bathrobe with straps.
I stared at it, wondering why the heck Sam Zawicki wanted to draw a dress.
And don’t ask me why. Maybe because Beech said I was good at art. Maybe because I knew what it felt like to try to see something all perfect in your head and then watch it come out all wrong on the paper. Because maybe I’d erased holes in my drawings before.
Or maybe because I lost my mind for five minutes. That’s probably it.
I studied Sam’s drawing. There wasn’t much to go on, especially with the hole right there where the armpit should’ve been. But I started to get an idea of what she was trying to do. I dug through the sewing box till I found the patterns she’d been squinting at. It looked like she’d taken pieces and parts of different patterns and stuck them all together in one dress. I spread the patterns out and drew the dress again on a clean sheet of paper.
And it turned out pretty good. A real dress somebody might actually wear. I even threw in some sparkles—a comic book artist trick—which gave it kind of a movie star look.
Not that suddenly I was a fashion designer or anything. But sometimes superheroes turn out to be girls, and sometimes they have to dress up and go undercover or something (they can’t wear a cape all the time), and a comic book artist needs to know how to draw their clothes. And sometimes those clothes need to be sparkly. That’s just a fact.
Still. Probably wasn’t a great idea to let anybody see it, at least not till I got famous.
I stuffed the drawing and the patterns into the sewing box and shoved it back under Mom’s desk where it belonged.
Nineteen
Noah held out his hand. “Cheese.”
I pulled our box of Velveeta from the fridge. Slapped it into his hand.
He slipped the Velveeta from the box, squared it on our cutting board, and began carefully peeling away the foil.
In kitchens all around us, apron-clad seventh-graders buttered bread, rattled drawers, and hacked off mangled hunks of cheese. Skillets sizzled. Smoke wafted.
Ms. Flanigan flitted from kitchen to kitchen, chef’s hat bobbing on her head, staving off potential culinary disasters. You wouldn’t think much could go wrong with a grilled cheese sandwich and canned soup. But we were seventh-graders. Seventh-graders with stoves. Ms. Flanigan was understandably nervous.
Stoves. I stopped. A bean wouldn’t want to be cooked. Would it? Could that be his weak spot, the chink in his armor, his kryptonite?
Uh, no. That was just pathetic.
“Tucker.” Noah’s voice was a sharp hiss. “I don’t need to remind you that Ms. Flanigan wields the toughest grade book in Earhart Middle. If she comes over”—he cut a glance toward Kitchen #4, where Ms. Flanigan was scratching something in her home-ec-teacher grade book—“and sees we haven’t even buttered our bread, we’re going to lose some serious Time Management points.” He held out his hand. “Cheese slicer.”
I rummaged through the drawer, pulled out the slicer, and slapped it in his hand. He steadied the Velveeta and began carving slices with the precision of a surgeon.
“Look at them.” He lifted his chin toward Kitchen #1, Emma’s kitchen, where Kaley T. was ripping the foil off their Velveeta in little chunks. “At this point I’d say we definitely have the lead in the Food Prep points department.”
Uh-huh. And at any point I’d say Noah was a little too competitive in the grade point average department.
I cut another glance at Kitchen #1. Kaley C. was wrestling with their gallon of milk. She finally got it opened and—
“Oh, man,” I said.
—dropped the whole thing in their sink. Milk glugged into their dishwater. Dirty soap bubbles seeped into the milk jug.
“That’s going to lose them some Ingredient Handling points,” said Noah.
No kidding. Poor Emma. With the Kaleys in her kitchen, her grade didn’t stand a chance.
By this time, Noah had covered our cutting board with cheese slices, lined up like flat little soldiers. We buttered and assembled our sandwiches. As we set them in the skillet to cook, Ms. Flanigan’s voice cut through the FACS room.
“Fresh food, seventh-graders. Remember, it’s all about fresh food prepared in a healthful and flavorful . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Dillon, dear, I believe that knife is a little large.”
The Zawickis were also in seventh hour Food and Consumer Science, in Kitchen #6, right across from us. The Zawickis, meaning Sam, of course, plus her brother Dillon, who was actually an eighth-grader (but way bigger than anyone else in the eighth grade, including the teachers and most of the coaching
staff), who flunked seventh-grade FACS last year and had to take it over and was relying on his sister to help him pass.
I glanced up. Dillon Zawicki had dumped their Velveeta onto their cutting board and was now circling it, trying to figure out an angle of attack. Armed with a very large butcher knife.
Ms. Flanigan fluttered over. “We don’t want to mutilate our cheese, do we?”
Dillon considered this. He didn’t seem convinced that mutilated cheese was a bad thing.
Ms. Flanigan turned to the class. “Remember, seventh-graders, you’ll enjoy more success in the kitchen if you choose your utensils wisely. It’s not always about using the largest and, uh”—she stole a glance at the butcher knife—“sharpest tool. It’s about using the right tool for the job.”
She slid open a drawer.
While Sam and Dillon watched Ms. Flanigan, Kaley C. reached over and slid the Zawicki milk jug from their counter. She flipped the lid off and began measuring out milk for their soup.
Nobody saw her. Except me. And for a second I did a little inside-my-head cheer for Kaley C., of all people. At least now Emma wouldn’t lose points for Improper Recipe Procedure.
Kaley recapped the milk and was about to slip it back into the Zawicki kitchen when Ms. Flanigan whirled around. Kaley thumped the milk back down onto her own counter.
“I think you’ll find this a little easier to use.” Ms. Flanigan set a cheese slicer on the Zawicki cutting board and removed the butcher knife from Dillon’s hand. “We won’t be needing this, will we?”
She balanced the knife on her grade book and paused to scribble a few notes.
Sam watched her. “Are you taking off points?” Her voice was actually kind of quiet for once. Not the usual bark that slapped you into the next county.
“I have to, dear.” Ms. Flanigan finished scribbling and dotted something with a big flourish. “We’ve had several class discussions about appropriate tool use. Dillon’s judgment was a little shaky this time, but if you two work hard for the rest of class, you should be able to salvage the project.”
Ms. Flanigan frowned at Dillon, who was now taking their bread in for a layup against the refrigerator door.
She tsked her tongue. “Do I need to call your mother?”
Dillon stopped. “My mother?” He tucked the bread under his arm. “That’d be great. If you get a hold of her, tell her I want to talk to her, too. It’s been a while.”
Sam froze.
Ms. Flanigan stared at the two of them, then scribbled something else in her book. She straightened her chef’s hat and flitted off to avert a scorched skillet disaster in Kitchen #1.
Sam watched her go. Closed her eyes, her mouth set in a grim line.
She opened her eyes—
—and caught me watching her. And for a split second she looked . . . embarrassed. Okay, maybe just surprised. Or probably not even that. This was Sam Zawicki we were talking about. Sam Zawicki, who’d never been surprised by anything in her life. It was probably just a trick of the light or something.
It only lasted a split second anyway, and then she was back to her usual: the Zawicki Glare of Death.
“What are you looking at, Beanboy? You think this is funny?”
“No. I wasn’t—”
“Just cook your stupid sandwich and leave us alone.”
Yeah. Like I ever wanted anything to do with Sam—or any Zawicki—in the first place.
“Oh, no.” Noah’s voice was a strangled groan.
I glanced over—
—and saw smoke curling up from our skillet. While we’d been watching Ms. Flanigan, the edges of our grilled cheese sandwiches had sizzled to a crispy black.
Noah closed his eyes, his face knotted in anguish and despair. “I can’t believe I let myself get distracted like that. I’m acing advanced Spanish, advanced English, and ninth grade chemistry. I can’t flunk grilled cheese sandwiches. How would that look on my permanent record?”
I glanced up. Ms. Flanigan was overseeing a boiledover soup disaster in Kitchen #4.
“She hasn’t noticed,” I said.
“She will. She can sense burnt from fifty paces. She’ll take off points in every category—Time Management, Equipment Maintenance, Ingredient Handling, Recipe Compliance. She’ll make up whole new categories just so she can take off points. We’re doomed.”
I stared at the burnt crusts. No way could I stay after school to redo the whole project. No way could I miss Art Club.
I slid our utensil drawer open and burrowed for what we needed. “I give you”—I held up a large metal cookie cutter—“extra credit.”
Noah eyed the cutter. His anguish and despair began to melt.
Because the one thing Ms. Flanigan loved more than anything, the one thing sure to make her give out extra credit points, was Food Presentation, or, as she put it, “arranging your meals in the most attractive and appealing manner possible.” According to Ms. Flanigan, good presentation could trick your brain into thinking the food tasted better than it actually did. She’d looked up a bunch of scientific studies that said so.
If anybody knew how to trick somebody into eating, it was yours truly, Tucker MacBean. It was probably my best talent. It was the one skill I possessed that came marginally close to a superpower.
It was the only thing keeping my brother alive.
And now it was going to save our sandwiches.
Noah scrubbed the black stuff off our skillet before Ms. Flanigan’s Spidey senses could kick in. I wielded our cookie cutter with skill and precision and buried the burnt-crust evidence in the trash. We fanned our sandwiches across a plate and stood back to admire our masterpiece.
“Gingerbread men!” Ms. Flanigan and her chef’s hat bobbed to our kitchen. “Or should I say, grilled-cheese men.” She held our plate up so seventh hour could see it. “Class, this is what I mean by food presentation.”
She set the plate down and bobbed off, scribbling stars in her grade book as she went.
Noah punched my arm. “Dude,” he whispered. “You saved us.”
Yep.
I did.
Me and my cookie cutter.
Twenty
The next day, on my way to first hour, I ran into Dillon Zawicki.
It’d been blowing and raining the whole way to school, and I was soaked to my undershorts. As I squelched around the corner toward social studies, Dillon Zawicki banged out of the middle school office.
And I ran smack into him.
Sort of bounced off. Like a gnat bouncing off a beach ball. Dropped my books, of course. They skittered all over the hallway.
“Hey. You.” Dillon’s mud-crusted sneakers clomped past. Left a size sixteen shoe print on my health notebook. “Watch where you’re going.”
Good advice. I’d have to remember it.
As I gathered my books, two more pairs of shoes followed Dillon out of the office. I looked up. One pair, neat and polished, belonged to Mr. Petrucelli, who was wearing his serious principal face and smoothing his serious principal tie. The other, a pair of work boots, belonged to an older guy, thin, compact, his face as brown and worn as his boots. Wisps of white hair twanged out at odd angles on his head, like they were surprised to be there.
It was the guy from the farmers’ market. The guy with the wagon.
I stared at his work boots. Muddy. Battered. Soaked through from the rain. Held together with duct tape.
I blinked. I’d seen those boots before. And not just at the farmers’ market.
I’d seen them on Quincy Street. This was the same guy who’d been carrying the ratty paper bag out of the thrift store. The bag of something fluffy and pink. The day Sam Zawicki drowned my comic book. I’d been a little distracted at the time, so I’d almost forgotten.
But I’d seen those boots clomping down the street outside Caveman.
Mr. Petrucelli looked down. “Tucker.” He raised a serious principal eyebrow at me. “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”
Somewhere besi
des the shoe grit and broken pencil lead in the middle-school hallway?
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”
I tucked my books under my arm and skirted around Dillon.
The work boot guy thrust his square, leathered hand toward Mr. Petrucelli. Mr. Petrucelli gripped it and they shook, the muscles in the man’s ropy arms standing out tan and work-worn next to Mr. Petrucelli’s crisp white principal shirt.
“I’m sure sorry you had to take time out of your day to call me down here,” the man said. “I apologize for all the fuss my boy caused.”
My . . . boy?
I stopped. Looked at the guy. Then caught Mr. Petrucelli’s serious principal frown, and started walking again.
That’s when I noticed Sam. She’d been there the whole time, I guess, but I sure hadn’t seen her, and I don’t think anybody else did, either.
She was pressed into a corner, between a locker and the door to the math room. She stood very still, holding her binder tight to her chest, watching over the top of it. Almost as if she was trying to be . . . invisible.
I brushed Dillon’s footprint off my health notebook and squared it on the table next to my lunch tray. Stared at the empty page, trying, once more, to think how I was going to lift Beanboy up to the ranks of the major comic book sidekicks. Like Robin. Or Jimmy Olsen. The truly great ones.
I needed something powerful. Like a villain. Yeah. A powerful villain could bring out the superhero heart of a sidekick. I stared at the blank page.
But my brain cells kept drifting to something else.
My boy.
That’s what the work boot man had said: My boy.
My boy, meaning . . . Dillon?
I cut a quick glance at the table under the EXIT sign. Where Sam was sitting. Alone. Rain hammered the windows behind her.
According to the Earhart Middle School Information Hotline (a.k.a. the Kaleys and their friends and everybody who listened to them, which was, well, everybody), Dillon had been suspended for a week.
The Adventures of Beanboy Page 7