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  When I said nothing, Mr. Fanta probed, “The first order of business should be to schedule a meeting, don’t you think?”

  I absolutely did not think. Still, I had to say something. “The problem,” I began warily, “is that we’re so new … ”

  He nodded understandingly. “Exactly how many members does the Positive Action Group have?”

  Members? Exactly the same number as the Stick-Your-Head-in-the-Furnace Club and the Leap-the-Grand-Canyon Society.

  “Well, there’s me … ” I fell silent and started counting on my fingers. To make it look good, I was going to have to include Pavel and Chuck—but I didn’t want to get them trapped in this by saying their names out loud. I counted Borje, too. Mr. Fancy-pants didn’t have to know he was in Sweden. He could be head of P.A.G. Europe. I threw in Evil McKillPeople, too, representing Canada, and also my sister, Melody, a sixth grader here. She wouldn’t be too pleased about it, but with any luck, she’d never find out. Oh, and Daphne—the only person on the list who actually wanted to be there.

  “Seven,” I reported.

  “That’s a good core group,” he approved. “There’s a lot of work to do, though. We’re going to need more members if we’re going to make a dent in the needs of this community. Speaking of which, did you know that Sycamore Middle School is sponsoring a raffle to raise money for the Salvation Army? That’s something the P.A.G. could latch onto and run with.”

  When I didn’t say anything, he added, “Well, it’s just an idea. We can worry about that later. The first order of business is recruiting. Why don’t you see if Daphne can meet you in the art room after school to make some posters?”

  There were times when you were playing a real battle game and you got pinned down, under fire, barely able to stay alive. That was how I had spent this whole face-to-face with Mr. Fantabulous—hunkered down, dodging bullets, trying not to get blown away. But in the game, sooner or later, your opponent would have to reload, or respawn, or even kill a spider walking up his wall. It was your chance to become proactive—to jump out of hiding and take the initiative with your own plan.

  For the first time in this horrible conversation with Mr. Fanberg, a strategy opened up before me. The instant the final bell rang at three o’clock, I was going to be out of Sycamore Middle School so fast I’d leave a vapor trail behind me on the sidewalk. Daphne couldn’t very well get mad at me for skipping out on a poster-making session she never knew existed.

  Sure, it was sleazy, and I felt a little bad about the dishonesty. But not bad enough to put myself into the frying pan.

  It was coming to me that all this was more than just a hiccup on the road to Rule the World. It was a direct threat to the lifestyle I’d spent more than thirteen years building up.

  I got a D-minus on my essay on To Kill a Mockingbird. It didn’t bother me. At least I didn’t flunk, which wasn’t bad considering I didn’t read the book. How was I supposed to know Harper Lee wasn’t one of the Duck Dynasty guys?

  I got twelve out of sixty-seven on my math test, and I did flunk. It didn’t bother me. Actually, I was amazed I got that many right.

  I got a big fat zero on my social studies presentation because I didn’t do one. It still didn’t bother me. Mr. Silva held his extra-help sessions after school when I had football practice. First-String McBean didn’t miss football for anything.

  Then Coach called me into his office, and that did bother me. Because it wasn’t to tell me about the highlight-film catch I made last week against Edison—one-handed, tiptoeing on the sideline, just in bounds.

  It was to tell me I was off the team.

  “String,” he said—everybody called me String—“you’re off the team.”

  It was like being blindsided by a linebacker—if there’d been a linebacker in our conference good enough to take down The String.

  “But, Coach—why?”

  “Academic ineligibility,” he said sadly.

  “Academic … ?”

  “String, you haven’t got the grades to stay on the team. Actually, you haven’t got the grades to walk upright.”

  “What do grades have to do with football?”

  “You know on our jerseys where it says ‘Sycamore Middle School’? Well, the ‘School’ part is about grades. You don’t pass, you don’t play.”

  I was in agony. “Yeah, I know that, but—”

  “But nothing,” Coach told me flatly. “You’re off the team until you start doing better in class.”

  “You can’t do that to The String!” I protested. “It’ll ruin my life. Or even worse, we’ll lose.”

  “I don’t make the rules, kid. Improve your grades and we’ll take you back.”

  Improve my grades—just like that! “Aw, how’s that ever going to happen?”

  “I might be able to work with you on that, Freeland,” came another voice.

  For the first time, I saw there was somebody else in the room. Coach always said, “When I’m talking, your eyes and ears are on me.” That was probably why I never saw Mr. Fanshaw, the guidance guy, sitting in a chair in the corner of the office. How could I ever forget him? He was the only person in the whole school who didn’t call me String. Maybe that was a guidance thing. They didn’t do nicknames.

  I was a drowning man thrashing for a life preserver. “Mr. Fanshaw, help me out here! I’m not a student—I’m a football player!”

  “The thing is, Freeland, you have to be both.”

  Here it comes, I thought. The lecture on studying and working hard and becoming a well-rounded student athlete. The only rounded thing about me was my helmet. What Fanshaw and even Coach didn’t understand was this: I didn’t have bad work habits; I had no work habits. Or at least none that didn’t involve catching, blocking, or running a tight pattern. If Fanshaw thought I was a dumb guy with Alvin Einstein trapped somewhere inside, then he was the dumb one.

  Another thing Coach always said: In football and in life, the only important thing was results. It didn’t matter what you said you could do, or what you had the potential to do. Just what you did.

  So I was completely honest. “Mr. Fanshaw, I can’t get good grades. I couldn’t get them in kindergarten, and I can’t get them now. I’m just not smart enough.”

  Coach got mad. “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk. You can learn a playbook; you can read a defensive scheme. You’re smart enough when it suits you.”

  Fanshaw made his pitch. “You only have to raise your grades a little bit. Nobody’s asking for straight A’s—that is, if you top it off with some really impressive extra credit.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded like hope. “Extra credit?”

  His smile reminded me of the guy who’d sold Dad our last car. “Have you ever heard of the Positive Action Group?”

  The story he told me lit a fire in my heart, which had been frozen solid by the idea of being shut out of football.

  There was this club—the P.A.G. I forgot what they did, but it was definitely good, because Fanshaw was pretty amped about it. If I joined, and didn’t totally bomb out in my classes, I could be back on the team in time for the playoffs.

  “Where do I sign up?” I asked.

  It was like a cloud had come to rain on Mr. Fanshaw’s good mood.

  “Well, the sign-up sheet isn’t posted yet,” he admitted, “because the posters aren’t ready. I’m not sure what’s taking so long. The boy who put it all together is obviously a visionary, but he’s a little short on action. To be honest, he’s hard to figure out. I think he might have an after-school job, because the minute school ends, he’s gone with the wind … ”

  “Spit it out,” Coach interrupted impatiently. “Is String going to be able to do this or not?”

  “Of course. All he has to do is talk to Cameron.” He turned to me. “Do you know Cameron Boxer?”

  I did, and he didn’t exactly strike me as the club-starting type. Cam was one of those gamer nerds. He hung out with that brainiac Pavel Dysan
and that dweeb Chuck Kinsey. Chuck tried out for football back in seventh grade and broke three fingers in the first minute of the first practice. The team still did a modified version of his scream before every kickoff.

  Did The String belong in a club with guys like that? Man, if it got me back on the Sycamore Seahawks, I would happily join the Church Ladies Knitting Team.

  For some reason, Fanshaw was still hemming and hawing. “… and Daphne Leibowitz and I waited in the art room for two hours, but Cameron never showed … ”

  I said, “I’ll talk to Cam.”

  “Really?” He seemed almost grateful, like I was offering him a lifeline, instead of the other way around. “Now, remember, you have to be firm with Cameron … ” And off he went into another long speech about how hard it was to pin Cam down because his mind was working at such a high level.

  “I’ll pin him down,” I promised. “When The String pins you, you stay pinned.”

  It wasn’t that hard to find Cam. The String had connections. Ziggy, our QB, was dating this cheerleader, Shaleen. Well, her cousin’s ex–lab partner in science, Dominic, was also in Cam’s last class of the day, health. So I sprinted to the health room right at the bell—fastest time in the forty in county history. No one ran like The String.

  Props to Cam—he was pretty fast, too. But I dashed past him and blocked the exit to the parking lot.

  “I’m in,” I told him.

  He looked completely blank.

  “The P.A.G., man!” I went on. “Fanshaw gave me the deets and I’m totally down.”

  “Great,” he said. But he might as well have said terrible, because that’s what it sounded like.

  “Cam!” Chuck came running up, his backpack bouncing on his narrow shoulders. “We’re still on after homework, right? I can’t wait to—” He took one look at me and cradled his fingers protectively. “Hi, String.”

  “Is he in the club, too?” I asked Cam.

  “What club?” Chuck blurted. “Wait—oh, that club.”

  “The thing is, uh, String.” Cam was working really hard to choose the right words. “The P.A.G.—it’s really complicated. I’m not sure we can put it together for this year.”

  I could feel my eyes narrowing. “We’re eighth graders. What other year have we got?”

  He was sweating now. “It takes time to iron out all the details. If we’re going to do it, we have to do it right—”

  “You’re jerking The String!” I leaned into his face. “And The String doesn’t like to be jerked. The P.A.G. is my ticket back onto the Seahawks. I need it. And when I need something, there’s nothing more important than what I need.”

  I wasn’t sure if Cam was getting my point, but I was definitely making an impression on Chuck. “You have to do it! He’s The String!”

  And then Cam Boxer did something that nobody else had ever done. He faked me out. He started to nod in agreement, ducked under my arm, and was out the door and gone, pounding through the parking lot toward the street.

  Oh, sure, I could have run him down from behind. But I needed to get to the gym to stay in playing shape for when I rejoined the Seahawks later in the season.

  There was no doubt in my mind that Cam would come through for me.

  Nobody dared to let down The String.

  I might have done too good a job selling my parents on the Positive Action Group, because now they hardly ever shut up about it.

  “How come you never talk about how it’s going?” my mother nagged. “We need details!”

  My mom was breaking her arm patting herself on the back. She considered all this to be the result of tough love. She’d threatened to ban me from my lifestyle and I’d responded by becoming a student leader. It was probably the only time in her career as a mom where her strategic parenting had actually paid off.

  “It’s funny,” my sister, Melody, put in. “Considering the Positive Action Group is such a big deal, nobody really knows about it. I haven’t seen any notices or posters. There isn’t even a sign-up sheet.”

  I glared at her. “There is a sign-up sheet.”

  “Where?” she challenged. “In the furnace room?”

  “On the website,” I gritted between clenched teeth. “You have to join online.”

  That part wasn’t even a lie. Mr. Fanny-pack had insisted that there had to be a way for new members to come aboard. Luckily, Pavel had created a form where, as soon as you hit submit, you were redirected to a site based in Honduras where you could “buy” a square foot of the rain forest to protect it from developers. No matter how many times you went back, you still ended up in Honduras. It was pretty ill.

  “Well, that makes sense,” my dad concluded. “Everything’s online these days. We have a website for the store. More and more people are doing their furniture shopping by computer.”

  He didn’t look happy about it. A few online orders could never make up for all the customers lost to the new mall. Even the free-matching-love-seat promotion had been a bust. If I won Rule the World, I’d give the prize money to my parents to help with expenses until things improved.

  If things ever improved.

  Melody wouldn’t let it go. She smelled a rat. “So who are some of your members?” she asked, the picture of wide-eyed innocence.

  “Oh, you know. A bunch of people.”

  “Like who?” she persisted.

  I threw it back in her face. “Freeland McBean, for one.”

  She looked impressed. “String? Really?”

  “He practically begged me to let him join. Football stars like helping people, too, you know.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “The word around school is he’s kicked off the team for not keeping his grades up.”

  I offered some big-brotherly advice: “You can’t believe everything you hear in middle school, Melody.” How come my sixth-grade sister was more tuned in to what was going on around school than I was after more than two years there? Wait—scratch that question. I already knew the answer. It was because she cared.

  She didn’t back down. “I still don’t see how String found out about the P.A.G. in the first place when it’s such a deep, dark secret.”

  “Maybe he heard from our faculty adviser,” I retorted. “That’s right, smart aleck. We have one, and you’ll never guess who it is. Mr. Fan”—my mind went blank—“you know, the guidance counselor.”

  “That’s enough,” my mom said tiredly. She turned to Melody. “Your brother is finally involved in something worthwhile. Best of all, it has nothing to do with video games. The real question you should be asking yourself is why you aren’t a member of the P.A.G.”

  “Because I can’t afford sixty bucks for a square foot of rain forest!” Melody shot back.

  She got in trouble for that—Mom thought she was sassing her. But it made me uneasy. That meant Melody had been on the web page, nosing around. And she could be like a bloodhound, especially when the target was me.

  I called Pavel as soon I got back to my room. “My sister’s onto us. We’re going to have to do something about the online sign-up sheet.”

  He was amazed. “You want me to make it real?”

  “Of course not. Just get it out of Honduras. If people end up at a different site every time they try to use it, maybe they’ll think their computer’s buggy.”

  He whistled. “And you thought your Melody problems were over when she started hanging out with that Katrina kid, leaving you the basement to yourself.”

  I sighed. “My Melody problems started the day they brought her home from the hospital. She barfed on my LeapPad and she’s been a pain ever since. Now Mom wants her to join the P.A.G. Like that could ever happen.”

  There was silence on the line for a moment, followed by Pavel’s voice, nervous now: “What if it could happen?”

  “Come on, man. You know better than anybody that there’s no such thing as the P.A.G.”

  “Maybe,” he replied slowly. “But String McBean thinks he’s a member, and what String thinks carr
ies a lot of weight at our school.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. If Chuck had been the one worried, I wouldn’t have given it another thought. Chuck freaked out over report cards, Batman, talking to girls, and hurricanes forming off the coast of Africa.

  But this was Pavel. Pavel was smart.

  If he was worried, maybe there was something to be worried about.

  Felicia, my campaign manager, gave me the latest poll numbers, and the news wasn’t good.

  “You’re losing to Kelly among sixth and seventh graders, and your eighth-grade lead is slipping.”

  “What? You said I was way out in front!”

  “It was your debate performance,” she said solemnly. “A lot of kids don’t trust you.”

  I was appalled. “I’m the most trustworthy guy in the school!”

  “You were sweating.”

  “It was a hundred and fifty degrees under those lights!”

  “Kelly didn’t sweat,” Felicia pointed out. “Even Jordana didn’t sweat, and she’s only a seventh grader.”

  “Jordana!” I fumed. “Leave it to Kelly to drum up a third candidate with almost the exact same name as me. She knows half the kids won’t be paying attention when they go to the ballot box. Jordan, Jordana—it’s all the same to them. She’s trying to siphon off my votes. The problem isn’t the sweat; it’s the sleaze.”

  She was patient. “You can stand here and complain that it’s not fair, or you can do something about it. It’s your choice, Jordan.”

  Felicia was like that—practical and sensible whenever I got too emotional. She was by far the best campaign manager in Sycamore Middle School. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to help win an election. When I had that black eye from dodgeball, she put makeup on it so I wouldn’t look like a punk at the all-candidates meeting for sixth-grade representative. In seventh grade, when I was accused of writing STYROFOAM ROCKS on the school’s Earth Day bulletin board, she broke into the display case, dusted powder over everything, and revealed a handprint too large to be mine. By the time she got done spreading the word that I’d been unfairly accused, I came back from a twenty-point deficit and won a seat in the student senate.