by Jody Feldman
I get between them. Fast. “What was that?”
“What was what?” Matti says, straightening herself out and fumbling with her backpack.
“Since when do you trip and fall?”
“Since my backpack strap came loose and got tangled in my legs.” She holds up the backpack. “Good as new.”
But even Kip’s looking at her funny like he doesn’t believe her. And when we ride home, I can exhale only when he turns toward his street and Matti doesn’t follow him.
An hour later things still feel weird. I break my grounding rules and call Matti. “What’s going on between you and Kip?” I ask. It’s so much easier to be blunt without those big brown eyes of hers making me feel even shorter than I am.
“I thought you were grounded from the phone.”
“I think you’re stalling.” I take the cordless to the front window to watch for my parents. It’s almost five thirty.
“I don’t understand your question,” she says.
“What’s not to understand? Are you and Kip going out?” There. I said it.
“Going out?” She practically howls with laughter. “Going out?” she says, a little too loud. “Going out?” She’s protesting too much. “Travis. I am not going out with Kip. That would be like going out with my brother.”
“But you like your brother.”
“And I like Kip. And I like you. And I like puppies. And I like hot fudge. And the only two of the above that have any chance of touching my lips are puppies and hot fudge,” she says. “And where in the world would you get such a stupid idea?”
“You mean, like when one of the most coordinated people I know—”
“Thank you.”
“Trips and lands in a hug with my other best friend? Then you give him this look—”
“Like I appreciated he didn’t let me fall flat on my face and break my nose?”
“Well, it didn’t look that way to me.”
My mom’s car turns into our driveway. Followed by my dad’s.
“Gotta go,” I say.
As I run to put the phone away, I picture her face again, and I know she’s either delusional or lying. Something’s going on between the two of them.
I can’t do anything about Kip and Matti now, but I can look inside the envelope.
I go to my room so my parents don’t suspect I’ve been doing anything besides homework. Curry follows me. I start to close my door, but I open it again because I normally keep it open until they get home, and I don’t need to add my parents to the list of people watching me even more closely than ever.
I sit on the floor with my bed as a backrest, and Curry curls up and uses my leg as a headrest. I grab a notebook and pencil and pretend I’m writing something.
Both my parents come in to say hi and to thank me for following the rules, and I really don’t feel bad because I was only on the phone with Matti for a minute. Besides, it was urgent. If I hadn’t talked to her, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything tonight.
When they go downstairs to make dinner, I dump the coin out of the envelope and put it with the other two. I stick out my tongue at the unexplainable math sequence still in my drawer. Then I pull out the new puzzle paper, which make my eyes jumpy.
Place these items in a plain, white envelope. Deposit the envelope in the office attendance box by the end of school on Wednesday.
What items? “Just looks like a bunch of blobs and lines to me, Curry.” I hold the paper up to her face, but I’m afraid if she licks it, the lines will turn into smears and I’ll have less than zero chance of solving what must be a puzzle here.
Idea! I pull out the other paper I got today. Maybe it’s a clue for this puzzle.
You are about to enter greatness. The secrets are about to be revealed. Follow the directions exactly and you will become one of us.
The Legend of Lauer
I stare at it for five minutes, but there’s no clue here. Maybe this is just encouragement. Keep your nose clean, Travis, and you’ll be rewarded.
I look back at my lines. Idea. They look like a bar code. What if I scan it at the store and it tells me to bring in a package of cookies? The attendance lady would like that. Not so much if it’s for vinegar. But what if it’s not a bar code and I waste a trip to the store? And an excuse to get there. I need to check the pantry.
I head downstairs, and the sound of TV drifts from the den. I miss that sound. I tiptoe toward it, taking a huge step over the part of the floor that creaks, hoping both my mom and dad are in the kitchen making dinner. I get on my knees and scoot across the wood floor until I can see half the TV screen over the back of the couch, without parents’ heads.
It’s nothing I want to see—the news—but it’s TV. I stay behind the couch and watch for about five minutes before Curry notices me. She scampers over, and my mom’s head pops up, apparently from its lying-down position.
Busted!
“I was coming down to get something,” I say, “but then I stopped to hear the interesting story about identity theft.”
Her face says she doesn’t believe me, but she finds me amusing, even when she grills me about calling Matti. I can’t believe she checked redial on the phone. But I don’t get annoyed, partly because I am guilty as charged and mostly because she’s not mad after I tell her it was important.
I take no punishment as a prize, go look at bar codes in the pantry, and decide they’re too different from my puzzle. I have no other ideas now, so I stay and help my dad with dinner. After we eat, my parents banish me to my room, which is fine. I zigzag up the stairs, knowing the puzzle will stare at me until I figure it out. And I will. Otherwise the paper wins. And a kid should be able to beat a piece of paper any day.
I plant my feet on the hall floor just outside my room, pull the door mostly shut and grab the doorknob. I lean in and the opening door pulls me into the room, diagonally. I let go, flop onto the floor, and drag myself to the bed like a guy in a desert crawling toward an oasis.
Except a page with skinny lines is not an oasis.
I lift myself enough so my hands can grasp the top side of my bed. I let my arms hoist me up until I’m eye level with the bed’s surface and the puzzle paper. And I’m a genius. At least I think I’m a genius.
From this angle the lines have gotten shorter! The lines have turned into letters!
And right now I have only one question. Why am I giving them seven nails?
CHAPTER 17
It’s no problem they’re asking for seven nails, like it’s no problem they asked for an i and a trash can. But it’s all so random. If they want random…
I put seven nails into the envelope and laugh. These are not the nails they’re expecting. I return the fingernail clippers to my parents’ bathroom.
The next morning I deposit the plain, white envelope into the office attendance box. I picture the attendance lady getting really grossed out, and that keeps me smiling until science, when I really start grinning. We get to work on our worm farms.
The worms have migrated to the second tray, and we need to harvest the fertilizer they’ve made. We take out the first tray, and a few worms are still in there.
“Eew!” That comes from a few people. We’ve been doing this all year, so you’d think they’d get used to a few slimy worms. It’s not like they bite.
I pick one up and move it to the second tray. So does this girl Sari, who didn’t eew. “I think we should name them,” she says.
“But how would we tell them apart?”
“If you name one Curly, you can call, ‘Hey, Curly,’ and whichever one looks up, well, that’s Curly.” She’s so smart, we know she’s not serious. I wonder if she’s in The Legend.
I wonder if everyone in The Legend is so smart. Or if they all look alike, like these worms or like plain, unmarked envelopes. I stop grinning. How will The Legend people know that particular envelope is from me? Should I have put my name inside? Will the attendance lady know where to deliver it? And what if she
gets so grossed out that—
“Travis!” Sari’s looking at me in horror.
“What?”
She points to my hand. “You’re—”
I’m squishing a worm. I toss it into a tray. “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t do it that hard. I didn’t kill it or anything. I…”
I decide to shut up.
“What happened?” says one kid.
Randall the oaf snickers. “He just pulled a minor Travis this time.”
“A minor Travis?” I say after school. “A minor Travis?”
Kip and Matti look at each other, which bothers me in more ways than one.
“My name is now a synonym for stupid, boneheaded mess-up? Who started it? When?”
Kip raises his chin toward the oaf. “They started it on Friday.”
I pound my fist into my glove. “You’ve known since Friday?” I say to Kip.
He can’t look right at me. “I thought it would go away like everything does around here.”
“So far nothing has.”
Matti steps up to Kip. “He’s not blaming you,” she says. I’m glad she can still read my mind. Or maybe she’s reading his. “He’s just upset at the world. You should know that by now.”
“I just don’t like to be blindsided by anything,” I say to Kip.
“No one does,” he says. “Sorry.”
I hate that I upset Kip. It’s bad enough that my name will become a dictionary definition. Travis: see stupid.
But I’m not stupid. I wish I could announce how I solved four impossible puzzles. No, three and three quarters. I still don’t know why that one number is 23.
Pulling a Travis. At least Kip and Matti’ve heard it only from oafs. At least no one dares say it when we’re at baseball. They know I don’t mess up on the field.
Why can’t I learn to be that Travis inside school? Why did I put fingernails into the envelope instead of hammer-and-nail nails? What if that’s enough to keep me out?
I hurry to my hall locker after the game—which we lose—hoping to find something positive so I don’t have to worry I messed up again. There’s a normal blue envelope.
All right. But why are there always eyes around? I put the envelope into my backpack, then Kip and Matti and I get our bikes and pedal out of here. Kip turns toward his house, Matti turns toward hers, and I turn down the next street, pedal for about ten seconds and stop my bike under a big tree. No one’s gonna bother a kid looking at a note.
If you want to be part of The Legend at Lauer, follow all our instructions exactly.
Rule #1. Don’t chew gum unless you have enough to share with the whole class.
Rule #2. 6th grade lunch. 11:30 Friday. There must be enough gum in the cafeteria to share with the whole class.
Rule #3. Don’t get caught.
The Legend of Lauer
They want me to buy gum for everyone in sixth grade? Not for my friends? Since when does The Legend single out one grade? Maybe always. Maybe I never really paid attention. Fine. Anything for The Legend.
So how many people in sixth grade? And how much does gum cost? How much do I have in the train bank on my desk?
I get back on my bike and speed to the grocery store. I don’t have a cent in my backpack, but I can find out how much I’ll need.
I run to the candy aisle, grab the biggest pack of bubble gum…and wow. I’ll need more than the seven dollars I have left from the birthday money I got from Grams and Gramps, the not-dead grandparents. I never should’ve bought that lame video game all the oafs were going nuts over. Showed me not to listen to oafs.
I want that money back plus half the money I caught in the money booths, especially because I didn’t win the signed Chase Maclin guitar. It felt good to be generous, and The Legend basically made it impossible not to be, but still.
I get back on my bike and pedal harder and harder because there’s something weird about this. If The Legend had all that money to give to the food bank, and if they sent ten kids and their parents to the Olympics the year before, then why are they expecting a kid like me to use a hunk of his own money to buy bubble gum for the sixth grade? Wouldn’t they at least shove a twenty dollar bill into the envelope?
But that’s not my only question. I feel another one about to erupt.
There’s the money thing and…what? What feels weird?
Okay. They had me spend money on the trash can, right? No. I bought the trash can, but I could’ve drawn a picture of one for the cost of a scrap of paper and a smudge of pencil.
That’s not it. What am I missing?
I’m missing a puzzle. And a coin. And I’m missing the answer to this question: are all the envelopes really from The Legend?
CHAPTER 18
It’s Wednesday and five minutes before lunch, my social studies teacher, Mr. Huff, hands me a note. No one knows what it says except me and him, but when I pick up my backpack and head to the door, it’s a non-oaf who says, “Did he pull another Travis?”
I want to punch the guy in the face, but I grin and raise an eyebrow. I can’t let them see how much this all bothers me: his comment and the summons to Mrs. Pinchon’s office.
I don’t know what she can accuse me of unless I have an evil twin or I went temporarily insane. I knock on her door, and before she waves me in, I notice her face from behind her desk: she’s not gonna name me King of Lauer today. “We meet again, Mr. Raines.”
My neck’s usually not in knots when principals call me in. It’s happened so much, I must be immune. But with The Legend and soccer captain and soccer camp, I have too much that could disappear before I take my next breath.
“I need to ask,” she says, “if you know anything about three gallons of hand soap missing from the janitorial closet.”
“I didn’t take it. I swear.”
She spins the chain of her mirror-ball necklace like she’s trying to hypnotize me into telling the truth. “No one is accusing you, Travis. And you’re not the only one I’m asking.”
“So, you’re rounding up all the usual suspects?” I mean it seriously, but it suddenly sounds ridiculous. I try to hold back my smile.
She smiles at me, though. “It’s okay. That was humorous.”
The buzzer sounds. Time for lunch.
Time for Mrs. Pinchon to stiffen back up. “Still,” she says, the smile wiped off her face, “whatever’s going on here is serious. Be on notice that whoever is messing with this school—and those who may be protecting them—will be punished. Fully. Is that clear, Mr. Raines?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I stop myself from kicking open her door. She said she wasn’t accusing me, but I’m the only one she called from my class. She didn’t draw my name at random.
I grab my lunch bag from my locker and stomp down the stairs. I turn toward the cafeteria, and there in the library hall is the oaf. Mrs. Pinchon should be talking to him.
My first instinct is to go kick him in the shins, but instead I’ll walk to lunch and leave his big face buried in his locker. But it’s not his locker. It’s the 207 locker hall. And Mr. McKenzie said no one has lockers down here.
I stop. I see him see me. And I see what he shoves back into that locker.
A shine-under-the-surface blue envelope.
Randall’s getting blue envelopes? Or is he giving them? Punking me. Either way they can’t be from The Legend. An oaf like him isn’t smart enough. He is evil enough to set up a whole fake Legend thing and force some smarter oafs to write the puzzles. Then they’ll all gather around, watch me make a fool of myself, and laugh hysterically at the end of his oafish joke.
Gotcha, Randall. Gotcha where you’ve been stashing my blue envelopes.
I head straight toward him. “What are you doing here?” I say.
“What?”
“What are you doing here?” I say oaf-slow, also trying to get a look inside the locker.
He slams it shut. “Whatever I want.”
Typical. “This isn’t your locker. No one has lockers down this
hall.”
“Maybe I do now.” He clamps the lock shut and gives the numbers a twirl.
“Fine. Lock it. But I know the combination.”
He gives me that dopey stare.
I need him to give me answers. “Talk to me about envelopes.”
“Envelopes?” He gives the lock another turn. A hard turn. “You put letters in them and mail ’em out. That’s all I know.” Good thing he doesn’t lie for the CIA.
I look at him like he’s toast. “What about the next envelope?”
“There’s no next envelope in the locker.”
He is so dumb. “I didn’t say anything about any envelope being in the locker.”
“Shove it,” he says, but he doesn’t shove me. His eyes, though, look for a place to settle. And that place is starting to look like a dent in my head. One he wants to make.
I can’t make him mad, not before he takes away my evidence. “What if I tell you something I know, and you tell me something back?”
“Why should I tell you anything when you go around accusing me of everything?”
“What’d I ever accuse you of that you didn’t do?”
“Forget it,” he says. “Just leave me alone. The whole group of you.”
I can’t lose him before he spills something. “I’ll prove I know about the envelopes. If I can’t open that lock on the first try, you can pummel me.”
He takes half a step aside.
I move in and spin the combination wheel right to 32, left to 23, then right to 16. I tug.
He grabs my hand.
“Don’t touch me.”
“Don’t open the locker.” He lets go but blocks the door with his whole hulk.
“Afraid I’ll get proof of what you and your little double-oh-seven wannabes are doing to me? ‘For your eyes only’? Ha!” I smash my fist into the locker next to him.
The library door flies open, and Mr. Drummond juts his head out. “I know you have somewhere else to be. Get to the cafeteria, and keep the noise down.”
