The Smartest Kid in the Universe

by Chris Grabenstein

  “I lost both my teammates from last year,” Grace continued. “One got into Chumley Prep. The other transferred to Sunny Brook.”

  “Do you have to know facts and stuff to be on the team?” asked Jake.

  “Uh, yeah,” Grace said with a laugh.

  Jake nodded. “Bummer.”

  A gigantic eighth grader named Noah “No Neck” Nelson strode up the hall. “What’s that for?” he said, jabbing a thumb at the poster.

  “Our Riverview Pirates Quiz Bowl Team,” Grace answered cheerfully. “A friendly but fierce competition against all the other middle schools in our district.”

  “Quiz Bowl?” snorted Noah. “That’s stupid.”

  He lunged forward to rip the hand-painted poster off the wall, but Jake blocked his move.

  “Hey, Noah—speaking of bowls, you ever have one of those taco bowls at Taco Bell?”

  “Oh yeah, man. Those are awesome. You can eat the bowl. It’s a taco.”

  “I know. Isn’t that amazing?”

  “Totally. I like those bread bowls at Panera, too. With the soup inside a scooped-out loaf of bread? I like any bowl you can eat.”

  “Me too, bro.” Jake balled up his fist, Noah balled up his, and they knocked knuckles.

  “Catch you later, Jake,” said Noah as he strolled away contentedly. “Oh, I almost forgot: you should try the meatball pizza bowl at Olive Garden.”

  “Thanks for the tip, bro!” Jake called after him.

  “No problem, man.”

  “Thank you,” whispered Grace when Noah was gone. “I only made the one poster. Not to be a pesado, but if Noah had ripped it up, I’d be en un lío.”

  “Yeah,” said Jake, even though, once again, he had no idea what Grace meant. “So, uh, Grace—are you trying to teach me Spanish?”

  She grinned. “Maybe. Un poco. Don’t forget: I saw your report card. You could use a little help in the foreign languages department.”

  “Hey, I got a C in French. Or, as they say in France, ‘un C.’ ”

  Kojo came strutting up the hall. “I love it when a plan comes together,” he announced, dropping another catchphrase from another ancient TV show. “Guess what, Grace? Your uncle Charley is going to take me down to the fallout shelter for my extra-credit report.”

  “Really?” said Grace. “That’s sort of off-limits….”

  “This school has a fallout shelter?” said Jake.

  “Uh-huh,” said Kojo. “From the nineteen sixties. You know—the Cuban Missile Crisis. Mr. Lyons’s grandfather was the custodian back then and told him all about it. The entrance is in the custodian’s closet.” Kojo squinted at the Quiz Bowl poster. “You doing that again?”

  “Definitely,” said Grace.

  “Put me down as a maybe,” said Kojo. “I have to check my schedule. They’re streaming Columbo reruns on the Sleuth channel this month.”

  The bell rang for first period. Well, it kind of clanged like an alarm clock somebody had knocked to the floor one too many times. That meant it was time for homeroom.

  “Let me know if you can be on the team, Kojo,” said Grace, hurrying off to class. “You’d be awesome!”

  “Will do.”

  Kojo and Jake headed in the opposite direction, to Mr. Keeney’s class.

  “You really might join the Quiz Bowl team?” asked Jake.

  “Sure. If, you know, it doesn’t interfere with basketball, my extra-credit social studies project, or my TV shows. When you make it to the top academically, like Grace and I have, Jake, you need to send the elevator back down for the other folks.”

  “I have no idea what that means, Kojo.”

  “It means if you’re smart, you have to help people like you, who, you know, aren’t so, uh, academically gifted.”

  “Gee, thanks, Kojo.”

  “Hey—who loves ya, baby?”

  “Are you going to keep saying that all day?”

  “I might, baby. I might.”

  On his way to lunch, Jake saw an extremely lanky kid he didn’t recognize.

  The guy was holding a slip of paper and turning around in circles.

  “You lost?” Jake asked.

  “Hardly,” the boy replied, looking down at Jake. Jake wasn’t offended. He figured the guy was so tall, he looked down on everybody.

  “Cool. I’m Jake McQuade.”

  “Hubert Huxley.”

  Jake raised a hand to slap a high five. The tall guy left him hanging.

  “Can you kindly direct me to Mrs. Malvolio’s office?” he asked.

  Jake nudged his head to the left. “She’s the principal. Her office is the office.”

  “Ah, yes. Smashing.”

  “Are you British?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Only British people say ‘smashing.’ You know, on that TV show. The one where they bake all the cakes.”

  The kid stared at Jake as if he were an unruly monkey hurling poo at the zoo. “Father was right. This is the worst school in the district. Maybe the entire state.”

  “Whatever. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go finish defending Earth from a zombie invasion. Because that’s the kind of twenty-first-century skills we’re learning here at Riverview Middle School.”

  Jake hit the cafeteria and quickly completed the next level in Revenge of the Brain Dead with one hand while munching on a cheeseburger with the other.

  “Book ’em, Jake-o!” said Kojo, peering over Jake’s shoulder. “That’s from Hawaii Five-O, only the dude’s name is Danno, not Jake-o.”

  “You ever think you watch too much TV?” asked Jake.

  “No such thing, baby.”

  Mrs. Malvolio marched into the lunchroom. She was carrying a thick stack of papers. Hubert Huxley, the tall kid Jake had met earlier, was walking behind her. They made a beeline for Grace Garcia’s table.

  “Miss Garcia?” the principal said with a smile.

  “Yes, Mrs. Malvolio?”

  “This is Hubert Huxley. He goes to Sunny Brook Middle School.”

  “Top middle school in the district,” said Hubert, bouncing proudly on his heels. “I’m the student council president and, of course, captain of the basketball team.”

  Mrs. Malvolio waved her stack of papers in the air. “I have completed the paperwork you’ll need,” she said to Grace.

  “Um, to do what?”

  Mrs. Malvolio smiled. “To transfer to Sunny Brook.”

  “We’re putting together our Quiz Bowl team,” said Hubert. “You were pretty good in last year’s competition, even though your teammates stank. We’d love to have you try out for our squad. You’d have a much better chance of winning at Sunny Brook.”

  “I’ve seen your file, Miss Garcia,” said the principal. “You earn straight As. You excel on all the state tests. You deserve better than we can currently offer you here at Riverview. You deserve to be at Sunny Brook.”

  Grace smiled. “Mrs. Malvolio?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “I appreciate the offer.”

  “Good!”

  “But I want to stay here with my uncle Charley.”

  “Who’s he?” scoffed Hubert.

  “My so-called vice principal,” muttered Mrs. Malvolio with a dismissive roll of her eyes. “Someone from Miss Garcia’s family has been on staff here ever since Riverview opened.”

  “That’s the weirdest reason for staying at a school that I’ve ever heard,” said Hubert.

  Grace grinned mysteriously. “Well, you don’t know my family. We’re tight. Always have been. Always will be.”

  After school, Jake and Kojo suited up with the rest of the Riverview Pirates for a basketball game against the Sunny Brook Cougars.

  “Is that what you’re wearing?” Kojo said when he saw Jake�
��s baggy shorts. Actually, they were sweatpants with the legs cut off at the knees. Jake was also wearing a T-shirt that read, MATH: THE ONLY PLACE WHERE PEOPLE CAN BUY 87 WATERMELONS AND NOBODY WONDERS WHY.

  “Yeah,” said Jake with a shrug. “Everything else is in my dirty-clothes bag.”

  “Your mother ever teach you how to do laundry?”

  “She’s tried. I’m a slow learner. Especially when it comes to household chores. I can almost set the table. Almost.”

  Kojo shook his head and put on his official black-and-gold Pirates uniform.

  “Jake?” said Mr. Lyons in his after-school role as the basketball coach. “Why can’t you remember to bring your uniform on game days?”

  “Because it’s hard?” offered Jake.

  “Hard? How hard can it be? ‘I have a basketball game today. I should bring my basketball uniform to school.’ What’s hard about that?”

  “Well, sir, first you need a calendar, to know what day it is. And then you have to remember to write down all the games in the little boxes on that calendar. Then you have to remember to look at that calendar on game days. That’s a lotta work, sir. A lotta, lotta work.”

  Mr. Lyons closed his eyes and mumbled something to himself. It could’ve been Why do I even bother? Jake wasn’t sure.

  “Okay, guys,” Mr. Lyons said right before it was time to leave the locker room and hit the floor. “Sunny Brook is tough. Their center is a six-foot giant named Hubert Huxley. The boy is humongous. But I outlined a play that I think will allow us to get into the paint and score on their big man….”

  He drew a play with a marker on a whiteboard. There were a lot of circles and arrows. Some dots and dashes, too. Jake had no idea what any of it meant. He figured he’d just run the play he always ran: Toss the ball around. Take random shots. See if anybody could hit the basket. Or the backboard. Odds were something would eventually bounce the right way and drop through the hoop.

  That was not what happened.

  Riverview lost to Sunny Brook, 120–12. (Kojo scored six times.) After the game, Mr. Lyons called a team meeting in the locker room.

  “Winning isn’t everything,” he said. “But you guys aren’t even trying. You aren’t playing up to your potential.”

  “Yes, we are,” said Jake. “We lost. It’s what we do best.”

  Mr. Lyons sighed one of his deep sighs and walked away.

  “I wouldn’t mind winning,” Kojo muttered after Mr. Lyons was gone.

  “Nah,” said Jake. “We’re better off losing. There’s a ton less stress.”

  “Well,” said Kojo, “we’re just gonna have to agree to disagree.”

  And for the first time in a long time, Kojo didn’t want to walk home with Jake.

  On Thursday night, Jake and his little sister, Emma, were home alone.

  Their mom was busy at her high-stress job as an events coordinator at the Imperial Marquis, a big downtown hotel. Ms. Michelle McQuade was excellent at her job. Super responsible, organized, and efficient.

  She was the exact opposite of her son.

  Emma, a fourth grader, was three years younger than Jake. Technically, he was her big brother, even though he wasn’t very good with much of the typical big-brother stuff—like helping her do homework.

  “I need help,” said Emma, even though she wished she didn’t have to say it. “With math, not Spanish.”

  Emma went to a Spanish-immersion elementary school. She knew Jake would be useless helping her with her bilingual language skills. But she figured he would at least know how to solve a fourth-grade math problem.

  They were sitting in the kitchen. Emma was working on her homework. Jake was working on his phone, slicing watermelons in a game app called Fruit Ninja.

  “Hang on. Goin’ for a five-fruit combo slice.” Jake swiped his finger across the screen of his phone. “Ah, missed.” He put down his device and gave Emma a gimme-gimme hand gesture. “What’s the problem?”

  Emma read off her worksheet. “ ‘At Billy’s Bakery, cupcakes cost fifty-three cents.’ ”

  Jake nodded. “Decent price. Go on.”

  “ ‘Bagels cost a dollar twenty-five.’ ”

  “Plain? Or with butter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about cream cheese?”

  “There’s no cream cheese in the math problem, Jake.”

  “There should be. Or butter. Who wants to eat a dry bagel?”

  Emma rolled her eyes and read the last sentence in the word problem. “ ‘How much more do two bagels cost than two cupcakes?’ ”

  Jake stroked his chin and pondered the question. “Do the cupcakes have frosting?”

  Emma shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Okay. Here’s your answer: too much!”

  “Huh?”

  “The two bagels cost way too much compared to the two cupcakes. The bagels are incomplete. No butter? No cream cheese? Not even margarine? The cupcakes, on the other hand, are fully frosted. Therefore, two bagels cost way too much compared to two cupcakes.” He pointed at the answer line on Emma’s worksheet. “Write down ‘Way too much.’ ”

  “That’s not the right answer. Mrs. Valiente is going to give me an F!”

  “Billy is ripping off his customers, Emma. Instead of writing math problems about the guy, they should arrest him!”

  Jake’s phone vibrated and sounded its text alert: a funny armpit-fart ringtone.

  “It’s Mom,” said Jake, glancing at the screen. “She has to work late. Big event. Says we need to fix our own dinner.” Jake looked around the kitchen. “Is there any money left in the pizza jar?”

  Emma shook her head. “We used it up the last time Mom had to work late. Last night.”

  “Come on,” said Jake, standing up. “You have your bus pass?”

  “Um, yeah. But why do I need it? There’s microwavable dinners in the freezer.”

  “Too much work,” said Jake. “If Mom has a big event down at the hotel, that means there’s a ton of food. Your choice of chicken, beef, or fish.”

  “I prefer the vegetarian option.”

  “Fine. You can have the pasta with peas and cauliflower. We’re taking a bus downtown. It’s suppertime!”

  Jake and Emma caught an express bus downtown.

  Fifteen minutes later, stomachs grumbling, they hopped off and bustled up the alley that would take them to the service entrance behind the Imperial Marquis Hotel. The building was forty stories tall. Its ballroom could seat five hundred banquet guests at once. The kitchen that turned out all that food was ginormous.

  Jake and Emma’s mom was in charge of making sure big banquets in the Imperial Marquis’s convention and meeting facilities went off without a hitch.

  “What’s up, you guys?” said Tony, one of the hotel’s event staff. He was hanging out on the loading dock while everybody else hustled their butts off.

  “Shouldn’t you be inside, helping out?” said Emma.

  “I’m on my break.”

  “In the middle of a banquet?”

  Tony shrugged. “I don’t make the schedule.”

  “What’s the big event?” asked Jake.

  “Some dude named Dr. Sinclair Blackbridge is giving a talk to a bunch of brainiacs,” said Tony. “Blackbridge is a futurist. From MIT.”

  “The Massachusetts Institute of Technology?” said Emma, sounding impressed.

  “I guess,” said Tony with another shrug.

  “What’s a futurist?” asked Jake.

  “A fancy fortune-teller with a bunch of college degrees. He uses science and computers to predict the future. He can tell you what’s going to happen in ten, twenty years.”

  “He any good?” asked Jake.

  “Seems like it. I mean, he can’t tell you who’s going to win tonight’
s game or nothin’, but way back in 1995, he predicted that we’d use computers to buy junk on the internet. Everybody laughed at him. Turns out he was right. Turns out he’s always right. He predicted GPS navigation devices for cars before anybody else, too. And those E-ZPass things on the turnpike so you don’t have to slow down or stop to pay tolls. The guy’s legit. A real scientific soothsayer.”

  “So, what’s for dinner?”

  “Chicken, fish, or beef.”

  “Is there a vegetarian option?” asked Emma.

  “Cheese ravioli. Go grab something. We always make extra.”

  “And we always appreciate it,” said Jake. He knocked knuckles with Tony. He and Emma headed into the kitchen.

  “Hey, Jake,” said a server, a guy named Arturo. “Hola, Emma.”

  “Hola, Arturo,” said Emma. “¿Cómo estás?”

  “Bien, ¿y tú?”

  “Muy bien, gracias.”

  Arturo was one of their mother’s hardest workers. He was toting a tray loaded down with at least a dozen domed plates. “You kids hungry?” he asked.

  “Does it show?” joked Jake.

  “We’re right in the middle of serving the main course. Go grab a seat in the greenroom. The speaker’s done using it. I’ll hook you guys up in about fifteen. Cool?”

  “Cool,” said Jake.

  “You want the ravioli, Emma?”

  “Sí. Muchas gracias, Arturo.”

  “No problem. Just hang and chill. We’ve got that chocolate mousse cake with the raspberries on top for dessert, too.”

  “Definitely worth the wait,” said Jake. “Thanks, man.”

  He led the way into what everybody called the greenroom: a small cinder-block cubbyhole with a couch, a table, a couple of chairs, and a private bathroom. It was a place where guest speakers could wait or rehearse before they went into the banquet hall to give their talks.

  There was also a video monitor where you could watch and listen to what was going on in the dining room. Right now it was mostly hubbub, laughter, and the sound of clinking plates and tumbling ice as uniformed servers whisked around the room with their heavy trays and pitchers of water. Somewhere, probably in the shadows, Jake and Emma’s mom was orchestrating all the action over her headset.