by Obert Skye
Darth Susan scowled as she sat on the HTV and looked out at the growing crowd. It would take a miracle to stop people from entering, and all she had was LAMER.
She leaned over from her seat and whispered something to Nerf. He listened for a moment while shaking. This wasn’t a football game or a Supply War. This was something much bigger than anything he had ever punched or bullied his way out of.
Darth Susan finished whispering and Nerf stepped closer to the crowd. He held up his hands and shouted at the huge group of movie-hungry people.
It seemed impossible to believe, but the amped-up mob was obeying him. Nerf was holding back a large wave of desperate moviegoers by pretending to be us and lying about a curse. Although I guess in some way our entire world was cursed.
Darth Susan sat on her HTV looking like an evil puppet master who was smugly enjoying what her fake-puppet super-group was doing.
“What now?” Owen asked. “Nobody’s going in. Will they still be counted as members of our school if they’re outside?”
“No.” I took a moment to properly moan. “According to the bylaws of the census, the humans have to be inside the actual building for them to be counted.”
Darth Susan motioned Nerf over and whispered something else to him. Nerf then turned and relayed the message to the crowd.
“She … I mean we suggest you all go home to avoid any further cursing.”
Remarkably, it looked like the crowd was thinking about obeying him!
They were still jittery and anxious, but because he was wearing a superhero costume and talking about a curse, some of them were beginning to turn away.
Nerf started to flex his muscles and show off.
Our plan was falling apart right before our eyes. Everything came down to this moment, and this moment was crumbling. We were just four Geeks up on a roof and out of answers.
“I guess I’ll need to start bulking up,” Xen whispered.
“What?” Mindy asked.
“I know I can belch for protection, but it’s probably a good idea to work out a little before we’re shipped off to outpost #72.”
Owen shivered. “I heard the principal is an ex-con, ex-cop, and current carney.”
“No one’s going to 72,” Mindy promised. “The district census counter will be here in ten minutes. So, we just need to remove some ugly blockage from the front of the security hole.”
“Um,” Xen said. “I’ve calculated our odds of defeating LAMER, and it’s ninety eight point four percent. But if the crowd jumps in and helps them, our odds decrease dramatically.”
“We have no choice,” I whispered. “If we don’t try, we only have ourselves to LAME.”
Everyone groaned.
Mindy stood up straight and glanced around. We could all hear and see the crowd growing below. The moment seemed monumental.
“This isn’t a time for bad puns,” Mindy said. “This is a time for action.”
Looking down over the edge, Mindy threw her hands together and clapped. The flagpole in front of the school cracked at the base and fell swiftly toward the school. It hit the edge of the roof with a thwack and created the perfect sliding pole.
Without saying a word, all four of us straddled the pole and slid down to where the action was.
It happened so fast that the crowd didn’t know what was going on or how to react. But suddenly, in a flash, we were standing on the ground in front of LAMER and Darth Susan. The mob of people looked … confused.
“What the hero?” someone in the crowd yelled.
Darth Susan didn’t miss a beat. She pointed at us and screamed …
The growing crowd seemed more than willing to do her bidding. They started to yell the sort of things that courteous crowds never would. It was a terrifying sight—Fanatics and Normals all hopped up on mob mentality and stomping toward us.
I quickly thought of everyone’s phone ringing, and all phones in the area went off. The noise created a circus of sound and confusion. Some of the Fanatics were mad.
“They did it!” Nerf yelled while pointing at us.
The crowd raged with anger and closed in around us.
“This is the end,” Owen said.
“No, it’s not,” Mindy shouted. “Quick, Xen, what is the gash of X times the square root of five divided by the number of errors in the Very Dismal System?”
Xen looked stunned. “That’s impossible … there’s too many…”
Xen rocked back and forth. He couldn’t calculate the incalculable equation. His head shook, and with one giant nuclear burp, he belched.
Everyone went down!
Well, not everyone at once. Nerf flew straight up about five feet before coming down. It was too bad that there weren’t any Fanatics still standing to take a picture of him flying.
Everyone moaned and muttered as they struggled to get back onto their feet. I stood and pulled Owen up next to me as the massive gathering of people worked their way back on their feet.
Our evil school secretary had been blown off the HTV. She got up fuming. Nerf and his poser friends stood up next to her looking baffled and wobbly. Darth Susan pinched Nerf on the arm and screamed, “Get them!”
Nerf looked scared.
“You heard her,” he said to Mud, Weasel, and Millie. “Get them.”
Nerf stepped back while his three friends came at us. Mindy took Millie down with a single sonic snap. Owen and I charged Mud and Weasel. We didn’t have super-strength, but we had moves. Seconds before we barreled into them, Xen burped and they flew backward as if we had just blown them over. It was a bit of trickery, but it made us look more powerful than we were.
“Hey!” a Fanatic in the crowd yelled, and pointed. “They’re not the impostors. They are!”
“No,” Nerf said. “We’re the real heroes. We—”
Before he could finish his lie, Owen lunged forward and flashed him with his eyes.
Nerf was temporarily blinded, so I took the moment to jump up and ram his legs.
“The HTV!” Mindy yelled while pointing to where it was parked in front of the security hole. “Get that rope from the flagpole!”
Owen pulled the rope off the broken flagpole and tossed one end of it to Mindy. She ran around LAMER and Darth Susan as Owen flashed his eyes at them and Xen burped just enough to keep them off balance. The crowd was clapping and cheering as if the movie had already begun.
Mindy cinched the rope around them, and we all quickly tied them to the HTV.
Instead of releasing them, we decided to pull the masks off LAMER.
Nerf and his friends were finally exposed.
The crowd cheered and booed.
It was a nice moment for geeks everywhere. The forces who had messed with us for so long were getting their come-uppance.
We weren’t going to let them go, but we were going to let them go away. Normally the HTV required the key that Darth Susan wore around her neck, but starting engines was what I was best at.
I imagined the cart engine turned on. I pushed the stick into drive, and the HTV started to move away from the school and toward Elm Street. The crowd parted, and all five bullies slowly rolled away, yelling and screaming.
The ever-growing crowd of Fanatics and Normals looked at us. There were so many of them now that I couldn’t take them all in with one glance.
“Sorry about those impostors,” I shouted. “They wanted you to miss the movie. We want you to see it. Show starts in four minutes.”
The cheering was so loud I thought my eardrums would burst.
We motioned everyone toward the security hole, and they began to file in, pushing each other through the hole as fast as they could. A bunch of Fanatics broke the locked doors nearby, allowing even more people to stream into the building. The four of us stood back and watched the river of humanity flow into our once-vacant school.
“I can hear them screaming,” Owen reported. “They’re slowly rolling down Elm Street. They’re angry but fine.”
“And I’ll turn off the HT
V as soon as they’re far enough away.”
I heard someone clearing his throat and turned to find the Pep Liaison and a woman with thick glasses and a blue sweater. She said her name was Elaine Simplot.
“He’s teaching some new students how to survive by hiding,” I lied. “But he asked us to show you in.”
“Who are you?” Elaine said with a sniff.
“This is LAME,” Peppy answered for us. “They saved me from ruin a couple of months back. You can trust them.”
Elaine followed us into the school, and we let her do her job. It wasn’t easy—she could barely move through the hall due to all the people. She tried to go into a couple of classrooms, but there wasn’t an inch of extra space.
“Time?” I whispered to Mindy.
“We have two minutes,” she whispered back.
There was way more of the school for Elaine to view, but she was bothered by the crowd and could clearly see that our student population was off the charts.
We gladly escorted Ms. Simplot and Peppy out the front and off the campus. As they walked away, we could see hundreds of people still streaming into the school.
“Did we do it?” Xen asked excitedly.
“I think we—”
“Look out!” Mindy yelled.
Running toward us at a breakneck speed was a disheveled-looking Darth Susan. She was coming up the street and holding what looked like a piece of the HTV. She swung it wildly above her head while screaming.
Darth Susan swung the piece of HTV directly down toward my head. It had all happened so fast that I couldn’t move. Luckily, my friends could. Mindy clapped and Xen burped simultaneously in Darth Susan’s direction, creating a burp-clap cloud.
Darth Susan flew back and into a bush across the street. She was defeated. She looked as if she had been put through the ringer and chewed up by life. I almost felt sorry for her. She struggled in the bush and then cried out.
Xen was very happy to answer her.
“Not bad,” I told Xen.
Darth Susan fell to her knees and beat the ground with her fists.
The four of us turned away from her. We joined the stream of people moving into the school and miraculously got the movie started on time.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Down and Nerdy
The movie was fine. It didn’t seem like anyone really hated it, and nobody really loved it. Worldwide everyone thought it was just okay.
Fanatics didn’t hate it enough to throw a fit. A weird kind of peace settled over Piggsburg and the world.
How long it would last nobody could tell.
For the record, most of the AV Club thought the movie was awful. Owen did like how it wrapped up Ky-Ryder’s story.
Nerf, Mud, Weasel, and Millie eventually made it back to school—the HTV did not. It had run into a tree near the dry lake and broke apart.
Right after the movie was shown at our school, we took the flash drive to the theater compound and secretly dropped it off. Because of demand, the government ran the movie nonstop in every theater for the past two weeks straight. Because of no-demand, they never ran a second screening of Darth Susan and Becky’s vacation to the trash pyramids in the State Formerly Known as Minnesota.
According to the census count Ms. Simplot took, our school was two hundred and thirty-seven percent filled to capacity. Because of that the district not only planned to keep it open, but they planned to hire an assistant principal to work under Principal Woth.
Darth Susan was devastated. After all, there was a good chance that the assistant principal might take away some of her control. Plus, her plan to shut down our school had miserably failed. Once again LAME had messed up her early retirement and helped save the life of Otto Waddle Jr. High Government Outpost.
Today was now Friday and I was in Zombie Biology dissecting a zombie frog.
LAME had not shown up in public since the day of the movie. We figured we’d lay low for a while just to be safe. As for LAMER, everyone had a field day with Nerf and what he and his friends had done. For the first time ever the biggest bully in school had lost all support. Nobody was scared of him because what he had done was so … well, pathetic. Nerf and the other three just slinked around school trying not to get made fun of.
The fame of LAME was growing. Everyone had posted thousands of pictures and articles about us taking down LAMER and helping the community see the movie.
Even the government wanted in on the fame. They lied about what had happened by telling people that they had enlisted LAME to show the movie at Otto Waddle because they knew that the community would like that.
You still might think it’s weird that we would go to so much trouble to save our school. There are days when even I don’t understand. But Darth Susan is not someone we want to see emerge victorious. Besides, there is something about being loyal to the mess you are in that makes LAME feel protective of Otto Waddle Jr. High Government Outpost.
I looked around my class and hoped that it was worth it. I saw Mindy, and the two of us smiled at each other. Yesterday she had complimented me on something, and I had finally said the right thing back.
The speaker on the wall in the classroom crackled to life. Darth Susan had something to say:
As the speaker snapped off we could hear Finn crying,
I looked at Mindy, she looked at Owen, Owen looked at Xen, and Xen looked at me.
I shut off the lights in our classroom, and under a cloak of darkness, we slipped out and moved into action.
Darth Susan was Darth-pressed and angry. It served her right. She should have known that wherever there is injustice, wherever there is oppression, wherever there is a need for four middle schoolers with mediocre abilities, LAME will be there.
Other books by Obert Skye
Geeked Out
THE CREATURE FROM MY CLOSET SERIES:
Wonkenstein
Potterwookiee
Pinocula
Katfish
The Lord of the Hat
Batneezer
THE WITHERWOOD REFORM SCHOOL SERIES:
Witherwood Reform School
Lost & Found
About the Author
Obert Skye is the author and illustrator of Geeked Out and the bestselling Creature from My Closet series, including Wonkenstein, Potterwookiee, Pinocula, Katfish, The Lord of the Hat, and Batneezer. He is also the author of the Witherwood Reform School series and the popular fantasy adventure series Leven Thumps and Pillage. He lives with his family in Arizona. Visit obertskye.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
1. Otto Waddle Jr. High Outpost
2. Sending Ourselves to the Office
3. Lamer
4. Honk Loudly
5. Caught in the Act
6. Something’s Wrong
7. The Announcement
8. Spotted and Spoiled
9. Hard to Imitate
10. Stalking the ’Tary
11. Whisked Away
12. Something’s Missing
13. Figuring It Out
14. Paper Jam
15. Snappy Solutions
16. High Flyers
17. Confrontation
18. Down and Nerdy
Other books by Obert Skye
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Obert Skye
Henry Holt and Company, Publishers since 1866
Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
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All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018945024
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First hardcover edition 2019
eBook edition April 2019
eISBN 9781627799423