I watched an episode of Happy Days.
Nothing happened.
Then I watched an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies.
Nothing happened. I was beginning to think that I might need a low-noise amplifier to make my signal stronger. But those things were pricey, and the odds of finding one at a demo site would be pretty slim. Or maybe a bigger satellite dish would do the trick . . .
Or maybe you’re kidding yourself that this could ever work in a hundred billion years, I heard my brain grumble.
Shut up, I told myself. All the great inventors have had moments of doubt. Thomas Edison once said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”
I watched an episode of The Brady Bunch, during which I decided I liked Jan better than Marcia because she reminded me of Rachel Lowry except with long hair and braces. Rachel’s teeth are really nice, by the way.
There was a knock on the door and Mom poked her head in.
“Hey, good lookin’. Any idea where your lunch sack is?” she said.
Oops.
“I think . . . oh. Sack, hmm. I left it at school,” I said.
Can you tell I’m not a good liar?
Mom listens to people on the phone all day long, liars included. I’m sure she knew I was lying.
“Everything okay at school?”
“Fine.”
“Did someone take that lunch sack from you?” she asked.
Do you see what I mean about her?
“Yeah, but it’s no big deal,” I said.
“Stealing is a big deal,” she said. “A very big deal.” She was getting all worked up. Boy, you’d think someone who hears about people falling onto subway tracks and getting their arms sliced off or about people tossing their wives out a hotel window wouldn’t care about a little thing like lunch sack theft.
“No, I know it is. It’s okay. I know who did it. I’m going to get it back.”
“Maybe I should have a talk with your teacher,” she said.
“No! Let me handle this!” I don’t generally raise my voice at her. Jeremy was at the door like a shot.
“What?” Jeremy said. “What’s going on?”
“Someone stole your brother’s lunch sack,” Mom said.
I groaned. This was all getting way out of hand.
Jeremy frowned at me and folded her arms against her chest. “Do you know who?” she asked.
“No one you know,” I said. The last thing I needed was for her to chase after Mason Ragg.
“All right, Owen.” Mom backed down. “I’ll let you handle this one.” Maybe she didn’t want to ruin our perfect day.
“Thanks.”
“So,” Mom said, glancing at the TV, “The Brady Bunch? I didn’t know kids still watched that show.”
“Some of us do.”
“You probably think Marcia’s cute, huh?” she said.
“Jan.”
“Really?” She tipped her head to one side and smiled. I had the feeling that she was always the girl that never got any valentines.
“Yeah. Definitely Jan.”
“All right, buddy. But next time someone is bullying you, will you promise me that you’ll tell the teacher?”
I nodded.
I could feel Jeremy’s eyes on me. I didn’t like the way she was looking at me. It felt like she was looking at me. And that for the first time she was seeing me for who I really was.
That night I slept with the TV on. I just couldn’t bring myself to turn it off, in case something happened.
Which it didn’t.
11
“What’s up, Flapjack?” Andre Bertoni jogged up to me and Jeremy on our way to school and he thumped me on my back.
Andre Bertoni is not someone you want to see first thing on Monday morning. There’s way too much thumping.
Quickly, I crushed the IPuffins tote bag against my jacket. Mom had put my lunch in the tote bag, much to my horror, but I had rolled it up into a cylinder as best as I could to hide the huge puffin on the side.
“What you got there, Flapjack? Is that a puffin?”
“It wasn’t his idea,” Jeremy was quick to defend me. “Someone stole his usual lunch sack.”
Then she turned bright red again because Andre Bertoni looked at her.
“Well, it wasn’t me,” Andre said, getting all bristly.
“No one said it was,” I told him.
“Well, she’s looking at me funny,” he said, nodding at Jeremy, who then turned a shade redder. You’d think if you were all heartthrobby like Andre, you’d know when a girl is turning red because she’s madly in love with you or because she thinks you stole her brother’s lunch sack and wants to pulverize you.
“I already know who stole it,” I reassured him.
“Really?” I could practically see his shoulder muscles relax. Frankly, if I didn’t know who stole my lunch sack, I might have started to suspect Andre. “Who?”
“Mason Ragg,” I said.
“Oh, man.” Andre thumped me on the back of my neck. “That’s who I wanted to talk to you about. Listen, don’t mess with that lunatic. Did you know he carries a razor under his tongue?”
“A switchblade. In his sock.”
“Here’s the thing,” Andre said. “I was at basketball practice on Friday, and I went to get a drink of water at the fountain. That’s when I overheard my coach talking to Mr. Wooly about you.”
“Me!?” I couldn’t imagine the name Owen Birnbaum being tossed around the gymnasium on off-hours.
“You and Mason Ragg. Wooly thinks the two of you were up to something at the triathlon. He thinks you two knew that there was going to be a fire drill and that’s why you arranged it so that you were both last.”
“That’s ridiculous! How would we know there was going to be a fire drill?” I said. “Besides, why would Mason and I be up to anything together? We can’t stand each other!”
Andre shrugged. “All I know is that Wooly is planning something special for the two of you at the next gym class.”
“What’s he planning?” I’m not going to lie to you. I didn’t ask this question with a nice, calm question mark at the end, like the one written here. I asked it with three exclamation points at the end, in bold letters, and underlined. In other words, I shrieked it.
Andre shrugged again. “I don’t know. But if I were you, I’d reconsider getting that fat exemption ASAP.” He thumped me on the belly.
“What’s a fat exemption?” Jeremy asked when Andre was gone.
“Nothing,” I grumbled.
“Owen?”
“What?”
“Maybe it’s better that those Oreos get taken.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean maybe you shouldn’t be eating Oreos at all, you know.”
“No, I don’t know. What do you mean?”
Of course I knew exactly what she meant. But never, NEVER had Jeremy said anything about my being fat. She was always the one who didn’t care. She was always the one who never even seemed to notice, who saw me for who I was, underneath all the blubber.
“Why can’t you at least try harder to lose weight, Owen? People make fun of you, you know. I’ve heard people laugh at you. They make you the butt of their jokes in front of everybody, even though they’re friends, and I defend you, I do, but you could at least try to lose the weight. You weren’t always fat.”
She blurted this out as though it had been something she had been wanting to say for a long time.
There it was. Everything had changed in a minute between us. She no longer thought I was a better person than I actually was.
“Fine,” I said to her, “if you’re so embarrassed of me, walk to school by yourself.” I ran ahead. I’m not an elegant runner, and once I started running I wished I hadn’t because my jacket got caught in the back of my pants and I had to yank it back down over my rear end.
All morning long I fumed about my argument with Jeremy and worried about what M
r. Wooly was planning. Fuming, worrying, fuming, worrying. I clutched my clay sarcophagus so hard that I snapped off the tip of it while I was painting it. Rachel Lowry helped me glue it back on. That was nice. Her breath smelled like toothpaste and construction paper.
Ms. Bussle made Mason Ragg spend some time in the math workstation because she said his name hadn’t appeared on the station’s sign-up sheet at all last week. One of the math books was open in front of him, and from a distance it looked like he was writing diligently on a worksheet when in actuality he was drawing something on the desk.
At 10:57 he rose suddenly and walked up to Ms. Bussle’s desk for the hall pass.
I’m not a spur-of-the-moment kind of guy, but my sister was disgusted with me, Wooly was planning to polish the gym floor with me, and it looked like the only thing Nemesis could do was pick up stupid seventies sitcoms. What did I have to lose, really? I stood up and went to Ms. Bussle’s desk.
“Hall pass.”
“Please,” she said.
“Please.”
She looked me over to see if it was once again something I had eaten. When she saw I looked fine, she handed me a hall pass.
I hadn’t counted to twenty like the note suggested, but I was pretty sure it was close enough.
The hall directly outside the classroom was empty, but I could hear footsteps echoing down the hallway that joined it at a right angle. I walked quickly, thankful that I was wearing a pair of unsqueaky sneakers. As I passed the lunch closet, I quickly glanced at the shelf where I had put the IPuffins tote bag. It was still there, rolled up in a cylinder the way I had left it. He wouldn’t have had time to rummage through it anyway. I turned down the adjoining hallway and could see Mason Ragg way up ahead. He was heading for the stairwell. I ducked behind a water fountain and peered out at him. The strange thing was that he never once turned to see if I was behind him. Maybe he didn’t have to. Maybe he just knew that I would follow him, even when I didn’t know it myself.
When I could just see the top of his head as he walked down the stairs, I started following again. I reached the staircase as he made the turn down the second flight of stairs.
That’s when I remembered what Izzy said about Mason attacking me in a dark corner.
I froze, listening hard. I could hear footsteps, faint and apparently descending the stairs at a fast clip. If they were Mason’s footsteps, he definitely wasn’t waiting for me. On the contrary, it sounded like he was running. What on earth was he up to?
I hurried down the stairs. At this rate, I might easily lose track of him. I remembered how fast his legs moved in gym class. I hurried faster, already feeling the dampness of sweat in my armpits. Soon I’d be huffing.
I cleared the second staircase and went through the doors to the first floor. I looked around quickly. There were three hallways—one to my left, one to my right, and one dead ahead. Mason was hurrying along on the left.
He turned around suddenly, and my heart stopped cold. I thought for sure he would run at me, showering me with curses at the very least, at the very worst reaching for his sock. But instead, he did the oddest thing. He actually looked terrified. Then he turned around again and began to run like mad.
He skidded to a stop in front of one of the doors up ahead, frantically turned the doorknob, and slipped inside the room.
The door slammed shut. I stood still for a moment, catching my breath, and wondering what to do next.
“Hey, dude, what’s up?” I turned and there was Izzy behind me, towering above me, a tube of rolled-up papers in his fist.
I hesitated and he narrowed his eyes at me. “You didn’t follow that Ragg kid, did you? You did! Oh man, what are you thinking?”
“Listen, it’s the weirdest thing,” I said. I told him how Mason had looked so terrified of me, and how he had run like crazy when he saw I was behind him. We were both completely flummoxed.
“Maybe he’s a werewolf, dude,” Izzy said.
“Yeah, right,” I said, but made a mental note to check if tonight was a full moon.
“And why would he leave you a note telling you to follow him if he was terrified when you actually did?” Izzy asked.
That was a good question.
“Maybe the note wasn’t meant for me,” I suggested. “Or maybe it was, but Mason wasn’t the one who wrote it. Maybe I was supposed to follow someone else.”
Behind us came the sound of a person clearing her throat. Izzy and I both jumped (the werewolf thing was still in our minds) and turned to see a teacher standing there with her hands on her hips.
“Let’s go back to our classrooms, shall we?” she said.
“We shall,” I said, because as you know, I always say stupid things when I’m nervous. The teacher narrowed her eyes at me and we hurried off.
Izzy walked me up to the second floor. He was hanging murals for the parent show, he told me, and he had to hang some up there anyway. He’d been hanging them all week as a matter of fact, which was great because he got out of class for half an hour or so. They chose him because he was so tall he could hang them without lugging around a chair.
Being a giant has its occasional advantages.
“Hey, man,” Izzy said before we parted, “how about you just let Mason take those Oreos? What’s the diff, you know?”
This echoed what Jeremy had said that morning. Everyone seemed to be turning on me at once.
“The diff is THEY’RE MY OREO COOKIES!” I cried.
Izzy held up his hands. “All right, all right, relax. See you at lunch.”
He took off down the hall and I started walking back to my class. I passed right by the lunch closet, then I stopped. Backtracked.
I knew it was silly. I’d been right behind Mason so I knew that he didn’t have time to rifle through my lunch, but I wanted to check anyway. I unrolled the tote bag and opened it up.
That’s right. You guessed it.
My frickin’ Oreo cookies were gone.
So it wasn’t Mason after all.
12
It’s funny the way things work. Just when I was thinking I might come close to a solution to my Mason Ragg problem, I found that I was even more confused than ever.
And just when I was feeling that I’d never be able to get Nemesis to work, a solution appeared out of the blue.
After school, I stopped by Nima’s apartment. I hadn’t seen him for a while, and quite frankly, I needed a break from Nemesis. I was afraid I was in for another long evening of Freakout shows with no sign of an old signal. Also, I was feeling pretty gloomy about the whole Jeremy thing and panicky about the whole Wooly thing, and I needed to take my mind off of both of them.
Nima was in the middle of watching one of his Indian movies, so he just opened the door, said a quick tashi-deley, and rushed back to the couch, where I sat down next to him. He’s got about fifty of these Indian movies piled up in his closet. They’re really goofy and they’re all the same: there’s a beautiful woman who’s in love with a handsome man, and there’s a bad guy who messes things up. Everyone sings and dances a few times, and it all works out great in the end. Nima loves these movies, which means I often have to sit through them. It’s fairly excruciating for me. This time, I spent most of the movie counting how many times the bad guy stroked his moustache in this supposedly sinister way. Twenty-eight.
The actors suddenly exploded in a musical number, and everyone was dancing and spinning. It reminded me a little of that woman in front of the museum. Nima sang along in a loud, out-of-tune voice and started popping his head around like a chicken.
There was a close-up of the Indian actress singing something to her best girlfriend, her eyes looking all woozy, so I knew it must be something about the handsome guy. I snorted in disgust. Nima looked at me. I think he took it personally, he loves these movies so much. I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings, so I tried to make an excuse for my snort.
“Pema is better-looking than that actress,” I said.
“Pema is more beau
tiful than a jewel.”
“Why doesn’t she come here already?” I asked. I’d wanted to ask this for some time. I wasn’t sure if it was some mysterious Tibetan custom, where you separate a newly wed husband and wife for a while.
“She wishes to. I wish her to. But her mother is sick, and there is no one to care for her but Pema. If I make more money, I can bring them both and pay for medicine for her mother. Maybe by next year.”
“Next year!” I said.
“If business improve much.”
Personally, I love momos. I think everyone should love momos. But lots of people have never heard of them, while everyone has heard of hot dogs or soft pretzels with mustard, both of which are sold at carts a few feet away from Nima’s momo cart. It didn’t seem likely that the momo business was going to suddenly skyrocket, but of course I didn’t say that.
We watched to the end of the movie, although I really don’t know why we bothered. They always end the same way. Just when you think all hope is lost, everything turns out great. The beautiful woman and the handsome guy get married while the bad guy gets punished.
“Let me ask you something, Nima,” I said as the credits rolled. Nima was watching the credits with as much interest as he watched the movie. I’m telling you, he’s a maniac when it comes to this stuff.
“Hmm?” he said, not taking his eyes off the screen.
“Do things ever turn out differently in these movies? Like the handsome guy gets killed, the beautiful woman gets depressed and gains two hundred pounds, and the bad guy never gets caught and lives happily ever after?”
“No, no, I don’t think so,” he said.
“Well, they should!” I said. “It’s like false advertising or something. Real life is full of unhappy endings.”
Nima nodded. “There is the saying, of course, life is not fair.”
“It’s not just a saying,” I insisted glumly. “It’s true.”
“But in Buddhist belief, the bad guy always be punished. If not in this life, then in the next life.”