Bringing Down the Mouse (2 page)

He knew that on the other side of the cinder-block walls, little spaceships were carrying groups of visitors through a cartoonish geography lesson populated entirely by robot children: a futuristic menagerie of cyborgs populating an invented land of a time well beyond the present. As Charlie navigated between the pipes and gears, the music growing louder with each step, he imagined himself wandering deeper and deeper into the working bowels that kept that cartoon world revolving:
Rust, steam, cinder block, crackling fluorescent tubes—these were the guts that made up that spinning world, yes, they were. . . .

Slowly, Charlie's terror began to subside. Maybe his pursuers hadn't seen him going through the maintenance door—maybe they had run right by. Maybe Charlie was free and clear. He shifted the backpack against his shoulders, taking some of the weight off his aching back . . . when he heard the click of a lock being opened from somewhere behind him, and then the sound of a door swinging inward.

He didn't look back, he just ran. Deeper, deeper into the building, the pipes and gears flashing by on either side as he went, the flickering lights casting jagged
shadows as his feet skidded across the cement hallway floor. He turned a corner, then another—and suddenly, his eyes went wide. Ten feet ahead, the hallway ended in a dead end, entirely blocked by a faceless steel door.

Charlie didn't even pause. He hit the door with both hands out in front of him and felt the blow right up to his elbows. It didn't budge. Charlie cried out, throwing all his weight against the steel, every ounce of strength—and nothing. It was locked. He was trapped.

“Like a rat in a cage, kid,” a muffled voice echoed from behind him. “You're not going anywhere.”

Charlie slowly turned away from the door. Loopy the Space Mouse stalked down the hallway, his sausagelike, silver-gloved fingers tracing the piping along the cinder block walls as he went. The Frog lumbered behind Loopy, those huge moon boots slapping ominously against the cement floor.

Charlie pressed back against the steel, his legs trembling beneath him.
Not good. Not good. Not good
. Loopy came to a stop a few feet away, then carefully reached up and placed his two enormous hands on either side of his own orbital head. With a twist, he pulled the head off and placed it gently on the floor by his feet. The man's face, now freed from the Loopy head, was flushed, his spiky hair dripping with sweat.
He jabbed at Charlie with one of his oversize fingers.

“Hand over the backpack, kid. There's nowhere else to run.”

Charlie closed his eyes, his shoulders sagging. Slowly, he reached for the backpack. In that moment, he couldn't help thinking that other kids his age were safe in their classrooms at schools across the country, taking tests, reading books, playing on playgrounds. And here he was, cornered in a dark hallway in the bowels of one of the biggest amusement parks on earth—and things were about to get ugly.

The worst part was, he had no one to blame but himself. . . .

Newton, Massachusetts, Three Months Earlier

IN THE BEGINNING, THERE
were potato chips.

Well, they weren't exactly potato chips. They came in a little plastic bag and their shape was vaguely chiplike, but that was where the resemblance ended. The ingredients on the bag were printed entirely in Japanese; nobody could say for sure what they were made of. Most of the sixth grade at Nagassack Middle School was convinced it had to be some sort of soy product, though a few rebellious souls maintained that the chips were reconstituted seaweed. Since Charlie's parents were both vegetarians, he'd become pretty adept at identifying seaweed in all its variations. It was actually pretty amazing what you could make out of seaweed. For his part, he was pretty sure that the chips did not come
from the ocean. Even the name matched its cartoonish appearance—spelled out in bright red block letters splayed across the front and back of the plastic bag with a picture of a lizard sticking its airplane-propeller tongue out at you.

Despite the mysterious ingredients, these Yum Yum Chippers were the only even remotely palatable item left in the vending machine that stood just inside the main entrance to Nagassack Middle School. The Middle School PTA had made sure of that two years earlier, banning soft drinks, sugary snacks, and high-salt treats, all of it swept away after a unanimous vote by the handful of parents and teachers bored enough to spend a sweltering spring Tuesday evening locked away in a middle-school gymnasium.

Of course, the kids hadn't gotten a vote. Instead, they got a vending machine full of rice cakes that tasted like cardboard disks, celery-based snack packs you'd feel bad feeding to a goat, apple slices that went brown the second you opened the biodegradable packaging, and Yum Yum Chippers. Surely, the fact that the school had a vending machine at all, which students were allowed to visit in the brief few minutes between classes, was a luxury that many middle schools had to live without. But that didn't stop anyone from complaining. The sad
state of the vending machine was an issue that crossed all class and clique boundaries.

But the political ramifications of the PTA's vote were far from Charlie Lewis's thoughts. Charlie crouched low behind a bright yellow plastic garbage can at the end of a long palisade of aluminum lockers that bisected the school's main entrance. From his vantage point, he had a clear view of the vending machine. And he was mostly hidden from the continuous slipstream of kids moving in through the glass revolving front doors of the building. Five minutes before eight a.m. was the highest traffic period of the day, which was exactly why Charlie had chosen that moment to plan his attempt. He'd never been the type of person who left things to chance.

“How does it look?” he hissed back over his shoulder. “You see any bogies?”

Jeremy Draper leaned out from an alcove three lockers back, his mop of curly red hair flouncing over his freckled face. Jeremy was an exceedingly stringy kid, with pipe-cleaner limbs and a neck that could have doubled as a garden hose. He'd been the tallest kid in their class since the second grade, which might one day be a good thing. Jeremy had been Charlie's best friend since before preschool; their mothers had met in a natural childbirth class in downtown Boston well before they were born, so
Charlie had heard every nickname Jeremy had endured: Scarecrow, Stretch, Plastic Man, String Bean, Bean Pole, Green Bean, and a dozen other variations on “bean.” The names had followed Jeremy all the way until the last week of fifth grade, when his school-wide identity had gone through a radical and abrupt change. Unfortunately, the change had not been for the better.

“Watch where you're standing, Diapers!”

Charlie watched as Jeremy dodged his head just in time to avoid the soccer ball tearing by his right ear. The ball ricocheted off one of the lockers, then rebounded back toward the eighth-grade soccer player who had kicked it at him. Jeremy mumbled something toward the kid, purposely too quiet for anyone to hear. Both Jeremy and Charlie had learned early on, it was incredibly hard to fight a nickname, especially one with a backstory as good as Jeremy's.

It had happened nearly five days before the start of the last summer break: Jeremy had been rushing to beat the morning bell, and with legs as long and awkward as his, rushing was never a good idea. To this day, it still wasn't clear whether somebody had tripped him, or whether he'd stumbled over one of his own feet. What was clear, however, was that when he'd hit the ground, Jeremy's backpack had come open, spreading its contents all over
the front hall of the school. Not books, not pencils or pens or any other sort of school supply.
Diapers
. At least a dozen, with brightly colored flowers speckled across their fronts, sliding mercilessly across the tiled floor. Nobody cared that Jeremy had a rapidly growing five-week-old baby sister at home, or that his sleep-deprived mother had accidentally packed newly purchased diapers instead of notebooks in Jeremy's bag; all that mattered was that a new nickname had been born. From that moment on, Jeremy Draper had become Diapers.

The eighth grader with the soccer ball dribbled by, and once again the coast looked clear. After a nod from Jeremy, Charlie started forward, inching out of the relative safety provided by the yellow garbage can.

From the long corridor of aluminum lockers, Charlie moved into the brightly lit, semicircular front atrium, which was dominated by the glass revolving doors. Five minutes to the opening bell, the doors were pretty much pinwheels of glass, spitting students into the school's main building in a steady metronome of motion. When the school had been built back in the seventies, it had seemed as good a design as any.

Like most modern interpretations of things that were very old, the Nagassack front entrance didn't make a lot of sense. The revolving door, fluorescent lights,
and space-age windows made the place look like one of the high-tech firms out on Route 128. Meanwhile, the wooden rafters, paneled walls, and intensely wild brush that ringed most of the campus made you feel as if you were standing in the foyer of some sort of hunting cabin. Skulking toward the vending machine, Charlie wouldn't have been surprised to have seen moose antlers jutting out from the nearest wall.

Almost there,
Charlie mouthed to himself as he covered the last few yards. His sneakers were almost soundless against the tiled floor. He could feel Jeremy's eyes on him from his secure position back by the lockers.
A few more steps
. Charlie could almost make out his reflection in the front glass of the vending machine, and a burst of anticipation moved through him. The machine was more than simply a depository for some bizarre, phenomenally healthy form of snack food. At Nagassack, the vending machine was an anchor in the chaotic, ever-changing flux of life. Only two weeks into sixth grade, the quest for Yum Yum Chippers had become an integral part of Charlie's routine.

He tiptoed the last few feet to the machine. Glancing around to make sure he was still unnoticed, he dug a hand into his back pocket, counting out the proper number of coins. His jeans were loose, which made finding
the right coins significantly easier. In point of fact, all his clothes were loose; he was positively swimming in his collared long-sleeve shirt, and his socks were balled up around his ankles. Like his best friend, Jeremy, Charlie had always been too skinny. Up until very recently, that hadn't mattered. Charlie wasn't exactly sure when kids had started to notice how different other kids could be, but things seemed to be getting progressively worse. Not
Lord of the Flies
, fight-to-the-death-on-a-jungle-island worse, but bad enough.

He retrieved the coins from his pocket and quickly shoved them into the slot halfway up the vending machine. Then he hit the correct button with his palm, and watched as the corkscrew mechanism behind the glass slowly twisted the Yum Yum Chippers toward the front.
“Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up.”
And then finally, the chips plummeted the few feet to the base of the machine. With a motion like a striking snake, Charlie's right arm shot out and into the machine's retrieval bin, and his fingers closed on the smooth, crinkly surface of the Yum Yum Chippers bag. Grinning, Charlie turned back toward Jeremy and the safety of the lockers.

“Well, look what we have here. My favorite little buddy with my favorite snack.”

Charlie exhaled as he looked up into the oblong,
doughy face of Dylan Wigglesworth. He could hear Liam Anthony and Dusty Bickle cackling from somewhere behind their leader, but he couldn't see past the mountainous giant's hulking form.

“Dylan, doesn't this get old after a while?”

Charlie tried to sound tough, but inside, he was mostly liquid. It was true, this
had
been going on for quite a while now; after all, he, Dylan, and most of his class at Nagassack had been going to school together since kindergarten. In the beginning, they had all been roughly the same size, and Dylan had simply been a run-of-the-mill jerk, making fun of Charlie and pretty much everyone else, just for the sheer pleasure of it. But as their physical geometry changed, and Dylan grew and grew and grew, the tenor of their relationship had also changed. Dylan had morphed into an out-and-out bully. If you didn't play baseball, you were a fair target. And since Charlie had never hit or caught a ball and had basically avoided any kind of object thrown in his general direction since he was about three years old, he was extremely high on Dylan's list.

“Okay, Numbers,” Dylan grunted. “You know the drill. Hand over the chips.”

Charlie could feel other eyes on him, and not just Liam's and Dusty's. A small crowd had materialized
in the front entrance, as it always seemed to do when something like this happened. Charlie knew that Jeremy was somewhere in that crowd, probably quivering with the urge to do something. Charlie also knew that Jeremy wouldn't dare.