Nothing but Trouble

  The class groaned just as the bell rang. “Dismissed!” he shouted, then walked out.

  “One point five,” whispered Maggie, stuffing her calculations into her notebook.

  Force equals mass times acceleration. If Mrs. Dornbusch and Principal Shute were placed on a single track and approached each other at identical rates of acceleration in a head-on collision, Shute would create one and a half times the force of the B-1 Bomber, thus obliterating her. It was a formidable difference.

  Maggie wondered how the rest of the year would go—if Day One started off with a bang like this.

  SIX

  AT LUNCH, MAGGIE WAS ASSIGNED TO Table 10, along with half her homeroom: Lyle, Max, Tyler, Jenna, Colt, Kayla—and the new girl.

  Emily and Allie were assigned to Table 1, which wasn’t even close enough to pass notes. In fifth grade, the girls had eaten lunch together every day. This year, clearly, would be different. But Maggie had known things would be different even before Mr. Shute assigned tables. For four weeks that summer, Emily and Allie had attended a church-sponsored sleep-away chorus camp on the shores of Lake Melody in Lackawanna State Forest. They had spent their days practicing harmonies and breathing techniques, learning about things that Maggie had never even heard of: vocal breaks and counterpoints, respiration and phonation. Then again, Maggie couldn’t even carry a tune.

  But as she set her cardboard tray on the table, she was shocked to recognize a feeling she hadn’t expected: relief. She felt relieved not to be sitting at the same table with Allie and Emily, the silent bump on the log as they burst forth into glorious song.

  Maggie sat down at the round cafeteria table with its eight attached stools. The tables were bright green and always made Maggie think of an octopus offering a pie at the end of each of its eight tentacles. Two seats over sat Colt DuPrey—by Maggie’s estimation the quietest kid in the class. In fact, by the time Maggie sat down at the table, he had already settled into a book, reading as he ate his baloney sandwich. Lena promptly sat down in the empty seat between Maggie and Colt.

  “Those are kind of . . . harsh,” said Lena, and Maggie saw that she was looking at the two dusty, old football banners that hung on either side of the cafeteria clock. Behind the banners was a kind of balcony. From there you could look down on the entire cafeteria.

  “The banners?” Maggie examined them. One read, There is no substitute for STRENGTH and no excuse for a LACK OF IT. The other one read, The PRIDE and STRENGTH of the Odawahaka Wildcats will not be entrusted to the TIMID or the WEAK. Both displayed the image of the fierce, lunging Wildcat.

  “Are they supposed to be . . . inspiring? Or powerful?” asked Lena.

  Maggie shrugged. “I don’t even notice them anymore. They’ve been there forever.”

  Kayla arrived and asked Colt, “Could you slide down, please? I’m supposed to sit next to Lena,” with that peculiar mix of politeness and impatience that only Kayla could get away with. Without a word, Colt marked his place in his book and moved down to make room for Kayla.

  How does she do it? Maggie wondered.

  “Now that’s power,” whispered Lena to Maggie, as if she were reading her thoughts. Maggie and Lena laughed, which brought a scowl to Kayla’s face as she opened her carton of milk.

  The one and only topic of conversation at Table 10 that day was the morning’s crazy prank. Max and Tyler were convinced that it was the work of some seventh-grade students who were mocking the sixth graders for being left behind in the falling-down old school when every other class had moved on. “We’re the class that no one wants,” Max explained to Lena, spinning on his stool as he ate his french fries.

  “That is not true!” argued Kayla. “We are not the class that no one wants!”

  “Yes, we are,” insisted Max. “The school’s going to be torn down, and we’re the class that has to spend another year in this crypt. It’ll probably fall down while we’re still here and then we’ll be”—he made his voice ghosty—“buried alive!”

  “Stop it!” ordered Kayla. She turned to Lena. “They just need to make space for us. That’s all. And there just wasn’t . . .” Kayla looked for a prettier way to say it, but then gave up. “There just wasn’t enough money.”

  “The town is broke,” crowed Max, continuing to spin on his pie-shaped stool.

  “Quit it,” said Kayla impatiently. “Back to this morning—I think it might have been the teachers who did everything, as a special welcome back, since we’re the very last class at Oda M.”

  “Yeah, maybe it was that psycho math teacher, Mr. Platt,” said Tyler. “He’s not normal! Did you notice all the cat stuff in his room?”

  Everyone had. In addition to a cat poster that announced New! Robotics Club! Meetings on Tuesdays after school!, Mr. Platt had a cat stapler, a cat bobblehead, cat bookends, and a digital cat stopwatch that meowed to signal the end of timed quizzes. He even had a giant stuffed toy lion lounging on top of his filing cabinet.

  “So he likes cats!” said Maggie. “That doesn’t mean he filled our lockers with tennis balls.” Maggie didn’t like sloppy logic.

  But Lyle had an entirely original theory: he insisted that the prank was the work of the fabled mice of Oda M. After all, it had been well known for years that burrows of mice lived in the walls of the old building. They could be heard scurrying about when students were taking tests or when anyone entered the building after dark. And there were all kinds of stories of “mouse mischief” that had taken place over the years. Lyle held up a ketchup-covered finger and pronounced in a somber voice, “It has been foretold: the mice are finally coming out of the walls.” Then he licked the ketchup off his finger, causing a chorus of groans to rise from Table 10.

  Mr. Esposito wandered by, smiling blandly. “Slow down, Maximus,” he said gently, resting his hands on Max’s shoulders to bring his spinning to a stop. Mr. Esposito taught French and Spanish to the students at Oda M, but his real passion was Latin. It was his dream to someday teach the language of Cicero and Ovid to the students in Odawahaka. So far, no one seemed the least bit interested. “A modicum of decorum. For as the great poet Virgil said, ‘Durate et vosmet rebus servate secundis.’ Yes. Yes, indeed!” He wandered off, his eyes slightly misty behind his thick glasses.

  The students at Table 10 held back their laughter until Mr. Esposito was out of earshot.

  “He’s another nut!” said Max. And the arguing continued about who had been responsible for turning a boring first day of school into a morning the students would never forget.

  “Oh, gross!” said Kayla, pulling a long piece of blond hair from her lunch tray. “This is one of yours!” she yelled at Maggie.

  Maggie shrugged. “Extra protein. It’s good for you.”

  Kayla balled the offensive strand of hair into a napkin and threw it at Maggie. “Your hair is a menace to society,” she said. “Why don’t you do something with it? Instead of just letting it grow like it’s some kind of wild plant!”

  Before Maggie could respond that she actually liked her hair just the way it was, Lena turned to face her and Maggie was finally able to read the lettering on her T-shirt. It said: Dada Is My Daddy. When Maggie saw it, she laughed so suddenly that she inhaled a piece of hamburger. She reached for her carton of milk and tried to guzzle it to wash the burger chunk down, but because she was still laughing so hard, the milk sprayed out of her nose. That got Max and Tyler going, and pretty soon everyone at Table 10 was in hysterics. Everyone except Kayla. “That is disgusting!” she declared.

  It was true: bits of hamburger were scattered across the table, doused in puddles of milk—which had traveled through Maggie’s nose. It was disgusting. But Maggie didn’t care. She hadn’t laughed that hard in a long time. She certainly didn’t laugh like that with Emily and Allie.

  Maggie gathered up most of the hamburger bits and placed them on a napkin. (Lyle was eyeing the napkin, but even he wouldn’t eat nose-milk-doused hamburger . . . would he?) Pointing at Lena’s T-shirt, Max asked
, “So what’s Dada?”

  Maggie jumped in and said, “It was this weird, weird art movement that happened after World War I, when all the artists were fed up with how horrible things were and how ugly the war had been, and they made art that basically said, ‘The world doesn’t make any sense and neither do we.’ And they called it Dada, because Dada doesn’t mean anything.”

  Lena nodded. “And when she says weird, she means weird. Like they painted a beard and a mustache on a picture of the Mona Lisa and said, ‘It’s art!’ Or they put a urinal on a pedestal and said, ‘It’s art!’”

  Lyle’s eyes opened wide for a moment. “Gross!” he said with enthusiasm, then returned to his habitual state of sleepiness.

  “That’s the dumbest name ever,” said Max. “Dada? It sounds like a baby.”

  “That’s kind of the point,” said Maggie.

  “But it was art,” said Lena, “because it made people think and feel. And it was political, too. They wanted to protest the war, and they got people to look at the world in a different way. Which is pretty cool.” She smiled at Maggie. “You still have . . .” She pointed to her upper lip, and Maggie swiped at some milk that clung to her face.

  Maggie smiled back at Lena. She was feeling so good, she didn’t even get that prickly feeling that usually came just before a Kayla attack.

  “A urinal!” said Kayla, her wide smile flashing, her teeth sparkling like jewels in a necklace. “That reminds me of something that happened that was so funny. Do you remember, Maggie, the time you were over at my house and you peed all over the kitchen floor? We were playing—I don’t even remember what it was we were doing—”

  “It was Legos,” said Maggie. “We were building a castle together.” She felt her chest tighten and her face flush.

  Don’t let her get to you, whispered her father in her ear.

  Max and Tyler started to snicker. Of course, everyone at the table had heard this story before. It was a small town, and the humiliations of your childhood followed you forever. But there was one person at the table who hadn’t heard this story—Lena—and Maggie knew that Kayla’s performance was just for her. Jenna giggled nervously. Colt kept his head down, reading his latest adventure series book. And Lyle had torn off a chip of cardboard from his lunch tray and was eating it.

  “Right. Legos!” squealed Kayla, turning to Lena. “It was amazing. She stood up and just a flood of pee started to pour out of her. I mean—a river. And she made this huge puddle on the floor and my mom had to clean it up, which she was really not happy about. I mean, can you blame her? Somebody else’s pee!”

  “Kayla! We were in first grade.” They had each drunk about a gallon of lemonade, and Maggie was really concentrating on the castle . . . and then it happened. She knew explaining or defending herself was not going to help. Arguing just made the story stick in people’s minds even more. But why did Kayla have to bring it up on the first day of school?

  “Who pees their pants when they’re six?” asked Kayla. “I can’t ever remember having an accident.”

  “Oh, I peed in my pants a tiny bit just last week,” said Lena, waving her hand casually. “What’s the big deal?” She looked at the frozen faces around the table and smiled her warm, friendly smile. “Oh, come on! We’ve all done it! I say if you’ve never wet your pants from laughing hard, then you’ve never really laughed.”

  Lyle nodded his head soberly. “That is an undisputable truth.”

  And after a split second of stunned silence, everyone at the table started to laugh. Including Maggie.

  Kayla, however, looked furious. She got up and walked away to dump her lunch tray in the trash barrel.

  Serves her right, said her father. And Maggie couldn’t help agreeing.

  While the others went back to arguing about the identity of the prankster—and if he or she would strike again—Maggie watched as Lena took a sketchbook out of her shoulder bag and began to draw something with her pencil. Her hands moved quickly, and she seemed completely absorbed in her work.

  As Maggie passed Lena on the way to the trash barrel, she looked over Lena’s shoulder and saw that she had drawn a mouse—one that looked so real, you would think you were staring at a photograph. Underneath the drawing, Lena had written:

  SEVEN

  AFTER SCHOOL, ALLIE AND EMILY ASKED Maggie if she wanted to come with them to the high school. They were going to try out for the school chorus. There was no middle school chorus this year; instead, all clubs and teams had been consolidated at the high school. Allie’s mother had promised to drive them to Bloomsburg for ice cream afterward.

  “I’m kind of tired,” said Maggie, which was true. She’d hardly gotten any sleep last night. Besides, sitting around while Emily and Allie practiced scales and vocalizations didn’t sound like much fun.

  Maggie started the uphill trek alone. A pickup truck passed her as she crossed Pine Street, and she noticed that it sported the town’s favorite bumper sticker:

  What This Country Needs Is Plenty of MOXIE!

  Typical Odawahaka, thought Maggie. She couldn’t help brooding as she walked, thinking about Allie and Emily auditioning together. The three had been a team for so long—ever since Kayla had dumped Maggie in the first grade—that it was hard to think of Emily and Allie doing something just the two of them. But Maggie couldn’t quite hide from herself this inconvenient fact: she hadn’t really missed them while they were at chorus camp.

  Maggie had just crossed Main and was still second-guessing her decision not to go with Allie and Emily, when she heard someone calling her name. She turned to see Lena.

  “Can I walk home with you?” Lena asked Maggie after crossing the street.

  “Afraid of getting lost?” It was a small-town joke. Getting lost in Odawahaka would be like getting lost inside a cereal box.

  Lena laughed. Maggie was beginning to see that Lena was a girl who laughed easily. She wondered if there was a trick to that, or if some people were just born that way. And others not.

  “No,” said Lena. “I just thought . . . tough day. First day in a new school. You know?” Maggie was surprised. Lena had made it all seem so easy.

  “Actually,” said Maggie, “I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be the new kid in town.” Kind of nice, I bet. “Come on. It’s all uphill from here.”

  As they walked, Lena reached into her shoulder bag and took out a camera. “Can I take a picture of you?” she asked.

  Maggie gave her a strange look. “Why?”

  “I take pictures of everything. Absolutely everything.” Lena fiddled with the lens ring, snapping a few test shots to check the aperture setting. Maggie didn’t know much about cameras, but she could tell that this was an expensive piece of equipment. “You have no idea how hard it was to leave my camera in my bag all day at school. I am never without my camera. It’s like a part of my body.” She raised the camera to her eye. “So . . . can I take a picture?”

  “I suppose . . . ,” said Maggie, and Lena snapped four or five pictures in rapid succession, then circled around Maggie and snapped another half dozen.

  “Stop it!” said Maggie, laughing self-consciously. “You said one. Why do you need so many?”

  “Because I make art. And it takes a lot of material to make art.” She swooped in and took a close-up of Maggie’s nose, then one of her left ear, then one of a single long curl of her out-of-control hair. “You have the most gorgeous hair I’ve ever seen on a human being! It’s like”—she reached out and touched a soft tendril—“the kind of hair a fairy would have. The best kind of fairy!” Then she lifted the camera and looked critically at the playback screen. She frowned. “I need my other lens. I’m doing photo montages of faces. Do you mind if I mix up parts of your face with parts of other people’s faces?”

  “That is a very disturbing thought,” said Maggie. “No, really! Stop!” She started laughing again as Lena took a photograph of her chin. “I have a zit on my chin! You may not photograph that!” She put her hand
up to cover the lens.

  “I won’t show it to anyone. I promise! I’m very respectful of my subjects.” Lena flashed through the shots on her camera screen again, smiling at a few. Then she looked at Maggie, who must have had a strange look on her face. “Yikes! Am I being too forward? I tend to do that. Especially with people I like.”

  Maggie was surprised. Who talked like this? Especially with someone they’d just met? Hoping to redirect the conversation, she said, “Hey, thanks for saying you peed in your pants at lunch. I mean—not that you peed in your pants at lunch but that . . . you know what I mean.” Lena was laughing. Maggie decided to change the subject again. “Can I take a picture of you?”

  “Absolutely!” said Lena. “I love having my picture taken.”

  Maggie took the camera and snapped a photo of Lena smiling, but when Lena looked at it, she shook her head. “Too ordinary,” she said. “Try taking one from a weird angle. Like in a way that no one has ever taken a photo before.”

  So Maggie snapped a picture of Lena’s back, then one of her toes (all ten of them lined up in a row), then one of her armpit.

  “These are awesome!” Lena jumped in excitement, looking at the playback of the photos on the camera’s screen. “You’ve got talent, Maggie Gallagher!”

  They had reached the top of the hill. “This is my house,” said Maggie, handing back the camera.

  Lena took the camera from her and smiled. “Can I come in?” She ruffled her hand through her pixie cut, making the sweaty ends stand up in spikes. Maggie hesitated.

  “Sorry!” said Lena. “Too forward again. Such a bad habit!”

  Maggie laughed. “No, it’s okay.” Weird, but okay, she thought. She imagined Lena meeting Grandpop, who could be downright rude, and her mother, who—that was a whole other mess. Maggie worried that Lena wouldn’t think she was so great after meeting her family. But today was Monday, and that was the day that Maggie’s grandfather went to the medical center for his weekly monitoring. A handicapped-accessible van picked him up at one o’clock. And her mother probably wouldn’t be home until dinnertime. Still, maybe it would be better to go to Lena’s house. “Where do you live?” asked Maggie.