Slacker

  And one of us was The String. Remember that part.

  As I lined up wide left, New Albany had a corner and a safety on me, but all the d-backs were looking my way. Whatever happened on this final play, I wouldn’t be lonely. I was going to draw a crowd.

  “Hike!” barked Ziggy, our quarterback.

  I took off down the sideline, and the crowd came with me—corners, safeties, even a linebacker. I peeked over my shoulder and caught sight of the ball coming my way. Coach’s freeway ramp speech must have really gotten to Ziggy, whose family ran the local Sunoco station. The pass was about as good as you were going to get from his arm.

  The New Albany guys matched me stride for stride, bumping me, grabbing at my jersey, trying to knock me out of bounds. They were bigger, stronger, taller, and had longer arms.

  Those poor guys, I thought to myself. They don’t know they’re outnumbered.

  There were five of them and only one of me.

  But I’m The String and they’re not.

  My cleats left the field, and I soared higher than I’ve ever soared before—and that was really saying something. The instant the ball touched my fingertips I knew I had it. But the goal line was still ten yards away, and we had no time-outs left. If I allowed myself to be tackled, the clock would run out.

  I schooled them all—stiff-armed one, hurdled another, and beat the rest with sheer blazing speed. When I entered the end zone, I spiked the ball so hard that it left a crater in the ground. Nobody spiked harder than The String.

  The entire stadium bugged. Our fans stormed the field to celebrate the last-second, come-from-behind victory. This may have been a crummy, disappointing, mediocre season with The String on academic probation, but now we were back, and play-off bound.

  The guys lifted me up on their shoulders. Coach was right there with them, tears streaming down his cheeks, which were bright pink. The chant rang out, not just from our cheerleaders, but from hundreds of throats:

  “String! … String! … String! … String! … ”

  I drank it in. It was the greatest triumph of my life. At least—it should have been.

  And it was good. Don’t get me wrong. The String was born for moments like this. It just wasn’t—that good. Something was missing. But what?

  What could be better than this—an amazing play only you could make, to score a winning touchdown, with no time remaining, and all the odds against you?

  And then it came to me. When the P.A.G. was power-washing the aluminum siding on the outside of the Early Childhood Center two weeks ago, I noticed that the front gutters were clogged with leaves. So Xavier boosted me up and I cleared them out. Nobody cleaned gutters like The String.

  Anyway, the very next night, we had this humongous rainstorm. The principal of the center said that if those gutters had backed up, it would have flooded out their front playroom, where they kept all the toys and the pillows and blankets for naptime. From then on, every time I passed that place and saw kids playing in the front room, I’d smile to myself and think: That was us. This game of Candy Land is courtesy of the P.A.G. This nap brought to you by The String and his fellow paggers. We didn’t save them from a burning building, or protect them from a pack of attacking yetis. But those kids’ lives were a little better because of us.

  The chants of “String! … String! … String! … ” went in one ear and out the other. I’d won the game, and that was great. We were in the play-offs. We might even win it all.

  But so what?

  The String used to be part of something off the chain—something that wasn’t just numbers on a scoreboard. The P.A.G. made a difference.

  And we just let it go like it was nothing.

  “Guys!” I shouted. “Put me down!” The celebration was so loud and crazy that they couldn’t even hear me. I had to wriggle myself back to the field as if I was breaking tackles again.

  “You’re the man, String!” cried Ziggy, hugging me.

  “Of course I’m the man!” I howled back. “Now get out of my way! I’ve got someplace I need to be!”

  I charged around the stadium, staring into faces, desperate to find Cam Boxer. I accepted a lot of high fives, and everybody slapped at my helmet and shoulder pads.

  “Cam!” I bellowed. “Has anybody seen Cam?”

  “He’s not here,” came a voice behind me.

  I wheeled to face Chuck. His friend Pavel was with him.

  “Great catch, String,” Pavel told me.

  “Never mind that! Where’s Cam?”

  They both looked completely blank.

  “Where is he?” I pressed. “You guys are always together!”

  Pavel shuffled uncomfortably. “We had a fight. He’s kind of mad at us. Especially me.”

  “We need him!” I snapped. “We’ve got to get the P.A.G. back together.”

  “We can’t,” Chuck said sadly. “Dr. LaPierre killed the P.A.G. It came straight from the top.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “We can’t. We’re not the ones who created the P.A.G. out of nothing and turned it into the best thing this school ever had! We need Cam! If anyone can figure out a way to save the P.A.G., it’s him!”

  They looked at each other. Pavel heaved a sigh. “String, what would you say if I told you that Cam doesn’t even care about the P.A.G.? That he’s happy it’s over?”

  “I’d say you’re nuts.”

  “It’s true,” Chuck confirmed. “It was never supposed to be anything. He only invented it to make his parents think he was getting involved.”

  “It was just a hoax that got out of control,” Pavel added.

  The story those guys told me was beyond unbelievable, even if I’d paid attention through the whole thing. Sometimes a little A.D.D. could be good for you—like when you played a sport where a split second was the difference between winning and losing. Or when you were being fed a load of garbage about burnt noodles and how the one guy you looked up to was a slacker who only wanted to dweeb out in front of video games.

  Or when you were told that the greatest thing you’d ever been part of was a scam.

  I felt like they’d punched me. Nobody punched The String.

  I scowled at them. “Maybe I’m just some dumb jock. But I know this: The P.A.G. was epic, and it only happened because of Cam. Some friends you turned out to be!”

  “We’re not lying,” Pavel pleaded.

  “Get out of my stadium.”

  Anybody who could stab Cam Boxer in the back didn’t deserve to be on the same field as The String.

  It was ill—even knowing that Evil McKillPeople was out there somewhere, waiting to pounce.

  The planet was in ruins, its capital city ablaze, which burned magenta because of the chemical content of the atmosphere. Our fleet had ringed the alien world with orbiting lasers, careful to avoid the clouds, which were made of pure nitroglycerine vapor and would explode on contact. It was total victory. All that remained was to capture the insectoid president and remove his scepter of office, which was surgically implanted in his thorax.

  I leaned forward on the basement couch, my thumb quivering over the button that would launch the final assault.

  “Waiting for your command,” said Borje in my ear.

  Would you believe it? I shut the game off. It was nothing against Borje. I thought about the voices that were missing—Pavel’s, Chuck’s—and it just wasn’t good anymore.

  Are you crazy? I wanted to scream at myself. You’re on the verge of beating the entire game! With Evil McKillPeople on the other side! His gamer tag is right up there on the list of opponents! Take him out ! Next stop, Rule the World …

  It was no use. The lifestyle I’d worked thirteen years to perfect was in worse shape than the alien surface on the screen—trashed and smoldering, about to be blasted into vapor and sucked down the nearest black hole.

  It was all because of that stupid ziti. If only I’d heard Mom and taken it out of the oven, I never would have had to invent the Positive Action Group in
the first place. The P.A.G.—that was why Chuck wasn’t talking to me and why I wasn’t talking to Pavel. And it was why Dr. LaPierre was calling my parents. It hadn’t happened yet, but every time the phone rang my head practically exploded.

  I could tell Mom and Dad that I wasn’t the person riling everybody up on the illegal P.A.G. web page. But they were sure to ask questions, and eventually I would have to lie to cover up the fact that I didn’t care about the P.A.G. and never had.

  Or I could protect my other lies by lying again and confessing to the web page. But then I’d be copping to something I didn’t even do.

  No. There was only one way out of this mess: I was going to have to abandon my principles and resort to honesty. It wasn’t me, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

  A lump formed in my throat, something roughly the size of a bowling ball. I hadn’t created the P.A.G. just for giggles, you know. I’d been defending my gaming system and my lifestyle. When I came clean to Mom and Dad, I had to figure they’d nix my sweet setup in the basement, and that might be just for starters.

  My eyes traveled from the controller in my hand to the darkened screen to the console itself. They were all turned off. That had been my choice—in the middle of the best part of my favorite game, minutes from the ultimate victory. I’d never done that, not ever. Not even while fire axes were breaking down our front door. That had to mean something.

  I dropped the controller like it was white-hot and went upstairs in search of my parents. They were in the front hall admiring the new door and complaining that Sycamore Sanitation hadn’t taken away the old plywood, which was still leaning up against our empty trash cans at the curb. Oh, how I wished it was gone. The surface was covered in graffiti, most of it about how awesome the P.A.G. was and how awesome I was, too.

  And now I was about to blow everything sky-high by telling my parents that the whole thing had been a giant fake.

  “Mom, Dad—can I talk to you?” My mouth was made of flannel, my tongue too dry to generate sound. “It’s about the Positive Action Group. I started it—that part wasn’t a lie. But it wasn’t like I let you guys believe.”

  I was determined to spill my guts. I was going to confess that the P.A.G. had never been a way to get involved for real, but a scam to make it look that way. I’d lay out how Mr. Fan-jet had gotten wind of it, and had turned it into an actual club, and suddenly kids were coming out of the woodwork to join up. I would explain the part where we got famous because of Audra Klincker and everybody in school wanted to be a pagger. I’d tell them about the mystery hacker who took over the web page. And I’d give them the unhappy ending, where we got shut down for what the Friends of Fuzzy did, and the only pagger who didn’t mind was me, and now I was in trouble because the mystery hacker wasn’t stopping.

  The only part I’d leave out was the worst part, because I didn’t want to think about it—that I was pretty sure the hacker was Pavel, and that I was fighting with my two best friends.

  It would be a long speech for me, probably the most I’d ever spoken not into a headset. And the consequences would be huge: You’re banned from video games; you’re grounded for life; you’re being sent to Devil’s Island; you’ll be hanged by the neck until dead, dead, dead !

  But—why weren’t they paying attention to me? Didn’t they realize I was about to tell all?

  “Are you guys even listening?”

  “Of course, Cam.” My mother was pale and tired. “We’re just a little distracted, that’s all. You’ve probably heard that the state is taking down our freeway ramp on Saturday. It’s not good news for the store.”

  It was like my eyes were opening for the first time. Here they were, struggling to keep a family business afloat when everything was going wrong for them. They were putting in fourteen-hour days at work and worrying about where customers were going to come from when the main highway dropped everyone off at the mall. Was it any surprise that my problems weren’t exactly uppermost in their minds?

  “Anyway.” My dad sighed. “We’ve got some big decisions ahead of us. We’ll probably have to downsize the showroom. It might even make sense to try to sell it if we can find a buyer. Sorry, Cam. We’ve got a lot going on.”

  As terrible as I felt for their worries and their troubles, I couldn’t keep the thought from bubbling to the surface: I’m in the clear. Of course, Dr. LaPierre was going to call one of these days. But he was going to accuse me of the website thing, and I was innocent of that.

  No.

  No more ducking and dodging. Mom and Dad deserved the truth. Maybe they were too stressed out to process it now. But even if everything went bad and they lost their store and had to put our lives back together again, sooner or later there would come a time when they had the right to know.

  Okay, I’d write them a letter. When something was right there in black and white, it couldn’t be ignored. And if it didn’t sink in today, the message would still be there tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that.

  Wouldn’t you know it—there wasn’t a single blank piece of paper anywhere in my book bag or my room. I usually did my homework on my computer and turned it in online. It was Melody who wrote everything out in beautiful, flowing cursive. Barf.

  Melody wouldn’t grudge me a sheet of paper. Actually, Melody would grudge me the blood to keep my heart pumping, but she was at Katrina’s right now. I went into her room and began opening desk drawers. The first was full of barrettes in a million colors, shapes, and sizes. The second contained pencils with erasers shaped like butterflies, ladybugs, and kittens. As I pulled out the third, a notebook caught my eye, its first page folded over.

  There were words and numbers on it, everything in that girlie script of hers. For some reason, they rang a bell with me even though they didn’t make any sense.

  And then a bolt of recognition went through me like a shot from a plasma-based weapon.

  The codes—the passwords for the P.A.G. web page and the Sycamore Middle School site!

  Suddenly, my legs wouldn’t support me, and I sat down cross-legged on the aquamarine carpet in her room.

  The mystery hacker who’d called all those extra meetings—who’d created Pajama Day and Crazy Hat Day, and had everybody raising money selling Pagger Pizza. Who had rebuilt the P.A.G. page and was filling it with rebellious messages even after the school had taken it down. That shadowy computer jock had never been Pavel.

  It was my own sister.

  Confusion filled me up like helium in a balloon. Why? Why would she do this? What was in it for her? She’d never been one of those red-hot paggers who couldn’t live unless they were oozing good deeds all over the place. And anyway, those messages on the web page had started even before the P.A.G. had gone big-time. What was her angle?

  When the answer came to me, the helium turned to rage, lifting me up to hit the ceiling. What was in it for Melody? Absolutely nothing. She did it just to stick it to me. She’d figured out why I started the P.A.G. and she despised me so much that she deliberately turned my life upside down so she could sit on the sidelines and enjoy watching me squirm.

  Well, it wouldn’t work!

  But as soon as that thought crossed my mind, I realized how wrong it was. It was working already. I was stressed to the point where I saw disaster around every corner; I couldn’t play video games and didn’t even want to; I’d practically given up on Rule the World. Worst of all, I’d chased my two best friends away. And my lifestyle? I had no life—period.

  So it had worked. Score one for Melody. But she wasn’t going to get away with it.

  I used our new front door for the first time then, barreling out into a clammy drizzle. I barely noticed the weather. I was like a heat-seeking missile, and my guidance system had one target: Katrina’s house. I covered the five blocks in record time

  I stomped onto the porch, a man with a mission. I’d probably hit the doorbell fifteen times when Mrs. Bundy appeared, an annoyed expression on her face.

 
“All right, all right. I’m moving as fast as I—” Her anger softened when she recognized me. “Cam—hi. We’re so sorry about what happened to the P.A.G.”

  Another thing—adults were treating me like I’d suffered a death in the family. I’d been sort of grooving on the extra kindness and understanding. Teachers hassled me less over long bathroom breaks, and Mrs. Backward gave me free candy at Sweetness and Light. Even our letter carrier made sure my gaming magazines didn’t get crumpled in our mailbox. His seventh-grade son was a former pagger.

  Now, though, I cut off Mrs. Bundy before she could start asking about my feelings. “Is my sister here?”

  A sympathetic smile. “She’s with Katrina in her room. Go on up.”

  She didn’t even make me wipe my wet sneakers. I wiped them anyway. I no longer wanted special privileges because of my connection with the Positive Action Group. I wished I’d never thought of those three words.

  I climbed the stairs and paused at the door, where a Star Wars poster declared May the Force Be with All Who Enter Here. Ha—the Force was nothing compared to what I was about to unleash on my rotten sister.

  As I burst into the room, a deep voice declared “Prepare for battle!” and that was when I saw them. The girls were in front of the TV, gaming. Katrina wore a regular microphone, but Melody’s was a shiny black helmet that completely covered her face.

  She spoke: “The Force is strong with you, young Jedi, but you will be annihilated !”

  The voice that came out wasn’t Melody’s. It wasn’t even close. It was the low, rich, breathless bass of Darth Vader.

  I nearly fainted on the spot.

  Not only was Melody the hacker who was ruining my life on the P.A.G. web page; she was also the rogue gamer who’d been hounding me for months on the network—following me, challenging me, owning me.

  Evil McKillPeople of Toronto, Canada, wasn’t from Canada at all. She was from my house, up the stairs, second door to the left.

  If I didn’t drop dead right there on Katrina’s Imperial Snow Walker carpet, I was going to live forever. There used to be a time when the world made sense—when video games were important, and a guy could live his life the way he wanted. But that was long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Now up was down, black was white, and the only thing anybody cared about was a club that wasn’t supposed to exist in the first place. You couldn’t depend on friends or parents, and definitely not sisters. Even something as solid as a freeway ramp might not be there the next time you looked. So what could you depend on? Just this—that there would always be someone to throw an alien disrupter grenade into your plans.