Pickle (9 page)

 

21

Banana Bread Bribery

“Good morning, students!” Pat's voice came over the P.A. and interrupted Ms. Ruiz's talk about lake monsters and dragons. “Imagine my surprise this morning when the heater came on in the office and I was showered with confetti. Confetti, I tell you! Some clever trickster put a great deal of confetti in our office vents. I enjoyed the rain, but I'm afraid Principal Lebonsky won't have the same, ah, appreciation. It looks like her office got the worst of it.” There was mumbling and the intercom clicked off. Ms. Ruiz took a breath to get back into her mythological creature talk. The P.A. clicked back on. “Pat here, again. If anybody wants to volunteer to help Rick and me clean up the confetti before Principal Lebonsky gets back from a school district meeting, there will be some banana bread in it for you. Thank you.”

Oliver stopped Bean and me on the way out of class.

“Mission accomplished. Consider me an official, initiated pickle maker,” he said. Bean high-fived him.

“Where'd you get the confetti?” she said.

“I bought it at Party Plus. I didn't want it to get traced back to Lee's.”

“They can't trace confetti! Way to take food out of my mouth, bro,” she said. Oliver looked like he might apologize, so I talked before he could.

“Nice work. How'd you think to put it in the vents?”

“I used to hide stuff in the heater vent at my last foster house. There was another kid there that swiped stuff,” he said.

“Pretty clever, Oliver,” I said.

“We'll call you Clevoliver.” Bean tapped him on top of the head with her pencil like she was knighting him. I don't call him that, but she does. A lot.

 

22

A Club with No Name

“Frank suggests that our group needs a name, and I think so, too,” I said on Thursday at the beginning of our second pickle meeting. Everybody nodded.

“We could leave a sign out for everyone to see when we pull off a prank. We
should
take credit,” Oliver said. Bean agreed. The League of Pickle Makers would obviously blow our cover, so we needed another name, too.

“Something with cool initials like the C.I.A.,” Frank said.

“G.O.O.F.,” Oliver said.

“What does it stand for?” I asked.

“Um … Great … Order … Of … um … Friends,” Oliver mumbled.

“That … doesn't … sound … so … great,” Bean said.

“How about Awesome Secret Society?” Oliver said. I thought he might be onto something for about eleven seconds until I figured it out. Bean hit him in the back of the head.

“How about the Secret Agency of Pranksters?” I said. It made us sound like covert, funny, super spies.

“You want to be a S.A.P.?” Frank asked. I did not.

Bean suggested we just think of words that would match the acronym D.U.M.B. After many, many bad ideas, we finally came up with a name that everyone agreed wasn't too bad—the Prank and Trick Association. The name itself was only so-so, but if we used the initials our signs could say:

“Today's entertainment brought to you compliments of the P.T.A. Thank you.”

It was kind of true, since the P.T.A. gave us money to start the club. Bean would print the cards out with some fancy cursive font on thick paper that they used for wedding invitations at the store.

“We could make a cool sign for the Pioneer Fair, too,” Oliver said. “But, you know, for the League of Pickle Makers. Not the P.T.A.”

“I guess so,” I said. “As long as it's not the same color paper or writing as the P.T.A. signs.”

“No doubt. That would be bad,” Bean said. “The store has a roll of bright green paper that we can use to make a banner for the Pioneer Fair.”

“I don't know. You two haven't done your initiation yet. Since you're not full members, I'm not sure that you'll get a vote,” Oliver said. He made air quotes when he said “full members.”

“Oh, Clevoliver. I'm not sure you'll get to bend your fingers into cute little quotation marks anymore if you keep talking to us like that,” Bean said. “When I do my prank, you're gonna know. It's going to be legendary.” I thought it might be better to do mine before Bean did hers. I just hadn't thought of anything yet.

“Cool it, guys. Listen. Let's have a website,” Frank said. He said he'd made tons of websites before. But, he wouldn't tell us what they were—other than Bean's Cat vs. Dude. We moved the meeting to the library to use the computers. The chess club was already in there, so we had to keep our voices down. We crowded around the computer farthest from the other kids. Frank showed us a site where you could pick a domain name. We found that most sites that have P.T.A. in the name were taken. They were probably all teacher and parent magnets anyway.

“I'm glad that we're doing this,” Bean said. She elbowed me kind of hard, but when I looked up she smiled. I thought she meant making a website, but then I realized she meant the club. I wanted to tell her that I thought she was cool, that I'd been wrong about her before, but I couldn't think of a way to do it that didn't sound bad.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Pickles forever!” Oliver said. I think he meant “I'm-happy-we're-friends-too-and-this-is-fun,” but Frank thought it was a website suggestion. He checked, and
www.picklesforever.com
wasn't taken.

“Wait a minute. We can't put prank stuff on there. People will know the pickle club is doing it,” I whispered.

“We can make it
appear
to be an ode to the pickle, but I'll encrypt a password to see the good stuff,” Frank said.

“What's the good stuff?” Oliver said.

Silence.

“Duh, pranks!” Bean shook her head. “How about if we post videos?”

“Too risky. Someone might identify us. Reports,” Frank said.

“What kind of reports? Like a book report?”

“No. Incident reports. Like the cops do. Pranks, Instructions. Kids from all over could come and learn how to do pranks at
their
schools if we tell them the password. We could still keep some stuff hidden. The P.T.A. could be HUGE,” Frank said.

“We could go viral,” Bean said.

“Like a computer virus?” I asked. I wasn't allowed to download stuff without checking it for viruses. Maybe it was because of Bean.

“Like a flu virus,” Bean said. I ignored her. “Catch up, Ben. Not like a computer virus. Like something that spreads around the Internet so that people all over see it. Like a kitten video.” Points for not mentioning her own website. She hardly ever had kittens in the videos. Not that I check. I have at least five kitten videos bookmarked, from other websites, but I wasn't going to tell them that. I just nodded.

“I'll get started on this and have something for you guys to see next week,” Frank said. He shooed us out of the library, and we went to check on the pickles we had made in the lab. We'd take them to the Pioneer Fair, everybody would be impressed that kids made pickles, and we'd get a cash prize. It was perfect.

Except one thing: When we got to the lab, the pickles were gone.

 

23

Check-In

“Why don't you tell me what's been happening,” Ms. Ruiz said. She had asked me to stay after school Friday for another League of Pickle Makers check-in meeting.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Well, how are things going for the Pioneer Fair?”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Fine, I guess.”

“What have you decided to prepare à la the pioneers?”

“Pickles,” I said.

“Well, of course, Ben! I assumed you'd be preparing pickles. You
are
a pickle maker. Which variety of pickle do you plan on preparing?” Ms. Ruiz smiled at me. I wanted to tell her that she talked like a tongue twister, but I didn't.

“Well, we made some … basic … pickles, and left them in the lab to … sit. But, somebody took them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I went to check on them yesterday, and they were gone. The jar and everything,” I said. Ms. Ruiz nodded and looked like she thought that it was totally reasonable that there would be a pickle thief at the school.

“Where were the pickles?” she asked.

“Just up on the counter in the laboratory,” I said. Ms. Ruiz nodded again.

“Rick probably thought they were left over from a science experiment. I'll arrange for a cupboard to be set aside
exclusively
for the League of Pickle Makers.” Ms. Ruiz made a note on a notepad covered in coffee stain rings. I thanked her and got up to leave. There just isn't that much pickle business to discuss.

“Ben, you had better gather your picklers together to prepare for the Pioneer Fair. It's just a few weeks away,” she said. “Most of the better pickling recipes take that long to cure.”

“We'll get started on something,” I said.

“Excellent. I've been making arrangements with the other club advisors. The baking club will definitely be participating, and some of the others. The art club made arrangements for a leather-punching demonstration.” I pictured people fighting motorcycle jackets, but I felt pretty sure it was something else.

“That's great,” I said, and got up from my chair.

“One more thing, Ben,” Ms. Ruiz said. “Do you know anything about the pranks that have been going on around school?”

“Why would I know anything about the pranks?” I said. My mouth felt like it was full of cotton balls. Dirty, lying cotton balls. My eye twitched.

“Principal Lebonsky has a theory that what has been happening would take more than one student, so one of the groups at school may be responsible,” Ms. Ruiz said.

“Oh.”

“I told her that I didn't think it was likely, but she said that the clubs have school access after classes. She's asked the faculty advisors to question all club leaders.”

“Other kids could come into the school when it's open for extracurricular enrichment,” I said.

“Exactly!” Ms. Ruiz said. “I have you pickle makers and girls' basketball. I told her that I'm sure that none of my students would do anything to jeopardize themselves. You've got enough on your plate with the Pioneer Fair; no time for mischief!” She laughed and shook her head.

I went straight home after the meeting and emailed the club to tell them what Ms. Ruiz said about the fair and the pranks. Well, I emailed their agent accounts. Bean had chosen to go by Agent Super, and Oliver was Agent 008. I sent the message in Italian. I told them that we needed to make a new plan for pickles for the fair, but nobody responded. I forwarded a couple of pickle recipes.

All these guys had to do was say whether the recipes looked good or not. I checked my email four more times, but they'd ignored the recipes. I slammed the computer closed and turned on the TV.

 

24

Trick #3

After I checked my email a couple more times, I caught the second half of
Escape from Zombie High.
It wasn't as funny as I hoped, but the final scene when the star football player got cornered in the gym by the mob of angry zombie cheerleaders gave me an idea for my initiation. The gym filled with fog before the attack, and I thought about how cool and creepy it would be to have our gym floor like that, full of swirling, misty clouds. Like zombie cheerleaders were going to grab you when you tried to climb the rope. That's what one of the guys in the movie did. He tried to climb the rope but he only got about five feet before the zombie girls pulled him down. I don't know what he was thinking. Nobody can climb those ropes very fast, and it's just hanging from a hook on the ceiling. It's not like he could escape. Still, it gave me an idea.

“I know what I want to do for my solo prank, but I need a little help,” I said. The pickle makers were eating lunch together in the quietest corner of the cafeteria.