Slacker

  For Harry and Nancy Korman

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Cameron Boxer

  Chapter Two: Pavel Dysan

  Chapter Three: Daphne Leibowitz

  Chapter Four: Cameron Boxer

  Chapter Five: Mr. Fanshaw

  Chapter Six: Cameron Boxer

  Chapter Seven: Freeland McBean

  Chapter Eight: Cameron Boxer

  Chapter Nine: Jordan Toleffsen

  Chapter Ten: Mr. Fanshaw

  Chapter Eleven: Cameron Boxer

  Chapter Twelve: Daphne Leibowitz

  Chapter Thirteen: Cameron Boxer

  Chapter Fourteen: Melody Boxer

  Chapter Fifteen: Cameron Boxer

  Chapter Sixteen: Mr. Fanshaw

  Chapter Seventeen: Pavel Dysan

  Chapter Eighteen: Jennifer Del Rio

  Chapter Nineteen: Cameron Boxer

  Chapter Twenty: Chuck Kinsey

  Chapter Twenty-One: Daphne Leibowitz

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Mr. Fanshaw

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Cameron Boxer

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Dr. Lapierre

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Pavel Dysan

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Freeland McBean

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Cameron Boxer

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Chuck Kinsey

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Daphne Leibowitz

  Chapter Thirty: Jennifer Del Rio

  Chapter Thirty-One: Cameron Boxer

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Daphne Leibowitz

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Cameron Boxer

  About the Author

  Look for more action and humor from Gordon Korman

  Copyright

  It was ill—ill being a good thing for it to be.

  The basement was dim. The couch was soft and comfortable, perfectly molded to the contours of my butt by the thousands of hours I’d spent on it. And the aliens coming out of the smoldering wreckage of the mothership were dazed and slow, ripe for the blasting.

  It was a moment to savor, but there was no time for savoring. The controller was an extension of my hands as I took aim and fired. My friends Pavel and Chuck had my back, and also this guy Borje, who was in Malmo, Sweden. Their voices rang out through my headset. We were a tight-knit team, even though Pavel was playing from three doors down, Chuck from two blocks over, and Borje at a distance of five thousand miles. The aliens were shouting, too, but they didn’t seem to be as organized as we were. And definitely not as dedicated.

  I heard another voice—my mother’s—coming from upstairs. I ignored it. Nothing that happened on Earth could be important right now.

  The basement lights began to flash on and off. Now, that annoyed me. With great effort, I had created a cave-like atmosphere ideal for gaming. And here was Mom, standing outside the cave, flicking a switch and ruining my concentration.

  “What?” I hollered, my finger tapping the Y control, which created a steady pulse of Omega radiation that the extraterrestrials were especially sensitive to.

  Another thing my mother didn’t understand: “What?” was not a real question. “What?” meant “I’m busy” or “Do not disturb” or even “Go shout at someone who isn’t involved in a life-and-death struggle with seven-foot insects!”

  She said something about having to go out, ziti in the oven, and ten minutes. What I heard was “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Seriously, if she was going to be back in ten minutes, why did I have to know about this at all? I had an alien hit squad on my tail.

  I focused on the screen, trying to peer through the burning extraterrestrial atmosphere. Suddenly a voice eerily like Darth Vader’s announced, “Cover me while I plant the heavy-neutron seed.”

  Chuck was the first to panic. “Cam! Did you hear that? It’s him!”

  “Yeah, but which one is he?” Pavel added desperately.

  Borje was babbling excitedly, but when he got too amped up, he switched to Swedish, so he wasn’t much help.

  I stared at the hideous aliens on the screen, with their armored, insectoid bodies; undulating antennae; and cold, hooded eyes. It was impossible to tell which was being manipulated by the owner of that deep voice.

  I screamed one word: “Attack!”

  And we did, blasting away with lasers, disruptors, and antimatter grenades. I even threw rocks. It had to be the most intense battle we’d ever fought. It raged on and on and on. Pavel had to leave to eat dinner, and Borje’s dad caught him and made him go to bed. It was just me and Chuck against a lone enemy, holed up in the wreckage of his escape pod. We had him cornered, but you couldn’t tell by the way he was fighting, firing at us through a breach in the strontium field.

  “You’ll never reach me in here!” the deep voice leered.

  Of course, we should have expected that the last alien standing would be him. The gamer with the Darth Vader voice synthesizer had been stalking me online for months, foiling my Normandy invasions, sacking my quarterbacks, forcing my chariots out of the Circus Maximus, and battering me with steel chairs in extreme wrestling matches. I didn’t even know the guy’s name—not his real one, anyway. He went by his gamer tag, Evil McKillPeople, of Toronto, Canada. My archnemesis.

  “What are we going to do, Cam?” Chuck was losing his nerve. “We can’t blast through strontium!”

  “Aim for the breach!” I advised.

  “But he’s aiming at us! And—Oh, hi, Mom. Dinnertime already?”

  “Do not put down that controller!” I ordered. “We’ve got him outnumbered!”

  The next voice I heard wasn’t Chuck’s or Darth Vader’s. It seemed to be coming from outside. What was it saying? I raised the headphones from my ears.

  “This is the Sycamore Fire Department. Is there anybody in the house?”

  Well, that had to be the stupidest question ever asked. Of course I was in the house. Why did the fire department want to know that?

  Without putting down the controller, I got up, ran to the high window, yanked away the pillow I’d jammed there for extra darkness, and peered outside. All I could see were fire engines and guys in heavy raincoats and rubber boots.

  “What?” I exclaimed aloud, and this time it didn’t mean “Do not disturb” or “I’m busy.” It meant: “Why is the entire Sycamore Fire Department parked on our lawn?”

  An enormous crash shook the foundation of the house. Heavy running footfalls sounded upstairs. A moment later, the basement door was flung wide and one of those giant raincoats appeared on the stairs, enveloped in a thick cloud of smoke.

  “Kid, what are you doing here?” he barked.

  “I’m finally going to beat Evil McKillPeople!” I yelled back.

  “Your house is on fire!”

  He shoved me upstairs, the controller still clutched in my hand. By that time, another firefighter had invaded the kitchen and found the baked ziti—a coal-black charred lump of carbon.

  “False alarm,” he announced. “This casserole burned and the whole house filled with smoke. Neighbor reported it pouring out the windows.” He turned to me. “Good luck getting the black off the ceiling.”

  My mother’s “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah” came back to me then. Only this time, it sounded more like “I’m making a baked ziti for dinner. Wait ten minutes and take it out of the oven.”

  That would probably have been about an hour ago—you know, back when our house still had a front door. I’d always wondered why firemen carry axes. Now I knew.

  I was bound to hear a whole lot about this later tonight. It was definitely going to disturb my lifestyle.

  Worst of all, when I finally went back down to the basement, the TV screen showed my character lying stone-dead on the alien surface. Evil McKillPeople was standing over him,
a leering grin on his green lips.

  Video games were exactly like life, only better.

  Both followed the laws of cause and effect. You take a turn too fast in a racing game, you roll your car. Or in the real world, if you don’t hear your mom talking about ziti in the oven, the fire department will bust down your door.

  It was easy to get a new race car. That happened with the touch of a button on your controller. Our door, on the other hand, turned out to be a nonstandard size.

  “Fensterman says it’s going to take a month to custom-make a new one!” raved my father, explaining why we now lived with a piece of plywood nailed across the front entrance of our house. For the next month, we would have to use the back door.

  Dad wasn’t shouting because he was mad at me. He was shouting to be heard over the roar of the giant fans that stood all around, blowing out the smoke and burnt smell left over from the ziti.

  He also happened to be mad at me. Just not as mad as Mom.

  “I asked one little thing of you, Cameron Boxer,” she seethed. “One thing: Take out the ziti after ten minutes and turn off the oven.”

  “That’s two things,” I pointed out.

  “Two things any orangutan could do, no problem!” she raged. “Of course, he’d have to swing away from the game console for thirty seconds.”

  Now, that bothered me. “You know,” I said, “you and Dad run a furniture store because that’s your lifestyle. Video games are my lifestyle. I’m not a big furniture fan, but I don’t dump all over it, because I respect your lifestyle.”

  My father’s eyes bulged. “That ‘lifestyle’ puts food on the table and clothes on your back. And it pays for things like video games and the electricity to run them.”

  “First prize at Rule the World is ten thousand dollars,” I reminded them. That was the East Coast gaming championship coming up in November. Pavel, Chuck, and I were in training—although I hadn’t decided yet which of those guys to take on as my wingman. We called ourselves the Awesome Threesome, but Rule the World only accepted twosomes.

  Mom sighed. “It’s not the money. It’s not the dinner. It’s not even the house full of smoke and the ruined door.”

  “It’s a little bit about the door,” Dad corrected her. “And it’ll be a little more if our insurance premium goes up because of this.”

  Mom ignored him. “Look at yourself, Cam. You’re pale as a ghost. You look like you just got out of prison. The best thing I can say about your grades is that you’re not failing. You’ve never played a sport—”

  “Too sweaty,” I interjected.

  She forged on. “Or did drama—”

  “Too showy.”

  “Or joined a club—”

  “Too many strangers.”

  “Or participated in a single extracurricular activity. Cam, if you didn’t have a birth certificate, it would be next to impossible to prove that you even exist! Your only interest is video games.”

  She said this like it was a bad thing. I was proud of my lifestyle. I saw this guy on TV once who said the key to happiness was to find what you love to do, and do it. I’d lived by that rule for every one of my thirteen years. Obviously, I still went to school, and flossed, and got haircuts and flu shots and all that. Even the TV guy admitted nobody could get away with only the good stuff. But if you could keep the balance in favor of doing what you love—80–20, let’s say—you could be at least 80 percent happy. Which was still pretty ill.

  My dad took up the lecture. “We’re not saying there’s anything wrong with video games in moderation. But you don’t do anything else. Sooner or later it’s going to cost you the chance to have any kind of life that doesn’t come with an avatar on a screen. Not to mention that you’re hogging the game system that was bought for the whole family. Your poor sister has to go to a friend’s house if she wants to play at all because you’re always on ours.”

  “Melody’s not a serious gamer like me,” I defended myself. “I’m in training. Doesn’t that show initiative and involvement?”

  Dad took a deep breath. “Listen up, kid. First of all, we’re going to be using the back door for the next month. In that time, you will find something else to be interested in besides video games. It can be a sport; it can be a club; it can be anything you want, so long as it involves real human beings and it doesn’t happen on a screen.”

  I was horrified. “But what about Rule the World? I’ve been practicing for months!”

  Mom spoke up. “We’re not taking your games away. Yet. But we’re not kidding, Cameron. Your life is going to change.”

  “Is it the ziti?” I demanded. “It’s the ziti, right? When I win the contest, I’ll buy you ten thousand dollars’ worth of ziti!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Your future is more important than any amount of ziti. This is going to happen, Cameron. It’s going to happen before we have a real door again. And if it doesn’t, you will lose that game system.”

  I staggered back. Honestly—like I’d been punched.

  I remembered something else the TV guy had mentioned: There were always going to be people trying to mess up your lifestyle.

  I’d been on guard for those people my entire life. But I never dreamed they’d turn out to be my own parents.

  Technically, Cam hadn’t chosen me yet as his Rule the World partner. But it was coming any day now. For starters, I was tops in the entire eighth grade in academic average. Oh, sure, school smarts didn’t necessarily translate into video-gaming skills. But problem solving was a big part of it. Also logic and quick thinking. What more could anybody ask for in a wingman?

  It wasn’t so much that I was better than Chuck, just more levelheaded. I could play myself out of any tight spot. When Chuck got himself backed into a corner, he’d panic and do something crazy. Nine times out of ten, he’d get himself killed, and we’d lose a life, or spend health points, or waste time waiting for him to respawn. That wasn’t the kind of guy you’d want as your partner in real competition.

  Mind you, every now and then, by sheer random chance, Chuck would go nuts on his controller and wipe out the enemy single-handed. If Cam was thinking about one of those times, he might get it in his head to pick Chuck over me. I’d be happy for him, and I’d still cheer for them at Rule the World. But I’d be wasting my time, because they’d definitely lose.

  And now there was this other problem.

  Technically, you couldn’t blame Mr. and Mrs. Boxer for being ticked off. Cam could have burned their whole house down, and himself with it. As it was, every room smelled like a luau gone out of control, and the kitchen cabinets and ceiling were all black.

  But banning Cam from gaming was like telling Bill Gates to give up computers and count on his fingers! There’d be no Rule the World for any of us. Regardless of whether the partner ended up being me or Chuck, there was never any question that the main guy was always Cam.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked him the day after the Great Ziti Inferno.

  He shrugged, dangling a long gummy worm and directing it into his upturned mouth. “My parents say I have to get involved. Show initiative—whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

  I provided the definition: “Initiative is the drive or ambition to get something done.”

  Chuck looked worried. “We’re dead. Nobody has less of that than Cam.”

  “I have initiative,” Cam defended himself. “It takes a lot of work to do as little as I’ve done for the past thirteen years.”

  The three of us were in our usual after-school haunt—Sweetness and Light, the only candy store left in Sycamore now that everything had moved out to the new mall. Cam was positive that gummy worms were a kind of brain food that made you sharper at video games. (The science behind that was technically zero.)

  “We can kiss that ten thousand bucks good-bye,” Chuck pronounced darkly.

  “Not necessarily,” I countered. “Cam’s folks want him to get involved. So all he has to do is join something.”

 
Cam flinched, and a gummy worm bounced off his cheek and hit the floor of the little shop. “I thought of that,” he admitted. “The problem is, when you join something, they expect you to do it. To”—he shuddered—“participate. Man, I hate that word.”

  “Yeah,” I challenged, “but if it’s the only way to save Rule the World … ”

  “You don’t understand,” he persisted. “Let’s say I join the soccer team. I’d have practice every day and go to games on the weekend. Or drama. They’re always rehearsing and performing. Even the chess club—can you see me waiting twenty minutes for some guy to make a move? None of that stuff fits into my lifestyle!”

  “I’m in the chess club,” I reminded him. School champion, two years running.

  Chuck was in true pain. “You can’t just give up!”

  “Listen,” said Cam. “Some people knock themselves out for straight A’s—”

  “I get straight A’s,” I protested.

  “Yeah, but it’s normal for you to get straight A’s, just like it’s normal for me to just squeak by. Some people play sports, or jump out of airplanes, or climb mountains. I could do those things, but it wouldn’t be me. It would be some guy who cares about that stuff.”

  I took a bite of gummy worm, but the candy turned to acid in my mouth. (Take it from a guy who actually understood the chemical process behind that.) A lot of words had been used to describe Cameron Boxer over the years—goof-off, loafer, shiftless, slouch, lazy blob of protoplasm. Those all said it pretty well, but he was more than that, too. What people couldn’t see was that there was something special about Cam. Yes, he was a slacker. But Cam was a slacker the way LeBron James was a basketball player—through a mixture of rare natural gift and intense practice.

  I spun my stool around and peered through the plate-glass window of the shop. Main Street was normally quiet since the Sycamore Mall had opened, but now the road was clogged with high school kids, soaking wet and covered in what looked like soap suds.

  “What’s going on out there?” I asked Mrs. Bachman, who owned Sweetness and Light.

  The storekeeper followed my gaze, scowling. “Those Friends of Fuzzy! Washing cars, they are!”