How Lunchbox Jones Saved Me From Robots, Traitors, and Missy the Cruel

by Jennifer Brown

  The two paws were as different as the maws were alike. Dad’s paw, Paw Stanley, was like Dad, tall and skinny with red hair and a big nose. Mom’s paw, Paw Morris, was short, fat, and shiny bald. Paw Stanley had been a gym teacher, so he was always making up game plans and patting his chest looking for a whistle that was no longer there. Paw Morris had been a salesman, so he basically did nothing but shake hands with people and offer deals.

  For my entire life, the aws came over on Friday nights for dinner—which the maws cooked together—and for cable TV sports channels—which the paws watched together—and for talking, which they all did together. And sometimes over one another. And sometimes without even breathing. It was like watching a science fiction movie: Attack of the Nonbreathing Chatterers.

  “There’s my wittle baby-waby Lukey-Wukey,” Maw Shirley said the minute she walked through the door. Her hands were already outstretched in pinch formation. “Come let Mamaw get a hold of you.”

  Just thinking about it made my cheeks tingle. Especially since right behind her was Maw Mazie, her hands in identical pinch formation. Definitely a science fiction movie: Attack of the Pinching Lobstermaws.

  “Just look at that sweet baby boy,” Maw Mazie said, coming at me. Pinch, pinch, pinch.

  It was useless to try to get away. The maws would get you no matter what it took. I accepted my fate, squeezed my eyes shut, and trudged toward them, sweet baby-boy cheeks–first. Even though I strongly disagreed that I was a sweet baby anything.

  “Well, look at him, Maw, he gets bigger every Friday.”

  “I think you’re right, Maw, he’s a little weed, my Lukey-Wukey.”

  Ugh. Lukey-Wukey. I didn’t mind nicknames, but Lukey-Wukey didn’t exactly inspire tough alien-dispatching badness. If Randy heard me being called Lukey-Wukey, my life would pretty much be over. And his laugh would blow my ear drums right out of my head.

  They hugged, they pinched, they fussed and cooed, and then Mom came into the room.

  “You’re here! We should get started. I was thinking Italian to night,” she said, and the maws peeled away. Mom distracted the maws for me every Friday so I wouldn’t suffer permanent cheek damage. This is, in my opinion, just one of the reasons moms are awesome.

  Immediately the maws began talking over each other.

  “Oh, I’ll handle the sauce. I’m great with sauce.”

  “I’ll take care of the meatballs.”

  “We’re having meatballs?”

  “Well, of course we’re having meatballs. It’s Italian. What’s more Italian than meatballs?”

  As they bustled into the kitchen, Mom patted me on the shoulder. “Go on out into the living room and say hi to the paws.”

  The paws talked just as much as the maws. And just as loud. And just as constantly. But at least they talked about quarterbacks and baseball games and soccer plays and things that had nothing to do with hair appointments, dead people, or how my bottom used to fit into the palm of one of their hands when I was a baby. And they never touched my cheeks.

  I walked into the living room. Dad was already camped in his recliner, feet up, one toe peeking out of a hole in his sock. The paws were taking up the entire couch, in matching postures—feet crossed out in front of them, one arm slung over the back of the couch, the other hand absently scratching their bellies.

  They were busy arguing over the NFL draft and didn’t even notice that I’d drifted into the room. I liked it that way. I pulled out the Ultimate Gaming Zone and sank down into it. I hoped they wouldn’t notice me, because when they did, one of them always asked when I was going to start playing sports.

  “Oh, hey there, Lukester! When we gonna see you on the gridiron, huh?”

  Shoot. They noticed me.

  “Yeah, you’re a fireplug of a boy,” Paw Morris chimed in. He hunched his chest over all muscle-like and made a grimacing face that was fairly terrifying. A guy should never have to see that many of his grandpa’s teeth at once.

  “We played football in gym this week,” I said, hoping that would be enough to satisfy them.

  “There ya go,” Paw Stanley crowed, throwing his hands up. “Bet you were the star. Quarterback? Wide receiver?”

  “Nah,” Paw Morris said, still hunched over. “Boy that size has defensive lineman written all over him. Right, Luke? Tell your paw, you were smashmouthing, you were laying those fellas out!”

  “I don’t think so . . . I didn’t understand anything that you just said.”

  The paws burst into laughter, punching each other on their shoulders. “You hear that? You hear what he said? Such a jokester, our Lukeman. Didn’t understand a word . . . Ho-ho-ho, that boy is a real cut-up.”

  “Ah, good one, Luke. So tell us, what position were you?” Paw Stanley said. His fingers fidgeted over his imaginary coach’s whistle excitedly.

  I licked my lips. “Um, I was over by the foreign language trailers? Kind of . . . kind of by the parking lot.”

  The paws looked at each other confusedly, then burst into laughter again. “I tell you, Charlie,” one of them said to my dad, “you’ve got yourself a real comedian here. By the parking lot, he says.”

  Dad grinned like he got the joke, so I grinned, too, and even squeezed out a little laugh.

  When they’d laughed themselves out and had gone back to their appointed football-watching positions, Dad spoke up. “Did I tell you, Paw? Luke here is on a different sort of team.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Paw Stanley said. “Rugby?”

  “I’ve always loved rugby,” Paw Morris said. “Used to be I could get you a great deal on some rugby uniforms.”

  “No, not quite rugby,” Dad said. “It’s a robotics team.”

  Instantly, I felt my ears burn. This always happened when I was surprised or embarrassed—every blood cell in my whole body rushed directly to my ears, making them bright red and hot. Please, please, I thought, don’t let one of the maws come in and see my ears. We would be stuck in a half-hour debate about fevers and rash-inducing illnesses from the early 1900s, and then next thing I knew I’d be rushed off to sit in some emergency room cubicle. Diagnosis: humiliated to death. Don’t think it hasn’t happened before.

  But the maws were still in the kitchen, busily squabbling about marinara. I was safe.

  The paws, however, had both gone slack jawed and were staring at me.

  “Ro-what-ics?” Paw Morris asked.

  “Robotics,” Dad said proudly, and if I could have had any wish in the world come true, it would have been for my dad to suddenly lose his voice. Not forever; just until the paws went home. Or, even better, if I could’ve turned back time to the football conversation. I’d have made up a better position, like thrower or point getter or maybe something passably violent sounding like nose ruiner or arm breaker or chief mangler.

  “What’s that?” Paw Stanley asked.

  “Sounds like some futuristic mumbo jumbo to me,” Paw Morris said.

  “Robots? That’s not a sport,” Paw Stanley said.

  “Well, no,” Dad said. “It’s, you know, science and technology and stuff. Tell them, Luke.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to do robotics,” I said.

  The paws looked equal parts confused and angry. “Well, you heard him, Charlie. He doesn’t want to do it. Why would you pull the boy out of football to make him do something he doesn’t want to do?”

  “Who would want to mess around with nuts and bolts when there’s a perfectly good pigskin to toss?” Paw Stanley asked.

  “That’s what I’m thinking. Can’t blame the boy for missing his team on the field,” Paw Morris declared.

  “He was never in football,” Dad said, and I sank deeper into the Ultimate Gaming Zone. This was just getting worse.

  Paw Stanley looked very confused. “What do you mean, he was never in it?”

  “Well, now you’re just talking nonsense. Hey,” Paw Morris said, elbowing Paw Stanley. “He’s ribbing us again. You two are jokers to night, Charlie. A fire
plug like this kid not playing football but messing around with some robot nonsense instead. Ho-ho-ho! That’s a good one.”

  Paw Stanley joined in the laughter. Dad and I stared at each other for a minute, and then Dad shrugged and started laughing along with the paws. He must have figured they had about as good a chance of understanding futuristic robot mumbo jumbo as I did of understanding one of Walter’s car parts.

  They all laughed and elbowed and sputtered, practically rolling around on the floor, and I felt that maybe I should start laughing, too, but right as I tried to muster up a chuckle, Rob walked into the room.

  “Hey, paws, what’s so funny?” he asked.

  “Heeey!” the paws cried out in unison, both of them flinging their arms out hug-style.

  “There’s our soldier!”

  “Here comes a good marine!”

  “Ten-hut!”

  “At ease, soldier! At ease!”

  I rolled my eyes. Everyone was always making such a huge deal about Rob going into the marines. It was sickening. It was boring. It was . . . going to happen whether I liked it or not, and that was what I liked least about it.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said, but everyone was so busy talking to Rob they didn’t even hear me. I jumped up out of the Ultimate Gaming Zone and raced to my bedroom. I even gave my door a good slam, and still nobody noticed. Of course not. Just because Rob was a soldier, all of a sudden he was a star.

  Rob had always been with me through everything. Through the time I wrecked my bike and had to get stitches in my forehead. Through the time when Susan Stoffsetter kissed me and I needed a deep cootie cleansing. Through the time when Walter invited me to a car show and I needed an excuse to get out of it. Everything.

  But now I was stuck on a robotics team and would be forced to be with Mr. Terry and who knew who else after school every Monday with no way out. And Rob wouldn’t be there.

  Some star.

  CHAPTER 6

  PROGRAM NAME: Group Torture

  STEP ONE: Robot enters room

  STEP TWO: Robot stands around looking goofy

  STEP THREE: Robot wishes five o’clock would get here already

  Everybody was all about hating Mondays. The kids at school complained about Mondays, rubbing their tired eyes. The teachers sighed that Mondays were so hard.

  My dad spent most of Monday mornings grumbling about mountains of laundry and grocery shopping, while swigging coffee from an old Snoopy cup that read: I DON’T DO MONDAYS.

  Mom rushed about with one high heel on and one off, one arm in a suit jacket and the other stuck in her briefcase handle, griping about how she had meetings all day and what could make a Monday worse than back-to-back meetings. Even Dad’s signature buttery cinnamon toast couldn’t make Mom stop hating Mondays.

  To me, Monday seemed like pretty much any other day. Get up earlier than you want to, go to school longer than you want to, eat less lunch than you want to, go home later than you want to, and start rounding up slimy green aliens with Randy until dinner, which is the only thing you actually want to do. What was there to hate? I didn’t get it.

  Until the Monday of the first robotics meeting.

  My brain tried to fool me. For most of the day, I was convinced that it was a Monday just like any other Monday. I’d even used most of English class to devise a plan for how Randy and I could beat level 17. (Hint: toss a pancake into the cornfield and wait for the aliens to swarm. No outer space creature could resist a good pancake. It was a proven fact.) My brain had me so good and fooled about what day it was, it took me a few minutes of waiting outside after the final bell, wondering where Dad was, before it occurred to me that I had something else to do.

  “Hey, Luke, where are you going?” Walter asked as I trudged past him. He was heading out to the bus lot, a Butterfinger melting over his fingers.

  “Robotics.”

  “Oh, that sounds like fun,” he said.

  “Not as fun as alien games,” I grumbled.

  “You want the other half?” he asked, holding out a broken piece of his Butterfinger. I was so bummed my stomach didn’t even want it. I took it, anyway, and ate it in three bites, because free candy was free candy, and I didn’t want to be rude to Walter. The buses roared to life outside and Walter jumped. “Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow. Have fun with the boop-beep-bop-boop.” He made a few jerky arm movements as he pushed through the doors.

  Something else to hate about robotics: it suddenly made everyone you knew imitate bad robots from 1970s movies.

  I kept trudging, now thirsty because of the candy but too annoyed to even bother to get a drink.

  Mr. Terry was standing outside the classroom, waving me in, his glasses sliding down his nose with every movement. He pushed them back up on his face.

  “Luke! Glad you could make it. That makes almost everyone. Go on in and get acquainted.”

  I walked through the door and dropped my backpack on the first chair.

  At the front of the room, huddled around the box Mr. Terry had brought in last week, were five kids.

  One of them turned when I walked in. “Oh, Luke Abbott’s here,” she said, and then turned back and stuffed her foot into the box of robot parts.

  Mikayla Armitage, normal-looking seventh grader by day, toe prodigy by night. That was Mikayla’s big claim to fame—she could do things with her toes. She was on the news once, in fourth grade, for having a whole art exhibit of paintings she made by clutching the paintbrush between her toes. She could eat, clap, and write with her feet. She wore flip-flops year round, just in case the mood to flex her feet struck, and on the first day of school you could always count on Mikayla showing off her newest toe skill. This year it had been flossing, which grossed out all the girls and got Mikayla called to the nurse’s office for a discussion about things we shouldn’t put in our mouths. Rumor had it she was working on basketball for next year; she just couldn’t quite figure out how to dribble and run at the same time. Which was true for most of Forest Shade Middle School’s basketball team, so she should fit right in.

  The toe thing was kind of cool, but mostly it was weird trying to talk to someone who is brushing her hair with her feet.

  I walked up to the group and stared into the box with them. If robotics was all about standing around staring at robot parts, so far it looked like we were going to do great.

  “Hey,” a kid next to me said. “I’m Jacob. Sixth grade.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Hey.”

  Another kid sidled up to my other side. “Hey,” he said. “I’m Jacob. Sixth grade.”

  My mouth dropped open and my head whipped back and forth between the two of them. “Uh . . .” was all I could manage.

  “We’re not twins,” the first Jacob said.

  “We’re not related at all,” the other one said. “My last name is Davis.”

  “And mine is David. Big difference.”

  I squinted. They both wore brown T-shirts and blue jeans. They both had blond hair and green eyes. They even both had lopsided smiles.

  “It’s only a one-letter difference, actually,” Mikayla said. She picked up a robot piece with her toes and inspected it, then dropped it back into the box.

  “What ever,” both Jacobs said at the same time.

  It hurt my head.

  I skirted around to the other side of the box and shoved in beside Stuart Hicks. Stuart was friends with Walter and would sometimes sit with us at lunch. But Stuart never actually bought any lunch. Instead, he ate what seemed to be an endless supply of sunflower seeds out of his jacket pocket. His mouth always bulged with seeds, and sometimes he spit the shells right onto Walter’s lunch tray. Other times he would crunch the seeds up in his teeth, shells and all. I wasn’t sure which was worse, but it all gave me that day-before-the-flu-hits feeling in my stomach. I secretly hated it when Stuart sat with us.

  “I think I’ve figured out how we can win,” Stuart said, his mouth working around what looked like roughly nine hundred millio
n sunflower seeds.

  “We haven’t even built the robot yet,” Mikayla said.

  “So?” the Jacobs said in unison.

  “It can’t be that hard, can it?” I said. “I mean, you just put some stuff together and push a button, right?”

  I heard a grunt from behind me. “Ugh. Of course, you would think that, Luke Abbott. And, gross, your ears are dirty.”

  I rubbed my fingers behind my ears before my brain could catch up. I knew that voice. That was the voice that had poured ice water through my veins since I was six years old. That voice was behind the recess rhyme: Loser Luke eats his glue-k, and then goes puke. And eats that, too-k.

  I probably don’t really need to point this out, but that didn’t really rhyme all that well.

  And it was mean.

  And also? I only tried glue one time. It looked like melted marshmallows and kind of smelled tangy and I was hungry and I put a little dab on my finger and can’t a guy be curious for one second of his life without some girl making a rhyme about it?

  Everyone sang the Loser Luke Eats His Puke song for all five years of elementary school. They even made a jump-rope routine out of it. The all-time record of pukes I ate, according to jump-rope tallying, was forty-four, held by Holly Asanti, who swore she could have gone on had the recess whistle not been blown.

  And the voice that had started that rhyme was right behind me now.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed I’d imagined it. Like a flashback in a horror movie.

  “Gross, I’ll bet you eat your ear dirt, too,” the voice continued. It got closer and I felt a thump on the back of my shoulder.

  Please, no, please, no, please. I opened one eye and chanced a look, and there she was.

  Missy Farnham.

  Otherwise known as Missy the Cruel.

  Picture a sixth grade girl in a tenth grade boy’s body. Giant, scabby knees and hands like clubs. Brown pigtails curved up like a Viking hat. Teeth that crushed the bones of small animals and freckles that spelled out the word GROWL on her cheeks.