Bigger, Badder, Nerdier

by Obert Skye

  The door almost smashed us, but we were able to shift our hold and set it down softly on the floor. We ran into the library and headed for the copy machine. Owen pulled open the large tray and put both reams of paper in. Mindy slapped the flyer Xen had made down onto the copier, and I used my gift to bypass the starting code and get the machine powered up. Instantly the copier began spitting out copies of Xen’s flyer.

  “How much time do you think we have?” Mindy asked.

  “Xen’s going to lead her to the football field while pretending to look for the button,” I answered. “When Mrs. Shh discovers there’s no button, she’ll probably come right back.”

  “I can hear them exiting the school,” Owen said. “They’re near the burned-out shed, and Mrs. Shh is telling Xen that toggles are just wannabe buttons.”

  “Poor Xen,” Mindy said. “I would—”

  All three of us jumped. Owen had been so busy listening to Xen that he had failed to hear Tyler coming in through the broken door and walking right up to us.

  I glanced at Mindy and she glanced at me as the copier continued to print out our flyers.

  Owen was the only one of us with enough composure to answer.

  “We were looking for Mrs. Shh. The door was knocked down, and we came in here to see where she was.”

  “That makes no sense,” Tyler said suspiciously. “Why would any student be looking for the librarian?”

  Tyler was right. Here at WADD, the librarian wasn’t someone most kids wanted to find on purpose.

  “That’s okay,” I said nicely. “How about we just go back to our class?”

  “That would be easier for me,” Tyler agreed. “But I have my orders to report anything suspicious, and you three standing in a place like the library seems suspicious. Follow me.”

  The three of us followed Tyler out of the library as the copier continued to print our flyers. We stepped over the broken door, and Tyler grumbled.

  “Did you kids have something to do with this?”

  “No,” Mindy said.

  “This whole school is a piece of junk,” he complained. “Someone should be embarrassed.”

  It seemed weird that Tyler was complaining, seeing how he was the one in charge of school maintenance.

  “You four sure have been a lot of trouble lately.”

  Tyler looked us over as we walked, and he realized there were only three of us.

  “Where’s that other one? The short one who wears books on his feet? Did he wise up and join a better group? Maybe the Scrums or the Blotches?”

  “You think we’re worse than the Scrums and the Blotches?” Mindy asked angrily.

  “Susan is going to have a field day with you,” Tyler said. “She might have to enforce her right as a general-secretary and lock you three in detention for a week.”

  “She can’t do that,” Mindy argued.

  “You might be surprised.”

  We couldn’t afford to be locked up. Our plan to save the very school that might soon lock us up would be ruined if we were detained in any way. I looked around for something to turn on or off. It was up to me to fix this mess. I was the one who—

  Mindy snapped her fingers while flinging them up toward Tyler’s head. The force of her snap sent his trash can helmet spinning wildly. Tyler started to scream as the movement of the twisting can sent him bouncing into the walls like an out-of-control top. Mindy started using both hands to fling clicks directly toward Tyler and keep him moving farther down the hall. He was screaming and trying to stop himself, but the movement of his head kept him off-balance and unable to regain his footing.

  “What are you doing?” I yelled at Mindy.

  I wasn’t too worried about Tyler hearing me, since he was busy spinning and screaming.

  “We had to do something,” Mindy said. “We can’t get caught now.”

  “Where’s Xen?” I asked Owen.

  He listened for a single second. “He’s in back of the school telling Mrs. Shh that it must not have been a button he saw. She’s not happy about it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We don’t have much time. Run to the library, get the flyers, and then get out. Mindy will keep Tyler spinning, and I’ll find Xen. Let’s all meet at Owen’s house as soon as we can.”

  “This is crazy,” Mindy said as she clicked.

  Owen took off.

  Tyler kept spinning.

  I went to save Xen. Well, I went to save Xen right after making a quick stop at the office. There was something I needed to get.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  High Flyers

  It turns out that Xen didn’t need saving. By the time I reached him, Mrs. Shh had already reprimanded him for the fake button news and returned to the library. Xen and I left the mostly abandoned school and ran to Owen’s house.

  We worried about Mindy and Owen for a few minutes before they both showed up. Owen had all the flyers in his arms.

  “We did it,” he said in amazement.

  “We did part of it,” I reminded him. “So far we’ve just made some flyers. I miss the good old days when things like making copies wasn’t a survival-type activity. How do they look?”

  Owen handed me one.

  “It’s not my fanciest design,” Xen said. “But I calculate our plan as having a thirty-two percent chance of working.”

  “I one hundred percent knew you would say that.”

  We went over the plan a dozen more times and then returned to our own homes for the night. We needed to sleep and be ready for what could be the biggest day of our lives.

  At dinner my parents couldn’t stop talking about tomorrow’s movie opening.

  They wanted me to skip school and go wait in line with them. When I told them that I needed to go to school, they seemed disappointed.

  Falling asleep was surprisingly easy, and before I knew it, morning had arrived. I got up and got ready as quickly as I could. I put on my LAME suit and wore a large jacket over it.

  My parents had already left to go wait in line at the theater compound, so the house was empty. I went into our emergency-preparedness room and grabbed the inflatable life raft. My dad had bought it a while back, when the government had been talking about flooding Piggsburg in hopes of washing away some of the many smells.

  After getting the raft, I went to the kitchen and grabbed some stale crackers for breakfast. I choked them down, gathered my things, and left for Xen’s.

  When I arrived, my friends were already there. They all had their costumes on, hidden under their coats.

  We put on our pollution masks and then began the hike across town to the government drone ease-way on the other side of the dry lake. On the way there, we passed WADD and saw that it looked completely vacant.

  “I hope this works,” Mindy said.

  Xen groaned. “I hope we don’t get arrested and have to work the government waste-mines for the rest of our lives.”

  “Yeah, that too,” Xen agreed.

  The ease-way we were walking to was on the far end of the dry lake. It was created as a place where drones could fly without interference. Ease-ways were like freeways for flying things, long strips of barren land with nothing on them so that drones could zip over the earth without too many people throwing sticks or spears at them. People still did, but since the ease-ways were outside the neighborhoods and main parts of the city, the drones were a little less likely to get messed with.

  Well, we were going to mess with one today.

  We circled around the edge of the dry lake and tromped through some tall, ragged pine trees. We stepped over a broken fence and arrived at a section of ease-way seventeen that was hidden by trees. Mindy knew about the spot because her older brother came here occasionally to set off fireworks.

  I tried to sound confident as I said, “According to what Milton told Darth Susan, the drone’s going to pass overhead shortly.”

  “You’re putting a lot of trust in this Milton kid.” Mindy shook her head as she talked. “What if he’s wron
g?”

  “Well, then we can prepare to live a pummel-rich life at outpost #72.”

  I pulled out the inflatable raft and yanked the cord on the side of it. In seconds it was completely inflated. We positioned the puffy yellow boat in the middle of the ease-way and threw our jackets into it for extra padding.

  Nine minutes later we saw a government drone coming over the horizon. Mindy and Xen pushed the raft into the perfect position to be directly in line with the oncoming drone. They fluffed up our coats, and Owen did some math in his head to calculate the exact moment I would need to shut things off.

  “Five, four, three, two, now!” he said.

  I thought about the drone shutting down, and it dropped from the sky, still falling forward as it did. Owen’s calculations were right on, and the drone landed in the jacket-filled raft.

  There wasn’t a second to waste.

  Mindy snapped open the metal lock on the top of the drone and pulled out a black flash drive. I took the one I had borrowed from Darth Susan’s office and popped it into the drone. Mindy closed the compartment, and we all stood up and backed away from the raft.

  The drone rose and continued forward on its programmed flight as if four geeks hadn’t just messed with it.

  “Amazing,” Xen whispered. “I can’t believe that worked.”

  “Me neither,” I said.

  We all wanted to stand around and be impressed with ourselves, but the clock was ticking. We put our coats back on and took off, leaving the raft behind. There was no time to deflate it or drag it behind us. We were already late for school.

  When we got to WADD, Owen listened in.

  “I can’t hear anyone in there besides Darth Susan and Tyler,” Owen reported. “Darth Susan is driving the HTV down the far hall and laughing. Tyler is in the cafeteria eating something and mumbling about how disgusting it is.”

  We slipped through the vacant security hole and made our way to the audiovisual room behind the stage in the auditorium.

  “Time?” I asked Mindy.

  “You have a watch,” she said.

  “I know, it just sounds cooler if you tell me. Time?”

  “Ten thirty-four,” she said, being a good sport.

  We quickly hooked up the flash drive and all the equipment and monitors we needed. We wanted to make sure that everything was in place to broadcast the movie to all the classrooms that had connections. Using the technology at our school was always a risk. Sometimes it didn’t work, and if it did work, there was always the possibility that it would break down. We were hoping that today we would have no problems. We only needed it to work for a short while.

  With everything hooked up, we climbed the ladder near the postapocalyptic art room and stepped out onto the roof of the school.

  Finn was away, leaving his tower empty.

  Owen and I unfolded the emergency weather balloon he had taken from his dad. Owen’s father collected them so that he could someday build a bathtub balloon ship to transport his family to someplace less nuts.

  Xen pulled out a huge bottle of fizzy seltzer water that he had added baking soda to. He took off the cap and drank like there was no tomorrow, which was appropriate seeing how there would be no tomorrow if we failed.

  “Sorry,” I said. “But we need your belches to be extraordinary.”

  Mindy and Owen unfolded the giant balloon and began shoving the flyers we had made into the open end. I took a marker and quickly wrote something on the side of it.

  Xen finished his drink and started jumping up and down to get his gut working. In no time at all he began to burp. We held the balloon’s opening toward him and he aimed his belches directly into it. It only took one and a half super-burps to fill the massive balloon and almost knock us all off the roof.

  It wasn’t easy, but Mindy and I quickly tied it closed with some rope.

  Owen and I struggled to lift and push the balloon up on Finn’s tower.

  Xen directed his mouth up toward the fully inflated balloon and got to burping.

  Xen kept at it and the balloon shot up off the tower and into the sky at an impressive rate.

  “Time!” I shouted.

  “Ten forty-two.”

  “Listen!” Owen yelled.

  None of us needed Owen’s super hearing to hear the angry roars and screams coming from the south. Their voices rose up in the sky just like the balloon we had launched. The movie was supposed to have started a few minutes ago, but everyone at the theaters had just discovered that the flash drive the theaters were using didn’t have Gritty on it. It had something much more terrible.

  “What was on that flash drive?” Mindy asked.

  “Home movies of Darth Susan and her lizard on their trip to the Minnesota trash pyramids.”

  “Ewwww!” the distant crowd screamed.

  “They probably just saw the part where she was giving her lizard, Becky, a good-night kiss,” I said with concern.

  “What have we done?” Owen whispered somberly.

  The noise of a disappointed and disgusted crowd grew louder and louder.

  I glanced up and saw the weather balloon. It looked miles away now, and it was drifting to the south and toward the theater compound.

  “Too late to turn back now,” I said loudly. “Do it, Mindy!”

  Mindy looked up at the sky and aimed her hands toward the distant balloon. She braced her legs and pulled back her arms.

  “Ready?” she said with a nervous smile.

  Owen, Xen, and I all nodded.

  Mindy thrust her arms forward and brought her hands together with a tremendous crack! Owen and I were blown off our feet and onto our backs next to Xen. The sound of the clap shot through the sky with unbelievable force. Up in the air the weather balloon exploded just as Mindy had wanted it to. There was an eruption of paper in the sky above us.

  “It worked,” Owen said in disbelief.

  We stood there and watched the flyers rain down over the polluted skyline of Piggsburg. The wind was moving them like a blanket of rectangular snow all over the city.

  “Places!” I yelled.

  We scrambled off the roof and back down to the AV room so that we could do some intense waiting.

  The plan was well in motion.

  Now there was nothing to do but wait (and think of all the things that could still go wrong).

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Confrontation

  The Pep Liaison and the district census counter were scheduled to be at WADD at eleven. We calculated that based on wind speed and the distance, it would take 1.3 minutes for the first of the flyers to drift down to earth. But we were wrong. Once the balloon had burst, the flyers flew quickly in all directions. Owen could hear people all over the city reading them aloud. Anyone coming from the theater compound would be here in approximately fifteen minutes. The flyers were landing everywhere, which meant that some people would be here much sooner.

  Owen kept a constant ear to the wind. There was so much excitement and chaos that his head rocked back and forth as he listened.

  “Great!” I said happily.

  “Not really,” Owen shouted. “There’s a problem. Darth Susan is onto us.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Someone caught one of the flyers and phoned her. They read her what it says. Also LAMER is here. Darth Susan is screaming at them about how someone’s trying to ruin her no-count.”

  “Cratch!” I swore passionately. “I hope LAMER’s not able to thwart our plan.”

  Mindy stared at me. I couldn’t tell for sure, but she looked super impressed with my passionate state of mind and my cool choice of words.

  “Thwart?” she asked sarcastically.

  “What?” I said defensively. “It’s a good word, and I’ve always wanted to use it.”

  “Well,” Owen piped up. “They are going to thwart our plans because Darth Susan and LAMER just reached the front of the school. They are currently outside the security hole stopping people from coming in.”

/>   Xen moaned. “I didn’t calculate this happening.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, trying to think. “We can do this. In fact, this might help.”

  “Help?” Mindy asked. “How?”

  “By help, I mean help our street cred.” I tried to look as serious as I could. “You guys know what we’ve got to do, right?”

  We all looked at each other.

  “Let’s take on LAMER,” Xen said.

  Mindy smiled. “I was hoping it would come to this.”

  “Well…” Owen gulped. “I was worried it would.”

  “This is our moment!” I cheered. “We get to show LAMER what it means to be LAME!”

  The four of us ran out of the AV room and climbed back up onto the roof. We thought it would look cool, and blow everyone’s minds, to descend from the front of the school and land right on top of LAMER. But when we got to the edge of the roof and looked down at the drop, we suddenly got cold feet.

  Not only was the drop a bit higher than we remembered, but down below us, all four members of LAMER were blocking the security hole.

  Darth Susan pulled the HTV up behind them and in front of the hole, creating an even bigger obstacle for anyone who might try to get in.

  There was a rapidly growing crowd of normal citizens who had seen Xen’s flyer and came over. They were itching to get inside and see the movie. It was now playing all over the world but Piggsburg was missing out.

  The Fanatics and Normals were jittery and anxious to get in.