Slacker

  I couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d told me that he was a space alien about to blast me into Dimension X. It had always been Pavel, Chuck, and me, as long as I could remember. The Awesome Threesome! All at once, I felt like I didn’t know those guys anymore.

  “What about Rule the World?” I asked.

  “It’ll be fun. I hope you pick me to be your partner. But to be honest, it doesn’t seem that important anymore.” Well, I must have gasped, because he added, “It’s not like we’re going to win or anything. If Evil McKillPeople can beat us so easily, there must be plenty of others who can, too. I’ll bet there are gamers who are better than him.”

  So I wasn’t free of the P.A.G. after all. It was haunting me from beyond the grave.

  I abandoned the Circus Maximus early, even offering it to Melody.

  She peered at the screen. “Have you figured out the hack where you have a centurion ride beside you? It helps fight off the barbarians in the home stretch.”

  “What do you know about it?” I said sulkily.

  “Katrina and I have been playing a lot lately, now that the P.A.G.’s gone. We kind of miss it, you know.”

  I ran upstairs.

  The P.A.G. haunted me at school, too. String stopped me in the hall to tell me his academic probation was over and he was back on the Seahawks. He reached out his long arms and enfolded me in a bear hug.

  “The String owes you, Cam! No P.A.G., no extra credit, no football. Paggers forever!”

  He wasn’t the only one. All day long, people kept coming up to me with emotional stories about what the Positive Action Group meant to them.

  “I never had any friends until the P.A.G.”

  “We saved that old lady’s life.”

  “Helping people made me feel so good!”

  “I met my girlfriend on the day we built the beaver lodge.”

  “The only time I didn’t fight with my brother was when we were on a crew together.”

  “The Friends of Fuzzy are the bad guys, not us!”

  “It’s no fair that they broke us up!”

  Daphne was especially bitter because Elvis had not been seen since the incident at the Y. “Those high school criminals did this! Elvis would be in his habitat if it weren’t for them!”

  “Or maybe he’d still be at the Y,” I suggested. “It could have been the fight that scared him out.”

  “What difference does that make?” she lamented. “He’s gone now. And we don’t even have the P.A.G. to help find him and get him back!”

  Beaver-finding had never been the P.A.G.’s job, as I remembered it. But that was happening with everybody. Now that the club was gone, they were remembering it wrong, like we’d done everything short of curing the common cold.

  In the cafeteria, I found Jordan and his election opponent Kelly having lunch together.

  “The vote’s off,” Jordan told me cheerfully. “Kelly and I have decided to share the top job and be co-presidents, with Jordana serving as treasurer.”

  “And we owe it all to you, Cam,” Kelly added.

  “To me?”

  “We were wasting so much energy tearing each other down,” Jordan confessed. “But in the P.A.G., you showed us the power of cooperation.”

  Kelly looked anxious. “Do you think they’ll let us restart the club once we’re in office?”

  “I don’t know,” I told them. “Mr. Fanfare seemed pretty definite that we were shut down. I think it came straight from the principal.”

  It was like that nonstop. Ex-paggers pulling me aside to reminisce about “the good old days,” and to complain that we got busted up when the Friends of Fuzzy were still going strong. Some even wanted to know what kind of revenge I was plotting.

  One thing that was common to everyone—they wanted to know how I was handling this terrible disaster. After all, the Positive Action Group was my baby.

  What could I tell them? That I felt great, like someone had lifted a thousand-pound weight off my back? That for the first time since this P.A.G. stuff started, I was free? That it was all I could do to stop myself from dropping to my knees and thanking the heavens above for releasing me from this monster I’d created?

  So I said, “I’m hanging in there.” Everyone accepted that.

  I was on my way to last period when the door of the supply closet next to my health class opened. An arm reached out, clamped around my neck in a semi–choke hold, and hauled me inside. The door slammed behind me.

  I struggled to get away, and when the hold finally relaxed, I wheeled. I was expecting to see Tony and Jennifer there to tie me up and leave me in here, or stuff me in a locker, or chop me into fish bait and dump me in the ocean. You never knew with those two.

  Instead, I found myself looking up into the huge features of Xavier Meggett. An icy chill ran up and down my spine, radiating outward to frost my entire body. We were used to Xavier now, but he was still the scariest kid in the school. The P.A.G. was his court-ordered community service. What if, now that we were shut down, he had to go back to juvie? And what if he was blaming me for that?

  “Been looking for you all day,” he rumbled, glaring down at me with burning eyes.

  “Oh, yeah?” My voice sounded squeaky, an octave higher than normal.

  “I’ve got something for you.”

  Here it comes, I thought in agony. A punch in the face, a broken arm, a ruptured spleen—

  He pressed something into my hands. When I dared to look down, I found myself holding a roundish, toilet-paper-wrapped object a little bigger than a softball. There was something solid and heavy inside.

  “Open it up,” he urged.

  I don’t know what I expected to find in there—a bomb? A shrunken head? My hands were shaking as I tore through the wrapping.

  It was a ceramic dish decorated with a pattern of cactus plants. “A bowl?” I croaked.

  “Not any bowl,” he corrected me. “A salsa bowl. But you can also use it for guacamole or con queso dip.” I guess I seemed totally clueless, so he added, “I made it in art class.”

  “Really?” I was impressed. The shape was even, and the cacti were really well painted. It looked like something professional, from a store. I glanced at his hands. They were the size of, like, hams. I couldn’t imagine his sausage fingers creating something as nice as this.

  “It’s really good, but—why are you giving it to me?”

  His eyes blazed into mine. “I never finished anything before. Not until the P.A.G. In the P.A.G., we finished everything we started. And when we were done, stuff was different. Not just different. Better. If it worked with the P.A.G., it could work other places, too. So this is yours.”

  “I really like it,” I said, and meant it. A salsa bowl was a useful accessory for a gamer. I could already picture it on the table next to my couch in the basement. What were the odds that the least likely person in Sycamore would give me the perfect gift for my lifestyle? “Hey, Xavier, you’re not in trouble, are you? You know, because the P.A.G. was your community service, and now … ” My voice trailed off.

  To my amazement, a gigantic tear bubbled out of his left eye and trailed down his massive cheek. I could barely manage the words. “They’re not making you go back to—you know, back there?”

  He wiped his face. “Nah, they cleaned my slate.”

  “So why … ?”

  He shook his big head. “I can’t explain it. When we had the P.A.G., I woke up in the morning and the day was about something! I had something to do, and it was important. Now—it’s like I’m just killing time.”

  “Do you play video games?” I suggested timidly.

  He looked at me like I was from another planet. “Not the same,” he said sadly. “I don’t know if anything can ever be the same again.”

  It was my secretary who first called my attention to it.

  “Dr. LaPierre, I thought the Positive Action group was disbanded.”

  “It is,” I confirmed. “All their activities have been canceled
, and their web page has been taken down. It’s as if the club never existed, which is fine with me.”

  “I see,” she said in a confused tone that communicated the exact opposite. She didn’t see at all.

  “Is there a problem, Carol?” I asked.

  In reply, she slid her laptop in front of me on my desk. I immediately recognized the design of the school website. And the page itself?

  I remained calm. Principals did not panic.

  “Carol,” I said, “page Cameron Boxer.”

  The announcement went out over the PA. I waited five minutes, then ten. No sign of the Boxer kid.

  “Carol, get Peter Fanshaw in here.”

  He was already spouting excuses when he entered my office. “I know we haven’t sold even a fraction of the tickets, but if we—”

  “Never mind the raffle.” I swiveled the laptop so that he could see the screen. “What’s the deal with this?”

  Principals didn’t panic; guidance counselors did. “But that’s impossible! The P.A.G. is disbanded!”

  “Apparently,” I told him, “not everybody thinks so. And your Cameron Boxer didn’t respond to my page.”

  He shrugged. “Well, yeah—wait a minute! You think Cameron posted that?”

  “I’m all ears if you have another suspect. Go find Boxer and bring him here.”

  I cooled my heels while Peter tracked the boy down. I had paperwork to do, but I just couldn’t concentrate until this issue was settled once and for all. When a principal makes a decision to close a school club, it shouldn’t take two tries to have it happen. That web page was a direct challenge to my authority.

  When Cameron was right there in front of me, I didn’t pull any punches. “Exactly what do you think you’re doing?”

  I had to give him credit. He was a good actor. He honestly looked like he had no idea what I was talking about. And when I showed him the web page, the shock on his face seemed completely real. There was an Oscar in that kid’s future.

  “Well?” I prodded.

  “I didn’t do it,” he swore.

  I wasn’t buying that. “Maybe you didn’t do the actual web design, but you’re the P.A.G.”

  He shook his head. “There is no P.A.G. I shut it down, like Mr. Fan—like he said.”

  Peter spoke up. “Cameron, this is no joke. We need the truth. If you didn’t do this, you have to tell us who did.”

  “I don’t know who did it,” he said.

  I had no patience for that. “You don’t seem to realize the amount of trouble you’re in right now, Cameron. Take a moment to think about how it will feel to be suspended from school. Think about the conversation I’ll be having with your parents. Think about the black mark this will leave on your permanent record.”

  He regarded me in abject misery. “I’m telling the truth. I don’t know who put that on the website, and I don’t know how to find out. It was happening before, too—these extra events and meetings would get called, and I wasn’t calling them. I know it seems like I was a big shot in the group, but I really didn’t do anything. I just started it, and other people took over. They loved it more than me then, and they miss it more than me now. It must be one of them who’s doing this. But how will I ever know which one?”

  I’d always thought Cameron Boxer was an unimpressive, unmotivated, lazy student. Now I knew better. He was a brilliant schemer and tactician. Not only had he avoided the blame, but he’d found a way to push it off on more than seven hundred former club members. He’d given me so many suspects that he’d effectively given me none at all. How could I ever interrogate 90 percent of my school to get to the bottom of this?

  Well, he wasn’t going to get away with it. If he thought he could bamboozle John LaPierre the way he’d bamboozled his hordes of followers, Cameron Boxer had picked the wrong principal.

  Cam was pretty ticked off at us. Technically, I understood. He thought when the P.A.G. went away, everything would go back to normal, that our lives would be the way they were before, where everything orbited video games and Rule the World and fun. He didn’t see that the P.A.G. had changed Chuck and me. The P.A.G. had changed everybody—everybody except Cam himself. How weird was it that the one guy who was immune was the guy who’d started the whole thing?

  Collecting coins, or health points, or trophies on a screen just didn’t measure up to the feeling of accomplishment the P.A.G. gave us. And anyway, thanks to Rule the World, Cam had turned into such a tyrant that video games were no fun at all. How could you play at a life-and-death struggle with someone who was treating it like a real life-and-death struggle? Whenever one of us got tired, or made a mistake, or if Evil McKillPeople wrecked us, he’d go ape. Even when we were eating gummy worms at Sweetness and Light, he was always lecturing us on some new strategy he wanted us to try. He was working so obsessively at his lifestyle that he wasn’t living it.

  I felt bad for him—until about four days after the end of the P.A.G., when he came roaring down on me in the stairwell at school.

  “It was you!” he raged. “From the very beginning! I should have known!”

  I was mystified. “What are you talking about?”

  “I just came from LaPierre’s office, where I got chewed out for posting things on the P.A.G. web page!”

  “There is no P.A.G. web page. They took it down.”

  “Like you don’t know!” he accused. “You’re the one who put it back up again, just like you’re the one who called all that extra stuff ! I’ll bet you invented Pagger Pride Day, didn’t you?”

  “No!” I was so shocked I could hardly defend myself. “We talked about this! We settled it!”

  “Because you lied!” he sputtered. “It’s been you the whole time! And now you’re posting stupid things like Are we going to take this lying down? You’re starting a revolution, and it’s getting blamed on me! I could get suspended! My parents are being called right now!”

  “How can you think I would do something like that?”

  “Who created that stupid web page in the first place?” he shot back.

  “I did,” I replied, “because my best friend asked me to.”

  “But you didn’t stop there, did you? You couldn’t let the P.A.G. die a natural death. You had all the codes and passwords. You set up meetings every time the wind blew so we always had a bunch of projects going. But even that wasn’t enough for you. You had to get cute! Pagger Pajama Day! The Hula-Hoop Marathon for Charity! Win a Dream Date with String McBean!”

  “I didn’t—”

  He cut me off. “And now you’re going to get me kicked out of school!”

  I pleaded with him. “How long have we been friends? How long have we been the Awesome Threesome? Why would you think I’d do something like that to you?”

  “I didn’t think you’d bail on Rule the World, either,” he seethed. “I didn’t think you’d take a fake club and turn it into the meaning of life!”

  “It wasn’t me,” I said earnestly. “I’m not the only person who’s ever hacked into a website, you know. All it takes is a password. Maybe you wrote it on something and left it lying around school.”

  “I never brought it to school.”

  “Or Dr. LaPierre exposed it. Or somebody else working on the school site.”

  “Or maybe it was you,” he retorted angrily. “Because video games weren’t enough for your superbrain. We started the P.A.G. to save Rule the World, but the wheels were turning in your head even then. If Daphne could use it to help a beaver, what could the great Pavel Dysan do? And if you had to hang me out to dry, well, that’s just—that’s just—”

  “Collateral damage?” I spat.

  He took a step toward me, and I took a step toward him. For a minute there, we were right in each other’s grills, and it seemed like we were going to settle this the primitive way. That was about as un-Cam as you could get, and definitely un-me. For guys like us, no disagreement was ever so big that it couldn’t be resolved with alien warriors at high noon (which techn
ically happened twice a day, since their home planet had a binary sun).

  I spun on my heel and walked away, knowing in my heart that we’d lost a lot more than just the Positive Action Group.

  The scoreboard painted the whole picture, and it wasn’t pretty. We were down 31–26 to New Albany, with only twelve seconds still on the clock. Coach and Mr. Fanshaw had been as good as their word, getting me reinstated to the Seahawks in time for the postseason. But that would all be for nothing if we lost today. If we couldn’t beat New Albany, we’d drop out of the last playoff spot. What was the point of having The String back if there were no games left for me to star in?

  On the sidelines, the guys looked terrified. I was the most terrified. One play left, forty-six yards between us and the end zone. Even the cheerleaders knew that the ball would be going to The String. The other team knew it, too, so I was going to be quadruple-covered, mugged, and run over by the New Albany bus. Believe it or not, there were some miracles even I wasn’t capable of.

  During our last time-out, Coach’s pep talk sounded more like the speech you make right before you clean out your locker because the season just ended. He didn’t think we could do this any more than we did.

  But then he said something none of us expected.

  “I see you guys rolling your eyes when I talk about Sycamore pride, but I’ve got some news maybe you haven’t heard yet: The Department of Transportation has set the date for the demolition of our exit ramp—this Saturday, eight a.m. A lot of people think it’s going to be the beginning of the end of our way of life here in town. Well, we might not be able to stop the Division of Highways, but we can make a statement on this field, today, right now. And that statement is that Sycamore is never out of it so long as we believe in ourselves!”

  I wasn’t usually big on motivational speeches. You didn’t win football games with rah-rah; you won by having somebody awesome like The String on your team and maybe a halfway decent quarterback who could throw the ball in my general direction. But in this case, it really worked wonders for our players. The lights were coming on behind all those desperate eyes. Face guards turned up from the turf. There were twelve seconds left, not zero.