The Girl Who Knew Even More

by Commander S. T. Bolivar, III

  “What are we going to do?” Mattie asked.

  “You keep asking that and I keep telling you: nothing.” Eliot stood and helped Caroline to her feet. Mattie didn’t move.

  “We can’t, Mattie,” Eliot continued. “You said it yourself, this is Munchem and we’re kids.”

  “That doesn’t mean we can’t do the right thing!”

  “C’mon, Mattie,” Caroline said. “We can’t stay any longer. Someone’s going to miss us.” She hauled Mattie up by his arm and dragged him into the cemetery. Far up the hill, the sun was disappearing behind Munchem and it turned the school’s three and a half towers into three and a half horns. Munchem was still as scary as ever.

  “We have to do something,” Mattie continued. “Dr. Hoo’s already hurt people—think of Kent and Bell and Rooney. They’re just the beginning if he sells the Weather-matic to that general!” He took a deep breath. “Someone has to tell my dad.”

  “Not it!” the Spencers said in unison.

  Mattie narrowed his eyes. This wasn’t the first time his friends had invoked Not It, and it wasn’t the first time Mattie had been caught out by Not It.

  “Don’t look at us like that,” Caroline said, stroking Beezus. Bits of rat fur took to the air and she waved them away. “You know the rules of Not It.”

  Mattie did indeed. What he didn’t know is why he always forgot to say Not It before Caroline and Eliot did.

  “Besides,” Caroline added, “your dad’s going to want to know why you were down here. How are you going to tell him without giving away Maxwell and Doyle? They’re kind of Larimore Corporation inventions too. How can you protect them?”

  “I don’t know,” Mattie said miserably. “But I can’t not say anything. It’s wrong.”

  “It’s wrong to get the clones in trouble too.”

  Mattie nodded. Caroline was right. Doing the right thing almost felt like doing the wrong thing and Mattie didn’t know what to think about that. “We can’t stay quiet.”

  “Well, technically…” Eliot paused and exchanged a careful look with Caroline, one Mattie understood well. Technically, they could stay quiet. They didn’t have to say anything. They could pretend to know nothing. His dad described it as “keeping your head down.” Mr. Larimore said it was a good thing—especially around attorneys and people who worked with income taxes.

  But Mattie didn’t think he could stay quiet. This was a dangerous invention. People could get hurt. In the wrong hands, people would get hurt.

  And Mattie would know he could have stopped it. “I won’t keep this a secret. My dad has to know.”

  OF COURSE, THE PROBLEM WITH Mattie doing the right thinG and telling his dad and outing Dr. Hoo for being an evil scientist was the fact that Mr. Larimore wasn’t actually at Munchem. He was still away on business. Mattie was going to have to call him, which brought up another problem because the students weren’t allowed to use the school’s phones.

  “Everyone’s going to be heading for dinner,” Mattie whispered to the Spencers as they made their way up through the dead gardens and into Munchem. “If you could create some small distraction to keep it that way, I can slip into Rooney’s office and call my dad.”

  Caroline petted Beezus through her sweater, and Eliot chewed his thumbnail.

  “So you’re going to do something wrong to do something right?” he asked at last.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Okay, so long as we’re all on the same page.”

  Mattie ignored him and took a left toward the administration wing. The overhead lights had been dimmed and Mattie’s shoes tapped quietly against the hardwood floors. At the hallway’s end was the headmaster’s door.

  Mattie glanced around. No one. He rapped lightly on the door. No response.

  Now or never, Mattie thought, and he took a few deep breaths for courage, but it only filled his nose with dinner smells and did nothing to lessen the tightness around his ribs. Please don’t let me get caught. Please don’t let me get caught.

  And Mattie reached for the doorknob. It turned easily, silently, maybe even a little eagerly in his hand. It was at that moment that Mattie wondered why the office hadn’t been locked. Because someone trusted the students? (Ha!) Because someone forgot? (Possibly.)

  Or because someone was coming back?

  Mattie’s armpits went swampy. He needed to hurry. Just like in the hallway, the office’s lights were low, pooling sha-dows in all the corners and under all the furniture. Mattie rushed to the big wooden desk and picked up the phone. He dialed his dad’s cell phone number and waited for the line to connect.

  Click. Mattie hesitated, peering at the phone’s receiver. There wasn’t a ring, and even when the call went straight to voice mail, his dad’s voice mail usually had a greeting, not a click. Then again, the line hummed as if it had connected. Maybe it is working, Mattie thought.

  “Dad!” Mattie faced the desk and curled over the phone so he could keep his voice down. “We have to talk! Dr. Hoo has given a weather machine a lightning setting and it can kill people! He’s going to sell it to the—”

  “Ahem.”

  Mattie’s blood turned to slush. Slowly, he turned, spotting Dr. Hoo and Delia only a few feet away. Delia was smirking her nasty smirk, and Dr. Hoo was twirling the end of what looked like a telephone cord.

  Mattie peered closer. That’s because it is a telephone cord, he realized.

  “I told you he was in here,” Delia said, teeth glinting in the low light.

  Dr. Hoo took a step toward Mattie, and—

  Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham! Footsteps crashed down the hallway and Carter burst through the office door. Panting, Carter looked from Mattie to Hoo to Delia. “Uh, hey, um, there you are, Mattie. I’ve been looking for you everywhere! We have that thing we have to do.”

  Mattie dropped the phone. “Oh, yeah, that’s right. I forgot.”

  Carter nodded frantically, dark hair flopping across his forehead. “Exactly. That thing with lots of other adults.”

  “They’re expecting me,” Mattie explained as he edged around Dr. Hoo and Delia.

  “Oh, I bet they are,” the scientist said, sounding as if he didn’t bet it at all. “You’d better run along.”

  Delia’s face flushed a deep purple. “Aren’t you going to do anything?”

  “Quiet,” Hoo hissed. “I’ll deal with it.”

  The hair on the back of Mattie’s neck stood up. “Yeah, uh, I better, you know, go—”

  Carter caught his arm and dragged Mattie toward the hallway as Delia swore under her breath. She was focused on Mattie getting away, Carter was focused on Mattie getting away, and Mattie? Well, Mattie couldn’t help himself. He glanced back. Dr. Hoo smiled at him.

  And then Dr. Hoo drew one finger across his throat.

  In later years, Mattie would say he had never felt so helpless and so scared. Dr. Hoo was an adult. He was an evil genius. And he was out to get Mattie—who was currently trying to keep up with his brother, who was dragging him somewhere. Mattie wasn’t sure where. He couldn’t focus. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to think—even if he could think. Panic had turned his brain staticky or maybe it was just that his head was filled with Dr. Hooisouttogetme!

  “This is sooo not good,” Mattie said to himself.

  “Ya think?” Carter stomped down the administration hallway and turned for the dorms.

  They’d just gone down the first flight of steps when Eliot caught up with them. “Hoo and Delia weren’t at dinner!” Eliot whispered.

  “Yeah, I figured that out,” Mattie said. “How did you know to save me?”

  “I saw them follow you into the office. Mandy and I were down the hall. We were, uh, busy,” Carter said.

  “Doing what?”

  Carter gave his little brother a jerk. “You’re killing me, you know that? What did I say?”

  Mattie sighed heavily. “That I should pretend I don’t know anything.”

&nbs
p; “And what did you do?” Carter asked.

  Mattie sighed even more heavily. “Tried to tell Dad everything I knew and now Dr. Hoo knows I know and he just dragged a finger across his throat like he was cutting my head off.”

  Carter said some of Mr. Larimore’s favorite curse words, and behind them, Eliot whistled in admiration.

  “Seriously?” Mattie asked.

  “What?” Eliot shrugged. “It’s impressive.”

  “I can tell you what else is impressive,” Carter said darkly, stopping at the corner so he could better glare at Mattie. “Captain Do Right’s ability to—”

  “I can’t do this right now,” Mattie said and kept going. Eliot and Carter tore after him, but Mattie didn’t stop. A floor above, the hallway leading to 14A smelled like vanilla cupcakes, but even the scent of sugary deliciousness couldn’t improve Mattie’s mood. He couldn’t stop picturing how Dr. Hoo had drawn a finger across his throat.

  The boys stomped through 14A’s doorway, and Mattie flung himself facedown on Eliot’s bed. For once, he was glad Kent and Bell hadn’t returned to school after the mudslide. Mattie could have his nervous breakdown in private.

  “Hoo’s going to kill me and make it look like a lightning strike.” The sheets smelled like Thanksgiving turkey. Mattie wrinkled his nose and rolled back over. “I’m a dead man.”

  Eliot sat on the bed’s edge, studying his hands, the walls, the floor—basically anything that wasn’t Mattie.

  Mattie sat up. “Eliot?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This is the part where you tell me it won’t happen.”

  “I can’t. It’s totally going to happen.”

  “Hey,” Carter said, patting Mattie’s shoulder. Mattie looked hopefully at him. Maybe his brother would know what to do. Maybe his brother could make him feel better.

  “Eliot’s right,” Carter said and then flicked Mattie’s ear as hard as he could. “What have I always told you?”

  “Ow!” Mattie rubbed his ear. “To kick Doyle in the crotch if he tries to stick me in the toilet again.”

  Carter flicked him again. “No, what’s the other thing I always tell you?”

  “To shut up?”

  “Exactly. It applies to so many situations. It’s like the Golden Rule.”

  Mattie thought about explaining (again) to Carter about what the Golden Rule really was, but his ear hurt too much. He flopped back on the bed and contemplated the top bunk’s cracked underside.

  “My point is, you shouldn’t have told Dad,” Carter con-tinued.

  “I had to. Think of what would happen to anyone General Mills doesn’t like! Think of what could happen to Dad!”

  “So that’s really what this is about.” Carter tried to flick him again and Mattie twisted away. “You’re worried about making Dad look good. Did it ever occur to you, Mattie, that maybe he deserves to be embarrassed? He hired those homicidal maniacs. They’re his fault.”

  Mattie glared at Carter. Carter glared at Mattie. “That’s not what it’s really about,’” Mattie said at last. “It’s just another reason I had to do something.”

  “Well, now you’re going to die, so yay you.”

  “Do you think people smell like barbecue when they’ve been hit by lightning?” Eliot asked, swinging his legs back and forth. “Or do you think they smell like burned chicken?”

  Mattie groaned. “I don’t want to think about it. Going up against Hoo is like being in a horror movie.”

  “What?” Eliot and Carter asked.

  “You know how in scary movies the bad guy always outsmarts the hero until the very end?”

  Carter laughed. “You think you’re a hero?”

  Mattie glared at him. “No. I’m just using it as an example. The bad guys always think of everything. They cover their tracks. They cut the good guys off from help. That’s how they get away with being bad.”

  The boys thought about this. All three looked very serious. Mattie looked, perhaps, more serious than Eliot or Carter, but the prospect of being barbecued can do that to a person.

  “Mattie?” Eliot asked at last.

  “Yeah?”

  “If the bad guys always get away, maybe you should start thinking like one of them.”

  “How am I supposed to think like a bad guy?” Mattie asked. He sounded a little horrified, and that was appropriate since we all know Mattie is supposed to be the only good kid at Munchem. He should sound horrified. He should be horrified.

  But Mattie kind of sort of wasn’t, because Eliot’s words had given Mattie an idea—an idea so good that a smile broke across his face. He looked at Eliot and Carter and Eliot and Carter started to look a little worried.

  “What?” Eliot asked.

  “Guys,” Mattie said. “I know how I can stop Dr. Hoo. He said the Weather-matic’s crystal core is one of a kind. So, we steal it.”

  WELCOME TO ANOTHER IMPORTANT MOMENT in Mattie’s evolution. Most biographers don’t include it because they lack attention to detail—and by “most biographers” I actually mean Alistair Wicket, who probably writes his drafts in crayon.

  Thankfully, however, I have loads of details to pick from, including how Carter will eventually set fire to Dr. Hoo’s car and Mattie will put it out, but that’s for a later date and has no place here because right now we’re concentrating on how Eliot’s eyebrows had just shot halfway up his forehead and how Carter was wiping away happy tears from his eyes.

  “Steal the crystal core?” Carter echoed, smiling a big, happy smile and patting his now damp cheeks. “I never thought I’d hear you say something like that.”

  “It’s the fastest way to stop Dr. Hoo.” Mattie jumped to his feet and began to pace. “Think about it. Dr. Hoo said the crystal core is the only one of its kind. He needs it to make more. No crystal. No Weather-matic 9000.”

  Eliot’s eyes went wide. “That’s a great idea!”

  Carter shook his head. “Except for the part where the Weather-matic is impossible to get to.”

  “Which is why they’ll bring it to us.”

  His brother sighed as if Mattie had given him a massive headache. “Yeah, that’s not how being a bad kid works, Mattie. People don’t give stuff to you.”

  “Shut it. I’m not being bad. I’m stopping Dr. Hoo from being bad—from being awful. Think how many people he could hurt by selling the Weather-matic!” Mattie paused. To pull this off, he would need something big, something unexpected, something that would really light a fire under Dr. Hoo and the other scientists.

  Wait. Mattie tensed. A fire?! He snapped his fingers. “We’ll get them to bring the Weather-matic out of the gym by setting the gym on fire.”

  Carter froze. “Do go on. I’m all ears.”

  Mattie opened his mouth and closed it. He loved his brother. He loved how Carter treated him like a friend now, and he especially loved how Carter no longer called him dog names, but Mattie wasn’t sure he loved the gleam in Carter’s eyes.

  “No,” Mattie said finally. “Hold on. Not a fire. That’s too dangerous. We just need something that will make them think the inventions are at a bigger risk for staying in the gym versus coming out of the gym. We need them to think there’s a fire.”

  Carter’s smile fell and he blew out an enormous, long-suffering sigh. Perhaps he was long-suffering. After all, no one at Munchem enjoyed random acts of arson quite as much as Carter Larimore. “You disappoint me, you know that?”

  Mattie ignored his brother. “What about the ventilation system?” he asked Eliot. “My dad bought a new one. It’s supposed to be controlled by one master computer system. Could you overload it or something?”

  Eliot shrugged. “Probably. If I could, it would get the alarms to go off. They might start evacuating everyone. I would just need a way into the system—maybe through the wireless, but they’d be stupid not to have it secured and—”

  “You’re overthinking it. You don’t need any of…” Carter made a face. “Any of what you were just talking about. You
just need a way to clog the vent system.”

  “Well, then we need something to clog it with.” Mattie studied his brother. “Carter? What do you have?”

  “Nothing,” Carter said quickly.

  Too quickly, Mattie thought. “Without me, you’d still be in that cloning pod under the cemetery.”

  His brother sighed another long-suffering sigh. “Fine. I don’t technically have them, but I can get about two thousand crickets. I was saving them for just this sort of emergency.”

  Mattie and Eliot gaped.

  “You were expecting something like the Weather-matic?” Eliot asked at last.

  “No, I was expecting my math midterm, but I can get them, and you can use them, and I’ll come up with something else for Algebra.”

  “How do we know this will work?”

  Carter snorted. “It’s me. Of course it will work.”

  Mattie and Eliot stared at him and Carter rolled his eyes. “Who put the dead possum in the air-conditioning unit last term?”

  Mattie tried not to gag at the memory. He’d been in Mrs. Hitchcock’s class, trying to figure out how to get out of Munchem, when they’d smelled the dead possum. Carter had stuffed it into the vent so every time the air turned on, the class was buffeted by stench. People had vomited. Mrs. Hitchcock had fainted. It had been awful and also rather epic.

  Carter smiled to himself, eyes misty as if he were recalling that day too. “I enjoy using the school’s infrastructure against the teachers.”

  And that was true, Carter certainly did, but Mattie was more impressed his brother knew the word “infrastructure,” which is supposed to refer to a building’s skeleton, but for Carter it was an opportunity for mayhem.

  “Anyway,” Carter continued, “we can dump the crickets into the air vent on the south wall—they still haven’t cleared away those rosebushes, so we’ll have cover—and then we wait. The crickets will prevent the air from moving properly plus they stink. And they stink even more when they die, so there’s that.”

  It wasn’t a bad idea. Mattie thought it over. Nope, it definitely had potential. Except…“I don’t think stink is going to make them evacuate the inventions.”