For Cate
Prologue
Everything was normal. Everything was average. It was a typical April morning in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey.
Vice Principal Snodgrass had arrived early at school, before even the janitors. Sitting in his office, he separated an immense mound of cash into five equal piles. Then he placed them all in a duffel bag, which he hid in the shadows beneath his desk.
He lifted the receiver of his phone and dialed a number. It cycled through a few rings, then transferred to an unnamed voice-mail box.
“It’s early, I know,” Snodgrass said. “But everything is in place. I’ll have the evidence soon enough. I just thought I’d give you an update. Thank you … thank you for the opportunity, sir.”
He placed the receiver back in its cradle. Almost as soon as he did, it started to ring. He waited a moment, so as not to seem overly anxious. Then he put it to his ear and cringed as a familiar voice asked, “Are you ready?”
“Of course I’m ready,” Snodgrass responded. “Don’t worry. It’s already begun.”
He slammed the phone down. Then he lifted a sheet of paper from his desk. On it was a list of five names:
DENTON KENSINGTON
WENDELL SCOOP
EDDIE GREEN
ELIJAH ROSEN
BIJAY BHARATA
He slipped the list into a folder, and he placed the folder in his desk drawer. Then he rapped his bloated knuckles nervously against the wood and looked out the window to see the sun introducing itself on the horizon and illuminating the damp soccer fields.
A muffled grunt and growl broke him out of his daze. He rose and walked over to his closet. He opened the door.
“Easy, boy,” Snodgrass whispered. “You’ve already had a drink this morning. We just have to move you. So don’t you dare try to bite me again.”
He paused and looked down at the curled-up shape in the dark corner of the closet. The growl was now a low, steady rumble.
“It works. Just look at you. And what we’ve done … it’s incredible, you know,” Snodgrass whispered. “If only you had the ability to understand that. Everyone else soon will….”
Chapter 1
DENTON
Denton Kensington sat at the breakfast table, sipping tomato juice. With a sharp flick of his wrist, he straightened up the Financial Times and had a look at the date.
Friday, April 12.
He had been in America for not even eight months. It seemed so much longer.
As he unfolded the paper, his mother came up behind him and hugged him around the shoulders.
“I’m so proud of you, dear.” She smothered his forehead with a kiss. “Both your father and I are so proud.”
Denton pulled away. “Argh, Mum, you’ll wrinkle my shirt. I just pressed it.”
“And it looks lovely, dear. You look lovely.”
“In America, looking lovely isn’t exactly cool,” Denton explained. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think it’s cool anywhere.”
“Well, maybe it should be.” His mother smiled. “Looking lovely will get you a good job and a good girl. Who wouldn’t want that?”
“Well, I don’t happen to have either,” Denton told her.
“That’s because you’re only thirteen, dear.”
“Don’t remind me,” Denton grumbled.
Back in England, there were other kids like Denton—prim, proper, and concerned with world affairs and correct grammar. He used to at least chat with those kids in school, sometimes share a chuckle or two. On occasion, he had even invited them over to his house to watch old movies on the couch or build model sailboats in his father’s study.
That had all ended when his father got a banking job in New York City, bought a house in some strange little town called Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, and moved the family overseas. Eighth grade, as it was called in America, soon followed.
Eighth grade was full of far too many swaggering, boorish boys and chatterbox girls. While they had plenty of those in England too, it wasn’t all of them. It might not have been all of them in New Jersey either, but to Denton it certainly seemed like it.
His new school was enormous. There were four hundred kids in the eighth grade alone. To find five or six he could connect with seemed an awfully big task. After months of empty searches, he stopped looking for friends. Time was better spent studying, getting ready for university. Cambridge or Oxford—those were the only ones worth attending, in Denton’s mind. And if he was going to get into either, if he was going to find his way back to his beloved England, he had to focus on his future.
“How old would you rather be?” Denton’s mother asked him.
Denton thought it over for a moment. “Forty-seven,” he finally said.
“Forty-seven?” His mother laughed. “That’s a peculiar age to pick.”
“At forty-seven, I’d have a good retirement plan already established,” Denton explained. “Perhaps I’d be able to afford a Bentley. I could be a barrister. That certainly beats eighth grade.”
“Don’t be so sure about that,” his mother said, fixing the part in his hair with her long, elegant fingers. “Thirteen is a grand age. And I think you’ll find today will be a grand day. Your best in America. Maybe your best ever.”
Denton looked up at her with more than a little suspicion. “I wouldn’t count on that,” he said.
He turned to the kitchen window and looked out into morning. Instead of his quaint English hometown of Ruttle-on-Tillsbury, where his family once had a garden with immaculate hedgerows, tulips, and fountains, he was treated to the images of suburban Ho-Ho-Kus: his neighbors’ stinky little pug and their rickety old trampoline.
He hated pugs (too slobbery!). He hated trampolines (too dangerous!). He hated Ho-Ho-Kus (too … too … New Jersey!). But this was his life.
School that day started no grander than any other day.
“Well, well, well. If it isn’t Harry Snotter, the ol’ Duke of Dork,” Tyler Kelly said in homeroom. He finished the sentiment with a knuckle punch to Denton’s arm.
“Blimey!” Denton howled. “What was that for?”
“I don’t know.” Tyler shrugged. “’Cause you say stupid stuff like ‘blimey.’”
“But I said it after you punched me,” Denton pleaded.
“I can predict the future,” Tyler said. Then he punched him another time.
“Blimey!”
“See,” Tyler said. “I knew you’d say it again. Just keepin’ you honest, Frodo.” Tyler raised his fist once more and swung it down. Denton flinched. But Tyler’s fist stopped short, about two inches from Denton’s arm.
“You’re lucky,” Tyler said. “You wouldn’t have said it this time. You were going to say ‘Crikey!’ or something like that.” He cackled loudly to himself, then turned and walked away, leaving Denton to rub his bruised arm.
Denton’s first class of the day was social studies, where he was to give a presentation on Bangladesh. He took his place at the front of the classroom and launched into it almost as soon as the other kids had reached their seats. And while Denton’s teacher was absolutely charmed by his masterful distillation of facts, by his commentary on agriculture and population density and religion and just about everything you could say about a country half a world away, his fellow students were less than enthusiastic.
Surely the girls will be impressed by my knowledge, Denton had thought. But even the girls who used to peer coyly over their books at Denton when he first came to school were now thoroughly uninterested. They sent texts under their desks. Or they drew inky temporary tattoos on the skin of their hands. Some just stared at the walls, their faces tired and blank.
After he finished, he bowed and received absolutely no applause. Then he took a seat at his desk. At that moment, he felt truly like a for
eigner, for lack of a better word.
And his next class was gym. And gym was even worse.
Denton wasn’t opposed to sports. In England he had played cricket and water polo and even a bit of rugby. But physical education in America was nowhere near as civilized as all that. It was organized chaos—all obstacle courses and foam balls and greasy mesh pinnies. Not to mention the fact that Coach McKenzie was a tyrant. He was constantly pointing his meaty finger at Denton, commanding him to shinny up ropes, to run wind sprints, to serve as a crash-test dummy for the more muscular boys to throw to the mats during wrestling demonstrations.
Lacing up his sneakers in the locker room, Denton felt a tap on his shoulder. He hesitated to turn around. He had fallen victim to too many sneak attacks over the years.
“Peter Pan!” came the thundering voice of Coach McKenzie. “My office. Now!”
Denton turned and looked up to see McKenzie stomping away. Reluctantly, he followed.
McKenzie’s office was like a small apartment. There was a desk and a dresser with a small television on it. In the corner was a small cot, presumably for midday naps. There were framed letters from former students on the wall, and certificates from various civic organizations. One wall was completely covered with a map of the world. There were green thumbtacks all over it—Australia, Kenya, Brazil, even his home of England. Denton also noticed two red thumbtacks. They were stuck in the center of Louisiana and on the top border of South Korea.
“No gym class for you today,” McKenzie barked.
“Really? Why?” Denton turned away from the map and faced McKenzie, not bothering to conceal his joy.
“Vice Principal Snodgrass wants to see you. ASAP. Which means I want you outta my sight and in his office in the next five minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Git ’er done,” Coach McKenzie said, slapping Denton on the back a little too hard.
Denton had never met Vice Principal Snodgrass, but it was common knowledge that he handed out detention as if it were a vaccine. He figured everyone could use a good dose. Denton didn’t deserve detention, though. He had done nothing wrong.
The Idaho Tests, that must be it, he thought. The most important tests of junior high, they were taking place next Friday. They covered all the bases—math, science, English, social studies. Everyone from fifth to eighth grade had to take them, but for eighth graders, they were of monumental importance. Not only did they determine what classes you were allowed to take in high school, they also gauged where your junior high ranked in relation to all the other junior highs in the country.
Teachers were taking the tests very seriously. Denton was taking them very seriously. Undoubtedly, Snodgrass was too. After all, he had scheduled a pep rally for the day before the test. And now he probably just wanted to check with the best students to make sure everything was going well. Which it was. Denton had been quizzing himself every night, memorizing historical facts and figures. He had been hard at work, programming his brain. Tests weren’t like his social life. Tests he could handle.
Relaxed, Denton opened the door to the vice principal’s office and saw that it was empty. A line of five chairs sat in front of Snodgrass’s desk. Denton used his fingers to straighten the part in his wavy brown hair. Then he sat down, crossed his legs, and waited.
Chapter 2
WENDELL
“Do you play basketball?” Sally Dibbs asked Wendell Scoop at the bus stop.
“No,” Wendell replied quickly.
It was a question he heard a lot, and it always irritated him. He knew she wasn’t asking just because he was black. It was because he was only thirteen and he was already six foot six—six foot nine if he counted his hair, a spiky, messy lump that stuck out in all directions like an old toothbrush. He weighed in at an impressive 240 pounds, which meant he also heard the next question a lot.
“Do you play football?”
“No.”
“Oh …”
Sally nibbled at her thumbnail and looked up at the clouds. “Baseball?” she asked tentatively.
“No!” Wendell barked back. Sometimes he thought about how great it would be to lose a hundred pounds and have his legs chopped off at the knees in some heroic accident. Then he would never have to answer such pointless questions again.
“What do you play, then?” Sally asked.
He was tempted to yell “Nothing!” as he often did in these situations. Sally was new in town, though, and she probably didn’t know any better.
“Video games,” he finally answered.
He could not have given a truer answer. When it came to video games, Wendell was an all-star—the LeBron James of Halo, the Peyton Manning of Warcraft. He had heard that in Japan and South Korea there were professional computer-game players who were treated like rock stars. They signed autographs. They were on TV. They got girls. Girls! For playing computer games! It seemed too unbelievable, but he often thought it was his destiny.
“As long as I keep playing,” he would tell his mother, “I’ll end up rich and famous in the end.”
“Just do what you love, babe,” she’d say. “That’s all your daddy and I ask.”
Wendell knew deep down she hoped he would become a software engineer, a computer programmer. After all, as good as he was at video games, Wendell was even better at math. Over the years, trophies from Math Olympiads piled up in his cluttered bedroom, competing for face time with anime posters and action figures.
Numbers were more than just symbols to him, more than things to be added and divided and jumbled together in equations. They were paths to solutions. They made life (some of it, at least) clear, definite, controllable.
Wendell’s older brother, Trent, was also a math whiz. He was a sophomore at MIT, where he was acing all his classes. He was smart and happy and he was Wendell’s hero. When Trent was thirteen, he was big and goofy too. By the time he entered college, he had come into his own.
People said it was more a boost in confidence than anything—walking with a stiffer posture, talking with a stronger voice. Though Wendell attributed it to something else: Trent had a girlfriend. Her name was Keisha and she was beautiful, with glowing eyes and a contagious laugh. They had been dating for nearly two years, which ruled out the possibility that she was dating him on a dare. As impossible as it seemed, she liked Trent—loved him, even.
“How did you do it?” Wendell asked his brother the day before eighth grade started.
“What’s that?”
“Get a girl like Keisha? I mean … get any girl?”
Trent laughed. “Just wait, little brother. Give it time.”
Four and a half years. That was a long time Wendell had to wait until college. An eternity. He filled it by playing video games, solving math problems, and writing computer code. While his old friends Carl and Ray and Dennis were playing touch football in the park, Wendell was behind the glow of his computer screen. While they were sneaking into Suzy Greenburg’s sleepover party, Wendell was firing through a book of Sudoku puzzles.
The guys still said hello in the halls, and sometimes sat next to Wendell at lunch for a few minutes to pick his brain about video game cheat codes. That was it, though, and Wendell couldn’t really blame them. They used to invite him along, but he always declined. After a while, they stopped inviting.
Now, Wendell sat alone on the bus, in the front seat, his long legs bent sharply and pressed against the steel barrier separating him and the bus driver. Sally Dibbs sat behind him, playing her iPod too loudly and cluelessly kicking the seat along with the beat of a Jonas Brothers song.
“Quit it!” Wendell said, standing up and turning around.
“Excuse me.” Sally smiled and pulled an earbud out of one ear.
“You’re kicking my seat.”
“I am?” She blushed. “Sorry. I sometimes don’t realize I’m doing things that … you know, I’m actually doing.”
“Well … quit doing them,” Wendell grumbled.
Sally twi
sted her mouth, which made her nose wiggle and her eyes blink. Then she smiled again, and nodded. It was odd, and awkward, and Wendell sat back down, choosing just to ignore her.
A queasy feeling overtook him as the bus bumped and swerved its way into the Ho-Ho-Kus Junior High parking lot. It happened a lot. He had a weak stomach, and it always went sour when he was nervous. School itself didn’t make Wendell nervous, but on this particular morning, he had woken with three monster zits on his face—one on his left cheek, one on his chin, and one right in the middle of his nose.
Acne was becoming a constant problem for him. It began erupting on his face about two years before, at the same time he started growing like a sponge in a hurricane. He had hit puberty before everyone else, and he had hit it hard. His voice skipped the part where it cracked, and almost overnight it became a low, manly rumble. His house was littered with bent and broken chairs that had met their demise due to Wendell’s new girth. Clothing had to be given away within weeks of buying it. He felt like the Incredible Expanding Boy, but that was something he usually could deal with.
Acne was different. Some mornings he would scrub his face until it hurt, but it never seemed to make a difference. His skin was the perfect soil for a crop of whiteheads, and it didn’t matter that his mom said all his classmates were going through similar problems. When his face was fresh with zits, Wendell couldn’t help thinking that everyone was staring at him or laughing behind cupped hands. His nerves would get the best of him. His stomach would do somersaults. There was only one cure.
It wasn’t a pill or a potion. It wasn’t a treatment. It was a person.
“Hi, Nurse Bloom,” Wendell said, poking his head into her office. “Whatcha reading?”
Nurse Bloom sat behind her desk engrossed in a book. Wendell could see only the picture on the cover, a jumble of numbers. She held a single finger in the air, then took a pencil off her desk and jotted something in the book. Then she placed it down, looked at him, and smiled warmly.
“Just a little Sudoku,” she said.
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