Shooter

by Caroline Pignat

So when Mr. Wilson called an assembly two weeks ago and told the whole school that, effective immediately, these pranks would stop or there would be serious consequences—no more sports, no more dances, no more intramurals, or even prom—I wondered if that was the end of our Prank Fridays. Maybe Operation Lightning Streak truly was our last mission. Mr. Wilson demanded names. But no one spoke. No one knew—except for me and Max. My face burned and I couldn’t sit still. What if Mr. Wilson found out? What would happen to us?

  But no one said anything, and eventually Mr. Wilson sent us back to class. As we filed out of the cafetorium that day, all the kids were grumbling—but not about Wilson. They were complaining about us!

  Screw these X-Men!

  Seriously—they’re such idiots.

  It’s not our fault they’re doing all these dumb pranks.

  My scholarship depends on placing at the track meet. What if it’s canceled?

  He wouldn’t cancel prom—not for real, right?

  Brotherhood of Morons

  …so immature…

  This is my future they’re messing with now, stupid losers.

  Someone should turn them in.

  Anyone know who they are?

  I didn’t see or hear from Max for a few days. I thought maybe he’d given up on our missions. But not Max. Like I said, he has vision.

  He came into Comic Corner on my next shift and he was angry. He blamed Principal Wilson for trying to turn all those fickle humans against him. His eyes were hot, intense, like lasers burning into mine. I wanted to look away. To tell him that maybe we should lie low for a while.

  He told me there’s a war coming and asked me if I was sure I was on the right side, quoting it right from the movie we’d seen a hundred times. I knew he had something planned. Something big.

  “You in?” he asked. “You loyal to the Brotherhood?”

  I swallowed. Gave one, slow nod. I never even blinked. He gave me a list: ping pong balls, electrician’s tape, chemicals, ball bearings, batteries—all kinds of random stuff I could get from Home Depot. I asked if we were doing another ping pong blast.

  “Bigger,” he said. “Badder. Operation Resolution. And, trust me, it’s gonna blow their little minds.”

  ALICE

  In my gut, I know Xander didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Not even Hogan. I glance at Hogan standing protectively just over my shoulder, and blush at the thought that someone is looking out for me. Even if I don’t need it.

  Xander’s eyes widen at Isabelle’s mention of calling the police. He bites his lip. I can feel him withdrawing into himself at the thought.

  Just as well we can’t call them. Not yet. They won’t get any answers, not from him. They won’t even know what to ask, or how. He’d shut down completely. No, it has to be here. Now. I have to find out whatever I can first, and then tell it to the police. They don’t need Xander, really. They need information.

  And it seems that only I speak his language. Only I know how to get it.

  “What did Max ask you to do to help get ready for today?” I say. The more literal and specific the question, the easier it is for him to answer.

  Xander repeats his shopping list—electrician’s tape, wire, ball bearings, ping pong balls.

  Hogan says it sounds like the items for the ping pong ball prank. “Maybe he’s doing that one again.”

  But why? If anything, Maxwell Steinberg is smart. Innovative. He won’t repeat a past prank any more than an author would rehash a scene. The pranks are like plot points in a story. Each one has to be new and exciting, bigger and better than the last. Each one has to raise the stakes.

  “All that effort, just to repeat the ping pong thing?” I shake my head. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

  Hogan shrugs. “We’re talking about a nobody whose sole purpose is to play practical jokes on his school. Clearly, this guy doesn’t have a whole lot of sense.”

  “Oh, he does,” Xander says, enthusiastically. “Max is a mastermind.”

  I chew on the ends of my hair. I’m missing something. But what?

  “You mentioned that you kept a log?” I ask.

  Xander rummages in the backpack and pulls out a blue notebook with superhero scribbles and stickers all over the front. He pauses, holds it to his chest, as though unsure if he wants it shared.

  “Dude, I’m not interested in reading your Dear Diary crap.” Hogan snatches it and flips to the last entry. “All I care about is what Maxwell said about today.”

  “He called his last mission ‘Resolution,’ ” Xander says. “But I’ve only listed the ingredients. I never write about the mission until it’s over. Technically, a log is for logging the details after—”

  “Wait,” Isabelle says, as though she’s had an epiphany. “Did you say the last mission? So, today is it?”

  She seems almost relieved, as though, after this last prank, her problems will be over.

  She sits on the red bag and crosses her long legs in front of her as she continues, “I just thought this Magnerdo—”

  “Magneto,” Xander corrects her.

  She rolls her eyes. “Mag-NEAT-o would’ve saved his big prank,” she puts air quotes around it, “for the prom next month. I’ve been totally stressing over it ever since these dumb stunts started. And then, when Wilson said he’d cancel everything if there were any more pranks, well, I thought for sure, these X-Men would target prom for their grand finale.”

  “Max said people would expect it at prom.” Xander seems proud that Isabelle has proved him right.

  “Well, I’m just glad you’re not.”

  Isabelle starts complaining about how much work it takes to plan a prom and how selfish it would have been to prank it. As she rambles on, Hogan scans the list of materials again.

  “Matches, ping pong balls, black powder. Typical noisemaker stuff.” He looks up. “Cherry bombs?”

  Xander nods.

  “That must have been what we heard in the stairwells,” Hogan continues. “Loud but not all that dangerous.”

  I don’t know anything about them, really. How destructive are they? How dangerous? Maybe a garbage can full of them might cause some damage?

  “How many does he have?”

  “Just a few,” Xander says. He looks at Isabelle. “The rest are in my gym bag.”

  “What?” Isabelle jumps up like she’s been jolted by a live wire. “You brought…” She backs up as far away as she can from the suddenly ominous red gym bag. “You let me…you mean, I’ve been sitting on…on bombs? Ohmigod! OH. MY. GOD.”

  “Well, they’re not lit,” Xander says, as though she is being ridiculous. For once, I don’t think she is. She’s always so overly dramatic, but sitting on a bag of explosives, especially ones made by Xander and Maxwell—to be fair, that truly warrants a big reaction.

  “Randy and I made some and shot them off in the backwoods,” Hogan says to Xander. “Nearly blew my hand off. They aren’t as safe as you’d think.” He looks back at the list. “But this other stuff, ball bearings…these chemicals…what’s this for?”

  Xander looks down. Fiddles with his laces. “Max was working on some Special Project. I got the stuff, just like he asked. But he wouldn’t let me help. He said it was top secret.” Clearly, being left out of the plans upsets him. “But I don’t know what he made.”

  Hogan looks at me, as if for confirmation. I nod. “He’s telling the truth,” I say, sure of it. “He doesn’t know any more than that.” Xander doesn’t lie. I don’t really know him, other than the readings he’s done in Writer’s Craft. X-Men adventures, superhero stuff. I wish I’d paid closer attention. But I do know a few things. For one, he is factual. And literal. And brutally honest. He showed that many times when giving other kids feedback. He has no filter.

  Isabelle raises an eyebrow. “So, how did you pay for all the stuff?”

  “My mom’s credit card,” Xander mumbles.

  “Totally traceable.” She sighs. “Sounds to me like he used you to get what he wante
d: pictures of himself, supplies, a scapegoat.” Isabelle glances at the sack of ping pong bombs on the far side of the room. “So, basically, he pulls the prank of the year and you’re left, literally, holding the bag. Nice. I thought you were friends.”

  Xander looks away.

  “So, why ball bearings?” I ask. They seem pretty specific.

  Xander looks up. “I figured that had something to do with Magneto.” He pulls a little silver ball from his jeans front pocket and holds it between his finger and thumb. “The real Magneto can manipulate magnetic fields and control metals, and in X2: X-Men United he escapes from his plastic prison using—”

  “Small metal balls,” Hogan finishes, his voice serious. “Yeah. I saw the movie.”

  “But in the original comic version—”

  “Come on,” Isabelle snorts, cutting Xander off. “He’s playing a role. Maxwell is not the real Magneto,” she says. “I mean, how much harm can he do with a few—?”

  “Not a few—549 ball bearings.” Xander holds up the little ball. “I kept one.”

  “Okay, 549 little silver balls?” she says, dismissively. “What—is he spilling them in the halls to make us trip?”

  I take the ball bearing from Xander. Roll it in my palm. Hold it between my fingers.

  “It’s a tiny ball of metal,” Isabelle mocks.

  “Right,” I say, as it dawns on me. I swallow. “And so is a bullet.”

  No one speaks.

  “What? So you think he’s firing them from his paintball gun?” Isabelle asks.

  “No.” Xander takes back the ball, considers it. “We tried that a few weeks ago. They don’t have much trajectory. Not enough for impact. And today he had a real gun. If he wanted to shoot anyone, he’d use that.” He looks up at us and, realizing what he’s just said, quickly adds, “Not that he wants to shoot anyone. At least, I don’t think he does. He never said…”

  Hogan squats by the bag and unzips it. “There’s got to be something else in here…some kind of clue.” He gingerly shifts the stuffed ping pong balls, careful not to upset them. I wish he’d just leave it alone altogether. If he nearly blew his hand off with just one, what will a whole bagful do in a small room like this?

  “Chain link, locks…and…” Hogan pulls out a spiral notebook, “this.”

  I move next to him as he opens it. Blue ballpoint-pen doodles cover the paper, fill the margins. Page after page of them.

  Isabelle peeks over. “More dumb comic stuff. Does every guy go through that phase? Is it, like, a puberty thing?”

  But these aren’t just doodles. The drawings have an energy about them. The lines are bold. Intense. In some places the explosions he scribbled were etched into the pages until they ripped. I run my fingers along the paper, feeling the braille of the drama from the flip side.

  “Is this yours?” I ask Xander. He shakes his head and comes over to join us. All of us are drawn to the notebook like rubber-neckers at a car accident.

  And it is like a car accident. Random. Crazy. Messy. Page after page after page of bizarre comic spreads where some caped, masked superhero shoots jagged thunderbolts, laser beams, or dotted lines that all end in big, exploding stars.

  “It’s like some effed-up Where’s Waldo?” Hogan says, turning the page to the same story, different setting. “There he is…” He turns the page. “There he is.” Turn. “There he is.” With every flip, the caped character becomes easier to find, usually levitating over all the carnage.

  “Looks like Max wastes a lot of time in class,” Isabelle says.

  “Well,” Hogan adds, “I doubt he’ll be getting hired by Marvel any time soon.”

  “Seriously,” Isabelle agrees. “Like, obsess much?”

  “Wait! Wait!” I shout. “Go back!”

  Hogan pauses and flips back one page.

  And I see my Tree of Knowledge mural, or a crude rendition of its swirling branches and oval leaves. Half of the tree, anyway. The other half is buried under a vicious scribble shooting out from the caped man’s gun. In this version it’s a flamethrower. I grab the notebook from Hogan and flip back through what we’ve seen. And suddenly it clicks.

  The mural.

  The garbage can.

  The airplane.

  The sprinklers.

  The skeleton.

  “These aren’t doodles or random comics,” I say, breathless as I flip back to the beginning, to where a lewd skeleton smokes a cigarette. I look up at the three faces near mine. “Do you know what these are?”

  “A waste of time?” Hogan says.

  “A geek’s fantasy?” Isabelle adds.

  “Better,” I grin. “These are blueprints. Don’t you get it? These are plans, outlines for every X-Men prank. And if we know what he’s planning…”

  Hogan smiles back. “Then we know how to stop him.”

  HOGAN

  Alice flips through the pages. “Look, see? There’s the ping pong one. Books and sprinklers—that’s the library. This one has a toilet…” She looks up.

  “Mr. Wilson’s washroom,” Xander says. “Not a lot of people knew about that one. Operation Fire-in-the-Hole. Once everyone cleared out for the fire alarm, we climbed through the ceiling into the washroom Wilson keeps locked and rigged his toilet with some sodium. It explodes when water contacts it. I bet it made a huge mess.”

  I look at the picture and see it now. A toilet exploding as some guy, probably Wilson, flies bare-assed over the moon.

  I smile at Alice, amazed that she somehow figured out how to see the story in the scribbles.

  Xander stares wide-eyed at the book. Then he grabs it from Alice and continues flipping, searching for something, growing more and more agitated with every page turn.

  “Haven’t you seen this book before?” I say. “I just took it from your bag.”

  Xander keeps flipping. “It’s Max’s bag. I grabbed it before I left the atrium. I thought maybe he would abort the mission if he didn’t have all his stuff.”

  “Try the last pages—the blueprint for Resolution is probably there,” Alice suggests. But Xander stops flipping and lowers his hands.

  “Missing,” he says, so quietly I almost think I imagined it.

  Alice takes it from him and keeps searching. “What?” she asks. “Resolution?”

  “No. His partner,” Xander says. He looks like he’s gonna cry. “I was with him on every mission and he never drew me once. Not even as a sidekick. Not in any of them.”

  “Be thankful,” Izzy says. “The last place you wanna be is in some psycho’s journal.”

  “But Isabelle…” Alice says, her voice sounding serious. “You’re in this picture.” She spreads the book wide open before Isabelle, the pages trembling in her hands.

  I find Where’s Weirdo? easily in all the explosions, rain, and thunderbolts. But this drawing is different. The ground isn’t ground exactly, but arms, legs, severed heads with Xs for eyes. Pieces in puddles. Each of them named. And with a shaky finger, Alice points to the one marked “Isabelle Parks.”

  Izzy whimpers beside me. “Why would he…? I don’t even…I never…”

  I try to reassure her. “It’s not just you, Iz. There’s about fifty names. And that one there with the W, the guy from the toilet, he’s in all the pictures. Probably Wilson.”

  “But I don’t even know him,” Izzy’s voice pleads. “Why would he target me?”

  I shrug. “School president?”

  “This is it,” Alice says, anxiously. “Resolution. This is what Maxwell is planning for today.” She bends down and lays the book open on the floor. We all kneel around it trying to make sense of the scribbles.

  At the center of the drawing hangs some kind of ball with light or lasers shooting from it in all directions.

  “Disco ball?” Izzy says. “No, Disco Day was last month during Spirit Week. Are you sure this is the right page?”

  But then I look at the lines coming out of the ball, at the circles at the other end. I’ve seen something l
ike this before. “Wait a second.” I flip back a few pages to a diagram of a garbage can and a load of ping pong balls. It dawns on me then. The explosion. The ball bearings. “It’s not a disco ball—it’s a bomb.”

  “Like one of those cherry things…but bigger?” Alice asks.

  I wish it was. But that sinking feeling in my stomach tells me I’m onto something. “Remember the ping pong explosion?” I point at the picture. The garbage can surrounded by dashes and dots. I flip back to Resolution. “Well, picture that, but bigger. Way bigger. With ball bearings instead of ping pong balls.”

  Alice’s eyes go wide. “With enough force, it would be like firing hundreds of bullets in all directions, all at once.”

  We look down at the picture and see exactly that.

  “Could he really build something like that?” Izzy asks, skeptically.

  “Max can build anything,” Xander says.

  “So we know what. But where?” Alice asks. “When? And how is he going to trigger it?”

  Xander shrugs. “He didn’t tell me.”

  We sit for a minute staring at the drawings, each of us hoping we’ll see some other clue. But nothing comes.

  Alice chews on the ends of her hair as she stares through the pages, deep in thought. “If I were Maxwell, I’d want to set this off where I get the biggest impact, right? The most damage.”

  “Well, apparently he’s already destroyed our trophy case,” Izzy says.

  “Yes…” Alice says, “but it’s not about damaging property.”

  Her comment hangs heavy between us. I wonder if that’s it. If Maxwell was planning to cross that line. Pranks are funny, yeah, but the thing is, once you do one, you raise the bar. And with everyone copycatting his little pranks, the next has to be even bigger, even better, even crazier.

  How insane is this guy?

  I think of the photo. The eyes.

  Crazy enough.

  “Hello?” Izzy chirps. “We’ve been in a lockdown for over forty-five minutes, hidden away in locked classrooms. How would he get at us even if he wanted to?”

  “Think about it,” Alice says, her eyes almost as intense as Max’s. “Where are there no cameras—thanks to Xander? Where can he set up this next prank without being seen? Just like their fire alarm Fridays. And where will crowds of people go when the lockdown ends?”