The No-Good Nine

by John Bemelmans Marciano

  “Finally, another attractive person!” he said. “I was afraid I had joined some sort of ugly club.”

  The Cruel gave him a withering stare. The kind that would turn your toes to icicles.

  I was starting to like her.

  Goody-Two-Shoes, however, was not. In fact, she didn’t seem to approve of any of the other recruits. Not the Vainglorious (for obvious reasons) and not the Rude either. Every time the Rude burped or picked his nose—both of which he did a lot—it seemed to cause her physical pain. She began looking around the factory like she was trying to find an escape route.

  The factory, by the way, was aces. (Yet another way of saying cool.) It was owned by the Brat’s family and it was where they used to make grenades and bombs back in the Great War. Since there wasn’t much need for that kind of stuff anymore, it was now empty. Or, rather, it had just become the world’s biggest secret clubhouse.

  “It’s time to start the meeting,” the Brat said.

  I said we couldn’t—“Not everyone is here yet!”—but the Brat said he wasn’t waiting for the Lazy to show up. He banged a gavel and called the meeting to order.

  “Why do you get to call the meeting to order?” I said.

  “Because I am paying for everyone, I own the building, and I have the gavel,” the Brat said, holding up the wooden mallet.

  I had to admit—those were good reasons. Where’d he get the gavel from, anyway?

  As the Brat finished welcoming everyone, someone else did walk in.

  But it wasn’t the Lazy.

  No, it was someone no one could believe. At least, not any of the three of us who had already met him.

  It was the Hooligan!

  Of the Mug Uglies.

  The kid who had tried to kill us!

  (Or at least hurt us real bad.)

  “What are you doing here?” the Brat said.

  The Hooligan looked sheepish. He couldn’t pretend like he had happened into this abandoned factory by accident—like he didn’t want to be at our meeting.

  “I said, what are you doing here?” the Brat repeated.

  The Hooligan shrugged.

  “I wanna get back at Santa,” he said. “He ain’t never given me a present. Not ever! All the other Mug Uglies have gotten a present at least once. Even my big brother Jimmy. And he’s on Death Row!”

  All at once, the rest of the Naughty Listers started yelling over each other.

  The Rude—“Yeah! I know way worse kids than me that always get presents!”

  The Cruel—“I’ve never gotten a present either!”

  The Vainglorious—“How could I not get a present?”

  The Brat—“Santa must pay for stiffing us!”

  The Hooligan—“Yeah!”

  “But what if we do all deserve it?”

  Everyone stopped shouting and stared at Goody-Two-Shoes.

  “Who let her in?” the Cruel said.

  “Yeah! She doesn’t belong!” the Rude said. “She’s rich! Her parents can buy her whatever present she wants.”

  “She does too belong!” the Know-It-All said. He held up the charred paper. “Anyone who’s on this list b-b-b-belongs. The question we have to ask is whether or not this list should exist!”

  This was the moment the Know-It-All had been waiting for ever since he had come up with his plan. He would convince us all, and together we would change the world!

  “There m-m-must be a reason why this list fell into our hands,” he continued. “Yes, we all want presents. Yes, we are all mad at Santa. But what will we d-d-do about it?”

  The Hooligan and the Rude both shrugged.

  “We will present Santa with a list of our own!” the Know-It-All said, answering his question. He was on such a roll, he had even stopped stuttering. “A list of demands! A list of rights for the children of the world on the day that was made for the children of the world—Christmas! We will make Santa see the error of his ways and stop dividing children into who is Naughty and who is Nice. Together, we will make Christmas a holiday for ALL!”

  The Know-It-All was finished. He looked triumphant. The speech came out just like he had been practicing it.

  “Uh, that sounds pretty good and all,” the Rude said. “But I just wanna go play with the toys of the nice kids of the world.”

  “Me too!” the Hooligan said.

  “And I still want to punch that fat old elf in the stomach!” the Brat said.

  “I’m with bow tie boy,” the Cruel said.

  “I wanna play with the toys and punch him in the stomach,” the Hooligan said.

  “Yeah!” the Rude said.

  “But if we do that, we’ll be just as bad—as naughty—as Santa thinks!” Goody-Two-Shoes said. “The Know-It-All is right!”

  “But we are bad. And naughty!” the Rude said. “Most of us, anyway.”

  Only the Vainglorious wasn’t saying anything. He had found a reflection of himself in the window and was doing that arched eyebrow thing again. I doubt he had any clue what we were even talking about.

  But everyone else had an opinion, and the meeting spiraled into total chaos. This was what we should have expected, getting a bunch of Naughty Listers together. It was up to me to get things back on track.

  Plus, I really wanted to try that gavel.

  BANG! BANG! BANG!

  It got everyone’s attention.

  “Look,” I said, waving the gavel in the air. “Why do we have to do just one thing or the other? Present a petition or play with toys? Make Christmas fair or punch Santa in the stomach? If the No-Good Nine is about anything—”

  “But there are only eight—”

  “If we’re about anything,” I repeated, cutting Goody-Two-Shoes off, “we should be about doing whatever the heck we want!”

  I turned to the Know-It-All. “You do want to play with the toys of the nice kids of the world, right?”

  “Well, yeah . . .”

  “So we’re agreed!” I said.

  There was a cheer and applause, and I had to bang the gavel again. I loved banging the gavel.

  “The first motion of the No-Good Nine—”

  “But there are only—”

  “Of the No-Good Nine is decided,” I said. “We will go to Santa’s factory, where we will play with the toys of all the nice children of the world and present him with a petition. Then we’ll slug him!”

  “DOWN WITH SANTA!”

  “TOYS! TOYS! TOYS!”

  Now, you might be asking yourself, Why do all these kids care so much about toys?

  The answer is that it wasn’t really about the toys.

  Has there ever been a party you didn’t get invited to and even though the person wasn’t your friend, you still wished that you had been?

  Or did you ever ask for a present that you never got and you still wanted it even though it wasn’t the kind of thing you liked anymore?

  And has anyone ever been wrong about you and you just couldn’t get over it?

  Well, those were the kinds of reasons why we wanted to break into Santa’s factory and play with the toys of the nice kids of the world.

  (Those, plus I always wanted my own baseball bat.)

  But do you know who didn’t care one bit about why we were going to Santa’s?

  The guy outside. The one eavesdropping on our meeting.

  My archenemy!

  8. MY ARCHENEMY

  I count eight children inside.

  They are plotting to take over Santa’s workshop and steal all the toys therein.

  They are also plotting to do physical harm to Santa himself.

  I do not yet understand how they plan to get there.

  From where I hide outside the window, I cannot hear everything, but I hear enough.

  These children must be s
topped!

  For the purposes of telling this story, it is a lucky break that my archenemy wrote everything down in his journal. And when I say everything, I mean everything. He even wrote down what was happening while it was happening.

  It is also fortunate that I was able to get my hands on his journals. Not that I myself could read them. That’s because his writing looked like this:

  Эти дети должны быть остановлены!

  My archenemy, you see, was Russian. And not just any Russian, but a former secret agent of the tsar, whose secret agents were pretty much the most terrifying secret agents in the whole entire world.

  Or at least they were until the revolution. That’s when the tsar got killed, and all his agents had to flee Russia or get killed themselves, which is how my particular nemesis—Ivan Ivanovich—wound up in Pittsburgh.

  His having been a top-flight spy back in his own country didn’t mean much in America, unfortunately for the both of us. As much as the guy dearly wanted to be a secret agent again, or a military officer, or at the very least a cop, the only job he could get in the U.S. of A. was as a truant officer.

  Now, you probably go to school without being hounded by an officer of the law, but it wasn’t like that in 1931. Back then, truant officers were a special kind of police force whose job was to hunt down children who were skipping school.

  It was my particular misfortune that not only had my school hired an obsessive Russian secret agent to be their truant officer, but he considered any kid who skipped school once in a while to be a hardened criminal.

  And I skipped school a lot.

  Normally, I stayed on the lookout for the Truant Officer, but that week I had let my guard down. For good reason. We were on Christmas vacation!

  I should’ve known that that wasn’t enough reason for my archenemy to stay home.

  I would find out later what had happened: The Truant Officer had been driving his beat-up black jalopy down the street when he saw me and the Know-It-All walking to the Brat’s. He figured this was suspicious behavior and followed us, and kept following us, even the next day when we went into Pittsburgh to recruit the other kids. And he hadn’t stopped spying on us yet.

  This crazy truant officer believed he had stumbled onto some kind of nefarious criminal conspiracy of bad-intentioned kids.

  Which I guess he kind of had.

  9. THE FIRST OFFICIAL MEETING OF THE NO-GOOD NINE CONTINUES

  And now for the rest of the meeting.

  First, the Know-It-All laid out his plan. It was so boring, it was like being in school, so I didn’t pay any attention. Heck, I could hardly stay awake.

  Those who were able to listen heard about the magical lighthouse, and how once we got there, we’d use its signal as a kind of enormous telegraph, transmitting a flashing message in Morse code. This message would call a giant narwhal—whatever that was—to come fetch us. Apparently the narwhal came hauling a barge behind it like some kind of oversize mule of the sea.

  As for how the Know-It-All knew this, he said he’d read about it in a magazine.

  “If it’s so easy to get to Toyland,” the Cruel said, “then why isn’t everyone doing it?”

  The Know-It-All perked up at the question. (I think he was just happy someone was still listening.)

  “That’s an excellent point!” he said. “The writer of the article swore never to reveal the w-w-whereabouts of the lighthouse. He did, however, mention that the lighthouse is in Labrador and—”

  “Wait, what does a dog have to do with this?” the Hooligan said.

  “Not a dog—there’s a place called Labrador.”

  “My family has a Labrador!” the Vainglorious said. “His name is Rex.”

  “No no no,” the Know-It-All said. “I’m not talking about a dog, I’m talking about a p-p-part of Newfoundland!”

  There were lots of lighthouses in Labrador, but the Know-It-All had figured out which one it was because of a photo in the article.

  “It shows the lighthouse keeper posing with a Chance Bros 55 mm I.O.V. Lamp.”

  “So?” the Rude said.

  “So, there is only one l-l-lighthouse in all of Labrador that uses the Chance 55 mm, at least according to the documents I was able to find,” the Know-It-All said, like it was the most exciting thing in the world. “And that lighthouse is in Black Tickle, located at a latitude and longitude of 53.47° north and 55.79° west.”

  “You’re making my brain hurt,” the Hooligan said.

  My feelings exactly.

  “Look, all you dopes need to know is that the Know-It-All has figured out where this magic lighthouse is,” the Brat said, “and that from there, we can get to Santa’s workshop.”

  Next the Know-It-All gave us our itinerary—the trains and boats we were going to take—with the rail portion of the journey taking us from Pittsburgh to Quebec City.

  “We’ll be l-l-leaving on the 5:59 p.m. train from Union Station on New Year’s Eve, which is to say this Thursday,” he said. “We will meet thirty minutes ahead of time—5:29 p.m.—at the mailbox just inside the south entrance to the station.”

  “But how are we supposed to pay for all these trains and boats?” the Hooligan asked.

  “I already bought the tickets,” the Brat said, and gave me the nod to start handing them out. “And as I paid for them, I expect you all to follow my orders.”

  “Hey, that ain’t fair!” the Hooligan said.

  “If anyone would like to pay for their own ticket, I’d be happy to sell them one. They cost fifteen dollars and thirty-six cents.” Which, in 1931, was a small fortune. Or a big one, if you were me. “Any takers?”

  As the Brat waited for somebody to speak up, the Cruel shot him a look so hateful, anyone else would have rephrased what they had just said.

  Not the Brat.

  “I didn’t think so!” he said, and banged the gavel.

  “I do have a question,” Goody-Two-Shoes said, raising her hand. “Won’t we be missing an awful lot of school?”

  “To hell with school!” the Rude said, and everyone cheered.

  To [heck] with school! one of them says, my nemesis wrote in his journal, crouched down in his hiding spot. And the other kids cheer!

  The last thing the Know-It-All told us was that we weren’t allowed to tell anyone what we were doing. Not a brother or a sister, or even a best friend.

  “And definitely not your parents!”

  “But won’t they be worried about us?” Goody-Two-Shoes said.

  The Know-It-All said that each of us should write letters to our loved ones, explaining that we were on a “mission” but without revealing what we were doing or where we were going. We would drop our letters in the mailbox at the train station. “By the time the letters get to our homes, we’ll be long gone,” he said.

  With all the boring stuff out of the way, it was finally my turn to talk. I had important secret society matters to address.

  “Like names!”

  “Good,” the Cruel said. “Because the No-Good Nine is the worst name ever. Especially since there are only eight of us.”

  “I’m talking about our names,” I said. “Because this is a secret society, we can’t use our real names. From now on, we only refer to each other by our No-Good Names. So I am no longer Looie, but the Liar. And you are the Cruel.”

  She actually smiled. “Fine by me.”

  “And everyone must call me Glorious!”

  “Vainglorious, you moron,” the Brat said. “How many times do we have to tell you?”

  I next told everyone the secret password—It’s me, stupid!—and showed them the secret sign, which I had been working on for two days. You made it by crossing your arms over your chest and flashing five fingers on your right hand and four on your left.

  “Just don’t use your left thumb
,” I said, demonstrating. “It’s the Sign of the Nine! Pretty jake, right?”

  “That is the most idiotic, childish thing I have ever seen in my life,” the Cruel said.

  “And there’s an oath!” I said, almost forgetting. “If you’re with us, flash the sign and say, One for nine, and nine for one!”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” the Know-It-All said. “On so many levels.”

  While that might have been true, it sounded swell and that was all that mattered.

  “Now, who’s with us?” I said, and flashed the sign.

  I waited for everyone to flash it back. The Cruel shook her head no like she wouldn’t do it. But she did.

  “One for nine, and nine for one!”

  10. WHAT HAPPENED ON THE WAY HOME

  The children are leaving!

  I rush to my car and duck down in the driver’s seat so I won’t be seen.

  I sit hiding, but I have learned much of their plan.

  The children will be meeting at Union Station in Pittsburgh on 31 December.

  Time: Unknown.

  Destination: Unknown.

  I will continue following them in hopes of learning more details.

  When we walked out, I noticed the beat-up old black jalopy parked across the street, but I didn’t recognize it. It just looked abandoned and—like I said—I assumed my archenemy was on vacation.

  Saying goodbye to the other Ninesters was kind of awkward. Goody-Two-Shoes left first, and then the Rude and the Hooligan followed her, all of them going in the same direction. Goody-Two-Shoes looked less than thrilled about the company, but was too polite to say anything.

  The Know-It-All and I started walking to the Doozy, and that’s when the Brat offered to give the Cruel a ride home.

  I understood why he did it—I mean, I was lying when I said she wasn’t that beautiful. But I was amazed he had the guts.

  It didn’t work out so well for him.

  “You have a car! Fantastic!” the Vainglorious said. “I’ll come too!”

  “Who asked you to come?” the Brat said. The Vainglorious, however, was already in the back seat, primping in the rearview mirror.