The Great Interactive Dream Machine (6 page)

Aaron's stubbly face fell into his big hands. “No,” he said, “no, no, no, no.”

“What happened, Aaron? You know. You have a theory.” I couldn't get used to my voice. It was like my dad was sitting on my tongue, talking out of my mouth.

“Emotional Component,” he said, “too close to the keyboard.”

“But my mind was a blank,” I said.

“Not when we were going to lunch,” he said. “Then we were really worried about Daryl's peer group, right? What did we both want at that moment?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Didn't we just want them off our case?”

“Go with that thought.”

“Oh. We both wished we were bigger than they are. And older. We wanted to be—”

“That's it,” Aaron said. “We had the same thought at the same time. We wanted to be upper-school size. We wanted to be seniors.”

The sacred word
seniors
hung in the air. My dress code was binding me bad.

The bell rang, and lunch was over.

“Aaron, how are we going to explain this? I wouldn't know you if I met you on the street. We're a couple of complete strangers. How can we go to History like this? How can we go home? This isn't the Hamptons. We can't just take a train.”

“No,” he said, “but it's the same principle, except instead of Ophelia and Heather, it's us. Our need combined spontaneously with my formula. That virus in it made it so interactive, it's almost infectious. I'm thinking radioactivity. I'm thinking—”

“Aaron, shut up.”

He thought for a minute. A big new vein in his forehead pulsed. Then, making senior gestures with his ham-sized hand, he said, “Here's the plan: Forget about History class. We couldn't pass ourselves off as us. Anyway, look how we're dressed. We're ridiculous. We wait till the bell rings again. Then we give it another ten minutes. Then we make a break for the upper-school locker room. After they've changed for P.E., we'll get into their lockers and take some clothes that fit us.”

“Is this stealing?”

“It's borrowing, and do you have a better idea?”

We waited. Another bell rang, and the school settled down for afternoon classes. We waited some more, and I couldn't get used to this body. It bulged all over, and my head was so far from the floor, I nearly had a nose-bleed. Then at the last minute we remembered our sixth-grade shoes and hid them in a file drawer. As Aaron said, if Mrs. Newbery found our shoes but not us, it would just deepen the mystery.

“Let's synchronize watches,” he said at the door. Luckily both watchbands were expandable. We had wrists like tree trunks. “We do this at a dead run,” Aaron whispered. “If Mrs. Newbery's at her desk, sprint right past her. She won't know us anyway.”

When Aaron opened the Black Hole door, we ran into each other. Then we started galloping through the media center. Mrs. Newbery wasn't around, which was just as well. I was pretty sure that somebody was in the book stacks, but I didn't really look because everything was a blur. We weren't used to being this big. It was like running on stilts. All four of our legs got tangled up, and we came crashing down in front of the Leisure Reading revolving rack. We were both grunting. Also, our dress code strangled us all over. When we got up, I heard the seat of Aaron's pants go completely.

The upper-school locker room is in the basement at the other end of school. It was two flights down, and we fell twice each. Our sock feet were like flippers. Then we were thundering down an endless corridor, taking huge strides, following the smell of the upper-school locker room. Then we were in it, and it was empty. The big guys were all over at the soccer field in the park.

“Aaron, we don't know the combinations of any of these locks.”

“If they're anything like the middle school, half of them are broken.” He ran a gigantic hand along the locker doors. He jerked one open, then another.

And inside ... big dress code.

“Aaron, what if they don't fit?”

“Josh, this isn't The Gap. We're not shopping.”

The upper-school guys' books were in their lockers with their names on them. “Hey, look,” I said. “This is Harrison ‘Hulk' Hotchkiss's stuff.”

“And I'm getting Otis ‘Stink' Stuyvesant's stuff,” Aaron said. “We're in luck. These are two of the bigger guys in upper school.”

I pulled out a huge blazer. “Whoa,” I said.

“Don't dawdle,” Aaron said. “Get naked and get dressed.”

I hadn't thought about getting naked. I don't usually think too far ahead.

I wrestled out of my little blazer. Taking off my shirt was like shedding a skin. When I peeled off my pants, my door keys popped out of a pocket and fell on the floor. I swept them up. Hanging on a hook in the locker were Hulk Hotchkiss's big underpants. I wasn't too crazy about wearing somebody else's used underpants. But my sixth-grade pair really had me tied in knots.

Aaron was down to his underpants too. We turned our backs on each other. Finally we were free.

Then we said, “Wow.”

We could keep our own socks. They stretch. Hulk Hotchkiss's shoes were a tight fit. I could have used a size larger. The hardest part was knotting our Huckley ties with our big hands. We had fingers like sausages. Aaron was really slow. Until just lately, his mom's been tying his tie for him. When we were finished, we looked each other over. It was fantastic. It was unbelievable.

My fully formed heart pounded in my well-developed chest. “Okay,” I said, “where do we go from here?”

“We get out of the locker room before anybody comes back,” Aaron said. “We get out of school.”

“Just walk out?”

“Senior privileges,” Aaron said.

Huckley School is a block away from Central Park. Halfway to the corner, we met the upper-school guys coming back.

Stink Stuyvesant and Hulk Hotchkiss led. Everybody was in Huckley sweatshirts and shorts, swaggering toward us. I started to get in the gutter like you have to do when you've got upper-school people coming at you.

“Forget that,” Aaron said, and we held our ground. They walked around us, the whole class. They didn't know us. They couldn't place us. But we were the same size as they were, bigger than most. It felt great.

Hulk Hotchkiss had brushed right by me. Little did he know he'd just walked past his own underwear.

We crossed Fifth Avenue, and then we were in the park. Aaron seemed to have something in mind. Like a plan. Now we were coming up on the soccer field. We sat down on a nearby rock and pulled up our huge knees.

Suddenly it was great. It wasn't even weird anymore. It was the perfect spring day, and we weren't in class, and we were practically grown. Better than grown. We were in upper school.

“How old do you think we are, Aaron?”

“I put us at seventeen, pushing eighteen. I'd say we were looking at colleges about now.”

We sat there and felt the sun on our big stubbly faces. We basked. “Aaron, we're adolescents, and we didn't have to get here. We didn't have to do the whole puberty thing. We didn't have to do the pimple thing. We didn't have to—”

“Hold it a minute,” he muttered.

People were beginning to trickle onto the soccer field from Fifth Avenue. Small, spindly people in droopy shorts were dragging net goals.

“Is that our Gym class?”

Aaron shook his head. “Our class is last period. This is the eighth grade.” It was. Trip Renwick in his Dartmouth sweatshirt was in the lead. Next to him like an assistant coach was Daryl Dimbleby.

We watched while Daryl assembled two eleven-man teams and ordered the real runts to the sidelines. We noticed how he put all his peer group on his own team, making sure the other team could be systematically stomped. We watched Daryl rule while Coach Renwick stood around, taking roll or whatever.

We watched the game kick off.

Then Aaron climbed off the rock. He slipped out of the blazer and rolled up Stink's sleeves.

So I did too. “What are we doing?”

“We're going to level the playing field.”

“We're what?”

“We're going to show Daryl how soccer's played.”

“But Aaron, we don't know. We're terrible at soccer.”

“We were,” he said.

He flexed his thick neck and then his big elbows. He hugged one knee and then the other in a warm-up.

So I did too. Then we started walking toward the game.

We weren't suited up, but our ties said we were from Huckley. And who's going to keep a couple of upperschoolers out of an eighth-grade game? Please.

Most of the guys who weren't on Daryl's team were already flat on the field, clutching parts of their bodies. We came in on their side.

The next minutes went really fast. I was feeling my way, trying to throw my weight around. Aaron got into it. Where his coordination came from I can't tell you. But he had control of the ball and was ankling it down the field, making magical moves with his vast feet through a forest of knobby knees. His fiery hair flashed in the sun, and now the ball was bouncing off his big shoulders, off his heels, you name it. Aaron was steamrolling the peer group. Daryl was screaming for time-out.

Then somehow I myself was pounding up behind Daryl, and Aaron was bearing down on his front like an express bus. It was amazing how small Daryl actually was. Shrunken, nearly. My Mighty Morphin kick went wild, and Hulk's thick shoe connected with the back of Daryl's shorts. It really lifted him. Aaron seemed to confuse Daryl's head with the soccer ball itself. The sound of their colliding skulls echoed.

Daryl went down hard, and a circle of his sidekicks formed around him. We'd given Daryl a taste of his own soccer. Coach Renwick's whistle cut through the chaos.

Aaron and I made a run for the rock. And we could run like deer. We grabbed up our blazers and kept on going. We didn't stop till we were in sight of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Then we were leaning against a couple of trees, getting our breath back. The adrenaline was thundering through me.

“That was great,” I gasped. “You want to go back for last period and get Buster?”

“We made our point,” Aaron said. “We got better things to do with our time.”

“How much time do you think we have?”

It was almost the old Aaron again, because his sausage fingers were beginning to keyboard the air. Old habits die hard.

“Cyberspatially, we could stay like this. I'm talking numbers, not need. But the Emotional Component wears off.” Aaron tapped his forehead. “After all, the human brain is the ultimate computer.”

“Are you a hundred percent sure that we're ...”

“Bidirectional? Yes.”

“So what are we talking here—hours, days?”

“It varies,” Aaron said, meaning he didn't know. “Wanting to go back could speed up the process. Like if we both concentrated, we might—”

“Frankly, my heart wouldn't be in it, Aaron. I'm not ready to give up all this.” I pointed at my body.

“That's because you never think ahead,” he said. “Next class period we're still absent. After that we're at large. We're fugitives. Also, we could go back to being eleven within the next couple of minutes. Think about that.”

I stared. “You mean we'd be back to our miserable small bodies, but wearing these big clothes in the middle of Central Park?”

“Exactly. Our best bet is to get home and hide in our rooms till it happens. Anyway, this condition is caused by a virus loose in my hard-drive memory. The sooner I get back to my technopolis, the better.”

Mention of the virus I'd caused shut me up till we got to the little pond where kids sail their boats. Aaron was keyboarding the afternoon air. We were taking long strides in our big shoes.

“I can't see it,” I said. “Today we're getting what we wanted. When we went to the Hamptons, we got what Ophelia and Heather wanted.”

“My formula's cuckoo,” Aaron said.

“I know that. But Ophelia came with us to the Hamptons. Why didn't Heather, not that I wanted her?”

“We went because we were standing too close to my equipment. And Ophelia wasn't that far away. Ophelia's mind is probably better focused than Heather's. Who knows what kinetic powers dogs have? They've got a lot of untapped potential. Dogs can hear sounds that humans can't, right?”

“Do I know?” I said. “Am I a poodle?”

“Careful,” Aaron warned. “Just don't say things like that around my PC.”