Slob

  Oh. My knapsack was plinking.

  Much like the giant cockroaches. Which meant they were probably hauling scavenged items, same as I was.

  I was at the fence when I realized this. I stopped and turned around, looking up at the tenement’s third floor. From my present angle, I couldn’t see very well into the interior, but it didn’t matter. One of the giant cockroaches was standing a few yards away from me, having just emerged from the bottom floor of the tenement. He was staring at me with an alarmed look on his face. He did have a face. It was filthy and bearded. He shifted his weight, and his feelers plink-plinked. They were made of old metal pipes that were sticking out of a sack strapped to his back. Most were lead, but some were copper, which fetched a tidy sum at the scrap-metal dealers.

  Just as I remembered the words of that young, nicely dressed guy at the Ninety-third Street demo site—how the metal scavengers weren’t beyond using violence to protect their territory—the figure held something up for me to see. He had been holding it in his hands the whole time, but I had been so focused on his face and feelers that I hadn’t noticed it. It was a large bronze-colored sheet of metal with tiny white rectangles all over it. I stared at the thing. It was so oddly familiar. Then I realized what it was. The cover of the building’s mailboxes. The metal scavenger had ripped it off the wall. I could see the names on those little rectangular pieces of paper: Tess Bailhouse, J. Rodriguez, R. S. Anderson, Robert/Shelly Weinstein . . . I might have some of their stuff in my backpack. Bits and scraps of their lives. It made me feel ooky. It made me feel like one of those grave robbers who dig up caskets and slip the wedding rings off dead people’s fingers.

  The scrap metal scavenger glanced at my backpack, sagging and lumpy with my loot. He smiled at me with brown teeth, and he raised his eyebrows.

  “We done all right,” he said, giving the mailbox cover a proud shake. He wasn’t alarmed anymore. He had taken my measure and had decided I was on his team.

  That made me feel even ookier.

  I squeezed through the opening in the fence and climbed the garden fence in about two minutes, no wiggling, no stumbling. I don’t know how I did it.

  By the time I got home, Jeremy was already there with her friend Arthur.

  “Hey, where were you?” Jeremy said. “We waited outside the school for, like, twenty minutes.”

  They were sitting at the kitchen table with an open notebook in front of Arthur, who was scribbling something in it.

  “I didn’t feel well,” I said. “I left school early.” I didn’t want to talk about my day. It had been too strange.

  Jeremy scrutinized me. “You don’t look sick,” she said.

  “I feel better now.”

  “Good. We’re furious,” Jeremy said. “Aren’t we furious, Arthur?”

  “We are totally . . .” Arthur stopped writing for a moment and searched for the right word. “Furious.”

  Arthur is the president of GWAB. She actually does look like a boy, and it’s not just because she has her hair cut short with tiny sideburns showing or because of the red polo shirt and chinos she always wears. She has a sort of heavy, bully-boy jaw. I think that makes the difference. Jeremy could cut her hair as short as Arthur’s, but she would just look like a girl with short hair.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Oh, was it Shackly? I told you he wouldn’t go for the name thing.”

  “He says we have to retake the test tomorrow, and if we don’t write our girl names on our tests, he’s going to mark them with Fs! And that test is 50 percent of our entire grade!” Jeremy said. She was all bright-eyed. It was partly from anger, I’m sure, but I think it was partly from pure joy. She loved stuff like this. Fighting for hopeless causes.

  “He will fail you guys, you know,” I warned them.

  “Let him.” Jeremy smiled. “Mr. Shackly is going to be in for a little surprise tomorrow.”

  I looked at the two of them. Arthur was writing away in the notebook.

  “What are you two doing?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Oh, we’re just drafting an e-mail, that’s all,” Jeremy said. She jabbed Arthur in the ribs and Arthur snorted and nodded. “Yes, just a simple e-mail,” Jeremy continued. “Which Arthur is going to send to all the major television networks tonight. We think the news shows will be very interested to know about this situation.”

  I sincerely doubted that, but I didn’t want to be the one to burst their bubble.

  “Arthur will be our television spokesperson, of course,” Jeremy went on to explain. That was even more dubious, since Arthur generally never said more than a few words at a time. “We’re actually hoping that she gets on Good Morning America or David Letterman or something. That way Arthur will actually appear in her own collection.”

  At the mention of this, Arthur looked up from her writing and smiled. It was a nice smile. By the way, Arthur nearly always wears the same clothes every day, even though everyone teases her about it. It’s because she won’t buy girls’ clothes and her mother refuses to shop in the boys’ department for her. So she is stuck with one boy outfit that another GWAB member gave her out of pity—the red polo shirt and chinos.

  “What’s her collection?” I asked.

  “Arthur collects Retro TV Magazines," Jeremy explained.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “They give the TV listings, just like TV Guide,” Jeremy said, “but they pay the most attention to the retro shows. You know, plot summaries, trivia, stuff like that. Arthur’s had been collecting them since—how long, Arthur?”

  “Since I was six.”

  “Really?” I said. That was actually impressive.

  Weird, but impressive.

  I left them to their work, and went to my room and sat down heavily on the edge of my bed. I usually went right to work on Nemesis, but the day had taken a toll on me. I felt completely unmotivated. And it was all because of Mason Ragg. Who, I now reminded myself, would be eating my three Oreo cookies tomorrow unless I found a way to prevent it.

  That got me to my feet.

  I went to my desk, pulled out my yellow graph paper notebook and a mechanical pencil, and started to draw. At first it was really just crazy doodles—a huge guillotine hanging from the ceiling above my lunch sack, a dagger that shot out of my lunch sack the second someone touched it, stuff like that. I got it out of my system, then I really settled down to business.

  Have you ever heard of Ockham’s razor? It’s a principle that says the simplest solution is always the best solution.

  What I came up with was spectacularly simple.

  Mason enjoyed eating my Oreos, so why not make eating my Oreos a lot less enjoyable?

  I went to the bathroom and opened the little linen closet. Mom keeps all her oddball remedies on the top shelf: burdock tinctures, nettle capsules, tea tree oil. It took a while to sort through it all and find what I was looking for, but I did. It was shoved into the back corner. I think Mom was embarrassed that she had to use it, especially since it wasn’t natural or organic and it didn’t have any herbal junk in it.

  Facial hair bleach.

  It’s for those little moustaches that women sometimes get. I once caught Mom with the stuff slathered across her upper lip. It’s white and thick. Much like the middle of an Oreo cookie. I looked in the box. It even had its own little spatula to spread the cream with. How convenient. I shoved the box back to the corner of the cabinet. I’d be using it in the morning.

  Obviously, I didn’t need to make any blueprints for this idea. Back in my room, I shut my graph paper notebook and opened the desk drawer to put it away, but I hesitated before I shut the drawer. I stared down at it for a moment, considering. Then I pulled the entire drawer out of the desk and put it on the floor. In the shallow gap between the runners and the bottom of the desk there was a small rectangular piece of pale green paper. I pulled it out, took a breath, and flipped it over so I could read the single word written on it:

  SLOB

  I kne
w the handwriting so well—the neat, round curves, the slight hook on the top of the L. My right hand held the paper and my left hand pressed against my stomach. It’s funny how things can hurt and feel good at the same time.

  “Owen?”

  Hurriedly, I put the paper back in its hiding place and slid the drawer over it.

  “Yeah?”

  The door opened and Mom walked in, carrying a plastic bag.

  “Hey, good-lookin’. How are you feeling?”

  “A lot better. I think the peppermint really helped.”

  “Did it? Wow.” She always sounds surprised when someone tells her that one of her remedies actually worked. “Have you been able to eat anything?”

  “I had a few Oreos,” I said. I figured it was better to fess up than have her discover the near empty package of cookies tomorrow morning. “That was all I could keep down,” I added.

  I could see she didn’t like that, but she was so happy I was feeling better and that my recovery was in part due to her peppermint remedy, she didn’t make a stink. Like I said, I’m not beyond lying on occasion.

  “I have something for you.” She handed me the plastic bag. Inside was a box that said Li’l Inventor. It was a kit to put together this plastic robot dog.

  “It says on the box that you can make it chase its tail,” she said.

  “Great. Thanks,” I said.

  She means well.

  8

  Don’t you love it when things work out exactly as you planned?

  Mason Ragg rose up suddenly from his chair at the English workstation at 10:37, asked for the hall pass, and left the room. When he came back, he looked unusually pleased. He must have taken the cookies and not eaten them yet. Good. I wanted to be in the lunchroom when he did.

  This time, I felt no panic. I didn’t even run out in the hall to check my lunch sack. I knew what I would find. Instead, I calmly worked away at the art workstation on a clay model of an Egyptian sarcophagus for global studies. Rachel Lowry even came over, and said, “Can I see that?”

  “Sure.”

  She picked the sarcophagus up and turned it this way and that.

  “Cool,” she said and put it back down. Her fingerprints were on either side of the sarcophagus. I left them there.

  It was a very excellent morning.

  Then came gym class.

  On the way down there, we passed Jeremy and Arthur and six other girls standing outside their classroom, looking angry and holding signs saying things like WE WILL NOT BE BULLIED! and GWAB RULES! and the ill-advised MR. SHACKLY SUCKS! All the girls had extremely short hair, except for Jeremy, and were dressed like boys. You wouldn’t think that there is that much of a difference in boys’ and girls’ clothes these days, but when you see a girl dressed in boys’ clothes, the difference is very clear. Boys’ clothes are a lot less interesting than girls’, for one. And also, they fit girls funny—baggy in some places and tight in others. Except for Arthur. Her red polo shirt and chinos fit her just fine. Also, the GWABs held themselves differently than other girls. They slumped more, I think.

  Unfortunately, there were no network news cameras or famous anchorpeople, but Sybil Tushman was there with her camcorder. She has a daily video blog on her website called The Universe According to Sybil. It’s usually just Sybil talking about her older sister and how much she hates her but she also does some news segments about our school. Lots of kids in our school watch it, believe it or not.

  “Lesby-girls,” hissed someone from my class.

  The GWABs didn’t even bat an eye over that one. It wasn’t anything they hadn’t heard before, and anyway, they clearly had more important things on their minds.

  I caught Jeremy’s eye as I passed, and she looked back at me, her face full of utter defiance. If I didn’t know that she was just a new member of GWAB, I would have guessed that she was the president. She has this leadership aura. She may not be supersmart, but if you stick her in a crowd of people, she just pops, like a zebra-striped jeep in a shoppingmall parking lot.

  In gym class, Mr. Wooly had set up a balance beam and a trampoline in the front of the gym, and now he was laying down a line of mats in the back of the gym. Not good.

  “So are you going to take my advice, Flapjack?” Andre asked me as I took my place on my spot.

  “The fat excuse or the lawsuit?” I asked.

  “Both.”

  “Nope.”

  “Neither?”

  “That’s right.” I was in a fairly cocky mood this morning.

  Mr. Wooly had finished with the mats and was on his way back up front when he actually came up to me and patted me on the shoulder in a friendly sort of way.

  “Morning, Birnbaum,” Wooly said.

  “He’s scared you’re going to make trouble for him about the dog harness thing,” Andre whispered when Wooly had passed.

  Andre was probably right about that.

  “Well, I won’t,” I said.

  Andre shook his head. He interlaced his fingers, flipped them upside down, and flexed his wrists. “You know what your problem is, Flapjack?”

  I growled. Quietly.

  “You think life has to be hard.” He smiled at me, one of his windsurfing-in-Malibu smiles. I wanted to punch him right then and there, but suddenly his smile crumpled and he looked uneasy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look like that before. He was looking at something behind me, so I turned my head to follow his gaze. Mason had come in the side door of the gym, accompanied by a teacher’s aide. Up to now, I had mercifully been spared Mason’s presence in gym class. Andre had told me that Mason had a “psycho exemption,” although I assumed there was a more official word for it.

  The teacher’s aide went up to Mr. Wooly and began to talk to him with her back turned to the class in order to be discreet, but Mr. Wooly’s face was clearly visible to all of us. And he was not happy. In fact, he made no effort to keep his voice down when he said, “Well, just so’s we understand each other, I won’t be held responsible when all hell breaks loose in here.” The gym was dead quiet and his voice echoed so we all heard his words quite clearly. It was the first time all the rumors about Mason had been confirmed by an adult in the school.

  The teacher’s aide was now angry too. She pointed a finger at him and said, “That was massively inappropriate, Gene.” She didn’t bother to keep her voice down either, so that we all heard her scolding him but more importantly, we caught that his name was Gene.

  “Gene?!” Someone in our class repeated loudly in an incredulous voice.

  “Settle down, people!” he called out to all of us. He probably would have called us “ladies” instead of “people” if the aide hadn’t been there.

  I was watching Mason. He had been working his jaw for several seconds, his mean little eyes fixed on Mr. Wooly. I suspected he was busy collecting a large glob of phlegm to use as a projectile.

  Yeah, do it, Mason, I thought. Hit Mr. Wooly right in the face with a fat, juicy goober.

  Instant revenge on both my enemies. You can see how much that would appeal to me, I’m sure.

  “Mr. Ragg,” Mr. Wooly said to Mason, “A4.”

  Mason’s jaw stopped churning. He stood there for a moment, glaring at Mr. Wooly, until the aide put a careful hand on his back and guided him to the spot on the slickery gym floor, showing him the A on the wall to his right and the 4 on the wall behind Mr. Wooly.

  Mason was front and center, directly in Mr. Wooly’s line of fire.

  Excellent.

  During our stretches, Mr. Wooly made us do a tricky series of leg hops, which he’d never had us do before. There was a lot of “left, left, right, left, right, right,” so that we had to keep switching legs in this random jig. We were all stumbling around—even Andre managed to look awkward. But today, Mason was Mr. Wooly’s prime target.

  “Keep up, Mr. Ragg!” Mr. Wooly shouted over the sound of furiously pounding sneakers. “This train doesn’t stop for latecomers! It’s sink or swim, pal! I see your feet
moving, but the parade is passing you by!”

  That’s three mixed metaphors in a row, in case you didn’t notice. Obviously, Mr. Wooly didn’t.

  I guess I should have felt pretty pleased that he was picking on Mason, but I couldn’t somehow. Maybe it was because Mason’s evil genius face was turned away from me. From my vantage point, all I could see was a kid with fast, skinny legs, hopping around really nimbly. You had to admire it somehow. It reminded me of some of those old cowboy movies, when the bad guy shoots at the feet of the good guy, which makes him dance around to avoid the bullets.

  But Mason was the bad guy.

  Still, at that moment, I admired him anyway.

  Finally, Mr. Wooly called a stop to the idiotic warm-up and said it was time for gymnastics. I felt my stomach twist up.

  “Today, my friends,” Mr. Wooly announced, “we are going to engage in a little healthy competition.”

  Oh, blithering carbuncles.

  I didn’t really think that, you understand. I thought something else entirely, but it’s not printable.

  “I’ll be separating you out into teams and we’ll have a little gymnastic triathlon.”

  From his back pocket, he whipped out a list of all our names and which teams we were on. I tell you, he must have sweated over the thing all night long. For a subhuman bozo, Mr. Wooly could be diabolically clever when he wanted to be. The three teams were set up thusly:

  1. Team A had one kid who was a superstar athlete (that was Andre) and a few other passably athletic kids

  2. Team B had several wannabe superstar athletes who were clawing their way to the top and full of pent-up frustration that they were not the real, actual superstar athlete. They also had a few so-so-ish to poor athletes and one bully magnet whose job was to bring down the entire team. That would be me.

  The combination was designed to not only foster competition between the teams, but also within the teams. Have you ever seen those movies about the Roman gladiator fights, where they tossed a bunch of poor guys into an arena with tigers and crocodiles?