I sigh. I have zero chance of bulling my way past these two. They have me outmatched in almost every way.
“Besides,” the Arch says, “if you didn’t get in trouble for the assembly, I doubt you’ll get in trouble for missing a few minutes of math.”
I don’t want this meeting to last any longer than it has to. He is the student body president now and I am the known troublemaker, so my odds of getting busted for being late are way higher than his. And I don’t want to waste my new info on Mr. Mayer on something as trivial as a one-class tardy. “Well, you seem to have all the answers. Why don’t you guys just beat me up or whatever you’re gonna do, so I can go?”
The Arch lets out a laugh. “You think I brought you here to beat you up?”
Suddenly I’m embarrassed. The truth is I’m scared of what they might do to me, but I shouldn’t throw myself at their feet so easily.
“If you’re not going to beat me up, then why am I here?”
“You’re here because I’m the president now, and somehow you have a way of conveniently getting out of trouble with Mr. Mayer. Whether I like it or not, that makes you and me the two most powerful people in this school.”
Taking a compliment from him is like winning a Nickelodeon award—flattering, but you end up dripping with slime after you get it.
He stops pacing. “I thought you were a genius,” he says. “Do I really have to spell it out for you?”
I’m not going to give him anything for free. Whatever he wants, he’s going to have to say it.
“I guess you do.”
“I called you here to offer a truce.”
I’d be lying if I said I don’t feel a tiny bit of relief at his words. Is this the moment I’ve been hoping for all these years? Is he about to apologize and go back to being plain old Archer Norris? I glance over my shoulder at his bodyguards and make a mental note to ask the Colonel how many times someone has been kidnapped and dragged to a secret room to negotiate a peace treaty. Something smells funny, and it isn’t just the laundry cart full of sweaty track uniforms.
“Do we need the goons here to talk about a truce?”
The Arch thinks for a moment, snaps his fingers, and points to the door. Like a pair of well-trained Dobermans, Marlon and Nate give me one last sneer apiece and shuffle out, leaving the Arch and me alone in the locker room.
As the echo of the slamming door fades, the Arch hops down and looks me in the eye. The cocky mask that everyone at Alanmoore knows as his signature look melts away, and he takes a few steps toward me so we’re only feet apart. My heart races.
“C’mon, Chub, why do we have to fight? Why can’t we just get along, like . . .” He trails off and looks at the ground.
I want to make him say it. I want him to choke on the words. “Like what, Archer?”
“Why can’t we just get along like . . . we did when we were friends?”
I run a hand over my bald scalp. “Because you’ve changed. And so have I.”
Archer Norris plops down on one of the benches and looks up at me. I search his face for a glimmer of the kid who used to be my best friend. The kid I used to spend weekends with, reading comics in the fort we built in the woods behind his house. He looks away and stares at the painted concrete floor. “That was a long time ago. Don’t you think it’s time we put that aside? What are you hoping to accomplish by being such a weirdo, anyway?”
I suddenly feel bold. “What are you trying to accomplish by being such a jerk?”
He’s quiet for a moment. “I’m just acting the way people expect me to act.”
I flinch. This is not at all what I was expecting him to say. I know what it’s like having people treat you a certain way because of your size and how you look.
But then I remember what Sizzler said, about how the Arch needs to be president, about how he has something major to hide.
“I guess that’s the difference between us, then,” I say. “I don’t do anything because people expect me to, and I don’t pretend to be something I’m not.”
He shakes his head, still staring at the ground. Is the fact that he threw away our friendship finally sinking in?
“So as long as you keep being the Arch for everyone else, we can’t go back to the way it was.”
My pulse rushes in my ears. Even though I can’t imagine him beating me up himself, the possibility of Archer summoning his goons to pound me into pudding still exists. He stands up and faces me, his eyes narrowing.
He’s wearing the Arch mask again.
“I was afraid you’d say something like that,” he says, and hops up on the bench and then up onto the wall so he’s looking down at me.
He fumbles in his pocket for something.
“I gotta say, Chub, I’m pretty disappointed in you.” He finds what he was looking for in his pocket and pulls it out, flipping open the spout on a little yellow bottle and spraying a clear liquid onto the pile of uniforms in the laundry cart. I catch a whiff of the liquid as he puts the bottle back in his pocket. It smells like the stuff my dad uses to light the barbecue. Then the Arch pulls a silver lighter from his other pocket and flicks it to life.
“A truce could’ve been good for both of us.”
I glance at the pile of clothes, then at the flame.
“But this time you’ve really gone too far.”
Before I can yell “NOOOOO,” he tosses the lighter into the pile of uniforms. A wicked blue flame bursts up and spreads like lava spilling out of a volcano.
Every fire safety tip I’ve ever learned disappears, and I run back and forth in raw panic.
Black smoke curls off the melting uniforms and up to the ceiling. I’m paralyzed watching the fire when a hand grips my arm. The Arch drags me away from the fire and out the door into the main courtyard.
When we’re safely outside in the fresh air, I realize I’m still holding my breath. He lets go of my arm and I drop to my knees, drawing in a lungful of the good stuff. For some reason I’m about to thank him, but I stop myself as I look up. His face is pure, cocky Arch, not the look of someone who is about to be kicked out of school for arson. What the heck just happened in there? What could he possibly have to gain by burning up his own track team’s uniforms right after he won the election?
Footsteps echo off the brick breezeway. My scalp starts to sweat when I look up and see Nate and Marlon sprinting toward us, with Mr. Mayer close behind.
CHAPTER 11
Thankfully, Mr. Kraley quickly put out the fire with an extinguisher, but not before it turned the pile of uniforms into a giant black puddle of goo.
Mr. Mayer marches me back to his office in silence, the kind of silence adults use when they are beyond angry. He pushes me toward my usual seat and slams the door behind us.
“Mr. Mayer,” I say, not sure what I’m going to say next.
“If I were you, Maciek, I’d just keep quiet right now.” He goes on his laptop and searches something.
I’m smart enough to know what this looks like. Everyone knows I have an ax to grind with the Arch. It looks like I went crazy after he won the election and burned the track uniforms as revenge. Even though it’s my word against the Arch’s about what happened in the locker room, I need to say something to soften Mr. Mayer up a little before he calls my dad.
“I didn’t do it!” I say as he picks up the receiver.
He blows air through his lips, shakes his head, and dials the number he’s found on the laptop.
“Mr. Trzebiatowski? This is Principal Mayer. I hate to bother you at work, sir, but . . . No, everyone is fine, but I need you to come to the school as soon as you can. There’s been a . . . an incident.”
My head burns imagining what my father is thinking as he hears those words. My parents work really hard just to afford the cheapest house in the school district. Whether I’m guilty or not, having to leave work to deal with this will mean punishment for me.
He hangs up the phone and sighs. I figure he’ll start suspension paperwork right no
w, but he just sits in his chair rubbing his forehead while we wait.
How did this all go so wrong? My campaign against the Arch used to be like chess, now it’s becoming more like chain saw juggling.
My dad arrives ten minutes later. Mr. Mayer tells me to wait in the outer office, and the two of them go into Mr. Mayer’s office and shut the door, leaving me alone with Mrs. Osborne. She works on some papers on her desk, avoiding eye contact.
After an eternity the door opens again, my dad marches past me, and I get up. Mr. Mayer stands in the doorway rubbing his temples. The hair there is a lot grayer than it was just a few weeks ago. I’m not sure if it’s me or this Mace character making him age so fast, but if Mr. Mayer has a rope, he looks like he’s at the end of it.
I search his face, desperate for a clue to my fate.
“We’ll deal with this on Monday,” he says, and then disappears into his office.
I almost apologize, but catch myself. What am I thinking? The Arch did this, not me. As though he hasn’t made things hard enough for me, now he’s about to get me kicked out of school for something he did.
The ride home is silent—outer-space silent, which makes it worse. At least if my dad tore off a chunk of my butt, I’d know where I stand. But chewing butt cheek like a lion feasting on a gazelle is what you do when you are angry. He’s something way worse than angry—he’s disappointed.
Most kids have it easy dealing with a disappointed parent. The parent will say something like, “I expect better decisions from you, Johnny.” Then Johnny nods apologetically and they go eat meat loaf for dinner.
It’s different for me. When immigrant parents are disappointed, you get to hear the whole story of how they came to America with nothing but a dream. Every time you disappoint them, the story gets worse and you feel more and more guilty. Trust me, nobody can use guilt better than parents who crossed an ocean to give you a better life.
I want to say something to defend myself, but my dad’s white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel of our old car tells me I’m better off exercising my right to remain silent. Whatever I say right now can and will be used against me somehow.
When we drive past our house, I know what Dad has in store for me. I guess it doesn’t matter to him that I haven’t technically been charged with setting the uniforms on fire, and Mr. Mayer isn’t going to do anything until he figures out what actually happened. Without even standing trial, I’m getting sentenced to a weekend of hard labor.
Fridays are busy at the dry cleaning shop, especially in the spring and summer. Tons of people come in Friday afternoon to pick up clothes for weekend weddings or to drop off clothes they want cleaned for the next week at the office. I know there’s no shortage of character-building in store for me. With the workout I’m bound to get, my character will be pumped up like a bodybuilder by the time I go back to school on Monday.
Dad parks in the alley behind the shop and pushes me in through the back door. The Friday rush is in full swing up front. I take off my coat to go help my mom with the customers, but Dad stops me with a hand on my shoulder. The only two words he says to me all day sound like the title of a horror film as he growls them under his breath. “The Pile.”
He lets go of my shoulder and heads up front to help my mom.
The Pile is a mountain of filthy old clothes donated by funeral parlors and people who don’t want them stinking up their own houses anymore. We take them in, and whenever my parents have spare time (or slave labor), they clean them and give them to local charities. My sentence is to sort the usable clothes from the trash and get the ones that can be saved ready to be cleaned.
I haven’t been to the shop since last week, and I hope someone else has worked on the Pile a little bit since my last run-in with the law.
No such luck. The Pile is even bigger than the last time I saw it, a life-size cotton, wool, and polyester statue of Jabba the Hutt. The only difference is it’s not Princess Leia chained to it, it’s a little Polish kid, a.k.a. me.
I don’t want to get caught standing around when my dad comes back, so I roll up my sleeves and get to work. I pick up an old tweed blazer and inspect it for damage. The blazer was acting as a seal between the earth’s atmosphere and the reservoir of stink that lives in the Pile, so removing the seal releases a smell like rotten meat mixed with a walrus fart. My T-shirt over my nose does very little to keep me from gagging. I briefly feel bad for making Moby marinate in Mr. Kraley’s BO in the kangaroo suit, but there’s at least a weekend’s worth of work ahead of me, and there’s no time for getting all weepy when you’re working the Pile.
When I was a little kid, I used to love going to my parents’ shop. Back then, before Archer turned himself into the Arch, he and I used to go to the shop on weekends to run the garment carousel and get plastic bags to make parachutes for our G.I. Joes. When we were little, the Pile was better than a jungle gym. My dad always told us to stay away from it or we’d regret it, but whenever he was distracted, we would climb on it and burrow under it like it was a giant pile of raked-up leaves.
At the end of our first week of second grade a rumor spread through the school like wildfire. Someone had brought lice to school, and the next day every student’s scalp would be inspected. Nobody wants to be known as the kid who gave the school lice. Once you are that kid, you’ll never be known for anything else until you grow up and move away.
I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew it was us. That day after school Archer and I met behind the shed where they kept the school’s sports equipment. Neither of us wanted to say what we were both thinking.
“We should see if it’s us,” I said.
“What do we do if it is?” Archer said.
My dad stored extra chemicals for the shop at home, and I knew there were some bottles of stuff he used to kill lice when they found them in the Pile, which was all the time. If we could kill our own lice before the inspection tomorrow, we’d be clear and no one would know it was us that had infected the school.
A plan was forming in my mind. “I think I know what to do.”
Archer trusted me. “Okay.”
When we got to my basement, we decided we should make sure we actually had lice before we started pouring chemicals all over each other.
“You want to go first?” I said.
“I guess so.” He leaned over and I looked at his hair. I had no idea what lice even looked like, but I figured it would be obvious if I saw one. He had some dandruff, but none of it was moving. I was about to tell him he was all clear when I saw first one, then hundreds of the little monsters on his scalp.
I jumped back like I’d been stung and watched the hope fade from my best friend’s face.
Then he checked me, and my worst second-grade fears came true too.
Archer was taller, so I held the chair as he grabbed the bottle of lice killer off the top shelf. We were desperate, and the picture of the dead bug on the label was good enough for us.
“How do you do it?” Archer asked. I guess it never occurred to us to read the label. Let me tell you, if I could go back, I would make myself read that label.
“My dad just sprays it on the clothes.”
We rock-paper-scissored for it, and as usual Archer won.
My hair, when I had some, was curly and blond. The kind of hair old ladies loved to touch, then say things like “If I had those curls . . .”
I parted it with my fingers so Archer could spray the stuff straight onto my scalp. I don’t know how much he sprayed on there, but my hair was dripping with it when he was done.
I went to take the bottle to spray him, too, but he held it out of reach.
He studied my dripping mop of hair. “Let’s make sure it works first.” The stuff smelled like gasoline and Lysol, which probably should’ve been a clue.
After a minute he asked, “Does it feel like it’s working?”
“I don’t know. How do . . .” But before I could finish my sentence, my head felt like it had caught fire, k
illing all the lice in a single, flaming instant. It was like a million little lice voices crying out in agony, and then they were suddenly silenced.
I stuck my head under the faucet until the burning cooled. When I stood up, I wasn’t on fire anymore, but my eyes were full of tears. I gingerly touched my head and hoped. The pain would have been worth it if all the lice were dead. But when I looked at my hand, my heart almost stopped. I was clutching a knot of tight blond curls.
Archer’s face was pale. We’d borrowed a mirror from my mom’s room, and he clutched it to his chest.
“Does it look bad?” I asked, although I could read the answer in the horrified look on his face.
He just stood there with his mouth open, staring.
I growled in frustration and held out my hand. “Mirror!”
“What?” He started backing away, like he was suddenly scared of me.
“Hand me the mirror!”
He didn’t want to hand it over, so I pulled it out of his hands.
When I saw what the stuff had done, I knew why he didn’t want me to see.
For the first time in my life when I looked at my own face, it wasn’t trimmed with golden curls. My scalp was red and raw, like the worst sunburn ever. Other than a few stubborn clumps of hair that fell out later, I was completely bald.
After Archer left the basement, everything was different. The next day he lined up for lice check like everyone else. It was no surprise that he had them, and he got sent home with a bottle of lice-killing shampoo.
It didn’t take long for the kids at school to blame the breakout on the kid who’d had a full head of hair one day and was bald the next. I thought about trying to explain it to everyone. About how it wasn’t me, it was us—me and my best friend, Archer. I wanted everyone to know it was a simple mistake and it wasn’t because people with accents carried strange diseases. Of course, it would’ve meant something only if Archer had stood up and vouched for my story. But something changed in him when he saw my hair fall out. He could’ve stood by me, but he didn’t want any part of the taunting and teasing and pointing and laughing I endured when I showed up at school bald. That day everyone stopped looking at me as the quiet little Polish kid, and suddenly I became the bald foreign freak who’d given the school lice. But the worst part wasn’t even the teasing, it was that my best friend acted like he didn’t even know me.
I Am Fartacus Page 8
