The Worst Class Trip Ever (9 page)

“I dunno,” I said. “But they knew I wasn’t alone.” I held up my phone so she could see the last text.

“Hey,” said Victor. “The sack. It’s gone.”

We looked back toward the trash can near the statue. The parachute sack wasn’t where I’d set it down. I ran over and looked on the other side of the can. It wasn’t there,
either. I looked around. There were plenty of people around, but nobody had the sack that I could see.

“Who took it?” I said. “Did anybody see?”

They all looked at each other.

“Weren’t you guys taking video?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Cameron. “But I figured the guy on the bench was one of the weird guys, and the idea was to get video of them, right? So when you walked to the bench I was aiming
at you. I kind of forgot about the sack.”

“Me too,” said Suzana. Victor nodded.

“Oh, man,” I said.

“Wait a minute,” said Victor. “From where I was standing, I think I might have the trash can on the video.”

“Let’s look,” I said.

We squeezed around Victor and made some shade so we could see his phone screen. He started the video, and we saw me set the sack down next to the trash can. Then we saw me walking toward the
bench and stopping behind it. Victor was right: We could still see part of the trash can at the very left-hand edge of the screen. We saw a couple of skate-boarders go past, then the lady with the
stroller. When the lady got to the trash can, she stopped for a second and bent over. We couldn’t see what she did. But it wasn’t hard to figure out.

“The lady took it?” said Cameron.

“Back up,” Suzana said to Victor. “And zoom in on her face.”

He did, but we couldn’t see much, because the face was almost totally covered by a bunch of brown hair.

“I think that’s a wig,” said Suzana.

I was getting a bad feeling.

“Back up some more,” I said. “Okay, stop there. Now zoom in on her feet.”

“Her feet?’ said Victor.

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” said Victor, zooming.

And there they were.

The purple Crocs.

“It’s him,” I said. “The little weird guy.”

“So,” said Victor. “Now they have Matt
and
the box.”

Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Then Cameron said, “They’re smarter than we are.”

“Shut up,” said Suzana.

I said, “Now we have to call the police.”

Nobody argued. I raised my phone to call 911. I tapped 9, then 1, and then…

And then my phone burped.

We all crowded in to read the text.

if u cal polic u nevr se frend agan

“They really can’t spell,” said Cameron.

“Shut up,” said everybody else.

“Ask them how we can trust them,” said Suzana.

I typed:

y shud we beleive u?

We waited.

u hav no chos

“Chos?” said Cameron.

“Choice,” said Suzana.

“They have a point,” said Victor.

I was about to ask what I should text back, but before I could my phone burped again.

we giv frend bak 2 days IF NO POLIC

“I don’t trust them,” said Suzana. “Tell them we want proof Matt’s okay.”

I texted:

we want proof our friend is ok

We all stared at the screen. I don’t think I was breathing. Thirty seconds went by, then,
burp
:

look @ stret

“Stret?” said Cameron.

“Street, maybe?” I said.

A horn honked three times.

We looked over at the street.

“There,” said Victor. “On the other side.”

A silver minivan was stopped at the curb. The front driver’s side window was down. The little guy was at the wheel, holding a phone, watching us. He’d taken the wig off. When he saw
us look his way, he said something. The rear window slid down.

And there was Matt. He looked terrified.

I could see the big guy right next to him in the backseat.

I waved at Matt. He didn’t wave back. The window went back up, hiding his face.

The minivan started moving. In a few seconds it was gone.

“What do we do now?” I said.
“What do we do?”

“Right now,” said Victor, “we have to get back to the class trip.”

Suzana looked at her phone. “Oh, man,” she said. “We gotta hurry.”

We started running. I felt weird, like my brain was spinning around. I wasn’t looking where I was going. I kept thinking about Matt’s face. I stumbled over something and almost fell.
Suzana caught my arm and held me up.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Matt’ll be okay.”

“We don’t know that,” I said.

“We’ll figure this out,” she said. “We’ll think of something. But right now, we have to get back, so focus on that, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. But all I could think about was what Cameron said.

They’re smarter than we are.

W
e made it back to the Smithsonian just in time and slipped in with the rest of the group in the gift shop. From there we went outside to a park
and the teachers gave us box lunches containing sandwiches made from some meat that nobody could definitely identify, although one kid who moved to Miami from West Virginia swore, and I don’t
think he was kidding, that it was squirrel. I gave mine to Cameron. Even if it had real food, I couldn’t have eaten it. My stomach was a mess.

We sat on the grass a little ways from everybody else—me, Cameron, Victor, and Suzana. At this point just about everybody had noticed that Suzana was hanging with us losers instead of the
Hot/Populars, but she didn’t seem to care.

“Okay,” she said. “We need a plan.”

I said, “I’m still thinking maybe we should call the police.”

“Really?” she said. “You saw what they texted. If we go to the police, we don’t see Matt again. You think they were kidding?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You want to take that chance? That they’ll kill him?”

When she said “kill” it felt like somebody kicked me in the stomach.

“No,” I said. “But what are we supposed to do? Nothing? Not even tell his parents?”

“If we tell his parents, they’ll tell the police. Telling his parents could be killing him.”

Another kick to my stomach.

“So we do
nothing
?”

Cameron added, “They said they’d let him go in two days.”

“Why should we believe them?” I said. “They said they’d let him go at the statue.”

“Yeah,” said Victor. “But you told them you’d be alone.”

Another kick. I was going to need a new stomach.

“So,” I said, “we just sit around for two days, hoping they’re not lying?”

“Maybe we can find them,” said Suzana. “We saw their car.”

“A silver minivan,” said Cameron. “Probably only about ten million of those in Washington.”

“You have a better idea?” said Suzana.

“He has an iPhone, right?” said Victor.

We all looked at him.

“Find My iPhone!” said Suzana. She looked at me. “Does he have that?”

“I dunno,” I said. “But even if he does, what if it’s not turned on? Or the weird guys turned it off?”

“We have to hope they didn’t,” said Suzana.

I said, “Don’t we need a password or something?”

“We do,” said Victor.

“You don’t know the password?” said Suzana.

“No,” I said.

“Could you figure it out?”

“I could try.”

“All right,” said Suzana. “When we get back to the hotel, we work on that.”

I was starting to realize that Suzana was the kind of person who really liked having a plan.

We finished eating—or, in my case, watching Cameron eat my squirrel sandwich—and then we walked to our next thing, which was, surprise, a giant stone building. I wouldn’t be
surprised if the rotation of the Earth got messed up from all this stone being dug up somewhere else and moved to Washington.

This particular giant stone building was the National Archives, which is where they have the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and a bunch of other historic important things.
I’m sure it’s great as far as archives go, but I don’t really remember anything about it, because the whole time I was thinking about Matt. I kept wondering whether he was okay,
and what I should be doing, and what I’d want people to be doing for me if the weird guys took me instead of him.

We finally got out of the Archives and walked back to the bus. Mr. Barto did another head count, but Suzana tricked him using
exactly
the same trick she did the first time, making her
eyes big and pretending she couldn’t work her window.

Girls have this
power
. To be honest, it’s a little scary.

Once the bus was going Victor motioned for me, Cameron, and Suzana to talk with him, so we all leaned in.

“Okay,” he said. “My dad called me when we were in the National Archives. I sent him a picture of that thing, and he—”

“What thing?” said Cameron, still filling in for Matt in the role of idiot.

“The electronic box those guys were after,” said Victor.

“Ohhh,” said Cameron.

“What’d your father say?” said Suzana.

“First of all, he wanted to know where I saw it. He
really
wanted to know where I saw it.”

“What’d you say?” I said.

“I lied. I said it was a picture I saw on the Internet, and I wondered if he knew what it was. And he did, right away.”

“So what is it?” I said.

“It’s a jammer. It uses a laser to jam laser-guided missiles so they miss their targets. My dad says it’s super high-tech and restricted, and only the U.S. military is supposed
to have it. They use it over in Afghanistan and around there.”

“Those guys aren’t U.S. military,” I said.

“No,” said Suzana.

“Why would they want to jam missiles?” said Cameron.

My stomach turned over.

“I know why,” I said.

They all looked at me.

“Matt was right,” I said. “They’re targeting the White House. That’s why they were looking at aerial photos on the plane. And that’s why they were hanging
around the White House.”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” said Suzana. “The box doesn’t
shoot
missiles. It
jams
missiles. How can it attack the White House?”

“It can’t,” said Victor, seeing it now. “But it can jam missiles coming
from
the White House.”

“Why would missiles be coming from the White House?” said Cameron.

“To defend it,” said Victor.

“From what?” said Cameron.

“From another missile,” said Victor. “Or a plane. Or whatever those guys are planning to attack it with.”

“Ohhh,” said Cameron.

“This is bad,” I said. “This is really, really bad. We have to tell somebody now.”

“What about Matt?” said Suzana.

I pictured his face, when he was in the weird guys’ van. Scared to death. I shook my head, trying to make the picture go away. “We have to do
something
.”

“Okay,” said Suzana. “Here’s what we do.”

We looked at her. I could tell that she—or at least part of her—was absolutely loving this. It almost made me mad, except I was glad that
somebody
had a plan.

“We have two days,” she said. “So we use them to try to find Matt and rescue him. If we can’t, we have to tell the police. But we do everything we can to find Matt
first.” She looked around at the three of us. “Everybody okay with that?”

We nodded. We had a plan:

Rescue Matt in two days.

Or…

I didn’t want to think about it.

W
e didn’t have much time when we got back to the hotel, because we had to get ready to walk to dinner, which was at an allegedly Italian
restaurant near the hotel. We had pizza. Usually, this is a good thing. Most kids like pizza because it’s always pretty much the same and not weird, so you’re usually safe ordering it.
But this “Italian” restaurant made the worst pizza in the history of the universe. I’m pretty sure that the tomato sauce was actually ketchup, and I am almost positive that the
cheese—I bet if you tried this in Italy they would put you in jail—was Kraft Singles. The worst part was the pizza dough, which I think they got from Home Depot. It was a weird
combination of rubbery and hard. It was like biting into a Frisbee. I gave mine to Cameron. I wasn’t really hungry anyway.