Panda-monium

by Stuart Gibbs

  Only, I didn’t feel like bringing this up in front of him. He was sensitive enough about his weight as it was.

  In addition to the tuna fish sandwich in his lunch, he also had a soda, a big bag of chips, a homemade cupcake, and two candy bags. Not exactly the healthiest lunch in the world.

  “There are cameras all around the dolphin tanks,” I said. “FunJungle has footage of you with the dolphins.”

  This was a lie. There were cameras, but no one had gone through the footage yet. I was just trying to get Xavier to admit to the crime.

  It worked. Xavier’s eyes went wide in horror. “Footage of me and Violet?” he gasped.

  That part was news to me: I hadn’t expected Violet to be involved. Luckily, I was much better at hiding my surprise than Xavier had been. “Yes, Violet too,” I said.

  Xavier slumped over the table, no longer bothering to feign innocence. “How much trouble are we in?”

  “I don’t know.” That was the truth. I hadn’t told anyone but Summer about my suspicions yet. I didn’t want Xavier to get into trouble, although I didn’t know how well I could keep his involvement a secret. Sooner or later, someone probably was going to find that footage of him. “It might not be that much trouble if we can claim you weren’t going in there to harm the dolphins. . . .”

  “Of course we weren’t!” Xavier sat up again, offended. “I would never harm an animal.”

  “I know you wouldn’t. I’m just saying we need to understand what you were doing in there.” I took a bite of my sandwich. “So . . . what were you doing in there?”

  “Trying to be as cool as you.”

  I waited for more, but Xavier didn’t elaborate. Instead, he kept his eyes on his food, as though afraid to look at me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Your life is so awesome. Your mom’s a famous biologist and your father’s this amazing photographer and you got to live in Africa as a kid and now you get to live at FunJungle, the most incredible place on earth, and you’re dating Summer McCracken, and you get to do all this super cool stuff like going behind the scenes of the exhibits and petting the rhinos and swimming with the dolphins whenever you want. I never get to do anything like that. My life stinks.”

  This caught me by surprise. I had never considered that anyone might be jealous of my life. After all, I had spent my first ten years living in a tent camp in Africa with a honey bucket instead of a toilet. And now I lived in a mobile home that my family didn’t even own. My parents weren’t rich; we didn’t have a nice car or fancy furniture, and when we ate out, it was almost always at FunJungle, which was usually lousy. Yes, I got to do some cool things with animals, but that was simply what was available to me: I had rarely been able to do many of the things other kids my age did, like go to the movies or play miniature golf or hang out at the mall. I’d never even had a friend my own age until I’d met Xavier, and until recently, Large Marge had been on a crusade to send me to juvenile hall. Plus, I seemed to have a lot of near-death experiences. Most kids didn’t get thrown into polar bear exhibits. Or threatened by grown men dressed as pandas.

  If anything, I had always been a bit jealous of my fellow students, who’d gotten to have much more normal lives than me.

  But out of everything Xavier had said, there was one thing that really startled me.

  “You know Summer and I are dating?” I asked.

  “Of course.” Xavier grinned proudly. “You’re not the only one with detective skills.”

  “How’d you figure it out?”

  “A bunch of ways. I see how you two look at each other, and how you hold hands when you don’t think anyone’s watching. And you’ve been spending a lot more time with her lately instead of me.”

  “Oh. Does anyone else know?”

  “I don’t think so. I haven’t said anything.”

  I poked at my sandwich, feeling a little awkward. “Sorry if I haven’t been spending as much time with you. . . .”

  “I get it. If Summer McCracken wanted me to be her boyfriend, I’d have ditched you in a second. I mean, she’s rich and beautiful and cool and her father owns FunJungle. Pretty much the perfect girl.” Xavier hung his head again. “It’s not fair. She likes you and Violet likes you. The two most popular girls at school.”

  “Violet doesn’t like me that way. She only likes me as a friend. The same way she likes you as a friend.”

  “No, she still likes you the other way. The head cheerleader. I thought maybe she’d think us sneaking in to swim with the dolphins would be a date. Like, the coolest date ever. But she only came for the dolphins, not me. And then the whole thing turned into a disaster.”

  “Because the dolphins stole your suit?”

  “Yes.” Xavier’s face turned bright red again.

  “What happened?”

  Xavier looked around the cafeteria to see if anyone was listening. No one was, but he lowered his voice to a whisper anyhow just to be safe. “Well, you and Summer get to swim with the dolphins all the time, and I wasn’t the only one who was jealous of you. Violet was too. We were talking about it one day after school, and I told her I thought I knew how to sneak into the dolphin tank so we could do it too. I wasn’t really saying we should actually do it, just that it could be done. But then Violet got all excited and said she’d love to go with me . . . and when the head cheerleader says she wants to do something with you, even if it’s kind of illegal, you don’t say no.”

  “So how’d you do it?”

  “It wasn’t that hard. Both of us have annual passes to FunJungle. So I had my older brother drop us off there last Saturday, and then, when the time came for the park to close, Violet and I hid back in the bushes around Shark Encounter.”

  “Your brother didn’t think it was weird you were staying after park hours?”

  “No, he knew what we were up to. And he was totally cool with it. I was spending my Saturday night alone with Violet Grace! So he said he’d give us a couple hours after the park closed and then come back for us. He even lied to my parents and said he was taking me to the movies.”

  “Oh.” This was another way in which my life wasn’t as cool as other kids’: I didn’t have an older brother who’d look out for me like that. Or any siblings at all. “So, you just laid low until the coast was clear and then got into the dolphin tank?”

  “Pretty much. We had to wait like half an hour after closing time for security to sweep the park, but they weren’t much of an issue. Marge came by, but she wasn’t really looking for trespassers. She was just swinging her flashlight around like it was a gun and humming the theme from Mission: Impossible. Like she was pretending to be a spy or something. Once she was gone, we changed into our bathing suits and snuck into the tank.”

  This was just what I’d observed about Dolphin Adventure two days before: It was the one exhibit at FunJungle where the animals were out in the open, without any fences or walls or moats. Anyone who was the slightest bit determined could easily get into it. “And no one saw you?”

  “I guess the cameras did. But we didn’t see anyone else around. We were trying to be quiet, though. We didn’t really say much. We only got in and swam. It was pretty amazing, right up until . . .” Xavier trailed off.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, I wanted to make sure the dolphins came to us. That was the whole point, right? Without dolphins, it would just be like any other pool. I’d watched the trainers a lot, and I’d noticed how they were always rewarding the dolphins with food.”

  I glanced at Xavier’s sandwich, understanding. “So you brought along some fish of your own.”

  “Right. I really wanted to bring something bigger, like a salmon, but when I went to the supermarket to get one, it was expensive, and I didn’t know how to sneak it into the park anyhow. So I thought, maybe tuna would work instead. It’s fish, right? And we had a dozen cans at our house. My mom wouldn’t miss one. So I put some in the pockets of my swimsuit to lure the dolphins over.”
<
br />   “And that worked?”

  “Yeah. It worked too well. The dolphins were all nosing around my crotch the whole time we were in the water. They were trying to get at the tuna, but they didn’t know how. So they kept nipping at me and tugging at my suit.”

  I considered this from the dolphins’ perspective. As Olivia said, the trainers often gave them puzzles to solve that involved food: It would be placed inside something like a plastic tub or a block of ice and they’d have to deduce how to get it out. They probably would have considered the tuna in Xavier’s pockets as something similar: a problem they had to solve, rather than a young boy who’d mistakenly put food in his pants. “And eventually, one of them just yanked your suit off?”

  “Yes.” I hadn’t thought Xavier could turn any more red than before, but now he did. It seemed as though every drop of blood in his body had gone to his face. “I was trying to get the tuna out for them, but they couldn’t wait. They were tugging at my suit so much, they actually yanked me under a few times. Finally, the string holding it on came undone and suddenly, I was totally naked. In front of Violet.”

  “Did she notice?”

  “Oh yeah. Right away. The suit was white, so it was the brightest thing in the tank, and she could see it when the dolphin swam off with it. She was like, ‘Did that dolphin just steal your suit?’ and I was like, ‘Maybe,’ and then she started laughing so hysterically, she actually had to get out of the water so she didn’t drown.”

  I thought of Violet laughing so hard at lunch the day before, when that soda had come out her nose. I had mentioned that the dolphins were pantsing people, which must have revived memories of her night with Xavier.

  “I’m not upset that she laughed,” Xavier said. “If it had happened to someone else, I probably would have laughed too. And she was really cool about the whole thing. She got my towel and my dry clothes for me and she gave me time to get dressed, but still . . . The whole dynamic of everything had changed. I wasn’t this cool guy who’d gotten her into the dolphin tank anymore. I was a screw-up who lost his bathing suit and wound up totally naked in front of her.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, I know what that’s like.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do. Because of you! The dolphin stole my bathing suit on Sunday because he’d learned how to do it from you.” Xavier might not have set out to teach the dolphins to do this, but it made sense that they’d learned it anyhow. They’d performed an activity: stealing the bathing suit—and there had been a reward: tuna fish. So they’d tried it again.

  “It wasn’t the same,” Xavier pointed out. “You had it happen in front of your girlfriend. I had it happen in front of a girl I like—and she’s never going to be interested in me now.”

  He looked so miserable, I decided to tell him the whole story about my experience. “I know Summer said there wasn’t anyone else there when I got pantsed, but there was. One of the trainers.”

  “Oh,” Xavier said, then added, “Is she cute?”

  “Yes. And yours happened at night, when Violet couldn’t see anything. Mine happened in broad daylight.”

  Xavier laughed, despite himself. Then he tried to hide it. “But you were in the tank, right? So they still couldn’t see that much.”

  “Oh, they saw everything. Snickers threw me into the air. Clear out of the water.”

  “He did?” Xavier couldn’t keep the laughter in anymore. He laughed so hard, he started coughing on his tuna fish.

  I didn’t mind, though. It was embarrassing, but cheering him up was worth it. I even laughed a bit myself. “I must’ve gone like ten feet up. Buck naked.”

  “I guess your life’s not so perfect after all.” Xavier chortled.

  Violet and Summer suddenly sat beside us. “What’s so funny?” Violet asked.

  Xavier gave me a conspiratorial glance, then answered, “Nothing. Teddy was just making a funny face.”

  “I thought you guys were eating outside today,” I said.

  “We were,” Summer told me. “But it’s crazy hot out there. Like a sauna. We couldn’t take it anymore.” She looked at me. “Did you find out what you wanted to know?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “What’s everyone being so top secret about?” Violet asked.

  “Teddy figured out it was us in the dolphin tank,” Xavier said.

  Violet reacted in surprise, but then nodded knowingly. “I told you he would,” she said.

  “Hold on,” Summer said. “Both of you did it?” She looked to me. “I thought you said it was only Xavier.”

  “I didn’t know Violet was there too,” I admitted. “Until Xavier ratted her out.”

  Violet wheeled on Xavier. “You little fink!” she cried, although she obviously wasn’t that upset at him.

  Xavier pointed at me accusingly. “He tricked me into it! I thought he already knew!”

  Violet looked back to me and asked the same question Xavier had. “Are we in trouble?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, then turned to Summer. “They weren’t doing anything malicious. Maybe there’s a way to square things with your dad?”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Summer told them.

  Violet returned her attention to Xavier and swatted him playfully. “I can’t believe you told on me!”

  “I didn’t mean to!” Xavier raised his hands in surrender, accidentally knocking over his soda. He snatched it up quickly, but it had already left a spot on his shirt. “Look what you made me do,” he teased. Now that Violet was around and being friendly with him—and possibly because he’d had a good laugh at my expense—he didn’t seem nearly as down on himself as he had before. He headed across the cafeteria to get some napkins.

  “Did Xavier explain everything to you?” Violet asked me, still a bit nervous. “We weren’t trying to cause any trouble. We were just jealous of you guys because you get to do stuff like that all the time.”

  “Yeah, he explained it,” I said.

  “If you wanted to go in with the dolphins like that, why didn’t you just ask?” Summer said.

  “We didn’t want to take advantage of your friendship,” Violet replied.

  “It’s no big deal,” Summer said. “I’d be happy to arrange it.”

  “Really? That’d be amazing!” Violet exclaimed—and then soured suddenly, noticing something across the room. “Oh no.”

  The Barksdale twins were making a beeline for Xavier. Poor Xavier didn’t see them coming, as he was busily mopping the soda off his shirt. The rest of the student body noticed them, though. And yet, while everyone realized TimJim was looking to cause trouble for Xavier, no one made a move to help him.

  “Those jerks,” Summer muttered. “The moment Dash and Ethan aren’t here to protect Xavier, they go right after him.”

  “And no one else here is tough enough to stop them,” Violet observed.

  As she said this, though, an idea came to me. “Maybe we don’t have to be tough to stop the bullying.”

  “What are you talking about?” Summer asked.

  So I told them what I had in mind.

  Across the room, TimJim grabbed Xavier from behind. “What happened, Tubbo?” one of them asked. “You of all people should know the food goes in your mouth, not on your shirt.”

  The other one laughed and jiggled Xavier so his belly wobbled in front of the entire school. “Look how fat you are!” he crowed. “It’s disgusting!”

  “Leave me alone, guys,” Xavier pleaded. “I’ve never done anything to you.”

  “You exist,” TimJim said. “That’s bad enough.”

  They were so busy taunting Xavier, they didn’t see Violet and Summer sneaking up on them. They just kept poking and prodding Xavier and saying mean things to him.

  And then, Summer and Violet yanked the twins’ shorts down to their ankles in front of the entire cafeteria. Both boys were only wearing jockstraps, so everyone had a great view of their bare bottoms.

  The whole room burst into laugh
ter.

  As I’d recently learned, there’s nothing as embarrassing as losing your pants in public.

  TimJim paled and instantly forgot about Xavier. They yanked up their shorts and spun around, ready to pummel whoever had pranked them.

  When they realized it was the two most popular girls in school, though, they grew even more embarrassed. Which was what I’d been counting on. To be pantsed by a guy would have been cause for retaliation. But to be pantsed by two girls they probably had crushes on was a major blow to their egos. It wasn’t merely humiliating; it was also confirmation that the girls didn’t respect them.

  “That’s what happens when you pick on kids who are smaller than you,” Summer told them.

  “So leave Xavier and everyone else alone,” Violet declared.

  The entire cafeteria whooped with agreement and burst into applause. Even the teachers who were monitoring our behavior seemed pleased by what had happened.

  TimJim fled from the cafeteria.

  Summer and Violet took Xavier’s arms and raised them above his head, as though he was king of the school.

  Everyone cheered for them.

  I knew that wouldn’t be the end of TimJim. The twins would certainly cause lots more problems for us. But for the first time, I realized there were other ways to handle bullies without needing protection like Dash and Ethan—or using force to fight back.

  Besides, now that Marge O’Malley wasn’t going to be any more trouble for me, I needed some new targets to play pranks on.

  Epilogue

  THE DEBUT

  The day Li Ping finally went on exhibit, the crowds at FunJungle were the biggest the park had ever experienced.

  The story of Li Ping’s kidnapping, the FBI’s botching of the case, the arrest of Walter Ogilvy, and the panda’s triumphant delivery to FunJungle had been a bonanza of free publicity. “Panda-monium” was headline news all over the world, which instantly made Li Ping the most famous panda on earth. (Walter Ogilvy still hadn’t gone to trial yet, but the public had already decided he was guilty. He was universally loathed as the jerk who had stolen a panda. Everyone was boycotting his businesses, which were tanking as a result.)