The (Almost) Perfect Guide To Imperfect Boys (20 page)

“Prong,” I corrected Dad, as he pried the fly bits off the sticky paper with the same fork I'd used to poke holes. I watched while he lowered the fly food into the jar. No way was Prong going to eat that junk, I decided. Not when it was so sticky and gross-smelling.

On the other hand,
I thought,
huh.
This flypaper stuff worked. It did catch bugs.

Just the way frogs caught bugs with their sticky tongues. A scientific fact you could look up online, or in the Fulton Middle School library.

And yes, the flypaper was sticky and gross-smelling. But also the right combination of harmless and disgusting. Organic, too.

Soooo . . . in other words, perfect.

The totally perfect froggy-themed payback!

Woo-hoo!

I twirled around the kitchen while Dad looked at me with an expression like,
Middle school girls. Sheesh.

• • •

That night Mom wrote a blog post about how boys thought in straight lines (you use a fork to poke holes in a jar lid, so your son names the new pet frog Prong). Whereas girls, according to her, thought in squiggles—you
were pretty sure you could follow the direction of their thought process, when suddenly, oops, the next thing you know, boys are leaving them frogs in pizza boxes and they're baking warts on cookie sheets.

I mean, that was the gist. Mom titled the post “Lines and Squiggles.” She asked for comments, but I forced myself not to write anything
(Excuse me? Squiggles? What? Love, Awesome Daughter)
.

Instead what I did was text Maya, Hanna, and Olivia:
Meet at lockers @ 7am tmrw.
I knew they'd assume we needed time to glue on the warts, so they wouldn't question the early arrival.

On Wednesday morning, I scribbled Mom and Dad a note to say I needed to get to school early “for my science project.” Then I peeled a banana for breakfast and checked on Prong. Somehow he/she had made it through the night, even without sampling any fly cuisine.

Well,
I told Prong as I put the jar back on the kitchen counter,
I hope you like pet-store bugs better. And spring is just a few weeks away, so hang in there, okay?

On the way out, I grabbed all dozen boxes of flypaper and crammed them into one of Mom's cotton tote bags.

By the time I got to school, Maya, Olivia and Hanna were waiting at my locker. Surprisingly, Dahlia Ringgold and Sophie Yang were there too.

“They want to join the festivities,” Maya explained, grinning. “I told them there were warts involved, and they just said, ‘Yay, we love warts.' ”

“We did,” Sophie insisted. “We do.”

“And the boys, it's really
so obnoxious
,” Dahlia added. “It's just like, I don't know. The way they're acting.” She shook her head.

“Great,” I said. “The more the merrier. Except we're not doing the warts.”

Maya's face fell. “Oh no. You couldn't make them?”

“No, I could. I even baked a whole batch. But I thought of something even better. Voilà.”

I dumped the boxes of flypaper on the floor.

“We'll decorate lockers,” I said. “With sticky, gross-smelling flypaper.
Which catches bugs exactly like a frog tongue
,” I added, in case anyone wasn't following.

“Whoa,” Olivia said. “That's definitely payback.”

And Dahlia said, “I mean it's just so incredibly . . .” Her eyes popped.

“Um, Finley?” Hanna said slowly. “Not to wimp
out on you or anything, but don't you think this may be a little . . . extreme?” She exchanged glances with Olivia. “I mean, except for the water bottle, which I agree was totally over the line, all the boys did was croak and ribbit. And wear green clothes and goggles. But seriously,
flypaper
 . . . ?”

“They dumped a frog on my front step,” I announced. “A cute little helpless
frog
, Hanna. In a dirty old pizza box.”

“What?”
Maya said.

“Yesterday afternoon. We put it in a jar.”

Maya was literally jumping. “That's APPALLING.”

“I know, right?” I said. “My baby brother named it Prong. It's extremely adorable, by the way.”

“Okay,” Hanna said. “Dumping a frog was wrong, I'm not arguing. But the thing is, you guys, I agreed to warts. I
thought
of warts. And putting that flypaper stuff on people's lockers is sort of vandalism.”

“Oh, but it's not,” I protested. “It's actually the
opposite
of vandalism; if it attracts bugs, it's helping the janitors
clean the school
, if you think about it. Plus this flypaper is one hundred percent safe, organic, and nontoxic,” I added, pointing to the box.

“Except to the bugs,” Olivia said.

“Well, yes. Except to the bugs.”

“I don't know,” Hanna said, sighing.

“Well, you don't have to decide anything right now, anyway,” I said. Before anyone else, specifically Olivia, could agree with Hanna, I explained that it didn't make sense to attach the flypaper before the end of the school day; if we wanted maximum bug attraction, it needed to work overnight.

I unzipped my backpack and revealed a box of graham crackers, some marshmallows, and some Hershey bars, all the leftovers from the s'mores. After we'd decorated certain lockers with flypaper, I said, we'd sprinkle a few crumbs on the sticky surfaces for good measure. Because one thing I'd remembered from Green Girls campouts—bugs appreciated sugar as much as we did.

“Hee hee, fabutastic,” Maya said. “This is so sick, Finley. I love it!” And then she did a perfect cartwheel.

• • •

The real challenge was getting through the school day without letting the boys know anything was up. So when they croaked at us—which they did constantly, sometimes softly, sometimes loudly, especially in the hallways—we had to act like we couldn't hear, didn't
notice, didn't care. And I know people say,
Oh, just ignore it
, when someone teases or bullies, but that's pretty worthless advice, if you ask me. When almost the entire grade of boys is ribbiting whenever you walk past, ignoring is not an option. But you can
pretend
to ignore it—at least, you can fake-ignore it for a few hours.

Plus I could tell Zachary was waiting for me to say something about yesterday's frog delivery—confront him, maybe yell at him, try again to “talk.” But I resisted all of the above. I had to sit next to Zachary in science and Spanish, but I didn't have to look at him, I told myself. Or smell his laundry detergent. Or peek at his drawings. Or even listen to his foot going
tap-tap-tap
and wonder if he was nervous about something, and what that something could be. Considering he was the Croaker hero, general of the Croaker army, it was pretty hard to imagine what he could be nervous about. Not that I cared, anyway.

• • •

At basketball practice, Sabrina Leftwich said it was her duty as captain to give the team a pep talk. Except it wasn't a pep talk at all. It was more like a rant:
It's really upsetting to me, you guys, when I feel like I'm the only one
who's giving my all at practice, while some of you
—here she made eye contact with me—
are not totally committed to the team, lalala
. Sophie Yang (who up until this morning I'd assumed was a generic Chloe-team follower) made a noise like barfing. And it was really impressive, because she did it without moving her mouth or even changing her expression.

When Sabrina finally finished ranting, Sophie, Dahlia, and I raced to the lockers. Hanna had decided not to do the flypaper; she'd be the lookout, she said, which I realized was a good idea. The school was surprisingly busy at that hour, and we needed to be sure no one would walk by while we decorated.

Meanwhile, Maya was wrestling with the flypaper boxes. “Finally!” she shouted at us. “What took you guys so long? I've been trying to open these without getting stuck.”

“Slow down,” I told her. “First we should probably decide which lockers we're decorating.”

“Zachary's,” Maya said right away.

Everyone nodded.
Ooh, yeah. Definitely Zachary's!

“Drew and Ben,” Olivia said. “Jarret and Kyle.”

“Jonathan Pressman,” Dahlia said. Then she laughed. “Wyeth Brockman.”

“What? No,” I blurted.

“No?” Maya squinted at me. “You're vetoing Wyeth? Seriously?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I'll explain later, okay?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “Fine. Then I'm vetoing Dylan.”

I would have said,
Oh, but Dylan is different from Wyeth. Wyeth is not a
crush;
he's just a nice kid who was nice to me when I needed niceness.
But we didn't have time for one of our big Finley-Maya arguments. I carefully ripped open a box.

“Gug,” Olivia said, her face pinching. “That stuff smells like nail-polish remover.”

“To me it smells like rotting apples,” I said cheerfully. “Let's start with Zachary.”

The hard part was figuring how to attach it. Flypaper, it turned out, was supposed to be suspended from the ceiling, just sort of fluttering in the breeze as bugs drunkenly crashed into it. And we definitely wanted that bug-catching effect, but we also wanted to wrap the door of Zachary's locker, the way I'd wrapped Maya's for her birthday. So in the end what we did was coil five flypapers into a big messy blob and make a sort of abstract art-sculpture thingy, a tangle of
rotting-apple stickiness that would need to be pried off with an ice pick. Really, it looked so impressive that I was sorry I hadn't brought my camera.

The other boys' lockers we did much faster—just one flypaper roll per locker door, twisted in a sort of free-form squashed pretzel. And we had just finished Jarret's door when I realized that Maya wasn't standing with us there to admire it.

“Where's Maya?” I said.

“She said she needed to step out for a minute,” Hanna answered. Her eyes darted down the hallway. “Please hurry up, you guys, okay? My mom just texted. She said the roads are getting slippery and she's coming to get me.”

I thought it was odd that Maya had taken off without explaining, but it wasn't the most unpredictable thing she'd done lately. We waited another five minutes for her to return, but when we heard teacher voices in the hallway—and one of the voices belonged to Señor Hansen—we decided we couldn't hang around any longer. It was too dangerous. Our lookout was leaving. The roads were getting bad. And truthfully, by then the smell of rotting apples was pretty nauseating.

In Fulton it snows a lot. It doesn't bother us, usually—we plow the roads, shovel our driveways, dress in plenty of layers. And because we're all so expert at dealing with snow, we never get snow days. Except that Thursday they declared an
ice
day, on account of slippery roads that the school-bus company called a hazard.

To me this was torture. For the first time ever in the history of school attendance I was desperate to go—but I consoled myself with the thought that the extra day meant extra bugs on the boys' lockers.

That morning my cell rang four times. First Olivia
called to repeat everything that had happened yesterday (“And wasn't it smart for Hanna to stand guard at the lockers? And wasn't it weird how Maya just disappeared?”). Then Drew Looper called to croak, followed by Zachary and someone who snickered like Jarret, so that meant it was either Jarret or Kyle. Possibly both.
How weird the world has gotten,
I thought.
Ice day in Fulton. Zachary croaking with his former nemesis. Nemeses,
if that was the plural.

“Aren't you guys sick of croaking?” I said to them. “Can't you come up with
anything
more creative? I mean, seriously, it's like you're not even trying.”

No answer.

So I hung up.

Then Maya called.

“Ice day,” she said happily. “Can you believe it, Finley?”

“I'm capable of believing anything at this point,” I told her. “Zachary and Jarret just called me together, which I'm pretty sure means it's the Apocalypse.”

“They
called
you?”

“Just to ribbit. So where did you go yesterday?”

“It's a surprise,” Maya answered.

“It is? You mean for me?”

“Not for
you
, but I'm sure you'll like it. Can I say something?”

“No one could stop you, Maya.”

“True.” She breathed into the phone. “Okay. So when we were decorating the lockers yesterday? It made me think how I trashed your birthday collage. But I only did that because you hurt my feelings.”

“I know,” I said. “I wasn't even mad about it. Besides, it was time. The paper was getting all scraggly.”

“Yeah, a little. But I'm still sorry I threw it in the trash. It was beautiful.” She sighed. “Anyhow, I'm just so glad we finally stopped fighting. And that you stopped being such a boy wimp.”

Here we go again,
I thought.
A hug and a pinch. Maya acting superior.

On the other hand, I realized she was right—I'd been a sort of boy wimp, boringly sitting on my lily pad. And now here I was devising payback. So what she said was actually a compliment.

“Um, thank you,” I said.

“Um, you're welcome,” she replied.

Then my text-message sound went off. It was from Zachary and it said:
ribbitribbit
.

• • •

On Friday morning, Mrs. Lopez drove Maya and me to school. We wanted to be sure to get there early, so we wouldn't miss anyone's reaction. I even brought my camera, because something told me the boys wouldn't be doing generic yearbook-type expressions when they witnessed their sticky lockers.