A picture flashed in my head of a really nice white-haired guy, crouched beside Beech, admiring his sorry pumpkin, giving him a rusty wagon to haul it around in. Sam said he already had enough to worry about. And he probably did, growing all those apples and beets and stuff.
Actually, I could think of two people: his grandpa and Sam. Eating with Dillon had to be better than eating by yourself.
If I thought about it hard enough (which I sincerely did not want to do but somehow couldn’t stop myself), I could think of three, if you counted Beecher, because he didn’t want Sam to be sad.
And I don’t know what was wrong with me, but for some reason, I didn’t, either.
So that made four.
Twenty-Four
Dear Mr. Petrucelli:
Being a principal must be hard work, having to make all the rules and then make everybody follow them and kick out all the people who don’t, plus on top of that, figure out who’s lying and who’s telling the truth.
Luckily, I can help you out with that. Because here’s the truth: Dillon Zawicki didn’t steal the milk from the FACS room. It was actually Kaley Crumm, but she didn’t do it on purpose. It was an accident, mostly because Kaley Crumm is not very good at opening things.
See, she was trying to get the lid off her milk, but she dropped it in the sink, and you never want to use dishwasher milk. Ms. Flanigan would subtract serious Ingredient Contamination points. So Kaley borrowed Dillon and Sam’s milk, only she couldn’t ask first because Ms. Flanigan was talking and I bet she didn’t want to interrupt a teacher. So she borrowed their milk and then I think it got stuck in her refrigerator by accident.
So it was all a big mistake. Kaley didn’t mean to steal it, and Dillon didn’t steal anything at all.
I hope this clears things up and makes your job easier.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Anonymous Citizen
I stopped by the office after computer lab and told Louise, our secretary, I had a sore throat. I tried to look sick and feverish. Also I coughed a couple times.
It must’ve worked because Louise clucked her tongue and said, “You really don’t look good. No color in your face at all. Better go on back and see the nurse.”
I felt bad, lying to Louise.
But not bad enough to keep from coughing and sniffling down the little hallway behind her desk, a clean, bright hallway that led to a whole nest of rooms in our school that hardly anybody ever saw: nurse’s office, counselor’s office, teachers’ lounge, detention room.
And also Mr. Petrucelli’s office.
I sidled up to his door and, after glancing around to make sure nobody was looking, slipped my letter underneath. Which was kind of hard because he had carpet on the other side, and I kind of had to wriggle and push it to get it through.
Then I slipped back down the little hallway and past Louise’s desk.
“Thanks.” I pushed through the door and out of the office.
Twenty-Five
Sam was sitting on our front steps when I got home from school.
I didn’t see her at first. I was scooting along Polk Street, head down, watching my sneakers scuff across the pavement, the hood of my sweatshirt pulled up to ward off the cold and the world. Thinking about how it would be way easier to make Beanboy the greatest sidekick ever if I didn’t keep running into Zawickis everywhere I went.
I stepped up onto our curb. Dropped my backpack. Leaned against the light pole to wait for Beecher’s bus.
And there she was.
Sitting on the top step, hugging her knees to her chest, running her finger through the dirt on the sidewalk.
She must’ve heard my backpack thump. She looked up. She eyed me. I eyed her. Like a game of chicken.
I blinked first. “It’s Friday,” I said. “I don’t have Art Club.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m not an idiot. I know how to read a calendar.”
She rose to her feet. Heaved her backpack onto her shoulder.
“Dillon gets to come back to school Monday,” she said.
I looked at her. “Really? That’s good.”
“Good?” She narrowed her eyes. “You think it’s good?”
“Well . . . isn’t it?”
“Yeah. But why do you think so? Nobody else does.”
Man. What was with her? Couldn’t she just babysit Beecher and leave me alone? She had to make a special trip over here on a day that wasn’t even Art Club and yell at me about her brother, of all people?
She stood there, kind of hugging the strap of her backpack, staring at the sidewalk.
“I went to Mr. Petrucelli’s office with my grandpa today,” she said finally. “He showed us the note.”
I froze.
Then remembered to say, “Note? What note?”
“Oh, for pete’s sake, Beanboy.” She rolled her eyes again. “Are you always this stupid? I’m sure Mr. Petrucelli’s never going to figure it out, so you can relax, but I’ve seen enough of your dumb little stickies to know what your writing looks like.”
“Oh.” I swallowed. “That note.”
“Yeah. That note.”
“So.” I cleared my throat. “You’re not going to tell him? Mr. Petrucelli, I mean. You’re not going to tell him who really wrote it?”
“No, I’m not going to tell him.” She pierced me with a glare. “What kind of person do you think I am?”
Well, the kind of person who drowns comic books and rips down dance flyers and calls people Beanboy, for one thing.
And who also doesn’t mind making happy faces on macaroni for my goober of a brother.
That kind of person.
“Anyway.” She let out a breath, like she was letting air out of a balloon. “I guess Mr. Petrucelli talked to Kaley C., and she started crying—of course—and admitted the whole thing and said she was sorry, and now Mr. Petrucelli says she’s honest and brave and he wished all his students could be as truthful as her, because he thinks she’s the one who secretly wrote the note so that Dillon wouldn’t get in trouble for something she did.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish. So she gets to stay in school and not be suspended or even do detention or anything because Mr. Petrucelli says she’s suffered enough. She’s supposed to apologize to Dillon. I wouldn’t put money on it. But at least he’s not kicked out anymore.”
I nodded.
She crossed her arms. Kicked her boot against our bottom step. “So now, what, you think you’re some kind of superhero, the great Beanboy, saving the scrubby little farm family?”
“What? No. I’m not a . . . hero or whatever. I was just trying to help.”
She kicked again. “Too bad you didn’t help sooner, before we lost all that money.”
What? I looked at her. “How was I supposed to help sooner? I didn’t even know Dillon was in trouble till he got kicked out of school. It’s not like you ever talk to me or anything.”
“I didn’t think you wanted me to talk to you.”
“I didn’t think you wanted me to talk to you.”
“I don’t.”
“Okay then.”
She hiked up her backpack. Pulled her jacket around her like she was going to leave. But then she just kept standing there.
Which made me feel like leaving, which was just stupid because it was my house.
“So. Anyway,” she said. “I just came by to tell you about Dillon, and also I wanted to say”—she kicked the step—“I just, I came by—” She closed her eyes. “I just wanted to say thank you. Okay?”
“Um. Sure.” I nodded. “Okay.”
“Good.” She pushed past me. “Tell the kid I’ll see him Monday.”
She started off down the sidewalk. And then, I don’t why, my mouth started saying stuff again.
“Um, Sam?” it said. “I bet you don’t have to lose the money. Your grandpa had to pay for the milk, but now that Mr. Petrucelli knows Dillon didn’t take it, he’ll probably give it back.”
She stopped, her bac
k to me. “He already did.” She didn’t turn around. “But he can’t give back the cauliflower. Or the turnips. Or the squash. That morning when Grandpa had to come down and get Dillon and it was storming and raining with the wind blowing like it could about take your head off? Well, it did. It took our heads off. While my grandpa was talking to stupid Mr. Petrucelli who wouldn’t listen to anything Dillon said, the storm laid it flat, the corn, the beans, everything. And Mr. Petrucelli can’t give that back.”
She hiked up her backpack and scuffed off down Polk Street.
Twenty-Six
Bing, bing. Bing, bing. Bing, bing.
I dragged myself from the Chasm of Sleep, fumbled for my alarm clock, and hit snooze. I collapsed back into my pillow.
Bing, bing. Bing, bing.
I groaned. The Batcave wasn’t supposed to still be binging. I rubbed sleep crust from my eyes and realized the bing was coming from the other end of the house. I battled my bedspread to free my legs and stumbled down the dark hallway, feet slapping against the cold wood floor.
And found my mother sitting on the couch. Sort of. Mostly she was slumped against the arm of the couch, head buried in a clutter of papers, cheek pressed against the RETURN key of her laptop. Snoring like a freight train. I didn’t even know she was home.
Carefully, so I wouldn’t wake her, I peeled her face from the computer and slipped one of the couch pillows under her cheek, like a magician whipping a tablecloth from under a table full of china. The binging stopped. My mom mumbled and burrowed into the pillow.
I pushed aside a mountain of textbooks (A Comprehensive Analysis of Behavioral Statistics, 17th Edition—no wonder she was unconscious) and set her laptop on the coffee table. I was about to close the lid when I thought maybe I should save whatever she’d been working on. I didn’t want to accidentally delete a term paper or something. My life wasn’t perfect, but I wasn’t ready for it to end.
I leaned down, finger hovering over the keyboard, all set to hit SAVE—
—and stopped.
Right there before my eyes, in giant glowing blue letters, were words I never thought I’d see on my mother’s computer: “University Withdrawal.”
That couldn’t be right. My mother never quit anything. She still got newsletters from the Nancy Drew Fan Club she joined in fourth grade. If she wouldn’t quit Nancy, she sure wouldn’t quit school. Not after she’d been talking about going back to college for at least my whole life. Probably even before.
I shook my head. Her cheek must’ve clicked on the page by accident.
I crouched down for a closer look. It was instructions for what to do if you decided to leave school. They even had an official list of Reasons for Withdrawal:
• Medical Issues
• Financial Hardship
• Personal Crisis
• Military Service
• Employment Conflict
• Family Burdens
Wow. That pretty much covered everything.
She had some other Web pages open, too. More stuff from the university. Some university foundation or something. I didn’t look at them. I just closed her laptop. Made sure it was plugged in so she’d have plenty of battery.
I’d scattered some of her papers onto the floor when I whipped out the laptop. Now I gathered them up. I glanced through, trying to figure out what they were so I could maybe put them in the right order. They looked like class notes. And the beginning of a paper. Plus a note to herself, it looked like. A phone number and some scribbles:
Which didn’t make much sense. But then, two words that did:
Family Burdens.
I sank back on my heels.
Family Burdens.
I crept back to my bedroom. Pulled out the sidekick contest entry form. Read through it. Made sure I’d spelled everything right, that my mom’s name and address were neat and legible.
She’d brought home a package of big brown envelopes right after the day at the farmers’ market. She’d used a couple, I think, but she still had a bunch left.
I liberated one from her desk, printed the contest address neatly on the front, and slid the entry form inside. I had to be ready. I couldn’t waste time. As soon as I finished Beanboy, I would slip him in the envelope, seal the whole thing up, and put it in the mail.
He needed to get to the judges as soon as possible.
Twenty-Seven
I chained my bike to the rail. Scraped down the steps, through the dusty glass door, and into the cave that was Caveman Comics. It took a second for my eyes to adjust, to make out the mountain of wild black hair and Hawaiian shirt hunkered over the back counter. The Cavester.
“Hey,” I hollered back to him. “I just need to look for something in the Dark Overlord encyclopedia.”
He didn’t look up. But I think his cheek twitched.
“My hands are clean,” I said. “I washed them before I left Art Club.”
(I didn’t mention that I’d shot out of Art Club early, dodging Mrs. Frazee’s raised eyebrow.)
“I won’t wrinkle the pages,” I told him. “And I won’t crack the spine. I’ll make sure the dust jacket doesn’t get bent.”
Caveman turned the page of his graphic novel. I took that as a yes.
I wove my way through the aisles to a tall, narrow shelf of books. Thumbtacked above was one of Caveman’s dusty signs:
I slid my finger over the thick spines. Past the Marvel encyclopedia. Past the DC encyclopedia. Past Seventy Years of the World’s Greatest Superheroes.
My fingers stopped on a tall book at the end. I pulled it down. Ran my hand over the smooth cover. The Dark Overlord Comics Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Characters of the Dark Overlord Universe.
I balanced the weight of it in my hands. This was me. At least, it could be.
Or my mom could be, since officially, she was the one entering the contest.
Not just entering. Winning. Winning the contest.
She had to.
And I, her chief Family Burden, had to find Beanboy’s superhero heart so she wouldn’t quit school. There had to be something here, in the Overlord Encyclopedia, that could help me. Something about H2O.
I settled on the floor, on Caveman’s mismatched (and disturbingly crunchy) carpet, and opened the book in my lap. I leafed through the superheroes, sidekicks, and villains. Lumen-X. Lyonheart. The Mad Chatterer.
“Here.” I found the entry and smoothed the page flat.
Case File: Madame Fury
Status: Supervillain
Base: Infuria, her laboratory fortress in the Himalayas
Superpower: Mad science
Superweapon: Stealth black helicopter, tricked out with laser beam, freeze beam, and other inventions that inflict pain and torture on anyone she believes has wronged her.
Real Name: Mary Ann Goodnight
Madame Fury was a major Overlord villain. They’d put in two whole pages about her. I started reading.
Mary Ann Goodnight was a clever, intelligent girl, even as a baby. Her parents, both brilliant scientists, were killed when their car skidded over an embankment during a storm. Three-year-old Mary Ann had been in the car, too. Hours later, rescuers found her, bruised and shaken, but otherwise unharmed.
Mary Ann was sent to live with her aunt, a kindly but poor woman who could not give young Mary Ann the education she needed. Mary Ann grew up wearing mended and well-worn hand-me-downs, teased and humiliated by classmates.
After working her way through college and finishing at the top of her class in science and mathematics, Mary Ann applied for a position at NAUTICA Enterprises, founded by renowned research scientist Marcus Poole. But Dr. Poole refused to hire her, saying her projects were too risky, that she hadn’t gathered enough data on possible adverse effects. Mary Ann stormed out, taking her research plans with her and vowing to prove Dr. Poole—and anyone who had ever humiliated her—wrong. She built her own secret lab high in the Himalayas and took on a new identity: Madame Fury.
But when a tragic lab experiment at NAUTICA went horribly wrong, changing Marcus Poole’s DNA structure forever, Madame Fury’s quest to prove Dr. Poole wrong became that much more difficult. Wracked with guilt and grief over the accident, Marcus Poole became H2O, vowing to use his powers to keep the planet safe.
Since that moment, Marcus Poole and Mary Ann Goodnight, alias H2O and Madame Fury, have been locked in a battle of good vs. evil, a battle that may well shape the future of Planet Earth.
I ran my finger down the entry. Most of it I already knew. I’d kind of forgotten about Madame Fury’s whole childhood humiliation thing, so I scribbled it down in my notebook. It made sense. Explained how sweet Mary Ann Goodnight had snapped and turned into Madame Fury.
But I didn’t see how it could help Beanboy.
I flipped to the middle of the encyclopedia. Found a tiny entry about Marcus Poole’s assistant, Godfrey Mann:
Case File: Godfrey Mann
Status: Faithful Assistant (not powerful enough to be considered a sidekick)
Base: NAUTICA Enterprises laboratory run by Dr. Marcus Poole
Superpower: none
Superweapon: none
Real Name: Godfrey Mann
Godfrey Mann appeared in the first H2O comic book, Underwater Adventures, long enough to die in the laboratory disaster that created H2O.
Godfrey, a man riddled with fears—of snakes, mud, germs, storms—became paralyzed by the violent thunderstorm unleashed by the disaster. Dr. Poole, trying to rescue his assistant, was struck by underwater electrical currents caused by the storm, which changed the structure of his DNA, turning him to water and giving him aqueous superpowers. Because Dr. Poole was unable to save Godfrey, he vowed to use his new powers to keep the planet safe, dedicating his quest to the memory of his faithful lab assistant.
The Adventures of Beanboy Page 9