by David Yoo
The door to room 12 was closed. I placed my right hand on the knob, but before turning it I said a little prayer to myself. “You’re going to be okay,” I whispered. Then I opened the door and my stomach immediately fell. The Sweet brothers were sitting in the front row! Mr. Tinsley waved me over to the front desk.
“You’re late,” he said. Which made sense—tiptoeing isn’t exactly the fastest mode of transportation these days. “Since this is your first time, let’s go over the house rules. You are to sit there and do homework. You are not allowed to get up from your seat unless I give you permission. You can talk quietly, but if I hear you over my headphones you will instantly get another detention. Understand? Now let me sign your detention slip.”
I tried to communicate with my eyes that I was in serious danger, but he just scribbled his signature and stuck it in a folder, and without looking up, said, “Grab a seat.”
“Well if it isn’t Street Magic’s Assistant,” Hugh said, smiling so broadly that I could see the sides of his molars. My lord, they were going to eat me. “You’re not alone, are you?”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
Hugh and Hank looked at each other before breaking out in mad laughter.
“Oh, this is going to be fun,” Hank said.
That’s how evil the Sweet brothers were. I mean, I would never consider it “fun” to torture something weaker than me, because I’m not a psychopath. Like on the rare occasion when I spend a couple of minutes smushing ants with a basketball in the driveway, I don’t think, Oh boy, killing these little ants is fun, yippee! It’s just something kids my age do when they have a basketball and there are a lot of ants on the ground. It’s embedded in our DNA, as my dad would say, that you simply have to smush them. It’s more like a job, really; there’s no “fun” involved—that’s just twisted.
I looked over at Mr. Tinsley and he just nodded sleepily at me, totally unaware that my life was in danger. He had headphones on and was reading a book. A rubber band hit me in the back of the head. I pretended I hadn’t felt it, even though it stung really bad, given the fact that Hugh was sitting approximately three feet away from me. He shot another one that clipped my ear.
“You better tie your shoes well, Street Magic’s Assistant,” he said in a normal voice, not bothering to whisper because Mr. Tinsley’s headphones were blaring. “Because the second you get out that door, we’re coming after you. And we’ll be looking for you and Drew especially during the day—we’re making you our special projects for the semester.”
Basically for the entire detention I sat there three feet away from two thugs who wanted to jump me. It reminded me of an exhibit at the museum of prehistoric times—I was the mastodon frozen in midgallop while there were two frozen cavemen, forever about to chuck their spears at me. In my head I mapped out alternate escape routes. My best chance was to head straight for the stairs, bolt out the back, try to lose them in the woods, backtracking to Drew’s house.
The bell rang, and I immediately bolted out of the room, but in my panic I made the wrong choice and headed down the hallway rather than over to the stairwell ten feet to my left. The Sweet brothers chased after me. They didn’t say anything as they chased me down the hallway, and once again the silence kinda freaked me out. I didn’t think I could outrun both of them, and I suddenly remembered this movie where a guy in a fighter jet slams on the brakes and the enemy jets fly right by—I figured I’d stop suddenly, and once they ran by I’d simply head back the other way, so right then I screeched to a halt.
Looking back, it wasn’t a horrible plan—I’m smaller than them, so I probably can change directions faster, the only problem was they weren’t nearly as close to me as I’d thought. Instead of being an arm’s length behind me, they were more like fifteen feet behind me, and so by stopping I allowed them to catch up to me. They looked surprised.
“Um, thanks for stopping?” Hank said, confused at first that I’d suddenly given up when in reality I was pulling away from them. Since I’m a fast thinker, I thought maybe I could turn this into brownie points with him.
“You’re welcome,” I said, praying with my eyes open that they’d high-five me and that would be it. Instead Hugh turned me around and gave me my second-ever atomic wedgie, ripping the elastic band of my favorite pair of underwear (it was my favorite because it was the pair I was wearing when I first discovered mica, a year earlier). I let out a yelp.
“Sorry, pal,” he said, clapping me really hard on the back. “It’s like that reflex test at the doctor’s—they hit your kneecap with that rubber mallet and your leg shoots out.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” I admitted.
“I’m just saying it’s kinda like that—whenever I see your pants, I can’t help but want to give you a serious wedgie,” he explained.
They laughed.
“If I wore shorts, would you have the same reaction?” I asked.
“Are you being obnoxious?” Hugh said.
“No.”
“Well, then the answer is yes—any kind of pants I think would do it.”
“Maybe the solution is for you to stop looking at my pants,” I offered, and this made Hugh really mad.
“I was about to let you go, but your big mouth got in the way again,” Hugh said.
As he grabbed my shirt from behind, I shouted, “Stop looking at my pants!” and tugged away as hard as I could—and miraculously wrenched myself free. I bolted back toward the stairwell and practically launched myself into the air at the top of the stairs. I flew down the three flights and out the exit doors, positive they were going to tackle me at any moment, but when I finally looked behind me, the Sweet brothers were standing at the window on the second floor, gasping for breath and glaring at me. I didn’t realize it at that moment, but I’d just made a major discovery that would help me in the future.
Chapter Fourteen
WHEN I GOT TO DREW’S HOUSE, I told him what happened, and he patted me on the back. “Well, on the plus side, that shirt’s going to last you a lot longer, since the collar’s all stretched out,” he said.
“Now’s not really the time to be making lemonade,” I said.
I explained what the Sweet brothers had said during detention, and we decided that we had no choice but to take martial-arts lessons immediately. The trick was going to be convincing our parents to let us learn how to become deadly weapons. I gave my parents a long spiel over dinner about how I wanted to be there for them when they got old, which meant I’d need to learn how to defend myself in the present. I thought the speech went pretty well, but at the end of it my parents were frowning.
“I don’t want you using that stuff on your classmates. It can only lead to trouble.”
“But I need it to be able to defend myself!”
“Violence never solves anything, Son,” Dad said.
“What’s the point of wars, then?” I asked. “We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the American Revolution.”
“That’s different,” he said, but he couldn’t elaborate so I knew I was right.
I made my eyes look real big and wet, as if I was a cartoon deer or something.
“I just want to have the skills so I can defend myself,” I said in as pitiful a voice as possible. I even sniffled a little. “Who’s going to take care of you when you’re really old, if I’m not around?”
“Is anyone picking on you?” Mom asked. “Tell me who it is, and I’ll call their folks right this second and put a stop to it.”
I knew she was trying to be nice, so I didn’t have the heart to explain to her that this was probably the worst idea in the history of parenting.
“I just don’t think taking martial-arts lessons is a good idea,” Dad added. “You have all this aggression inside you.”
“No, I don’t!” I shouted, feeling really angry all of a sudden.
“Remember when we went to that park one time, and you kicked that dog as it ran b
y?” my dad asked.
“I thought it was going to bite me!”
“End of discussion, Peter,” my mom said. “Honey, I have an idea. Why don’t you try writing a letter to whoever is bothering you? I’m sure they’d understand.”
“That’s a wonderful idea,” I said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it first, to just put it into words, of course . . .”
“That’s the spirit,” Mom said, pumping her fist.
“I think he’s being sarcastic, honey,” Dad said to her.
Even though Drew and I didn’t have any classes with each other, I told my parents I was doing a project with him, and they let me go over to his house after dinner. I figured it wasn’t lying because, technically, we were working on a project together: a project to save our own lives. We tried to work on his mom, thinking maybe if we got her on our side, she could convince my parents to let me take martial-arts lessons, but she was no better, because she’s a dental assistant.
“Just win over your enemies with smiles, that’s the best defense, boys,” she suggested. “Because as everyone knows, smiling is infectious. Peter, do you need any floss?”
I sighed.
“No thanks, Mrs. N. I still haven’t quite finished the container you gave me last week.”
Drew and I went outside and started pacing back and forth under Corbett Canyon. I kicked at a tall weed sticking up out of the grass, but since I don’t know martial arts, I missed.
We climbed up into the tree house. The moon was full, making the inside of the tree house glow a dull blue. I put on my nighttime reading helmet but didn’t bother turning on the headlamp. The helmet is made of hard green plastic, with leather straps. My mom was so excited when she got me this ugly thing, but I have to admit it served its purpose—every weekend this past summer, I read comics late at night with it on.
“I guess I’m going to have to start wearing this stupid helmet to school for protection,” I said.
“We’re dead meat,” Drew said. “And there’s so much I never got to do in my life . . . I never did get to ride in a helicopter, for instance.”
“Maybe we can teach ourselves martial arts,” I said. “If we put our heads together we can come up with our own form of fighting. We can call it Peter Drew Fu or something.”
“Or Drew Peter Fu,” Drew suggested.
“No offense, but that has a terrible ring to it,” I said.
That weekend we invented our own form of martial arts. We realized we had to use our main strengths (namely, lack of size and slightly-above-average speed) to our advantage. To be honest, it was pretty basic, consisting of only two moves:
Move #1. Shoving someone in the back before they have a chance to realize you’re even there, followed by
Move #2. Running away.
We focused our training mostly on the second move, “land-skiing,” all afternoon. Behind Drew’s backyard is a thick forest full of evergreens that severely slopes all the way down to the main road. Land-skiing is this thing I came up with where you just start running as fast as you can down the steep hill, and because the ground is covered with slippery pine needles you eventually start gliding in your sneakers. I got the idea because of the way I’d flown down the stairs so fast after detention, escaping the Sweet brothers. The key to land-skiing is you have to jump to the side in order to weave around the trees, and we quickly became experts at weaving down the hill like this.
It’s really fun (and incredibly dangerous).
On Monday it was time to test out what we’d learned. In the lobby before homeroom we saw the Sweet brothers in the corner, and they looked bigger than I’d remembered. The thought of actually trying to shove them didn’t seem so bright an idea anymore. And we couldn’t really use our land-skiing abilities, because the hallways were flat. “We could run away,” Drew suggested. “We could start land-skiing right now, and by nightfall I bet we could hit the New Hampshire border.”
Instead we thought outside the box and came up with an alternate solution, using the school’s circular shape to our advantage: Basically, after every class I’d head to the left no matter what to get to my next class, even if the next class was closer by heading to the right. Then, if I spotted the Sweet brothers coming my way, I’d simply change directions, allowing me to avoid the Sweet brothers altogether. Drew used the same strategy.
It wasn’t a perfect solution, though. The main problem was that it sometimes meant we had to do up to two laps around and we’d end up late for class (and really sweaty, too), but we figured it was worth not having to get bullied by the Sweet brothers. All day long we didn’t run into them at all, thanks to our system.
Another good thing was that for the first time I noticed that we weren’t the only kids being bullied by the Sweet brothers. It turned out just about everyone else was scared of them, too. Before English class I saw the Sweet brothers terrorize some seventh-grade girls from behind by shouting in their ears, and the two girls ran away, squealing. After math class I saw Carson get shoved into the lockers by Hank Sweet, and before social studies I was standing in the doorway and saw Trent changing directions right before he got to our class because the Sweet brothers were approaching him.
Apparently we weren’t the only ones who had figured out this strategy.
Chapter Fifteen
YOU KNOW, AT SOME POINT we’re going to get unlucky and run right into them,” Drew said on our walk home from school the next day.
“I know,” I agreed. “Which is why we need to get going with the plan to trick everyone into thinking we’re popular in every other town besides Fenwick.”
We sat in Corbett Canyon making up our new identities: By day, we were the mysteriously isolated Peter and Drew, but outside of school we were the most popular kids in the neighboring town of Halliston. On weekends we went to birthday parties with all the cool kids at Halliston Middle and simply had no time to attend parties in Fenwick.
“But how can we prove we go to parties in Halliston?” I asked Drew.
“What about digital pictures?”
I put a hand on Drew’s shoulder.
“There aren’t actually any parties we’re going to, remember?” I said real slowly.
“I know. I mean we could make fake pictures.”
A good chill ran through me, as opposed to the bad kind you get right before you throw up.
“Drew, I have good news,” I said. “You’ve officially gotten out of the box.”
He beamed.
“Really?”
“You are box free, my friend,” I said, and we high-fived. “Okay, so here’s the deal. Tomorrow after school I’ll borrow my dad’s digital camera and we’ll take a bunch of fake action shots of us hanging out at parties. What I need you to do is pick up some cheap party decorations so we can make the inside of the tree house look like someone’s birthday party. Oh, and you need to order a birthday cake at Stop & Shop, which we’ll pick up tomorrow. It should read, ‘Happy Birthday, Emma!’ because there aren’t any Emmas in our grade.”
“How much does a birthday cake cost?” Drew asked.
“Does it really matter?” I asked him.
“Kinda. I’m the one paying.”
“You’re wrong. There’s no price to thinking outside the box.”
“Okay, honestly I’m still not solid about this box thing.”
“Forget the box! Just make sure you order the cake tonight. I have to go home for dinner. I’ll bring the camera with me to school so we can come straight here afterward.”
We shook on it.
All day long in classes the next day I was itching for school to be over so we could take our fake party pics. Students furiously scribbled notes as usual, but I couldn’t concentrate. I would try to take notes for a minute, but my mind would wander. At the end of the day I ran into Sunny in the hall, and she asked me if I was ready to discuss my ideas in T.A.G. class.
“It’s not until Wednesday,” I corrected Sunny, patting her on the head. “You must be p
retty high-strung these days, huh?”
“Today is Wednesday, genius,” she said.
“Crap.”
I took off to find Drew the second the bell rang. He was waiting for me by the entrance. “I forgot I have T.A.G. class now, I’ll meet you at Corbett Canyon afterward.”
I showed up late for class and already the room reeked of espresso, as Ms. Schoonmaker walked around the table. “As you’re focusing on building your prototypes throughout the semester, you’re also going to have to prepare your pitch describing the invention at the fair. So for today’s class, let’s go around and have you each describe one of your invention ideas to the class, and the rest of us will offer our two cents about it.”
I glanced over at the cubbies on the shelves and groaned. Almost everyone had a big box or bag of some sort in it, along with pieces of wood, a hammer, an industrial-sized bottle of Elmer’s glue, and a ruler. My cubby, of course, was empty. Sunny’s yellow duffel bag was so full, it stuck halfway out of her cubby!
“Now, why don’t you all take out a piece of paper and start listing the pros and cons of your invention, while I run down to the teachers’ lounge for a refill,” she said, waving her empty espresso cup (wafting the smelly fumes) as she left the room.
Everyone took out their notebooks. I was frazzled that I’d almost missed class, and that I seemed to be the only student who hadn’t already started working on a prototype, but when I opened up my inventor’s notebook I relaxed a little, remembering that I’d filled in a third of it with really good ideas.
When Ms. Schoonmaker returned, Carson started describing his idea—a calculator holder on his belt buckle, which we all quickly shot down because he’d be the only one to use it. “But more people would want to buy calculators if they had a place to wear it,” he said in defense.
“That might be what some call a niche product—meaning, it’s for a very specific consumer. We want to think broader,” Ms. Schoonmaker said.
