The Boomerang Effect

by Gordon Jack

  I ran over to the tree and grabbed hold of the branch where Zoe was perched. Zoe gave a yelp of surprise as the bough dipped dramatically, causing her to drop her phone onto Heidi’s lawn below. I started shaking the tree branch, trying to loosen her grip and make her drop to the ground. Zoe hung on like a cat trapped above water, but our combined weight was too great for this limb and the thing creaked and snapped, sending her plummeting onto Heidi’s lawn. I heard Zoe land with a thud and an oomph.

  I jumped up and peered over the fence. “I got her!” I called out to Audrey.

  The lights in Heidi’s house suddenly came on, freezing the Viking in his tracks. He dropped his crowbar and took off running toward the opposite fence. With a leap worthy of a parkour enthusiast, he was up and over the barrier and out of sight. At least we still had one half of the crime syndicate. I vaulted over the fence myself, though not as gracefully as our bandit, landing on Zoe’s leg, which made her scream bloody murder.

  “Gotcha!” I screamed, wishing I had thought up a better catchphrase.

  Zoe stared at me, her face full of rage and pain. “You idiot!” she screamed back. “We nearly had him.”

  “Yeah, but now we have you,” I said, more pleased with this witty retort than my “Gotcha” comment earlier.

  Seconds later, Heidi and her dad were standing behind me. Heidi was in flannel pajamas decorated with what looked like tiny Republican elephants. Her father was in boxers and a T-shirt, his bulging muscles filled with steroids and adrenaline.

  “Zoe, what happened?” Heidi asked. She was holding a cell phone. I looked down at the phone that Zoe had dropped. It lay about a foot away from where she fell. I started to make some connections that didn’t bode well for me.

  “You two know each other?”

  “She’s my mentor in the Buddy Club,” Heidi said. “She was helping me catch the Viking.”

  “Lawrence ruined everything,” Zoe groaned.

  “But . . . how?”

  “Zoe was guarding the float,” Heidi explained. “She just texted me to call the police when you came along.”

  I don’t know which information stunned me more: the fact that I had just let the Viking escape or that Zoe was in the Buddy Club. When my counselor suggested I join the program, I thought he saw potential in me to help someone in need. If Zoe was a mentor too, it could only mean one thing: the Buddy Club was a cult that sold the souls of freshmen to Satan.

  “At least your float is safe,” I offered weakly. Heidi’s dad grabbed me by the shirt collar and dragged me inside.

  I was held captive in Heidi’s kitchen while they examined the video Zoe had made of the Viking’s appearance. Zoe had just started zooming in on the shadowy figure when my shaking of the tree made it impossible for her to hold the camera steady. All the footage showed was Zoe experiencing a magnitude 7.0 earthquake until my face appeared saying, “Gotcha.”

  Heidi’s dad, clearly trained in the art of breaking down terrorist suspects, interrogated me for thirty minutes, trying to extract a confession that I was in league with the Viking. I did my best to explain what happened but he kept accusing me of “playing dumb.”

  “I don’t think he’s playing,” Zoe said at one point.

  “Maybe we should use the enhanced interrogation techniques,” Heidi suggested. Her cold, hard stare matched her father’s, and suddenly I realized why she’d run unopposed for freshman class president.

  “Baby, you know we can’t do that,” Heidi’s dad said.

  “Because of the Geneva Convention,” I said.

  “No, Dad’s inversion table is broken.”

  “The neighbors complain about the screaming,” he added.

  They kept me for another twenty minutes before letting me go. Heidi’s dad drove Zoe home but left me stranded at the curb. I looked around for Audrey but didn’t see her anywhere as I walked back and picked up my car. I expected to find a note stuck to the windshield from Audrey, maybe apologizing for not coming to my rescue, but there was nothing. Maybe she ran out of ink and parchment. Or maybe I had totally made a fool of myself and now Audrey wanted nothing to do with me.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I drove to school the next morning full of anxiety and dread. I half expected Stone to be waiting for me in the student parking lot with my exit papers. As soon as Zoe and Heidi offered their eyewitness accounts of me helping the Viking Vandal, he would have all the evidence he needed to transfer me to Quiet Haven. He couldn’t prove I was the Viking, but he wouldn’t need to. It was enough that I aided and abetted the vandal in his crimes. Perps went to Rikers on flimsier evidence, or so Law & Order would have you believe. It was over. Better to accept it now than to cling to false hope.

  I stepped out of my car, and who should be there to greet me but Zoe, looking like an oil spill on the Mediterranean Sea. Today, she’d accentuated her black attire with a black beret, which sat on her thick, bristly hair like an upended cereal bowl. Her powers must have been set to low because the sun and birds didn’t drop lifeless from the sky.

  “I’ve been waiting for you, Lawrence,” she said. Her lips looked stained with the blood of the innocent.

  “What do you want?” I fell back against my car and tried to control my bowels.

  “You,” she said in the quiet, sinister voice usually adopted by deranged hypnotists, “are taking me to homecoming.”

  “What?” I rasped.

  “You. Are. Taking. Me. To. Homecoming,” she repeated.

  Unable to breathe, I shook my head as if she were trying to spoon-feed me a puree of brussels sprouts and gasoline. I saw students exit their cars and walk toward the campus, completely unaware that the world was coming to an end. I wanted to scream for help, but some deeply embedded survival instinct cautioned me that the story of Lawrence Barry being bullied by a four-foot-eight-inch girl would be repeated as campus folklore well beyond my graduation date.

  Despite my heart beating in what felt like triple time, my body seemed suddenly deprived of blood. I would have fainted if Zoe wasn’t sandwiching me between her body and the side of my car.

  “Why?” I managed to squeak.

  “I like you. Is that so hard to believe?”

  “Yes.”

  Zoe ran a long, crimson-painted nail along my forearm. It felt like someone dragging a burning match against my skin. “You’re cute, in a dumb puppy kind of way,” she said. “Which reminds me, you’ll be wearing a studded collar and leash to the dance.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Revenge, mostly. Plus it will go with my outfit. You shouldn’t have ignored me the way you did last year after we got together.”

  I couldn’t breathe. My fingers clawed at my throat, trying to get my windpipe to open. All I managed was a few choked gasps. “Never,” I managed to say.

  “Then I show Stone the little movie Heidi made of you foiling our attempt to capture the Viking. I think you know what conclusion he’ll draw from seeing that.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I think you know I would.”

  “I have an alibi,” I said. Audrey could testify on my behalf, provided they had a translator who spoke Shakespeare.

  “You say alibi, I say accomplice. Who do you think Stone will believe?”

  Zoe had me trapped in her web. Both she and I had seen the Viking make his getaway last night. If I used Audrey as my alibi, Zoe would claim she was the Viking and then we’d both get in trouble. It did look kind of suspicious that Audrey disappeared after I was caught. I’m sure she had her reasons for running away, but Stone wouldn’t listen to them.

  “You’re evil,” I said. “Why are you even in the Buddy Club?”

  “I feel like I have something to offer,” Zoe said, examining her bloodstained nails. “Plus, I enjoy virgin sacrifices. Tell you what. I’ll convince Heidi to ask your little friend to the dance and we can double date. Would you like that?”

  “Does Heidi like him?”

  “She does. She’s pretty conservativ
e and thinks Spencer’s formality is refined. She has no idea he’s on the spectrum.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t know either?” Zoe cackled and four crows alighted on the roofs of cars surrounding us. “That’s hilarious. Your buddy is autistic.”

  “No, he’s not.” I’d seen autistic kids before. At least I thought I had. They’re the ones that pass out from too much emotion. Or was that narcolepsy?

  “You’re so adorably dumb,” Zoe said, and walked away. “The dance is this Friday. Get me a black corsage and I won’t muzzle you.”

  I stumbled onto campus, my mind reeling with the revelation that Spencer’s brain wasn’t superhuman. What if I did something that damaged him permanently? The image of him locked in the bathroom stall at the library suddenly appeared in my mind with horrifying clarity. I needed to talk with Lunley, pronto.

  I sneaked around the back of the cafeteria to avoid Spencer and made my way toward the counselor offices. Lunley’s door was open, so I stormed in and demanded some answers.

  “Is Spencer autistic?” I asked.

  Lunley was dipping a tea bag in a steaming cup of water.

  “Good morning, Lawrence,” he said, ignoring my question. He carefully lifted the tea bag with a spoon and squeezed it like a sponge over his mug. Then he deposited the soggy remains in the mini compost bin he kept next to his wastepaper basket.

  I repeated my question.

  “We don’t know,” Lunley said. “He’s never been tested.”

  “Why don’t we test him?”

  “His mother doesn’t want to. She’s worried he might be unfairly labeled.”

  “Do you think he’s autistic?”

  Lunley held his teacup to his nose and breathed in. The aroma seemed to calm him, which was odd because to me it smelled like wet dog hair. He set the cup down and indicated for me to sit on the yoga ball in front of his desk. “I think he may be on the spectrum.”

  “That’s what Zoe said. What does that mean?”

  “It means there’s a wide range of autism, from severe to high functioning. Severe autistic kids need special schools, whereas high-functioning ones can be mainstreamed. We have several high-functioning kids here at Meridian.”

  “Can’t you force his parents to test him?”

  “Why should we do that? Have you observed him struggling?”

  “He’s not normal, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s a pretty subjective term, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t think it is.”

  “Am I normal?” Lunley asked, taking a sip of his tea.

  This seemed like a trick question. “You’re on the spectrum,” I said.

  Lunley choked down his tea and then burst out laughing. “Nice one,” he said.

  “What I mean,” I continued, “is that you can look around the campus and see immediately who fits in and who doesn’t.”

  “Fitting in is easy though, right? You just have to act normal. Most people can learn to do that. People on the autism spectrum can’t.”

  “So that’s it. Spencer’s problem is that he can’t act normal?”

  “He can’t pretend to be something he’s not.”

  “You make it sound like it’s a good thing.”

  “I’m not saying people like Spencer don’t struggle. People with autism often suffer from intense anxiety and depression. That’s why I thought you’d be such a good mentor for him. You’re friendly and warm and generous.”

  Lunley seemed sincere, but part of me wondered if he was just sucking up to keep me in the program. “You should have warned me,” I said.

  “What would I have told you? That Spencer may be on the autism spectrum? I don’t know that he is. He’s been at this school for only a few months. And I didn’t want you treating him different.”

  “So you’re like his mother in that way.”

  “I guess you’re right. On some level, I can understand her concern.”

  Once again, I felt the urge to take Lunley’s yoga ball and bounce it against his head. I wondered if any of his more belligerent students had done that to him. Instead, I took a deep breath and told him I thought he should take me out of the Buddy Club. “I just don’t think I’m helping him,” I said. “I may be making his life worse.”

  I’d dragged a disabled kid into a plot to save my own ass. That was like hitching a ride on someone’s wheelchair.

  “The fact that this concerns you shows me that you belong in the club,” Lunley said. When I didn’t respond, he continued. “Why don’t you try a new approach with Spencer. Instead of trying to help him, just be his friend. If you’re still unhappy by the end of the quarter, I’ll see about getting Spencer reassigned.”

  I agreed to Lunley’s terms, even though I knew he was wrong. Being Spencer’s friend would be way harder than being his mentor. I left his office and walked directly back to my car in the student parking lot. Crawling inside, I reclined the seat and curled into a fetal position. No way I was going to first-period history today. I couldn’t look Audrey in the eye and tell her I was taking Zoe to the dance. (Or to put it more accurately, she was taking me—in a leash and dog collar.) She already suspected I liked Zoe. I’m sure I could trust her enough to tell her the truth, but would she trust me enough to believe me? I wasn’t ready to find out, so I texted Dad and told him I was going home with a stomachache. Honestly, I had felt like throwing up ever since I woke up this morning.

  I stayed in bed all day watching cartoons. It felt good to revisit my childhood, when a tummy ache was treated with Estrella’s blankets, ginger ale, and SpongeBob marathons. I realized why Audrey liked traveling back in time so much through LARPing. Things were so much easier in the past; it was a place of refuge from our shitty present and even shittier future.

  Eddie texted me just before lunch.

  Dude. Where r u?

  Sick

  Sick sick or fake sick?

  Sick sick

  Drink fluids

  OK

  And no medicinal marijuana

  Thx doc

  Dawn brought me a brownie today

  Fur reelz?

  Well, she brought them for the whole squad. But she gave me the biggest one

  Our conversation was interrupted by a FaceTime request from Mom. I congratulated Eddie on his accomplishment, happy to be done with his crazy, and answered Mom’s call.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said, impersonating a sick person.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Better. Thanks. I think I just needed some rest.”

  “You got me thinking that our website needs a physical ailment page. Someplace where you could log in comments about headaches, stomachaches, fevers. Maybe we could link it with our Fitbit data.”

  “Sounds great, Mom.” I hadn’t worn my Fitbit in a year. The thing felt like the kind of tracking devices scientists place on animals they’re studying. Plus, Dad kept taunting me with messages about my lack of physical activity. So I flushed it down the toilet.

  “I’m going stir crazy lying in bed all day.”

  “How are things with Aunt Lucy?”

  “It’s like living in a reality show. So much drama.”

  “Really?” Anyone going to the homecoming dance in a dog collar? I almost asked.

  “Dashiel went to a friend’s beach house for the weekend and I guess there were no parents there. Lucy flipped out and grounded him for a month.”

  “Harsh,” I said. If Mom took the same tactics with me, I wouldn’t leave the house until I was eighty.

  “Everything is so explosive around here. All they do is yell at each other. It’s so unhealthy. Lucy clearly doesn’t know what’s going on in her son’s life. I told her our website might help her communicate better with Dashiel, and you know what she did? She laughed at me!”

  “Laughed?”

  “She said their communication was just fine and that the problem with Dashiel was he was a sneaky little shit, like all teenager
s. You’re not like that, are you, honey?”

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “That’s what I told her. The thing I can’t figure out is why Dashiel isn’t more defiant. The day after he got grounded, he and Lucy went out for a jog together in nearly matching outfits. Go figure.”

  “Yeah. Weird.” I tried to think of the last time Mom and I did anything together. We made a gingerbread house one Christmas when I was seven or eight. We snacked on all the gumdrop candies so the final product looked like it was made out of cardboard and Elmer’s glue.

  “I gotta go now,” Mom said. “The guys at VirtueTech want to show me some redesigns they’ve made to the site. I’ll check in with you later, okay?”

  “Okay, Mom. See ya.”

  I signed off and entered our conversation start and end time on the communication log. Seven minutes. A new high. We were trending upward.

  At four o’clock, I decided to drive over to Audrey’s house and see how she was doing. She came to the door wearing clothes that actually fit. Her jeans were tight enough to show off her curves and butt. In a strange coincidence, or maybe soul-mate signage, she was wearing a SpongeBob T-shirt that clung nicely to her chest and revealed toned, freckled arms. Her wild, frizzy curls were pulled back with a bandana. She must have been doing something artistic because she had a smear of gold paint on her left cheek. “Lawrence!” she said. “Where were you today?”

  “I stayed home sick.”

  “What ails you?”

  “Zoe. I have to take her to the dance this Friday.”

  “What?”

  “She’s blackmailing me. If I don’t take her then she’ll tell Stone I helped the Viking escape.”

  “But you didn’t. I was there.”

  “Were you?” I mumbled as I stared at the splatter of gold on her cheek. I knew that color. It was the same shade painted on the beard of a certain Viking that had gone missing. Zoe’s words about Audrey being my accomplice slithered into my ears like Parseltongue. Audrey was there. Just as she was there the night the costume disappeared. Just as she was out the night the sophomore float got destroyed.