Slob (3 page)

Now he had.

You know why?

Because sitting on the table in front of him, stacked in a tidy little column, were three Oreo cookies.

“What are you staring at?” he asked in a quiet voice.

“Cool scar,” I said. I really did. I do stuff like that when I’m nervous and can’t think of what to say.

I can’t repeat his response, though. Use your imagination, you won’t be wrong.

“Sorry,” I said.

That’s correct, you heard me. I said sorry to the kid who stole my moment of bliss.

You might have too. Did I mention that Mason Ragg’s right eye is a spooky milky blue while his left one is brown?

“Too bad about the cookies, man,” Izzy said after the period buzzer sounded and we had to go our separate ways. “But no use tangling with Ragg. He has a buck knife strapped to his arm.”

“I heard it was a switchblade in his sock,” I said.

“Does it matter? I mean, really?”

“No.”

“Hey. Keep the faith.” Izzy could say things like that, which might sound sort of cool if a non-giant said them. But when he said them, it sounded like one of those deep, garbled voices you hear on the subway speaker system. You know, “Ninety-sixth Street and Broadway. Watch the closing doors. Keep the faith.”

“Thanks, Izzy.”

He squeezed my shoulder. It hurt. I didn’t say “Ow,” though, because he was only trying to be nice, and he couldn’t help being insanely strong.

After school I waited for Jeremy and we walked home together, like we always do. I was in a lousy mood, but she was in a very good one. Suspiciously good. She strode along beside me with a small, secretive smile.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing. Just a gwab thing, that’s all.”

“By the way, I think there’s a girl in my class who’s a gwab,” I said.

“Who? Oh, Rachel somebody or other, you mean?” Jeremy said.

“Rachel Lowry.”

“Nah. She looks like a gwab, but she’s not. Anyway, all the gwabs are in sixth grade not seventh. Hey, do people ever get expelled from our school?”

“Why?” I looked at her. She was still smiling a small, secretive smile. I didn’t like it. “What did you do? Is it something about gwab?”

It’s not “gwab,” actually, but GWAB. Girls Who Are Boys. Jeremy joined the club two weeks ago. There are seven other girls in the club and they have all changed their names to boys’ names. They only wear boys’ clothes and cut their hair in boy haircuts. Jeremy didn’t cut her hair. I don’t know how she got away with it, since GWAB is pretty strict. Jeremy is stubborn, though. Her hair is bright red, straight as a ruler, and reaches the last vertebra in her spine. Jeremy used to hate it when she was younger because someone in her class told her that redheads were freaks of nature. But our mother told her that redheads were genetically more courageous than other people and that she should always wear her hair long, like a warrior’s badge of honor. I don’t think there is any biological accuracy to that statement, by the way. In any case, Jeremy never cut her hair, except for a trim at the barbershop every now and then.

“We all signed our boy names on our math test,” she said.

“But how will Mr. Shackly know who you are?”

“He won’t. He’ll have to ask. Then we will stand up in class and publicly declare that we are to be called by our boy names from now on.”

“He won’t do it, you know,” I said. Mr. Shackly is one of the tougher teachers at our school.

“He’ll have to,” Jeremy said simply. “We won’t answer him if he calls us by our girl names.”

I groaned. There was going to be trouble. The GWAB members were pretty intense. I’ve seen them around, looking very determined. They recruited Jeremy after they saw her get into a fight with a boy in her class. They said she had the right stuff, and she agreed to join. I don’t think she did it because she actually wants to be a boy. I think she did it because she was just lonely. Things have been a little topsyturvy for us these past two years—new school, new apartment. New life. I think Jeremy was just glad to have some friends again. Plus, she loves a good fight and so do most of the GWAB members. It was a perfect fit, really.

“Hey! Flapjack!”

Jeremy and I both turned around to see Andre Bertoni jogging up to us. We occasionally meet him as we’re walking to or from school since he lives right across the street from us, in this fancy apartment building called Fuji Towers.

More about Fuji Towers later.

Andre was wearing his big-screen smile. I heard Jeremy swallow hard. Really, I heard it. She has a huge crush on Andre. She’s a sensible kid in every other way.

“How you doing, man?” Andre said when he caught up to us. “Hey, Caitlin.”

“She’s not Caitlin anymore,” I told him. “She’s changed her name to Jeremy.”

“But that’s a boy’s name,” he said, his smile now looking confused.

“That’s right,” I said.

He looked over at Jeremy, and her face became roughly the same color as her hair.

“You know what I would do if I were you, Flapjack?” he said, looking away from Jeremy.

Kill yourself? I thought. But I said. “I have no idea, Andre.”

“I’d sue,” he said confidently.

“Sue who?” I asked.

“The school,” Andre said. “Because of what Mr. Wooly did to you.”

“What did he do?” Jeremy’s ears pricked up at this. She was always looking out for unfair things that people had done to other people, especially if it involved me.

“Nothing, nothing,” I said.

“What did he do to Owen?” she addressed this to Andre, completely forgetting herself and yanking Andre’s jacket sleeve. Andre looked a bit surprised himself. He smoothed down the material of his jacket (it was probably some fancy European jacket that his father had brought back from some super-suave country).

“He put him in a dog harness and forced him to roll around on the floor,” Andre said.

“It was nothing,” I insisted.

Jeremy’s mouth gawped open. For a moment I thought she was about to bellow. She’s a little bit like a superhero with no superhero talents. She despises bullies and loves underdogs, much like the classic superhero. But she’s thin as a coat hanger and on the shortish side, and all she can do is punch reasonably hard with her bony knuckles. No jet-propelled flying, no invisibility skills.

“I’ll pulverize him,” she said in this quiet voice. It was impressive. Even Andre gave her his full attention for about seven seconds before he turned back to me.

“Tell your mother to call my dad. He might even be willing to take the case himself.” Then he jogged on, leaving me with the dismal, fleeting image of Mom sitting in Mr. Bertoni’s cushy leather office chair (it had to be leather) discussing how I had been trussed up in a dog harness.

“How could Wooly treat you like that!” Jeremy blurted.
“You!”

She has this idea about me. She thinks I am a better person than I actually am. Nicer, funnier, smarter. I mean, I am smart, but she thinks I’m a genius, which I am not. Not quite. I missed genius rank by one point.

What she didn’t know was that people were always treating me like Mr. Wooly had, or thereabouts. I mean, I do think she understood I wasn’t exactly popular, but sixth graders and seventh graders live in totally different universes. She didn’t know that I had become an official bully magnet, the punch line of every joke. That people made fart noises when I walked by and murmured things like “Fatty Fatty Ding Dong.” She didn’t know and I wanted to keep it that way.

“Just forget it,” I said. “It was no big deal.”

But the anger was leaving her face and being replaced by a look of despair. “Oh, Owen. What a world.”

They were gut-squeezing words. It made me think of other stuff besides Mr. Wooly and stolen Oreo cookies. I glanced at Jeremy. She was frowning down at the pavement. I worried that she might be thinking of the very same stuff.

“Hey,” I said, trying to make my voice sound jolly. “How about we go to the demo site on Ninety-third Street?”

“All right, I guess.” She didn’t sound enthusiastic, but once we arrived at the tall sheets of plywood that fenced off the demolition area, she started to perk up a little. The week before, Jeremy and I had found a loose board on one corner. Security around these places is shockingly slack. Every so often I consider writing the mayor of New York and letting him know what a shoddy job the demo crews are doing and that little kids could really get hurt, but that probably wouldn’t be in our best interest.

We slipped inside. The site was a mess of rubble, of course. The tenement had a blazing fire a few weeks before and had burned down partway. The demolition crew knocked the rest of it down a little while after. There were some real gems scattered around. To date, we had scavenged the motors from a washing machine, a heap of bicycle chains, an old laptop that worked some of the time, half of a pair of handcuffs (no keys), and a really beautiful slab of marble.

One time, we ran into a young guy who was also hunting there. He looked totally normal. Nice button-down shirt and jeans. He said he liked to furnish his apartment with recycled items. I thought that was a very polite way of saying he was a garbage picker, just like us. He was a pretty friendly guy, and he did give us some advice about new demo sites and a warning about metal scavengers. He said that they we should watch out for them. They were really protective of their sites, because they made a living out of collecting stuff like copper pipes, brass valves, and aluminum heating coils and selling it to scrap metal dealers. He said that they weren’t beyond using violence if they caught you on their sites. That scared the heck out of me, but it made Jeremy even more eager to go scavenging. She liked anything that might pose bodily danger.

Back home, we dumped our haul in my room. Mom wasn’t home yet—she never gets home before six thirty—and Honey’s back teeth were swimming she had to pee so badly, so first thing I did was take her for a walk. Honey is a pit bull that Mom found in front of our apartment building one evening. We named her Honey so that she wouldn’t seem quite so scary to people, but it never really worked. In the elevator people press themselves up against the opposite wall and give her the evil eye. She doesn’t seem to care. She wags her tail at them anyway. She’s so easygoing that she never fusses when I put the Crap Catcher on her. It’s one of my first inventions. Fairly primitive—a strap around the waist and a loop fitted under her butt, made of wire slipped into a sleeve of plastic. Attached to the loop is a tiny motor, scavenged from an electric shaver I found at a demo site on Seventy-seventh Street. What you do is you fasten a plastic bag around the loop with a rubber band and walk your dog. When she does her thing, you push one button on a handheld remote and the band cinches together quickly. The rubber band pings off the loop and the plastic bag falls to the ground, ready for you to pick up and put in the garbage can. It works beautifully. You wouldn’t believe how many people stop me in the street and ask where they can buy one. The only weak spot is the rubber band pinging off somewhere.

After I walked Honey, I opened the fridge and found a plate on the bottom shelf with an apple, a slim slice of cheese, and a handful of zucchini sticks. My afternoon snack. I devoured it in two minutes flat. It made zero impact on the empty hole in my stomach where the three Oreos should have been.

I knew where the package of Oreos was kept. The cabinet above the refrigerator. My mom calls it the Stop-and-Think Cabinet. In order to reach it, you have to find the phone book and the dictionary, drag over a chair, put the phone book on the chair, the dictionary on top of the phone book, then balance yourself on top of the phone book and the dictionary in order to reach the shelf. All that dragging and balancing, and potentially falling, gives you time to stop and think if what’s in that cabinet is really worth the trouble. It was. But here’s the thing . . . let’s say I did take a few unauthorized Oreo cookies. There was a chance that Mom wouldn’t notice they were missing. But there was also a chance that she would. If she did, she wouldn’t get mad. She wouldn’t yell or anything like that. What she’d do was worse. She’d look me in the eye and tell me that I had broken my promise to her.
Pow
. That’s like getting the worst sucker punch right in the gut. If you don’t believe me, you don’t know Mom.

Three more hours till dinner. I went to my room with a sickish rumbling in my stomach. In the center of the room was a tripod on which stood an eighteen-inch satellite dish. On the floor was a black receiver, an old television set, a mass of wire coils, connectors, and various hardware.

Her name is Nemesis.

I’ve been researching and building Nemesis for a year and a half. She’s nearly finished.

I’m not going to tell you what she will do once she’s complete. You don’t know me well enough yet. You probably think you do. Everyone thinks they know the fat kid. We’re so obvious. Our embarrassing secret is out there for everyone to see, spilling over our belts, flapping under our chins, stretching the seams of our jeans.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have other secrets that you can’t see.

I pulled out the metal toolbox from under my bed and opened it. As always, I took a moment to admire the sight—neatly organized nuts, bolts, and screws in the top shelf, tiny to medium-sized wire clippers and an X-Acto knife in the middle shelf, and needle nose pliers, wire strippers, and screwdrivers in the bottom shelf, arranged according to size, along with bottles of oil and grease and an ancient soldering iron.

Thomas Edison once said, “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”

I definitely had the junk. There was also a carton in my closet, full of old motors—motors from electric fans, automatic jewelry cleaners, and toy cars all the way up to a boat’s outboard motor—tangles of wires, spare parts from the auto salvage, an elevator cable, and much more.