Slob (8 page)

Have you ever heard of Ockham’s razor? It’s a principle that says the simplest solution is always the best solution.

What I came up with was spectacularly simple.

Mason enjoyed eating my Oreos, so why not make eating my Oreos a lot less enjoyable?

I went to the bathroom and opened the little linen closet. Mom keeps all her oddball remedies on the top shelf: burdock tinctures, nettle capsules, tea tree oil. It took a while to sort through it all and find what I was looking for, but I did. It was shoved into the back corner. I think Mom was embarrassed that she had to use it, especially since it wasn’t natural or organic and it didn’t have any herbal junk in it.

Facial hair bleach.

It’s for those little moustaches that women sometimes get. I once caught Mom with the stuff slathered across her upper lip. It’s white and thick. Much like the middle of an Oreo cookie. I looked in the box. It even had its own little spatula to spread the cream with. How convenient. I shoved the box back to the corner of the cabinet. I’d be using it in the morning.

Obviously, I didn’t need to make any blueprints for this idea. Back in my room, I shut my graph paper notebook and opened the desk drawer to put it away, but I hesitated before I shut the drawer. I stared down at it for a moment, considering. Then I pulled the entire drawer out of the desk and put it on the floor. In the shallow gap between the runners and the bottom of the desk there was a small rectangular piece of pale green paper. I pulled it out, took a breath, and flipped it over so I could read the single word written on it:

 

 

SLOB

 

 

I knew the handwriting so well—the neat, round curves, the slight hook on the top of the
L.
My right hand held the paper and my left hand pressed against my stomach. It’s funny how things can hurt and feel good at the same time.

“Owen?”

Hurriedly, I put the paper back in its hiding place and slid the drawer over it.

“Yeah?”

The door opened and Mom walked in, carrying a plastic bag.

“Hey, good-lookin’. How are you feeling?”

“A lot better. I think the peppermint really helped.”

“Did it? Wow.” She always sounds surprised when someone tells her that one of her remedies actually worked. “Have you been able to eat anything?”

“I had a few Oreos,” I said. I figured it was better to fess up than have her discover the near empty package of cookies tomorrow morning. “That was all I could keep down,” I added.

I could see she didn’t like that, but she was so happy I was feeling better and that my recovery was in part due to her peppermint remedy, she didn’t make a stink. Like I said, I’m not beyond lying on occasion.

“I have something for you.” She handed me the plastic bag. Inside was a box that said
Li’l Inventor.
It was a kit to put together this plastic robot dog.

“It says on the box that you can make it chase its tail,” she said.

“Great. Thanks,” I said.

She means well.

Don’t you love it when things work out exactly as you planned?

Mason Ragg rose up suddenly from his chair at the English workstation at 10:37, asked for the hall pass, and left the room. When he came back, he looked unusually pleased. He must have taken the cookies and not eaten them yet. Good. I wanted to be in the lunchroom when he did.

This time, I felt no panic. I didn’t even run out in the hall to check my lunch sack. I knew what I would find. Instead, I calmly worked away at the art workstation on a clay model of an Egyptian sarcophagus for global studies. Rachel Lowry even came over, and said, “Can I see that?”

“Sure.”

She picked the sarcophagus up and turned it this way and that.

“Cool,” she said and put it back down. Her fingerprints were on either side of the sarcophagus. I left them there.

It was a very excellent morning.

Then came gym class.

On the way down there, we passed Jeremy and Arthur and six other girls standing outside their classroom, looking angry and holding signs saying things like WE WILL NOT BE BULLIED! and GWAB RULES! and the ill-advised MR. SHACKLY SUCKS! All the girls had extremely short hair, except for Jeremy, and were dressed like boys. You wouldn’t think that there is that much of a difference in boys’ and girls’ clothes these days, but when you see a girl dressed in boys’ clothes, the difference is very clear. Boys’ clothes are a lot less interesting than girls’, for one. And also, they fit girls funny—baggy in some places and tight in others. Except for Arthur. Her red polo shirt and chinos fit her just fine. Also, the GWABs held themselves differently than other girls. They slumped more, I think.

Unfortunately, there were no network news cameras or famous anchorpeople, but Sybil Tushman was there with her camcorder. She has a daily video blog on her website called
The Universe According to Sybil.
It’s usually just Sybil talking about her older sister and how much she hates her but she also does some news segments about our school. Lots of kids in our school watch it, believe it or not.

“Lesby-girls,” hissed someone from my class.

The GWABs didn’t even bat an eye over that one. It wasn’t anything they hadn’t heard before, and anyway, they clearly had more important things on their minds.

I caught Jeremy’s eye as I passed, and she looked back at me, her face full of utter defiance. If I didn’t know that she was just a new member of GWAB, I would have guessed that she was the president. She has this leadership aura. She may not be supersmart, but if you stick her in a crowd of people, she just pops, like a zebra-striped jeep in a shoppingmall parking lot.

In gym class, Mr. Wooly had set up a balance beam and a trampoline in the front of the gym, and now he was laying down a line of mats in the back of the gym. Not good.

“So are you going to take my advice, Flapjack?” Andre asked me as I took my place on my spot.

“The fat excuse or the lawsuit?” I asked.

“Both.”

“Nope.”

“Neither?”

“That’s right.” I was in a fairly cocky mood this morning.

Mr. Wooly had finished with the mats and was on his way back up front when he actually came up to me and patted me on the shoulder in a friendly sort of way.

“Morning, Birnbaum,” Wooly said.

“He’s scared you’re going to make trouble for him about the dog harness thing,” Andre whispered when Wooly had passed.

Andre was probably right about that.

“Well, I won’t,” I said.

Andre shook his head. He interlaced his fingers, flipped them upside down, and flexed his wrists. “You know what your problem is, Flapjack?”

I growled. Quietly.

“You think life has to be hard.” He smiled at me, one of his windsurfing-in-Malibu smiles. I wanted to punch him right then and there, but suddenly his smile crumpled and he looked uneasy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look like that before. He was looking at something behind me, so I turned my head to follow his gaze. Mason had come in the side door of the gym, accompanied by a teacher’s aide. Up to now, I had mercifully been spared Mason’s presence in gym class. Andre had told me that Mason had a “psycho exemption,” although I assumed there was a more official word for it.

The teacher’s aide went up to Mr. Wooly and began to talk to him with her back turned to the class in order to be discreet, but Mr. Wooly’s face was clearly visible to all of us. And he was not happy. In fact, he made no effort to keep his voice down when he said, “Well, just so’s we understand each other, I won’t be held responsible when all hell breaks loose in here.” The gym was dead quiet and his voice echoed so we all heard his words quite clearly. It was the first time all the rumors about Mason had been confirmed by an adult in the school.

The teacher’s aide was now angry too. She pointed a finger at him and said, “That was massively inappropriate, Gene.” She didn’t bother to keep her voice down either, so that we all heard her scolding him but more importantly, we caught that his name was Gene.

“Gene?!” Someone in our class repeated loudly in an incredulous voice.

“Settle down, people!” he called out to all of us. He probably would have called us “ladies” instead of “people” if the aide hadn’t been there.

I was watching Mason. He had been working his jaw for several seconds, his mean little eyes fixed on Mr. Wooly. I suspected he was busy collecting a large glob of phlegm to use as a projectile.

Yeah, do it, Mason, I thought. Hit Mr. Wooly right in the face with a fat, juicy goober.

Instant revenge on both my enemies. You can see how much that would appeal to me, I’m sure.

“Mr. Ragg,” Mr. Wooly said to Mason, “A4.”

Mason’s jaw stopped churning. He stood there for a moment, glaring at Mr. Wooly, until the aide put a careful hand on his back and guided him to the spot on the slickery gym floor, showing him the
A
on the wall to his right and the
4
on the wall behind Mr. Wooly.

Mason was front and center, directly in Mr. Wooly’s line of fire.

Excellent.

During our stretches, Mr. Wooly made us do a tricky series of leg hops, which he’d never had us do before. There was a lot of “left, left, right, left, right, right,” so that we had to keep switching legs in this random jig. We were all stumbling around—even Andre managed to look awkward. But today, Mason was Mr. Wooly’s prime target.

“Keep up, Mr. Ragg!” Mr. Wooly shouted over the sound of furiously pounding sneakers. “This train doesn’t stop for latecomers! It’s sink or swim, pal! I see your feet moving, but the parade is passing you by!”

That’s three mixed metaphors in a row, in case you didn’t notice. Obviously, Mr. Wooly didn’t.

I guess I should have felt pretty pleased that he was picking on Mason, but I couldn’t somehow. Maybe it was because Mason’s evil genius face was turned away from me. From my vantage point, all I could see was a kid with fast, skinny legs, hopping around really nimbly. You had to admire it somehow. It reminded me of some of those old cowboy movies, when the bad guy shoots at the feet of the good guy, which makes him dance around to avoid the bullets.

But Mason
was
the bad guy.

Still, at that moment, I admired him anyway.

Finally, Mr. Wooly called a stop to the idiotic warm-up and said it was time for gymnastics. I felt my stomach twist up.

“Today, my friends,” Mr. Wooly announced, “we are going to engage in a little healthy competition.”

Oh, blithering carbuncles.

I didn’t really think that, you understand. I thought something else entirely, but it’s not printable.

“I’ll be separating you out into teams and we’ll have a little gymnastic triathlon.”

From his back pocket, he whipped out a list of all our names and which teams we were on. I tell you, he must have sweated over the thing all night long. For a subhuman bozo, Mr. Wooly could be diabolically clever when he wanted to be. The three teams were set up thusly:

1. Team A had one kid who was a superstar athlete (that was Andre) and a few other passably athletic kids

2. Team B had several wannabe superstar athletes who were clawing their way to the top and full of pent-up frustration that they were not the real, actual superstar athlete. They also had a few so-so-ish to poor athletes and one bully magnet whose job was to bring down the entire team. That would be me.

The combination was designed to not only foster competition between the teams, but also
within
the teams. Have you ever seen those movies about the Roman gladiator fights, where they tossed a bunch of poor guys into an arena with tigers and crocodiles?

Yeah.

That’s right.

And I didn’t even have a helmet or those nifty sandals.

But Mr. Wooly had another decision to make. He hadn’t counted on Mason being there. After all the rest of us were herded into opposite ends of the gym, Mr. Wooly looked down at his list, then looked at Mason, who was still standing on A4. You could practically hear Mr. Wooly’s Neanderthal brain whirring, trying to figure out where Mason would cause the most pain and suffering.

“Team B,” Mr. Wooly finally said.

Of course.

Mason strutted over to our team, his chin tipped up, eyeing all of us. Clearly he was not going to disappoint Mr. Wooly. He stood a little apart from the rest of us, but to be honest, we were all standing apart from each other. No one on Team B seemed to want to be on Team B. Even I looked longingly at Team A where Andre was already having a sportsmanly chat with his team.

“This is so unfair,” muttered a tall, pimply kid on our team named Jay, one of the Andre wannabes. “Andre gets Ron and Corey and Tristan, while Wooly gives us . . . what? A fat slob and a psycho.”

Everyone on the team glanced at Mason nervously to see how he would react to that. No one looked at me nervously, of course, but I didn’t expect them to.

Mason didn’t say anything. He slowly reached down for his sock. All eyes followed his hand. We all saw it. The outline of something stuffed in his sock. Something distinctly knife-shaped. Eyes grew wide. Then Mason calmly tugged at the edge of his sock, just as though he was adjusting it to make all the lines in the cuff straight. He stood upright again, folded his arms against his chest, and quickly looked at all his teammates, as if daring them to say anything. None of them did.

So he
did
keep his famous switchblade in his sock. I’d have to tell Izzy.

Mason’s little exhibition did one good thing at least. It stopped Team B’s grumbling. All of a sudden, losing a gymnastic competition seemed somewhat less important than losing a thumb.

Mr. Wooly explained the triathlon’s events course, which involved walking across the balance beam, jumping on the trampoline and tucking your legs, running a lap around the gym, then ending with a somersault on the mat.