Now I just had to get through gym class.
I stayed at the computer workstation for twenty minutes, looking up stuff about hieroglyphics for my paper, because Rachel was interested in them and I was hoping to impress her.
As 11:40 crept closer, I began to feel queasy—so queasy, in fact, that I considered telling Ms. Bussle that I was sick again and needed to go home. The idea began to appeal to me. No gym class. No public humiliation.
It would also give me an entire day at home to work on Nemesis. That was much more important than anything I was going to do in school today.
“I feel queasy,” I said to Ms. Bussle very quietly. I didn’t want Mason to hear. For now, he might actually think that I was brave enough to face Wooly on my own. Of course by tomorrow he’d know that I was in fact the biggest coward in the Northern Hemisphere, but I wasn’t thinking about tomorrow. Or even about two hours from now. I was thinking about 11:40, which was in exactly fifteen minutes.
Ms. Bussle squinted at me suspiciously. She was going to give me a hard time, I could tell. And it was going to be in a loud voice. I quickly clapped my hand over my mouth and made a small lurching movement with my neck, as though I was about to puke right then and there.
That wasn’t one of my finer moments.
It worked, though. Ms. Bussle handed me the hall pass right away, and I hurried out before she could change her mind. I went directly through the hall and to the stairwell, but then I stopped. I was beginning to have second thoughts about this being the best-possible course of action.
I heard heels clicking down the hall, so I slipped inside the boys’ bathroom. Thankfully it just smelled like disinfectant and nothing worse. I sat on the shallow tiled windowsill, leaned my head against the thick frosted glass, and sorted through my thoughts.
Here’s what they were:
If both Mason and I missed gym class today, Wooly was going to be a raving monster on Friday.
Friday was only two days away.
On the other hand, anything could happen to Wooly in two days. A freak accident, debilitating illness, short-term memory loss, a change of heart.
None of which were statistically likely.
On the other hand—
I checked my watch. It was 11: 35.
Decide, decide. I groaned. The water pipes above me groaned back. They really did. I glanced up at them, and that’s when I saw the grayish white thing hanging from a piece of hooked wire on one of the ceiling pipes. At first I thought it was someone’s old underwear. Then I looked more carefully. I sucked in my breath. It was my lunch sack. My recycled sock lunch sack. Just hanging on that wire by its small cloth loop, like a dead cat. It felt so personal, like someone had hung
me
up there for everyone to see, drooping and helpless. Look, it seemed to say! This is what you can do to Owen Birnbaum. He’ll let you do it. He won’t make a stink. He won’t fight back.
Then I had a thought that was more horrible yet.
The wire was really high up. Definitely more than six feet off the ground. There were no chairs to stand on in the bathroom. It would be nearly impossible to throw the sack in the air and have the wire hook catch the tiny little loop on the outside of the sack by pure chance. Someone had hung the sack up there deliberately. Someone very tall.
Someone who had free access to all the hallways this past week while he was taping up murals for the parent show.
Someone who could have rifled through the lunch closet, no problem.
I suddenly remembered what Jeremy had said to me:
I’ve heard people laugh at you. They make you the butt of their jokes in front of everybody, even though they’re friends.
I had thought she meant that they were
her
friends. But maybe she meant that they were
mine.
My only friend, as a matter of fact, besides Nima.
Something came out of my mouth then that can only be described as a yowl. It rebounded off the bathroom’s tiled walls and sounded so much like an animal in some sort of anguish that I listened to its echo in shock.
That was me, I thought in amazement.
“What was that?” A kid had poked his head into the bathroom and was staring at me. I knew him. He was in my gym class. He must be on his way there now.
A breeze came in from the hallway, and I saw my lunch sack flutter slightly like a flag.
Owen Birnbaum’s flag. The Republic of the Big Fat Boulder. Long may it wave.
I jumped off the windowsill, pushed past the kid in the doorway, and headed to gym class.
14
I felt pretty brave until I started pulling on my gym shorts. Then I started trembling. It was the sort of trembling that I’m not sure you can see from the outside. It was deep, deep inside. The kind you can hear in your breath.
As usual I was the last one in to the gym. All the kids were in a state of confusion. No one was standing on their spots for the simple reason that 80 percent of the gym was covered with gym equipment. Wooly must have pulled out everything in the equipment storage room—trampoline, mats, hurdles, tires set up on their sides, tires set up as a tunnel.
Faced with this buffet of torture, you can see why it took me a few moments to realize that everyone was watching me. Word must have gotten around about Wooly’s plans.
Thanks, Andre.
“Oh, man, Flapjack.” Andre sidled up to me and thumped me in the ribs. “Why didn’t you get the damn exemption? Are you a glutton for punishment or something?”
I waited for someone to riff on the word
glutton
, but no one did. That’s how serious the situation was.
I saw Wooly stop momentarily in his fussing with the equipment and scan the group. His eyes landed on mine. His chin lifted slightly and his ape chest puffed out. He had sighed. Yes, he was a happy man. Next, his glance flitted over to my left and seemed to be searching for something. He must have found it because his face grew stony. I looked to see what he was staring at, as did everyone in the class, and found the wiry figure slouching at the far end of the group.
Mason Ragg.
When you are looking down the barrel of your own imminent pain and suffering, you can’t help but feel relieved that you have someone to share it with. I know that’s not very Buddhist of me, but it’s the truth.
I tried to save him. Don’t forget that.
I did it for karma points, however.
Note to self: Ask Nima if good karma can be revoked, like a driver’s license.
I made my way through the group until I was standing next to Mason. He was the only other person in this crowd who might be experiencing a similar sense of doom, and I felt a natural inclination to be near him. Also, I hadn’t forgotten the switchblade in his sock. Not that I thought he would use it or anything. It just seemed like a situation where you would want to be near a person who carried a switchblade in his sock.
I wound up on the evil genius side of his face, but for some reason it didn’t give me the heebie-jeebies. In fact, when I looked at him, I found that I was mentally skipping over the scar somehow.
“Is this all for us?” he asked in a quiet voice.
“I’m pretty sure,” I answered. “How come you didn’t get an exemption?”
Mason shrugged. “I wasn’t in the mood. What do you guess all the mats are for?”
“Somersaults.”
“Can you do one?” he asked.
I remembered that Mason hadn’t been there to witness the dog harness.
I nodded. I did think I could, actually. As I said before, it’s all physics.
“Good.” Mason nodded slowly. “How about jumping hurdles?”
“Not my specialty,” I said.
“That’s what I figured. Trampoline?”
“Don’t know.”
“I bet not good,” Mason said.
“Probably not,” I agreed. I wasn’t insulted by all this, though. Mason didn’t seem to be making fun of me. The whole time he’d been eyeing the equipment thoughtfully, as though he were working something out.
“Those tires, the ones standing upright, are the things that worry me the most though,” he said.
“Really?” I said, surprised. There were four of the tires standing up and permanently fixed to a plank of wood. “Don’t worry. You’ll crawl through those, no problem.”
Mason looked at me. I was getting so used to the evil genius side of his face that now I could even figure out its expressions. At the moment it looked like it couldn’t believe how thickheaded I was.
“I’m not nervous for me, I’m nervous for
you,”
he said. “You’ll
never
squeeze through those tires. In fact, I could see you getting wedged in there and not being able to get out. I’m sure Wooly thought of that too.”
I took a better look at the tires. I hadn’t thought about them too much because they looked so harmless compared to the rest of the stuff. Mason was right. The centers were small, so small that some of the average-sized kids in the class would have a hard time fitting through. As you are well aware, I am not average size.
“See,” Mason continued, “he put them at the end of the obstacle course. It’s like the grand finale, you getting stuck in there.”
“Holy crap, you’re right.” That was just what Wooly would do! “How did you know that?”
“I’ve dealt with people like him before. Worse than him.” Mason said grimly. “So here’s how you handle this. You do the somersaults. You do the hurdles. You’ll knock them over but lots of people do, just try not to fall on your face. The trampoline is going to be tricky. No matter what you do, people are going to laugh at you while you’re on it. Fat kid bouncing around, you know. Make one really good bounce, and when you hit the trampoline, start screaming that you’ve hurt your ankle. It happens all the time. Even Wooly won’t try and make you keep going if you’re injured, and you’ll have gotten through at least half of the obstacle course without making a total fool of yourself. It will be bad, I’m not going to lie, but at least you’ll avoid getting stuck in those tires.”
I stared at him in astonishment. His eyes shot away from mine.
“Let’s just say I’ve spent most of my life avoiding humiliation,” he muttered by way of an explanation.
I couldn’t help it. Thoughts of werewolves went through my mind.
I wasn’t astonished at his plan, though, as good as it was. I was astonished that he had thought this all out for
me
! He had shown up for gym even though he didn’t have to, and faced with Wooly’s diabolical obstacle course, he was more concerned about me than he was about himself.
Personally, I was beginning to think that Mason Ragg might be a little like The Fonz. Tough on the outside but heart of gold on the inside. Practically the very next second, the gym door opened and in marched Arthur. No kidding. It was like she had ultrasonic hearing for anything related to The Fonz and would appear on the spot if someone even thought about him. Stranger still, she was dressed in a boy’s gym uniform—white T-shirt, blue shorts. Right behind her was Jennifer Crawford, a.k.a. Benjamin, then came Emmie Wiltshire, a.k.a. Robert, then Chantal Samms, a.k.a. George, then three more members of GWAB whose names I didn’t know. They were all dressed in boys’ uniforms. I don’t know where they got them from, but except for Arthur, they didn’t fit the GWAB members very well. Then came Sybil Tushman with her camcorder. Last of all came Jeremy. I knew she would be there, of course. It came to me in a flash that this was The Blue and White Rebellion they had been plotting (blue and white being the colors of the gym uniforms), and now I realized with horror that she was going to watch Wooly wipe the floor with me. And so were her friends. If she was ashamed of me before this, she was going to want to disown me as a brother after this debacle.
Jeremy’s gym uniform was so big that the shorts reached below her knees, and the T-shirt was almost as long as the shorts. But what shocked me, what made me literally suck back my breath in a gasp, was her hair. The long red mane that she had always refused to cut because our mother had loved it so much had been completely lopped off. Her hair was as short as a boy’s. It struck me as the final betrayal. With a few bold snips of the scissors, she had cut us all out, along with her hair—Mom, Dad. Me.
Still, I didn’t think she looked very happy as she followed the others to the back end of the gym where we all stood, gawping at them (for the moment, everyone had forgotten about me and Mason and every head was riveted to the GWAB parade). Her head was lowered and her eyebrows were pinched together. She looked mad. Fighting mad. By comparison, the other girls just looked like they were pretending to be angry, but mostly they looked self-conscious as they stood in a clump by the rest of us, tugging at their badly fitting uniforms.
Suddenly I had two thoughts:
1. Watch out, Arthur. Jeremy is going to become the president of GWAB in no time.
2. The Blue and White Rebellion might actually save the day. Wooly was going to have to deal with them, and that would eat up precious pain-and-suffering time that he’d allotted for me and Mason.
I considered donating a charitable contribution to the organization.
Like the rest of us, Mr. Wooly watched the members of GWAB in bewildered silence. Then he collected himself and boomed:
“Excuse me, ladies!”
Our class was so used to being called “ladies” that all our heads turned toward him. So he made a lassoing motion with his arm in the direction of the GWAB members and clarified things by saying, “You lot! The girls in boys’ uniforms! Out!” His invisible lasso was now tossed toward the gym doors.
Arthur stepped forward. It wasn’t a big step and it probably should have been. She started saying something. I was pretty sure it was the speech that they had been working on. Unfortunately, no one could hear what she was saying.
“I can’t hear what you’re saying,” Mr. Wooly said.