Bringing Down the Mouse (6 page)

Charlie grimaced as he yanked the collar of his down jacket up as high as it would go. He was shivering so hard that he could hear his teeth clattering together, and it felt like the bones in his cheeks had turned to ice. It wasn't supposed to be this cold so early in the fall—but then again, growing up in New England, the seasons had always seemed to rage over the calendar like hurricane-driven white-water rapids. The best you could do was dress the part. Today, for Charlie, that meant a navy blue down coat that made him look like a blueberry Michelin Man, thick jeans tucked into
thermal socks, and stiff work boots that kept his toes warm but left blisters on his heels the size of golf balls. All things considered, he'd rather have dressed normally and stayed inside.

Unfortunately, staying inside wasn't an option at eleven thirty a.m., because that was the beginning of the sixth-grade lunch period. Which meant that if he wanted to eat, he had to line up outside, single file, on a covered double-wide sidewalk, and wait his turn to pick up a plastic tray from a stack by the propped-open double doors leading inside. It seemed crazy, having an outdoor entrance to a lunchroom in New England, and every year, the school administration made plans to shift the waiting area to somewhere more reasonable. But for some reason, these plans never came to fruition. There was always some other construction project or school addition that took precedent. Charlie secretly believed the school wanted them put on ice before lunch—better to keep them from turning into wild animals in the relatively free time between classes.

Once Charlie claimed a tray and a battered fork and knife, he'd get to make his way inside. But for the moment, from where Charlie was standing—still twenty feet from the double doors, wedged between Jeremy and a British exchange student named Niles
who was quietly cursing to himself as he bounced from foot to foot in a useless effort to stay warm—it seemed like they'd be stuck outside forever. Charlie would have gladly taken three of Mr. Marshall's notoriously tricky social studies exams in exchange for a trip to the front of the lunch line—or a pair of better fitting boots.

“If you die first,” he said, eyeing Jeremy's high-top Converse sneakers—obviously a hand-me-down from some cousin somewhere, so scuffed and worn they looked as comfortable as cotton, “can I have your shoes?”

“Don't you get your allowance next week? Make me an offer. I don't need all my toes.”

Charlie laughed. The thought of his allowance cheered him, because it meant another month had gone by, and the deeper he moved into sixth grade, the more routine and comfortable middle school was beginning to feel. It was already the last Thursday in September. After the bizarre and electrifying afternoon at the Halloween fair, life had almost instantly returned to the uneventful and warmly monotonous rhythm of another school year. Middle school felt just like elementary school, from the bus picking him up at his suburban home in a leafy cul-de-sac near the Newton-Wellesley line, to Jeremy and Charlie's daily assault on the vending
machine. And then after homeroom, the relentless hop from class to class, most of it mindless swatches of time to Charlie, because he was too far ahead of the curve and too smart to open his mouth when the teachers asked questions. He knew what it was like to be the kid who gave the right answer too many times.

As fascinating as the Halloween Fair with Finn and Magic had been, that had seemed to be the end of the bizarre episode; despite Magic's farewell words, the two seventh graders had made no attempt to contact Charlie, nor had he seen either kid in the hallways in school. And the further away from that afternoon Charlie got, the more okay he was with the idea that it was just some strange moment in his life, insignificant and soon forgotten. After two weeks, the thrill of that moment had begun to fade. The more Charlie thought about what he'd seen, the more reluctant he was to delve much deeper into the matter.

It's just math, chemistry, and a little physics.

In Charlie's mind, there were a few too many problems with what Finn had implied with that cryptic statement. To use math to beat carnival games suggested the games had a predictive nature about them—that the games themselves had a set, mathematically precise way they were supposed to be played, and that you
could somehow figure out mathematical or physical formulas that gave you an edge. Throwing a coin at a plate seemed to be a game of skill and luck, not math. And popping balloons with a dart? Wasn't that just about how good your aim was and how strong your biceps?

Either Finn and Magic were just messing with him, or they were involved with something much more complex than Charlie could imagine. And of course, there was one other possibility—that somehow Finn and Magic had figured out a way to cheat. Charlie wasn't a saint, but he tried to be a good kid most of the time, keeping the lying to his parents to a minimum. Telling his dad he was going to meet Jeremy at the Halloween Fair was about as bad as he got. But cheating a carnival game—that seemed plain wrong. He'd never cheated on a test—not that he'd ever felt the need to—and he'd never taken anything that wasn't his. So if Finn and Magic were involved in some scheme to cheat at carnival games, well, that just seemed like something he didn't want to know more about.

Whatever the case, Charlie had finally decided to put all his ruminations aside, and he'd gone back the business of being a regular sixth grader. Hanging out with Jeremy and the rest of his friends during his free time, avoiding Dylan and his gang in the halls and
on the playground, studying for his classes, doing his homework, having regular dinners with his parents when they weren't off writing papers or playing with their test tubes, beakers, and pipettes in their respective labs.

“Finally, here we go,” Jeremy interrupted Charlie's thoughts, gesturing with a spindly arm. “We seem to be moving. If we can just get our muscles thawed enough to make it to the front of the line, we might survive another day at this prison camp.”

Charlie rubbed his hands together to get life back into his fingers, then followed as Jeremy and the rest of the line lurched forward toward the trays. A few more minutes went by in grim silence, broken only by the sound of a few dozen boot soles scraping against the near-frozen sidewalk, and then they were working their way through the double doors, both gripping lime-green plastic trays and tarnished silverware. Charlie had found a fork with three tines intact—a coup!—but the only spoon he'd managed to track down had been flattened into something resembling a miniature shovel. No matter, Charlie was inside, his skin prickling as the heat brought life back into his zombified outer cells.

They made quick work of the food dispensary. Choosing matching cartons of whole milk from the
industrial-size coolers just inside the doorway, lining up again to slide their trays down the aluminum shelving tracks that allowed the lunch ladies—flabby-armed doughy women with hairnets and white-and-pink short-sleeve buttoned coats that made them look like dental assistants—to dollop out huge spoonfuls of vaguely identifiable slop into the different hexagonal compartments dug into the trays. As usual, one of the compartments got a heavy glob of beans and rice; next to that, some sort of meat, drenched in sauce that seemed to glow beneath the fluorescent ceiling lights; and in the last compartment, bread, orange, rectangular, and mushy, that could have once been bananas, corn, or wheat.

And then they were through the line and out the other side, facing a wide room that had once doubled as a gym—until a grant from a wealthy alum with fond memories of dodgeballs and rope climbs had led to the construction of a fairly ridiculous monstrosity on the far side of the school complex, complete with fiberglass bleachers and an Astroturf track. Charlie was certain the alum had spent less time on the receiving end of those dodgeballs than he and Jeremy, but even so, you had to applaud his generous spirit.

In short, the lunchroom floor was still shiny cement covered in fading blue and red lines that had
once designated a basketball court. There was still a scoreboard attached to the far wall, though the digital screen had long since faded into a gray cloud of dead pixels, and the clock had frozen in time—2:55, numbers that seemed apocryphal in that they mimicked the idea of a school day that never ended, a final class that never let out, never reached the holy, buzzer-blessed moment of 3:00.

Spread across the basketball court were a dozen long rectangular steel picnic-style tables, with circular stools attached along each side. The stools were green, blue, and yellow, in no particular order. For some reason, the guys usually preferred the green and blue stools, while the girls preferred the yellow. Charlie had his theories, but he'd never tried to analyze the preference scientifically, though he was sure his mother would have attacked the problem with statistical fervor, compiling data charts and conducting blind polls. For Charlie's part, he didn't really care about the color of his stool. His main goal, like most of the other kids, was to get through lunch as fast as humanly possible.

As Charlie moved out of the food dispensary and past the first few steel tables, he could see that most of the other kids in his grade were already way ahead of him; the tables closest to the food were already full,
the kids hunched over their trays, focused on shoveling the nameless slop down their throats. Many of the kids hadn't even bothered removing their heavy coats, scarves, and even gloves, because lunch bled into recess. The faster you ate, the more free time you got to hang out with your friends in the much more preferable indoor/outdoor playground that was attached, via a side door, to the lunchroom. The playground was pretty state-of-the-art—an indoor section full of donated toys, electric trains, puzzles and board games, and a nicely manicured yard dominated by a prefab plastic jungle gym contraption with built in slides, swings, and climbing apparatus, all connected by tubes that were designed to vaguely resemble some sort of space station. From afar, the jungle gym looked more like a habitrail built for giant hamsters, but nobody was complaining—it beat the aging tire swings and warped steel slides that had previously littered the play area.

Beyond the habitrail/space station, there was a field for pickup soccer next to a triangle for either baseball or kickball—but Charlie and his group usually avoided those high-risk areas. With Dylan's crew continually roaming that part of the recess geography, it was much safer to stay near the front of the playground, in full
view of the open doorway leading back into the indoor section of the recess area. Mrs. Patchett, who had been drawing recess proctoring duties since the school year began, never actually set foot outside the indoor section, but even though she looked to be in her mid-hundreds, she had eyes like a hawk. Dylan wouldn't bother anyone within range of her seemingly bionic vision; he was content lording over the fields, if not all the flies.

In short, lunch was really just the opening act for recess, which meant you got in, you got out, and if you were lucky, nobody got hurt in the process.

“Ah, the other inmates are already plotting our jailbreak. Sharpen your spoon, Charlie, we go over the wall as soon as we choke down our radioactive mystery meat.”

Charlie followed Jeremy's gaze and spotted their group at their usual place—the last table, farthest back in the room, tucked into a corner on the left side of the basketball court. The far edge of the table was positioned right up against a locked door that used to lead to the old boys' locker room, and the center stool—green, at the moment empty and waiting for Charlie—was directly beneath a fluorescent ceiling panel that had gone dark at least four years ago. Charlie had once heard that the bulb that had flickered inside the panel
had been recalled for leaking unnamed chemicals; Bobby, the school janitor, had assured him the yellow goo that Charlie could still sometimes see pooling in the corners of he ceiling panel was perfectly innocuous. Even though Bobby had never graduated high school, Charlie wanted badly to believe him. Better a little noxious chemical than giving up the table he and his friends had spent most of their lives around.

It wasn't exactly preferred real estate, but it was home. Since third grade, Charlie and his friends had been eating together at that table, and even though now they were in middle school, there didn't seem any reason why they should shake things up.

“Looks like Crystal is way ahead of you, Jeremy. She's distilling the bread down to its acids and bases, and she's going to use the runoff to tunnel our way out.”

Crystal Mueller, the only girl at the table, looked up from her tray as Charlie came around the corner and chose the free green stool next to her. Jeremy took the seat directly across from him, his back to the rest of their class, and pointed at the impressive contraption Crystal had built across two of the plastic compartments of her tray. From Charlie's vantage, it looked like she'd cut a plastic straw in half, attached one end to a rubber party balloon, and placed the other end in two
spoons that looked like they'd been melded together under intense heat. Everything on her tray had come from the lunchroom, but seeing it all put together like that was bizarre—if you didn't know Crystal Mueller.

“Is Charlie right?” Jeremy asked once they'd settled into their seats. “Are you building a still?”

Crystal's cheeks flushed as she pushed her brown bangs off her forehead, then steadied her chunky, zebra-rimmed glasses on her nose. She was constantly readjusting those glasses—a nervous tick that Charlie found equal parts charming and annoying, depending on his mood. Then she rolled her eyes behind the quarter-thick lenses.

“It's nothing of the sort. It's a simple pipette and a vinegar well. I've siphoned the vinegar out of some salad dressing, and now I'm going to test the corn bread for calcite deposits.”

Charlie stifled a laugh, because with Crystal, it was impossible to know if she was joking or completely serious. He'd been friends with her since second grade, and her obsession with geology sometimes seemed to bleed into every aspect of her daily life. She'd been collecting rocks for so long that she'd run out of room in her bedroom to display them, so she kept boxes in all their lockers. As the only girl in their little group, they
gave her a fair amount of slack—even though Charlie would have been the first to admit that she was quite possibly the smartest of them all. But he'd never have told her so to her face; he wasn't that shy a person, but with girls, he often clenched up like he was trying to swallow something particularly large. Usually, he didn't think of Crystal as a girl, but sometimes, when she did something particularly impressive, or when he noticed her pretty features, her little nose and brown doe eyes, he found himself losing words. Then again, more often then not, he thought of her the same way he thought of Jeremy and the rest of them. After all, he'd seen her rock collection.