by Mike Thayer
“Wait.” Zak’s face went slack with panic. “Can you look that up online or something? How’d you find out? How do I delete it?”
“Whoa there, partner.” I made a calming gesture with my hands. “You can just go into your game center settings on your phone and erase your activity history,” I lied. I had no idea how to erase your activity history. I just needed him to calm back down so I could get some more useful information out of him to use at the next discard day. Today was looking like yet another bust, unfortunately.
Zak put his notebook on his lap and massaged his forehead with both hands. If he was this worried about his parents finding out he played a video game for a few minutes a day, I wondered how they’d react if I ever got him into some serious discard-day trouble. It was definitely a new goal.
The bus took a sharp turn, and Zak’s notebook slid off his lap onto the floor, splaying open. Before Zak could pick it up, I saw an incredible sketch of some kind of ripped superhero blasting energy from his hands.
“Uh, what’s that?” I asked, pointing.
“Nothing,” Zak dismissed quickly.
“Like it’s Captain Nothing or Mr. Nothing or the Mighty Nothing? ’Cause that actually looked like a pretty awesome superhero.”
Zak let out a little sigh and opened his trusty notebook. “Don’t tell anyone, please.” He flipped through the pages, revealing character after character of expertly drawn superheroes.
“Dude,” I said, genuinely impressed. “Again I ask: Is there anything you can’t do? I mean, apart from being allowed to play video games.”
“Drawing helps me relax,” Zak offered, as if that explained everything.
“Well, you must relax a lot.” I paused. “Or I guess you must need a lot of relaxing. What’s that one there?” I gave a short laugh and pointed to a character with a mop for a weapon and garbage-can armor.
Zak gave a half smile. “Haven’t named him yet. Was thinking of something like Smasher Trasher. Don’t tell anyone, but I actually used a picture of Mr. Wilding from the school’s website as a model.”
“Interesting,” I said, writing a few things in my own notebook.
Sticky Day: (Sticky Monday—Sept. 20th)
School was over. I waited outside the bus and chewed on my bottom lip. After nearly two weeks of discard-day trial and error I had come to the sinking realization that the most convincing things I could tell Zak couldn’t be done on a discard day. No matter what information I could secretly learn about him on a discard day, none of it would be as powerful as predicting the future, and I could only do that on a sticky day. It was now just a matter of two things: waiting for the right day and having the guts to take the leap of faith. The bus ride home on the discard day had provided me with the opportunity I was looking for. Now for the leap.
I pulled out my sticky-day notebook and flipped between a few pages, mumbling the lines I’d written down. I swallowed hard against a heartbeat that had somehow migrated to my throat. My legs suddenly swayed like I was standing on a boat in choppy water and not the sidewalk in front of the school. I had to steady myself on the bus to keep from toppling to the ground.
I checked my watch. It was do-or-die o’clock. I wasn’t going to get a better opportunity than today. I slapped my face a few times and quickly boarded the bus, stashing my notebook back in my pocket. Zak sat three-quarters of the way toward the back. The seat next to him was predictably empty. I stopped and shared the same small talk with Freddie that I had on the discard day about stopping by the Roost later on today. I took a deep breath and continued down the aisle.
“Hey, man. How was school?” Zak said, taking out his earbuds as I walked over and sat down.
My heart fell back into my chest but was still slamming around like a feral hog in a steel trap. “Good. It was good.”
Zak paused and leaned forward. “You all right? You don’t look so hot.”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to regain my composure. This had been so easy on the discard day, but doing it now was like playing the final boss on Mega Man with no extra lives. A screw-up here and it was game over. I needed to get back on track. “Sorry, man. Intense day. I could sure go for some Brahms’s Violin Sonata number three right now, am I right?”
Zak flinched like I’d flicked water in his face. He checked his earbuds and then patted his pants to find his phone. “How’d you—”
“Meh, don’t worry about it.” I waved my hand. “Just mind-reader stuff.” I needed to get him curious. Going in too strong too quick didn’t work.
“Uh-huh.” Zak gave a skeptical raise of the eyebrows. “You get your test score back from Mr. Ziggler today?”
Mr. Ziggler was our science teacher, but we had him during different periods. “Yeah, how’d you do?”
Zak rolled his eyes. “I swear Ziggler takes pleasure in putting the most random facts ever on his tests. If we don’t cover something in class and it isn’t on the study guide, then it shouldn’t be on the test. Plain and simple.” I’d heard Zak’s same rant on the discard day. I smiled inwardly at the sight. It was nice to know that he could get worked up over something. “I seriously think I’m going to complain. Writing a test no one can do well on doesn’t mean you’re smart. It means you’re a bad teacher. At least he’ll grade us on a curve. Still stupid that I’ve never gotten anything less than a ninety-three on any test in my entire life, and you know what I got on this one? Eighty—”
“Seven point five?” I said, finishing Zak’s sentence.
Zak scrunched his eyebrows and tilted his head back. “Yeeeah, how’d you know that?”
I pulled my test out of my backpack and handed it to him. “The same way I was able to get this.”
“A hundred?” Zak’s eyes went wide as he glanced from my test to me and back. “Dude … wha … what? How did you pull that off?”
“Dude.” I looked at him like the answer was obvious. “Mind-reader stuff.”
“You don’t just ‘mind read’ your way through one of Ziggler’s tests, man. If this is some trick you learned off of YouTube, then please send me the link. What else you got up your sleeve?”
I brought two fingers up to my temple. “Let’s see here. You stacked your books in your backpack in the following order, back to front: history, math, science, then there’s a music folder, and then a library book—The Count of Monte Cristo, if I’m not mistaken. Oh, and there’s a note from Sefina in your outermost compartment.”
Zak gave me a strange look before unzipping his backpack. I could hear him mumbling the names of his books before looking back up at me with a blank stare. “Danny, I just pulled those books from my locker and stashed them in here like three minutes ago. How did you … and the note from Sefina … What?”
“Hey, man, you asked what else I had up my sleeve.” I shrugged. This thing was building momentum. I was past the point of no return. “I was just getting warmed up, but you don’t look like you’re in the mood for more.”
“Danny,” Zak said, his face vacant of any humor. “How are you doing this?”
I sucked at my teeth and took another deep breath, ducking my head down. “I’ll tell you on two conditions.”
Zak tentatively ducked down as well. “Go on.”
“You have to promise you’ll give me a chance to explain myself and promise you won’t tell anybody. Like not one of your other friends, or parents, or anything. Deal?” I said, holding out my hand. “On your blue belt’s honor.”
Zak paused, as if only now realizing how serious I was. He nodded, then shook my hand. “Blue belt’s honor.”
I cleared my throat. The moment of truth. “So I kind of have this thing where I … I live every day twice.”
Zak squinted. “Come again?”
I nodded slowly. “Every day of my life, for as long as I can remember, happens once, and then it resets and happens again. The first day just kind of disappears, and I get to repeat it. We actually had this conversation yesterday. Well, my yesterday. For you, it never h
appened. That’s how I knew what was on the test, how I knew what score you got, and how I was able to predict what those kids wrote down on my first day here.” I went on to explain how discard days and sticky days worked, as well as the events from yesterday’s discard day.
“Wait. Didn’t you ask me about this a while back?”
“I did.”
“Dude, I am so confused.”
“I know.” I held up a finger. “But I knew you were going to say all this. Look, as I said, we’ve already had this conversation before. I’ll prove it. A little while ago, I learned some things about you that you’d never told a soul, some things that only you could know, so that when we eventually had this conversation, I could repeat them back to you and prove that I could only have gotten the information from talking to you.”
“During a discard day that never happened for me?” Zak repeated slowly.
“Precisely.” I pointed to his notebook. “You ever remember telling me about your superhero drawings?”
“Uh … no,” Zak said, pulling his book into his chest.
“But have you ever told anyone that halfway into that notebook, on the twenty-first page, you have a drawing of a guy in garbage-can armor that you plan to call Smasher Trasher? And that you used a picture of Mr. Wilding from the school’s website as your model?”
Zak’s face went slack. His notebook hit the floor. “That’s impossible.”
I held up a finger. “But completely explainable if I lived every day twice, wouldn’t you agree?”
Zak wordlessly moved his mouth up and down. An alarm beeped on my phone. It was time for the nail in the coffin, for the reason why I had picked this particular sticky day to tell Zak.
“In fifty-two seconds, Mr. Rory will slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a dog. David Eggerton is going to fall out of his seat and roll into the aisle, and Nicole Campbell is going to fall on top of him. A bunch of students will pull out their phones, and it will be the first picture to ever be on both Studs and Duds at the same time. LeeAnna Sumsion’s unzipped backpack will spill out, and her pink water bottle will roll all the way down to the front of the bus.” I referred to my notes and started pointing around the bus. “He’ll bonk his head on the window and start crying; she’ll laugh hysterically; he’s gonna say a cuss word.”
I checked my phone timer and placed my hands on the seat in front of me to brace for the sudden stop. I stared at Zak and motioned with my head for him put his hands up as well. He hesitated.
I checked my phone again and then put it in my pocket. “Seven, six, five, four…”
Zak waited until two before putting his hands on the seatback. The bus lurched to a stop. Kids screamed as they were jolted forward into the next row of seats. David and Nicole tumbled into the aisle on top of each other; LeeAnna’s backpack spilled out onto the floor. Some kids laughed; one started crying. A cuss word shot above the chaos, and a pink water bottle thudded to a stop near the bus driver.
Zak’s eyes darted around the bus, taking it all in, processing my prediction with what he had just witnessed. He slowly turned to me. “Dude, you’re like a psychic.”
“No, my friend,” I said, placing my hand on his shoulder. “I just live the double day.”
CHAPTER 15
DOUBLE DAY DUO
(Sticky Monday—Sept. 20th)
I lay in bed, watching my phone buzz with a new text for about the tenth time in the last two minutes. It was 10:30 p.m., late for a sticky-day night, but I was expecting this. Before getting off the bus, I had given Zak a slip of paper with the final score and some key stats for tonight’s New Orleans Saints versus Green Bay Packers game. The game had just ended.
Dude, call me.
Danny … The Saints just threw for EXACTLY 343 yards. The Packers had 274. The score was 34–21. Okay, man. I believe.
We NEED to talk.
Have you told anyone else about what you can do?
What do you use the double day to do? Have you ever tried staying up all night? Can you DIE on a discard day?
C’mon, man, you can’t just swear me to secrecy, drop a bomb on me like that, and then go silent!
None of this makes sense. Danny, I’m freaking out over here, man!
CALL ME!
I let him sweat it out a bit more before calling him. Zak’s face appeared on the phone before the first ring. “Danny, this is insane. Where have you been? You been doing a bunch of crazy stuff?”
“If you call assembling the patio swing with my dad and eating dinner with my family ‘crazy stuff,’ then yes. I’ve been doing insane stuff,” I said. “It’s my sticky day, Zak. My goal is to do the exact opposite of crazy stuff. I was actually going to bed.” Even though I had already broken the ice with Zak about the double day, it was still a surreal experience to be talking so plainly with someone about it during a sticky day.
“Oh, right.” I could see from the look on his face that this whole concept was a lot to take in. “So what’s the plan for tomorrow? You going to solve some crimes or maybe even stop crimes before they happen or wait until the sticky day and then video crimes as they happen? You could capture some wild stuff to put on YouTube if you knew where to be ahead of time.”
“What’s with you and crimes?” I asked. “I usually spend my discard day faking sick and playing video games. If I go to school, it’s to see what’s on tests and pull pranks and stuff.”
“So you do actually cheat on all your tests and quizzes?” Zak said, looking deflated.
“No,” I replied calmly. “I do not cheat.”
“Didn’t you just say you go to school to see what’s on the tests?”
I gave Zak a look like he should know better. “Since when is it cheating to look at a quiz or test after you’ve already taken it?”
Zak rolled his eyes. “But it’s before you take it on the sticky day.”
“I don’t look at it on a sticky day, now, do I?”
Zak twisted his mouth to the side. “That’s a technicality. So is that all the stuff you do? Video games, study tests ‘after you’ve taken them,’ and pull pranks?”
“I mean, that’s not all I do. Sometimes I get bored and do some pretty crazy stuff. I ran my mom’s minivan into a light pole in the grocery store parking lot once.”
I thought Zak would think that was cool, but he just stared back blankly. “You are totally not using this power to its full potential.”
“Hey, don’t make me regret telling you about this, dude.” I was giving Zak a hard time. Zak didn’t know it, but it was precisely for his different way of looking at the double day that I had told him my secret in the first place.
Zak’s eyes went wide, and he shook his head. “I promise you won’t regret telling me. I’m assuming you told me because you wanted someone to bounce ideas off of and stuff, right? Well, I’ve got a ton of ideas, although first I need to ask you a bunch of questions.”
“All right, hit me,” I said, propping up my phone on a nearby moving box. “I’ve gotten very good at pretending like sticky-day conversations are the first time I’ve talked about something.”
“Huh,” Zak said, considering my comment as he glanced down at a sheet of paper. “That’s weird. Anyway, for my benefit, I’ll still go through my list. So, to start, how often do you use it to help people?”
“Uh, I don’t know. Let me see. A couple weeks back I prevented my sisters from drawing all over the walls and ruining a basket of laundry with some shoe polish. Oh, there was this one time my mom set the oven on broil instead of bake and ended up burning a lasagna pretty bad. I made sure it was set right the next day.” I was downplaying it just a bit to get a rise out of Zak, but the guy had made a pretty decent point on the discard day.
Zak pursed his lips and started an exaggerated slow clap. “You saved a lasagna. I mean, you’re practically Batman.”
“C’mon,” I said defensively. “She burned it like really bad.”
Zak wrote something down. “And I believe that alread
y answers my question about stopping crimes. So, have you used your extra time to learn some skill like superhumanly fast? Because you realize you can practice twice as long as anyone, right? An instrument, a second language, up-close magic, et cetera.”
“Up-close magic?”
“I don’t know,” Zak said. “Just some sort of skill.”
“Uh, did I not mention how much gaming I do?”
“You’re killing me, man.” Zak shook his head.
“You know, I actually have killed someone before.”
“Wait.” Zak’s face went slack. “You have?”
I rolled my eyes. “No, I’m just messing with you … or am I?”
I gave him a hard stare, then burst out laughing. I hadn’t tried that one on him before. Even though Zak had a very different view of what I should be doing with the double day, talking to someone my age about it on a sticky day was like removing a backpack full of cement from my shoulders.
“Danny, let me be straight with you, man.”
“Uh-oh,” I said, “here it comes.”
“Look, this is a crazy power, and it’s wasted if you spend it cheating on tests—”
“I don’t cheat.”
Zak gave a small sigh. “Studying tests before taking them … again, driving into light poles, and playing video games. You could do some incredible things.”
“Man, you sound like Dr. Donaldson,” I said.
“That a bad thing?”
“Quite the opposite.” My gut was right. Zak was the perfect choice. He was more than just someone to share the double day with. I didn’t enjoy being challenged, but I knew I needed it. “Okay, Dr. Zak. What would you do, besides practicing the violin, because that’s lame.”
“Hey! Violin is cool.”
I nodded. “I like seeing you so obviously wrong about something. It makes you relatable, you know?”
