“And it’s good!” the announcer crowed over the loudspeaker, as the bleachers began to reverberate with the Wildcat Beat. Odawahaka had won the game. Maggie plugged the wire into the outlet. Nothing could stop the hack now.
But then there was a whistle, and the voice over the PA announced, “Flag on the play.” The crowd hushed. There were still three seconds left on the clock. The game wasn’t over, and there was a penalty that could change everything.
The announcer relayed the official’s call: “Unsportsmanlike conduct on the Wildcats. Fifteen-yard penalty. Replay the down.”
A collective groan went up from the Wildcats side of the stands, while the Ironmen fans cheered and stamped their feet.
“What does that mean?” asked Lena.
Mrs. Dornbusch looked at Maggie and the fuse box. “It means you better pull the plug on whatever you have planned, because the kicker needs to make another field goal. And with an extra fifteen yards tacked on, he’s out of his range. He’ll never make a kick that long. And Odawahaka is going to lose its only chance of an undefeated season.”
Maggie shook her head. “I can’t unplug it. I mean, I can, but it won’t do any good. The electrical wiring just jumps the starting motor. The hydraulic press runs on Freon, and—”
“Are you telling me—?”
“That an eight-foot rubber mouse is about to inflate midfield, right where the kicker is lining up.”
“This is bad, right?” asked Lena, looking from one to the other. “I don’t know anything about football, but I can tell this is bad.”
“What’s the thrust?” demanded Mrs. Dornbusch.
“Two thousand pounds,” admitted Maggie.
“Son of a monkey!” shouted Mrs. Dornbusch. “The ground is going to erupt right where that kicker is setting up, and he’s going to get hurt.” She pointed her mittened hand in the direction of the field. “And this town is going to lose its first undefeated season ever. Maggie!” She hurried out from under the bleachers to stop the game, and as she raced past, she said, “Just like your mother.”
“Tell me what’s happening on the field!” said Lena. “I can’t stand to look.”
Maggie peered between the bleachers. “The kicker is lined up!” she said frantically. “He’s signaling that he’s ready. Oh my gosh! Mrs. Dornbusch is rushing the field! She’s screaming something, but no one can hear her. Oh no, the ground! It’s starting to . . . bubble up. It’s like it’s breaking into bits! I don’t think the players see it. The field goal kicker is going ahead anyway.” Maggie gasped. “A security officer has Mrs. Dornbusch. Oh my gosh, she kicked him! He’s limping, and I think he’s swearing at her! But she got away! The football is sailing through the air . . .”
“And it’s good!” shouted the PA announcer. For the second time in the last two minutes, the Wildcats crowd erupted in cheers. “That’s a personal best for our Wildcats kicker and one that will go down in history for sure!”
Lena hugged Maggie, lifted her off the ground, and swung her around. Then the two girls lined up next to each other and performed the cheer that Maggie had taught Lena, complete with hand movements, turns, and a kick at the end: “Momentum equals mass times velocity! Go, Wildcats!”
The crowd was so overcome with joyful celebration—hugging, backslapping, and general noisemaking—that it failed to notice the growing gray blob in the middle of the field until it was nearly fully inflated. But Maggie and Lena watched, mesmerized.
“It’s beautiful,” whispered Lena, just as Mrs. Dornbusch reappeared under the bleachers, her raspberry knit cap missing, but otherwise unharmed.
“Well!” said Mrs. Dornbusch, breathing heavily. “At least I’ve still got a little oomph in this old body! But I’d say it’s a pretty serious flaw in your design that you couldn’t disable the mechanism once you started it,” she added, wagging her mitten in Maggie’s direction.
“I can disable the second part of the hack,” said Maggie, “but at this point—”
There was an earthshaking gasp from the six thousand fans in the stands, and Maggie, Lena, and Mrs. Dornbusch looked to see that the sprinklers had turned on, spraying the entire football field and all the players from both teams.
“Let me guess,” said Mrs. Dornbusch. “It isn’t water coming out of those sprinklers.”
Maggie shook her head, trying her best to keep a smile from curling her lips. She was edging toward the side of the stands. Lena was backing up in the opposite direction, not even trying to hide her smile. The Bleacher Beast couldn’t catch them both—
“It’s Moxie!” they shouted, then ran out onto the sidelines.
Maggie and Lena met on the field where the mouse had reached its full height of eight feet. Maggie could spot nearly every other sixth grader, along with their teachers and even Mrs. McDermott. Mr. Platt smiled and waved at her, giving her a big thumbs-up. Allie and Emily were standing with the high school chorus, which had broken out spontaneously in the traditional town anthem:
The river flows past us.
It flows to the sea.
From Odawahaka,
The land of the free.
Others in the stadium joined in the song, more and more of them, until the stadium rang out with the old-fashioned melody, learned for generations, that celebrated the small town and everything about it that made it dear to the people who lived there.
Many of the fans ventured onto the field. Those who liked Moxie leaned over the sprinklers as if they were giant water fountains and drank their fill, and those who didn’t were happy to get soaked in the sticky stuff anyway.
“That’s the thing about Moxie!” shouted Lena. “You either love it or you hate it!”
But Maggie had her eyes on the mouse. “It won’t be long now,” she whispered.
Lena grabbed Maggie’s arm. “It’s going to be spectacular.”
“Unless it doesn’t work,” warned Maggie.
“It will work,” said Lena simply. “I have faith.” She squeezed Maggie’s arm, and both girls held their breath.
The mouse inflated to 180 psi and then exploded in all its glory. Twenty-two pounds of glittery confetti (purple and silver, in honor of the Wildcats) sprayed out all over the field, sticking to the fans who were soaked in Moxie. A ROAR! rose up from the crowd.
Lena cheered, wildly dancing in circles around Maggie. “The perfect hack!”
Maggie was about to contradict Lena and repeat her father’s firmly held belief that no hack is perfect, but she stopped herself. Watching the confetti sparkle as it floated through the air, listening to the song of joy and celebration sung by the entire stadium in unison, and seeing the simple happiness on the faces of the people she’d grown up with her whole life, she had to admit, yes, it was perfect.
“Hack, perfectum!” she shouted, then grabbed both of Lena’s sticky hands and began swinging in circles, her long yellow hair flying out like party streamers caught up in the wind.
Maggie got home much later than she’d expected. It was well after eleven when she and Lena crept into the living room of Maggie’s house and were surprised to find her mother asleep on the couch, an afghan pulled up to her chin.
“He-e-ey,” said her mother, pushing herself to a sitting position while trying to wipe her hair out of her face and swipe away a tiny bit of drool that had dribbled across her cheek. “Look at you. What is all that stuff in your hair?”
“Confetti,” said Maggie. “And anything else that will stick to high-fructose corn syrup. Which, it turns out, is pretty much everything on earth.” She felt gross after the short bus ride home, but happy, too. The hack had been a huge success. “You missed the party.”
“I know. I heard on the radio, though. It sounded like a blowout. Ha-ha!” She smiled at Lena. “I had something I had to work on.”
“Hi, Mrs. Gallagher,” said Lena. It seemed to Maggie that Lena and her mother exchanged a look before realizing that they should definitely not be looking at each other. Maggie stared at one, then th
e other.
“I’m going to my room,” said Maggie. “And then I’m taking a shower. And then I’m going to bed. Forever.”
“Okay!” said Lena, and she laughed in a very strange way, but didn’t move to the door.
“I’ll see you tomorrow?” asked Maggie.
“I think,” said Lena, “that I’ll just . . . get a Moxie for the road.”
“You have got to be kidding,” said Maggie as Lena headed for the kitchen. Maggie turned to her mother. “I wish you’d been there. It was epic.”
Her mother smiled. “Your dad used to say ‘sublime,’ when a hack went off perfectly. That’s a Latin word. It means ‘up to the very limit of perfection.’ Sublime. What is it with engineers and Latin?”
Maggie knew. It was the language of people who built empires.
Her mother would never understand her the way her father would have, if he had lived. Engineers speak another language, she realized. Hackito, ergo sum. Her dad would have loved this night. Maggie was surprised when tears started to fill her eyes. “Good night, Mom,” she said as she climbed the stairs. Lena would have to show herself out.
The hallway was dim and her tears made her vision blurry so that she missed her own doorway and came to the end of the hall where the bathroom was. She swung around. She wiped at her eyes. She reached out to turn on the hallway light.
There was no door.
In confusion, she looked down to the other end of the hallway. There was the door to her mother’s bedroom. There was the hallway closet. Behind her, the bathroom door stood slightly ajar. Everything was exactly the way it had always been in this house. Except that the door to her bedroom had disappeared.
Like a blind person reaching out into unfamiliar territory, she spread both hands and touched the wall where the door should have been. The wallpaper felt smooth under her fingers as it always did. There was the sleepy Little Boy Blue. There were the sheep in the meadow, and there, the cows in the corn.
She heard a giggle. She turned. Lena and her mother were peering up at her from the landing on the stairs. Lena’s smile was so wide it looked like she could swallow a minivan. Her mother was smiling, too, but more carefully, as if she had something to lose.
“You . . . you . . . hacked my door?” asked Maggie slowly.
“It was your mother’s idea!” shouted Lena, unable to hold back her glee. “She asked for my help, but I hardly did anything, just printed up the wallpaper. She’s been working on it all week.”
Maggie ran her fingers carefully over the surface of the paper, reaching wider and wider from the center of where she knew her door was supposed to be. She couldn’t feel a single seam. The pattern matched up perfectly. It was completely undetectable. Sublime.
“I sanded down all the edges,” said her mother. “Then I used this special matte varnish adhesive that causes the roughed-up fibers to sort of meld together.”
“It must have taken you hours,” said Maggie.
Her mother nodded, looking closely at Maggie’s face, waiting.
“You did this for me?” asked Maggie.
“You’re my daughter. I’d do anything for you.”
Maggie didn’t know what to say or do. She had never had this feeling before, the feeling that her mother actually understood her. It was bewildering. “Oh, Mom,” she said awkwardly. Then she rushed down the half flight of stairs and hugged her mother hard, neither one minding the horrible stickiness of the gooey Moxie that coated them both.
“I’m going to cry!” shouted Lena. “Seriously. The tears are about to start gushing out of my eyes!”
“You like it?” asked her mother, squeezing Maggie.
“It’s perfect,” said Maggie. “I didn’t know you were a hacker.”
“Oh, honey,” said her mother, stroking Maggie’s hair. “There’s lots and lots of stuff you don’t know about me.”
Later that night, after showering, Maggie was lying on the sofa in the living room. She had decided to sleep downstairs because she couldn’t bear to undo her mother’s hack yet. It was too fantastic, and she wanted to examine it in the light of day.
Maggie had just entered that am-I-asleep-or-am-I-awake phase, when her cell phone rang. It was Lena.
“Maggie?” she asked. “Did you hear they made the B-1 Bomber the principal of Oda M?”
“No!” said Maggie, trying to keep her voice low because her mother had gone to bed. Oh, are we in trouble.
“I bet she’s the only one who would take the job,” said Lena. Maggie heard the bounce of bedsprings and imagined Lena in her rainbow world, surrounded by all the colors of the prism.
“That’s because she’s the only one who isn’t afraid of mice!” Maggie rolled over on the couch, burrowing under the blankets her mother had tucked in for her.
“She isn’t afraid of anything!” said Lena, and they laughed, retelling the story of how the Dungeon Dragon had tackled the security officer.
Both girls grew quiet for a moment, in that way that happens late at night.
“Maggie?”
“Yeah.”
“I miss the Mouse.”
“Me too.” What would come next, now that the Mouse was no more? During the celebration on the football field, the sixth graders had agreed to abolish the office of class president and have a student council instead. That way, everyone could have a voice in making the school a better place. Even Kayla had agreed to the change. After all, she didn’t want to be class president just because the real winner exploded.
There was something else on Maggie’s mind, too, but she wasn’t sure how to bring it up. Finally, she decided just to ask. “Lena? When Principal Shute said that stuff about your family—that there were ‘oddities’—what was he talking about?”
Maggie could hear Lena take a deep breath in. “The next time we’re together, I’ll tell you all about it. But not tonight. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Maggie. “Tonight, we celebrate!”
“Hackito, ergo sum gaudium!”
“What is it with artists and Latin?” asked Maggie, laughing. She paused for a minute. “I’m really glad you moved to town. You know why? Because you are nothing but trouble, Lena Polachev.”
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to begin by thanking the entire town of Berwick, Pennsylvania, and most particularly Dr. Holly Morrison, previously the principal at Fourteenth Street Elementary School, and Dara Scala, the Title 1 Reading Specialist at Fourteenth Street, who invited me to their district in 2014 to visit Berwick’s four elementary schools. This was my first experience of the necklace of small towns in central Pennsylvania that follow the Susquehanna River as it winds its way from its headwaters in Upstate New York to its final destination, the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. Most of the Susquehanna’s 464 miles flow through Pennsylvania, and if it sounds as though I’m thanking a river in these acknowledgments, I suppose I am. But more specifically, I’m thanking the many people—too many to name—who live along its route and who talked to me with great openness and generosity about what it’s like to live in a small town that has fallen on hard times.
Many will notice that the fictional town of Odawahaka bears more than a passing resemblance to Catawissa, Pennsylvania. That’s because Allison Burrell, librarian and media specialist at Southern Columbia Middle School in Catawissa, was brave enough to answer a desperate, last-minute request from an author she’d never met: Could I please spend a day at your middle school, attending classes, and perhaps even meeting with some of your students? I’m writing this book, you see . . . She kindly—and with great speed—secured approval, made the arrangements, and smoothed my path in every way, and for this, I am eternally grateful. A very special thanks to Madison Colella, Allyson Kranzel, Stephanie Dunkelberger, Lear Quinton, Ty Roadarmel, Max Tillett, Amelia Esposito, and Kayla Gallagher, who all gave up a precious lunch period to talk to the peculiar author who wondered what it was like to be thirteen years old in a small
town in central Pennsylvania. These students were friendly, funny, open, generous, and spirited. I hope I was able to capture their love of their hometowns on the page. I myself fell in love with the town and borrowed liberally the names of its streets, its businesses, its geography, and its points of interest. So, thank you, Catawissa.
Odawahaka Middle School, I want to be clear, is completely unlike the beautiful middle school that students in Catawissa attend. Oda M, rather, is a gothic fantasy that reflects some of the reality of small towns across the country, but more so the dark passage of time and the sad truth of what happens when we fail to adapt and change and grow with present-day circumstances.
I’d like to thank Ariane Oliver, Latin teacher at Wellesley High School, Peter Caccavale, Latin teacher at Needham High School, and Matthew Webb, Latin instructor for the public schools of Brookline. All three helped me with the Latin translations in the book. Any mistakes that appear in the text are entirely my own. Mea culpa. (I did that one all by myself.) And thank you to Deborah Douglas, director of collections and curator of science and technology at the MIT Museum, who answered my questions and provided invaluable sources for information about famous hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To all who are interested in achieving the unachievable, I highly recommend the book Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT, by T. F. Peterson and published by the MIT Press.
Thank you to the members of my writers group who read the first draft of this book and helped, as they always do, to make it better: Sarah Lamstein, Tracey Fern, and Carol Peacock.
And a giant—and ongoing—thank-you to my editor, Maria Barbo, and her assistant, Rebecca Schwarz, at HarperCollins. When Maria and I first discussed the idea of writing a book about two middle school girls who can’t help but get into trouble, I said I wanted to set the story in a small town in central Pennsylvania, the kind of place where all that is wonderful about small-town America exists alongside the struggles and despair of such places. She was fully on board from the beginning, and her support never waivered. For that, I say, Thank you, Maria.