“Of course I lied,” he said reasonably. “For friendship.”
“For friendship?” the superintendent echoed. “How does friendship figure into a titanic hoax perpetrated on an entire community? They named a sandwich after you, for crying out loud!”
“I was protecting Donovan,” Noah told him righteously. “And he was protecting Beatrice.”
“Beatrice?” the governor chimed in, irritated. “Who’s Beatrice?”
“My dog, sir,” Brad supplied. He turned to me. “What’s Beatrice got to do with all this?”
I was determined to say nothing, but I had no control over Noah’s mouth.
He replied, “Donovan didn’t want to get caught in Hashtag’s neighborhood because Beatrice has a criminal record.”
The buzz of confusion that greeted that statement filled the cafeteria to the high ceilings. I knew the jig was up when I saw Hashtag and his parents pushing through the crowd toward us. There was no way to protect Brad’s beloved chow chow now. I had to come clean.
“Noah was going to start a fight at the Taggarts’, so I went over there to stop him,” I confessed. “The thing is, I was supposed to stay away from Hashtag, because Beatrice bit him. So when all that stuff happened with the propane truck, I couldn’t even admit I was on Staunton Street.” Then I pulled another Donovan Classic—one that was, in a way, every bit as reckless as anything I’d ever done before. I added, “So I begged Noah to cover for me.”
Okay, I didn’t owe the guy any loyalty after the way he’d been treating me lately. But for all his brains, he could be like a newborn baby. How could I let him be hated by an entire town that needed someone to blame because they felt stupid for worshipping the wrong hero?
Mr. Taggart stepped forward. “Son, I can’t tell you how impressed I am with your family. First, there’s your brother-in-law in the armed forces. Now I find you’re the real superkid, but you were willing to give up all that glory to protect a family pet. I take my hat off to you people. And I promise not to make any trouble for your dog.”
The governor left, mumbling something about urgent state business. And it was as if, once he was gone, no one could remember what they’d come for in the first place. So the cafeteria emptied out quickly. The robotics team had to gather up all the golf balls and load Heavy Metal back onto the bus, but Oz said they didn’t need my help. On top of everything else that had happened, we still had no idea what was wrong with our robot. One thing was sure, though: If we didn’t fix it, entering any competition was out of the question.
Chloe approached me in the parking lot, looking sheepish. “I guess I was half-right, huh? Sorry, Donovan. I should have believed you.”
I smiled at her. “It wasn’t very believable.”
“Weren’t you scared?” she asked. “You know, when you were in the truck?”
I shrugged. “You know me. I never think first. If I did, I might never get out of bed.”
Oz called her over to the bus, and she left me with my parents.
Mom told me how proud she was to have not just one American hero in the family but two. “And if you ever try a crazy stunt like that again,” she finished, “so help me, Donnie, I’ll break every bone in your body!”
So what else was new?
As we got into the station wagon, my father looked at me with a strange expression. “Superkid, huh?”
“I guess.”
He shook his head. “I can’t even get you to cut the grass.”
25
SUPERINNOCENT
CHLOE GARFINKLE
>
Abigail pounded the keyboard at light speed, beads of perspiration standing out on her forehead. I worked almost as furiously at the computer next to hers. Across the robotics lab at the teacher’s desk, Oz was hunched over his own laptop.
Our drone sat on a table at the center of the room, next to a shopping bag full of golf balls. Heavy Metal stood beside it, powered down and harmless now, but the damage had already been done—and in front of the governor and half the town, no less. That was why we were there after the rest of the robotics team had gone home. This was our best chance to find the mysterious glitch that was causing our robot to melt down.
It had been Abigail’s idea to perform a diagnostic not on all the robot’s software—that would have taken hours—but on the commands that had been executed most recently.
>
“You girls should go home,” Oz called wearily from across the room.
“No way,” Abigail murmured without looking away from her screen.
“It wasn’t your fault, Abigail,” the teacher insisted. “Or yours, Chloe. Nobody can foresee every problem. System failures happen. All you can do is hope and pray that they don’t happen in front of the governor.” He added, a little bitterly, “Or Dr. Schultz.”
If he thought that would make Abigail feel better, he’d picked the wrong kid.
“Since we have no idea what caused the malfunction, how can we say with any confidence whose fault it was?” she demanded, her voice rising. “And even if it wasn’t our fault, it might as well have been.”
“If it’s okay, Oz, we’d like to stay,” I put in. “We’re really anxious to get to the bottom of this.”
The teacher nodded, then looked out the window to the parking lot. “That’s Dr. Schultz’s car. I have a feeling he’s going to want to talk to me. Let me know if you make any progress.” He headed out of the lab, his laptop under his arm.
We slogged on, energized by the knowledge that the superintendent was in the building. Neither of us put it into words, but we both understood that nothing less than the robotics program itself was at stake. The disaster had been that serious—especially to a guy like Dr. Schultz, who flipped out over anything that made the school district look bad. He went crazy over potholes in the parking lot. We could only imagine his opinion of a class project running amok in a cafeteria full of people that included the governor of the state.
I knew instantly when Abigail stumbled on something. Her bony shoulders rose up around her ears, and her fingers on the keyboard were just a blur.
“What is it?” I abandoned my own computer and wheeled my chair over beside her. “What’s”—I squinted at the screen—“GradeWorm?”
“I’ll tell you what it isn’t,” she replied grimly, scrolling through lines of code. “It isn’t anything that belongs on Heavy Metal’s hard drive.”
I scanned the seemingly endless coded instructions that were unfurling before our eyes. Face it, I wasn’t Abigail. I couldn’t sight-read all this and be sure what I was looking at. But I could take a pretty good guess. “A virus?”
She shook her head. “A program. An internet bot, I think.”
“Heavy Metal’s not on the internet! What’s a bot doing there?”
Her face was reddening to an unhealthy plum color. “What it’s doing there? It’s hurling golf balls at the governor, and making us look like idiots in the process!”
I just stared at her.
“Someone hid a renegade program on Heavy Metal’s hard drive,” she explained in a fury, “and it interfered with our software, causing all that weird behavior!”
I couldn’t believe it. “But who would do something like that? Who’s even capable of it?”
We looked at each other and chorused, “Noah!”
I was still confused. “Why would Noah hide a program on our robot?”
I could tell when Abigail had the answer to that question. Her face drained of all color, and her mouth formed the letter O. “That maniac!”
“What?” I almost screamed.
She scanned the lines of code, analyzing the meaning of each complicated instruction. “GradeWorm is a bot designed to hack into the school district’s website so users can change their grades on the central database.”
“Noah did that???
? I was horrified. “Why? He could get A-plus-plus in everything just by showing up!”
“Who knows why?” she retorted. “It’s Noah—there doesn’t have to be a reason! He’s a few degrees shy of a full rotation! And this time he destroyed our robot and maybe our reputations! Well, he’s not going to get away with it! We have to make sure everybody knows all this is his fault and we didn’t do anything wrong!”
She was 100 percent right. Noah had created an awful program nobody should ever have, and wrecked Heavy Metal in the process.
On the other hand, this was Noah. Okay, he was guilty, but he was also so innocent!
>
Noah had just been exposed to the world as a bogus superkid. Did we really want to pile on with all this too?
“Or,” I said slowly, “we could cover for him.”
She almost blew a gasket. “Oh, no you don’t! That little lunatic was blessed with more brains than all the rest of us put together! Do you know how much I’d give to be inside that head of his for five minutes, just to see what it’s like to be that smart? He doesn’t deserve favors from us; he deserves to face the music!”
“Abigail, have a heart—”
She froze me out. “In the gifted program? Don’t make me laugh!”
“Come on—”
The door was flung wide, and in scrambled Oz, his expression wild.
“What happened?” I asked.
His breath was ragged. “I went to show Dr. Schultz our operating system, and—and—” He opened his laptop on the desk in front of us. The GradeWorm software was displayed on the screen. “Wait till I get my hands on Noah Youkilis!”
I opened my mouth to speak up for Noah one more time, but no sound came out. All I could do was watch as Abigail threw him to the sharks.
She took a deep breath.
>
I closed my eyes.
Then she said, “Don’t be hasty, Oz. There’s absolutely no proof that Noah did this.”
“No proof?” The teacher’s eyes bulged. He scrolled down to the bottom of the page. There, beneath the final line of coding, was this message:
© by SuperkidHardcastle
26
SUPERKICKED
NOAH YOUKILIS
It was too good to last.
I don’t mean my time as the superkid—although that didn’t last either. I’m talking about going to regular school.
They kicked me out of Hardcastle Middle School. Expelled. Not for lying about what happened at the Mercury house and pretending to be something I wasn’t. No, it was GradeWorm that did me in—the internet bot I created for the two Daniels. Dr. Schultz was unimpressed by my elegant design and next-generation coding. All he got out of it was the idea that kids could use it to change their grades to whatever they wanted them to be.
He was against it.
The really unfair part was how I got caught. Remember the safe place I thought up to hide GradeWorm after the two Daniels were too chicken to use it? I saved it on some free space on Heavy Metal’s drive. It was a location where it could never interact with the robot’s software.
Except it did.
Funny, I was so confident in the secure isolation of my hiding place that I never even considered the possibility that GradeWorm was the reason why the robot kept going haywire.
The world and YouTube—and, apparently, Heavy Metal’s hard drive—were such complicated, interconnected, and messy systems that nothing could ever be 100 percent determinate.
It was a mistake on my part. A miscalculation.
See, this was even more proof of the amazing progress I was making at Hardcastle. Miscalculations. Mistakes. At this rate, I would be average in no time at all.
Dr. Schultz didn’t agree. That was the real downside of what happened. Not only was I out of regular school, but I had to go back to the Academy. I tried to persuade Dr. Schultz what a bad idea that was. But he said the whole point of having a gifted academy was to put people like me in it.
So there I was, back in the gifted program, getting 100 percent in everything.
Yawn.
“Don’t be crazy, Noah,” Abigail scolded. “Hardcastle Middle might as well be a kindergarten for all they have to teach you.”
“You’re wrong,” I told her.
Abigail didn’t appreciate being wrong like I did. She scowled at me.
“Seriously,” I persisted. “I improved there. I never improve here. There’s zero opportunity for growth. I start at a hundred percent and just flatline.”
“Because you’re that smart,” Chloe argued.
“Name one thing you improved on at Hardcastle,” Donovan challenged.
“Cheerleading,” I replied immediately. “I started off merely good, and now I’m fantastic. Quod erat demonstrandum.” The Academy stank, but at least people understood Latin here.
Luckily I didn’t have to give up my cheerleading career. Just like Donovan rode the minibus to the Academy for robotics, I now rode a different minibus to Hardcastle for cheerleading. The Hornets told Coach Franco that the winning streak would be in jeopardy without me on the sidelines, and the girls all threatened to quit if I wasn’t allowed to stay on the squad. Even Megan seemed to like me better now that I wasn’t the superkid anymore. Maybe it was awkward to have to cheerlead side by side with your knight in shining armor. She probably had a crush on me. She definitely appreciated how I was making the squad better. She signed us all up for Marine training with Brad, and she carried the heaviest pack when we marched—with seven bricks inside it.
The girls were awesome. They never blamed me for posing as the superkid. They understood that I only did it to help out Donovan. I was worried that other people might hold it against me after the truth came out, but that didn’t happen. It wasn’t so much that everyone forgave me. It was more like nobody seemed to care about the whole superkid thing the way they used to. One minute, it was the biggest story in the world, and the next it just wasn’t anymore.
Even Russ Trussman didn’t have any hard feelings. He called one last time after the governor’s visit to confirm the facts of what had actually happened that morning on Staunton Street.
“One last thing,” he said. “How did that chair get in the Mercurys’ pool? I understand all the details except that one.”
I frowned. I’d already explained that to him right before the governor’s visit. Had he forgotten? Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember him writing that part down in his notebook.
So I walked him through the details of why I’d gone to Staunton Street in the first place—to confront Hashtag about bullying Donovan. I didn’t have to keep that secret anymore, since everything was out in the open now. Hashtag and I were friends, and the Taggarts had promised not to take any action against Beatrice. “No self-respecting wrestler would be caught dead without a steel chair to break over his opponent’s head,” I told him. “That’s common knowledge.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. I got the impression that Mr. Trussman wanted to ask another question, but he couldn’t find the right words. That had always been the problem with Russ Trussman. In spite of the fact that he was a famous reporter, he wasn’t very good at his job.
To nudge him along a little, I suggested that maybe he should interview Donovan, who was the real superkid.
“I think Hardcastle has had enough heroes for a while,” he replied wearily. “Good luck, Noah. You’ll need it.”
He hung up before I had a chance to inform him that I didn’t need luck. I had a genius-plus IQ. I had YouTube. And I had friends—more than ever before, in fact. That was all that mattered.
Speaking of friends: Donovan and I were getting along much better. Even though we didn’t go to the same school anymore, we still saw each other at robotics. And I came over to his house a lot for training and to visit Tina.
I was holding the
baby on my knee—supporting her head, as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics—singing the formula for calculating the volume of a gas at various ocean depths, when I looked at Donovan. He was trying to get something out of Kandy’s coat, which was either chewing gum or a highly advanced form of plastic explosive.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted suddenly.
“For what?” He was scrubbing at the matted fur with rubbing alcohol, never glancing away from his task. “You’re not the one who went dumpster-diving in the trash can.” He added to Kandy, “Yeah, I’m talking about you, smart guy. Don’t act so clueless.”
“It’s just that—” I hesitated. I wasn’t good at this. Regret was kind of alien to me. But lately, I’d been haunted by an odd sense that the whole superkid episode had been hard on Donovan.
“Spit it out, Noah,” he prodded.
“I’m sorry I was so good at being the superkid that I made you look bad.”
He stopped working at Kandy’s fur and scrutinized me for a long time. Finally, he said, “Don’t worry about it.”
I added generously, “You may not be a superkid, but you’re a superfriend.”
He laughed. “Thanks, Noah. You too.”
So friendship didn’t follow the mathematical principle of radioactive decay after all. A friendship could decay for a while and then go back to the point where it was better than ever.
27
SUPERGIFTED
DONOVAN CURTIS
“Who’s my beautiful baby girl? That’s right—you are. Yes!”
I pressed my ear against the wall to listen in. The words themselves weren’t what surprised me. Ever since Tina was born, that kind of cooing had become a constant soundtrack in our house. No, what blew my mind was that the voice doing the cooing belonged to Brad!
Well, what did you know? First Lieutenant Bradley Patterson had finally decided to throw away the Marine Corps handbook and stop speaking to his newborn daughter as if she was a cadet at Parris Island.
“I could just eat you up! Look at your cute little nosey-wosey. And your earsy-wearsy . . .”