The Worst Class Trip Ever (15 page)

The point is, the look on the D.C. taxi driver’s face was reminding me a lot of the look on the New York taxi driver’s face when he realized my dad wasn’t going to give him a
tip. Except my situation was worse, because I didn’t even have enough money for the
fare
.

“Is there a problem?” said the driver.

“Um,” I said. I have a way with words.

My phone burped up another Suzana text:

meet under big butt

What?

“You owe me eighteen seventy-two,” the driver said, pointing to the meter.

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “We don’t actually have the total amount.”

“How much do you have?”

I held out my hand with the money and Skittles in it. “We have nine sixty-three.”

“I might have some more Skittles,” said Matt.

Yes, he actually said that. He probably thought it would lighten up the situation. He was wrong.

“You think this is funny?” the driver said. “You think this is a joke?”

“No,” I said. “I’m really sor—”

“THIS IS NOT A JOKE. THIS IS STEALING!”

“Look,” I said, “if you give me your address, I swear I’ll send you the money.”

“No!” said the driver. “You are thieves!” He opened his door and got out.

“What’s he doing?” said Matt.

“I don’t know,” I said. Then I saw a police car parked a little ways up the street. The taxi driver was walking toward it.

“Oh no,” I said. “He’s going to tell the cops.”

“What do we do?”

I was already opening the door. “We run,” I said.

I got out of the taxi. The driver looked back, saw us, and yelled. I took off running toward the Ellipse with Matt right behind me. I could hear the driver shouting for the police but I
didn’t turn around. I felt pretty awful; the driver was right, and we were wrong. Maybe some day I could explain to him about the Gadakistan guys and Cameron and the White House and
everything. But this was not a good time.

We ran into the kite festival, trying to lose ourselves in the crowd, which was pretty huge. I stopped and looked back and didn’t see the taxi driver. Now we had to find Suzana and Victor.
I pulled out my phone and read Suzana’s text again:

meet under big butt

“Okay,” I said to Matt. “Do you see a big butt?”

“That’s one’s pretty big,” he said, pointing to a lady in jeans who did, in fact, have a major butt.

“I don’t think that’s what she means,” I said. “I think she means a kite.”

We looked up at the sky, which was full of kites, all sizes and kinds—birds, bats, butterflies, fish, serpents, squids, angels, planes, rockets, random shapes—swooping around in the
wind. They went on and on, all the way across the Ellipse. But I didn’t see anything that looked like…

“A butt!” said Matt, pointing. “Over there!”

I looked, and there it was, hovering at the far end of the Ellipse—a set of naked buttocks the size of a UPS truck.

We ran, dodging through the crowd, until we were under the butt, where a lot of people were taking pictures of it and selfies with it hovering behind them. A few yards away were the guys flying
the butt. They looked like college students, which makes sense, from what I have heard about college students.

“Wyatt!”

I turned and saw Suzana running toward me, with Victor behind.

“We found them,” she said.

“The Gadakistan guys?”

“Yeah. They’re over there.” She pointed. I looked and spotted them through crowd, maybe fifty yards away. The big guy was pretty easy to pick out.

“Where’s the dragon kite?” I said.

“It’s still on the ground. Guess what else they have.”

“What?”

“A little portable TV. Victor snuck close and got a look. It’s tuned to C-SPAN.”

“What’s C-SPAN?” said Matt.

“It’s a TV channel that shows government things,” said Suzana.

“Why would anybody want to watch that?” said Matt.

“Well, I can guess why these guys want to,” said Suzana. “They’re watching to see when the president and the Gadakistan leader, whatshisname…”

“Brevalov,” said Victor.

“Right, him,” said Suzana. “They’re gonna watch C-SPAN and see when they come out of the White House for the press conference in the Rose Garden. That’s when
they’ll launch their kite. Except we’re going to stop them.”

“By telling the police?” I said.

She shook her head. “They won’t believe us. Look at what happened when we told Mr. Barto and Miss Rector.”

“Yeah, but now they can see the Gadakistan guys, right there. So they’ll know we’re telling the truth.”

“Wyatt, they’ll see two guys with a big kite. On a field full of people with big kites.”

She had a point.

“So what
are
we going to do?”

“We’re going to watch them until they’re getting ready to put their kite up. Then we’re going to jump them.”

“Jump them.”

“Yes.”

“As in physically jump on them.”

“Yes.”

“Suzana, the one guy, he’s big. He’s
really
big.”

“Yes, but there are four of us. We jump on them and yell and just generally make it impossible for them to fly their kite. The police will probably come, and they might even arrest us, but
at that point it won’t matter, because they won’t be able to launch their kite in time. The only thing I’m worried about is Cameron. We don’t see him here, and we
don’t know where he is.”

“He called me,” I said.

“Cameron did? When?”

“A little while ago. He was using Matt’s phone.”

“Where is he? Did he get out?”

“I don’t know. Before he could tell me anything, the battery died.”

“But he must be out of that house, right? If he called you?”

“I guess. But here’s the thing: He said we made a bad mistake.”

“What? What mistake?”

“The battery died before he could tell me.”

“Well do you have any idea?”

“Maybe he meant we shouldn’t have let them get the laser jammer back.”

“You think?”

“I can’t really come up with anything else that would be really
bad
. Like blow-up-the-White-House bad.”

Suzana nodded. “That makes sense. We really have to stop those guys.”

“Then we really better get going,” said Victor. “Because they’re about to launch their kite.”

W
e all looked through the crowd. Victor was right: the big guy was holding the end of a rope attached to the dragon and backing away. The little
guy was standing next to the dragon, fiddling with it.

“Come on!” said Suzana. As usual, she didn’t wait to see if anybody agreed with her. She just took off running. As usual, the rest of us followed her. She was running like a
crazy person, waving her arms and yelling. People were getting out of her way. I was sprinting as hard as I could to keep up, zigzagging through the crowd.

Then I heard a yell and, out of the corner of my right eye, saw something coming at me.

I was tackled and landed facedown, hard enough to have the wind knocked out of me. Someone was sitting on my back, shouting “Thief!”

The taxi driver
. The maniac must have been looking for me and Matt. He was not in a good mood.

I rolled sideways and managed to get out from under him and stagger to my feet. He grabbed my arm and was still shouting about me being a thief. I was trying to talk to him, but I couldn’t
catch my breath. Matt and Victor had stopped and were yelling at him to let me go. There was a lot of yelling going on. A crowd of people had formed around us; I think they were confused about what
was happening. I was yanking my arm as hard as I could but the taxi driver, who was a little guy but strong, would
not
let go. I was still gasping for air, trying to explain that I would get
him his money if he would just let me go for a minute so I could go help my friend. But he had me in his grip, and I felt totally helpless as well as breathless, knowing that I had messed up yet
again, and left Suzana out there taking on the bad guys all alone.

Except she wasn’t. I found that out when I heard her yelling “GET OUT OF THE WAY,” and then saw her bust through the crowd headed straight for me and the taxi driver.

You have probably never heard of hong fo. It’s a martial art, like karate, kung fu, and tae kwon do, except supposedly harder to learn and just generally more martial. Well it turned out
that, in addition to everything else, Suzana was a student of hong fo, and although she was fairly new to it, she had learned an attack move, involving both punching and kicking, named The Raptor,
after those really mean dinosaurs with like nineteen thousand teeth that ate a bunch of people in
Jurassic Park
. Suzana executed The Raptor on the taxi driver, who never saw what was coming.
One second he was gripping my arm and calling me a thief, and the next second he was lying on the ground holding his head.

“Come on,” said Suzana. She grabbed me and pulled me through the crowd. People were getting out of her way, and I didn’t blame them.

“Who
was
that guy?” she called over her shoulder.

“A taxi driver,” I panted, still trying to get my breath. “We owe him eighteen seventy-two. Plus tip.”

“You didn’t
pay
him?”

“We didn’t have enough money. You don’t have twenty bucks you could lend me, do you?”

She looked back at me. It was not an admiring look. “
Now?
Are you
serious?
”

“I just thought—”

“LATER!” She was already running again, and once again I was following her. We’d lost Victor and Matt, who were stuck back in the mob around the taxi driver. Up ahead, to the
right, the big guy—who was wearing some kind of headset with a microphone—had stretched the rope to its entire length. To the left the little guy, who was also wearing a headset, was
lifting up the body of the dragon and then lowering it over himself, so only his legs were showing.

“You grab the kite!” Suzana shouted, pointing toward the little guy. “I’ll get him.” She veered toward the big guy. Just her. Alone. I don’t think I ever felt
lamer than at that moment, turning left toward a guy who was no bigger than me while Suzana turned right and ran full speed straight toward a guy the size of a building.

But I did turn left.

The big guy started running with the rope, pulling the dragon. While at the same moment the little guy, under the dragon, ran along with him. They were heading into the wind. I could see the
dragon starting to lift.

Suzana, who like I said is a very fast runner, caught up with the big guy and launched herself into the air, planning to execute The Raptor. She looked pretty good right up until the moment when
she hit the big guy. She bounced of him like a Ping-Pong ball colliding with a cement truck. The big guy kept right on running with the rope. I’m not sure he even noticed that Suzana Raptored
him. It was shocking to see.
Suzana actually failed at something
.

Which meant now it was up to me.

Except I’m not as fast as Suzana, and I wasn’t sure I was going to get to the little guy before he launched the kite. He picked up speed, and the big dragon lifted higher; I could
see most of the little guy’s body now. In a few seconds he’d let go of the kite, and I’d be too late to grab it. I veered right a little, trying to get the best angle. Just a few
feet to go…

Then the little guy shouted something and the dragon suddenly rose, and I knew I wasn’t going to get there in time.

Except he didn’t let go.
He stayed inside the dragon and rose with it, his legs off the ground now, dangling down. In an instant I realized what their plan was: The little guy was
going to
ride the kite over the White House fence
. He would operate the laser thing to jam the White House defense missiles, and detonate the bomb, or whatever they planned to do.

Unless I stopped him.

I still don’t totally believe what I did next. Later on I saw a video of it, taken on a phone by a guy at the kite festival, and if I do say so myself it was pretty impressive. I sped up,
took two long steps, and dove forward like a football player making a tackle, and somehow I managed to get my arms around the little guy’s legs. He screamed something in
Gadakistani—probably not “Nice to see you again”—and kicked hard with both feet. It hurt, but I hung on. That was the good news. The bad news was,
the dragon kite was
still rising
.