Slob

  That morning I sat at the math station with Rachel Lowry, the girl who looked like she might be in GWAB but wasn’t, and Aidan Overbeck, who is as hyper as a gerbil and about as intelligent. His leg never stopped jiggling as he tried to work out an equation. He was making the entire math workstation jiggle too until Rachel finally clamped her hand on his knee and squeezed hard. Aidan squealed (much like a gerbil) and said, “What was that for?” And Rachel said, “You are a one-man earthquake.” And he said something idiotic like, “It’s better than being a one-woman ugly.” It was so stupid that Rachel didn’t even bother to roll her eyes. I sort of like her.

  While I was working on a math problem, I kept glancing over at Mason. He caught me once and his twisted mouth stretched into an expression that was hard to define. When half a person’s face is all messed up like that, it’s really had to tell if that person is smiling at you or scowling. I was thinking it probably wasn’t a smile. I attempted to shoot back a cool, stony stare, but I couldn’t quite manage it and wound up shrugging at him and going, “Heesh.” I have no idea why. He looked away with what I assume was disgust. Again, hard to tell.

  At 11:07, Mason got up from the global studies station, quickly walked to the front of the room, and got the bathroom pass from Ms. Bussle. My heart started thumping. My veins were crawling with adrenaline. This is what it feels like to be powerful, I thought. This is the revenge feeling. It was so different from the squashed feeling I usually felt at school. The victim feeling. Why hadn’t I thought to use my brains for combat before this? All those times when I’d been humiliated . . . when my hair had been set on fire during assembly and when a girl had stuck pins in me to see if I bled brown because of all the chocolate I ate. I might have had revenge back then.

  “Nima won’t like this.”

  That was the little voice in my head speaking.

  Sometimes little voices in your head should be ignored.

  I waited and listened. There might be a yelp of surprise or a howl of anger. I looked around for a weapon, just in case I had to defend myself. It was slim pickings, but I spotted a protractor compass in a tray in front of Rachel and casually picked it up. One side was a pointy metal stick. That would do. I pretended to measure some arcs, my eyes flitting to the door every other second. He was taking forever. Finally the door opened. Mason walked in. There was no lunch sack attached to his hand. He didn’t look angry. In fact, he looked sort of calm.

  Again, hard to tell with his face being what it was.

  I put down the protractor compass and rushed up to Ms. Bussle.

  “Bathroom pass,” I said breathlessly.

  “A please would be nice.”

  “Please.”

  I hurried out the door to the sounds of snide giggles from my classmates, who must have thought I was having a urinary emergency. I didn’t care. I ran to the wide, door-less closet that was recessed in the wall a few yards from my classroom. There were rows of hooks where we kept our coats and backpacks, and above that was the shelf on which our lunches sat. My lunch sack was where I left it. It looked untouched. Very carefully, with my right hand supporting the bottom, I took it off the shelf. Putting it on the floor, I peered inside. The spiked handcuff was in place, open and poised against the side of the sack. Directly below it was the eco-container.

  The cookies were gone.

  I took the thick wooden-dowel bathroom pass and inserted it in the sack, then pried the edge of the eco-container with it. Snick! The cuff snapped closed on the imaginary wrist, just as it was supposed to, and I slipped the dowel out. There was no way Mason could have bypassed the mechanism . . . yet he had!

  I heard footsteps down the hallway, so I replaced my lunch sack on the shelf and made a quick stop at the bathroom, just to complete my alibi. I actually had to go anyway.

  When I got back to the classroom, I automatically searched out Mason. He had planted himself in the global studies workstation and was tattooing his forearm with a green felt-tip marker.

  I usually just suck things up. I don’t complain, I don’t start trouble. I’m good at that. Lots of practice.

  But when people steal things from me, I have to do something about it. Two years ago something was stolen from me—the biggest thing you could possibly steal from a person, really, apart from their life—and Nemesis was hopefully going to help me make things right on that account.

  Now Mason Ragg had stolen from me too. Three times. I couldn’t suck it up. I walked right up to Mason and stood over him with my hands on my hips.

  “Give them back,” I hissed.

  He looked up from his tattooing. Unfortunately, I was standing by the messed-up side of his face, so that when he looked up I was staring full on at the misshapen sneer and the milky blue eye. It actually made me gulp, which is one of those things that characters do in books but that never happen in real life. Except when Mason Ragg looks at you with the messed-up side of his face. Then all those things that you read about in books but never happen in real life— like hair standing up on the back of your neck or shaking in your boots or gulping—are suddenly entirely possible.

  “Give what back?” he snarled.

  “You know what.” I was trying to avoid saying it because it sounded sort of ridiculous, but Mason just kept staring me down with that lunar blue eyeball, so I was forced to say, “Give me back my cookies.”

  “Your cookies?” he snorted. “What would I want with your cookies?”

  If you say the word cookie in a sneering way, it can sound an awful lot like a preschool term—like binky or blankey.

  “Look,” I said, “I know it was you. You took them yesterday and the day before and, though I don’t know how you managed it, you took them again today. Just give them back, all right . . . just . . .”—I thrust my open palm out toward him—“give them back and I won’t tell on you.”

  Then Mason said something that I can’t repeat.

  I stood there for a minute feeling especially fat. I mean, I always feel fat, but sometimes I feel like a boulder. A huge fat boulder that people write curse words on or pee on. And I just stand there, letting it happen, because I’m a boulder and that’s what boulders do.

  Boulders also turn around and walk away from people who terrify them, which is also exactly what I did.

  Jeremy would have stood her ground even if it meant getting thrashed. Even if it meant a switchblade in the gut. I winced at the thought.

  Behind my back, I heard Mason hiss at me, “You’re not as smart as you think you are.”

  That stopped me cold. I felt a sickening, swirling feeling in my stomach. Remember when you were a little kid and you wouldn’t let your feet dangle from the bed because you were afraid a monster might grab your ankle, pull you under the bed, and eat your intestines? Logically, you knew it probably would never happen, but still, there was that little speck of doubt.

  Hearing Mason Ragg say, “You’re not as smart as you think you are,” was like being pulled under the bed by the monster. And having my intestines eaten. “Not being as smart as I think I am” was something that I often worried about as I worked on Nemesis. It nagged at me when I measured trajectories, when I was splicing wires or soldering parts. Could I really do this? Was I really as smart as I thought I was? Then I’d think logically. My IQ is . . . well, I’m not allowed to tell you what it is, but believe me, it’s impressive. I could do it. I had to do it.

  Then along comes Mason Ragg, evil comic-book character/bogyman who figures out a way to bypass the Jaws of Anguish and then tells me that I’m not as smart as I think I am.

  “I don’t feel well.”

  Ms. Bussle looked at me from her desk in that squinty, nearsighted way she has.

  “What’s wrong, Owen?”

  “Nauseous,” I mumbled.

  “Did you eat something you shouldn’t have?” she asked. By the way, she has a loud voice.

  “Like the state of Texas?” one kid said.

  “Like a mastodon?” another kid called out. br />
  “Here. Go to the nurse,” Ms. Bussle said, quickly giving me the hall pass. She’d started something that she knew she wouldn’t be able to stop.

  “Like a Twinkie factory?”

  5

  The nurse, a pear-shaped woman with a pointy nose, took my temperature but barely glanced at the thermometer. She seemed to know it would read normal.

  “Bad day?” she asked.

  “I’m feeling nauseous,” I told her.

  I needed to leave the school. Now. I had things to do. She did a little sniffing thing where her lips pushed out and her nose wrinkled. She was considering. Or else she had highly developed olfactory senses that could sniff out when kids were lying to her. Either way, she decided in my favor.

  “All right, let’s give Mom a call.” She pulled up the information from her computer and dialed. Mom couldn’t leave work—she’s usually in the middle of dealing with some hairy situation—but she sent over Mrs. Leaper, an elderly neighbor, to come fetch me from school then leave me alone in our apartment.

  In my room, I carefully removed the Jaws of Anguish from my lunch sack and ate the sandwich. After that I ate my snack in the fridge.

  The phone rang. It was Mom.

  “How’s the belly?”

  “Not so good.” I tried to make my voice sound weak and shaky, which wasn’t hard.

  “Have you vomited?” she asked. Her voice was professionally level, but I could hear the anxiety seeping through.

  “Not yet,” I answered as I stood by the kitchen window and stared at Andre’s apartment building, the Fuji Towers. It was directly across the street, a slick steel-and-glass apartment building with a steeply angled scooped-out steel roof on one side, like a giant snowplow had been nailed onto the side of the building. It was insanely ugly, but it probably was supposed to be very chic or something.

  “Peppermint tea,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “In little sips.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “I know.”

  She might have been talking to one of her callers. “Stay calm. Deep breaths. Help is on the way.”

  I ate another PB&J, a bowl of cereal, and a hunk of cheddar cheese. I scaled the chair and phone book and the dictionary to the Stop-and-Think Cabinet without stopping to think, and I grabbed five Oreos out of the package and devoured them in less time than it took me to get them. I’d be sorry later, I knew, when Mom discovered it, but it seemed totally worth it. After the cookies were finished, I had second thoughts, but of course it was too late to do anything about it.

  That was why I climbed back up and ate seven more.

  After that, I turned on Nemesis and got down to work—adjusting the dish, trying different channels. Nothing happened. Mason’s words started replaying in my brain. I tried to beat them back. I told myself that I was attempting to do something extraordinary, something that a thug like Mason would never be able to do. But staring at a blank TV screen for an hour was beginning to wear away at my confidence.

  Then I heard a voice.

  It was coming from my TV set.

  There was a picture too, but it was so fuzzy I couldn’t make out anything. Still, I could hear someone talking about a tractor.

  I must be picking up some farming channel.

  I yelled and punched the air and did this little dance, but that part was embarrassing so I stopped doing it pretty fast.

  My equipment worked!

  But not well.

  And it was going to have to work very, very well in order for Nemesis to do what I needed it to do.

  I was going to have to boost the signal, which meant I needed an amplifier. Forty decibel or better.

  I emptied out my backpack, slung it over my shoulder, and headed for the demolition site on West Eighty-second Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. Jeremy had told me about it. She had spotted it when she was on her way to a GWAB member’s house. She said that it was impressive: three old tenements that had been knocked down to make way for a high-rise condominium. Ripe hunting grounds for an amplifier.

  I walked down Broadway, on the west side of the street. Broadway was livelier than Amsterdam Avenue. In fact, it reminded me of a kid with ADD, all hopped up and in constant motion. Even the stores couldn’t stay focused for very long. A new restaurant would open, then close a few months later, reopen again as a clothing store, then close again and reopen, close and reopen. I peered into a new stereo and electronics shop, its shelves full of slippery black equipment. It was almost as alluring to me as the Italian bakery on the block before. For now, though, I’d have to be satisfied with what I scavenged.

  When I reached Eighty-fifth Street, I almost crossed over to the east side of Broadway. It was an involuntary reflex. I hadn’t been by the store in months, and I didn’t know if I wanted to see it today when I wasn’t feeling too terrific about myself.

  I made myself do it, though. I kept walking on the west side of the street. My heart began to race, stomping crazily like the feet of a rabbit that’s been picked up by the scruff of its neck and is struggling to get away.

  “Breathe,” I said, just like Mom to one of her callers. “You’ll be fine.”

  A stationary store. A hair salon. Breathe. A magazine and smoke shop, the same one that had been there for as long as I could remember. The owner, he—shhh. Breathe.

  I made myself stop when I reached the shoe store. I must have looked funny—standing still in the middle of the street like that, not looking at the store I was stopped in front of but straight ahead—because a few people glanced at me. Okay, I said to them in my head. Fine. I’ll look. You’re making me look.

  The store was completely different than it once had been, of course. There were the shoes, for one thing. Sleek, expensive-looking shoes for men. Dark and polished. On one wall were sandals and some colorful sneakers, but the colors were odd, like acid green and orange. I didn’t know any men who wore shoes like this. My father had always worn battered canvas loafers.

  As always, it wasn’t the differences that struck me so much as what had remained the same. There was the same ancient, white-painted tin ceiling, made up of dozens of embossed squares. There was the narrow door in the back wall, behind the cash register; that was the door that led to a short hallway. On one side of the hallway was a dinky little office. On the other side was the door to the basement.

  The walls had been repainted. Of course.

  The store was empty except for a balding blond man, very spiffily dressed in a gray suit. He looked a little bored. His hands were in his pockets, and he was staring at a row of shoes with strange, squared-off toes, as though he was trying to decide if he liked them or not, without really seeming to care much either way. He turned away from the square-toed shoes and scratched the back of his neck. The scratching turned into picking at something, maybe a pimple or a scab.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of someone staring at me through the window of the magazine and smoke shop next door. The graying hair was slicked back and oiled with pomade, and I could see the flash of gold around his neck. Mr. Boscana. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see him. He’d been sitting at that same stool behind the counter for as long as I could remember. Still, the sight of that familiar face jolted me. I could read a quick series of emotions playing with his features—shock, pity. He collected himself and rearranged his mouth into a wide, warm smile, his white teeth flashing even behind the smudged window. He rose from his stool by the cash register.

  In a minute he was standing outside his store, his necklace and teeth flashing in the sun. “Owen! Owen, mi hombrecito!”

  I’m a coward. You know that about me already. For the second time in a single day, I chickened out. This time was worse than the time with Mason. This time I heard the hurt in Mr. Boscana’s voice, calling after me as I rushed away down the street: “Owen!! Hang on a minute!”

  The liveliness of Broadway now felt like some menacing barri
cade. I couldn’t maneuver through the crowds. People seemed to be deliberately squeezing together too tightly, just to keep a fat kid from passing them. Finally I shoved my way between a couple. My body touched theirs. People don’t often make physical contact in New York City, even though we are all pressed together so tightly. It almost always produces a strong reaction.

  “Watch where you’re going!” the man said.

  “Big oaf!” the woman muttered.

  Big oaf. Big oaf. The sound of that played back in my head as I ran across the wide street and east, away from Broadway and the crowds. Big oafs were frightening. Big oafs were the mean, sweating guys dressed in Speedos tossing other big oafs into the air inside pro-wrestling cages. Why wasn’t I that sort of oaf? Why wasn’t I that sort of fat?

  Because you are the boulder. Boulders just sit there and let people do what they want.

  All of a sudden I didn’t care about the demolition site anymore. I didn’t care about the forty-decibel amplifier.

  I didn’t even care about Nemesis anymore.

  The only thing I cared about at that moment was that I was starving. It was a sudden burning, aching hunger that left me dizzy. The empty space in my gut where the three Oreo cookies should have been had doubled, tripled, despite everything that I had eaten back home. I dug through my pockets, but all I found were two dimes. Not enough for anything. I counted the blocks that I’d have to walk to get back home: eleven. Too far.

  But Nima’s momo cart was only three and a half blocks away.

  6

  I crossed over to Columbus Avenue and then walked a few blocks downtown to the Museum of Natural History. There were three or four people in line at Nima’s cart, which stood to the left of the wide steps that led up to the museum entrance. Hanging by a cord around the front of the cart were brightly colored flags, and printed on the red awning were the words NIMA’S AUTHENTIC HANDMADE MOMOS. Nima was behind his cart, as small as a kid and so skinny. I could see his hands furiously working away at forming his dumplings and dropping them in the huge steamer pot. My stomach responded to the sight by cramping with hunger. I walked faster.