“Oh.”
I couldn’t decide whether to be grateful to Ol’ Butt-Braid for making my case for me, or annoyed that she’d managed to convince Alex that paper dolls were as cool as pranks.
“Plus, now you owe me,” said Alex.
“Yeah.”
“I got my mom to promise me we’ll visit in December. She picked a random Thursday, since apparently that’s the day Ubercut gets the fewest clients. December thirteenth. I get to skip school and come to school with you. We’ve got a chance to do something amazing.”
“Wait. One more thing, Alex…”
I hadn’t gotten to my last point, the last thing I’d realized when I couldn’t sleep. Which was this:
I’d retired from pranking.
Not fake retired, melodramatically mentally retired, like I’d kept saying at the beginning of the school year. No. This time, I was done.
I couldn’t trust myself. I’d hurt too many people.
“Whoopee cushions?” said Alex. “Stink bombs? Water balloons?”
“None of them,” I said. “I can’t. Because— OW!”
The closet door had been ripped open, and I’d jumped, and I’d landed right on the dump truck.
“Soren, Soren, Soren,” said Dad, sighing. “Where do we even start with you these days?”
“Oh. Hi.”
“Computer, please.”
I handed it over.
“Huh?” said Alex’s tinny voice. “Because what, Soren? Why can’t you?”
Dad righted the laptop. “Hello, Alex.”
“Oh! Hi, Mr. Skaar.”
“We sure miss you here in Camelot. But this guy”—he clumsily angled the laptop toward me—“has not been authorized to use technology in his bedroom closet. As he well knows. I’m not sure when you’ll talk to him next, so you’d better say goodbye.”
“Bye,” I whispered.
Alex stared at me. “Because why?”
The laptop closed.
* * *
—
ON MONDAY, Ms. Hutchins said, “Now that you’ve wrapped up your Ethics in Science presentations—some of you more successfully than others—it’s time to return to our study of experimental design.”
“More bean plants?” said Goldie.
“More Coke?” said Freddy.
“If you want!” Ms. Hutchins gave a wait till you see what’s in store for you smile. It’s always a bad sign when you get one of those from a teacher. “Class, you’ll really get to think like a scientist. Because it’s time for…”
She paused expectantly, but nobody drum-rolled.
“Science fair!”
She explained each step. We’d have to ask a question, and do background research, and formulate a hypothesis, and design an experiment, and execute the experiment, and analyze the data, and make a trifold presentation board, and present to outside judges during a special evening event on December 13—
December 13!
Science fair was the day of Alex’s visit. This was the best prank opportunity I’d ever have. Alex, the triplets, and me—and a hundred kids and parents packed into the gym, a gym cluttered with scientific apparatus and experimental animals and trifold boards—
“This is a huge project,” said Kiyana.
But I couldn’t prank. I’d retired for a reason.
“It is huge,” agreed Ms. Hutchins.
Flynn loved science. Science fair would probably be the highlight of his year. If we pranked it, he’d never forgive me.
Nope. No prank. I’d gone too far before, and I couldn’t go back now.
Retirement, I’d started to realize, meant saying nope, no prank for the rest of my life.
“You’ll write an individual research report,” said Ms. Hutchins, “but you’ll share the rest of the work with a partner.”
“Soren!” hissed Jéro. “You want to—”
“An assigned partner,” she said.
“Maybe she’ll put us together,” I whispered.
“No way,” he said.
He was right. Sometimes teachers put girls who are friends together, because they have this idea that they’re nice and docile. Boys, though, never get put with their friends. Especially boys who maybe don’t behave perfectly every second of every day. But I bet we’d behave better if we did work together. Ever think of that, teachers?
“Jéro and Lila,” Ms. Hutchins read from her list.
They both groaned.
“Goldie and Kiyana.”
They squealed in delight.
“Marsupial and Evelyn. Jeremiah and Emily. Olivia and Tori.”
I looked around the class. There weren’t a lot of people left. Billiam was unpartnered, which was bad, but so was Tabitha, and her I wouldn’t mind—
“Soren,” said Ms. Hutchins, “and Flynn.”
I froze. I’d never expected this. Nobody else was with their original lab partner. And nobody else was with their cousin.
Flynn had been avoiding me hard lately. At school he was always with a group, always moving, and at home he was always in his room, adding scenes to the Soren Stinks mural, I guess.
“Your initial idea is due next Monday,” Ms. Hutchins said. “Go forth and think like scientists together!”
I DIDN’T SEE how I was going to think with Flynn if he wouldn’t even talk with me. Sometimes Ruth and I will try the silent treatment on each other, but it never works. What happens is we keep thinking of good insults and breaking the silence to say them, and at some point both of us accidentally forget we’re mad. The funny thing is, that’s how Mom and Dad fight too.
So to me the silent treatment had been kind of a mythical beast, the unicorn of getting mad. I’d read about it, but I was pretty sure it didn’t exist in real life.
It does.
Flynn pulled it off for eight solid days. Eight! He refused to make eye contact and shunned me at school and ignored me at the dinner table. I couldn’t even tell him I’d retired from pranking, because he refused to acknowledge me. Every time I thought I’d pinned him down, he’d get this distant, confused look and cup his hand around his ear and say, “What’s that noise? It must be the wind.”
Ruth was still mad at me too, but her madness was like our Internet connection. It went in and out.
“Do you have after-school plans?” Dad asked me on Friday morning.
“Nope.” Though hopefully the question meant I wasn’t grounded anymore. I’d been doing all my science homework plus participating with Flynn-like frequency, and although my grade wasn’t going to get a certificate of merit, at least it was in the double digits.
“Then why don’t you come with me to Ivan’s new class at the rec center?”
I shrugged. “Okay.”
“We can talk.”
Uh-oh. The word talk was ominous these days. “Okay.”
Flynn went home with Kiyana. Ruth got off at our bus stop, but when the triplets turned down their driveway, she followed.
“Wait,” I said. “You’re going there?”
“I’m teaching them how to play Catan,” said Ruth.
“Ethan loves it,” said Tabitha. “So the plan is, we’re going to become secret experts and then pound him next time he comes home.”
“He’ll be so mad,” Olivia said dreamily.
“That sounds fun,” I said, kind of hoping I’d get invited. I paused. Nobody said anything. “Too bad Dad wants me to hang out with him,” I said to save face.
“Too bad,” said Olivia. “Otherwise you could have come too.”
Darn. I should have paused longer.
“Have a good afternoon!” called Lila.
Ruth didn’t even smirk at me. Maybe she felt a little bad for stealing my friends and leaving me out. Or maybe she was so happy she forgot all about me. Either way, I d
eserved it, but that didn’t make it easier.
* * *
—
IVAN CHARGED ME when I got home. Well, I assumed it was Ivan, since it was three feet tall, had limbs, and was attacking me, but I couldn’t be positive since a helmet with a mesh mask covered the whole head-face-neck region. “IVAN FIGHT!” the figure cried, smacking my thigh with a wooden spoon.
It was definitely Ivan.
Dad dove in and grabbed the spoon. “Say en garde before you strike!” he told Ivan. “Remember how we practiced?”
“EN GARDE!” Ivan chopped at my leg with his hand.
“Sorry, Soren,” said Dad, scooping him up. “His new class is Fencing for Toddlers. We thought it might provide an outlet for his natural aggression.”
“IVAN KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR!”
“You’ve had a lot of questionable ideas,” I told Dad, “but this is the worst.”
We sat with the other parents in the bleachers at the rec center. The instructor made the toddlers all line up and lunge across the gym (several fell over in the attempt), and then he gave them cardboard wrapping-paper tubes. “I’m glad they aren’t getting real swords on the first day,” Dad said.
“They’re getting real swords?” I yelped. “When?”
“Once they’ve mastered the basics.”
One small girl lay flat on the floor while two others battered her. Ivan, with a determined expression, was hitting himself in the head. “So, never,” I said.
“Let’s hope not,” said Dad. He squeezed the back of my neck. “You know, you were exactly the same at that age.”
“I was not.”
“Luckily, you’ve grown up. You’re completely different now.”
Was he being sarcastic? He stared with a straight face at the instructor, who was wringing his hands and yelling, “Fencers! Fencers! You should be practicing your first-position stance!”
“Really?” I said.
“You should not be whacking each other!” said the instructor. “Or yourselves!”
“Sure,” said Dad. “You don’t cause any trouble at all.”
“Sarcasm is the lowest form of humor,” I said, which he says to us all the time.
“True. I guess I should just come out and say it. It was you with Jim Bob, right?”
I jumped. That was not what I’d expected. I’d thought the talk today was going to be about No Technology in the Bedroom Closet.
“Well?” said Dad. “Let’s skip the part where you play innocent, okay?”
“Ruth told you, didn’t she?”
Dad snorted. “Soren. Someone brings the Skaar piglet to school, releases it in the middle of an assembly, and causes total chaos. I don’t need Ruth to tell me who did it.”
He had a point. “When you put it that way…”
“I know you know this,” said Dad, “but taking Ruth’s piglet, that wasn’t the nicest move.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re going to need to make it up to her.”
“I know. And Flynn. He would have won.”
“Second place is wonderful.”
“Not to Flynn.”
The instructor had succeeded in getting all the kids to sit on the floor, nice and far away from each other. He wiped his brow. “Let’s try that again,” he called, “without the swords.”
“Poor guy,” Dad and I said at the same time. We laughed. I glanced over. Dad didn’t seem that mad. In fact, he didn’t seem mad at all.
“Are you going to tell Mom?” I asked.
“Eventually,” he said. “In 2030, maybe. Or 2040. Not that I’m keeping secrets from my wife, but does she need to know now?”
“Definitely not.”
“This guy I knew,” said Dad, “his junior year of high school, as soon as he got his driver’s license, he borrowed his brother’s pickup truck. He drove it out to his best friend’s family’s farm, and they loaded it up with two pigs. On them, they painted ‘#1’ and ‘#3.’ ”
“Then what?”
“They brought them to school. Released them. The admins rounded them up pretty fast, but everyone had to stay outside for three more hours while they looked for #2.”
I laughed. “That’s amazing.”
“I guess what I’m saying,” said Dad, “is that I should be blaming myself.”
“Wait.”
“Yep. That guy? That was me.”
I stood up in the bleachers, I was so discombobulated. “YOU?”
“And my best friend?” continued Dad. “That was your mother.”
“MOM?”
“It was her idea.” He sighed. “We should have known better than to combine this sort of genetic material.”
“But you guys are anti-prank!”
And then I thought about it.
How they drove me around to buy alarm clocks and never asked why.
How they looked to the side whenever I came home covered with Jell-O, and never interrogated me about how I’d gotten a whole can of Silly String in my hair.
How they gave me a twelve-pack of whoopee cushions for my sixth birthday.
How, when I rubber-banded the handle of the sink sprayer so it’d shoot water when you turned on the faucet, and Mom got it right in the face, after she’d put on her work makeup, she’d laughed.
“Whoa,” I said.
My world was shaking.
“Even so,” said Dad, “here’s something I didn’t learn till I was, oh, twenty-nine. There’s a time and a place for pranking, and it’s not always, and it’s not everywhere.”
“I know. I’m retiring.”
“No! Soren! A prankster of your talent!”
“I’ve done too much damage.”
Dad reached around my back and pulled me in. “You and Ruth and Flynn are going to be okay.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I really think so.” He squeezed me in to him, and I fit my shoulder in the warm nook under his arm. After bath but before bed, when we were little, Ruth and I got to settle into those nooks so Dad could read Narnia to us. He does voices but isn’t annoying about it. I remembered the bristle of his cheek at the end of the day, and the waffley feel of the blanket. When I was little, I thought nothing would change. I thought I was a kid and that was the way it was. But everything that’s now eventually turns into something long ago.
“I believe in you,” said Dad. “You’re learning. You’re growing up. That’s a good thing, Soren.”
“What happened when you were twenty-nine?”
“My two-year-old filled my favorite shoes with ketchup,” he said grimly.
“Oh,” I said. “That would have been me. Oops. Sorry.”
We watched the toddlers sprint around the gym, banging each other with wrapping-paper tubes. “Ivan’s having the time of his life,” said Dad.
“It does look fun,” I said.
MOM NOTICED FLYNN’S silent treatment. “Give him time,” she told me. “Keep trying, but give him time.”
The problem was, we didn’t have time. Our science-fair idea was due on Monday. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, I cracked and told her about our assignment. “Oh,” she said. “Hmm. Well, what if we try neutral ground? Do you think you could work together at Mugshot?” That’s the coffee shop in town. “I could drop you off now.”
“I can’t even ask him if he wants to,” I said, near tears, “because he’ll say I’m the wind!”
The silent treatment, man. It gets to you.
“I’ll talk to him,” said Mom. I don’t know what she said, but Flynn followed her down to the kitchen a few minutes later. I gave him shotgun even though he didn’t call it.
Mugshot was packed, as always. We went up to the counter. “One coffee, medium roast,” said Flynn to Jo Ann, who’s worked there since it w
as the Kwikky Stoppe & Diner, since before some California tech guy got a cabin up here for the ice fishing and decided what Camelot really needed was an espresso bar. He wasn’t wrong.
“Sure, hon,” said Jo Ann. “Cream and sugar?”
“No thanks. I take it black.”
I stepped up to order. “Cream and sugar, please,” I said.
“Coffee?”
“No thanks. I take it white.”
“Every man needs a signature drink,” said Jo Ann, twinkling as she handed me the cup.
We sat at the creaky table by the window. Flynn got out his notebook. He still hadn’t spoken to me. I was starting to wonder whether we’d plan the whole experiment like charades.
“So,” I said, twiddling the sleeve on my cup, “um…”
He opened his notebook and labeled the page Science Fair without looking up. Maybe this was a good time to tell him I’d retired from pranking. He’d be all happy, we’d be pals again, the project might even be fun—
“Just out of curiosity,” he said, “are you planning to pull your weight, or should I expect to do the whole project myself?”
“I’m going to help!” I was highly insulted. “You’ve never worked with me. I’m good at science.”
“Riiight,” he said. I bet he’d snuck a look at my presentation grade. That rat. “You have any ideas, then?”
He said it like he wasn’t expecting anything. “Actually,” I said, “I was talking to Jéro’s big brother. He said the experiments with people, like psychology, he said they don’t do well. It’s too hard to figure out what’s going on.”
“As in, it’s too hard to isolate the variables,” he said, all condescending.
“Sure.”
“I’d concur.”
Fine. If he was going to act that way, I’d concur too. Whatever that meant. “I was thinking we could do an experiment with bugs,” I said. I liked bugs. I also liked that Flynn didn’t like them. “And let’s split up the work as much as possible. Let’s make it like two individual projects, and we’ll pretend we did it together when Ms. Hutchins asks.”
“Perfect.” He drew a line down the middle of the notebook page. “That’s just what I want.”
Here Comes Trouble Page 15
