Slacker

  Well, it was no joke, and Xavier knew it. In her last column, Audra Klincker wrote:

  … to build a beaver habitat for no beaver would be a hilarious farce if not for the waste of time, man power, and school resources. With our freeway ramp scheduled to be demolished in a matter of weeks, Sycamore could soon be a town with its best days in the rearview mirror. We will be facing tough choices on how we spend our limited resources. And while we can expect no easy answers, it seems clear that unoccupied beaver lodges should be very low on our list of priorities.

  What a hypocrite that Audra Klincker was! When we were building the lodge, she was our biggest fan. But that had been back when the P.A.G. was the newest and hottest thing in town. And, even though I hated to admit it, those days were in the rearview mirror, too, just like our freeway exit was going to be.

  It was so unfair that the P.A.G. was getting blamed for stuff we didn’t even do. We were working harder than ever. With so many members, we practically had to beg people to let us help them, just to keep our paggers involved. But every job we took on, every drive we helped out with, every cleanup we did—something bad always happened, and it wasn’t our fault. Either the work went sour, or a shutter or window would get broken, or something rude would get spray-painted on a wall. Sometimes the whole job would be mysteriously undone. Someone was sabotaging us. But who?

  We were starting to get bad press, and not just from the Klincker Kronicle. The police chief called us “the middle school wrecking crew.” All we’d ever wanted to do was help. That really hurt!

  If you thought we were upset, you should have seen Mr. Fanshaw. He once told me that he considered the Positive Action Group the greatest achievement in his entire career. He’d backed the P.A.G. from the very beginning when Cam had first proposed it. He was our faculty adviser. A lot of our best projects had been his idea. You couldn’t miss the dark circles under his eyes. The poor guy wasn’t sleeping, worrying about what was going wrong.

  It had to hurt for him to watch our jobs evaporate until almost nobody wanted us anymore. But Mr. Fanshaw never gave up on us. He called in some favors and arranged for the P.A.G. to repaint the pool area at the community Y.

  “This is a major opportunity, people,” he announced at our next meeting, which had to be held in the double gym with the room divider removed. “It’s a big undertaking, and a tough one. But it’s also in a high-profile location that half the town goes to. If we can ace it, I know we can turn everything around.”

  The roar shook the rafters. P.A.G. meetings had become a lot like pep rallies at our school. Bigger, even, now that String was off the Seahawks.

  “I’ll hand it over to your P.A.G. president, Cameron Boxer!”

  This time the cheer was even louder, because everybody stomped on the bleachers at the same time. The whole building seemed to shake.

  It took a while to find Cam, so the noise died out a bit. But as soon as he stepped to the microphone, the volume pumped back up.

  When it finally got quiet enough for him to speak, he said, “I agree,” and the place went nuts again.

  It wasn’t exactly the Gettysburg Address, but we all understood his message. The P.A.G. was alive and kicking, and the boss was in the driver’s seat. He’d never said much about Elvis, either, but when the time had come, Cam had made things happen.

  We put thirty-six paggers on the work crew. More than double that showed up at the Y on Saturday morning.

  “It’s not a bad idea,” Mr. Fanshaw decided. “Painting can be messy, so it’ll be good to have extra people taping walls and laying drop cloths.”

  We entered the building, checked in at reception, and made our way to the pool area. That was when the full scope of the mission ahead hit us. The place was massive. There was an Olympic-size pool surrounded by stadium seating; diving boards at low, medium, high, and platform levels; a kiddie pool off to the side with an interactive water park; two hot tubs; and a waterslide. Most of our job was walls and trim, of course, because many of the surfaces were tiled. But it was still an awful lot of work. The paint cans alone, piled four high, covered a giant rolling palette so heavy that Xavier could barely move it.

  We got to it. There wasn’t much complaining, or even goofing off. We were the Positive Action Group, and this was what we did. We’d tackled tough projects before. This was just another one.

  I was proud of us. Tarps were spread; baseboards taped; paints mixed; brushes, rollers, and sandpaper handed out. We were like a well-oiled machine.

  I approached Cam. “When you first created the P.A.G., did you ever dream it would be like this?”

  His friend Pavel went into such a coughing fit that I had to pound him on the back.

  “No,” Cam told me honestly. “Never in a million years.”

  We worked for a couple of hours until Mr. Fanshaw called a break. We all went into the community room and started in on our bag lunches. Mr. Fanshaw ate with us, but left halfway through to pick up a huge order of Munchkins for dessert. We sent him on his way with a big cheer. We were tired, but happy. The work was going well. There was no feeling quite as satisfying as seeing that your efforts were paying off.

  As usual, String was bragging that he’d painted faster, better, and more than anybody else. Several of the guys decided to challenge this, so they trooped back into the pool area. A handful of us followed to serve as judges.

  We hadn’t even crossed the hall yet and we could already hear that something was different. There was a churning-water sound, a kind of bubbling roar. Xavier threw open the double doors.

  We saw the hot tubs first. The whirlpools were on full tilt, and out of the baths rose two pillars of soapsuds, ten feet high and growing. Beyond that, in the interactive water park, a broad-shouldered high school boy in a black leather jacket was emptying a bottle of dishwashing liquid into the kiddie pool.

  “Tony?” Cam blurted.

  Startled, Tony dropped the bottle, turned tail, and ran.

  “Stop him!” shouted half a dozen voices.

  String ran him down from behind and tackled him. The two hit the tile floor and slid in a shower of yellow, pale blue, and purple—I blinked—just the same colors as—

  That was when I pushed my way forward through the crowd, and saw them. There were at least twenty high school kids, and they were wrecking our work—spilling our paint cans, dumping detergent into all the pools, and writing on the freshly painted walls.

  “Stop it!” shouted Chuck.

  “Who’s going to make us?” jeered an older girl.

  I didn’t know a lot of high schoolers, but I recognized her immediately. It was Jennifer Del Rio. And as soon as I saw her there, it all came together for me like puzzle pieces locking into place. The Friends of Fuzzy! They’d been the ones dogging us all along, because they couldn’t stand to share the spotlight. And now they were here to ruin our biggest project of all.

  The other teenagers joined Jennifer, advancing on us menacingly.

  “Where’s Boxer?” Jennifer’s laser-guided eyes locked on Cam in the middle of our group. Tony and two other big guys started toward the P.A.G. president.

  “Somebody do something!” pleaded Katrina.

  There was a loud crunching sound as Xavier pulled the long slide free of its frame and swung it around, sweeping the high schoolers into the big pool. There they flailed in the sudsy, paint-stained water, howling in outrage, windmilling their arms, and kicking up even more foam.

  It was so chaotic, so crazy, that I almost missed it. Right in the middle of the struggling teenagers, another head broke the surface of the water—a smaller one, brown and furry, with two large buckteeth.

  I heard my own scream as if it were coming from someone else. No wonder nobody had seen Elvis for all these weeks! Somehow, the poor little guy had broken into the Y and was holed up here, living in and out of the pools and hot tubs!

  As I watched, one of the boys grabbed Elvis around the midsection, holding him up in triumph. “Hey, it’s the
missing rat!”

  Elvis struggled, his broad flat tail beating at the surface of the water, a beaver’s distress signal. At the sight of him looking so frightened, the Y winked out for an instant to be replaced by a furious red haze. The next thing I knew, I was flying through the air. I hit the pool with a mighty splash and began freestyling to the rescue. I heard more splashes all around me, and suddenly there were paggers in the water, swimming into battle—Xavier, String, Chuck, Jordan, donuts—

  Donuts?

  “Get out of the water!” bellowed Mr. Fanshaw, arms thrashing. “Get out of the—” And then he sank like a brick.

  The dilemma almost tore me in two—should I save Elvis or Mr. Fanshaw? In the end, I had to go with our faculty adviser. I knew Elvis could swim. I wasn’t so sure about Mr. Fanshaw.

  I dove down, grabbed the guidance counselor’s arm, and brought him to the surface. He tried to thank me, but he was spitting up too much water. By now, everybody was in the pool, even Cam, although I think he might have been pushed in. Soggy Munchkins bobbed all around us.

  “Where’s the beaver?” I shrieked at the high school boy.

  He could only shrug.

  I did a desperate three-sixty, and nearly let go of Mr. Fanshaw. My eyes fell on a half-open door to the outside.

  Elvis had left the building.

  When I was nine, my mother wanted to put me in swimming lessons. I refused. It was a skill I would never need. I was going to be a teacher, and stay forever on dry land, I argued. If I had known then that I would one day owe my life to Daphne Leibowitz, that would have been a very different conversation.

  I still had no idea what made me jump in the water, taking three hundred Munchkins with me. On what level did I not know I was going straight to the bottom? But I’d just left a beautiful example of young people involved in public service work, and returned to the spectacle of an aquatic brawl being fought in mountains of multicolored bubbles. Or maybe it was this: My students were younger and smaller—except maybe Xavier—and they were being threatened. Was I proud of them for finding the courage to stand up for themselves and the good work they were trying to accomplish? You bet! Was I sorry that the Y got trashed and was going to be unusable for at least six months? Well, okay, that too.

  The worst part of all was that the Positive Action Group was getting blamed for everything while those bullies and jerks from the high school were being let off scot-free. Audra Klincker wrote in her column that the whole incident had been the high schoolers trying to prevent the P.A.G. from vandalizing the Y. Now the Friends of Fuzzy were earning the gratitude of the community by volunteering to clean up the mess in the pool area that they’d made.

  My colleague Barbara Lederer wasn’t as sympathetic as I’d expected. “It’s your own fault,” she told me. “You were the one who called Audra Klincker in the first place. You were more than happy with all the publicity you got when she was writing good things about the P.A.G.”

  “But the good things were all true!” I reasoned. “This is wrong! Those Fuzzies aren’t heroes! They came to spoil our job. They’ve been doing it for weeks!”

  “Audra Klincker is a reporter,” she explained patiently. “She follows the story. The story used to be how great you are. But nobody wants to read the same thing over and over again. So the story had to change.”

  I was speechless.

  “Plus,” she added, “Audra Klincker is an idiot. You’re not from around here, but the locals all know that.”

  Dr. LaPierre was beyond furious. “Do you have any idea how this reflects on the school?”

  “Of course I do. But our kids are innocent.”

  “Well, the high school says their kids are innocent.”

  I was resentful. “The high school is lying. Ask yourself what those teenagers were doing at a closed pool, knowing full well that someone else would be working there. They’ve been stalking us for a while now. If you’d just take the time to investigate—”

  “I don’t want it investigated,” he interrupted. “I want it over. Shut it down.”

  I stared at him.

  “The Positive Action Group. It’s gone.”

  I was horrified. “Don’t they deserve a chance to clear their name?”

  “I just came from a demonstration of what waterlogged donuts can do to a seventy-thousand-dollar pool-filtration system. Shut it down.”

  I begged for mercy. “But it’s been so good for our kids! The shy ones have made friends. The young ones aren’t intimidated by the upperclassmen anymore. Working side by side has done that for them. Take a boy like Xavier. He hasn’t been in trouble once since joining the P.A.G.”

  The principal’s lip curled. “Not unless you consider ripping apart a giant water slide and using it to assault twenty people ‘trouble.’ ”

  “Or Freeland,” I continued gamely. “He never had a thought beyond the football field. Now he has a real life, and his grades are improving. And what about Cameron Boxer himself? He barely left a footprint in this school. Did you ever think we’d see such leadership from him?”

  He held up a hand, policeman-style. “Save your breath. I’m not saying it wasn’t good for a while. But it isn’t good anymore. End it.”

  And that was it. I had a lot of good arguments left, but he didn’t want to hear them. Dr. LaPierre was my boss. He’d given me a direct order. All that remained was for me to tell seven hundred twenty-nine paggers that they couldn’t be paggers anymore.

  Well, obviously I couldn’t personally break the news to seven hundred twenty-nine people. And I certainly didn’t want to deliver a shock like that over the PA. So I paged Cameron.

  It was a testament to how much the P.A.G. had become a part of my life that I wasn’t even surprised when he didn’t show up. A check of my watch gave me a pretty good idea of where he had to be. I left my office, stepping over the boxes of unsold raffle tickets, and made my way to the second-floor boys’ room. Sure enough, there was the P.A.G. president, slouched against the sink, phone in hand, playing that game he loved so much—something about clans.

  “Cameron?” I said gently. I startled him, and he nearly dropped his phone in the process of fumbling it out of sight.

  “Oh, hi, Mr. Fan—uh—sir. I was just—”

  “It’s all right. I’m not going to report you.” It might have been his legendary politeness that made me overlook his cell phone violation. Or maybe it was my heavy heart at what I had to tell him. “I’ve got bad news, Cameron, and I wanted you to be the first to know so you can pass it on to all the other members. The Positive Action Group is canceled. It’s not going to be allowed to operate anymore.”

  I watched his face as he digested my words. A grimace appeared that sent the corners of his mouth shooting up toward his ears. If I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn it was a huge, Grinch-like grin. He was working very hard to keep his emotions in check.

  “It was wonderful while it lasted,” I went on. “I can’t tell you how much I admire what you did for this school. But it’s over. I’m sorry.”

  His tight control never wavered. “Okay.”

  “Okay,” I echoed. It seemed like more should be said, but Cameron had always been a man of few words. Fine, we’d do it his way. We shook hands, and I left him there without ordering him back to class. The kid deserved a little time and space to collect his thoughts.

  The last thing I heard as the bathroom door closed behind me was the flourish of trumpets from his video game.

  When was it ever better than this?

  The Positive Action Group was history, so I had my life back. Mom and Dad still gave me credit for creating it, though. And sympathy, too, because I’d been wronged, and my greatest achievement had been taken away from me. Even Melody was cutting me some slack. It was pretty ill.

  Better still, I didn’t have to worry about Jennifer and Tony anymore. The Friends of Fuzzy were back in business, and they were getting things all their own way. But since I was, too, it didn’t bother me that
they didn’t really deserve it. I’d seen the Dodge Charger a couple of times, but now it just drove right by me. One time I could have sworn I got a friendly wave from Tony behind the tinted window. I’d never realized just how nervous that car had made me. Now it was like when I was five and the family with the big mean dog moved away.

  Illest of all, though—I was back on the couch, in the spot perfectly formed for my butt, practicing for Rule the World. Gone were the days of stealing ten minutes here, fifteen minutes there because the P.A.G. was taking up all my time.

  I was in the lead chariot, racing around the Circus Maximus, well ahead of the pack, when my wingman, Gaius Magnus, let go of the reins and coasted to a stop.

  “Chuck, what are you doing?” I howled, watching his avatar being trampled into the dirt by every other team in the race.

  “This is boring,” he told me over the headset. “I don’t want to play anymore.”

  “What do you mean ‘boring’?” I demanded. “We love this game.”

  A tone indicated that Chuck had logged out.

  “What’s with him?” I complained to Pavel after the race was over.

  Pavel sounded exasperated over the network. “You’ve got tunnel vision about your so-called lifestyle,” he accused. “You never think about other people and what makes them tick.”

  “That’s kind of harsh,” I complained.

  “Chuck loved the P.A.G., and he’s really bummed about it.”

  “The P.A.G.?” I echoed. “What does the P.A.G. have to do with video games?”

  “Nothing,” he replied readily. “There were no chariots, or space aliens, or titans. But when we helped somebody, that person’s life was better, even if it was only in a tiny way. And it was in reality, not on any screen. So when Chuck said the game was boring, he technically didn’t mean it was a bad game. He just meant it didn’t measure up to the stuff we did with the P.A.G. And you know what? I think I agree with him.”