by Henry Clark
Everybody clapped twice. Then they crossed their hands in front of their faces, tugged on their earlobes, put their hands on their hips, and launched into an ear-splitting performance of the song “Oklahoma.” For two and a half minutes everybody assured us that Oklahoma was doing fine, it was grand, and, while it might not be terrific, it was certainly okay.
Then everybody sat back down, finished their round of applause for Rudy Sorkin, and picked up their conversations right where they had left off. The lunchroom filled instantly with its usual noise.
The first time this had happened, over a year earlier, it had been scary. We had been new to the school then, so we thought maybe it was a middle school ritual that no one had let us in on. That time, everybody had stood, faced the kitchen, and sung about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. And it turned out it hadn’t been just the lunchroom. It hadn’t been just the school. It had been the entire surrounding town of Cheshire. Or 90 percent of it. People had pulled their cars to the side of the road, gotten out, and sung.
I immediately decided it was alien mind control.
The next day, the newspaper said it was a flash mob. According to the report, everybody had been texting one another on their cell phones for weeks ahead of time. They had chosen what direction to face. They had picked out the song. They had agreed that everybody would perform together, no matter where they were or what they were doing, at exactly eleven forty-eight on the morning of September 28. After it was over, everybody who participated would deny having any memory of having done it if they were questioned by any nonparticipants. It would all be part of what the paper called “a grand and glorious lark.”
To me, it seemed like a grand and glorious waste of time.
After that, it kept happening. Freak and I learned to expect a singing flash mob every eight to ten weeks. Sometimes, there was even a dance step or two.
Fiona was good at it. She followed instructions perfectly, and after each flash mob she always claimed she couldn’t remember doing anything out of the ordinary.
I started to feel left out. Since Freak and I didn’t have cell phones, we were out of the loop. We had almost gotten cells the summer we graduated from elementary school, when the Disin Tel store opened on Coal Avenue and had offered an irresistible limited-time promotion.
LISTEN TO DISIN! the cleverly rhyming banner in front of the store had proclaimed, going on in smaller print to offer free phones to every family member past the age of ten in any family that signed a one-year contract. It was so inexpensive that practically every family in town took advantage of the offer. Then Freak’s father accidentally dropped his new phone down the garbage disposal, and he took Freak’s phone to replace it. And my aunt Bernie pulled mine out of my jeans after they’d gone through the wash. I’d had the phone for one day.
“Even if we had cells, would we be doing this?” demanded Freak, after everybody had finished singing “Oklahoma.” “How is it possible that there isn’t one kid here with a cell who doesn’t think this is totally stupid? Not a single person can decide to just sit it out? And why are they doing it again so soon?”
“Maybe the Elbonian overlords are stepping up their plans for world domination,” I said, adding a couple of potato chips to my cheese sandwich. I like a sandwich with crunch.
“The Elbonian overlords?”
“Weird foreign people in the Dilbert comic strip.”
“Why would you read Dilbert? It’s about office workers.”
“Someday I figure I’ll work in a cubicle. That’s what middle school is training us for. I think there’s some serious mind control going on here.”
“You mean the flash mobs.”
“That, too.”
Freak scowled.
“You can’t be right,” he said. “This is weird.”
“No, it’s not,” I assured him.
“It’s not?”
“No,” I said. “It’s hyperdiculous.”
It was the only word that described it.
CHAPTER
03
Hellsboro
The next morning, I had a sword fight with the sofa. I hadn’t planned to. The sofa forced my hand.
I arrived early, even before Freak. I wanted to examine the sofa on my own.
The upholstery was dark green, close to the color of the zucchini crayon. A long slit ran horizontally across the fabric of the back cushion, like somebody had slashed it with a knife. That, and the stain on the cushion, were the only things wrong with it that I could see.
I flipped the cushion over. The bloodstain lined up perfectly beneath the slit. If the sofa had belonged to my aunt Bernie, she would have made a slipcover for it. She never threw anything out.
My aunt Bernadette had started working double shifts at the medical center as soon as I got out of elementary school. We’d been together more when I was younger, but now I sometimes saw her only on weekends. It was just her and me in the house.
I lunged at the sofa with my sword. It had, after all, drawn first blood with its vicious fishhook attack. I duplicated the slashing motion that must have caused the slit, then pressed my advantage with a series of lightning strokes so fast, they were impossible to see. The fact that my sword was invisible probably helped.
“En garde, Monsieur Zucchini Couch! Stab me, will you? Taste my steel!”
“You think the sofa is French?” asked Freak. I whirled to face him. I hid my invisible sword behind my back. “What are you doing?”
“Forensics,” I said, improvising. “I’m trying to figure out how the slit got in the back cushion. It might have been done with a sword.”
“You think there are guys with swords in the Underhill place?”
“Who knows what goes on in the Underhill place,” I said. Freak looked toward the house. I took the opportunity to slide my invisible sword back into its invisible sheath.
“We’re wasting valuable sitting time,” said Freak, throwing himself onto his favorite cushion. I took a seat, too, after flipping the bloodstained cushion facedown again. It wasn’t long before Fiona joined us.
“I have news,” she announced, and sat down between us. “It turns out,” she said, “there are people out there who collect crayons.”
“Yeah,” said Freak. “They’re called five-year-olds.”
“No, they’re called adults, and some of them might pay good money for the zucchini crayon we found. Especially if the crayon has never been used.”
She looked at us to make sure she had our attention. She did. She continued.
“I looked up zucchini crayon on the Internet. It’s one of over two dozen colors the crayon company doesn’t make anymore. It’s very hard to find. There were only five hundred made, for a special limited-edition box of crayons called Victory Garden.” Fiona pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of a pocket in her book bag and consulted it. “This was during World War Two. The five hundred boxes were the prizes in a radio contest for kids. Sixteen crayons per box, all named after vegetables. But the new machine they were using in the crayon factory to pack the boxes left out the zucchini crayon and put in two rutabagas instead.”
“Rutabaga?”
“Yellowish purple. Not a very popular crayon, according to the article. Most of the zucchini crayons wound up in a tray, and the tray got left on a radiator, and most of them melted.”
“So,” I said, “any zucchini crayon that survived the meltdown would be worth something?”
“How much?” asked Freak.
Fiona looked back at her piece of paper. “Five years ago a Victory Garden box of sixteen crayons, two of them rutabaga, none of them zucchini, sold at auction for five hundred dollars. The winner of the auction was quoted as saying he would happily pay the same amount or more for the missing zucchini.”
“Holy cow!” said Freak. “Do you have the guy’s name?”
“The article didn’t give it.”
“We don’t need the guy’s name,” I reasoned. “We have the crayon. We could sell it through an In
ternet auction site.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” agreed Fiona. “And since I’m the only one with a computer with Internet access, you should give the crayon to me.” She looked innocently at Freak.
“Yeah,” he said. “Like that’s going to happen.”
“I need to be able to describe it exactly and take a picture of it.”
“I can do that.”
“You don’t have a computer.”
“I’ll go to the library.”
Fiona stared at him for a moment. Then she said, “You’ll get yourself killed.”
Freak had no answer to that, because it was true. Freak risked his life every time he went to the library. That’s because Freak insisted on taking the shortest route.
The shortest route went straight across Hellsboro.
Freak could get in and out of Hellsboro through a hole in his backyard fence. He insisted he knew all of the safe paths, but he risked falling into a sinkhole and roasting to death every time he returned a library book. He preferred to do that, rather than pay the late fee. He said the trick to Hellsboro was to keep moving, or the bottoms of your sneakers would start to melt.
“How about,” I said, “Freak and I just come over to your house tonight and we use your computer? It’s your parents’ bowling night. We wouldn’t be in anybody’s way.”
Fiona thought about it. “It’s really my mom’s computer,” she admitted. “It’s in my parents’ room. You guys would have to stay in the kitchen while I start the auction. If my phone rings, you guys don’t make a sound while I’m on it. And the fridge is off-limits.”
By seven thirty Freak and I were sitting in Fiona’s kitchen, eyeing the fridge. We’d taken seven or eight photos of the crayon with Fiona’s phone and had finally gotten one that was in focus and clearly showed the word Zucchini. We’d written a description for the auction—“Crayon. Cylindrical. Five inches long. Pointy. Never used. Rare zucchini color.”—and Fiona had gone off to use her mother’s eBay account. At that point she had suggested we leave. Freak had said no, we would stick around, in case the auction got a bid immediately. He said we should be there if it did.
Fiona’s refrigerator was covered with family mementos held in place with magnets. A photo of Fiona’s older sister, who was away at college, was near the top. It shared a magnet with a drawing done by her younger brother, Stevie, who was in grade school. The drawing showed a child being chased by a gargoyle with braces on its teeth. Right next to it was a photograph of Fiona, smiling, showing the braces on her teeth. Below it was a photograph of Fiona’s parents and my parents, back before my parents had died in the accident. My father was holding a fishing pole and a fish. He looked like he was having the best day of his life.
I was jealous of Fiona’s family. She would complain about them sometimes—her mother was too strict, her kid brother was a pain in the neck—but I noticed she never complained about her brother when Freak was around, and she frequently stopped herself from going on about her parents when she realized I was within hearing distance. It made me think Fiona might be more sensitive than Freak or I gave her credit for. And maybe Freak and I helped her appreciate what she had. Which, to someone like me, was a lot.
Freak opened the refrigerator door about two inches and an alarm went off.
“Hey!” shouted Fiona from the other side of the house.
Five minutes later, she walked back into the kitchen. “The auction’s been running for ten minutes and there are no bidders yet,” she announced. “I’ll let you know tomorrow if anything happens tonight. ’Bye.”
Freak and I remained seated at the kitchen table.
“Your refrigerator has an alarm on it,” Freak said.
“It’s a buzzer and a battery with a photoelectric cell. The little light in the fridge goes on, the alarm goes off. I made it so I’d know if Stevie went after the Dutch apple.”
Fiona, I was sure, would someday win a prize in the Disin Tel science contest with an invention like this. She had skipped a grade and usually knew all the answers in science class and most of the answers in English. Still, she did stupid things sometimes. She thought Travis Miller might notice her someday. She favored vomit green as a nail polish color. And she hung out with a group of girls who made fun of her behind her back. At least Freak and I made fun of her to her face.
She folded her arms and leaned defensively against the refrigerator. Her phone rang, and she shooed us out before she answered it.
“Dutch apple is the one with raisins?” Freak asked as the door was slammed in our faces.
“And lots of cinnamon,” I said dreamily as we turned away from the House of Pie.
I went with Freak to his garage and helped him bring the trash out to the curb. He carried the recycling bin. When he put it down, he rearranged it so the empty water bottles were on top, covering the other bottles. He waved his hand above the bin, as if that would fan away the lingering smell of alcohol. He looked at the house, where a single dim light glowed in the living room, and motioned for me to follow him. We went around back.
A chain-link fence with barbed wire at the top separated Freak’s backyard from the backyard of the boarded-up house on the next street over. The fence extended for miles in either direction, completely encircling Hellsboro. Every thirty feet or so a sign wired to the fence declared:
DANGER
ENTRY FORBIDDEN
TOXIC GROUNDS—SUBTERRANEAN FIRES
DO NOT ENTER
BY ORDER OF THE CHESHIRE FIRE MARSHAL
In Freak’s backyard, right below one of these signs, he had cut a triangular opening through the links and folded back the fence. It’s how he got in and out of Hellsboro. A second fence, farther in, marked where things got really dangerous. He had cut through that fence, too.
“There was an odd glow out there last night,” he said, gesturing toward Hellsboro’s center. It had been a while since Hellsboro had glowed. It happened when coal burned close to the surface. Most of the surface coal had burned off long ago. “It wasn’t the usual reddish color. It was blue. And I heard a whumpa-whumpa sound.”
“A whumpa-whumpa sound?” It was getting cold out. I suddenly felt chilled.
“It didn’t last long,” said Freak, and shrugged.
The sound of a slamming door came from Freak’s house.
“Right,” said Freak. “I’d invite you in, but—”
“I know,” I said. “It’s okay.”
I found my way back to the street.
I hung around for a moment, listening to a raised voice somewhere in Freak’s place. It was muffled, but it still made my stomach churn.
Freak’s father was under a lot of pressure. Freak always said so. I had once been alone in their living room and overheard the answering machine taking a message from a very angry man at a collection agency. He listed the number of warnings Mr. Nesterii had been given and assured him that if the bills weren’t paid, there would be legal action.
Even when I got to my own front door, I could still hear the raised voice. The voice wasn’t Freak’s. Freak almost never raised his voice. Whatever was being said ended with something that sounded like a fist smacking a tabletop. The quiet that followed was just as disturbing as what had preceded it.
I wished I hadn’t heard things like that so often before.
The next day, Thursday, the sofa was still sitting on the edge of Breeland Road. I was surprised Max Schimmelhorn hadn’t picked it up. I thought it was a pretty nice sofa.
I was the first one there. Freak joined me a few minutes later. He had a bunch of bananas, and he gave me one.
“Is that all you’ve got for lunch?” I asked.
“They’re good for you. They’re full of potassium. My father got it into his head we needed bananas. There’re six more bunches back at the house.”
We heard shouting off in the distance. Fiona was on the far side of the field separating Breeland from Bagshot Road. She was waving a paper in the air and running toward us. Th
ree crows took flight at her approach. Freak had once told her she’d be good at protecting farm crops.
She dashed up to the sofa, knit cap askew, and thrust the paper in our faces. Then she pulled it back, said, “No, wait,” and took a moment to catch her breath.
“Last night… before I went to bed… we had two bids on the crayon.” She was still panting heavily. “The high bid was twelve dollars, forty-seven cents.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Shut up!” she said, then continued. “This morning… after breakfast… I went online just before leaving the house… we had ten bids from five different bidders.”
“And?”
“And the high bid was seven thousand dollars.”
I grabbed the piece of paper showing a printout of the auction. She wasn’t kidding. The high bid was $7,056.72.
CHAPTER
04
GORLAB vs. Alecto
I handed the paper to Freak. He looked at it and shook his head. “This has to be somebody’s idea of a joke. Nobody’s going to pay seven grand for a crayon.”
“Look at the bidding history.” Fiona squeezed herself onto the sofa between us, took the paper back from Freak, and pointed at the list.
“The first bidder was CRAYOLA42. He bids ten dollars. Then WaxLips bids twelve dollars and forty-seven cents. By midnight, there are three more bidders and the high bid is sixty-five dollars. Nothing happens then until about five o’clock in the morning, when two new bidders change everything. GORLAB bids a hundred dollars. Then Alecto bids five hundred. Within minutes, GORLAB bids a thousand. Alecto bids five thousand. GORLAB brings it up to seven thousand, which is where it is now, but the auction doesn’t end for another week, so who knows how high it will go!”
“So, really,” said Freak, “it’s just these two wacko bidders who have driven the price up.”
“It’s called a bidding war. Anybody who’s trying to sell anything in an auction wants it to happen. Two people who want whatever you’re selling so badly, they go crazy in the bidding.”
