Dinosaur Boy Saves Mars (2 page)

Orlando's “makeup day” stunt got him suspended for three days. I'm pretty sure he spent the entire time thinking up new prank ideas, because when he finally returned to school he had a new practical joke planned for every day.

On his first day back, he deflated all the volleyballs in the gym.

The second day, he put birdseed on top of all the cars in the faculty parking lot. The picture on his blog that night was a close-up of Principal Kline's car covered in bird poop.

The day after that, he released a jar of crickets into a loose ceiling panel in the boys' bathroom. They spread all over the school. Now, whenever it gets quiet in a classroom, we can hear them chirping above our heads.

Unlike the Wi-Fi thing, there was no actual proof he did any of those things. But everybody knew it was him. It was always him. You only had to read his blog to know.

He was pretty much permanently in detention, but he didn't seem to care. And he didn't have any friends, but he didn't seem to mind that either.

I'm not sure if his lack of friends was the reason he pulled so many pranks. Or if pulling so many pranks was the reason for his lack of friends. It didn't really matter. The end result was the same. Every day, Orlando ate lunch by himself at the center of an otherwise empty cafeteria table. Like there was some kind of invisible force field between him and everybody else at school.

Most of the stuff he did was more annoying than harmful. Like rearranging all the desks in our homeroom to face backward. Or taking a selfie and setting it as the background on Ms. Filch's computer. Or gluing the caps onto all of Ms. Filch's pens. He really seemed to like tormenting Ms. Filch. She was pretty patient with him, considering. Until the day that Orlando put superglue all over her chair right before free reading period.

By the end of free reading period, Ms. Filch's jeans were permanently attached to the chair. We all had to leave the room while another female teacher came to help her get out of them. And to hold a towel around her until someone could find something else for her to wear. Orlando got a picture of the janitor hauling away Ms. Filch's ruined chair (with her jeans still attached) and put it up on his blog. And Instagram. It got three thousand likes in less than an hour.

That was when Ms. Filch kind of lost it.

At lunch that day, she made us all sit at our desks and explained that we would not be allowed to leave the room until someone confessed to being the glue perpetrator.

“Ms. Filch?” Elliot called out from the back row, waving one of his long, skinny arms in the air. “Why do we all have to sit here? Everybody knows that it was—”

Ms. Filch raised a hand to silence him.

“I don't care if you know who it was, Elliot. I don't care if everybody in this room knows. It's not just about who did it. I said I want a confession. A confession is about taking responsibility. And until someone confesses, the entire class will eat their lunch at their desks. Silently.”

We all turned to glare at Orlando.

He pushed a strand of hair off his forehead, adjusted his glasses, and started unwrapping his sandwich. He looked exactly the way he always did at lunch: small, quiet, and completely unbothered. And not like someone who was about to take responsibility for anything.

We all took out our lunches. I poured dressing over my favorite salad (mixed greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, and banana peppers) and as I ate, I stared at the first page of my notebook where I had started a brainstorming list for my “passion” paper.

So far, the list consisted of the words “Possible Passions,” underlined twice, with nothing underneath.

At the desk next to me, Sylvie pushed back the hood of her sweatshirt and nodded to my notebook.

“What's that for?” she whispered.

“I still have to write my paper,” I whispered back. Ms. Filch had given me a two-week extension. But I still had no idea what I was going to write about.

“Oh that,” Sylvie said, unwrapping a pack of Starburst. “I got an A-minus on mine.”

“For a Martian, you're really good at English,” I grumbled, taking a big bite of my salad.

“Oh, not especially,” Sylvie said, sandwiching a pink Starburst between two yellow ones and biting them in half. “All Martians speak English.”

“Really?” I asked. “That seems weird.”

“Why?” Sylvie asked, lowering her voice to an even quieter, mysterious tone. “Who do you think taught it to you Earthlings?”

“Really?” I said again, louder this time.

“Shhh!” Ms. Filch hissed from the front of the room.

We were both quiet for a minute. When Ms. Filch returned to her book, Sylvie leaned toward me again.

“Actually, it's because Martians are obsessed with American TV,” she confessed. “All the planets are. My dad says nothing has united the galaxy like everybody's shared love for
American Idol
. They speak English at all important intergalactic summits now. It's very trendy.”

“Huh,” I said thoughtfully.

I returned to my notebook and wrote “TV” as the first item on my list.

I crossed it off a second later, after I remembered I hardly ever watched TV. There had to be something I was more passionate about than that.

Lunch seemed to take a lot longer than usual. By the time the bell finally rang, I had eaten my entire salad and had written and crossed out three more items on my list. Sylvie had ripped her Starburst wrappers into tiny pieces and used them to spell out
ORLANDO SUCKS
across her desk. At the back of the room, Elliot had his legs stretched out in the aisle, his head tilted over the back of his chair, and was taking what looked like the world's most uncomfortable nap.

Ms. Filch got up from her desk and gave Orlando a pointed look.

He pushed his glasses farther up his nose and blinked at her.

Ms. Filch sighed. “It looks like we'll all be having lunch together tomorrow too.”

We had lunch inside every day for the next week. Ms. Filch refused to back down and Orlando refused to confess. I had just begun to think I would be spending every lunch period for the rest of fifth grade at my desk when finally, the following Tuesday, Ms. Filch was forced to let us outside.

It wasn't because Orlando confessed. It was because the school had finally decided to do something about the crickets, and the stuff the pest-control people sprayed inside the school was supposed to dissipate for an hour before any of us breathed it. So my class got to join the rest of the school in the courtyard during lunchtime.

I had just finished my salad. I was standing around with Elliot and Sylvie, enjoying the feel of the sun on my plates, when all of a sudden a tornado-level wind whipped up and knocked over every trash can in sight. Garbage scattered everywhere and some of the smaller kids had to grab on to bigger ones so they wouldn't get blown away too. Everyone was staring up at the sky and pointing. I craned my dinosaur neck at a painful angle so that I could see the large, circular object that was hovering over the quad and blocking out the sun.

The disk just hung there for a split second, like a humongous spinning quarter. Then the wind stopped and it fell to the ground with a deafening crash. Pieces of asphalt went flying in all directions, and roughly half the kids standing nearby were knocked off their feet. It was a miracle that no one got flattened.

The UFO did take out three of the four outdoor basketball hoops on its way down. But nobody seemed to notice because as soon as the disk stopped spinning, a small door opened on the underside and two enormous polar bears came charging down the gangplank.

The bears tore through the crowd, making weird, trumpetlike sounds and knocking kids aside like bowling pins. The panic was total. Everybody, including me, scrambled, trying to find a safe direction to run in. But whenever I managed to get myself out of the path of one of the bears, I instantly found myself right in front of the other one. So I ended up huddled between Elliot and Sylvie, smashed in a shaky clump with a large group of other fifth graders.

Eventually the bears stopped running and started pacing. They made slow circles around us, clicking their long, black claws against the cracked asphalt and holding their noses high. The larger of the two passed within a foot of me. It was sniffing the air in an expectant way. Exactly like Fanny does when my mom cooks bacon.

Which made me wonder if perhaps we were the bacon in this scenario.

But before I could get too worried about it, another figure appeared on the UFO gangplank. It was not another polar bear. It was a man—a rugged-looking, gray-haired man wearing a leather Indiana Jones hat and jeans. He raised his fingers to his lips and let out a shrill whistle.

The polar bears stopped dead in their tracks. Then they lowered their heads and backed away, just like Fanny does when she's caught misbehaving. When they were about ten feet away from the mass of students, they both sat down on their hindquarters so that they strongly resembled enormous, salivating teddy bears.

My grandfather lowered his fingers from his mouth and shouted, “
Who's got the peanut butter?
”

• • •

Nobody answered him, so my grandfather repeated the question as he came toward us.

“Who's got the peanut butter?”

I heard mutterings of confusion in the huddled mass of kids around me, but nothing resembling a response until Gary Simmons timidly cleared his throat and raised his hand.

“Yes?” my grandfather called on him, impatiently.

“Um, well, sir,” Gary stammered. “We're actually a nut-free campus.”

“A what?”

“Nut-free. Be-be-because so many people have allergies.”

My grandfather blinked at him for a moment, then shook his head resolutely.

“Nope. Somebody has peanut butter. Otherwise, they wouldn't have acted like that.” He motioned to the polar bears. They were still frozen in teddy-bear poses, which would have been funny if we weren't all still shaking so badly.

My grandfather narrowed his eyes, just as Emma Hecht pushed past me and took a step forward.

“It's me,” she admitted, looking horribly ashamed as she handed my grandfather a pink Hello Kitty lunch sack. “My grandma packed my lunch this morning. She never remembers the rule about nuts. I'm sorry.”

My grandfather opened the sack and pulled out a plastic bag, which contained a slightly smushed, crustless peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich cut into triangles.

The polar bears both sat forward eagerly.

“I never even took it out of the bag,” Emma said hurriedly. “Just in case.”

“That was smart of you,” my grandfather said and gave her a reassuring smile as he tossed the sandwich toward the bears. Each one caught a triangle in midair and gulped it down. Then they sat back on their haunches, smacking their lips with long, black tongues.

My grandfather cleared his throat.

“No harm done,” he said to Emma, and then he raised his voice so that even the kids in the back of the crowd could hear. “But let this be a lesson to all of you. If you don't respect the dietary restrictions of your fellow classmates, the polar bears will come back. Got it?”

There was a smattering of mmm-hmms, yeses, and nods. But basically everybody just continued to stare at him.

My grandfather nodded smartly, finally spotted me in the crowd, and grinned.

“Ah, Sawyer,” he said. Then he noticed Sylvie and Elliot standing beside me. “And Sylvia, good. And also…also…”

He frowned for a moment over Elliot's name.

“Elliot,” Elliot reminded him.

“Of course, Elliot,” he said, as he handed Emma back her empty lunch sack. “Glad to see you. I came here looking for the three of you.”

“You did?” I asked, feeling rather awkward. Emma slipped back behind me, holding her lunch sack protectively to her chest.

“Yes. I'm afraid Sylvie's father may be in trouble. I'm going to need your help.”

Elliot and I just stood there dumbly. But Sylvie let out an enormous sigh of relief.

“Finally,” she muttered. Then she slung her enormous lunch bag over her shoulder and walked up the gangplank of the ship, right past my grandfather, without looking back once to see if Elliot and I were coming.

My grandfather grinned down at me.

“Well? Are you ready for an adventure or what?”