The Terrible Two

by Mac Barnett

  But he hadn’t.

  Maybe he should have.

  No! Surely Barry Barkin had made the right choice that day! Just as Bertrand had been right to take the portrait down! Because a principal’s authority must be absolute! There was no room for weakness!

  Principal Barkin’s eyes refocused. “Detention. After school. And before school. Every day until you leave this school.”

  Miles sank.

  Chapter

  27

  MILES HAD NEVER EVEN HEARD of before-school detention. Technically, that wasn’t even detention. You had to be at school already to be detained. What would you call it? Prevention. Apprehension. Incarceration.

  What was he going to tell his mom?

  He walked to the bathroom. Niles Sparks was sitting on a sink.

  Miles was too tired to be surprised.

  “How did you know I’d come here?”

  “First place I’d go if I got all those detentions,” Niles said.

  Miles went to the next sink and turned on the cold tap. (There was only a cold tap.) He looked in the mirror. He did not look well. He needed sleep. And now he was going to have to wake up early so he could make it to detention.

  “Listen, Niles,” he said, “I surrender.”

  “Sorry,” said Niles, “I don’t accept.”

  “Niles, I can’t do this anymore. I’m not going to have time to prank anymore. You win. Please. Let’s end the prank war.”

  Niles grinned. “Oh, we can end the prank war.”

  “But you just—”

  “I don’t accept your surrender.” Niles held out his hand. “Truce!”

  “But—”

  “Oh, come on,” Niles said. “Buck up. So I’m ahead right now. You would have gotten me eventually.”

  Miles wasn’t sure that was true.

  “It’s true!” Niles said. “I keep telling you: You’ve got real talent. You understand people. And you’re quick on your feet. That bacon flyer for Coach O.? Brilliant. The Ten Plagues excuse? I could never have made that up on the spot.” He shrugged. “I’m more of a planner.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah! I never wanted this prank war to begin with. Pranksters like us shouldn’t be stepping on each other’s wingtips.”

  Miles splashed some water on his face.

  “A lot of so-called pranksters,” said Niles, “they’d just flush a cherry bomb down that toilet and spend the rest of the school year high-fiving themselves. But we’ve got ambition. We’re visionaries.”

  Miles had always thought of himself as a bit of a visionary.

  “Miles, we need each other.”

  “We need each other? I thought you’re always saying how much you can teach me.”

  “Oh, I can!” Niles said.

  Miles rolled his eyes.

  “Look, I can teach you things, you can teach me things. Together we’ll prank better. We complement each other, blah, blah, blah. Great. Whatever. That’s not why we need each other.”

  The faucet ran.

  “Why, then?” Miles asked.

  “I need a friend.” Niles was matter-of-fact. “And so do you. Pranking is better with a buddy.”

  Niles held out his hand.

  “Truce?”

  If Miles shook, well, that was that. They wouldn’t just be school buddies. They’d be real buddies. Miles took a good look at the kid perched on the sink. He’d never met anyone like him: a sash-wearing kiss-up with the secret brain of a pranking mastermind. A visionary. A weirdo. Did Miles Murphy really want to be friends with a kid like Niles Sparks?

  “Truce.”

  They shook.

  Niles hopped off the sink. “Great. I’m going to go get you off the hook with Barkin.”

  “Wait, how?”

  “Pretty sure it’s a violation of chapter thirteen, section two of the disciplinary code to punish you when there’s only circumstantial evidence.”

  “What?”

  “You know, stuff that implies you committed a crime but doesn’t prove it. I’m going to tell him we should give you some slack and try to catch you red-handed so he can forget about detention and just expel you. He’d love to expel you.”

  Miles shut off the tap. “OK . . . and so I guess then I just lay low for a while?”

  “No way,” Niles said, bound for the door. “You and I are going to pull the biggest prank Yawnee Valley’s ever seen.”

  Chapter

  28

  THE NEXT MORNING there was a rubber chicken in Miles’s locker.

  At half past three Miles rang the doorbell of the big blue house at 47 Buttercream Lane.

  Niles answered, sashless.

  “You made it.”

  Miles held up the chicken. “I learned the telephone cipher in kindergarten.”

  “You didn’t have to bring the chicken.”

  “Oh yeah. I forgot.”

  “Come in.”

  The Sparks residence was tidy and quiet. Niles led Miles through room after white-carpeted room. Beige sofas, big TVs, bar stools that swiveled. Blond wood and white leather. “This is the TV lounge. That’s a half bath. Here’s the kitchen.”

  “Are your parents home?” Miles asked.

  “Yeah. Dad’s in his office, Mom’s in her office.” He pointed in opposite directions. “They work from home. Do you want something to drink? We have a bunch of drinks. A soda? I have regular soda and diet soda. Or I have a bunch of natural sodas, which are pretty good, actually. But then I figured you might not drink soda, so I got us a bunch of different juices. And I could make you an Arnold Palmer, which is half lemonade and half iced tea, if you’re allowed to drink iced tea.”

  “I guess I’ll just have a glass of water,” Miles said.

  “Tap water or sparkling water?”

  “Tap water’s fine.”

  Niles was clearly disappointed.

  “Actually, sparkling sounds good.”

  “Great!”

  Miles and Niles sat on the counter and drank water with bubbles.

  “So,” said Niles. “I’ve never had a friend over to my house before. Is this going OK?”

  “Sure,” said Miles.

  “Is this fun? I mean, I thought we should hang out, but I don’t know if this is fun.”

  “It’s fun.”

  Niles took a sip of water. “No, it’s not. Come on, I’ll show you something cool.”

  Niles’s bedroom looked like it belonged to another house. The carpet had been ripped up to reveal a cherrywood floor that was dark and shiny. There was a deep red rug with golden swirls. A desk and a bed and a big armchair that looked very old. Two large speakers hooked up to a complicated audio system. The tallest globe Miles had ever seen. The rest was books—books piled high in stacks that leaned against the walls and reached almost to the ceiling. If there was an organizing principle to Niles’s library, Miles couldn’t see it. In one column he saw an atlas, three novels by Louise Fitzhugh, Accents & Dialects for Stage and Screen, a joke book, two copies of Esio Trot, and volumes on cacti, the Hittites, and thoroughbred racehorses.

  “This is amazing,” Miles said.

  “This isn’t the cool part.”

  Niles opened a door next to his desk. “After you.”

  “What’s in there?” Miles asked.

  “Technically it’s a walk-in closet, but I don’t really need a walk-in closet.”

  “So what’s in there?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Miles’s scalp tingled. Was this a prank? Wait. Was this all a prank? What if he walked in there and got a bucket of glitter dropped on him, or Niles locked the door behind him and a hundred tarantulas poured out from the walls?

  Miles walked into the closet.

  Niles closed the door behind them, and everything was dark. He pulled a chain that turned on a lightbulb that hung from the ceiling. The four walls and the ceiling were covered in chalkboard paint, and Miles was surrounded by words and diagrams and maps, all in Niles’s tidy handwriting. S
ome of it was in code. Some was in English. There were a couple of lines in what was maybe French? Directly behind Niles’s head was an illegible chart labeled OPERATION: FLOSS ACROSS THE WATER. Written in a corner, behind a milk crate full of dark socks: “A prank that takes place only in the victim’s mind.” Miles steadied himself against the wall, careful not to smudge anything. It was like walking into a three-dimensional pranking journal.

  “Welcome to the prank lab.” Niles turned over two crates and sat on the yellow one. Miles took the blue.

  “All right,” Niles said. “Are you ready to swear the Prankster’s Oath?”

  “Wait, there really is a Prankster’s Oath?”

  Niles pulled a yellowed slip of paper out of a penny loafer on the floor. “Of course. Nobody knows who wrote it or when. But it comes from the International Order of Disorder, a loose confederacy of pranksters that flourished a couple of centuries ago. Raise your left hand.”

  “Shouldn’t it be my right hand?”

  “That’s for normal oaths. You know what ‘right’ is in French? Droit—that means law. But this is the Prankster’s Oath—we’re outlaws. The Latin word for left is sinistra, like ‘sinister.’ That’s us. The mischief makers.”

  Miles raised his left hand.

  “Repeat after me:

  On my honor I will do my best

  To be good at being bad;

  To disrupt, but not destroy;

  To embarrass the dour and amuse the merry;

  To devote my mind to japes, capers, shenanigans, and monkey business;

  To prove the world looks better turned upside down;

  For I am a prankster.

  So be it.”

  “So be it,” said Miles.

  “Perfect,” said Niles. “I hereby declare us the sole members of the Yawnee Valley chapter of the International Order of Disorder, hereafter known as the Terrible Two.”

  “Great,” said Miles.

  “Hmm,” said Niles. “I feel like we need a secret handshake or something.”

  “Yeah . . .”

  They sat on their crates and thought. “I’ve got it,” said Miles. “Hold up two fingers.”

  Niles did. Miles did too. He touched his fingertips to Niles’s.

  “High five,” said Miles.

  “But that’s just a high two,” said Niles.

  “Roman numeral five,” said Miles.

  Miles grinned.

  Niles laughed.

  It was official.

  And so the Terrible Two got to planning their first prank.

  Chapter

  29

  NILES STOOD UP. “What’s the best holiday?” Miles could tell it was a rhetorical question.

  Niles continued. “April Fools’ Day.”

  Obviously. Miles nodded.

  “On April first, 1698,” said Niles, “in England, everyone was invited to the big moat outside the Tower of London to see the lions get washed. That morning, a huge crowd showed up. This was going to be great. Except: There are no lions in the Tower of London. And also: You don’t really wash lions.”

  “No lions, just a bunch of goats,” said Miles.

  Niles smiled. “Yeah! Exactly! Standing around a stinky ditch. It was the first April Fools’ prank. And ever since, April first has been for pranks and hoaxes and practical jokes. As a holiday, there’s only one thing wrong with it.”

  “What’s that?” asked Miles.

  “We don’t get the day off school.”

  Niles erased a section of one wall with his sleeve. “So. How do we pull a prank so big school gets canceled?”

  Two hours later Miles was sitting in the old armchair and Niles was pacing around his room. There was an empty bowl on the floor and potato chip crumbs and a bunch of crushed soda cans. On one wall of the prank lab was a red square filled with ideas for pranks.

  But none of them were good.

  Or at least not good enough.

  “Well, last time school got canceled, there was a blizzard, right?” said Miles. “Maybe this is stupid, but is there any way we could control the weather?”

  Niles thought for a while. “No,” he said. “I heard they have machines that can do that in China, but I don’t see how we could get our hands on one.”

  “What if we blocked all the entrances, like you did with Barkin’s car?”

  “Hmmm,” said Niles.

  “And by the way, how did you get Barkin’s car up there?”

  “Let’s stay focused,” said Niles.

  “OK, so we block it with monster trucks.”

  “Too hard to obtain,” Niles said. “Plus everyone could just go underneath them. We could brick up the doors . . . but that’s too much damage.”

  “Those crickets weren’t bad. I mean, a thousand crickets wouldn’t shut down school. But what about a million crickets?”

  “That would cost over ten thousand dollars. Plus we’d be repeating ourselves. We need to think bigger.”

  “Bigger than a million?”

  “Bigger than crickets!”

  “Cows,” Miles said.

  “What?”

  “Cows.”

  “But—”

  “Cows can walk up stairs but they can’t walk down.”

  Niles stopped pacing. “How do you know that?”

  Miles unzipped his backpack and pulled out a crumpled booklet.

  Niles tossed Miles a piece of chalk. “Let’s figure this out.”

  Two weeks, six boxes of cereal, four bags of chips (one original, three sour cream and onion), and a tub of red licorice later, they’d covered one whole wall of the prank lab.

  This was going to be great.

  Chapter

  30

  APRIL 1 WAS A MONDAY, fifty-two days away. Most afternoons Miles and Niles went to the library or did research in the prank lab. At lunch they sat together and planned, careful not to seem like they were planning anything. “Looks like you and Niles are getting to be pretty good friends,” Holly remarked one day, one eyebrow upraised. “Yep,” Miles said, because there was no better cover story than the truth. Holly raised her other eyebrow.

  When the snow melted they put on puffy jackets and took tools into the forest by the lake. Together they picked the perfect tree, an old sycamore with a thick, mottled trunk and sturdy white branches spreading out and ending in barren spindles. Miles’s mom was so thrilled to hear he was building a tree house with a friend that she chipped in for materials. Niles’s parents, who Miles had seen around the house only a few times, financed the rest—Niles had pitched the clubhouse as an engineering project.

  They hammered and sawed. It wasn’t long before they’d built a platform, and then a roof. Even though it was cold, they brought books to the tree and read in the gray light of winter. It got warm enough to camp out. They brought Niles’s red tent to the tree and set it up on the platform. Miles was in charge of setting it up and taking it down. Niles was in charge of marshmallows. In March their tree grew great green leaves, and the clubhouse got walls and a window.

  “It’s perfect,” Niles said, when the tree house was done.

  Miles painted SECRET HQ above the doorway, and they carved initials next to the window. They made their final April Fools’ preparations nineteen feet above the ground, and then there was nothing left to do but prank.

  Chapter

  31

  OFFICIALLY THE PRANK BEGAN on March 23, when Miles Murphy deposited a letter in the mailbox on his corner, but the real action didn’t get under way till midnight on April 1. Miles watched the red numbers on his alarm clock change from 11:59 to 12:00. The last verse of “These Boots Are Made for Walking” started playing softly, but Miles was already awake. He hadn’t gone to sleep. About two hours ago he’d given up on the book that he was too distracted to read, and he’d been staring at the radio since then, going over the plan, waiting for the tiny click his alarm clock made before the music came on. Miles grabbed his backpack. He’d hoped he’d be too tired to be anxious, or too
wired to be anxious, but he was anxious. And tired. And wired.

  “Happy April Fools’ Day,” he said. Time to go.

  Miles had sort of wanted to make a rope with his bedsheets, but his mom was a deep sleeper. The smartest thing was to sneak downstairs and out his front door. Stars spilled overhead, and the night’s cold air made his lungs ache. The only sound was the faint buzz of a streetlight on the fritz. Miles Murphy realized he’d never been out this late on his own before. It was exhilarating. He pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt and took off down the street.

  When Miles saw headlights he froze. Bent over, he pretended to tie his shoe. Act natural. He was ready for the car to slow down, ask him what he was doing, a kid out at night, and on April Fools’ Day too. But the car drove right by. After that Miles didn’t stop for anything.

  On Spring Street a raccoon crawled out of a storm drain and stared at him like he knew exactly what Miles was up to and like he was in on it. They were two of a kind, Miles and this raccoon! Masked bandits, denizens of the night! Miles saluted the raccoon as he ran past. The raccoon went back down the drain.

  Soon there were no more street-lights, just darkness, but Miles knew where he was going. Paved road gave way to dirt road gave way to no road. Miles hopped a fence. The grass grew tall here and the dew soaked his jeans to midcalf. When he made it to the meadow, where the trees grew thick, it was safe to use the flashlight, just for a second. He caught his breath, got his bearings, flicked the switch to off. He had to move slower now, stepping carefully over roots and easing down gullies. Almost there.

  At the rendezvous point, he pressed a button on his watch and the face lit up. Eleven minutes early. He leaned against a maple tree and waited.

  A steady creaking came at 1:00. It grew louder and stopped nearby. Miles flashed his light three times. Three blinks answered. Niles pulled up on a bike, pulling Miles’s wagon behind him. The wagon held a small bale of hay.