Enough About Me

by S. G. Wilson

“No way!” said Lil Battleship. “He was scary. The bird too. Anyway, they gotta be the vandals!”

  “Where were they headed?” asked Meticulous, peering down the halls.

  Lil Battleship seemed to notice my double for the first time. His eyes went from me to Meticulous and back again. If he was confused about what he saw, he kept it to himself. He held out a hand. “Hi, I’m Lil Battleship. You new here?”

  Like most everybody when they first met Lil Battleship, Meticulous looked surprised to see such a tough giant acting so polite. “Quite. I just transferred in. So where did you see this dirty bloke and the bird?”

  “They ducked into the supply closet with all the uniforms,” said Lil Battleship. “Maybe the dude wanted some clothes. He sure needed them. Anyway, let’s go explain everything to the guards. We can turn in the bird and the guy and clear my name. They totally want to pin all this on me. As usual.”

  “We can’t turn in Cave!” said Meticulous. “Barbra maybe, but not Cave.”

  “Cave?” said Lil Battleship. “Barbra?”

  “Short for Caveman,” I explained. “His, uh, nickname.”

  Lil Battleship screwed up his face in confusion. “You mean you know that weirdo?!”

  “Uh, sort of?”

  Meticulous eyed the closest hallway. “I’ll go fetch those rascals. Think I could take out that guard with my tray if I threw it just right?”

  Lil Battleship stood up. “You have to tell the staff the truth and get me off the hook!”

  I hated how keeping the multiverse a secret meant disappointing everybody in my life.

  “I’d like to help you,” I said, the words hard as leather in my mouth. “But I’ve sort of got to help them more.”

  Lil Battleship gave me a look so cold that I would have preferred he’d just hit me instead. “You’re no better than anybody else here. Selfish as the rest of them.”

  “It’s not that!” I said. “See, Cave and the bird and this guy…” I pointed to Meticulous. “They don’t really…belong here.”

  As I grasped for words, Eardrum and Slime walked up on either side of me.

  “What’s this?” asked Eardrum. His leaf blower of a voice blasted my eardrums. “You two getting your stories straight for O’Fartly and Pooplaski? Well, it won’t work. Everybody knows you guys did it. I told them. And I let them know about the pee while I was at it.”

  Meticulous blew hurricanes of anger from his nostrils. “Will you turn down the volume of your voice? I’m trying to focus!”

  Eardrum and Slime took in my counterpart. Surely they’d see the resemblance. My teeth chattered so much that they nearly guillotined my tongue.

  “Who’s this nerd?” said Eardrum.

  “Yeah, nice glasses!” said Slime.

  Meticulous stood, smoothed the wrinkles from his uniform, and sauntered up to Eardrum. The cafeteria went quiet as every eye in the place turned to us. I slid down in my seat and covered my face with my hands. Meticulous had just increased our chances of getting busted by a thousand.

  “You have a lot of words to take back,” Meticulous told Eardrum. “The nerd comment for starters. Plus the accusation that my friends here vandalized this facility. As for the pee, let’s renounce that statement too, shall we?”

  Lil Battleship balled his fists. “Agreed. Take it back.”

  I didn’t like where this was headed. Lil Battleship never actually started fights—he just had trouble backing down from them. One more strike on his record and he might get transferred to an even worse juvie than this one. There was only one way to break this up.

  I threw all the food on my tray directly into Eardrum’s face.

  Egg, tortilla, hash browns, and Jell-O (because there always has to be Jell-O in any kind of institutional meal) splattered all over the loudmouth.

  Shaking with rage, dripping with breakfast, Eardrum charged at me until someone pegged him with a stack of pancakes. I barely dodged a fake meat patty that sailed past my nose. Slime wasn’t so lucky with the hunk of butter that splattered the back of his head. And before I knew it:

  “Food fight!” somebody shouted.

  A volley of yogurt tubes and orange juice cartons forced Eardrum and Slime to back off. A swarm of jelly tubs gave Lil Battleship and Meticulous cover to slip away.

  I planned on sneaking out right behind them, but Mr. Lunt got to me first.

  Yes, that Lunt.

  My school sent my least favorite adult of all time to the County Youth Development Center once a week as part of some sort of feel-good outreach teaching program. I was convinced Lunt only did it to continue his life’s work of antagonizing me.

  “I saw the whole thing, Macon!” said Lunt, grabbing my arm. “I’m taking you to security. Hope you get out in time for my final exam. But don’t get your hopes up!”

  “That was not a good deed!” said the MeMinder.

  “Now you tell me,” I muttered.

  I might have been one of the few criminals in history who had to spend a good chunk of an interrogation cleaning up their interrogation chamber. Caveman and Barbra had rampaged through the conference room, and O’Fartly and Pooplaski expected me to deal with it. As I swept up garbage and refiled folders, my head was a microwavable popcorn bag of bursting questions. What sort of chaos were Caveman and Barbra getting up to now? What new fights would Meticulous pick next? What would Mom, Dad, and Twig think when I didn’t show for the visitation? How would my grades survive missing the final?

  I got so sick of worrying that finally sitting down to talk to O’Fartly and Pooplaski actually came as a relief.

  “It all leads back to you,” said O’Fartly, his broken chair squeaking when he leaned forward. “You’re at the center of every stupid thing that’s happened today. Lunt told us you started that food fight.”

  “And we have witnesses who say the rumble between your roommates this morning was your fault,” said Pooplaski.

  “And now we have evidence that you were behind all this vandalism too,” said O’Fartly.

  “Evidence?” I tried my best to sound innocent and surprised. I failed.

  Pooplaski shoved aside a dented trash can to reveal rows of identical stick figures scrawled on the wall in marker. mes, read sloppy letters underneath.

  “That’s clearly short for Meade,” she said.

  “Anybody could have drawn that!” I cursed Caveman in my mind. “They’re framing me!”

  “Nice try,” said O’Fartly. “The other guards say you’re a good kid who just made a mistake. You know what we think?”

  “Uh, you agree?”

  He shoved a finger in my face. My nose filled with the smell of artificial breakfast pastry frosting. “We think you’re a screwup who’s just earned himself a longer sentence at a more restrictive facility.”

  Pooplaski nodded. “Sit right here while we write up our report to the supervisor.”

  They stormed out of the room, locking the door behind them.

  Now it was official: in the span of a few short hours, Meticulous had ruined my life yet again. If I didn’t get him and the others off this Earth, there was no telling how much more damage they’d do to me and the rest of my universe. I couldn’t just sit there waiting for that to happen.

  Searching for a way out, I tugged on a pull-up blind. It covered a one-way window looking out on the visitation room. All this time, the guards had been spying on us! Weren’t there rules against that? I might have been outraged if I hadn’t seen Twig sitting there waiting for me. Just the sight of her had a way of calming me down. Never mind that she was with Nash. The two of them sometimes visited me together, and I was okay with that.

  Well, not really.

  Twig and Nash were the only two people on this Earth who knew the truth about me, but things had grown awkward between us. And it wasn’t just because I
liked Twig as more than a friend, or that Nash used to bully me. People see you differently when you’re behind bars, even when they know you don’t really belong there. I was sure Twig and Nash already thought less of me, and they’d think even worse if I didn’t show up to see them.

  I’d started looking around again for an exit when Meticulous, of all people, walked into the visitation room.

  He’d messed up his hair and was slouching in an exaggerated way. He was pretending to be me! Or at least, some amusement park caricature of me. He started joking around with Twig and Nash, making them laugh. They never laughed like that around me, not lately, at least. I saw a speaker on the wall and turned it on.

  “We’ve been waiting so long, I think we only have a few minutes left, so we’d better say it now,” said Nash, puffing out his chest. “We wanted to tell you about a new documentary project we’re working on. The three of us are a team, though, so we need your sign-off on this.”

  Who did Nash think he was, talking like some sort of movie agent?

  “It’s different from the more newsy documentaries I’ve done before,” said Twig, chewing on one of her curls. She ate her hair when she was embarrassed, flustered, anxious, or all of the above. “It’s about middle school dances—you know, the teenage ritual of it all—”

  “And we’re going to homecoming together,” Nash butted in.

  The dung beetles trampled over my heart and nearly ripped it from my chest.

  “It’s only for the sake of the film,” said Twig, chomping away at more of her hair. “Not a real date or anything. It’s just to have the full experience of homecoming. But we know how it looks, which is why we wanted to tell you.”

  Nash gave Meticulous the winning smile he’d mastered from years of, well, winning. “Exactly. We’re all about communication. So, bro, what do you think?”

  Meticulous examined his nails like they were more worthy of his attention than this talk. “Rubbish.”

  Twig spat out her hair in surprise.

  “I knew he wouldn’t be cool with us going to a dance together,” Nash muttered.

  Twig punched him in the arm, a move she used to reserve just for me. Exactly how close had these two grown while I’d been out of their lives?

  “I have no problem with you two going to some twee little dance,” Meticulous said in a decent impersonation of my accent. “My problem is with Twig wasting her time on this sort of cack. I sincerely doubt the world needs a so-called documentary about a homecoming.”

  Twig raised her eyebrow to a 25 percent arch. I knew what that look meant: suspicion. His Earth One slang was giving him away.

  “Her channel’s lost subscribers lately,” said Nash. “Something fun like homecoming is a way to build an audience and get some eyeballs.”

  Twig scowled at Nash.

  Meticulous chuckled. “The Twig I know doesn’t give a farthing about eyeballs and all that tosh.”

  Twig’s eyebrow arch went all the way to 100 percent. She was definitely onto Meticulous now. I had to put a stop to this before she outed him and blew his cover. But how?

  The fizz. That was it. Meticulous had said my problem with the fizz was a mental thing. What if I could get over it? I focused like I’d never focused before, going so deep into my head that the world around me disappeared. I’d always figured people who claimed to meditate were really just taking a fancy nap, but now I knew they were onto something. I could feel the fizz buried deep down in my gut, a barely flickering spark. So I reached out and touched it.

  More fizz than I’d ever felt jolted through my body.

  I passed out.

  I woke up a few minutes later facedown on the tabletop with a thick wad of drool hanging off my mouth just like Caveman. The fizz had never made me pass out before. Then again, the Rip and its energy had never been so strong before either. It must have been too much for me to take, especially after such a long dry spell.

  When I looked out the window, I saw that Twig and Nash were gone. Meticulous had moved on to my next scheduled visitation. The one with Mom and Dad.

  They’d messaged me ahead of time that they had something “important to discuss” at this meeting, so I’d been expecting the worst: that they’d finally gone through with getting a divorce. They’d already separated a few months ago, and though they said it had nothing to do with me, I’m sure having a kid go full-on delinquent isn’t exactly a cure for a troubled marriage.

  Their T-shirt choices confirmed those fears: they wore different Doctor Whos. When my supernerd parents had a T-shirt battle about which Doctor Who was better (Dad liked the eleventh doctor, Mom the tenth), you knew there was a problem.

  Meticulous held both their hands like some sort of grief counselor. “It’s fine. I understand. I saw this coming. You two had a sixty percent chance of splitting up. Er, that is to say, lots of marriages end in divorce.”

  “Well, you’re taking this a lot better than I feared,” said Dad.

  “Dad, would you pipe down for a moment?” said Meticulous, not taking his eyes off Mom. “I’m just glad you’re both here and…alive.”

  I didn’t have a say about anything in the outside world, and now Meticulous thought he could speak for me in lockup. That was the final straw.

  Even a little trickle of the fizz went a long way, and the spark I grabbed passed into me like an IV of Red Bull. It raged through my limbs and flamed around my heart, which nearly Grinched right out of my chest.

  I felt the talents of a hundred Mes inside me, but I didn’t know how to use them. When I’d fizzed before, I’d operated on autopilot—Marathon Me’s running or Bollywood Musical Me’s dancing just sort of kicked in when I needed it. Now it was different. Because I’d activated the fizz on purpose, I figured I had to turn on the right skill too. I had the potential to do so many things—kick open the door like Ultimate Mixed Martial Arts Me, remove it from its hinges like DIY Me. Should I choose them, or some other Me ability altogether?

  Stepping up to the door, I remembered the time I broke out of Lunt’s supply closet by picking the lock. That had to have been an Escape Me trick. I hadn’t ever talked to Escape, but I’d seen him breaking out of straitjackets at Me Con a few times. As I thought about him, the fizzing got stronger in my fingers. I reached for the door lock and had it open in moments. This was a first: I’d just fizzed a Me on purpose.

  I didn’t see any guards in the hall outside, but I didn’t want to make any noise. I thought about Mime Me until the fizz went to my feet. Moving now in total silence, I tiptoed around the corner and squeezed behind a busted soda machine.

  “This is not a good deed!” said the MeMinder.

  I would have put the thing on mute if I knew how.

  Before I could figure out what to do next, Officer Lenny walked into the room and called the Mom and Dad meeting to an end. I had to suffer through the sight of Meticulous giving Mom a long and teary hug and Dad a halfhearted pat on the back.

  Lenny led my parents out, leaving Meticulous to find his way to class. As my double passed the soda machine, I popped out from behind it, hoping to surprise him. Meticulous didn’t so much as flinch. “Hello, Average,” he said. “Enjoy the show?”

  “Why did you go in there acting like me?”

  “I just figured you not showing for your visitation would raise a lot of unpleasant questions for Mum and Twig. And the others.”

  “You mean Dad and Nash?”

  “Right, them. Anyway, too many questions might have complicated my escape plan.”

  I wanted to tell him off in so many different ways that the words wadded up in my mouth and nothing came out.

  Meticulous slipped on his glasses. “You know, your mum is a lot like mine was. And the Twig of this Earth is very bright—I think she was onto my little ruse, but I can’t be positive.”

  “You think?” I shif
ted to my British accent: “ ‘Oi! It’s not bloody proper for you blokes to prance about together at the dance!’ ”

  Meticulous rolled his eyes. “You and Stand-Up Comedy Me should perform together.”

  “Like your impersonation of me is so great. Would you just go round up Caveman and Barbra already? I’ll meet you out there after my final and help however I can. But you’ve got to promise to go and never come back.”

  “Fine,” said Meticulous.

  But things weren’t fine when we reached the door to class and looked through the glass pane. There at the blackboard, gnawing on a piece of chalk like a complete idiot, stood Caveman.

  The most important final of my life was in the grubby hands of a brute who couldn’t even talk.

  Caveman chose to take the practical portion of my algebra final by filling the chalkboard with stick-figure hunters chasing down deer and buffalo. A furious Lunt grabbed for the chalk, but Caveman kept it out of his reach.

  Everybody in class laughed and laughed except Eardrum and Slime. My roomies watched Caveman with sniper-scope eyes. I didn’t see Lil Battleship in the mix. Where had he gone off to? Looking for me?

  “What’s Lunt, of all people, doing in there?” asked Meticulous.

  “Never mind that,” I said. “What’s Cave doing in there?! That’s my class!”

  “Maybe one of these young scholars mistook him for you and invited him inside.”

  In the classroom, Cave bit down on a piece of chalk and blew a white dust cloud from his lips. Excited, he hopped up and down, spewing more chalk air. Lunt shouted at him, and Caveman blew an especially thick cloud up his nose, sending the teacher into a coughing fit.

  “We have to get him out!” I said. “Now! If I don’t pass this final, I’ll have to repeat a grade once I get out!”

  Meticulous beamed with pride. “This is math? Then you couldn’t have picked a better Me to take this test for you.”

  “He’s a caveman! You expect him to do algebra?!”

  “Oh yes. Math is the universal language, after all. I taught him myself. Just watch.”