33 Minutes

by Todd Hasak-Lowy

  “Of course, Samuel, I’m not the only person here who is sorry.” Principal Benson smiles a bit and turns his head to Morgan. Then some silence of the awkward variety, until: “Morgan, is there anything you want to tell your friend?”

  Morgan clears his throat, mumbles something.

  Principal Benson blinks his eyes a few times. He may have also just clenched his jaw underneath all that facial hair. “Morgan, I am going to ask you to repeat whatever you just said. This time, however, I ask that you speak more clearly. I would also ask you to think about what it truly means to say what you’re saying. And, Samuel, if you would like, you may look at Morgan so you can know that he means what he says.”

  I try turning my head, but I can’t. And not because my jaw hurts. I settle on my shoe instead.

  “I’m sorry.” There’s an outside chance he might actually have meant it.

  “Thank you, Morgan. Samuel, I asked you in here so you can hear, right from the very top, how we’re dealing with what happened to you today. Normally, both participants in a physical altercation such as this would receive a suspension, but according to numerous eyewitnesses, you did not initiate this altercation, nor did you have a reasonable opportunity to defuse it. So you are, as they say, off the hook. Morgan, on the other hand, should be looking at an extended suspension. However, because he provided us with crucial information regarding the origins of the fire”—I look up from my shoe at Principal Benson—“because Morgan has done this, Morgan will be allowed to return to school in two weeks’ time.”

  “What information?” I ask.

  “I am sorry, Samuel,” Principal Benson says, not looking all that sorry to me, “but I am not at liberty to disclose those details at this time.”

  “That’s totally stupid,” I say, before I realize what I’m saying. But Principal Benson doesn’t respond. “I’m sorry.” And then I try to shut up, but I think I still mumble, “but it is.”

  “Samuel,” Principal Benson says, and he may be trying to smile, who knows why, “I understand your frustration, but I ask you to try to understand the demands of protocol in this situation. There are reports to be filed, parents to be informed, and various state agencies to be contacted. You will learn all that you need to learn in good time.”

  “State agencies?” I try turning toward Morgan again, but my head won’t allow it. Back to my shoe. “Where’s Chris?”

  Principal Benson examines his fingernails. “Chris ­Tripadero will not be returning to Wagner Middle School.” More silence.

  With Chris gone, even after all this, maybe, who knows?

  “Gentlemen,” Principal Benson chimes in again, “today’s events got me thinking about a little saying I try to live by. Would you like to hear it?”

  We both say, “Sure.” Politely, not enthusiastically.

  “What is so fascinating about this saying is that despite its profundity, it contains no word more than two letters long.” He looks at us, wanting to see if this little factoid has impressed us. Sure, I’m impressed. “Here it is, ten words.” And he lifts up both hands to count them off with his fingers. “If it is to be, it is up to me.” A smile of deep satisfaction. “I think you’ll agree that—”

  A knock at the door. Principal Benson says, “Excuse me for a moment,” stands, buttons his suit jacket, and opens the door just a crack. “Hello . . . Principal Benson . . . Yes . . . Thank you for coming.” He closes the door and speaks to us. “Gentlemen, I need to speak confidentially with these good people out here in the hall for a moment. I trust you are both aware that any poor decisions you might make while I’m standing just on the other side of this door will be dealt with most severely.” I nod. I assume Morgan does the same.

  Soon it’s just me, Morgan, and my shoe.

  1:23

  “What’d you tell them?” I stare at my shoe and ask him.

  “That Chris started the fire,” Morgan mumbles.

  “How do you know?” Soon I’ll actually look at Morgan.

  “I saw it,” he says, a little more clearly.

  “They believe you?”

  “He sent me a couple e-mails, like a month ago,” Morgan says, like e-mail is the dumbest thing ever, “explaining how he’d do it. Said he was definitely going to at some point.”

  I try looking at him but only make it halfway through my sentence. “How did he do it?”

  “Mr. Rozier left a cabinet unlocked with a bunch of chemicals in it near our lab station. Plus, there was a trash can right there. Chris put his dirty clothes in the can, poured some chemical on it, dropped a match in.” Morgan sounds like he’s reading out loud the most uninteresting recipe in the history of cooking.

  “So why today?” I ask, but Morgan just shrugs. “Was it so he could get us both outside?” But Morgan doesn’t say anything. “And why’d you tell them?” I ask, looking down at my other shoe for a change. Morgan doesn’t answer. “You got Chris kicked out of school.”

  “Chris does too much stupid stuff,” Morgan says, sounding like he just figured this out for the very first time. It almost makes me feel better, and I look at him so he can see I agree, but he’s staring straight ahead at the Viking Code. “­Benson said Coach might suspend me for the first two games next year. Said he probably will—said he’s ­considering four games. Chris, man, he doesn’t care about anything.”

  I can hear three voices, two male and one female, on the other side of the door, but I can’t make out any of the words they’re saying. But still, the voices are pretty clear, almost familiar.

  “You know I didn’t say any of that stuff,” I tell him, trying to sound like I don’t care whether or not he knows this.

  “So?” Of course he’s better than me at sounding like he doesn’t care.

  “So”—eyes back on my shoe—“so, I didn’t say any of it. And I didn’t mean to give that note to anyone. I didn’t even mean what I wrote in it.”

  “So?”

  I turn back to him, determined not to look away, fighting to keep my jaw from shaking, which, yes, hurts a lot, a lot more than Tootsie ever hurt. “Chris was just trying to get us to fight.”

  Morgan must really find that poster interesting, because he won’t stop looking at it. It’s like he’s hanging on to the thing for dear life. Well, of course he is. Morgan will die if he can’t play. Football might be stupid, but it sure makes ­Morgan happy, so happy that, I don’t know, maybe it’s not so stupid after all. And if we—or if I—I mean, if he can’t play because of something I did. That note and me showing off all those times until he actually let Chris convince him to fight me. Because if he’s not allowed to wear his jersey on game day, and if I had anything to do with it, even just a small part—or maybe a medium part, actually—I don’t know what I’ll do.

  But I could make it up to him if he’ll let me.

  “You know,” I tell him, or at least his shoes, “we could, you know, still hang out and stuff. Now that Chris is gone.”

  Morgan drags his feet under his chair, so I lift up my head and notice the red marks on his right hand. The damage my jaw did to his fist.

  Then he makes a sound like a laugh. Like this is funny. Like this whole thing is totally hilarious.

  The room is silent. But I can still hear his laugh. I can hear it louder and clearer than when it first happened, until suddenly, the last thing on my mind is Morgan and his jersey. I turn away from him, listen to those voices on the other side of the door, and sit like I’d sit if it were just me in here, alone, waiting for Principal Benson to come back.

  Morgan’s going to be gone for two weeks. Chris will be gone even longer. Two weeks to figure out where to sit at lunch.

  The door opens, this time all the way. Morgan’s parents, Edward and Jocelyn, are standing next to Principal Benson. They do not look very happy. Only his mom seems to notice me, and that’s just for a split second. Even though I
ate dinner at their kitchen table a couple times a month since I was six.

  “Let’s go, Morgan,” his dad announces.

  But before Morgan is done standing up, Principal ­Benson suddenly closes the door. The voices start up again, only this time I can make out more than three. And the new voices, two of them, are way, way more familiar than the ones belonging to Morgan’s parents. I still can’t hear their actual words, but I know their tones so well I can figure out exactly what they’re saying.

  My dad: Is Sam in there?

  My mom: Is he okay? Are you sure?

  Which means that my mom came back from St. Louis early. Even before she heard what happened. Which means she missed me. A lot. Plus my dad dropped everything to come here, even though my mom obviously could have picked me up all by herself.

  I think the vibrations of their voices aren’t just passing through the door, they’re passing straight into me. Because why else would I be shaking like this?

  Morgan, who froze for a moment or two when the door closed again, takes a step toward it. Even though he was probably trying to avoid it, his eyes look at me for a moment. At which point I start shaking for real and can feel things happening up around my own eyes. This can’t happen right now. Getting beaten up is one thing, but there’s no way I’m going to let him see me cry, too.

  So I do something I saw in a movie or read in a book or maybe just make up right here on the spot: I bite the inside of my lip. I bite it hard, so it will hurt, so that it will hurt enough to short-circuit all the other stuff, the shaking that won’t stop and the tears that seem determined to find their way out. For a moment or two I’m not sure it’s going to work, so I bite even harder, clenching my swollen jaw, feeling the inside of my lip as I crush it between my teeth. I bite harder, until it hurts more than anything else has hurt today, until I need to close my eyes and breathe in all the air inside the office, until I can feel the room start to tilt and flip all the way around.

  1:15:52 to 1:15:59

  nce upon a time there was a boy named Sam Lewis, and one day he and his ex–best friend, Morgan Sturtz, are sitting in the office because they got in a fight. Sam’s and Morgan’s parents are waiting right outside the door, and, when the principal opens the door, all four parents flood into the office.

  Actually, nce upon a time Morgan leaves first, and a few seconds later he and his parents disappear forever. Then Sam goes outside and hugs his parents.

  No, actually, nce upon a time, right after Morgan and his parents disappear forever, Sam’s parents see their son’s jaw before they even hug him. So they look at Principal Benson like he’s the one who did it, and he apologizes again and really means it this time. Then Sam’s mom hugs her son for almost one entire minute, until Sam’s dad says, “C’mon, Becca, let’s go.”

  So the three of them start walking out of the school, which smells like burnt eggs, only to run into Mr. Glassner, who smiles, shakes Sam’s parents’ hands, and apologizes as well. “Truly regrettable what happened today,” Mr. ­Glassner says, “but perhaps not all is lost.” Sam and his parents, all quite puzzled, look at Mr. Glassner, so he explains: “I was able to get today’s meet rescheduled to take place at E. C. Dunbar. Might Sam, despite all that happened today, still be willing to take on the vaunted CalcuLeaders in less than one hour? Normally, I’d allow this event to, as it were, go up in smoke, but in light of today’s special celebrity judge, well, I was very much hoping not to have to cancel.”

  Of course, the only problem is that almost all the other students have already left, because school was canceled, because school was recently on fire. And as anyone who knows the first thing about the rules of the Michigan Matholympics Association can tell you, each team at a meet must field at least three competitors or be forced to forfeit. Mr. Glassner, knowing these rules by heart, informs them, “I was able to locate Elliot Baumgarten.” Sam tries not to laugh, and Mr. Glassner says, his eyes shrinking with a smile of his own, “I’ll admit he’s not exactly first-string material, but if we field a solid one and two, we should be fine.”

  “But who is going to be our number two?” Sam asks.

  So they begin searching the school, and a couple minutes later, who do they find? None other than Amy ­Takahara, studying Latin prefixes, waiting for her parents to pick her up, and worrying about Sam. At first she’s not willing to compete, but after Sam offers to help her study Greek suffixes later that evening, she agrees. And they all go to ­Dunbar, where Sam performs so brilliantly that even the losing Calcu­Leaders join in the applause. As soon as the clapping dies down, Professor Davies, the totally bald celebrity judge, rushes up to Sam and says, “Highly impressive. You’ve got a bright, bright future ahead of you.” And he is right, because afterward they all go out to pizza, and Amy and Sam sit together at lunch every day from that moment on.

  Actually, nce upon a time Amy and Sam eat lunch together every day from that moment on, until mid-October in eighth grade, when Amy’s dad gets a new job and she has to move again, this time to Orlando, Florida. So, after almost six months of living happily ever after, Sam is a lonely loser once more. He sits all alone in the cafeteria and watches Morgan, captain of the football team and most popular kid in school, eat lunch with all their old friends and perhaps even with a couple girls as well, since eighth graders, especially the cool ones, always seem to have girlfriends.

  Or, no, nce upon a time Sam is a lonely loser again, but only for a little while, because around Thanksgiving he makes a new friend, maybe even two new friends—well, he makes at least one, some new kid with curly hair named Darren, who shares his Ho Hos with Sam most days.

  Sometimes Sam and Morgan pass each other in the hall, and because the two of them are so definitely not friends by this point, Morgan doesn’t even bother ignoring Sam anymore. Sam might as well just be any other kid at school. Every once in a while Sam hears some news or rumor about Morgan: that he was asked to work out with the high school team, that he bench-pressed two hundred pounds, that he’s going out with Kelly Davidson, who is almost certainly going to be a supermodel one day. Sam is interested in this news, but not too much.

  Then, in the final term of eighth grade, Sam and Morgan get stuck in the same cooking class together, even though neither of them signed up for it. They’ll even wind up getting put in the same cooking group. At first it will be super awkward, but then it will gradually start to feel normal (and will be kind of fun, too, especially the red velvet cake disaster), until, well, the two won’t exactly become friends again, but when they take that picture together, just the two of them, right after middle school graduation in June, each of them wearing a graduation robe and a tassled cap, they will both be smiling for the same reason. Because even if a friendship like MorSam comes to an end, it can never end completely.

  Actually, nce upon a time, Sam Lewis and Morgan Sturtz were best friends. Then they stopped being friends. And for better or for worse, they were never friends again. But they were best friends, for a bunch of years they were definitely best friends. They were maybe even the very best friend either of them would ever have.

  The end, probably.

  1:16

  I open my eyes, let go of my lip, and feel the room turn back to its normal position. Morgan, probably standing the whole time, stares at me like I’m a creature from another planet, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he takes a ­couple steps toward the door, toward all those voices that are still talking.

  “Hey, Morgan,” I say.

  He stops, right next to the side of Principal Benson’s desk, but doesn’t bother looking at me. “What?”

  “Morgan,” I calmly say his name again.

  Now he turns around, more than a little annoyed. “What?”

  This time I look right at him
, my eyes no longer dragged down to my shoes or his. I wait a second, because I want to make sure he’s listening.

  My mouth and jaw still hurt, but I have no problem saying the word as clearly as I’ve ever heard anyone ever say it: “Good-bye.”

  Todd Hasak-Lowy lives in Evanston, Illinois, with his wife and two daughters. He has published several books for adults. This is his first book for young readers.

  www.TODDHASAKLOWY.com

  Jacket design and illustration by Jessica Handelman

  Author photograph by joey garfield

  ALADDIN

  SIMON & SCHUSTER, NEW YORK

  Meet the author, watch videos, and get extras at

  KIDS.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  First Aladdin hardcover edition January 2013

  Text copyright © 2013 by Todd Hasak-Lowy

  Illustrations copyright © 2013 by Bethany Barton

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  ALADDIN is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc., and related logo is a registered trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Designed by Hilary Zarycky