The Worst Class Trip Ever (2 page)

And it turned out that being nerdy was pretty handy on the class trip.

The trip was for the Culver eighth-grade civics classes. Every year they go to Washington, D.C. This year there were forty-seven kids on the trip, plus two teachers and eight parent
chaperones.

The teachers were Mr. Arnold Barto and Miss Christine Rector. Mr. Barto is my civics teacher, and he’s a good enough guy, but he forgets stuff. I mean, a
lot
of stuff. Like,
he’ll say, “Today we’re going to cover the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution.” And we’ll be like, “We already covered that.” And he’s like,
“We did? When?” And we’re like, “Last year, in seventh grade.” And he’s like, “Wait, you aren’t seventh grade?” And we’re like,
“No, we’re eighth grade.” And he’ll look at us and blink like he just noticed us, and go, “Oh, right.”

You probably think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. He’s a good teacher, but his brain works kind of backward. Unless something happened two hundred years ago, he can’t
remember it.

I never had a class with Miss Rector, but a lot of kids like her. She’s pretty, for a teacher, and she’s smart. I was glad she was one of the teachers in charge of the Washington
trip, because if Mr. Barto was in charge all by himself we’d have probably ended up in Brazil. Although looking back on it, that might have been better.

The chaperones were six moms and two dads, and the most important thing about them was, none of them was
my
mom or dad. I mean, I love my mom and dad, most of the time, but the older I
get, the more I like to love them from a distance, if you know what I mean.

The class trip left early in the morning from the Miami airport. My parents dropped me off. My dad gave me some money and told me to spend it wisely, referring to the time in fourth grade when
my class went to the Seaquarium and my dad gave me five dollars and I used it to buy five bags of Cheez-Its from a vending machine and I ate them all and on the way back to school I threw up orange
glop all over the bus. My mom hugged me really hard and told me she loved me very much, and she was going to miss me, and if I did anything stupid in Washington she would kill me.

When the parents were gone Mr. Barto gathered all the kids and chaperones together for a little speech. He told us that it was a privilege for us to be on this trip to Washington and he expected
us to be on our very best behavior as ambassadors representing Culver Middle School. That was when Cameron Frank farted. He’s one of those kids who can fart whenever he wants to. His insides
must be like 75 percent gas. Sometimes I think he could actually explode.

A bunch of kids laughed, and Mr. Barto glared at us and said that if we thought he was going to tolerate those kind of shenanigans—he actually said “shenanigans”—we were
sadly mistaken, and he would not hesitate to send troublemakers home, and did he make himself clear?

Everybody was quiet for about ten seconds while Mr. Barto looked around at us with a look that I guess was supposed to be scary. Then Cameron Frank farted again.

This time everybody laughed. Even the chaperones were trying not to crack up. Mr. Barto said a few more strict things, but I think he realized he was losing us, so he clapped his hands and said,
“All right, let’s go!” He started marching off, wearing his humongous backpack, like he was a general leading us into battle, except he was going the wrong direction. Miss Rector
had to catch him and aim him the right way.

That was how we started our class trip.

We went through security and walked to the gate. I was technically walking with Matt Diaz and some other kids who are my friends, but I was trying to walk near Suzana Delgado.

I really, really like Suzana Delgado, who is the most beautiful girl in the eighth grade and probably the world. She has like 183 million Instagram followers. She’s also really smart and
funny and pretty nice for somebody that beautiful. Basically she’s perfect, except for her height, which is: tall. Or at least taller than me. I’m kind of short. Okay, I’m not
“kind of” short. I’m short. My mom claims everybody in our family started out short and I’ll wind up normal, but that doesn’t do me any good now.

The thing I wanted to do, more than anything else in the world, was to date Suzana Delgado. But I couldn’t ask her. Not because she was tall, but because she was dating Jean-Philippe
Dumas, better known as J.P., who’s in the French program. He’s also tall, even taller than Suzana. Sometimes I look at him, standing around being tall without even trying, and I want to
kill him, except he could definitely beat me up.

My plan was to wait for J.P. and Suzana to break up, and then see if she would date me. The problem was, they were like a permanent couple. When we went on the class trip, they’d been
dating for nearly five weeks, which I think was a Culver Middle School record. But I still tried to talk to Suzana or text her whenever I could think of a reason.

Like, we were in the same math class, so every school night I’d text her to ask what the math homework was. The truth was, I already knew the math homework, and pretty soon she figured
that out. But she went along with it, and it turned into kind of a joke, her making up funny answers. Like she’d say the math homework was to figure out the square root of a hamster, stuff
like that. Sometimes we’d even make jokes about it in school, talking in person. I definitely think she liked me. But she was still dating J.P. And he was still tall.

So anyway, we got to our gate and stood around for a while, me standing near Suzana but not actually saying anything to her. When it was time to get on the plane, Mr. Barto told us we all had to
go to straight our assigned seats, which we all did, except for Mr. Barto, who went straight to the completely wrong seat and had to be steered to the right one by Miss Rector.

I was in a middle seat next to Matt Diaz, who had a window seat on the left side of the plane. On my other side, unfortunately, was Cameron “Gas Attack” Frank. Suzana was two rows
behind me with two of her friends. In the row between us were an old lady and two guys, probably in their thirties. One of them was short, with really long stringy hair that looked like seaweed,
wearing sunglasses and a backpack and purple Crocs, which you don’t usually see on a grown man. He had the window seat behind Matt. The other one was very big and very bald. He was wearing a
black T-shirt, and he had huge arms with some kind of snakes tattooed on them. He was carrying a long black duffel bag, which he spent like five minutes trying to stuff into the overhead luggage
space, holding up all the people trying to get to their seats. Finally one of the flight attendants, who was eighty jillion years old and probably was a flight attendant for the Wright brothers,
came back and told the bald guy he would have to check the bag.

“No!” he said, like really angry. “It will fit!” He had some kind of accent, but not Spanish. He pushed the bag really hard and got it to go in. The flight attendant gave
him a look, but didn’t say anything. He looked like a guy you didn’t want to get any more upset than he already was.

Which is exactly what my friend Matt, who I believe I already mentioned can be an idiot, proceeded to do. He pointed up at the luggage compartment and said—too loud, as
usual—“What do you think he has in that bag? A missile?”

The big guy heard this. He looked down at Matt like he was about to pick him up by the neck and stuff him into the overhead space, which this guy was definitely big enough to do. The shorter guy
with the sunglasses said something to him, and he sat down.

“Jeez,” said Matt, still too loud. “Maybe it
is
a missile.”

“Will you shut
up
?” I said, but it was too late: We looked back, and the big guy was leaning forward, his head almost in our row, glaring at Matt, for like ten seconds, just
leaning over us and
staring
. He was really close, and he looked a little crazy, and I’ll be honest: I was scared. Then the little guy said something again, and the big guy sat back.
Matt and I looked at each other, like
whoa
, but even Matt wasn’t stupid enough to say anything else.

When the plane was loaded the same flight attendant came down the aisle checking things, and she told the little guy he couldn’t hold his backpack in his lap.

He said, “I need to hold it.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, not sounding sorry. “You can’t hold it during takeoff or landing.”

“Is very important.”

“You can hold it after we take off. Right now it has to go in the overhead.” She reached for the backpack.

“No!” said the little guy, pulling it away.

“All right,” she said, “then you’ll have to put it under the seat in front of you.”

“I am not comfortable doing that.”

“Sir,”
said the flight attendant, “you can
not
have that in your lap. Either you stow it now, or you’ll have to get off the plane.”

This time the big guy said something quietly to the little guy, in what I think was a foreign language. The little guy sighed and stuck the backpack under the seat in front of him, which was the
seat that Matt was sitting in. The flight attendant gave the little guy a look and walked away.

Matt leaned over to me. “What do you think’s in the backpack?” he said—whispering, fortunately.

“How would I know?” I said.

“You think it’s a bomb?”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“Because, moron, he had to go through security.”

“Well, then what is it? Why’s he acting so weird? Him and his friend with the missile…”

“It’s not a missile!” I said, too loud—that’s the kind of thing Matt makes you do—and all of a sudden I realized the big guy was leaning forward and glaring
at us again, so I shut up. We stayed quiet during the safety lecture where they show you how to fasten your seat belt and tell you that your seat cushion floats, which I’m sure would be
really helpful if the plane actually crashed into the ocean at five hundred miles an hour.

I noticed that after we took off, the little guy immediately reached down and got the backpack out from under Matt’s seat. But then I stopped thinking about him and started trying to
figure out how to talk to Suzana, two rows behind. My idea was to pretend I had to go to the bathroom, and then, when I walked past her, I would say some funny thing that would make her laugh, and
we would start having a conversation, with me standing in the aisle, which was good because I would be standing and she would be sitting down so I’d be taller.

This seemed like a solid plan, except for one thing: I didn’t have anything funny to say. I spent the first half hour of the flight trying to think of jokes, which wasn’t easy
because Matt kept whispering to me about the guys behind us, who he was convinced were terrorists planning to blow up the plane.

Finally I came up with a joke: I’d walk by, and I’d say to Suzana, casually, like I just thought of it, “Do you know where the emergency exit is?” And she’d say
something like, “Why are you looking for the emergency exit?” And I’d say, “Because I’m sitting next to Cameron Frank, and I need some fresh air!”

I’m not saying this was hilarious. I’m saying this was the best I could do under the circumstances. I was going over my lines in my head (“Do you know where the emergency exit
is?”), rehearsing for my big moment. Meanwhile Matt kept sneaking peeks back at the weird two guys behind us and whispering reports to me.

“They’re looking at something,” he said.

“So what?” I said.

“We need to find out what it is,” he said.

“No we don’t,” I said.

Anyway, we finally got to the altitude where you can walk around, so I got up and started toward the back of the plane. I noticed out of the side of my eye that the two weird guys behind us
actually
were
looking at something, kind of hunched over it so you couldn’t see what it was. But I was focused on Suzana. I was so focused on Suzana that I didn’t see that the
man in the seat right across the aisle had his leg sticking out.

What happened next was the kind of horrible embarrassing failure that your brain memorizes every single detail of so it can torture you by playing it in your head over and over and over for the
rest of your life. This is how it went: