I knew what she was going to say—that even if the murderer was caught, people were not going to stop making fun of me. That I would still be 57 percent fatter than the average American twelve-year-old.
That’s not what she said.
She didn’t say anything. She just hiked up her skates higher on her shoulder and left the apartment.
The whole thing bothered me so much that I ripped off the white gloves, poured another bowlful of fake Cocoa Puffs, and scarfed it down. After that, I fished around the fridge until I found half a turkey sub that Mom had brought home from work and began to devour that too. My stomach was suddenly gripped with the familiar aching emptiness that came on right before a major food binge. The first time I had felt it was a few months after my parents were killed. Back then I ate a half pint of rocky road ice cream, and that made it better. After a while it would take a whole pint to fill the emptiness. Then a pint and a Snickers bar, and on and on. The way I was feeling now, I could make a clean sweep of a five-gallon drum of ice cream and still have room for a family-sized bag of pretzels. I was still chewing on the final bite of the sub and was just getting up to rummage through the kitchen cabinets for more food when I caught sight of the white gloves lying on the stack of Retro TV Magazines. One glove lay on top of the other, just like two hands that were patiently waiting on their owner’s lap. Very narrow, delicate hands. It made me think of my mother’s own hands—long and slender and pale—and I shivered. At that moment it felt like she was sitting right there, across from me, waiting to see what I would do next.
I stood there for a second, staring at the gloves and feeling the awful ache in my belly. Then I sat back down again. I slipped on the gloves, picked up an issue of Retro TV Magazine, and resumed my search for the cheerleader episode of Charlie’s Angels. The painful feeling in my gut didn’t leave. If anything, it grew worse, but I just kept my butt planted in that chair and the gloves on my hand. As long as the gloves were on my hands, I reasoned, I could not eat.
I finished my search at a little past eleven. To my dismay, I found that the episode, called Pom Pom Angels, was on a total of twenty-three times in the past two years! I hadn’t counted on that. No doubt that particular episode was so popular because of the cheerleaders.
Well, I would just have to catch some more old signals, and with any luck they would be from really unpopular shows that were aired only once in the past two years.
I watched the Freakout Channel until three thirty. I was watching out of habit, really, since I now knew that the signal from Nemesis wouldn’t come in until the evening. At three thirty I took Honey out for a walk and came back and watched more TV until Mom said dinner was ready. My eyes were burning from watching all that TV, and I felt slightly nauseated. Apparently Jeremy was not feeling so good herself. She had come back from ice skating around four and hadn’t been out of her room since.
“Go tell Jeremy that dinner is ready,” Mom said as she gave the salmon burgers a final flip.
I knocked on her door. “Jeremy. Dinner.”
“I’m not hungry,” she called back.
“You all right?”
“Yes,” she said. Then added, “I’m sleeping.”
“She’s sleeping,” I told Mom.
“Really? Is she sick?” I could practically hear Mom sorting through her brain’s stockpile of teas with healing properties.
“I think she’s just tired,” I said. Actually, I guessed she was mad about this morning, and that made me mad. She was the one who was being difficult. I suspected she was jealous, although I never would have thought her to be that type. People change, though. She should have just been thankful, she should be thinking of something more than herself. She should be thinking about our mom and dad and doing what was right.
After dinner I went back into my room and into the world of Freakout. By now, I probably knew just as much about these shows as Arthur. Speaking of which, when I turned on the TV, an episode of Happy Days was playing. After watching a few episodes, I was beginning to get the appeal of The Fonz. He was tough on the outside and nice on the inside. People love that. Somehow it’s even better than being nice all over.
Then came B.J. and the Bear, which is about a truck driver and a chimpanzee. Yes, it is as stupid as it sounds. And wouldn’t you know it, they had a marathon that night. Three B.J. and the Bear episodes in a row. I didn’t know if I could stand it. I pulled the scavenged junk box out of the closet and started messing around with some of the items, just for something to do. I picked up an old bike chain and turned it over in my hands. I’d always wanted to do something with it, but I never could think what.
Suddenly there was pift.
My heart jumped and my head shot up. On TV a fuzzy Jan Brady was sneezing like mad. I watched long enough to get the gist of the plotline (six minutes). Jan was allergic to the family dog, Tiger, and they were going to have to get rid of him.
Okay. We were back in business. Now I had to slip on the white gloves again and start studying two years’ worth of Retro TV Magazine for every instance of The Brady Bunch on the Freakout Channel. Plus, there was a very good chance that this episode had been repeated several times. If only I had been able to catch two old episodes in a row, I would have a better chance at figuring out when these shows were first broadcast. But since there was no guarantee that I’d hold onto the signal for that long, I went to Arthur’s carton and started my long night’s work.
Then I got lucky.
There was a commercial break on TV, and a fuzzy lime green screen came on with the words Freakout Pop Quiz in hot pink bubble letters. Then a voice read out the pop quiz question while it was spelled out on-screen: “What famous Laverne and Shirley star was born on this day, sixty-three years ago?”
I waited through a bunch of commercials, terrified every second that I’d lose the signal before the answer came on. I didn’t. “The answer to today’s Freakout Pop Quiz is . . . Penny Marshall, who played Laverne on Laverne and Shirley.”
I was so happy I could have done that embarrassing little dance.
Now all I had to do was to check the Internet for Penny Marshall’s birthday. Once I found that out, I just had to do a simple calculation to figure out the day, month, and year of this broadcast. Presto!
Well, not quite presto since we didn’t have the Internet at home. I’d have to wait till I got to school to check it.
Pift.
Jan Brady was gone, and in her place was a chimpanzee doing a handstand on a pool table.
I’d lost the signal.
Jeremy left for school without me the next morning. She must have snuck out while I was in the shower, because her door was closed when I walked into the bathroom and when I came out, the door was open and she was gone. She’d never left without me before, and I won’t lie, it hurt my feelings. At first. Then it just started making me angrier with her, and by the time I got to school, I decided that I wouldn’t wait for her after school. I just hoped that she would notice.
I arrived at school early to sign up for the computer workstation. There’s only one computer in our classroom, and it’s hooked up to the Internet, so it’s always the most popular workstation. I was the first one on the list today. I was shaking with nervousness. Everything rested on this one piece of information.
Mason Ragg slunk in, late as usual. He looked the same as always—from the top of his wild uncombed head to the tips of his busted-up sneakers, every inch of him seemed to say, “Oh yeah? Go ahead, I dare you.” It was almost unbelievable to me that only the day before yesterday, I had seen him fleeing from me with terror in his face.
He caught me staring at him, but this time his eyes swerved away quickly.
For no reason at all, I felt like a bully.
Well, maybe there was a tiny reason.
I started thinking about this whole karma thing. It occurred to me that I might have collected some pretty rotten karma lately. After all, I had attempted to clap Mason’s wrist in a spiked handcuff and po
ssibly poison him with facial hair bleach, and the whole time he was innocent. I assumed that these were fairly serious crimes, karma-wise.
I looked at the computer screen as it was slowly booting up. If I ever needed some good karma, it was now.
I stood up and walked over to Mason, who was sitting in the art station, drawing on a piece of paper. His back was to me, so I was able to get a good look at his drawing. It was a wolf howling.
“Wow, that’s good,” I said. It really was. The wolf’s fur was drawn with these careful, fine little strokes. It was hard to believe Mason could do something that delicate.
Mason’s head swiveled around. Thankfully I had a view of the unscarred side of his face this time. It was like the half man/half woman that you’d see in old-time circus pictures. He gave a totally different impression if you saw him from the left side or from the right. From this view, Mason Ragg just looked like an unkempt kid. Nothing sinister in the slightest.
“I don’t have your (really bad curse word) cookies, if that’s what you want,” he said.
“I know you don’t,” I told him.
“Then what do you want?” He didn’t look mad. He looked nervous. Of me! Owen Birnbaum. Professional Boulder.
“I want Penny Marshall’s birthday to be before October 25.”
No, I didn’t say that.
“I want to tell you something,” I said. An opportunity for improving my karma had just popped into my head. “First of all, could you still be exempt from going to gym class?”
“I guess,” he said cagily. “If I wanted to be.”
“Then ask for an exemption today,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because Wooly has it out for us,” I said. From the corner of my eye, I could see the computer screen light up and the little ta-dring sound. “He thinks that we somehow knew there was going to be a fire drill on Friday and we deliberately put ourselves last so we could get out of the triathlon. He’s going to make us do something totally humiliating today, you can count on it.”
This didn’t seem to impress Mason the way I had hoped. He turned back to his drawing and started working on it again.
“I did know,” he said.
“Know what?”
“I knew about the fire drill.”
“But how?” I asked.
“I hear things,” he answered mysteriously.
“So you put us last deliberately?” I asked.
Mason nodded. His pen was adding tiny slashes of fur to the wolf’s cheek.
Two things occurred to me:
1. I had really misjudged Mason. He was actually a pretty nice guy.
2. I had a hell of a lot of work to do in the bad karma department.
“Everyone wanted to see you make a clown of yourself,” Mason explained. He drew a full moon in the left corner of the page. “I hate clowns,” he said.
Oh.
Well, maybe I had slightly less work to do in the karma department.
“Anyway,” I said, edging toward the computer station, “just remember about the exemption.”
He nodded without looking up.
I walked away hoping it was enough to erase all the bad stuff I had done. It felt like it was enough. In fact, I thought it was downright heroic considering that when Wooly saw that Mason wasn’t in gym class, he’d pour out all his wrath on me. And believe me, I’m no hero.
I sat down in front of the computer and signed on to the Internet. I typed in penny marshall birthday in the search engine. Before I hit Enter, I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and thought, Pleasepleaseplease.
Then I hit Enter.
There it was, right on top of the page. I didn’t even have to click on a website. Penny Marshall Date of Birth Oct. 15, 1943.
I did the math. That Brady Bunch episode was aired on October 15, 2006. Ten days before my parents were killed. The timing was right. It was perfect, in fact, since it gave me ten days to hook Nemesis up to the deli’s surveillance camera receiver and attempt to capture the signals from the night of October 25.
Amazing what some good karma could do.
Now I just had to get through gym class.
I stayed at the computer workstation for twenty minutes, looking up stuff about hieroglyphics for my paper, because Rachel was interested in them and I was hoping to impress her.
As 11:40 crept closer, I began to feel queasy—so queasy, in fact, that I considered telling Ms. Bussle that I was sick again and needed to go home. The idea began to appeal to me. No gym class. No public humiliation.
It would also give me an entire day at home to work on Nemesis. That was much more important than anything I was going to do in school today.
“I feel queasy,” I said to Ms. Bussle very quietly. I didn’t want Mason to hear. For now, he might actually think that I was brave enough to face Wooly on my own. Of course by tomorrow he’d know that I was in fact the biggest coward in the Northern Hemisphere, but I wasn’t thinking about tomorrow. Or even about two hours from now. I was thinking about 11:40, which was in exactly fifteen minutes.
Ms. Bussle squinted at me suspiciously. She was going to give me a hard time, I could tell. And it was going to be in a loud voice. I quickly clapped my hand over my mouth and made a small lurching movement with my neck, as though I was about to puke right then and there.
That wasn’t one of my finer moments.
It worked, though. Ms. Bussle handed me the hall pass right away, and I hurried out before she could change her mind. I went directly through the hall and to the stairwell, but then I stopped. I was beginning to have second thoughts about this being the best-possible course of action.
I heard heels clicking down the hall, so I slipped inside the boys’ bathroom. Thankfully it just smelled like disinfectant and nothing worse. I sat on the shallow tiled windowsill, leaned my head against the thick frosted glass, and sorted through my thoughts.
Here’s what they were:
If both Mason and I missed gym class today, Wooly was going to be a raving monster on Friday.
Friday was only two days away.
On the other hand, anything could happen to Wooly in two days. A freak accident, debilitating illness, short-term memory loss, a change of heart.
None of which were statistically likely.
On the other hand—
I checked my watch. It was 11: 35.
Decide, decide. I groaned. The water pipes above me groaned back. They really did. I glanced up at them, and that’s when I saw the grayish white thing hanging from a piece of hooked wire on one of the ceiling pipes. At first I thought it was someone’s old underwear. Then I looked more carefully. I sucked in my breath. It was my lunch sack. My recycled sock lunch sack. Just hanging on that wire by its small cloth loop, like a dead cat. It felt so personal, like someone had hung me up there for everyone to see, drooping and helpless. Look, it seemed to say! This is what you can do to Owen Birnbaum. He’ll let you do it. He won’t make a stink. He won’t fight back.
Then I had a thought that was more horrible yet.
The wire was really high up. Definitely more than six feet off the ground. There were no chairs to stand on in the bathroom. It would be nearly impossible to throw the sack in the air and have the wire hook catch the tiny little loop on the outside of the sack by pure chance. Someone had hung the sack up there deliberately. Someone very tall.
Someone who had free access to all the hallways this past week while he was taping up murals for the parent show.
Someone who could have rifled through the lunch closet, no problem.
I suddenly remembered what Jeremy had said to me: I’ve heard people laugh at you. They make you the butt of their jokes in front of everybody, even though they’re friends.
I had thought she meant that they were her friends. But maybe she meant that they were mine. My only friend, as a matter of fact, besides Nima.
Something came out of my mouth then that can only be described as a yowl. It rebounded off the bathroom’s tiled wal
ls and sounded so much like an animal in some sort of anguish that I listened to its echo in shock.
That was me, I thought in amazement.
“What was that?” A kid had poked his head into the bathroom and was staring at me. I knew him. He was in my gym class. He must be on his way there now.
A breeze came in from the hallway, and I saw my lunch sack flutter slightly like a flag.
Owen Birnbaum’s flag. The Republic of the Big Fat Boulder. Long may it wave.
I jumped off the windowsill, pushed past the kid in the doorway, and headed to gym class.
14
I felt pretty brave until I started pulling on my gym shorts. Then I started trembling. It was the sort of trembling that I’m not sure you can see from the outside. It was deep, deep inside. The kind you can hear in your breath.
As usual I was the last one in to the gym. All the kids were in a state of confusion. No one was standing on their spots for the simple reason that 80 percent of the gym was covered with gym equipment. Wooly must have pulled out everything in the equipment storage room—trampoline, mats, hurdles, tires set up on their sides, tires set up as a tunnel.
Faced with this buffet of torture, you can see why it took me a few moments to realize that everyone was watching me. Word must have gotten around about Wooly’s plans.
Thanks, Andre.
“Oh, man, Flapjack.” Andre sidled up to me and thumped me in the ribs. “Why didn’t you get the damn exemption? Are you a glutton for punishment or something?”
I waited for someone to riff on the word glutton, but no one did. That’s how serious the situation was.
I saw Wooly stop momentarily in his fussing with the equipment and scan the group. His eyes landed on mine. His chin lifted slightly and his ape chest puffed out. He had sighed. Yes, he was a happy man. Next, his glance flitted over to my left and seemed to be searching for something. He must have found it because his face grew stony. I looked to see what he was staring at, as did everyone in the class, and found the wiry figure slouching at the far end of the group.
Mason Ragg.