Here Comes Trouble

by Kate Hattemer

  Oops. I hadn’t thought of how weird that’d sound. “She wants to get most of the building done before the rehearsals really get going, so the actors won’t be in danger….Hammers, you know….”

  I’ve never been good at lying under pressure. Alex and I used to practice, but the practice hadn’t helped. I still babbled.

  Ivan saved me. “IVAN NEED BROWN!” he shouted.

  “Just a sec, Soren,” said Dad. The best four words in the world. “Ivan, you want me to dye the new batch brown? Are you sure? What about a nice, autumnal orange?”

  “BROWN!” insisted Ivan.

  “You could make autumn leaves! Or pumpkins!”

  “IVAN NEED BROWN!”

  “Fine,” sighed Dad. “Soren, help. What primary colors make brown?”

  “All of them,” I said. “Just dump them in.” If I’ve learned anything from art class, it’s how to make ugly colors.

  When we’d kneaded the new batch smooth and let it cool, I took it over to Ivan. I peered at their projects: Ruth was making a set of mini fruits; Flynn was making a dude playing a banjo; Ivan was making a mess. “Is that a self-portrait?” I asked Flynn.

  “I’m thinking it has good potential for my album cover.”

  “Ah.”

  “You should make something, Soren,” said Ruth.

  “Am I allowed?” I asked Ivan.

  “SOREN SIT!” he yelled.

  “Really?” I was touched. My baby brother wanted my company. Flynn was okay and all, but I guess it just wasn’t the same without me.

  “SIT!” Ivan said.

  “I’m going to make a model of Lionel Messi,” I said, pulling out the chair.

  I sat.

  Something squished.

  Ivan cackled.

  I jumped up and felt my rear end. It was damp with a huge clod of play dough, which, I saw as I attempted to peel it off, was from the new batch. A rich, fruity brown.

  “Ivan!”

  Ruth and Flynn howled with laughter. Ivan joyously banged a spoon. I scraped brown play dough off the seat of my pants.

  “Did I get it all?” I asked Ruth.

  “Spin….”

  As my butt passed Ivan, he yelled, “FEE SEES!”

  “What?”

  “SOREN FEE SEES!”

  “What? You see fees? Fee sees? Who is Fee?”

  “Oh,” said Dad, abashed. “I’m sorry, Soren. I taught him that word today.”

  “Fee? Like an admission fee?”

  “We were discussing polite language, but I’m not sure anything sank in except that one word….”

  “What word?”

  “FEE SEES!”

  “Um,” Dad said delicately, “I believe he’s saying feces.”

  Ruth and Flynn resumed howling, but even louder. “I’m leaving,” I said.

  “IVAN LIKE FEE SEES!”

  “Ivan is a fee sees,” I muttered.

  I could hear them laughing all the way up the stairs.

  MR. JACKSON, JANITOR and very nice guy, looks exactly like Andrew Jackson, the guy on the twenty-dollar bill. Hairdo and all.

  He (the alive one) gave me a bucket of rags and a spray bottle of whiteboard cleanser. “Now,” he said, “you do not want to ingest this board cleanser. Pure acetone. It’ll eat you from the inside.”

  “I’m not going to drink whiteboard cleanser, Mr. Jackson.”

  “That’s what they all say,” he said darkly, “but I’ve been in this business for a few years. I knew a kid once—No-Hit Norman, they called him, best pitcher Camelot Elementary ever had. But he got thirsty cleaning the board, and instead of visiting the water fountain…” Mr. Jackson shuddered. “No-Guts Norman, that’s how he was known ever after. He was a shell of his former self. Literally.”

  “Got it, Mr. Jackson.”

  “If it were up to me, the most dangerous thing you kids would hold would be a No. 2 pencil. Not that No. 2 pencils can’t cause serious damage. Are you old enough to recall Perfect Pamela? No? On track for sixth-grade valedictorian, quite a student—until, that is, she became Perforated Pamela….”

  If I didn’t start now, I’d never get to Ms. Hutchins’s classroom. “I’ll be extremely careful, Mr. Jackson,” I assured him as I headed off down the hallway.

  “And you watch out for those rags!” he called after me. “The stories I could tell you about rags!”

  I gave him a wave as I turned the corner into the kindergarten zone. The teachers were gone, their rooms dim and dustily quiet. I worked my way up the classrooms, youngest to oldest, cleaning the boards as fast as I could.

  Finally, I got to Ms. Hutchins’s room.

  I was nervous. But it was a familiar feeling. I’d felt the same way before every prank we’d ever pulled. My hands quivered. My knees melted. My stomach churned like a washing machine, and my heartbeat went as hard and fast as Tabitha Andrezejczak on the snare drum. Everything was sharper, brighter, like the world was a YouTube video that had suddenly adjusted to HD. Alex used to feel the same way.

  We both loved that feeling.

  I went straight to the windowsill. A tidy line of forty-eight bean plants leaned toward the sunshine.

  I darted a glance over my shoulder.

  No movement, no sound from the hallway.

  I lifted the spray bottle. I hit the first plant labeled WATER with a good spray of cleanser. “Pure acetone,” Mr. Jackson had said. If it could destroy the intestines of a star pitcher, what would it do to a twiggy bean plant?

  One after another, working quickly but carefully, I sprayed every water-fed plant. Then I got a watering can and watered every Coke-fed plant. Done.

  I headed to the side board with the cleanser, and not a moment too soon.

  “Hey there, Soren!” said Ms. Hutchins.

  I jumped. “Where did you come from?”

  “Oh, just grabbing—now, where did they go—aha!” She waved a manila folder of quizzes. “Almost forgot them, but what’s an evening without a stack of grading? Come on, I’ll walk you out. Leave the supplies. I’ll get them to Mr. Jackson tomorrow.”

  Phew. Close call.

  “That’s your dad picking you up?” she said once we were outside.

  “Yep.”

  Dad rolled down the window. “Evangeline! Hello.”

  “Good to see you, Jon! Angelica and I have missed you at yoga class lately!”

  “Yeah, I’ve had my hands full with this one.” He nodded back to Ivan, snarling in his car seat. “Takes after his big brother.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Ms. Hutchins. “Well, come to yoga anyway. Ditch the kid; get your Bikram on—”

  “IVAN NOT KID!”

  “Really, sweetie?” said Ms. Hutchins. “What are you?”

  “IVAN TIGER!”

  “It’s a phase,” Dad said wearily.

  “I understand why your yoga practice is—er, on hiatus.”

  “Eighteen-year hiatus.”

  “You know,” mused Ms. Hutchins, straightening to stretch her back, “there are definite perks to being a teacher.”

  “Sending them home?”

  “Exactly.” She waved. “See you tomorrow, Soren. Don’t let your brother bite anyone’s leg off!”

  She thought that was pretty funny. I think it hit too close to home for Dad and me. He turned on the radio, but it didn’t drown out Ivan’s growls.

  “NEVER, IN MY ten years of teaching,” said Ms. Hutchins, “has an experiment gone so poorly.”

  Nobody was supposed to hear that, I don’t think. She muttered it to herself as she walked among us, watching us measure our Coke plants (as green as a rain forest) and our water plants (the gray-yellow that Ruth turns when she reads in the car). “Are you sure you’ve been treating your plants according to the labels?�
�� Ms. Hutchins asked me and Flynn. “The Coke one’s getting Coke? The water’s getting water?”

  “Of course,” said Flynn, his face cloudy. He gently shifted a leaf to measure the water plant’s full height, but the stem was so brittle it broke. The leaf wafted to the floor. “I don’t understand it.”

  “I don’t either,” said Ms. Hutchins. “It’s almost like someone—but no. Couldn’t be.”

  Flynn shot me a look. I put my face close to the ruler I was using to measure the Coke plant. “Seven inches,” I said, “and one, two, three, four, five of these little tick marks, um, so, five-sixteenths—”

  I could feel myself blushing. Alex always told me I needed to control my blush better. We used to practice that, too, throwing accusations at each other and seeing how long we could make it before we cracked. I was never very good.

  “I guess it’s just one of those things,” said Ms. Hutchins.

  “Guess so,” said Flynn, but even with my face buried in the ruler, I could tell he was still looking at me.

  * * *

  —

  I GOT AN email from Alex that night:

  So, I took your advice and just did it. I snuck in during recess. The math room was empty. I covered half the desk in Post-its, and then the teacher walked in.

  Not good.

  I hate this place.

  I really hate this place.

  That was the whole thing. I checked, but she wasn’t online. I wrote back:

  WHAT?!?! NOOOOO!!!!!!

  She wasn’t online the next night either, and she hadn’t responded to my email. I kept checking all weekend, and she never wrote back and never signed on.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I LEFT my last Tuesday detention, Flynn was alone on the playground, juggling a soccer ball. Left knee, right knee, right heel, up and over, bump from the forehead, left knee, roll down the shin to the toe— “Oh, hey,” he said, doing a little jump move to catch the ball between his knees.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Same as you. Waiting for your dad.”

  “Yeah, but why are you here?”

  “Mr. Brandoon was helping me arrange one of my original songs for choir and band. He’s pretty into the idea.”

  “Cool.”

  “Yeah.” He passed me the ball. We kicked around for a few minutes, ranging over our weedy-dirty field. When my pass went wide, he ran for it and dribbled back, but he didn’t pass. “Hey,” he said. “Mr. Brandoon and I were in the Fine Arts office.”

  “So?”

  “So,” he said, still not passing me the ball, “I was giving him a preview of ‘Jim Bob, the Red-Nosed Piglet,’ my latest. You want to hear it?”

  “Not right now.” The way he was holding on to the ball, it was making me nervous. I did a few butt kicks just to have something to do with my body. “Then what happened? Pass.”

  He passed. “Well.” I trapped the ball between my feet. “This lady walked in. Tall and really pale?”

  I kicked him the ball. “I think you’re talking about Ms. Babbitt. She’s the drama teacher.”

  “Figures. Because she said, ‘What a day, Barry, what a day! Children! Children! I am exhausted!’ Then she collapsed onto the table. Not really collapsed. It was all fake.”

  “That’s Ms. Babbitt for you. She’s very dramatic.”

  Flynn started to juggle again. “She stayed in the office for the rest of our meeting. She ate a whole king-sized chocolate bar and moaned occasionally, but mostly she was on her phone.”

  “I’m not surprised.” I couldn’t figure out the point of the story. I saw our Honda at the stoplight down the block, and I said, “Dad’s here.”

  Flynn tucked the ball under his arm. I slung my backpack over one shoulder and we walked to the pickup circle. “Well, I was surprised,” he said delicately, “because I thought you were staying after school to help Ms. Babbitt build sets.”

  Oh.

  Oh.

  “I—I was—she told me what to do and then left, probably went straight to the Fine Arts office….”

  There I went again, babbling whenever I tried to lie. That was my main tell. Alex always fiddled with her glasses. Hers was more obvious, but mine was harder to stop. All she had to do was sit on her hands.

  Dad pulled up. “Don’t tell Dad,” I said hurriedly. “Please, Flynn.”

  “What have you been doing, then?”

  “I got detention. You know. The milk thing. I didn’t want to tell Mom and Dad. I’ve been cleaning classrooms.”

  “Alone?” said Flynn. “Have you cleaned the science room?”

  He was looking straight ahead, his profile tipped to the sky, but I could tell he knew.

  “I don’t care what you tell your parents,” he said. “But the science, Soren. How could you?”

  “It’s funny,” I said weakly.

  We were right by the car. Flynn stopped. “You have to tell Ms. Hutchins.”

  “No!”

  He wrapped his fingers around the handle to the front door. I guess he was getting shotgun. “Either you tell her,” he said, “or I do.”

  “Flynn! You can’t!”

  “What I can’t do is let someone mess with a scientific experiment.” He opened the door. “Uncle Jon! Thanks so much for the ride! How are you today?”

  TUESDAY IS EXPERIMENTAL Food Night at our house. I dawdled over Dad’s latest: broccoli slaw with peanuts, tofu, and a spicy peanut-ginger dressing. It wasn’t as gross as it sounds, but it involved a lot of chewing. “My voice teacher in New York gave me a bunch of exercises that strengthen the facial muscles,” Flynn told me as I massaged my jaw. I was still at the table with half my dinner while everyone else bustled around me, cleaning up the kitchen. “I can pass them along if you’d like.”

  “Soren’s just trying to get out of cleanup,” said Ruth, shooting me an evil glare from the sink.

  “Am not!” I said.

  “To ensure domestic tranquility,” Mom said smoothly, “we’ll leave Soren the drying and putting away.”

  They were all in the living room by the time I finished eating. It sounded like they were playing charades. It sounded fun. I marched over to the mountain of clean, wet dishes stacked by the sink, and the same questions that had been racing around my head for hours did another lap.

  Was Flynn actually bothered that I was messing up the experiment? Or was he a tattletale looking for an excuse?

  Would he tell Ms. Hutchins? Or should I call his bluff?

  What would Alex do?

  And what had happened to Alex, anyway?

  I glanced at Dad’s laptop. I was risking trouble—I hadn’t asked permission or finished the dishes—but before I knew it, I’d abandoned the sink and dried my hands on my pants and signed in. (Everyone knows Dad’s password is “fr33d0m” plus the year Ivan graduates from high school.)

  Finally! She was online. I clicked on her name and she picked up right away. “Where were you?” I said. “Oh my gosh, Alex, I have so much to tell you. Are you okay? What happened?”

  “I got caught.”

  “Right, you said, but—”

  “My parents took away my screen time. Since grounding wouldn’t make much sense for someone who has no friends.”

  “That’s not true! You have friends!”

  She ducked closer to the screen. “I hate it here, Soren. I. Hate. It. The math teacher, she got all mad at me for wasting Post-its! Which I bought with my own money!”

  “What better use for Post-its is there?” I agreed.

  “She made me stack them neatly so they could be reused. And then the vice principal called my mom.”

  “What did the other kids think of the prank? Did they laugh?”

  It was probably the Internet being crappy, but h
er eyes looked all blurry, and there was a tiny chance she was crying, or about to. “She caught me too fast. I had all the Post-its restacked by the time they came in. All they saw was me being sent to the office.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s a minor setback. You’ll do something better.”

  “You only get one first prank, one time when no one suspects you, no one’s on the lookout—and I wasted it.”

  That first part was true. After Alex had confessed to the plastic ants, she was always at the top of Principal Leary’s suspect list, and some suspicion rubbed off on me because I was her friend. Luckily, my parents were oblivious. Once, my mom had to wash Silly String out of my hair, and she didn’t say a thing.

  Alex said, “My mom’s training new employees right now, but she says that as soon as she trusts them with Ubercut, we can drive up for a visit.”

  “Really?”

  “It’ll be short, she said, but I can spend the whole afternoon with you. We should prank together. Since I’ll never pull off anything here.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “Unless I’ve been caught out too.”

  “How are the bean plants?”

  I took a cautious look around, but all I heard was guessing and laughing and clapping from the charades game in the living room. “Fine. Except. Well. What would you do if…if someone found out about your prank?”

  “You’re getting blackmailed?”

  “He said he’ll tell Ms. Hutchins unless I tell her first. But I don’t even know if he’s serious.”

  “Who?” said Alex. “Soup?”

  “No, no—”

  “Billiam Flick? He would be a blackmailer.”

  “He would,” I agreed, “but no, not him—”

  “Well, then, who?”

  “It doesn’t matter. What should I do?”

  “Poison,” said Alex. “Just kidding. Pay him? Persuade him not to tell? Blackmail him back? If you’d tell me who it is— WHAT, MOM?”