She moves her backpack to the other shoulder. “Well . . . I’m going to wait for the late bus.”
“Okay.”
“You’re walking?”
“Yeah.”
She gives me this little smile. “Ethan . . . Por supuesto no me equivocaba contigo.”
Another subject my sister excels at: Spanish. “What?” I say.
“Figure it out.”
“I’ll never even remember what you said.”
We both stand there for a few seconds, and then she leaves.
“Bye, Rin,” I say under my breath. What I used to call her when we were little. When things weren’t so complicated. When tomatoes and marshmallows were enough.
ERIN
That was nice of him. He didn’t have to say all that.
There are times he can be okay.
There are times he’s not such a bad brother. Or person.
So. I don’t know.
WESLEY
I stand. “Hey, Marcus.”
He looks at me. “Yeah?”
“You want to know what she said?”
“You know?”
“Yeah. Turns out, I’m kinda decent at Spanish.”
“Okay.”
“She said, ‘Of course I was right about you.’ ”
Marcus shakes his head. “Thanks.”
“Sure.” I go inside Gilardi’s room.
“Wesley,” she says. “How was your day?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Party
ERIN
I sleep on it like Ms. Gilardi suggested, but when I wake up Saturday morning, I still don’t know what I should do. Or want to do. Anyway, it’s Halloween, and tonight’s Naomi’s party, so this is very unlike me, but I’m not going to stress about it today.
Zoe and I were going to be eighties girls, but we’re not exactly best friends at the moment. We haven’t talked much since lunch on Tuesday. We’re not not talking, but it’s definitely been awkward. I’m still having trouble processing the fact that she likes my brother. And does he like her? I mean, that just brought everything to another level, you know?
So I guess I’ll dress up as an eighties girl by myself.
I spend all morning looking up pictures online of eighties movie stars, then all afternoon making my hair big (which is easy) and splatter-painting an old sweatshirt. Mom gives me a pair of old neon-orange leg warmers she used to wear. I slather on lipstick and glittery eye shadow, put a headband around my forehead, and I’m set.
Mom laughs as she’s taking a picture of me. “You look very rad, dudette. That’s eighties slang for ‘radical.’ ”
“Thanks?”
She wants to get a picture of me and Ethan together, but he won’t put on his costume. He tells Mom he’s keeping it a secret and isn’t showing anyone until he gets to Naomi’s house. In the car on the way there, Dad’s the only one who talks.
“So a Halloween party, huh?”
“Glad kids still do this sort of thing.”
“I bet you won’t be bobbing for apples and carving pumpkins, though. What do kids do at Halloween parties these days?”
Ethan’s looking out the window and I’m doing the same. Dad keeps talking, telling us a story about his cousin, who once whipped a giant jawbreaker at someone’s house when they were trick-or-treating and hit their mailbox and made a dent. “At high speed,” he says, “those things are like meteors.”
We pull up at Naomi’s house. Dad turns around to us and grins. “So my advice is to stay away from giant jawbreakers. And mailboxes.”
“You’re so weird, Dad,” I say.
Ethan gets out. “Bye. See you later.”
Brian’s waiting for Ethan outside. They throw their arms around each other and get into a huddle. About their costumes, probably. I ring the doorbell but no one answers, so I just go in.
Tons of people are already there. A lot of the theater kids that Naomi’s friends with. Sheridan and Jacob and this guy Armando, who’s wearing a Mr. Potato Head costume that everyone thinks is hysterical.
I spot Zoe across the room. She isn’t an eighties girl. She and Parneeta are dressed as winter and summer, apparently. Zoe’s hair is spray-painted yellow and she’s wearing a green tank top, jean shorts, sunglasses, and flip-flops. Parneeta’s got on an ugly Christmas sweater, a knitted hat, and mittens.
I get a little catch in my throat. Zoe glances at me, and suddenly I feel stupid for sticking to the eighties idea when she didn’t.
She’s hanging with Parneeta and Jamie, so I get a cup of punch from a giant bowl with fake steam coming off the top, then stand next to a bookcase, not knowing what to do or who to talk to or anything.
Naomi’s mom is walking around with a tray of bloody fingers made out of cookie dough and red icing, telling everyone she found the recipe on Pinterest and isn’t it cool? Armando starts doing karaoke, singing that friend song from Toy Story. Jacob’s tossing M&Ms into the air and catching them in his mouth.
Then suddenly Armando stops singing, points, and starts cracking up. Everyone turns and looks toward the door. Ethan and Brian make their entrance.
They’re sumo wrestlers.
I should’ve known it would be something like this.
They have on giant inflatable skin-colored costumes with a black strip around the middle that looks like a tiny pair of shorts and black caps with a fake hair bun attached. They walk, actually more like waddle, toward the center of the room and everyone crowds around them, taking pictures and bumping into them and patting the fake buns.
I mean, everyone except me. I’m still by the bookcase.
Brian and Ethan go over to the karaoke machine and pick up the microphones and start doing a kind of rap. Which is really just a lot of grunting and pretending to make muscles, but everyone loves it, even Naomi’s mom, who’s clapping along and also making muscles.
Jamie’s standing near me. “Your brother’s hilarious,” she says. “Is he like this all the time?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
Jamie looks at me and tilts her head, then sort of drifts away, and for some reason, I think of the time when Ethan and I went to her birthday party in third grade. There was a magician, and of course, he asked for volunteers. Who volunteers first? Right, my brother.
Anyway, he went up there and pretty much stole the show. He was right on cue with the jokes and even did his own trick, pulling a quarter from behind the guy’s ear. The magician said, “Hey, kid, you want to quit school and go on the road with me?”
And Ethan answered, “Sure, how much you gonna pay me?”
I remember watching him then like I’m watching him now. I would never do those kinds of things. I don’t like when I’m embarrassed or put on the spot or people are laughing, because I never quite know if it’s with me or at me.
But Ethan . . . None of that bothers him.
I like who I am, I really do. I have a lot of good qualities and I don’t have self-esteem issues, so don’t jump to that conclusion.
But can I tell you something? Just once, or maybe even more than once, I’d like to have someone say I’m hilarious. But not if it involves wearing a sumo wrestler costume.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Mystery
ETHAN
Monday morning on the bus, I tell Brian I’m going to withdraw our project from Invention Day.
He blows out a breath. “Excellent decision. I’m not saying I told you so . . . but I am.”
“It’s fine, you can say it. We stink at inventions.”
“But we’re brilliant at being pretend sumo wrestlers.”
“True. Maybe we can dress up in the sumo costumes and do a karaoke song for D’Antonio about how kids shouldn’t be chained to their desks. Whaddya think?”
Brian leans away, practically out of the seat. “You’re on your own with that one.”
“I wasn’t serious.”
“Good. I was a little worried there for a second.”
I sigh. “You know the worst part about this whole thing? Nothing’s ever gonna change. Radical protest: fail. Cool invention: fail. So I’ll be sitting in school until I’m old and fat and my muscles have wasted away to the point where I couldn’t stand at my desk even if I wanted to.”
“Sucks, I know, but like my Gram says, it is what it is.”
“Yeah . . .”
“Or like she also says, never put potatoes under the bed.”
I laugh. “Okay. Good to know. You want all your stuff back, by the way? The Slinkys and everything?”
Brian grins and pats my back. “You can keep it all, dude.” He flutters his eyelashes. “Our special memory.”
“Thanks.”
When we get to school, I trudge to my locker. Another week of classes. Another week of same old, same old.
There are eight minutes until the bell, just enough time to get to Gilardi’s room and tell her I slept on it and I’m for sure withdrawing. Except when I open my locker, a white paper, folded into quarters, falls out. I pick it up and unfold it.
There are only a few words on the paper, and they’re typed:
think about how a folding table works
What?
I check around to see if anyone’s watching me, but no one is. At least not that I notice. Who the heck wrote this, and why? How did they know where my locker is? And what’s it supposed to mean?
Think about how a folding table works?
Do you have a clue here? Because I certainly don’t.
Erin comes to her locker, right next to mine, opens it, and hangs up her jacket.
I go, “Hi.”
She takes out some folders, gives me a sideways glance. “I just saw you at breakfast, but okay, hi.”
“What’s going on?”
“Um. Nothing.” She shuts her locker and leaves.
Was it her? How could it be? She just got here. How could she have put the note in my locker?
I refold the paper and slide it into the back pocket of my jeans. Then the bell rings and it’s too late to go to Gilardi’s room. I’ll have to go after school.
I rush to math, take my seat, and start working on the warm-up problem on the board, but really, the only thing in my head is the mysterious note.
All lowercase letters, no period. Typed. Erin would never write a sentence without proper punctuation, although she would definitely type it. Unless she was trying to throw me off so I wouldn’t think it was her. She’d do that.
But anyway, why would someone write that and put it in my locker? What does it mean? I finish the math problem and plunk my pencil down. Someone’s trying to tell me something! But about . . . a folding table? Maybe that’s a clue for something else. A secret message or an encrypted code.
At lunch I show the note to Brian. He doesn’t have any answers either and thinks the note wasn’t even meant for me but was put into the wrong locker by mistake.
“It’s probably part of someone’s homework or something,” he says, then resumes his constant staring at Jamie, who’s sitting across the cafeteria. “Should I just ask her out already?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s solid evidence she likes me.”
“Like what?”
“At the party, she talked to me for practically an hour!”
“Yeah, in a group with about five other people.”
“So! Plus, she loved the sumo costume.”
I shrug, finish my sandwich. Slowly scan the cafeteria to see if anyone’s looking my way. Nope.
It doesn’t come to me until I’m scomatizing in LA that the note might have something to do with the desk-evator. I bolt up in my chair. What if someone’s trying to help me? Give me a tip of some sort? Would someone do that?
Not that many people know about my idea. Erin, Zoe, Romanov, Gilardi, Mom and Dad. I told a few kids at the Halloween party too. They were all like, don’t give up, you gotta do this. So maybe it was one of them? Sheridan? Parneeta? I can’t even remember who else was around when I was talking about it.
Suddenly I realize Delman’s drumming his fingers on my desktop. Everyone in the room is quiet. I look up.
“Ethan,” he says. “I asked you to explain how the second stanza in the poem contributes to its overall meaning.”
“The second stanza?” I repeat, quickly reading it on the whiteboard. “Sorry, uh, I don’t know.”
Delman sighs, then turns away and calls on my sister, who of course has her hand raised. “It relates to the theme of loneliness,” she answers. “How we can never really know another person. We’re all just oil and water, not ever truly understanding each other.”
Delman nods. “Interesting way to put it, but yes.”
Erin glances at me, as if she wasn’t talking about the poem, but . . . her and me.
And I get this weird feeling that she wrote the note. Maybe she felt bad about what she said in Spanish and she’s not mad anymore and is trying to secretly help me. But in typical Erin style, it’s not easy to figure out.
It’s not until school’s over and I’m walking to Gilardi’s room that it comes to me. I stop in the middle of the hallway and take the note from my pocket. I’m a complete idiot. It is about the desk-evator. She’s telling me that instead of the sides raising up like an elevator, I should make it like a folding table with legs that fold in. Duh, duh, duh.
I run out the front door while texting Brian. It isn’t over yet. A miracle just happened.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Desk-evator
ETHAN
I run toward home, texting Brian to get to my house ASAP. I tear through the park, the seagulls scattering and shrieking, then sprint the last few blocks like this is a race and I’m nearing the finish line.
This is a race! A race to eliminate scomas! To save myself and every kid in every school everywhere.
When I reach my house, I punch in the code on the number pad outside the garage, then duck under when it’s not even fully open. Everything’s exactly the same as the day Zoe and I tried to clean up the mess. But what I want to see is the table. The folding table.
I crawl underneath to see how the legs are attached. It’s a little more complicated than I imagined. On each of the four corners, there’s a hinge (yeah, okay, I learned something from my trip to Home Depot) and a screw and a slide-y type metal thing. Technical term for that last one.
“Okay, I’m here,” Brian says. “What’s up, dude? What’s the miracle?”
I quickly scoot out from under the table, leap up, and slap the top. “This is how we do it! This is how we make the desk-evator. It doesn’t raise up, it has legs that fold in and out. Like a stand, so we can stand. Get it?”
“Ah,” he says. “Clever. Why didn’t we think of that?”
“Because we were so stuck on doing it the other way.”
“So that’s what the person who wrote the note was telling you?”
“I think.”
“But who wrote it?”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s someone who obviously wants to help us! Let’s not question it, let’s just go with it. Whaddya say?”
He groans. “I thought we were quitting, that this nightmare was behind us.”
“We’re not. Come on.” I grab Brian’s arm and drag him inside, then go directly to the pile of bags that Mom left in the laundry room, ready to drop off at Goodwill. One is filled with old kitchen stuff. Just yesterday, she was cleaning out the kitchen! And right on top of the bag is a scratched-up, half-broken cutting board.
Exactly what we need.
From the kitchen drawers, I grab four chip clips, a roll of duct tape, two wooden spoons, and two spatulas. Not stuff that’s going to Goodwill. Stuff we’re still using. But Mom won’t mind if I borrow them for a while, will she? Not for a good reason, I’m sure.
Brian’s leaning against the counter with his arms crossed. “Looks like you’re on a mission.”
“You bet I am.” I go down to the basement, carrying all the stuf
f, and Brian follows.
I tape the spoons and spatulas to the corners of the cutting board at ninety degree angles, then tape the chip clips onto the bottom of each spoon/spatula. And in less than ten minutes, I’ve got the desk-evator pretty much put together. It folds and unfolds. It clips. After all those fails, it just happens.
Was it like this for Edison? Thousands of light bulbs that didn’t succeed, then one day, something worked.
This is that day. Me and Thomas E, we’ve got something in common now.
I try to stand it up on the floor. So it looks like a preschool art project gone bad, and the thing’s kind of unstable. I have to hold on to it, but it’s okay. It gets the message across.
Erin wasn’t right about me.
“Behold the desk-evator,” I announce. “It can be folded up and stacked in the back of a classroom. When you can’t sit anymore, you go get one, unfold it, clip it onto your desk, and bam! You can stand, stretch your legs, take a quiz, take notes, whatever.”
Brian’s nodding. “I like it. It has a very . . . homemade kitchen-type look.”
“This is only a prototype, of course.” I smooth down one corner of the tape. “Maybe I can use some hinges.”
“Hinges? Whoa. Who are you?”
“Oh, just an inventor.” I grin, then tilt my head and look at it. “I made this thing. What if it takes off and I get a patent and it actually gets used in schools? I mean, this could really be big—”
Brian fake-coughs. “Hold on. This isn’t going to win, Ethan, you know that, right?”
I shrug.
“Come on. I heard Romanov’s working on a robotic hand that you control through an app. That’s what wins invention fairs, not this.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“Uh, yeah, I do.”
“Well, this is what we got, and we’re going with it. It solves a real problem. Something important.” I pull my phone from my pocket and take a few pictures of the desk-evator, then print them for the middle section of the display board.
Ethan Marcus Stands Up Page 10
