Her comment is: “You’re dripping black gunk on the floor.”
“Really?” Uh-oh. There’s a trail of shoe polish splatters all the way down the hallway. Too late to worry about that now. Once the video is in the can, I’ll do my best to clean up after myself. I think rubbing alcohol works on that stuff. Or maybe nail polish remover.
Joel is waiting for us inside the music room. He’s already put up the video club’s green screen and set out all the instruments we’re going to need. The flip-cam is mounted atop a tripod—another reason why we don’t need Chase’s steady hand. Joel’s got some extra lights plugged in with a spaghetti of power cords. We’re ready to roll.
For music, I’ve chosen a full orchestral version of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” performed furiously in triple time. I’ll add that in during the editing stage, but I play it on my phone during filming so I’ll have the timing right while I’m doing my thing with the instruments. It’s not such a big deal with the small stuff—trumpet, clarinet, sax, flute, piccolo. But for violin and the string family, it’s important that my bow should be moving to the right tempo. That goes double for the trombone, the kettledrums, and especially the cymbals. If I go crash, then there’d better be a real crash.
“I know this song,” Kimberly comments after the music has been playing in an endless loop for at least twenty minutes of shooting. “How come you picked such a lousy song?”
We’re in the home stretch: bassoon, French horn, and tuba.
The tuba is last. I stare at it. It’s the marching band kind, where you climb into the middle of it, and it’s all around your body like a python.
“Wait a minute,” I protest. “Where’s the regular one?”
“Dented,” Joel replies. “Somebody dropped it down the stairs and it’s out getting fixed. So it’s this one or nothing.”
Well, you can’t have an orchestra without a tuba. I squirm in and struggle to my feet. I swear the thing weighs more than I do. I’m no Hercules, but the kid who plays this in the marching band is a four-foot-eight-inch sixth-grade girl. How does she lift it, much less have the breath left over to blow into it?
Kimberly is regarding me a little dubiously, so I give her my most confident look and announce, “Piece of cake.” It comes out like I’m straining to pass a kidney stone. Not the effect I was reaching for.
I put my lips to the mouthpiece and nod to Joel to start filming the final shot. The camera comes on.
The double doors are kicked open, and before I can react, a tidal wave of white foam fills my field of vision. It hits me full in the face. It wouldn’t normally be enough to knock me over. But with the heavy tuba bell suspended above my head, I overbalance and go down like a stone. There’s a loud clang as the brass of the instrument strikes the metal edge of the riser.
I hear a gasp of horror from Joel, and soon I understand why. When I roll out of the stream of foam, still wrapped in the tuba, I see Aaron Hakimian and Bear Bratsky, each armed with one of the school’s big silver fire extinguishers, spraying down the room and everything and everybody in it.
“Go away!” Joel pleads in a quavering voice.
Aaron laughs a nasty laugh. “Well, if it isn’t the loser. I don’t think we ever welcomed you back to school. How rude of us!”
“Welcome home, loser!” bellows Bear, and blasts a jet of foam, covering Joel from head to toe.
I turn to Kimberly, who’s standing there and, of all things, giggling. At long last, the girl has found something funny in one of my videos. She thinks it’s part of the plan and doesn’t even notice we’re under attack.
“Go get help!” I bark at her.
“Yeah, get help,” snorts Bear. “Why don’t you call your friend Chase?”
That makes sense to me. He’s the only one with half a chance of taking on these two. “Get Chase!” I yell at Kimberly.
Aaron laughs cruelly. “And you’re supposed to be smart! Who do you figure sent us here, genius?”
“You think Chase doesn’t remember the loser who got him put on community service?” Bear adds.
“Go!” I shout. “He’s in Mr. Solomon’s room—” A blast of foam silences me and I go down again, still encircled by the tuba. Now my arms are pinned at my sides, and I can barely move—not that I’d be much help standing up to those two Neanderthals. And if I’m upset, I can only imagine what must be going on in Joel’s mind. After everything he’s been through, he comes home only to find that it’s starting all over again.
Kimberly bolts past the two attackers and out the door. They make no move to stop her. Their focus is on me and mostly on Joel.
“Hey, check out all these instruments,” Bear snickers, as if the band room is the last place anyone might expect to find such things. “You think if I practice hard I could become a musician like the great Joel Weber?” He delivers a solid boot to the French horn, which skitters across the floor, kicking up a spray from the melting foam that covers half the room.
“Please don’t touch the instruments,” Joel whimpers. “I promised Mrs. Gilbride I’d be responsible for everything.”
Well, that does it. Once those two idiots see how to get a rise out of Joel, they’re off to the races, throwing flutes like mini javelins and Frisbeeing cymbals all around them. They roll trumpets and trombones into the slop and send violins floating on top of it. A kettledrum is upended. Music stands are hurled in all directions. Sheet music is scattered like autumn leaves.
Still stuck in the tuba, I try to scramble toward Aaron and Bear. I slip on wet paper and hit the floor with another clang. Joel has Aaron by the shoulder and is trying to pull him away from the instruments, but Aaron laughs and shakes him off.
Suddenly, Chase barrels into the room, Kimberly hot on his heels.
“What’s going on?” he bellows.
“Dude, what took you so long?” Aaron crows in unholy glee. “We had to send the chick to get you!”
“This is your best idea yet,” adds Bear. He hefts his fire extinguisher and hands it to Chase. “It’s all yours, maestro!”
Chase looks totally blown away. I can’t read his expression—shocked? Or something else?
“It’s your plan,” Aaron reminds him. “Bring it home!”
Chase is a statue, eyes wide.
Bear gets impatient. “Okay, I’ll do it for you.” He tries to take back the extinguisher, but Chase tightens his grip and holds on.
There’s a vicious tug-of-war for the extinguisher. With a mighty yank, Chase wrenches it out of Bear’s grasp. It swings free—just as Joel rises from the floor where Aaron tossed him.
With a thud, the heavy metal strikes Joel in the side of the face and he drops back down into the foam.
Agitated voices sound out in the hallway. Six teachers burst into the music room, Mrs. Gilbride in the lead.
“What’s going on here?” she yells, taking in the wreckage all around her. “Where’s Joel Weber?”
With a groan, Joel sits up. The foam on his face can’t disguise the fact that his left eye is already turning black-and-blue.
That’s when it hits me how this must seem to the teachers. The music room is a disaster area. Instruments, music stands, books, and papers are strewn everywhere, the whole place buried in foam. The school’s three most notorious bullies are right there. One of them—Chase—still wields a fire extinguisher. And their number one target—Joel—is down on the floor with a rapidly swelling face, obviously the victim of an assault.
“It isn’t what it looks like!” I gasp, and then bite my tongue. What if it’s exactly what it looks like? The idea to send for Chase came from Aaron and Bear. Was that the plan all along? And was Chase the ringleader, just like those guys said?
The teachers don’t pay any attention to me. Their job is defusing the crisis. Mrs. Gilbride rushes Joel to see the nurse, and the other staff members march Aaron, Bear, and Chase off to the principal’s office. Kimberly follows. Even now, her only concern is Chase.
As quickly as th
at, I’m all alone, still trapped in the marching band’s tuba. With a heavy sigh, I struggle up and try to shake myself out of the brass tentacles of this thing. It moves maybe an inch. I’m going to be here all night.
As I continue to wriggle and squirm, dripping gray frothy shoe polish into the foam, I reflect that the worst part of this isn’t being stuck in a tuba. It isn’t that One Man Band is never going to happen. It’s the sad fact that Kimberly could leave me in such a terrible state just because Chase is in trouble.
And as soon as I think that, I realize that the real worm around here has to be me—wormier, even, than Aaron and Bear. I care more about my love life than the fact that my friend Chase might not be my friend after all.
It isn’t true! I scold myself. Chase used to be like that, but not anymore!
Then there’s the evidence of my own eyes and ears: the trashed band room. Another attack on poor Joel. Chase, right alongside his old wrecking crew, delivering the final blow.
I sit down on the edge of the riser and hang my head, too depressed to wriggle anymore.
The sound of wet sneakers squishing in the slop jolts me out of my melancholy. I look up to see Kimberly standing over me.
She says, “I thought you might need some help getting out of that thing.”
My heart soars.
Hope.
It should be familiar to me—sitting on the chairs outside Dr. Fitzwallace’s office with Aaron and Bear, waiting for the ax to fall. Aaron assures me that our butt-prints are permanently etched into the seats. I don’t remember any of that, but it’s accepted fact that the three of us have spent a lot of time here.
Aaron settles himself comfortably and grins at me. “There’s no place like home.”
I’m not in the mood to grin back. “Are you both crazy? What was all that supposed to be about?”
Bear rolls his eyes. “Oh, boo hoo. The poor Geek Squad.”
I’m furious. “Forget them—what about me? You’ve just gotten me in a ton of trouble! What about yourselves? You’re both going to get kicked off the football team for this! And for what? So you could spray fire extinguisher foam on a bunch of band instruments?”
Bear keeps on smiling. “At least we weren’t the ones who conked Joel Weber.”
“That was an accident!”
“You think Fitzwallace is going to believe that?” Bear retorts. “Who’s going to back you up? Your video dweebs? I kind of doubt you’re their favorite person right now.”
I’m so upset I can barely come up with the right words. “You did this on purpose to frame me! We’re supposed to be friends! And you were so dead set on wrecking my life that you didn’t even care if you went down the drain with me!”
Aaron’s calm. “No one’s going down the drain.”
“Are you delusional or just stupid? With our reputation? They’re going to throw the kitchen sink at us! Community service is something we can only dream about now! We’re going to get expelled! And we’d better pray Fitzwallace isn’t on the phone with the cops right now!”
“Relax,” says Aaron in an undertone. “First off, we are friends. And we’re not going to let anything bad happen to you. Just stick with us, agree with everything I say, and we’ve got this.”
“You are delusional,” I hiss. “How could there be any way to explain that train wreck in the music room?”
When the door to the inner office opens, the knob makes a snap like a gunshot. Then Dr. Fitzwallace is upon us, his rage all the more terrible because it’s ice-cold. Honestly, I can’t say I blame him. I’m not thrilled about being in trouble. But if any situation ever justified a principal losing it on three students, it’s this one.
He ushers us inside and seats himself while we stand in front of his desk. “Well, it’s the three of you again. I was hoping—” He looks at me and shakes his head sadly. “All right, let’s hear it.”
Knowing full well it’s not going to get me anywhere, I’m about to protest my innocence when Aaron speaks up.
“I know it looks bad, but we didn’t do anything wrong. Bear and I were walking past the band room and saw smoke coming out from under the door. So we grabbed fire extinguishers and ran inside, spraying. They were shooting some kind of video, and they had a million lights plugged in. Something must have shorted out and caused a fire. Chase heard the yelling and came in to help us. But the video kids attacked us because their project was getting ruined. And somehow Joel Weber hit his head on one of the extinguishers.”
The principal frowns. “That’s not how the students on the scene described it.”
Bear shakes his head understandingly. “Don’t be too hard on them, Dr. Fitzwallace. They were probably just scared of getting in trouble for starting the fire.”
The frown deepens. “None of my teachers smelled smoke.”
Aaron sighs with relief. “Good. We got it in time.”
Dr. Fitzwallace shifts his gaze from the two of them to me. “And that’s what happened?”
This is it—time for me to shoot down Aaron’s ridiculous lie and speak up for my own innocence. Sure, Dr. Fitzwallace will never believe I was framed. But at least I’ll have the satisfaction of throwing those two guys under the bus, even if I have to go with them.
“Well?” the principal prompts.
To my astonishment, the anger is completely gone from his expression. He’s waiting for my answer—and I think I know what he’s hoping to hear. He’s rooting for me to go along with Aaron and Bear.
Why would a principal want to let three delinquents like us off the hook after such a huge incident? I take an educated guess. It’s probably a major hassle to come down hard on students the way he’d have to throw the book at Aaron, Bear, and me. Three sets of unhappy parents. Triple the paperwork. School board meetings, maybe court cases—everything in triplicate.
And—my eyes find the photographs on the wall. The two state championship pictures, my dad and me. Losing Aaron and Bear would be a blow to the Hurricanes, and it would definitely shut down any possibility of me coming back.
So I mumble, “Yeah.”
“Excuse me?”
It should be an easy thing to say, but each word sits on my tongue like poison. “Yeah, what Aaron said is the way it happened.”
Fitzwallace looks almost relieved, and I know I’ve picked the right answer. Aaron and Bear are both smiling, although they’re working hard to keep the celebration inside. They’ve gotten away with it, and so have I.
We’re not totally off the hook. We get a bit of a lecture on how we should have called for help or pulled the fire alarm before taking matters into our own hands. He tells us we need to be less impulsive and not so rough with our fellow students. Also, we’re not allowed to leave on our own. He calls our parents, and they have to pick us up.
As we stand in the foyer, waiting for our rides, Aaron and Bear are raving about our “amazing escape.”
“Seriously, man,” Bear tells Aaron, “I’ve seen tap dancing before but that was filth! Like art.”
Aaron nods. “I was afraid Chase was going to mess it up at the end, but our boy came through. Didn’t I tell you he’d have our back?”
I don’t say anything, but inside I’m thinking, It’s true. I covered for them. I saw a way to save my own butt and I took it.
And in the process, I wrapped myself in their phony story and got drawn back into the old life. So this is what it was like.Make trouble. Lie. Repeat.
Luckily, those guys are so busy congratulating themselves that they don’t notice I’m not adding much to the conversation.
Bear gets picked up first, then Aaron. I’m just reflecting that Mom’s not going to be thrilled about having to leave work early and come get me over this when the Ambrose Electric truck rattles along the drive.
Not Mom. Dad.
He’s beaming at me like I’m here to present him with a big check from the state lottery.
I climb into the passenger seat. “What?”
He reaches over and
playfully punches my shoulder. “Fitzwallace told me everything, and I read between the lines. Way to go, Champ.”
“It wasn’t great, Dad.”
He laughs. “You think that’s the first time I’ve ever gotten a call like that about you, Aaron, and Bear? It’s never great. But you got away with it. That’s pretty great.”
I almost say, “Not really.” But that wouldn’t be true. I could easily be buried under a mudslide of pain right now, and I’m not. I can’t regret that.
What I regret is the way I got so free and clear.
When I arrive at school the next morning, Ms. DeLeo is waiting for me at my locker.
“You found out what happened,” I conclude. “I’ll apologize to Brendan, Joel, and Kimmy when I see them at video club.”
She shakes her head sadly. “I’m sorry, Chase. You’re not part of the club anymore.”
Maybe I’m stupid, but that really catches me by surprise. “Nobody told you I didn’t do anything wrong?” Suddenly, there’s a bowling ball in my throat and I can’t seem to clear it away.
“I spoke to the Webers on the phone last night,” she tells me. “Joel’s okay, but the family is pretty rattled, considering that the injury came from you.”
“What about Brendan?” I press. “He knows I’m innocent.”
“I had a talk with him too. He’s not sure about your role, but the word innocent never came up.” She shoots me a penetrating gaze. “And it doesn’t help that you backed up the story that your two friends spun about an electrical fire.”
My heart sinks. She’s right about that. I signed on to the lie to save my own skin, but I never thought about how that would look to the video club kids. They know there was no fire.
They’ve all been waiting for the old me to show up. And I delivered.
“So they kicked me out,” I say.
She shakes her head. “That decision was mine. I’m really sorry, Chase. You were doing so well. Warrior is the best middle school project I’ve ever seen.”