Mr. Fahrenheit (14 page)

“Wh-what do you think this is? Banjo?” CR asked. “Not, like, what do you think it's made of. What do you think the pod is, period?”

Benji couldn't find his voice. He'd asked himself what the pod was a hundred times since last night, of course. Before his close encounter with Agent McKedrick, Benji's best (if disheartening) guess was that the pod was nothing more than the final random fragment of the miracle of the century.

But then the Question had come momentarily alive . . . then
this pod had unleashed a wave of enigmatic energy. . . .

We own this magic
, Benji thought.
These . . . these machines. They're our secrets, but holy shit, they're not just little freaking toys we play with, tricks that only seem amazing when we use our imagination. They touched the rest of the world. They have that power.

We
have that power.

And the same booming voice he'd heard in the dream about the drive-in filled his head, speaking a name just alien enough to suggest something extraordinary:
I AM MR. FAHRENHEIT.

Finally, Benji answered CR: “Whatever it is, it's important. And we're going to figure it out. We're
meant
to.” His voice was completely steady.

“You sound pretty damn sure about that,” CR replied, surprised.

Benji smiled. “Yeah. I am.”

“Me too, Benji Lightman,” Ellie said. “Hot damn,
me too.
”

You grow up being told you'll change the world. Maybe for most people becoming an adult means giving up on that belief, and letting the world change
you
. But Benji—Benji and Ellie—wouldn't let that happen. They were on the eve of gathering fate. It was all happening, and she was in it with him completely. And it was then, for the first time, that Benji began to understand that Ellie might be falling in love with him, too.

B
enji, CR, and Ellie made it back to school just in time for their last classes. After the experience in the tree house, the rest of the day seemed torturously boring. Evening had fallen by the time Benji's after-school practices ended. When he got home, Papaw was in the living room polishing his work shoes.

“Benjamin!” Papaw said, looking exhausted and excited, like he had when introducing Benji to McKedrick. “How'd the meetin' go?”

Before Benji could answer, their landline phone, the one used only for police business, rang. Papaw grimaced, picked it up, and said, “Sheriff Lightman. This better be good.”

Benji was about to go to his room when Papaw hung up. “That plane crash has opened an unbelievable can of worms,” Papaw said, frowning. “We were inspectin' the crash site and came across a cannabis field on Deegan's property. The whole property's roped off. I get the pleasure of giving the DEA a tour at five thirty in the a.m. tomorrow.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You and me both. So, that meetin', how was it? I bet it was interestin'.”

Benji answered honestly. “You have no idea, sir.”

Papaw smiled.

Benji woke up the next morning just before dawn. He'd managed to sleep only a little, his dreams filled with images of the drive-in and the Dream Machine Cadillac, but he didn't feel tired at all.

After Papaw had left around five thirty to show the DEA Deegan's field, Benji called the school's band director to let her know he wouldn't be able to make it to today's six a.m. parade practice. It had been a long time since he'd faked a stomachache to skip out on something; he thought he did pretty well, especially considering that his legs were bouncing with excitement the whole time.

He thought about calling Ellie, Zeeko, or CR to come over, but even if they were awake, they'd be too busy: Ellie was constantly in the media lab finishing the nostalgia-a-thon video for the assembly, Zeeko in the community health truck with his dad, CR at morning practice. Still, despite being alone (perhaps
because
he was alone), Benji smiled. He could spend time alone with the pod, and the thought filled him with relief and anticipation as strong as any he'd ever felt.

Benji grabbed his old laptop, which took a couple of minutes to boot up. As he waited, he looked out his window at the tree house. It all still seemed so unreal. Not just the pod and the Question, but that expression on Ellie's face yesterday, the way roses had appeared in her cheeks when he gave her the scarf.

But it
is
real
.
Actually, it's the realest thing that ever happened to me.
He felt like he
existed
in a way he never really had before.

When Windows finally loaded, he opened the browser and
put it into Private Mode. (Despite the shock wave from the pod, his phone still worked fine, but he felt more comfortable using the laptop because he wasn't sure if his search history showed up on their cell phone bill.) As he had last night, he checked the local TV station's website. After scrolling past several headlines about Friday's homecoming game, he clicked on a headline reading
Bedford Falls Power & Light Co. Outage Reported.

The story still just said that the power had gone off very briefly due to a surge, which the power company was investigating. There was nothing to indicate anyone suspected anything extraordinary had occurred.

Satisfied, Benji jogged downstairs. He went out the front door, making sure Papaw hadn't unexpectedly returned while Benji had been online.

As soon as Benji stepped onto his porch, he heard a squeal of brakes.

At the end of the street, a black SUV, which had been turning onto his road, bucked to a stop. In contrast to the older cars in the neighborhood, the brand-new SUV practically glittered. Benji stared. There were government plates on the front of the car. Although he couldn't quite make out the face, he could tell the driver was wearing a black suit.

Is that McKedrick
?
Maybe he's dropping off the pamphlets.

Except, no. Benji had told him he had practice this morning. Why would McKedrick come now, in spite of thinking Benji wouldn't be home?

The SUV reversed quickly, did a U-turn, and sped away.

What if
, Benji's mind whispered,
he was coming
because
he thought I wouldn't be home? What if he wanted to have a little look around?
Paranoia stiched into Benji, his mouth suddenly spitless.

I can't keep the pod here anymore.

“Y
ou want to do the thing? SERIOUSLY?!” CR shouted.

“ASAP.”

“You want to do the thing ASAP?! (Hut-hut-hike.)”

The center snapped the ball into CR's hands. The offensive and defensive lines collided, the sound like firecracker pops in the wintry air of the after-school practice. CR faded back several yards, checking for a receiver. Seeing none, he momentarily looked back to Benji on the sidelines.

“I LOVE this, Banjo! What changed your mind?”

“You're being blitzed.”

“I'm BEING BLITZ—
oh, shitty shit.
”

Two defenders surged through holes in the offensive line. They were zero trouble: CR tucked the ball into his elbow, deked left before dashing to the right, and the poor JV defenders, who had dived to tackle him, got nothing for their efforts except mouthfuls of snow and laughs from the hundreds of people watching the practice from the stadium's bleachers.

With the effortless grace of his mighty and Einsteinian arm, CR let the football fly toward an open receiver on the very far
end of the field. The throw was a spiraling leather missile slicing through the flurries, and the crowd gasped in a kind of exalted amazement.

CR didn't seem all that interested. He was bending over to help the defenders up even as the receiver downfield pulled the pass into his chest and sprinted into the end zone. Men in the stands shouted, “Hell yes!” and “Go, Magic, go!” and (this one made Benji laugh out loud) “God bless America!”

Coach Nicewarner blew his whistle, clapping. “Don't think we can end better than that! That's practice, gentlemen!”

CR took off his helmet, his hair matted and sweat soaked, and jogged toward the sidelines. In the cold, his head steamed a little. There was a murmur of excitement from fans in the stands, but CR didn't go for them. He stopped in front of Benji, looking him straight in the face.

Benji worked to appear calm, which was tough after the most uncalm day he could remember. After seeing the SUV, he had waited at the house until Papaw got back from work mid-morning; he didn't feel safe leaving the pod at the house, and he didn't think McKedrick would come back if Papaw was home. Benji had told Papaw he'd forgotten his history book, then biked to school, spending the rest of the day trying to figure out what to do. He didn't know if McKedrick had been in the SUV, let alone if he knew anything about the saucer. In fact, as the day went on, Benji felt increasingly confident that things would work out the way they were meant to: perfectly. But he refused to take the chance.

“I can't believe you want to do the prank, Banjo,” CR now said quietly, beaming. “What changed your mind?”

“I was just thinking that it's something I know you wanted to do for a long time,” Benji said.

“What a sweetie pie my friend is.” Then CR giggled, pulled
Benji in, and gave him a noogie. It was too affectionate, too loving, for Benji to get mad. After CR was finished, he kissed the top of Benji's head with a cartoon sound:
mwah!

“So we should figure out what we're gonna do, right?” Benji said.

“Oh, baby, I know what we're gonna do. I've only been planning this for a million years. Step one is, we need to grab Zeeko and tell him to get some of his dad's supply of Icy Hot. And you know those things the cheerleaders use to shoot shirts at the games?”

“The T-shirt cannons.”

“Right, we're gonna go grab those bad boys, too.”

So they grabbed those two bad boys from the field house equipment closet. They found Zeeko outside the stadium gates with his dad in the community health truck (which looked like a silver-plated UPS truck) and got him to come with them. After they bought a couple of additional supplies from Walmart, Benji called Ellie. She sounded excited when she picked up, and after Benji explained the plan and asked her to meet them at his house, she said, “I want you to know, Benji Lightman, that I'm doing this only because I am a better getaway driver than Christopher Robin, and I do not want you to get in trouble. See you in ten minutes.”

“Why do we need to go to your house?” CR asked Benji after they'd hung up.

“I just have to grab a couple things.”

But it was just one thing, really.

Adrenaline had helped Benji move the heavy pod into his magic steamer trunk by himself earlier. But the adrenaline had faded. Papaw was in his bedroom, trying to catch up on sleep. As Benji struggled to quietly pull the trunk from the closet where he'd hidden it, CR jogged over and said, “Allow me, buddy.”

Before Benji could object, CR picked up the trunk. He grunted. “What you got in this thing, a dead body?”

“Some new props for the assembly tomorrow. I was thinking we could drop them off in the theater at school after the prank. Ellie's got a key, and I wanted to get there early tomorrow to practice anyway.”

CR looked at him a moment, and Benji could not read his expression. Then CR just said, “Sweet!”

They decided to take the RustRocket because the guys from Newporte High School in Indianapolis might recognize CR's truck. After they loaded the magic trunk into the back of the station wagon, Benji took the front seat, and he smiled. Ellie was wearing his scarf.

After you passed through some woods outside of Bedford Falls, the journey to Indianapolis was mostly farmland, just a panorama of cornfields bisected by the highway. Every once in a while a gap appeared in the rows of corn, and there would be lines of natural gas mining machinery, motionless and rusting in the snow. Even on cloudy nights like tonight, you could see Indianapolis miles before you actually reached it, the skyscrapers and lights of downtown flying high above the plains. During every minute of the fifteen-minute trip to the city, with a giddiness Benji couldn't help but love, CR bounced in his seat and seemed to talk in one continuous, breathless sentence.

“Holy crap, y'all, this is so exciting. Like, I can feel my butt tingling right now. Do your butts tingle when you get excited? Well, I can't be the only one. I just want to click my heels right now, just click my heels like a damn leprechaun! Zeeko, pass me those paintballs. Thank you, Dad Clothes, you are my bae. These Newporte d-bags deserve it, am I right? These big-city guys are all the same. Their big-ass companies stomp on little
towns and then they go back to their mansions and wipe their big asses with hundred-dollar bills.”

“I think you're confusing the Newporte football team with Scrooge McDuck.” Benji laughed.

CR giggled. “‘Hey, Newporte, shut the duck up!' I'm gonna say that! They'll be all like, ‘Whaaaat?'”

“You don't want them to recognize your voice,” Benji said.

“You're right, not my best idea. But people mess with my Banjo at their own peril. Banjo, you are my bae. Zeek, you're sure Icy Hot can't kill someone, even if they get it on their balls? Sweet, sweet. Guys, I can't believe this is happening. Can you believe we're seniors and we're doing this? This is exactly like I imagined being old would be.
I love everything so much right now!
”

Everyone cracked up.

From what Benji could tell, the north part of Indianapolis was the fancy-pantsiest part of town, with lots of McMansions and upscale restaurants and a pair of Apple Stores. They turned off the main road and drove past the huge main Newporte High School building, which looked so spotless that it almost gleamed in the night air. After making their way through the manicured campus, CR told Ellie to park the RustRocket on the far edge of their football stadium's enormous parking lot, just past the reach of the field lights.

Everyone followed CR's lead and got out of the car, hearing the distant football practice sounds: shoulder pads colliding, whistles chirping. With a ten-thousand-seat capacity, Bedford Falls's stadium was pretty big, but Newporte's dwarfed it. It looked like it could seat fifteen thousand, and from the parking lot Benji could see their Jumbotron, which must have been twice as big as the one in Bedford Falls. The players' cars, parked by the gates, were different than you'd find in Bedford
Falls, too: brand-new SUVs, as well as some low-riding sports cars that seemed hilariously optimistic for an Indiana winter.

CR grabbed a duffel bag from the trunk of the car, checked the time on his phone, and said, “Okay, here's what's up. It's six fifty-two right now and their practice ends at seven, so we better hurry.

“Step One: Eleanor, you're gonna be the distraction. I got this idea from a book we had to read for class. It was about this guy at a boarding school and he was obsessed with dead people and this girl who was smart but moody but
hot
, so okay. Pretty good book! Sad, though.
Shit
, was it sad! Anyway, Eleanor, drive the Rocket over to the other parking lot, the one way on the other side of the field. At exactly six fifty-eight, cell phone time, light these babies up.” He dropped his duffel bag to the ground. As the canvas flap fell open, its cargo tumbled out: two dozen long, red, cylindrical sticks, topped with black fuses. He had tied all their fuses together, so that one spark could light the whole thing. “They're bottle rockets. I got 'em on sale last year right after the Fourth of July. Told you I'd been planning this forever, Banjo!

“Okay, Step Two: While everyone's distracted by the fireworks, me and Zeek go in the locker room and rub Icy Hot in all the seniors' underwear.”

“Let it be noted,” Zeeko said, “I'm only participating because I feel it is my Christian duty to make sure CR doesn't sterilize anyone.”

“Good man,” CR said. “So once their balls are on icy fire, some of the guys will probably freak and come outside, which is when Banjo launches the paintballs out of the T-shirt cannons. Banjo, here's a tip: Be sure you don't aim where people are. If you want to hit them, aim
just
ahead. Aim where they're going to be.

“Eleanor, you have to be back here by the time the paintballs fly, 'cause we're gonna have to haul ass out of here. Cool? Okay, now the disguises!”

He grabbed the Walmart bag and handed them four ski masks. They were hot pink, with little poofy balls on top. They had obviously been designed for tween girls, and CR had obviously thought this was hilarious. He tugged his mask on. “So how hot do I look right now?” he asked, then headbanged as he played heavy metal on an air guitar, the poofy ball jigging.

“It's six fifty-six,” Ellie said impatiently.

CR threw his air guitar over his shoulder. “All right, buddies, let's go make history!” He and Zeeko jogged toward the field through the shadowy parking lot.

“See ya real soon, Benji Lightman,” Ellie said as she drove off.

Benji opened the plastic tub of assorted-color paintballs they'd gotten from Walmart. He divided them equally into the large barrels of the two T-shirt cannons, then checked that the CO
₂
tanks, which launched objects from the guns, were screwed in tightly. He adjusted some nozzles so the guns would shoot with the maximum amount of power.

And then he waited. He put on his mask, which was too tight. Still, as the seconds ticked, he was surprised to feel a delighted, nervous thrill. This was actually pretty fun.

Or at least it was, until 6:58 came and went without Ellie igniting the bottle rockets. The practice was ending, all the players heading back to the locker room. Benji's phone buzzed with a group text from Ellie.

Fireworks r duds! Won't light! Get out of the locker room!

“Oh, shit,” Benji said. Right then, from all the way across the parking lot, he heard several shouts of surprise from the Newporte field house.

Doors burst open and CR and Zeeko dashed out. Inexplicably, CR kneeled between a couple of the Newporte players' cars, like he was praying. As some of the Newporte guys followed them out, CR looked back and shouted in a high falsetto voice, “We just fed you a revenge sandwich with a side of justice!” He and Zeeko sprinted across the parking lot toward Benji, sprinted like men possessed, arms churning, poofy ski mask balls bopping happily back and forth.

“Shoot!” CR screamed in that high voice. Benji realized he was trying to disguise his voice. “Shoot the d-bags
now
!”

Benji picked up both T-shirt cannons and fired simultaneously. They kicked against his shoulders, two jets of gas ejected from the barrels, and there the paintballs went, a multicolored swarm rainbowing through the night.

The amazing Technicolor onslaught peppered a few of the Newporte guys who had been chasing CR and Zeeko, but it wasn't a direct hit; he'd forgotten CR's advice about aiming for the future. Still, the shock of the assault made the players momentarily retreat behind their cars, which had just received rather psychedelic new paint jobs.

The Rocket peeled to a stop a few feet away. CR scrambled into the passenger seat, Benji and Zeeko in the back, CR shouting and half laughing, “Go go go go!”

“CR, I can't believe you did that!” Zeeko said, ripping off his mask. “That was too far!” He was as angry as Benji had ever seen him.

“What did you do?” Ellie said, speeding from the parking lot.

“I slit a bunch of their car tires,” CR said.

“Wait, wait, isn't that an actual crime?” Ellie said.

“I had to do it or else they'd be able to chase us!”

And it seemed hard to argue with that logic, but unfortunately,
as they turned onto the highway out of the city, they realized that the Newporte guys
were
chasing them. A pair of new SUVs trailed them, gaining as they entered the panoramic cornfields.

“Lose 'em, Eleanor! Take a shortcut!”

“Point the way,” Ellie said sarcastically. It was all cornfields for miles, with just a single lane heading in either direction. “If we make it back to Bedford Falls, maybe they'll stop chasing us. Buckle your asses up, boys.”

She floored it. The Rocket might have been pretty much a piece of crap, but it was
Ellie's
piece of crap, and she knew exactly how to take it to its outer limits. They accelerated, miraculously putting distance between themselves and their pursuers. By the time they reached the foggy, winding forest roads just outside of Bedford Falls, they were at least a mile ahead of the SUVs.