I was thinking about Bubba.
And about Bubba's dad. I've seen Mr. Bixby in action, and boy! He's just like Bubba, only bigger.
And meaner.
I was also thinking about my dad. My totally great dad, who calls me champ, and helps me be Shredderman, and took me to meet The Gecko.
How could two dads be so different?
How could two kids be so different?
What if I had to live with Bubba's dad? Would I get meaner?
What if Bubba got to live with my dad? Would he get nicer?
Was that the key to making Bubba nicer?
Was there even a key? Or was Bubba always going to be the same?
I think the rest of the kids in class were day-dreaming, too, because everybody jumped when Dr. Voss walked in the room.
Dr. Voss is our principal, and her walking in a room can make you jump all by itself, but now she wasn't alone. She had Bubba with her.
Everybody pretended to be reading, but eyes were shifting around like crazy!
Bubba didn't look at anything but the ground, and went straight to his seat while Dr. Voss and Miss Newby stood off to one side and whispered.
And even though Bubba didn't look at anyone, everyone in class noticed—Bubba's eyes were red and puffy.
All the kids in class twitched their faces and mouths. They were spreading the word without saying a word.
Bubba Bixby had been crying!
Crying.
For the rest of school, no one knew what to do. Or say. Even Kevin and Max steered clear of him. And although Bubba was quieter than he'd ever been, something about him looked extra angry.
Extra dangerous.
So, believe me, I was shaking in my shoes! But at recess, nothing happened. And at lunch, instead of stalking kids like a tower of terror, Bubba sat by himself on the lower field, throwing pebbles at the grass.
All kinds of kids asked me about meeting The Gecko, and normally talking about it would have been great. But I didn't want to talk about it. It felt like showing off your Christmas presents when the guy next to you only got a lump of coal.
Even if the guy next to you deserved a lump of coal, it still felt… wrong.
Besides, a lot of kids were telling me I was his-tory. Toast. Nothing but walking worm food.
And I had the feeling that they were right. Bubba hated me so bad now, he was probably planning something even wickeder than usual. My stomach was in knots! My throat choked off! I couldn't even remember my times tables!
Then during math, I got the world's craziest idea. I actually dropped my pencil, it was that crazy. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. The more I wanted to do it.
It would either change things, or get me killed.
I just had to get up enough nerve to find out which.
CHAPTER 17
Alvin Emerges
When school let out, I followed Bubba to the bike racks.
My heart was beating like crazy!
I got on the other side of the racks, looked right at him, and said, “I can take you to meet The Gecko.”
He stopped pulling his bike back. “What?”
I cleared my throat. “I said, I can take you to meet The Gecko.”
He squinted at me, then snorted and yanked his bike the rest of the way out of the rack. “Quit pulling my chain, Nerd.”
I followed him as he headed for the street. “I'm serious. He said I could come back today. I'll take you with me.”
Bubba stopped and looked at me like I ate flies. Finally he said, “Why?”
I shrugged. “Because… I'd like to?”
“Shut up, Nerd. You expect me to believe that?”
“I'm serious! I'll go get my bike. We can ride over to Old Town together.”
He just stared at me.
“Wait here,” I told him. “I'll be right back!”
I tore home, told Mom where I was going, jumped on my bike, and raced back to school.
Bubba was still there.
“Come on!” I shouted as I coasted past him. “Let's go!”
Bubba Bixby may be big and mean, full of teeth and ready to bite, but he's not very fast on a bike. I had to stop and wait for him at least three times!
And the whole way there, he didn't say one word to me.
Not one.
We parked our bikes at a rack in front of Old Town, and when we were walking over to the hotel, I told him, “They're probably going to recognize you from yesterday, so just let me handle it, okay?”
He nodded. His cheeks were like McIntosh apples, and he was dripping sweat.
He still didn't say a word.
At the hotel, we got stopped by a security guard. I told him, “The Gecko… uh… Chase Morton invited us.”
“Oh, right,” he said sarcastically. He squinted at Bubba, saying, “Didn't I specifically invite you to not come back?”
Bubba looked down.
So I said, “He's here with me today. I'm Nolan Byrd. Ask Chase. He'll tell you it's all right.”
“Hmmm,” the guard said.
“Or Henna Blockwell. She knows it's okay.”
He studied me a minute, then got on his walkie-talkie radio. Five minutes later, Henna showed up and let us in. “Hi, Nolan. Chase told me if you showed up to send you upstairs. Apparently he's got some new move to wipe you out in Tekken 3.” She looked at her watch and said, “He's only got about ten minutes before his call time.” Then she noticed that Bubba was following along.
“Uh…Nolan?” she whispered. “Isn't he the boy who ruined the take yesterday?”
I nodded.
“I don't think we can—”
“Please, Miss Blockwell? It's… it's kind of hard to explain, but it's important. And if we've only got ten minutes…” I shrugged. “Please?”
She looked from me to Bubba and back again. Finally she sighed and said, “Well, come along.”
Chase was sitting cross-legged on his bed. His thumbs were flying on his PlayStation controller. “Nolan!” he said when he saw me. “My man!” He tossed me the second controller. “I am gonna wipe you out!”
We entered a battle. I was Yoshimitsu Green. He was Yoshimitsu Red. He had totally mastered backflips. And the deathcopter trick! And samurai cutter! He was even using slap-u-silly!
Whoa!
But I managed to slash and bash and dance all around him. It was close, but I won the round!
“How'd you do that?” Chase cried.
“Man,” Bubba mumbled. “You're good.”
“Huh?” Chase said, finally noticing Bubba. “Hey…” He squinted at him. “How'd you get in here?”
“I, um, I brought him,” I said.
“You're friends with that guy?” Chase asked, his eyebrows flying up.
“Well, um…” I looked at Bubba. “Not exactly.”
“So… ?” Chase was starting to look annoyed.
Maybe even mad.
“I… I brought him because I thought it was… a nice thing to do.” I looked down and said, “It's a long story, and really complicated. Don't be mad, okay?”
“Okaaaaaay,” Chase said, studying me. Then he nodded and stuck out his hand to Bubba. “I'm Chase Morton.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “The Gecko!”
Bubba shook his hand. “I'm…Bub…,” he said, then stopped himself. “I'm… Alvin Bixby.” He started pumping Chase's hand like crazy. “Your number one fan!”
“Well, hey, Alvin. Nice to officially meet you.” Then Chase eyed me and asked him, “You think your friend here will let me whip you in Tekken 3?”
I looked at Bubba.
Bubba looked at me.
And it was weird. He didn't even seem like Bubba.
He seemed more like an oversized toddler.
I held out the controller to him and grinned. “Go easy on him. He's just a superhero.”
Bubba laughed and took my place on the bed. “You gonna be Yoshimitsu again?” he asked Chase.
“You bet! You?”
> “Nah,” Bubba said. “I choose True Ogre! He's rad!”
“Hoo-hoo-hoo!” Chase laughed.
And the battle began.
CHAPTER 18
Out of Control!
Yoshimitsu clobbered True Ogre. What do you expect when a gargoyle with flame-breath takes on a Manji ninja? But Bubba didn't even seem to care. He said, “You want to go again?”
Chase would have, but Henna came in and made them stop. So Chase made Henna get Bubba a poster that Chase autographed and signed: To Alvin “Bubba” Bixby, who rocks at Tekken 3. And since no visitors were being allowed on the set, we had to leave the building, but not before I took a quick picture of Bubba and Chase with my digital camera.
When we were unlocking our bikes, I asked Bubba, “You got e-mail?”
Like I didn't know!
Then I added, “I'll download the picture of you and The Gecko and send it to you.”
He frowned for a minute, then said, “Bixby at BigNet-dot-com.” He pulled his bike from the rack and stared at me. For a guy who had just met The Gecko, he sure wasn't looking too friendly.
He stood there for a minute like he was trying to figure out how to say something, but it never came out. And finally he just swung onto his bike and left. No See ya, no wave. He just took off.
So I took off, too, only I went a different way. And I wondered what Bubba had been trying to say.
Thanks?
Nah, more likely it was Don't think this makes us friends, Nerd!
Like I would want to be!
Or Don't start thinking you can e-mail me, Geek.
Too late for that. I'd been e-mailing him for months!
As Shredderman!
So I was thinking about how I'd have to use my parents' e-mail system to mail Bubba the picture, but the minute I got home, I forgot all about Bubba. My mom was screaming, “Nolan! Nolan, come here quick!”
I dropped my backpack and charged for the kitchen. “Mom? What's wrong? Mom?”
“In here!” she yelled from the family room. “Look.”
Her eyes were cranked open.
Her jaw was dropped to the floor.
She was tearing apart her purse trying to find her phone, but she wasn't looking at what she was doing.
She was looking at the TV.
“What's wrong, Mom? What's…” And then I heard a voice from the television say, “… Shredderman.”
Two newscasters were talking about me on TV!
“It's everywhere,” the man was saying to the lady next to him. “I got the e-mail this morning, you got it last night. Everyone in the industry seems to have a copy of Joel Bowl vandalizing that hotel”—he shuffled through some papers— “the Historian up in Cedar Valley.”
The lady was nodding. “And I've heard the hotel and the production company are planning to press charges.”
“So this might be the Mole's last digging spree?” the man asked.
“I, for one, hope so!” The lady grinned into the camera and said, “Meanwhile, good work, Shred-derman, whoever you are.”
“Yeah,” the man added. “What's that motto of his?”
“Yours in truth and justice!”
“Exactly!” The man turned to the camera and said, “And now to Bill McCloud, who hopefully has some truth and justice to convey to us about the weather ….”
Mom had found her cell phone. She muted the TV while she pressed buttons on her phone with her thumb. “That was news out of Los Angeles!” she whispered to me. Then she said into the phone, “Steven? Steven, you are never going to believe what was just on Channel Five. …”
Wow. If it had been on Los Angeles TV, where else had it been? I charged down to my room to check my e-mail. While I'd been worried about surviving a day at school, stuff had been happening! People had been talking! Sending my clip around! Cedar Valley and the Historian had been on big-city news!
I booted up.
Dialed up the Internet.
Checked my mail.
Flick… flick… flick, e-mails sprang up from the bottom of my in-box!
Flick…flick…flick-flick-flick!
Flick-flick-flick-flick-flick-flick-flick!
My screen was going crazy! Messages were flying in! Scrolling off the screen faster than I could read who they were from!
I watched them for a whole minute.
Two!
I got out of my chair and backed up.
Whoa! They were still flying in!
Finally I clicked on Send and Receive, and there was the blue line, only partway done. And the message said, Receiving…302 out of 927 messages.
927 messages?
303, 304, 305, 306…The ones column was spinning around like the cents counter at the gas pump!
Who were all these people?
Mom wandered into my room without knocking.
That happens when you leave your door wide open.
She still had her phone attached to her ear. She was making little sounds into it. Fragmented sen-tences. Nuh-uhs and Uh-huhs. Sighs and tisking noises.
Then all of a sudden, she gasped like she'd spotted a Tyrannosaurus rex in my room.
I jumped and looked around.
No T. rex. Phew.
“He's got nine hundred twenty-seven messages!” she whispered into the phone. “Steven, this is totally out of control!” Her eyes were enormous. “Uh-huh. Okay. All right. I don't know, okay? Uh-huh. All right. Call back when you can.” She flipped the phone closed and sat on the edge of my bed. “Nolan? Your dad won't be home for a while.”
“Uh-huh.” I was scrolling through messages. Dad worked late a lot.
“The Gazette's been flooded with calls about Shredderman.”
I looked at her. “Really?”
“And since your father is supposedly spear-heading the investigation into who Shredderman is, he's having to steer people in the wrong direction.”
I grinned at her. “Cool!”
“Cool?”
“Yeah! It's great that Dad can help out like that.”
“But—”
“He's turning out to be a pretty good sidekick, huh?”
“Sidekick? Nolan, he's your father!”
“Who's being a pretty good sidekick!” I was still grinning. My dad as a sidekick. Something about the idea seemed really… cool.
“Mr. Green's your sidekick, remember?” She was looking a little miffed.
“But Mr. Green's in Oregon. And Dad's been real helpful, you know?”
“But—”
“Call him a substitute sidekick, if you want.”
“I don't want to call him any kind of sidekick! He's a reporter and he's not supposed to lie or cover up or—” Her cell phone rang, interrupting her. She flipped it open. “Yes?”
I was busy racing through messages. People loved Shredderman!
She listened, then whispered, “CNN? What did you tell them?”
CNN? National news? That got my attention!
“Tonight?” she was saying. “Wow, they work fast. Okay. Yes, I will. No, no, don't worry. I'm keeping him right here.” She was about to hang up, but at the last minute asked, “Hey—what are your thoughts on being called a substitute sidekick?”
She laughed and rolled her eyes, then hung up.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He said, ‘Cool! ’”
CHAPTER 19
National News
That night they talked about Shredderman on CNN, ABC, CBS, and Fox News. And in the morning we ate breakfast and listened while a group of morning-show anchors talked about it over coffee. “He sounds like some kind of vigi-lante,” one of the guys was saying.
“No, he's not,” the blond lady said. “I think he's just a kid. Did you check out his Web site?”
“He's got a Web site?” the guy asked.
“Shredderman-dot-com,” she said. “It's a hoot. Intelligent, but also very kidlike.”
“I think it's a teacher,” the other guy said. “No kid could possibl
y put a site like that together.”
“Well, no teacher's going to have a link called Bubba's Big Butt,” the lady said.
“There's a link to our former president's butt?” the first guy asked.
“No!” she laughed, tagging him with the back of her hand. “It's just some kid's backside. Fully covered, I might add.”
“So maybe the teacher's got it in for a troublemaker.”
“Maybe Shredderman is the troublemaker.”
“No! How can you say that after he busted Joel the Mole? Shredderman's a champion of truth and justice.”
“Well, speaking of truth and justice,” the first guy said, “we were talking about lobbyists, remember?”
“Right!” The lady looked in the camera and said, “And we want to hear what you think should be done about special-interest groups. Give us a call or log on to—”
Mom clicked off the TV and muttered, “I told you we should take Bubba's Big Butt off the World Wide Web!”
“It'll blow over,” Dad said. “Tomorrow they'll have forgotten all about Shredderman.” He winked at me as he stood up and grabbed his coat. “Today, though, I'm probably going to have to spend a lot of time trying to mislead people about our town's superhero.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I told him.
He smiled. “No problem, champ.” He nodded at the kitchen clock. “You'd better get moving if you don't want to be late for school.”
Yikes! How'd that happen? There were only fifteen minutes before the opening bell rang!
I tore down the hall to get dressed. Socks inside pants—check!
I raced down to the bathroom to brush my teeth.
No time to floss! My hair was sticking out everywhere!
I tried spraying it down.
Boing! It shot right back up.
I stuck my head in the sink. No time to mess around!
“Uh, Nolan?” My mom's arm was poking through the bathroom door. She was holding out the phone to me. “It's Mr. Green.”
Mr. Green?
I took the phone. “Hello?” Water was dripping everywhere!
“Hey, Nolan. Just calling to say congratulations. According to my TV, you're making some pretty big waves out there.”
“Thanks, Mr. Green,” I said. Then I whispered, “You haven't told anyone it's me… have you?”