The Nerdy Dozen #2 (2 page)

Nebula dimmed the lights, and the giant ceiling was illuminated with stars.

“Class, above you'll see the night sky as viewed through our telescope,” Nebula said. “You can see how much more of the cosmos is visible without light pollution.”

Neil watched as a comet or asteroid passed above. It cut through the sky in a bright slash.

“Was that an asteroid?” questioned Tyler.

“It could be,” replied Nebula. “An asteroid last hit Earth sixty-six million years ago, and many scientists believe a crater in Mexico, just off the coast, is the mark of this impact. It wiped out any dinosaurs that were unable to fly,” answered Nebula.

I wonder if Sam's heard of that crater. I'm sure she has. . . .

Neil missed talking with Sam daily and hearing her spout off all the random space knowledge bouncing around her brain.

“What's the crater called?” Neil asked.

“Will it happen again?” asked someone in a comfy chair behind Neil.

“Are you stupid? Of course it can't ever happen again. We'd blow it up before it even gets close,” said Tommy.

“Chicxulub. The Chicxulub crater,” said Nebula. “Something you can Google tonight after you plant the sapling I'm giving each of you.”

Chicxulub. I'll tell Sam.

Just then a phone ring echoed through the expansive planetarium. Neil froze as he recognized the ringtone that continued to pulse—the one specifically designated for his mother.

Neil realized that while they successfully switched the video feed, he hadn't cut the audio from his game, and it was still being broadcast through the system's speakers. Tommy looked over and caught Neil squirming.

“Hm, well, can't say I've seen this before. If I could have everyone silence their phones, please,” Nebula shouted over the phone ringing. After four beats Neil's phone once again went silent.

But before Neil could silence his phone, a bubbling sound alerted everyone in the planetarium that Neil had a new text. Tommy Scott cracked a devilish smile.

“Phone, read text,” Tommy shouted right at Neil, using Neil's voice commands for evil purposes.

Oh no.

“Ah, ixnay that, phone robot.”

“Reading text from Mom,” a choppy robot voice said over the speakers. “Hey, Neil.”

Tommy Scott turned to Neil with a smug smile.

“Janey's waiting to hear about being an alternate for a big karate tournament this weekend. Just wanted to keep you updated. Love you, Boogercheeks. Mommy.”

Neil wanted to melt into the slanted floor below him. Everyone around him laughed as Tommy Scott high-fived anyone in a four-foot radius.

“Folks, this behavior is strictly against museum policy,” said Nebula through gritted teeth. “Who among you is Boogercheeks? Show yourself! The remainder of the show's been canceled. I'm finding your teacher.”

Wishing he could just disappear, Neil strained his eyes upward toward the live feed of space. His focus was quickly drawn to a bright light. It looked like the asteroid they saw earlier, but it was moving faster and upward. It lingered in sight a bit longer, then sped off in a smooth crescent away from the range of the telescope.

“Hey, what was that flash of light that just happened? That seemed different from that asteroid,” Neil asked Nebula as the houselights were turned back on.

“Probably just space junk, kid,” Nebula snapped. “Now, all of you, head out!”

Neil rushed out of the planetarium before the rest of the class, heading toward the parking lot with their school's bus and past the buffet. He was nearly to a buffet station featuring large pieces of meat being hacked apart under warm lamps when he heard the dense, husky voice of one Tommy Scott.

“Way to go, Night Light,” he shouted at Neil. “Now we have to go back to school. And we don't even get to eat.”

Neil turned away and kept walking, toward what looked to be a dinosaur skeleton made out of rotini. But Tommy wouldn't be ignored as he reached for a fistful of applesauce and flung it at the back of Neil's neck. Neil's back arched from cold shock as the soppy fruit sauce dripped down his back.

“What are you gonna do about it, Night Light?” Tommy snorted.

Neil turned away to avoid anything further, but he felt a blob of pudding splatter on his back.

Okay, not cool.

Neil turned around, staring at Tommy Scott and the two lackeys positioned behind him.

“You know what, applesauce me once, shame on me. But do it twice, ham on you,” Neil said, grabbing a few glistening chunks of carved ham. He tossed them perfectly at Tommy, connecting solidly with his face and chest. While it maybe wasn't his best pun, Neil felt pretty good about it. But after Tommy mopped the cooked meat from his face, the food fight was officially on.

He threw the face ham back at Neil, but it hit a group of kids having lunch with their babysitter. Neil turned to apologize but was greeted with a few handfuls of spaghetti.

“Food fight!” yelled Tyler, who rushed to Neil's side. He slung sliced beets like tiny Frisbees, while ladles full of mashed potatoes flew in all directions. Everyone in the general area, child or not, began firing back. Neil witnessed a full-grown man wearing a shirt with two wolves on it chuck spare ribs at a group of Neil's classmates. Cubes of Jell-O bounced across the floor as Tommy and a goon cranked on the soft-serve ice cream machine.

Tommy let frozen clumps fill his hand before catapulting them Neil's way. Neil grabbed a tray to use as a shield and did his best to deflect the rounds being fired at him. But as the food-launching chaos grew more intense, the ear-piercing shriek of Mr. Rhome's whistle caught everyone's attention. Neil was frozen in mid–Brussels sprout toss.

“Andertol! I can't believe you!” Mr. Rhome shouted, spitting out chicken nuggets. He stood next to Nebula and a middle-aged museum director with wispy black and gray hair. “Sounds like we're gonna have to cancel this trip and leave early because of you! And now this?”

The rest of Neil's classmates groaned as they brushed peas out of their hair.

Neil and Tommy glared at each other as they slowly dropped any edible weaponry.

“And you'll all figure out how to repay damages,” said the museum worker next to Mr. Rhome. “You kids got vanilla soft-serve all over the Neanderthal exhibit. Those cavemen are dry-clean only!”

Neil felt one hundredth his normal size. He had gone from the highest heights of filmed online gaming immortality to the museum's number one public enemy, completely soaked in Thousand Island dressing.

NEIL HOPPED DOWN THE STAIRS OF HIS SCHOOL BUS AND
heard the doors squeak shut. The bus rumbled into gear and drove away in a black cloud of exhaust. From the corner of his eye, he watched a car slowly turn a corner and creep up behind him. Neil cocked his head to see a glossy black vehicle, and his pulse jumped in anticipation. For the last three months, any dark SUV had Neil hoping for another adventure, another burlap sack to be thrown over his head.

As Neil's neighbor rolled by with a cheery wave from her decidedly not-undercover car, he knew it was an ordinary bad day.

I do have gravy still in my sock, so maybe not totally ordinary.

Sunshine peeked over the clouds as Neil followed the street to his house. On his porch, he grasped the front door's handle and pushed, but it was locked.

“Mom! Janey! Open up!” Neil yelled, ringing the doorbell. After a few more fist pounds and no response, Neil turned to the front yard. He grabbed the family's secret rock that housed a key and, currently, two slugs.

Neil pushed open the door and returned the house key to the fake rock.

“Hello? Anybody?” Neil asked to no response, stepping into the kitchen. “I also just want to get this out of the way, but there's a good chance I'm banned for life from the museum.”

No one replied.

He saw a sticky note clinging to the hood above the stove, and Neil could hear his mother's hurried tone as she scribbled:

Hi, honey, Janey was accepted into the karate tournament I called you about—woo-hoo!

Neil shook his head and ate an angry bite of cereal, wondering if starting tomorrow he would be known as Boogercheeks to the entire eighth grade, and possibly ninth.

It's an hour north, so we had to get on the road. We'll be back Sunday, and Dad should be, too, but his site needed him to work through the weekend somewhere in Montana. The sitter should be there around five. Love you, Mom.

“A sitter? Aw, man,” Neil said to the stove. That meant hanging out with a community college sophomore named Vanessa, who refused to let Neil play video games all night. She used phrases like “Your brain needs to be engaged” and “Video games rot your third eye.” Neil despised Vanessa weekends, and he couldn't wait until he could stay at home alone. His mother always promised he could when he turned fourteen, and his winter birthday couldn't come soon enough.

“Skeeroonk!”

An animal squawk rang out from the backyard.

“Okay, okay, Regina,” Neil said, shaking his head as he scurried toward the sound. He spilled out from the back door toward a small fenced-in area tucked between two seven-foot-tall hedges.

Neil squished through the foliage and opened a gate in the fence to reveal a tiny ostrich, complete with a full house and habitat. She was much shorter than the ones Neil had seen—and ridden—on his mission to a South Pacific island chain, because she was still young. She had arrived that summer as a large speckled egg, in a wooden crate from Harris. Neil took it as Harris's way of apologizing for the whole “stealing top secret intel to become the kingpin of the video game underworld” ordeal. Neil's mother and father took it as an attempt to kill all the grass on their lawn.

He had fibbed, telling them it was a class pet that grew too big for the classroom and that he had been selected as its lucky caretaker. Neil knew this would buy him enough time to figure out where he could house a fully grown ostrich.

“Hi, Regina,” Neil said to the tiny animal. She cocked her head and pecked at the ground. “I'm not gonna reach my hand in there for a while. You almost took a pinkie off the other day. I've got a big match that's going to start soon.”

Neil tossed two handfuls of Grade A ostrich pellets into Regina's cage and filled her water dish. She spread her wings and flapped them a couple times.

“See you later, Regina,” he said, and he turned back to his house. He grabbed a juice from the kitchen and bounded up his carpeted stairs with a grin. He pressed a button on his white controller and jolted his console out of sleep mode. His in-box held a total of three new messages. Neil clicked on the first, an audio message from Sam. It was her first in weeks: “Going to get another practice session in with Fury, may be a bit late for the team game. Excited to play!”

Neil smiled. It was good to hear that familiar voice of Sam's. The very one Neil took to be a boy's for roughly a year.

He looked at a disc labeled
SHUTTLE FURY
and contemplated playing it. It was the game that NASA had sent to all the kids after the success of their first mission. But it just wasn't . . . fun.

Tomorrow
, Neil said to himself, like he did every night.

It's not that he hadn't
tried
to beat it; he just got beyond frustrated with the space simulator. The clunky graphics looked at least ten years old, the ship itself didn't do any cool tricks, and the game itself was too hard—Neil never had trouble beating games after enough time, but he couldn't seem to figure out this one's secrets.

Neil grabbed the Shuttle Fury disc and sighed deeply before moving it toward his gaming console. He placed it on the end table next to his favorite comfy chair and perched his juice box on top.

At least the game works as a coaster.

With ten minutes until the big game, Neil opened his next unread message, a video from Biggs: “Hey, Neil! Sorry, but gonna have to bail on the game tonight. We'll play again soon, though,” he said, nodding and smiling into the camera. “Just heard about a big lecture on carp destroying the ecosystem, and I can't miss it. This is my Christmas.”

Neil shrugged his shoulders and laughed. While he was upset the big game would no longer happen with everyone, he couldn't stay mad. But as the minutes edged along toward game time, nobody else seemed to be logging on. Neil listened for the familiar notifications alerting him of his friends signing on, but he only heard the whirring fan inside his game console. Where was everybody?

The doorbell rang, echoing through the empty house. Neil sighed. His friends can't show up on time, but of course the babysitter is early.

He walked slowly to the front door, dragging his feet to savor his freedom, knowing he would soon be under the control of Vanessa.

He unlatched the dead bolt and pulled the door open.

“Hey, Vanessa,” Neil mumbled, trying to turn back around and head upstairs quickly. He figured he could grab two days' worth of food and juice in his arms and lock himself in his room until Sunday, relieving himself out of an open window every few hours or so.

But when he heard the gravelly-sounding voice of a man, Neil turned back to face the doorway.

“You were expecting a babysitter, Andertol?” Major Jones said, spitting sunflower seed shells into Neil's front yard. “Come on. We need your help. Again.”