It was the girl with the pigtails. This close he could see that her hair was parted with such precision and severity it appeared to be pulling her skull in half. Even so, her pigtails were slightly lopsided, like a picture you just can’t get to hang straight on the wall.
“I’m Petula,” she said, holding out her hand for Nick to shake. “That’s PETula like spatula, not PeTOOLa like petunia.”
“I’m Nick, like…” He decided not to finish that sentence.
“With or without a k?” Petula asked. “These things are important.”
“With,” Nick said.
Petula turned to see Ms. Planck dishing up her lunch.
“You get beef,” Ms. Planck said. “We just ran out of fish. Don’t complain to me, I don’t do the purchasing.”
“For dessert I’d like—” Petula began.
“You get what you get,” said Ms. Planck, putting a dish of Jell-O on her tray.
Petula looked at Nick and pointed to the glob of red. “Told ya,” she said, although Nick couldn’t figure out what moral objection she could have to Jell-O. Nonetheless, she pushed it into the trash on her way out.
Seeing that Nick was last, Ms. Planck took a moment to breathe and wipe her forehead before she served him.
“You new, or is that just a new haircut that lets me see your face?”
“New,” Nick told her. “You know, I don’t think that girl cares for Jell-O.”
“I know,” Ms. Planck said. “Petula doesn’t need dessert. She’s already wired enough without sugar.” She looked him over. “So have things changed, or does it still suck to be new?”
Nick smiled at her directness. “Pretty much, yeah.”
She ladled a spoonful of beef something-or-other onto his plate, then gave him a second helping.
“Tell you what, because I’m in a good mood, I’ll give you a few pointers.”
“I thought you said you were in a bad mood.”
“You weren’t listening. I said no mood.” She pointed toward the tables in the cafeteria. “Third table from the left? Cursed. Regardless of who sits there, it never ends well. No one’s made the connection yet but me.”
She pointed at another table. “Back row, second table in, people who think they’re popular, but aren’t. Sit with them, your head will swell until you can’t fit through the door.”
She pointed at another table. “Front row, center. Future CEOs of Fortune Five Hundred companies. Don’t let their zits fool you.”
Nick tried to absorb the information, and notice the faces and locations. “So, taking all that into consideration, where do I sit?” he asked.
“Doesn’t matter. In my experience, the seat finds the child.” And she spooned yet another blob of beef onto his plate. Then she leaned over the sneeze guard and whispered, “But if you really want to be accepted like no other new kid was accepted before, I’ll tell you what you have to do.”
Nick leaned in closer. “I’m listening.”
“You see over there? The kid with the buzz cut?”
Nick saw her pointing to a large kid with his back to them, at a table with other large kids. It was a table for eight, but only four of them seemed to fit.
“Go over to him,” Ms. Planck went on, “and dump your entire tray of food on him.”
“What?!” Nick almost shouted.
“This is gold I’m giving you here, kid,” Ms. Planck said. “Gold! And I don’t do this for everyone.”
Nick could only stare at her, opening and closing his mouth wordlessly. “But that guy is twice my size,” he finally managed. “He’ll kill me.”
“Trust me on this one,” Ms. Planck whispered. And there was something in her eyes that told Nick he could.
Slowly he walked into the cafeteria, and as he got closer to the table, he realized that this was the same muscle-bound kid who had pushed him aside like a freight train in the hallway that morning.
Nick swallowed hard. He felt the lunch that he hadn’t even eaten yet wanting to come up. But he put his faith in the lunch lady, and as he passed the human freight train, he tilted his tray and dumped a massive triple serving of beef something-or-other, mashed potatoes, and Jell-O, not just on the kid’s shirt, but on his head, on his shoulders, and into his lap.
“What the—? What the—?” the massive kid said.
“Oops. Sorry.”
The kid stood up, a full head taller than Nick, his entire body quivering in fury, like a thermonuclear device ticking down to zero.
And finally Nick was convinced that Colorado Springs was trying to kill him. First, the falling toaster. Then the car careening in the rain, nearly pinning him and Caitlin to the tree. The electric shock this morning. And now this.
But then, from behind Nick, someone began to clap. Then someone else. And it built into applause from the entire cafeteria. As the freight train stood there, too angry to do anything but steam, everyone else began cheering.
The bell rang, and as people funneled out of the cafeteria, kids Nick didn’t know came up to him and clapped him on the back.
“Hey, man, that was classic!”
“Heisenberg so deserved that.”
“Yeah,” someone else said. “I’ve wanted to do that for years but never had the guts.”
Nick was practically carried out the doors by the throng. He looked back to see Ms. Planck behind the warming trays, folding her arms across her chest and smiling in triumph.
As the last period of the day was ending, Nick was called out of class to the office. He suspected it was about his stunt in the cafeteria, and was convinced of it when he saw his father sitting with the principal.
“It was an accident,” Nick blurted. “I didn’t mean it. And anyway, it wasn’t my idea.”
“Sit down, Nick,” said the principal, whose name he didn’t even know yet. “There appears to be a problem with your permanent record.”
“What kind of problem?” Nick asked, afraid to sit down.
“The problem is that there isn’t one.”
“Excuse me?” said Nick’s father.
“According to Tampa Heights Middle School,” the principal said while glancing at his computer screen, “there is no student named Nicholas Slate. Not in that school, or the entire district. And although I found fifteen Nick Slates on SpaceBook, none of them are you.”
“What?” said Nick. “I have a SpaceBook page. I exist.”
The principal put up his hands. “All right. Let’s all calm down now. There’s no need to call the police.”
Which, of course, made Nick’s father do anything but calm down.
“So there’s a glitch in your computer system. So?”
To that, the principal just laughed and laughed. “This is Colorado Springs, home of NORAD. We don’t have glitches.” Then he frowned.
“So what are you saying?” Nick’s dad asked.
“Simply stating the obvious. That you and your sons are not who you claim to be.”
“What—has Danny’s record disappeared, too?”
“That question you’ll have to take up with the elementary school.”
The principal said little more, just continued to give them suspicious eyes and make veiled threats until his father finally stormed out to the car.
Nick went to get his books from his locker. School had been over for twenty minutes now, and the hallway was pretty much empty. Finally he let his frustrations fly and slammed his locker shut—to find someone standing there, filling the hallway, blocking any escape.
Heisenberg.
Nick knew, without any uncertainty whatsoever, that he was about to get the pounding of his life.
Heisenberg, his face fixed in a death frown, advanced on him. And before Nick could say a word, Heisenberg lifted him off the ground…and pulled him into a bear hug.
“Thank you,” Heisenberg said. “They told me in my anger management class that I was going to be tested. They sent you, didn’t they?”
Nick tried to answer, but the hug w
as so tight he couldn’t breathe.
And with tears in his eyes, Heisenberg said, “Now I’ve passed the test. I’ve never been so happy.”
Then he put Nick down and ran off to get some tissues.
Caitlin had avoided Nick the entire day. She had her reasons, which had little to do with Nick and everything to do with the object she’d bought at the garage sale.
The day before, Sunday, she had planned to spend the morning creating her work of art. She donned her smashing clothes and laid a tarp in the garage, with the poor, defenseless recorder in the center. She approached it, hefting the sledgehammer, wondering how many swings it would take to disfigure it just right.
But she had never used a reel-to-reel recorder before, and she had to admit it intrigued her. Was it possible the thing still worked?
She looked for a power cord and found it had none. But when she pressed PLAY, the spools rolled and tape fed across the playback head. Apparently the tape was blank.
She pressed STOP, plugged in the microphone, and hit RECORD.
“Testing, testing. This is Caitlin Westfield. Testing, testing.”
Then she rewound it, watching the tape counter reverse to 000, and played it back.
“Testing, testing,” said her voice through the woven speaker grille. “This is Caitlin Westfield, and this is a waste of time.”
She almost didn’t catch it, because to be honest she wasn’t really listening closely, and she really had been thinking what a waste of time this was.
“That’s weird,” she said, and immediately decided that she had misheard. She played it again. When she heard the same thing a second time, she concluded it must have been what she had originally said, because what other explanation was there, really?
Just to prove it to herself, she hit RECORD again.
“Testing, testing. I’m testing this stupid machine again so I can smash it and be done with it.”
And her own voice on playback said, “Testing, testing. I’m testing this stupid machine again so I don’t freak out.”
Now Caitlin was freaking out.
If it was some sort of trick, there was no explanation for it. Her heart began to beat way too fast to be healthy. She hit RECORD again, and as the reels turned, she looked at the machine from every possible angle, to see if there was anything unusual about it whatsoever.
That’s when her cell phone rang.
She pulled it out of her pocket and looked. It was Theo. Her boyfriend had a penchant for calling at the most inopportune times. She put the phone on speaker and set it down so she had both hands free to study the device.
“Hey, Caitlin, it’s me.”
“Hey.”
“Wha’cha doing?”
“Art project.”
“Oh. Because a bunch of us are going to the mall. Maybe we can see that new horror movie.”
“I’d really like to, but I’m kind of busy,” Caitlin told him. “Come over later?”
“Yeah, sure, we can hang out.”
“Bye, Theo.”
“Bye.”
It was only after she hung up that she realized the machine was still recording.
She pressed STOP, looked at it for at least a full minute, refusing to believe she was thinking what she was thinking—and knew, if her thinking was correct, this was major.
Then she rewound the tape to 000 and pressed PLAY.
“Hey, Caitlin, it’s me.”
“Hey.”
“Whatever you’re doing isn’t important, but I’ve got to ask, so tell me anyway.”
“Art project—like you care about anything that matters to me.”
“Oh. Because I don’t want to be the only guy at the mall without a girl. We’ll make out at the movies.”
“That sounds awful. I’ve already checked out of this conversation, but you can come over later, because I might actually be that bored.”
“Yeah, sure, maybe then we can make out.”
“Bye, Theo.”
“Hmm, I wonder what’s for lunch.”
Calmly, Caitlin turned the machine off, wrapped it in the tarp, then carried it out back and dropped the entire thing in the trash.
Then she went to her bedroom, closed the curtains, and hid beneath the covers.
The device remained in the trash for an entire ninety minutes before Caitlin took it out and hauled it up to her room. Any thoughts of smashing it were gone. She didn’t know what this thing was, or why it could do the thing that it did. But there was no doubt about it—somehow this old recorder took the things you said and turned them into the things you were thinking. Even more than that, the machine seemed to delve deeper, to the things you were feeling—and didn’t even know you were feeling until it played them back.
To a girl like Caitlin, whose heart was wrapped in so many layers of disguise that she never knew exactly what she really felt, this machine was either her salvation, or her ruin.
On Monday, as Nick struggled to fit into the school, Caitlin struggled with the tiny chink that the reel-to-reel player had put in her armor. Her well-crafted social veneer only worked if she was convinced she truly was the person she presented.
She believed herself to be the kind of girl who didn’t play games, who said what she meant in take-it-or-leave-it terms. But the impossible nature of that tape recorder hinted that there were parts of herself she didn’t entirely know.
Caitlin had always been a fearless girl. But this frightened her.
Throughout the day, her thoughts kept gravitating to that new kid. Nick. The way the strange light had pulled her, and all the other people, to the garage sale.
Nick had valiantly saved her life. She tried to imagine Theo doing the same, but she couldn’t. Not that Theo wasn’t a decent guy, he just wasn’t that kind of guy.
There was a heightened sense of something surrounding Nick Slate. The energy of the school seemed to change around him. He even humbled Heisenberg.
By the end of the day, it was her own interest in Nick that troubled her more than anything, so she resolved to take a healthy step away, and under no circumstances let him into her world.
Nick’s world that afternoon had little to do with inexplicable garage-sale items and a lot to do with inexplicable math homework. In spite of Vince’s claim that the school was pathetic, it was somewhat less pathetic than Nick’s school in Tampa, because Colorado Springs eighth graders were way ahead in mathematics. Nick, in his attic room, was doing his best to get up to speed, because whether or not his principal believed it, he did in fact exist.
Danny, on the other hand, took his official nonexistence as a no-homework pass.
“It’s not every day you get to be deleted,” he said. “I’m gonna make the most of it.”
Nick had to admit that, for someone who didn’t exist, he had made an impression on his first day at Rocky Point Middle School. He had no idea how he would fare on his second day. Not only academically, but also socially. Caitlin came to mind—and her boyfriend. Theo was tall, mostly because of a long neck featuring an Adam’s apple the size of Nick’s fist. Nick, on the other hand, had not yet hit his growth spurt, which his father insisted was genetically inevitable.
“It’s all about perception,” his father had told him. “Think tall, and other people will think it, too.”
Nick doubted that any kind of mind control would work on a girl like Caitlin.
When he took a break, he went downstairs and saw his brother in the front yard, waiting for their father to come home from a day of job hunting. Danny absently tossed a baseball in the air, only catching it about half the time.
Nick sighed. Danny had been born after their father’s major league days, but they still loomed larger than life for him. Wayne Slate had been an excellent pitcher, but unfortunately he was better known by his nickname, “Whiffin’ Wayne.” He picked it up thanks to his less-than-stellar batting at away games against National League teams, when a pitcher couldn’t take advantage of a designated hitter and had to bat f
or himself. His father wore the unwanted nickname much longer than his major league jersey. Nick was a pretty good pitcher in his own right, and batter as well. In fact, he was pretty much the star of his Little League team back in Tampa. But for Danny, an early talent in the sport had not presented itself.
Danny dropped the ball once more, and Nick decided his homework could wait. He went out the front door to join his brother.
“Hey, space case,” he shouted, “you need two people to play catch.”
Danny tossed the ball to his brother. “We need mitts,” he told Nick. “Dad says his old one’s in a box in the basement, but I don’t want to use it. It’ll smell like smoke.”
Nick tossed the ball lightly, and Danny caught it. “Back up,” Danny said, which Nick did. Even so, he had to stretch to catch the next throw. At least his brother had a good arm. Nick returned the ball underhand. This time Danny dropped it.
“It’s the attitude,” Danny said. “Colorado’s got thin air. The ball does weird things.”
“You mean altitude,” Nick told him as Danny threw another pitch so wild that Nick had to leap to catch it. “Step into it when you throw,” he said, tossing it back.
“I am.”
“With your other foot.”
“That feels funny.”
“Stop arguing and do what I tell you.”
“You’re not Mom. You can’t tell me what to do.”
Nick held eye contact with Danny for a moment, then had to look away. His brother’s stare felt like an accusation.
It was then that Nick caught sight of a familiar, pearlescent SUV, driving too slowly to be anything but menacing.
He had no idea what to think, but even if he had, the thought would have been knocked out of his head by the baseball that beaned him right on his stitches.
“Ow!” Nick turned to his little brother, who looked both horrified and satisfied at the same time. “Danny, that really hurt!”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to hit you in the same place as the toaster. I was just aiming for your head.” Then he looked down. “I thought for sure you’d catch it. You catch everything.”
Nick found he didn’t have the heart to yell at him. And when he looked back at the street, the SUV was gone.