Nothing but Trouble

by Jacqueline Davies

  Maggie had read these comments so many times that it was as if some version of her father lived in her brain. And the conversation just went on and on.

  She put aside the notebooks and shuffled through the remaining contents of the box: half a dozen photographs, a handful of press clippings, a letter from the dean pleading with the Gamma Gamma Heys to “show restraint” during Parents’ Weekend, her father’s student ID card, a key, a standard-issue MIT baseball cap that someone had embellished with the embroidered words Mouse In Training. Maggie sifted through each item, always hoping that she had somehow missed something. That there would be some new piece of her father to hold in her hands.

  When she reached the bottom and the box was empty, she carefully returned everything as it had been, then slid the box under her bed. She could hear the kitchen timer going off downstairs. She scrambled to her feet, but not before her grandfather could start his grousing.

  “I’m coming! I’m coming already!” shouted Maggie. The T-shirt slogan Dada Is My Daddy suddenly flashed in her brain, and she laughed for a second, trying to imagine explaining Dadaism to Grandpop.

  Just before she left her room she heard the ping of an email landing in her in-box. As if by telepathy, the email had a one-word subject line: DADA! Maggie opened it; there was no message, just a picture of the Mona Lisa with the face of Mrs. Dornbusch expertly Photoshopped over it. It looked like it could be an actual painting hanging in a museum. The effect was incredibly eerie.

  Maggie stared at the image. Downstairs the TV was blaring. In her mother’s room, the TV was humming. But here, in this little space she’d carved out for herself, Dada lived.

  She allowed herself one more moment in the glow of the computer’s screen, then hurried downstairs to take the casserole out of the oven.

  Even with a casserole, timing mattered.

  TEN

  OF COURSE MAGGIE EMAILED LENA BACK later that evening to tell her how much she loved the “Mona Dornbusch” painting, and then Lena emailed her back, and then Maggie emailed her back . . . and then here they were the next morning: sneaking into the empty school two hours before the school day began.

  It was only the second day of the school year, and most sixth graders were still in bed, ignoring their parents’ pleas to “Get up!” But Maggie and Lena were creeping around the rear of the school. Both girls had backpacks, but Maggie also carried her old Little Mermaid insulated lunch pack from first grade. It held dry ice and two small glass bottles filled with a clear liquid. By the look and the smell of it, it could have been water. But it wasn’t water.

  “Aren’t you afraid it’s going to explode?” asked Lena. Maggie had described the volatile results of what would happen if even a feather touched the solution.

  “Nope, it’s safe. As long as we keep it cold and dark and wet.” The chemical compound she had made was floating safely in a slosh of ammonia. It was completely stable—until the ammonia evaporated.

  “How do you even know about this door?” asked Lena as Maggie pushed aside the overgrown branches of a neglected buttonwood bush to reveal a rusted metal entrance.

  “I make it my business to know every way in and every way out. When you hack, you have to know your routes.”

  “Ha! Roots!” said Lena, pointing at the bush, which had just slapped her in the face as if it were alive. There was a scraggly daisy plant at the foot of the bush. Lena snapped off a single flower and tucked it into the buttonhole of her denim jacket.

  That’s right, whispered Maggie’s father. Always know your entrances and exits. . . . Maggie could tell that her father was annoyed that there was a third member of their hacking team, but she didn’t have time to dwell on negatives. They were about to re-create the original MIT hack, and it involved explosions. What could be better?

  Back in the 1870s, the first MIT hackers occasionally sprinkled nitrogen triiodide on the gymnasium floor so that students practicing their military drills had a little extra snap, crackle, and pop to their routine assembly. It was harmless, but inevitably led to chaos—it’s hard to keep marching in a straight line when the floor is exploding beneath your feet.

  That’s what Lena had loved about the idea of adding some unexpected zip to gym class. Chaos when you least expected it. A surprise in the most familiar of places. A beard on the Mona Lisa. A urinal on display in a museum. “We’re modern-day Dadaists,” she had said to Maggie.

  Whatever. Maggie just loved explosions.

  Lena stepped back in fear when Maggie tried to hand her the lunch pack. “It’s safe!” promised Maggie, turning her attention to the rusted-shut door. “Trust me.” But Lena set the lunch pack carefully on the ground as soon as it was handed to her.

  “It isn’t locked?” asked Lena as Maggie lifted up on the door handle.

  “Nope,” said Maggie, pushing with her hip in just the right spot. “Mr. Fetterholf, the custodian, thinks it is, because it’s jammed. I could fix it—it just needs its hinges readjusted and a good cleaning and oiling—but it’s actually pretty useful to have a secret door that no one else knows. One time last year, I forgot my homework over the weekend, and this door totally saved my butt.” Maggie pushed again. It was tricky, finding exactly the right spot.

  “But there isn’t an alarm system? Or surveillance cameras?”

  Maggie stopped and looked at her. “Are you kidding? This is Oda M! We barely have lightbulbs! Believe me: there are no surveillance cameras!”

  Maggie hit the door one more time with her hip. The rusted and forgotten door groaned as it opened into the cavernous old gym. Maggie picked up the lunch pack and hurried inside with Lena a cautious few steps behind.

  There weren’t real gym classes this year. Instead, the school fulfilled its state-mandated physical education requirement by assigning each teacher an hour’s worth of “activity supervision” each week. Mr. Platt was eager to organize team games like capture the flag, kickball, and relay races. Mrs. Matlaw was planning to teach yoga and lead trust-building exercises. But Mrs. Dornbusch was old-school. They knew she would make them run laps or do calisthenics until the students flopped in exhaustion on the piles of wrestling mats that were soaked in fifty years of sweat. Lucky for the students, gym class was just one day a week, and today’s session would be “taught” by Mrs. Matlaw. Maggie didn’t expect that any trust would be built.

  She set her backpack down on the gym floor and retrieved two pairs of safety gloves from its zippered front pocket.

  “We’re not going to make a mess of the gym, are we?” asked Lena. It was clear that Lena didn’t like the thought of making more work for the school custodian.

  “No,” said Maggie. “We’ll leave Mr. Fetterholf with clear instructions and a bottle of sodium thiosulfate. It’ll wipe up the stains super easy. Or he could just wait, and the stains will disappear on their own.”

  The Third Commandment, whispered her father solemnly. Don’t destroy anything that doesn’t belong to you. Destruction = Failure.

  “I know that!” said Maggie.

  “Know what?” asked Lena.

  Maggie closed her mouth. “Oh, nothing. I just sometimes talk to myself.”

  “Me too!” said Lena, laughing. “Especially when I’m painting. Two peas in a pod.” And she put an arm around Maggie’s shoulders and gave her a quick squeeze.

  But they weren’t two peas in a pod, and Maggie knew it. I don’t need your advice on everything, she muttered inside her own head. She was used to talking out loud to her father during hacks. It was strange to have someone else along. Someone . . . real.

  Hey! protested her father, but Maggie had decided to ignore him and was busy surveying the scene of the hack—the grand old gymnasium of Oda M.

  “It’s like a cathedral,” whispered Lena, and Maggie knew just what she meant. The ceiling of the gym soared to fifty feet high, with a row of narrow windows at the top that allowed the early morning light to filter in. The air was still, and the quiet contained by the enormous space seemed tha
t much more profound. It was like the calm of the forest on a snowy morning—the silence deepened by the vastness of the place.

  Get a move on, urged her father.

  Maggie and Lena looked straight up and were surprised by the complicated maze of air ducts, rafters, water pipes, beams, electrical wiring, trusses, supports, netting, vents, ropes, lights, and fans.

  “Wow,” said Lena. “It’s like some kind of supercity with highways and factories and no road map.”

  “I didn’t think it would be so high,” Maggie worried.

  “There are the ropes,” said Lena. “Come on.” She moved quickly to where the climbing ropes that hung from the ceiling were cleated to the wall. They needed only one, and so she chose the center rope and unhooked it. It hung down from a rafter in the ceiling, ending directly in the middle of the gym floor.

  “It’s too high!” said Maggie again. “We didn’t plan for that height. You shouldn’t do it. It isn’t safe.” She felt drops of sweat gather on her forehead and upper lip. Dampness seemed to suddenly appear out of nowhere under her arms. Just looking up at that height made her stomach drop down to her knees.

  “Maggie!” said Lena. “This is the easy part. You’re the one carrying explosives in your lunch box!”

  “No!” said Maggie. “You can’t do it!” Climbing that high hadn’t been part of the plan.

  Lena put a hand on each of Maggie’s shoulders. “Breathe deep, Mags. This is what I’m good at. You’re the planner. I’m the wing nut. This is what makes us such an awesome team.”

  Lena reached into her own backpack and chalked up her hands, then hooked the pack on her back and began to climb the rope hand over hand. She didn’t even use her legs. Maggie couldn’t believe someone could have that much strength in her arms. Lena made it to the top in less than a minute, flipped herself up, and sat on a rafter, catching her breath.

  “I can’t watch,” said Maggie, feeling like she might throw up. She stared down at the floor. “Just tell me what you’re doing.”

  “It’s so cool up here, Maggie. I wish you could see it.”

  “No way! Just do what you have to do.” Then she heard the rapid-fire clicking of Lena’s camera. Maggie wanted to scream. This was not how you hacked. “Come on!” she said urgently. “We don’t have time for art!”

  “There’s always time for art,” said Lena emphatically. “You might as well say there isn’t time for life!” But she put her camera away and began to work. Once or twice, Maggie tried to look up to check on her friend, but just the sight of Lena sitting on the rafter so high above the ground made her feel nauseous. She imagined what her father would write about her in his notebook: Useless when it comes to heights!

  A minute later, Lena was back on the ground, and Maggie breathed a huge sigh of relief. From here on out, everything was a piece of cake. They just had to handle small amounts of a highly sensitive contact explosive, preferably without blowing anything up.

  They began at opposite corners of the large gym floor, staying within the lines marked by the basketball court.

  “Remember,” said Maggie, “just one drop, then move down five feet, then one drop. All the way to the end of the row.” The goal was to have the explosions just close enough so one would set off the next.

  “The gloves feel weird,” said Lena. “What if I drop the whole bottle?”

  “Don’t!” said Maggie emphatically. “Just don’t. That’s what hacking is. Planning and execution.”

  “What about the unexpected?” asked Lena. She had already completed her first row and was now working her way into the center of her next row. “That’s what art is about.”

  And that’s why hacking and art don’t go together! said her father.

  But for the first time, Maggie wondered if her father could be wrong about something. She thought she and Lena made a pretty good team.

  Didn’t see that coming, she whispered inside her head.

  The girls met in the middle, back to back, each having finished half of the last row.

  “Okay,” said Maggie. “Now let’s get out of here quickly, because as soon as the drops dry, the chemicals are highly unstable, and that’s when the fun begins.” They screwed the lids onto the bottles and took off their gloves, but in even that short amount of time, the droplets on the floor had . . . vanished.

  “Which way?” asked Lena, looking down at the clean, dry floor.

  “I’m pretty sure . . .” But now Maggie realized that she wasn’t sure at all. They had laid down the droplets of nitrogen triiodide inside the faded lines that marked the perimeter of the basketball court so there were one hundred and thirty-five “hot spots” in all. Maggie had drawn a grid on paper, and the pattern was very clear in her head.

  But here, on the actual surface of the scuffed gym floor, the pattern was not so clear. Especially since the drops had evaporated—which meant they were both invisible and ready to explode on contact. Even the touch of a feather would set them off. How had she not considered that it would be better to work from the center out instead of from the edges in? Planning was supposed to be her strong point!

  Lena started to laugh.

  “This is not funny!” insisted Maggie. How could Lena not understand that the whole hack would be ruined if they took a single wrong step? But then all of a sudden she realized that Lena did understand exactly that, and that was precisely the reason she was laughing. They had done all this planning and all this work, and now they were boxed in by their own hack!

  Maggie cracked up. This is why you should never hack alone, she thought, recalling the Sixth Commandment. Forget about safety! It was just more fun.

  “Okay,” said Lena, gasping for air between howls of laughter. “This is what we’re going to do. I’m going to pick a direction and just walk. And you’re going to follow directly in my footsteps. If anything explodes, we’ll stop and reassess. Okay?”

  “Why should you go first?” asked Maggie, knowing that Lena was taking all the risk.

  “Because I’m a person of faith, and the Universe will protect me. I believe!” And she set off with confident, careful strides in the direction of the gym’s edge. Maggie sucked in a deep breath and followed.

  Not one explosion. Maggie was both relieved and disappointed. What if she had mixed up the solution wrong? What if the entire hack was a dud?

  “C’mon,” said Lena. “Let’s get out of here. We’re tempting the Fates.”

  But as they quietly gathered up their backpacks and tiptoed toward the gym door, there was the sound of something softly hitting the floor. They turned to see the daisy that Lena had worn in the buttonhole of her jacket.

  “Oh, Maggie!” said Lena. “I took it out when I was up there because I didn’t want it to fall by accident, and then I left it by mistake! It must have moved when I swung down on the rope.”

  “Well, we can’t leave it there,” said Maggie. “It’s a flower in the middle of the gym floor! Mr. Fetterholf could come along and pick it up.” The hack was not supposed to happen when Mr. Fetterholf was alone in the gym. What if it scared him so much he had a heart attack?

  “But . . . nothing exploded,” said Lena.

  No. It hadn’t. Not one single explosion.

  Doubt flooded Maggie. Did I do something wrong? she whispered inside her head, questioning the only person who had the answer.

  You’ve mixed that same formula before, said her father. It’s not that complicated, Maggie. Even Griggs could do it, and he’s a complete tool. Maggie heard a hint of disapproval in his voice, that impatience with people who make sloppy mistakes, who can’t keep up.

  The sound of voices approaching could be heard through the closed gym doors that led to the school hallway.

  “We have to go!” said Lena. “Now!”

  “We can’t leave that flower in the middle of the basketball court!” protested Maggie. She could hear her father scolding. It was sloppy. Inelegant. Dangerous.

  But Lena was already pulling on Maggie�
�s arm. The two girls slipped out the secret door, jamming it closed behind them.

  “It’s too bad we won’t get to see it happen,” said Lena as they hurried around to the front of the school. The first students were beginning to stream down the hill.

  “That’s how it is with hacks,” said Maggie. “You set them up, and then you disappear.” The private glory comes later when you know you did something no one else could even imagine.

  Maggie and Lena didn’t have gym until Friday with Mrs. Dornbusch. It would be Mrs. Matlaw’s class that had the honor of taking part in the Exploding Gym Class Hack. At least that was how it was supposed to work.

  ELEVEN

  BUT DURING HOMEROOM THAT MORNING, Mrs. Dornbusch made an unexpected announcement: she and Mrs. Matlaw were swapping gym days, and her class, which included Maggie and Lena, would meet in the gym next period. When Tyler asked why, Mrs. Dornbusch said, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” She was deep into her crossword puzzle, and the word around school was that Mr. Platt had unwisely challenged her to a daily puzzle-off: whoever finished the crossword puzzle first each day won a bag of jelly beans from the loser. It was only the second day of school, but Mr. Platt had already had to provide a bag of Jelly Belly jelly beans, which Ms. Dornbusch was popping in her mouth as she worked the crossword.

  “But Mrs. Dornbusch—” began Maggie.

  Mrs. Dornbusch stared at her, a look of true bafflement on her face. “Not Megan. Not Maria. Not Michelle . . .” Maggie opened her mouth to say, My name is Maggie! but the Gray Gargoyle waved her hand in the air as if to disperse a bad smell and said, “It doesn’t matter.” The bell rang. “March! With any luck, I can finish this puzzle while you all run laps.”