No. Never.
I had to upload this software to a location where no one would ever think to look for it. A flash drive was too obvious. And my home computer wasn’t safe either. I was a celebrity now, and my fame could make me a target for hackers.
And then it came to me. The perfect hiding place.
16
SUPERSALESMAN
DONOVAN CURTIS
Noah was right when he said I didn’t understand what it was like to be popular. In fact, I understood exactly zero about Noah these days. When I first met him he was an oddball genius with an IQ so high that even the Academy brainiacs regarded him with awe. Now he was a hero, a cheerleader, the “it” guy at school, and flirting with remedial classes.
I barely recognized him. Vanessa and the cheerleaders had been taking him to the mall to punch up his wardrobe. They’d convinced him to get prescription sunglasses, so half the time you couldn’t see his eyes under the flat brim of his 59Fifty baseball cap. I wouldn’t have known him at all if it wasn’t for the way his new clothes hung off his praying-mantis frame. That wasn’t something you could change with a trip to Hot Topic or Aéropostale.
This was the guy who thought you could create wrestling boots by spray-painting the skin-tight ankles of your skin-tight long underwear.
Then again, how could I understand? I wasn’t popular.
That remark still made my blood boil. Before all this superkid business, I’d been the only thing standing between Noah and death by dodgeball. If it hadn’t been for me—with a little bit of help from the Daniels—he would have been wedgied and hung from the flagpole. I took a punch in the jaw from Hash Taggart to protect that ungrateful little jerk-face. And my life hadn’t been the same since.
Speaking of Hashtag, he was Noah’s new best friend. I guess that made me Noah’s old best friend. The superkid only hung out with cool people, and I didn’t make the cut. It was starting to drive me crazy that I personally had bumped Noah up to a level where he could exclude me.
The news had just come in that Hashtag was officially out for the rest of lacrosse season. Even though Beatrice’s bite hadn’t broken the skin, it had supposedly damaged the muscle underneath it. Sidelined by injury, the captain was supporting his team through the Hornets Booster Club. If he couldn’t break records on the field, he would break the record for selling more T-shirts, hats, sweatpants, and pennants than anyone had ever sold before. Wherever kids had money—the cafeteria, the book fair, the pizza place in the strip mall next door—there he’d be, pushing his stash of Hornets stuff. His best customers were the sixth graders, who were the youngest, the smallest, and the most afraid to say no. And because it counted as school fund-raising, the teachers let him get away with it.
It had gotten to the point that Hashtag’s foghorn voice had become an expected interruption to the usual lunchroom buzz. “Hey, everybody, I see a lot of you out there who haven’t had a chance to pick up your gear yet!” Or: “School spirit, baby! Support the green and gold!”
I cringed into my chicken nuggets. Everybody knew what was coming next.
“Here’s a guy who shows his Hornets pride! Give it up for the Youkinator!”
Oh, how I hated that nickname.
Hashtag reached down and hauled Noah onto the table beside him. The superkid was decked out in team apparel, from his Hornets slouchy beanie to his green-and-gold athletic socks and matching flip-flops.
A roar of appreciation went up in the cafeteria. All those students who’d been hoping Hashtag would shut up and go away mobbed the table, thrusting money at “the Youkinator.”
“Oh great, now he’s hawking T-shirts,” muttered a voice behind me.
“His first celebrity endorsement,” I added in disgust, before turning around to see Megan at the table next to mine.
We looked at each other, both of us regretting our words—or at least who we’d said them to.
I couldn’t help noticing how comfortable Noah seemed to be, as he perched on the tabletop accepting handshakes and high fives while Hashtag conducted business. What had happened to the clumsiest kid in the world? Surely it wasn’t Brad and his Marine training. Aside from a few tire flips and push-ups, all they were doing was lugging a diaper bag full of bricks around the neighborhood.
It drove me nuts when my brother-in-law went on and on about the wonderfulness of his beloved Corps. But what other explanation could there be?
I turned to Megan. “Has his cheerleading gotten better?”
“You must be joking!” she practically spat.
I shrugged. “A couple of weeks ago, he would have fallen off that table and knocked himself unconscious. Now he’s almost—nimble.”
“Maybe,” she admitted grudgingly. “He says he’s taking extra lessons with this former cheerleader.”
“Katie Patterson,” I supplied. “She used to be Katie Curtis.”
Megan’s brow furrowed. “Why does that name sound familiar?”
“She’s my sister, for one thing.”
Megan shrugged it off. “Yeah, well, whoever she is, she must be the klutz whisperer, because he’s definitely better. Not that it’s possible to be any worse.”
I was about to confess that the real klutz whisperer was the United States Marine Corps, but at that moment, Noah’s high-pitched voice piped, “Special superkid deal—five dollars off all sweatpants! Comfortable enough to throw yourself into a runaway truck and save Megan Mercury from getting killed!”
Her stony expression could easily have been carved on Mount Rushmore.
I couldn’t resist. “You might have survived,” I whispered.
“Yes!” she exclaimed. “That’s what I keep telling everyone, but—” All at once, she caught herself. Glaring at me, she gathered up her lunch, and carried her tray to a table on the opposite side of the cafeteria.
Funny—for a minute before she stormed away, I could have sworn that Megan had been about to crack a smile in my direction.
Robotics lab. Governor’s Simulation, Take 1:
Heavy Metal crossed the robotics lab, his hydraulic lifting arms bearing a tote bag like the one he was supposed to present to Governor Holland. I manipulated the joystick to put him into the final turn.
The robot continued in a straight line, past the stacks of equipment and worktables.
Latrell was playing the part of the governor, his hands out to receive the bag. “Is that supposed to happen?”
I wiggled the controller back and forth. Zero response from Heavy Metal.
“Shut it down, Donovan,” Oz ordered.
I flipped the kill switch on the joystick unit. Instead of stopping, the robot bumped into a desk, changed direction slightly, and rolled on toward the far side of the lab.
“Shut it down,” Oz repeated.
“I’m trying!”
I dropped the controller and ran after the malfunctioning robot. I was faster, but Heavy Metal had a head start. As I reached out for the emergency shutoff on the robot’s side, a spark shot from the switch to my index finger, shocking me. I jumped back, and watched as Heavy Metal smacked into the wall. The lifting forks punched matching divots in the drywall and only the fabric of the tote bag stopped the entire body from breaking through as well. As Heavy Metal keeled over on its side, a rear flap popped open and an avalanche of golf balls rat-a-tatted onto the floor with a sound like machine gun fire.
Abigail screamed. She always took robot fails personally.
Everyone converged on the scene. Noah got there first. For a moment, he actually kept his balance, dancing deftly on a sea of moving golf balls—props to Brad and his Marine training. That thought had barely crossed my mind when Noah’s legs flew out from under him and he went down with a crash. Okay, maybe not.
I reached out a hand to steady Chloe, who was about to be next, and the two of us picked our way over to Heavy Metal. By this time, the power was off and the Mecanum wheels had stopped spinning. Oz was on his hands and knees, rubbing his shoulder. The rest of the team we
re either scattered like ten-pins or standing frozen, afraid to take a step as the balls continued to roll, spreading like an oil slick.
“Why does it have to be golf balls?” I complained in the horrified silence that followed. “What’s wrong with Ping-Pong balls? At least when you step on those, they break.”
The answer made me feel stupid, which happened a lot at the Academy.
“Ping-Pong balls are too light,” Chloe explained. “Their trajectory would be affected by air currents. It would be impossible to calibrate the firing mechanism.”
Chloe and I helped our teacher pick up the robot and set it upright.
“No permanent damage,” Latrell commented after giving Heavy Metal a once-over.
“If you don’t consider the wall,” Oz put in mournfully. “We already have the highest budget in the whole school. This isn’t going to look good on my expense report.”
“But what went wrong?” Abigail demanded.
What she really meant was whose fault was it? If it was a structural defect, that pointed to Latrell and his team, who’d built the physical body of the robot. If it was a computer hardware problem, Abigail might be responsible. If it was software, the culprit would be Noah. If the source of the glitch was hydraulics or pneumatics, that sounded a lot like Chloe. And if it was an “operating issue,” you could slap the cuffs on the dummy with the joystick.
I suggested, “Maybe the controller ran out of batteries. That happens all the time in video games.”
Thousands of IQ points in the room, and I was the only one who thought of that—including Oz.
“Well, it’s easy enough to check,” the teacher decided.
So we did. The batteries were perfect. And the blame game started over again.
“People! People!” Oz waved his arms for quiet. “We’re a team, remember? It doesn’t matter whose fault it is! The only important thing is that we get it straightened out! Which we will—together!”
“We’re going to look pretty stupid if this happens in front of the governor!” Latrell put in.
“Thank you!” Abigail exclaimed. “Only we won’t just look stupid. It’ll be a black mark on our records.”
“You know, your record is just other people’s opinions of your performance at things that were never very meaningful in the first place,” Noah told her soothingly.
She almost bit his head off. “That’s easy for you to say! You have the highest IQ in the state, and you’re the superkid!”
Every now and then, something reminded me that there were definite advantages to being ungifted. This was one of those moments.
“Calm down, everybody,” Oz ordered. “This isn’t the first time we’ve ever had issues. We’ll fix this.”
He was trying to be reassuring, but nobody was reassured.
The whole point of a controller was to be in control. When the robot ignored all commands and rolled off on its merry way, you weren’t in command anymore.
What was wrong with Heavy Metal?
17
SUPEREXCITED
MEGAN MERCURY
I should have noticed that Shayna Rodgers didn’t look as solidly upright as she normally did. But I was at the top of the pyramid, beaming straight out into the bleachers, a textbook dazzling smile on my face. The smile was mandatory, even though this was only practice. Ms. Torres always said to make the smile a part of the routine. If you always wore it, when game time came, you would never forget.
They told me later that when the pyramid crumpled, I smiled all the way down. I was proud of that—and proud of Vanessa and the girls on the bottom level, who caught me just before I hit the ground.
But that didn’t explain what had gone wrong. “What was that?” I demanded, turning on my cheerleaders.
They seemed pretty rattled too. The human pyramid was our trademark move. It was second nature to us by now.
“Take it easy, Megan,” Ms. Torres soothed. “That’s why we practice. To get everything just right.”
“We shouldn’t have to get the pyramid right,” I argued. “It’s been part of our routine going on three years. We should be able to do it in our sleep!”
“Relax,” our coach insisted. “There’s no such thing as absolute perfection. No matter how good you are, and how hard you train, at some point you’re bound to slip up. It just happens. Nobody knows why.”
“I know why” came an all-too-familiar voice.
Vanessa stepped forward. “What is it, Noah? What did we do wrong?”
The other girls jumped all over this—like being interviewed on Russ Trussman made you a cheerleading expert.
“It’s simple physics, really,” Noah explained reasonably. “Weight ratios. I can fix it for you if you want.”
“Listen, Noah, we’ve been doing this for a long—”
Vanessa cut me off. “He can fix it!” She had stars in her eyes.
“Certainly,” he said. “I just need everyone’s individual body weight—in kilograms, preferably.”
A roar of outrage went up in the field.
“Pounds would be okay too,” Noah put in quickly. “I can convert in my head.”
“Let’s take a break,” Ms. Torres advised. “I’m sure the pyramid will be fine from now on.”
The girls headed for towels and water bottles.
Noah went over to a young woman who was sitting in the first row of bleachers, watching the practice. It occurred to me that this must be Donovan Curtis’s sister—that ex-cheerleader/master of lost causes who was trying to work with Noah.
When I saw her, I did a double take. Her face was burned into my memory. Katie Curtis—no wonder I knew that name!
I was in kindergarten, maybe pre-K, when the cheerleaders from Hardcastle High came to our school to give us a demonstration on field day. I never forgot the show they put on. Flying through the air and then somehow landing perfectly—and with a smile, too. Those girls—so pretty, so athletic, so self-assured. They were the center of attention, and they gloried in it. I made up my five-year-old mind on the spot that I would be exactly like them one day. Especially the head cheerleader—and there she was years later, leaning over the bleachers speaking with Noah. Katie Curtis.
I had to thank her for inspiring me. The minute Noah went into the locker room, I rushed over there. I could feel my heart pounding—like I was about to meet the president, or Taylor Swift, or some major celebrity.
I promised myself I’d play it cool, but once I was in front of her, it all came pouring out of me, and I gushed through the details of that field day all those years ago.
Katie Curtis—Patterson now—seemed a little scared at first. As in Who is this stalker? Once she realized what I was babbling about, though, she was really nice. “I can’t believe you remember that!” she told me. “I barely remember it myself.”
“It changed my life,” I told her earnestly. “I was sitting at the end of the row, and when you guys were done, I shouted, ‘I love you!’ And you stopped and gave me a big hug right in front of everybody. And I’ll never forget what you told me. ‘Kiddo,’ you said, ‘keep those pom-poms moving.’ I still use that to this day. When I’m cheerleading, if my arms ever get tired, it’s your voice I hear. And I find a tiny bit of extra strength.” I stopped, suddenly embarrassed, and added, “Sorry for being such a fangirl.”
She grinned. “Are you kidding? These days I’m sleep deprived and buried in dirty diapers. I need all the fans I can get. Like Noah—although he’s really more a fan of my daughter.”
“Right—Noah.” There it was. I couldn’t even share a moment with my long-lost cheerleading idol without Noah coming up like a bad burp that tasted like yesterday’s guacamole. I changed the subject. “I’m really excited about next year. They let the high school squads enter competitions.”
Katie nodded with a nostalgic smile. “Great times. We brought home a lot of hardware—trophies and ribbons and stuff.”
“I’ve seen some of it—in the display cases at Hardcastle High. I
hope we can measure up to you guys one day.” I added, “Got any advice for me?”
She thought it over. “Well, the first thing you have to do is get the bugs out of your pyramid. Listen to Noah. He’s a genius!”
I read somewhere that it was never a good thing to meet your heroes. They always let you down.
As the semester rolled on, the lacrosse team kept on winning, even though Hashtag was still on the bench. The temperatures stayed chilly, the spring rains lingered on—until the magic date approached. My birthday.
My dad called it Megan’s Luck. Suddenly, the skies were clear, and the weather got hot. Perfect conditions for swimming. Rah, rah, global warming! I was so excited about my upcoming party that I was finally getting my cheerleader’s positivity back.
I was stringing patio lights on the section of fence that had just been repaired while the guy from the pool company checked the pH levels of the water. The two of us were alone out there. Mom, Dad, and Peter were inside the house with Russ Trussman from Channel 4. Of all the people who were making a fuss over the whole superkid business, he was the grand poobah. We were so happy to have our fence back and our pool back. When were we going to get our lives back?
The answer seemed to be: whenever Russ Trussman found something else to talk about on his TV show.
I was tying the end of the string of lights to the corner post when he came wandering into the backyard, grinning at me with all those teeth.
“Just a few more questions, Megan.”
Right—in addition to the nine hundred he’d already asked. “Fire away.” Ms. Torres would have been proud of my cheerleading smile. Especially when what I really wanted was to ruin his perfect hair with the bug dipper.
The notebook came out. I was starting to hate that notebook. “I understand you’re on Noah’s cheerleading squad.”
“No,” I said, trying to keep the ice out of my voice, “he’s on my cheerleading squad. I’m the head cheerleader.”
“What I can’t get my mind around,” he went on, “is why Noah would do such a heroic thing and then run and hide. Especially since the two of you are such good friends.”