Slacker

  “I think,” I said through clenched teeth, “that he needs another lesson.”

  Tony backed away. “I’m not making him walk home from California. He’s only a kid. It’s not safe.”

  “We won’t touch a hair on his stupid head. I just want to make sure he knows we’re watching him.”

  He knew we were watching him, all right. Every day, when he got out of school, we were parked there. Tony’s ride didn’t exactly blend into the scenery. It was fire-engine red, with oversize tires and a hole in the muffler, so it sounded like an M1 tank. When Boxer began to walk down the street, we’d parallel him. I’d roll down my window just enough to hang a pom-pom outside—a calling card. If he ran, we’d speed up. I was ready to go even further and park outside his front door. But it turned out he didn’t have one—only a sheet of plywood covered in graffiti. Leave it to him.

  I wrote FUZZY IS EVERYWHERE on it in my favorite lipstick—the one that matches Tony’s car.

  We were getting to him. There was no question about that. He was starting to go home cutting through people’s yards, climbing fences, and skirting pools. But Tony knew the streets pretty well. We always caught up with him.

  One time, he stopped dead in his tracks and approached the car. I just glared at him through the glass, so he knocked on the window. When I rolled it down, he said, “I hate the Positive Action Group as much as you do. I only started it to get my parents off my back, and now I can’t stop it. Nobody can!”

  I honestly could have forgiven him up until that moment. I could even have pictured myself keeping in touch with him from Harvard after he shut down the P.A.G. to help me get in. But this—to look me straight in the eye and lie—was inexcusable. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back, the point of no return.

  “Drive, Tony.”

  We peeled away with a screech of tires.

  One thing was clear: I could no longer handle this on my own. The P.A.G. had hundreds of volunteers, but they were still just middle schoolers. We were the Friends of Fuzzy, steeped in tradition. It was time to fight for what was ours.

  Tony shot me a look. “Why the face? The kid practically apologized. The war’s over, right?”

  I set my jaw. “The war has just begun.”

  My lifestyle was slipping away, and I didn’t know how to get it back.

  There were eight hundred fourteen students in our school and six hundred forty-five of them were P.A.G. members. According to Pavel, who did math in his head, that was almost 80 percent. I would have loved to find the other 20 percent and thank them for their nonsupport. But I didn’t have time to look for them. I didn’t have time for anything.

  My whole reason for inventing the P.A.G. was so I wouldn’t get banned from video games. Now, thanks to the P.A.G., I never got near my console. I was too busy.

  Whoever had hacked into the web page was still doing it, posting all this stuff. We had meetings practically every afternoon, and most of them weren’t even real meetings. We had Cookie Day and Crazy Hat Day and Pagger Pride Day, where we silk-screened P.A.G. T-shirts. Not showing up wasn’t an option. They’d come to get me. It wasn’t like before when I only had to worry about Mr. Fanlight and Daphne and a handful of others. Everybody knew me now. I tried to come up with excuses—doctor’s appointments, stomachaches, scorpion bites. They thought I was kidding. No one could be as sick as I was pretending to be. No one alive, anyway.

  Even Chuck was on my case to attend all these things. Chuck—one of my best friends, who knew better than anybody what an un-thing the P.A.G. was supposed to be. He loved it. Everybody loved it. Everybody except the president.

  So I went. But it wasn’t just after school. Some mornings, we were called in early. On weekends, we had so many volunteers that we had to break up into separate work crews. There were barely enough projects to go around.

  That left just the evenings free. But by the time I was done with homework and could get down to the basement to practice for Rule the World, other things would come up. I got phone calls. Daphne wanted to pick my brains about how we were going to find Elvis to put him into his new home. Like I knew all the beaver hangouts. Katrina texted me from the mall. She needed my opinion on whether or not she should cut her hair. Felicia threw a party so she could hit me up to endorse Jordan in the student council election. The very next night, Kelly held a bash of her own, and tried to strong-arm me into dumping Jordan and backing her. String dragged me to football parties, which offended the soccer players. So I had to go to their parties, too.

  Pavel didn’t understand why I was so miserable. “What are you complaining about? You’re popular! All the guys want to hang out with you. All the girls want to date you. You get invited to everything. No one passes gas without asking your permission. What’s the downside?”

  That bugged me. “What about Rule the World, huh? If I want to get on the console at all, I have to sneak down to the basement at three in the morning! And,” I added sarcastically, “I’m sure you and Chuck are getting in tons of practice without me.”

  “Well,” he mumbled, “we’re pretty busy with the P.A.G., too.”

  I was bitter. “The last time I faced Evil McKillPeople, he pinned me in fifteen seconds at extreme wrestling.”

  “Evil McKillPeople always beats you.”

  “Yeah, but I usually put up a fight. Don’t you get it? I’m losing myself. It took thirteen years to build my lifestyle, and the P.A.G. has it leveled to the ground in just a few weeks.”

  He was sympathetic, but there was nothing he could do to help me. There was nothing I could do to help myself.

  When I finally managed to wangle some decent gaming time, my space cruiser had barely entered planetary orbit when the banging began.

  “Cam!” came a bellow from outside. “Are you in there?”

  “Go away,” I murmured under my breath. “Please go away.”

  Even Borje heard it through my microphone, all the way in Sweden. “Your mom isn’t baking more ziti today?” he asked nervously.

  “Come quick!” shouted the voice. “It’s an emergency!”

  I threw off the headset and sprinted upstairs. At the front door, the plywood vibrated with every pounding blow. “Cam!”

  “Come to the back!”

  I stepped out the kitchen door just in time to see a football player in full equipment wheel around the corner of the house and charge at me at full speed. A split second before he would have flattened me, he stopped short and pulled off his helmet. There, gasping, the black smudges on his cheeks running with sweat, stood String McBean.

  “I thought you were off the team,” I said lamely.

  “The String’s been working out with the high school JV squad to get me up to speed. So when I came back to our locker room to get changed, I passed the office, where Mr. Fanshaw was getting bawled out because a bunch of paggers tore up some bushes at the public library.”

  I had to ask. “Why would they do that?”

  “They didn’t! I was on that library crew. We washed down all the furniture in their outdoor reading garden. And let me tell you, nobody scrubs pigeon poop like The String—”

  “So who ruined the bushes?” I interrupted.

  “Nobody!” he insisted. “I mean, somebody did it, but it wasn’t us paggers. Legit.”

  I felt the pull of the basement, but something was eating at me. String McBean was only in the Positive Action Group for extra credit so he could return to the football team. What was the skin off his back if we got blamed for a few ripped bushes? Was that really terrible enough to send a guy scrambling all over town in full pads and a helmet?

  My thoughts were interrupted by an earsplitting roar.

  String jumped. “What the—”

  But I’d already recognized the unmuffled engine of a certain Dodge Charger that had been stalking me for more than a week. As we watched, the bright red car came howling down the quiet street doing at least sixty. It slowed in front of the house. The rear window lowered, and som
ething was tossed out onto our lawn. The Charger screeched away, accelerating out of the neighborhood.

  We ran over to the mysterious object. It was a clump of bushes, the earth still clinging to torn roots.

  At least now I knew who ruined the library’s bushes. And why. It was the Friends of Fuzzy, and they’d done it so they could blame it on the P.A.G.

  “I’ve definitely seen that car around,” String mused.

  Yeah, me too. These days, I saw it in my sleep. “Forget it.”

  “Forget it?” he exclaimed. “That guy is making everyone think the P.A.G. are the bad guys! Are we going to let him get away with that?”

  At that moment, I wanted to scream: Who cares? Does it kill zombies or help you prestige or level up? Does it earn you a speed boost, or a better weapon, or a magic spell? Those were supposed to be the things that mattered!

  But I couldn’t say that to String, so I kept my mouth shut.

  He looked angry for a moment, and then his expression slowly turned to understanding. “I get it. We don’t sink to that level. The P.A.G.’s too chill for that. We let our reputation speak for itself. Man, respect from The String! No wonder they made you pagger-in-chief.”

  No wonder.

  I still liked video games. They just weren’t my whole life anymore. Sooner or later, something comes along that shows you what really matters.

  That’s what being a pagger did for me. Before that, everything was about hanging out with Cam and Pavel, eating gummy worms, and playing video games. Now I had a higher purpose—a calling, almost, although it had nothing to do with church.

  I knew it the first minute we were out there at the senior citizens’ garden project. This old guy bent over to dig up the last of his potatoes, and his back went out because it had been “wonky,” whatever that means, since the Korean War. So I did it for him. It was easy for me. He was smiling. I was smiling. Even one of the potatoes looked like it had kind of a smile on its “face,” although that was obviously random. It was a perfect moment, and I did it just by getting down on my hands and knees and pulling a few lumps out of the ground.

  It was amazing that I’d lived thirteen years and never really understood about helping before. Yeah, it was good for other people, but it was even better for the guy doing the helping. I should have known that, because my sister, Emma, had been in the Friends of Fuzzy since freshman year of high school. But sometimes you couldn’t see the forest for the fire.

  I used to get upset when my clan base got sacked, or when Evil McKillPeople crushed me. But now everything was cool, because the P.A.G. had shown me what was important.

  Which was why I flipped out when I saw the Klincker Kronicle that morning.

  The Positive Action Group has done so much good for this town that it’s a shame to hear about the incident at the library last week. We all understand that middle schoolers in their playful high spirits may do some accidental damage. But when sanitation workers found a section of honeysuckle hedge in the garbage outside the home of P.A.G. president Cameron Boxer, it was hard not to conclude that this was an act of deliberate vandalism.

  I choked on a bite of toast. “That’s not true!”

  Emma laughed. “That’ll teach your dumb friend to dispose of the evidence in his own trash can. I always knew that kid’s head wasn’t screwed on right.”

  “The P.A.G. didn’t touch those bushes!” I swore. “Jennifer Del Rio tore them up and dumped them on Cam’s lawn.”

  My mother frowned. “Jennifer would never do anything like that. She’s a lovely girl.”

  “You’re delusional,” Emma said to me.

  There was something about her face that made me uneasy—an I-know-something-you-don’t look.

  Later, on the way to school, Cam, Pavel, and I passed by the little kids’ playground on Fourth Street. A P.A.G. crew had worked there the previous afternoon, power-washing the jungle gym and swing sets.

  I stared. The place was a swamp. Mud dripped from the climber and oozed down the twisty slide and the seesaws. There were piles of it on the toddler swings. The sandbox was more like a quicksand box.

  We stopped in front of the sign declaring this to be Eagle Park. Right across the face of it, someone had written in magic marker:

  “Jennifer and Tony did this!” I exclaimed in horror.

  “Then it’s not our problem,” Cam said pointedly.

  “It is if Audra Klincker writes in her stupid column that it’s our fault,” Pavel countered.

  “We shouldn’t have to think about this,” Cam complained. “We’re supposed to be in training for Rule the World. We’re not going to make it past the first round!”

  “Come on, Cam,” I pleaded. “You’re a pagger, too. I know things didn’t turn out the way we planned, but we can’t let Jennifer and Tony do this to us!”

  He just kept on walking.

  At school, everyone was talking about Eagle Park, but also about the flowerbeds in front of the community college. They grew chrysanthemums to spell out WELCOME ALUMNI for homecoming weekend. The P.A.G. had weeded the beds just a few days before. Now everything was dead, trampled to pieces, and kicked into the earth.

  “Do you think it’ll get blamed on us?” I asked.

  “Count on it,” Jordan predicted grimly. “I saw Audra Klincker over there with a photographer. It’s so unfair.”

  Felicia looked thoughtful. “Unfair or not, I don’t think you can risk being a part of this. If it turns into a scandal, Kelly could use it to bury you in the election.”

  “I’m standing right here,” Kelly said in an annoyed tone. “And I’m as P.A.G. as anybody. This is bigger than the election. Somebody’s out to get us.”

  I was dying to tell them what I knew about Jennifer and Tony, but Cam had sworn me to secrecy.

  “I’m not going up against Jennifer,” Cam insisted. “She’s crazy.”

  “This is too important, man. Hundreds of paggers are depending on you.”

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve got no proof.”

  I pounced on this. “Of course you do! You’ve got a witness. String was with you when Tony dumped that bush on your lawn.”

  He laughed without smiling. “I can hear it now—‘Nobody witnesses a bush-dumping like The String!’ ”

  “Cameron!”

  Mr. Fanshaw burst out of the stairwell, skidded once on the terrazzo floor, and swooped down on us.

  “Hi, Mr. Fan—uh, sir.”

  “Cameron, what’s going on?”

  “We can explain about the park!” I burst out. “And the flowerbeds!”

  “Never mind that,” the guidance counselor exploded. “What about the leaves?”

  “Leaves?” Cam echoed.

  “The P.A.G. was supposed to rake the leaves around Sycamore House. A crew was put together, and the school provided a bus. What happened?”

  I was mystified. “We did it. Ask anybody.”

  “I just drove by there,” Mr. Fanshaw snapped. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

  He was so bewildered that he signed Cam and me out at the office and the three of us drove over to Sycamore House, which was our town’s historical society offices and mini-museum. It was the first home ever built around here, back in the early 1800s, and it was surrounded by rolling lawns and ginormous trees. It had taken an entire busload of us nearly four hours to rake and bag all those leaves.

  Mr. Fanshaw pulled up to the curb and we stared. The lawn was so deep with leaves that you couldn’t even see the grass.

  I looked at Cam, and we both understood. Jennifer and Tony could rip up a bush, or stomp on flowers, or maybe even slime a jungle gym. But no two people could do this, not even if they worked all night.

  “How do you explain this?” Mr. Fanshaw demanded.

  Neither of us answered. What was there to say?

  That night, I was taking out the garbage when my dad pulled into the driveway in his pickup. He got out, leaving the motor running. “I’m just going to change,” he told
me. “I have to go to the car wash. The next time your sister borrows the truck, it would be nice if she didn’t trash it.” He rushed inside.

  Curious, I hopped up on the running board and peered into the payload. Leaves plastered the flatbed and clung to the sides, wet and shredded. There were darker shapes, too—shreds of torn lawn bags.

  Suddenly, I knew how Jennifer and Tony had been able to undo all our hard work. They hadn’t. Not by themselves, anyway. They’d had help from people like my own sister. High school kids had more freedom than we did. They could stay out later. And they had access to cars and pickup trucks.

  Last night they’d driven all the way out to the town dump, loaded up our lawn bags, and brought the leaves back to Sycamore House.

  Cam thought he was being picked on by Jennifer and her boyfriend. He didn’t know the half of it.

  We were under full-on attack from the Friends of Fuzzy.

  It killed me that Elvis was missing out.

  We’d built him a lodge fit for a prince, and now it was standing empty, waiting for him to come and claim it as his own.

  Credit to Cam Boxer for the fact that there was any habitat at all. I was positive he’d never let the P.A.G. do anything for Elvis. But I was wrong. He didn’t stand in my way at all. His leadership style had a really light touch. I was just starting to appreciate it.

  Elvis. That was the tragic part. No one knew where he was. It had been weeks since we’d spotted him at the senior citizens’ garden project. And there’d only been one sighting after that—swimming in a storm drain off Main Street after a heavy rain. Since then, nothing.

  If it hadn’t been for the support of my fellow paggers, I don’t know what I would have done. That was another reason I was grateful to Cam: He’d created more than a fantastic club; he’d created a community. By this time, we had over seven hundred members—almost the entire school.

  Not everybody was supportive. Xavier said if I wanted to find Elvis, I should “look under the front wheel of the nearest truck.” I swatted him with my book bag, which freaked people out, because Xavier had a bad reputation. But he just laughed and told me he was messing with my head.