“Prairie, you run third,” she said. “And for heaven’s sake, don’t anyone drop the baton again.”
“Like y-y-you did y-yesterday?” Prairie piped up.
I choked. Max smirked.
Lydia ignored us. “All right, team. Let’s show these loggerheads how it’s done.”
Max rolled her eyes at me. I was beginning to like this girl.
“It’s not a race,” I reminded everyone.
Lydia just stared at the field, eyes narrowed. She was determined—you had to give her that.
We’d reached the track, where Max approached the starting line and did a deep knee bend. Meanwhile, I freed a fire stick from my back pocket. Lydia glared at me. “You’re not going to eat that now, are you?”
I stared at Lydia, then down at the fire stick. With a heartsick sigh, I stuck it back in my pocket. “Guess not.” To myself I added, Dad always said it’s not polite to eat and run.
We ran eight seconds slower than the day before. Not bad, I thought. Nobody got hurt.
Ashley Krupps approached us after the relays, no doubt to tell us we were lousy, which we already knew. “What do you want?” Lydia snarled.
I hate Ashley Krupps. Hate her to her rotten apple core. I have my reasons. And it’s not because she’s the principal’s daughter, or because she’s fat like me and doesn’t care. No one ever makes fun of Ashley Krupps. Probably because she has the power to get them expelled on a whim. I thought Lydia should be careful.
Ashley said, “Our squad decided, since we’re going to keep the same teams, that we should make up team names.”
Melanie drew up alongside Ashley. She swabbed nonexistent sweat off her forehead. “Our name is the Neon Nikes,” she sang in a singsong.
“Oh, brother,” Lydia muttered.
Really, I agreed.
Their two other team members appeared, like right off the cover of Preteen Queen. Rachel Cagney and Fayola K. No one with English as their native tongue could pronounce Fayola’s K.’s last name. There weren’t any vowels in it. Fayola had a personal vendetta against me because I once referred to her as Fayola Crayola. I think she thought it was a racial slur, but all I meant was that she used very colorful language.
“Oh, damn,” she said. “I broke a nail. Damn, damn, damn!”
See?
“James Martinez’s team is the Oakland Raiders,” Rachel said.
“Original,” I replied between licks of fire stick.
Lydia snorted.
“What’s Kevin Rooney’s name?” Melanie asked Rachel. She was in love with him, too. Which made me despise her.
“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “They’re still arguing about it.” We all looked over. Fisticuffs were about to break out between the boys.
“How about the Rooney Tunes?” I hollered over.
Ashley, Melanie, Rachel, and Fayola all made the same face at me. So that’s what they did in the rest room for twelve hours at a stretch. Fayola said, “You’re real friggin’ funny, Solano.” She didn’t say friggin’.
“Thank you.” No one ever accused me of bad manners.
“So, anyway”—Ashley started to walk away—“that’s what the rest of us are doing.” She addressed me personally on her way past. “Not that you should feel like you’re included.”
A retort formed on my tongue, then dribbled off. It had too much of Fayola’s colorful language to voice out loud.
Out of nowhere Lydia announced, “We’re the Snob Squad.”
The Neon Nikes skidded to a group halt. They exchanged glances like… like they wished they’d have thought of the name. We stared at Lydia like she was lights out, long gone.
Max rolled her eyes at me. I rolled mine back.
After the Nikes left, we all turned to Lydia. Max said what we were thinking. “The Snob Squad?”
Lydia hooked a hunk of hair behind her ear. “Why not?” she said.
Max looked at me. I looked at Prairie. Prairie shrugged. “W-why not?”
A million reasons. None of which I was willing to share if they didn’t already know.
“The Snob Squad,” Max repeated. “I like it.”
Lydia beamed.
See? Others need professional help a lot more than me.
Chapter 4
There’s this saying: Birds of a feather flock together. I don’t know how we qualified as birds exactly, but we started flocking. Far as I could tell, the only thing the four of us, the Snob Squad, had in common was that we were the most unpopular people in school.
I first noticed this flocking phenomenon at lunch the next day. My whole school life I’d always eaten lunch alone, off at the most remote cafeteria table under a flickering fluorescent bulb. Now Max, Lydia, and Prairie joined me. It was weird. The feel of other people, the sounds of group chewing.
Lydia blabbered on and on about how she hated Ashley Krupps. How Ashley was a stuck-up liar and a slut, a spoiled brat juvenile delinquent, et cetera, et cetera. I relished her rage. It reaffirmed my feelings.
Lydia was still steaming from the incident that morning. After we were all settled in class and ready for roll call, Lydia opened her desk and screamed. Inside was a dead bull snake. Fresh roadkill; the floppy body was still warm. You should’ve seen Lydia. Major conniption. Anyway, since Ashley was laughing at Lydia the loudest, Lydia assumed she’d done it. She probably did. She was always tormenting Lydia. Doing things just to make her scream. Naturally everyone thought it was a hoot. I would’ve too, if someone other than Ashley had been responsible.
We all tried to console Lydia. Except Max. She said, “Could I have the snake?”
Lydia just looked at her. “I don’t have it. I don’t know what happened to it.” She shuddered.
Max clucked her tongue. Major disappointment.
After lunch Prairie had to go finish some kind of IQ test. Lydia, Max, and I wandered back to the clown target behind the baseball field. The clown target was the PTA’s pet project last year. It was supposed to stop kids from throwing snowballs at each other by eliminating the temptation. Yeah, right. Winter was a heavy referral season at Montrose.
Max scooped up a dirt clod from the outfield and slung it through Bozo’s gaping mouth. Lydia and I balanced on the chain-link fence in front of the dugout to watch. Okay, Lydia balanced. I buttressed.
“She’s weird,” Lydia whispered to me.
Look who’s talking, I thought. I replied, “Who isn’t? You want a Smarties?”
“Sure.”
I handed her a roll. We unwrapped our candy in unison. While we sucked on the pellets, we continued to watch Max. She was gathering a crowd. Mostly guys who secretly admired her arm, I suspected.
“Here comes Prairie,” Lydia said, pointing. “She must’ve finished her test early.”
Prairie was limping out the A wing door. She scanned the playground. When she saw us, she waved and started over. To get to where we were, she had to walk through the crowd watching Max. Just like always, it happened. Whenever Prairie Cactus passed by a group, especially boys, she became a target. She was fingered and poked, pushed and prodded. Teased with cries of “Ow! Ooh! Prickly!”
As she hobbled by the onlookers in the field, it started up. “Ow, ooh, ouch, ooch.” Max paused mid-sling. She spun on the crowd. There was one final “Ouch” as Prairie emerged. Max charged forward and grabbed the shirtfront of the boy who’d last poked Prairie. “What’d you say?” she asked him.
He sneered. “I said ouch.” He looked to the kid beside him for support. The kid backed off. Funny how your best friend in the world will desert you in a moment of crisis.
“You must have ESP,” Max said. She hauled off and punched him in the stomach. He squealed and staggered backward. “Who else said ouch?” Max held up a fist.
No other confessions were forthcoming. The crowd dispersed, fast.
My palms drew together. In slow syncopation I clapped, paused, clapped, paused…
Lydia picked up the rhythm. Wheeling toward us, Max’
s face registered… nothing. Or something; something impossible to read. If she’d had an Uzi, she might have gunned us down, like the dumb smart-offs we were. After a minute, one corner of her lip curled up and she bowed. Now that’s class.
When Mr. Dietz called the Snob Squad to the starting line that afternoon, Max led the way. From the sidelines we cheered. Our hero.
The Nikes just looked at us. Everyone did. It made us cheer louder. I even whistled through the gap in my two front teeth. Funny how you’ll do stupid stuff in a group you’d never do alone. Mr. Dietz blew his whistle to start the time trials.
Max was breathing hard as she rounded the track to hand the baton off to Prairie. For an instant we were ahead of yesterday’s time. Lydia’s new strategy for the day was to switch me and Prairie. Prairie ran second; I was third. Don’t ask me why. Lydia was captain.
Prairie limped around as best she could, but by the time she crossed the finish line three days later, we were behind again. If Lydia thought I was going to improve our time, she was denser than I figured.
“Good try,” I heard Max say to Prairie as I took off like an earthquake. When I thundered over the finish line, sweating like a roast pig, Max said, “Good race, Solano.”
I sneered at the insult. Funny though, Max seemed sincere. I felt better. Less like Flubber burning rubber. A few feet behind us the Nikes’ heads were drawn together. They were plotting something—you could smell it. Mostly what I smelled was Melanie’s perfume. P.U. How could Kevin Rooney stand to be within sniffing distance of her without hyperventilating? Myself, I’ve always considered the fragrance of deep, dark chocolate to be irresistibly appealing.
Lydia charged around the last curve, running, as she did, like a knock-kneed duck. She had to be related to Daffy, no kidding. Her lack of style was glaring, too, since she was all alone on the track. Someone, Fayola I think, said, “Quack,” to mock Lydia, and Max’s head nearly propelled off her neck trying to catch who it was. I visualized it: one army boot to Fayola’s front teeth. Crunch. Talk about colorful.
As Lydia came flat-footing toward home, the Nikes advanced. Suddenly Lydia went flying. She crossed the finish line facefirst. An anguished yowl rose up from the dirt, loud enough to roust the roadkill in Rangoon. Where is Rangoon?
I lumbered over to Lydia, Max zooming past me. “You okay?” She yanked Lydia to her feet by the waistband of her stretch pants. Prairie retrieved Lydia’s glasses and handed them to her.
Lydia’s nose was bleeding, and her palms were embedded with gravel. She shoved her glasses on. “My new pants!” she screeched.
Sure enough, the knees of Lydia’s green and yellow flowered pants were shredded. A blessing in disguise, I thought. “Someone tripped me,” Lydia snuffled.
Max’s spine went rigid.
“It’s true,” I said, staring at Lydia’s knees. Without warning, my vision blurred. All that blood was making me woozy. Either that or my blood sugar level was dangerously low, since I hadn’t eaten in an hour. Taking a deep breath, I added, “I won’t name names, but it was Ashley Krupps. I saw her stick her foot out.” You couldn’t miss those size twelve, shocking pink Reeboks.
Max lunged for Ashley, fist clenched.
“It wasn’t me,” Ashley said, cowering behind Melanie. Max threatened Melanie with her other fist.
“I didn’t do it,” she whimpered.
“None of us did anything.” Ashley regained her composure. “She just fell. Lydia’s a klutz.” The Neon Nikes all nodded in unison.
Beside me, Max growled. I held her back. Tried to.
“All right, break it up.” Dauntless Dietz rushed in at the last moment. “You, go to the office and get cleaned up. The rest of you girls take your starting positions.” He raised his whistle to his withered lips.
“But Mr. Dietz,” Lydia wailed, “Ashley tripped me! Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”
He looked from Lydia to Ashley and gulped. “Shake hands and make up.”
“For what?” Ashley said. “I didn’t do anything. She’s a whiner. Ask anyone.”
I hoped he wouldn’t. “Come on, Lydia.” I took her arm. “He isn’t going to do anything. He can’t. He has to keep working so he can get Social Security.” I glared at him, daring him to deny it.
He didn’t.
Max, Prairie, and I trailed the sniffling, hobbling Lydia to the nurse. Someone behind us said under her breath, “Quack.” I recognized that voice. I won’t name names. Max stiffened. She didn’t turn around. She just balled both fists at her sides and seethed, “You know what this means.”
I took a stab. “Their goose is cooked?”
Between clenched teeth, Max snarled one word: “War.”
Chapter 5
Lined up along the length of the army cot in the school clinic, we watched while Lydia got her temperature taken. It’s a state law or something that even if you go to the nurse bleeding to death from a pencil up the nose, you have to have your temperature taken. After sticking the thermometer down Lydia’s throat, the nurse disappeared. We heard her giggling at some crack Principal Krupps made out in the hall.
Max muttered, “Solano said it first. We need a strategy.”
“I said that? When did I say that?”
“We need to set up a command post. Some place underground. A secret headquarters.”
Max, I thought, you’ve been watching too many Schwarzenneger movies.
“What about Ms. M-Milner’s room?” Prairie said. She sat crouched next to me, elbows on knees. “N-no one goes there.”
Unless they have to.
“Forget it.” Lydia pulled the plastic thermometer out of her mouth. “I’m not setting foot in the special ed room.” She blinked at Prairie. “No offense.” The thermometer slid back into her mouth.
I wondered what the human temperature was at the moment of strangulation. From the look on Max’s face, she was wondering the same thing.
“N-none taken,” Prairie said, sparing Lydia’s larynx.
Prairie spent most mornings in Ms. Milner’s PC lab. I’m not sure what PC stood for—I didn’t think it was Politically Correct. Most everyone referred to it as the retard room.
“We need a place away from school,” Max continued. “At someone’s house.” She looked at me.
“Don’t look at me. I take the bus.” Which was another trauma I’d be dealing with well into adulthood.
Max arched an eyebrow at Prairie. “I have s-six brothers,” Prairie said.
We all groaned.
Eyes focused on Lydia. She removed the thermometer again. “My mother doesn’t allow me to have friends over when she’s not home. Anyway, I go to day care after school.”
Day care? I said what everyone else was thinking. “Day care?”
If the blood rushing to her face was any indication, Lydia’s temperature shot up a hundred degrees.
“We’ll meet at my house then,” Max said. “You know where the old burned-out firehouse is?”
Everyone knew where the old burned-out fire-house was. Last year’s most talked about news event. And the name in the news was Max McFarland. She’d been expelled for a month because someone reported her smoking there.
“I live right behind it,” Max said.
“In the dump?” The thermometer fell out of Lydia’s mouth.
Max glared. “It’s not a dump. It’s a junk car lot. My brother buys old cars and fixes them up. That’s his business. He sells hard-to-find car parts.”
They would be hard to find in that jalopy junkyard, I thought.
Max added, “You can come to my house with me after school today.” It wasn’t a request. She twisted her head toward me. “My brother will drive you home afterward.”
We were all expecting it, the whine, the excuse, the drawn-out explanation. The three of us looked at Lydia.
“I’ll have to call my mother at work,” is all she said. Shock. She retrieved the thermometer from under the sink and blew it off.
We got up to fo
llow Lydia to the phone. On the way out, Prairie took the thermometer from Lydia and squinted at it. “N-n-normal,” she pronounced.
“Must be defective,” I muttered. Max slugged my shoulder. Good thing I’m padded.
We rendezvoused at the clown target after school. Before leaving the school yard, Max flung one last dirt clod at Bozo. Direct hit, right between the eyes.
Max led us down Erie Avenue, through the alley, and in between a row of decrepit apartment houses. The sign said LUXURY LIVING.
“Which one’s Donald Trump’s?” I asked.
Lydia laughed. Max and Prairie didn’t get it, I guess.
As we passed by the burned-out firehouse, we all gaped, and gulped. None of us dared look at Max. At the junkyard—excuse me, Used Auto Parts Establishment—we picked our way through the catacombs of car corpses back to a ramshackle house, nearly camouflaged in the rubble.
“I’m home!” Max bellowed as she hurled open the back door. No one answered. It was dim in the kitchen, even though it was still broad daylight at three-thirty in the afternoon and the overhead light was on. The walls were dingy, covered in striped, mousy wallpaper, stained and peeling at the corners. I wouldn’t normally notice wallpaper except there was movement behind one strip over by the stove. Maybe it was my imagination, or maybe this was the original roach motel.
“I said I’m home!” Max’s husky voice, raised in volume, flattened my ears.
“Keep it down, toad breath.” A taller, hairier version of Max emerged from the darkened doorway. He wore blue jeans, no shirt, shaggy beard. He looked like he’d just got out of bed. “Mom’s channeling,” he said, raking fingers through his snarled hair.
Beside me I felt Max tense. “These are my friends.” She nodded to us. “Solano, Lyd, and Prayer. My brother, Scuzz-Gut.” They traded sneers.
“Don’t you want to know who died?” he said to Max.
“Not really.” She flung her backpack through the open doorway into the living room. I’ve always wanted to do that—announce my arrival home by pitching my backpack through the door. With my luck I’d bust a lamp.