Art was third and it was a little bit better. Ms. Calderon has zero patience for bullying or meanness of any kind. When I walked into class she looked me up and down and gave me a thumbs-up. “I am impressed, Javier,” she said, nodding. “Finally you are starting to let your fashion sense show.” She pointed over to our easels. “And your timing is perfect—we begin our self-portraits today.”
Ms. Calderon was my favorite teacher. Wiki liked her too, but for completely different reasons. I loved that she was a real artist. When we painted, she painted. And she was so into it—she thought about painting the same way I thought about cooking. It was something you worked hard at, but it didn’t feel like work, and it was worth it anyway because the final product was so awesome. She was also super creative and really encouraged us to find our own styles. No art was bad art if it was true to your style. That’s how I felt about cooking, mostly.
Wiki dug her because she was secretly tough as nails. You barely saw it, because usually Ms. Calderon was super sweet, but no one even dreamed of messing with her. I was pretty sure that she was a warrior by night and she would one day train Brady in the ways of butt-kicking.
A few of the girls in class started quacking at me as we started painting, but Ms. C gave them one of her signature looks and they shut up immediately. Part of Ms. C’s toughness comes from her eyes. She has such an intense stare when she’s painting or talking about painting that I think it’s going to light the canvas on fire. The other kids make fun of it behind her back, but I think it’s kind of awesome and the root of her powers. I remember when we were finishing each other’s portraits one day and she talked about how your eyes should pierce the painting. The other kids laughed but I dug it.
“A self-portrait isn’t just about painting yourself,” she said as she walked around the room. “It is about painting your presence. Your essence. What makes you unique. Whether you illustrate it in the expression, the lighting, the objects, or landscape surrounding you.” She nodded as she passed by each kid’s painting.
“We need to expand our search,” Wiki whispered to me. We were painting next to each other. “I’m not sure my pirate research surfaced anything useful. We need a new approach.” I glanced at his self-portrait, which looked like a stick figure. Wiki was a genius, but a lousy artist.
“Okay, let’s see…” I whispered when Ms. Calderon was on the other side of the room. “Maybe we study things that sailors are scared of? Ooh, we could use Andy to summon a giant squid.”
Wiki made a face. “I’m picturing a giant squid slithering around helplessly in your kitchen. Ew, that’s disgusting.” He shook his head. “No, I was thinking about the other defining aspect of Blackbeard. He’s a pirate, but he’s also technically a chrononaut.”
“A cronut? Wow, just realized I’m starving.” I licked my lips.
“A chrononaut. A time traveler. I mean, I don’t know exactly how Andy functions, but regardless, there are a lot of things Blackbeard won’t understand about the modern world. And I bet technology will scare him. We can use that to our advantage.”
Thirty minutes later, Wiki had proven his point. We were at library class in the dumpy middle school library. (Picture a boring school library. Yep, that’s it. It’s nothing like the magical high school library.) We were trying to research time travel, but this library only had books that were middle school level or below, so we weren’t finding much.
Blackbeard was sitting at the computers twenty feet away from us, and the middle school librarian was helping him figure out what he was doing.
“Wow, I can’t believe you want to spend your weekends building a puppy-petting area for the kids.” She swooned. “You really are as bighearted as they say.” The librarian’s eyes looked like they could have had little cartoon hearts in them. I groaned quietly.
“Yes, anything for the, er…kids. They are our, uh, future,” Blackbeard mumbled, clearly trying not to throw up in his mouth as he said it. “Now, is this the compass then?” he asked, waving the mouse in the air and shaking it. “It doesn’t seem to be working. I don’t see true north. Your compass is broken.”
The librarian shook her head. “That’s not a compass, it’s a—”
“A very small telescope. Yes, I see that now. Hmmm, I don’t see the hole…” He put the mouse up to his eye. “Oh no. I’m mistaken. This is clearly a tiny anchor.” He tossed it onto the floor, then shook his head and looked at her. “This is a very low-quality anchor. I suggest you invest in better anchors.”
I was trying my hardest not to laugh.
“Why are all the teachers here so bad at technology?” the librarian muttered under her breath as she put the mouse back on the table and explained computers to Mr. Teach. He started trying to order the monitor around like it was one of his crew.
“I have to sit somewhere else,” I wheezed. “Or I’m going to explode.”
Wiki held it together better than I did. “As funny as this is, we’re still watching him gather information for world domination.” He looked over at me. “But this does confirm my suspicion. We can use a version of the Columbus eclipse approach.”
“You know I have no idea what that is,” I said, looking down at the table so I wouldn’t laugh at Beardo.
“Christopher Columbus once used his knowledge of an upcoming eclipse to fool the Indigenous people into thinking God stole the sun because He was mad at them. Columbus predicted the sun’s vanishing to their chief and it terrified them. Really he’d just read about it in an almanac.”
“Wow, that guy really was the worst. But your point is?”
“There are a thousand ways we can use technology to scare someone from the seventeen hundreds. We’re talking about pre–Industrial Revolution times. Even a telephone or car is news to them.” I nodded. Wiki did have a point. “Okay, give me some time to come up with a plan,” he said. He did some mental calculations in his head, then noticed something behind me. “Hey Javi, check it out. Looks like we’re not the only Blackbeard haters.”
I turned around, and sitting in a corner of the library with a newspaper in his lap was none other than Mr. Scrimshaw. And he had a death stare aimed right at everyone’s favorite pirate. “Finally, someone who sees through him!” I wanted to walk over and high-five him right then and there, but he already thought I was weird enough. Still, it was good to know that one teacher in this school had common sense.
The day was finally looking up, when a bunch of girls leaving the library whispered, “Quack you later, loser.”
Gym was last period. Right before the bell rang I was putting away the kickball in the storage room when I heard someone behind me. The way the hairs stood up on my neck, I knew exactly who it was.
“Day two,” Blackbeard said darkly as he pretended to mop the floor.
Instead of my usual terrified self, I was actually mad. “This is a low blow, even for you! Why didn’t you make Brady wear some dumb pj’s too?”
“And upset the future Queen of Pirates? Never.” Blackbeard smiled. “But please never wear that to school again. It’s even worse than I imagined.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
Then in one second his face went from weird smile to violent frown. “Enough. I grow impatient. Do you have the bell or not?”
In one second I went from angry Javi to petrified bunny rabbit. “W-w-we have one more d-d-day!”
“Today is the last day I ask nicely. And if I don’t get it by the end of the school day tomorrow…” He walked off without finishing his thought. Not like he had to anyway.
“Wikiiiiiiii!” I yelled, running to catch him in the halls.
He better have come up with a solid plan. Or we were going to have to rethink this whole not-giving-Blackbeard-the-bell thing.
17
“What would scare me if I were from the seventeen hundreds?” Wiki asked himself, looking around Brady’s room as sh
e practiced flying side kicks and I lay on the floor, imagining our deaths. “Music playing from speakers, maybe? Or a voice seeming to emanate from nowhere?”
“It should probably be portable, Wiki,” Brady said mid-kick. “Maybe you should steal your dad’s phone.”
“Smartphone. Yes, you’re right. I won’t need to steal it—he would love a day without it. Hmm, the possibilities are endless. I’ll have to experiment with it tonight.”
“Hey guys,” I said, staring up at the ceiling. “Have you ever stopped to wonder exactly how Andy works?”
“Stopped to wonder?” Wiki asked, looking at me like I should be wearing a dunce cap. He pulled a notebook out of his backpack and started tearing out pages and tossing them at me. They landed like dirty snowflakes on my head, and I sat up to make sense of them. Wiki’s class notes usually look like a mad scientist’s scribbles, but these were extra loco. He had all kinds of diagrams scrawled across every page, mostly arrows pointing back and forth along a time line with a sketch of Andy somewhere in the middle.
“This is intense, even for you,” Brady muttered as she picked up some of the pages and also tried making sense of them. “Why’d you get so obsessed with it?”
“Why?” Wiki gasped. “I’ll tell you why. Because Mozart became the most famous musician of all time, the Earl of Sandwich invented the sandwich, and Blackbeard’s still dead.” We both stared at him blankly. “Haven’t I explained the competing theories of time travel to you both ad nauseum?”
“Wiki, you know we tune you out the second you start ranting about time travel,” Brady said flatly. “Just like when you bring up those Hadron Collider thingies.”
“Fine, well then here’s something to blow your mind: What if Mozart became legendary because he saw what pianos were like in the future? What if the earl created the sandwich because Javi showed him one first?”
Our jaws dropped so hard I swear I heard them hit the floor.
“It’s the butterfly effect. The tiniest change to the past can cause massive changes to the future. So when they went back to their original times, having learned about futuristic pianos and sandwiches, they could have totally changed our future. But that’s just one theory. Because then there’s the multiverse theory.”
“You’re making me dizzy again,” Brady said, but Wiki ignored her.
“The multiverse theory states that our guests are either plucked from a parallel universe or returned to one, so that the other universe is changed, but ours remains untouched. This is a popular theory, and I’m almost positive it’s how Andy works. Otherwise the butterfly effect would have done much worse things to our reality. Of course there are at least five other competing theories that seem viable to me.”
“Wiki,” Brady said, punctuating his name with a stomp that made me worry we were going to fall through the floor. “Basta. Enough. Stop wasting your brain on time-travel theories and start using it to get us out of this mess. Focus on the bell.”
That shut him up. We shared a long moment of silence watching Wiki nod in slow motion as his brain started working on the right problem again. It hypnotized me into a daydream about Andy.
“Speaking of the bell…” I said, as my brain landed on an idea. “Andy’s a pretty old-looking table. Ancient, even. You ever think that we might not be the first people to use the bell?”
Wiki huffed. “Trust me, Javi, I’ve thought about that extensively too. The issue is, I imagine few people would escape like Blackbeard did, and if they did they must have been caught. Otherwise we would’ve heard of them. There are no news stories about historical figures reemerging into modern society.”
Brady looked at me, nodding. “I don’t know, Wiki. If someone was smart, they could probably figure out a way to disguise themselves and stick around. I think Javi might be onto something…for once.”
“We can theorize about Andy after we’ve survived tomorrow,” Wiki said flatly. “Let me focus on defeating the most fearsome pirate of all time.”
“Th-th-that most fearsome pirate of all time?” I asked, as my heart practically exploded. Leaning against a tree in our front yard was an extremely smug Blackbeard, staring right at me through the window, eating an apple he’d stabbed with his knife. He pointed the knife at me, winked, and walked away.
18
“Everyone in front of their easel, class,” Ms. Calderon said as we shuffled into the room.
It was first period, and Wiki still hadn’t told us his plan. On the walk to school he’d said he thought it had a 64 percent chance of success, but he was still working out the kinks. I did the math—64 percent chance of success meant a 36 percent chance of us dying. That was a 36 percent bigger chance of death than I felt comfortable with. Brady wasn’t too happy with that number either.
“You’ll notice you have a brand-new canvas today, not yesterday’s half-finished self-portrait,” Ms. C said in her singsongy voice. “We will continue those tomorrow, but today we are going to be working on something else. We have a very special guest who volunteered to model for us—we’ll be painting his portrait for our double-period art today.”
Someone modeling for us? For almost two hours? This was going to be weird. Was it a high schooler? A teacher?
Then the smell wafted in.
No. Oh no. Please no.
“Perhaps you have not had the pleasure of meeting him yet, but already he is a legend at this school. Ever since he arrived, teachers are finding flowers on their desks in the morning and spotless classrooms that we can all appreciate. He has generously vowed to spend his weekends building new facilities for you to maximize your learning. And he just loves kids and puppies. May I present our wonderful new groundskeeper, Mr. Teach. Strike a pose on the little stage for us, Mr. Teach. Kids, give him a warm welcome.”
Some kids applauded loudly, some gave some confused claps, and Wiki and I just stared in horror as Blackbeard clomped onto the little platform in front of us, sat on the stool, and smiled so widely at us that it seemed like his entire beard was grinning.
It was the creepiest smile I’d ever seen in my life. Oh, we were dead. So very dead.
“Feel free to find a pose that speaks to your essence, Mr. Teach,” Ms. C said, moving her arms in the air to demonstrate. “And when you’ve found that pose, let us know and the kids will begin their artistic renderings.”
“Ready,” Blackbeard said, still smiling cruelly as he looked straight at Wiki and me and mouthed “Day three.”
“Perhaps you could tell the kids a little bit about yourself, Mr. Teach, to help them conjure up your essence as they paint,” Ms. C said nicely.
“I was born on the sea, I’ve spent my life on the sea, and one day I’ll die on the sea. The sea is my mother, my father, my lover, and my child,” Blackbeard said, way more poetically than I could’ve imagined.
Secret Crush Sarah raised her hand. “You look a lot like a pirate, Mr. Teach. But you don’t talk like a pirate.”
Blackbeard chuckled without smiling. “Now, how do you suppose a real pirate talks?”
“Oh, you know, ‘Yarrrr matey! Shiver me timbers! Avast! Walk the plank, landlubbers! You’re headed to Davy Jones’s Locker.’ Like that,” she said.
Blackbeard shook his head, puzzled. “I’m afraid I’ve never heard pirates talk like that.”
Sarah looked shocked. “Really? At lunch I’ll show you some videos of how pirates actually talk. Then maybe you can pretend you’re a real pirate.”
Blackbeard nodded slowly, perplexed.
Tommy raised his hand. “Are you obsessed with whales like Mr. Scrimshaw is?”
Blackbeard gave a wicked smile. “No, because I’ve never hunted whales. I hunt…other things.”
His eyes landed on us again.
“Ms. C, bathroom!” I yelped, dashing out before she had time to say anything.
Wiki joined me in the hall a minut
e later. “Well, this is going to be an unpleasant morning.”
“You think? That smile he just gave us. I think it was the Smile of Death.”
“There’s no such thing as a Smile of Death, Javi. Kiss of Death, yes. Smile of Death, no,” Wiki said calmly.
“Can you please just tell me how we’re defeating Beardo after school? I could use a little ray of hope right about now.”
“Well, hold on a second. This plan isn’t meant to defeat Blackbeard just yet. It’s just meant to buy me some time to concoct the bigger plan.”
“This isn’t the plan? It’s the pre-plan to let you figure out THE PLAN?! Oh, we’re dead. We are so very, completely, utterly, hopelessly dead.” At this point I was walking in circles with my hands raised above my head, ranting at the ceiling. Finally I just marched back into art class and resumed my post five feet away from Blackbeard’s death stare.
The rest of art class was probably the worst two hours of my life. Sarah spent half the class teaching Blackbeard to talk like the pirates on TV, and Blackbeard spent the rest of it talking about how there was nothing sweeter than revenge.
The school day flew past after that. I guess time flies when you’re hours away from a gruesome death! At least Wiki was focused—every time I glanced at him during class he was hunched over his notebook scribbling diagrams and maps.
When the final bell rang, my heart stopped for a full minute.
Wiki, Brady, and I met at the middle school lockers. Wiki was staring at the floor, his eyes darting back and forth like he was reading invisible diagrams. Brady asked him over and over again to tell us the plan, but Wiki kept his intense floor-stare going, mumbling what sounded like math equations to himself. Brady turned to the drinking fountain next to us, filled her cupped hands with water, and splashed it in his face.
Time Villains Series, Book 1 Page 7
