The Revealers Page 2
“I do?”
“Yeah. You do.”
“Why?”
His forehead wrinkled. “Because I told you to,” he said, patiently.
“Oh.”
He started to walk away. “Be there,” he said without turning around.
That afternoon, I started filling up again with happiness. Hey … Richie smiled at me? He said that was that!
Maybe he wants to be friends. Maybe I passed some kind of test or something. Maybe that’s why he told me to come to the Farms.
Yeah!
I even started thinking about that black army jacket again. I guessed maybe I had earned it now. It’d be like special identincation—only he and I would have them. Only we would know.
After school I went up quiet old Chamber again. I walked by the police building and crossed the parking lot. Just when I was coming up to the back of Convenience Farms, the side door opened and Richie stepped out. It was like he knew when I’d be there, like he had extrasensitive perception.
He leaned against the building and flicked his head toward the door.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Get your soda.”
“Oh. Well, okay. You want one?”
But I didn’t have money for two. Why did I …
“No,” he said, smiling in a funny way. “I don’t want one.”
I went in and got my root beer. This felt great! I was going to have a soda! Everything was going to be okay. Really okay.
When I came back out Richie was still leaning against the wall. He flicked his head again in a motion that told me: Come over here.
I went over.
He stuck out his hand. His thumb and fingers were curved, the way you’d hold a bottle. He looked at me. He lifted his eyebrows.
I put the bottle in his hand.
He studied it, frowned, and handed it back.
“It’s not open,” he said.
I turned the white cap. The plastic catches broke, one af- ter another, slowly, like each little snap was the only sound in the world.
I gave him the bottle.
He took it and stood up straight, and with his free hand he gripped the front of my shirt. He lifted the bottle over my head, slowly tipped it, and started to pour.
Here’s how an ice-cold twenty-ounce A&W root beer feels being poured over your head:
It’s cold and wet and it fizzes horribly on your scalp. Down your hair! It fizzes so hard your face hurts—it’s like burning, dribbling down the back of your neck, soaking cold the front of your shirt. (Aw no, not more …) It actually hurts on top of your head. You can taste root beer on your tongue, and the drops look golden brown at the tips of your eyelashes. Everything drips. You’re already getting sticky.
I just stood there. Richie put the empty bottle in my hand and walked away.
“Recycle,” he said, without looking back. “Save the planet.”
By the time I got home—in town, people kept turning to look at me—my fingers were sticking together. My shirt was heavy and stuck to my chest, and my hair felt really weird. It was plastered down. My underwear was chafing and sticking at the same time.
Then I was inside peeling off the clothes, thankful for once that my mom wasn’t home yet. I felt for stuff in the jeans pocket, and pulled out a soaked-brown folded-up square. The Daredevil picture.
I went into the kitchen where the garbage is, and slowly I tore it—the paper fibers just pulled apart—into little wet wads. Then I dropped the wads in the trash.
STREAMING
Well, that was it. That was enough. I had to do something. I just had no idea what. I mean, what do you do in a situation like this?
It was pointless to ask my mom—it would only make things worse. I do my own laundry after school, so I was able to wash out the evidence.
I had to get myself home from school every day, right? I couldn’t send for a helicopter. I couldn’t climb into a limo with tinted windows that no one could see in. I liked thinking about that for a while, the limo, but it was also pointless. And I could not avoid or elude Richie just by going different ways.
All of a sudden he had this power over me. He was kind of lording it over me, too—and that, frankly, was what got to me. I didn’t want to be friends with this guy, or co-weirdos or whatever. Never mind wearing a stupid jacket; I wanted to figure out how to make him stop.
But how?
The basic trouble was, I had no idea what Richie would do next. I didn’t understand him at all, even though most of the time he was all I could think about: where he might be, what mood he would be in … what he might do to me. It was kind of an obsession. And that, I suddenly realized, was exactly how he wanted it.
Hey, yeah!
But why?
I had no idea. But I wanted to figure it out—I really wanted to. It suddenly occurred to me that I needed advice. Expert advice. I needed to talk to someone who had been in this kind of situation, and every situation like it, many many times before.
I needed to talk … with Elliot Gekewicz.
I sat up straight. Yeah!
You know how there’s always one kid in school who’s the dirty one, one kid who’s the smelly one, one kid who throws the ball over the backstop … and one kid who it’s okay for anybody, absolutely anybody, to trash?
In our school, that last kid was Elliot. Not that he was dirty or smelly—I don’t mean that. I wasn’t really sure why he was the one, but the fact was that in Parkland School seventh grade, no matter who you were, Elliot Gekewicz was lower on the social scale than you.
He was small, and that wasn’t good; he had a horrible name; and he was smart, which only made things worse. And anyway somebody has to be on the bottom, and in our class it was him.
I had known Elliot since we were in kindergarten, and I had seen a lot of stuff happen to him. I never really joined in, but I never tried to stop it either, not that I could have. Kids had done all the usual things: called him names, stomped on his feet, played keepaway with his stuff, hung him by the back of his underpants on the cleat for the climbing rope in gym … Kids poured water inside Elliot’s backpack—while he was wearing it. They stuffed him in his locker—upside down. They took his milk in the cafeteria, soaked his sandwich with it, squirted in a packet of ketchup, squashed the red-white mess between two trays, took his cookie and walked away eating it while everyone else laughed. Kids would say stuff in the hall when Elliot walked by, like: “Where’d you get that shirt—from a Dumpster? Who cuts your hair—your mom?”
Elliot didn’t get mad, he didn’t cry, and he didn’t seem (to me) to ask for it. He wasn’t your classic bully magnet. I guess this stuff happened to him because it always had—and because it had to happen to somebody, especially in seventh grade. And he is kind of funny looking. He looks like a little bird with a big bobbing head, scooting across the playground before he’s spotted. People called him Bird Boy, sometimes. When he went by in the hall, certain guys would make “cheep cheep” noises.
They did other stuff, too, especially once our class started really getting into the Darkland spirit. Sometimes they played Surround and Pound. They’d trap Elliot on the playground (yes, we still had recess and we were still sent to the playground, in seventh grade), and they’d start closing the circle and shoving him back and forth. He’d try to shoot out between kids, and if they could grab him they’d throw him back. When they closed the circle all the way, they’d shove him like a rag doll between them. Once at recess when Elliot was on the monkey bar by himself, these two guys, Burke Brown and Jon Blanchette, snuck up below and pantsed him. They were the ones who hung him on the cleat, too, actually.
Elliot himself was obsessed with dinosaurs. Had been for years. He was always lugging around big dinosaur encyclopedias, and he had dinosaur stickers on his notebooks—even then, in seventh grade; and when he had any kind of school project he’d relate it to dinosaurs if he could. (You can even do this in math, if you’re Elliot. Once when we had to do something on probability, he did “Es
timating the Life Span of Triceratops.” He said that was probably the last dinosaur to die out, so they know more about it.)
For all I knew, dinosaurs were the only thing Elliot ever thought about. And I could understand this. I mean, if you’re Elliot Gekewicz, spending your days lost in your mind among giant prehistoric reptiles probably has a lot more appeal than being awake to the realities of Darkland Middle School.
So anyway, I called him. I had to take a deep breath first, because this was really depressing, in a way. But I told myself I wasn’t going to be friends with Elliot, I only wanted to ask him a few things. It was like being a detective. I had a mystery, and I was looking for clues.
One of his sisters answered the phone. When I asked for Elliot, there was a long silence. I heard whispering.
Finally she said, “Who is this, please?”
“It’s Russell Trainor.”
“Oh. O … kay …”
I heard more whispering. The phone was set down … then it was picked up and Elliot said, “Hello?”
“Hi,” I said. “It’s Russell.”
“Oh. Hello.”
“I had to like pass a security check to get to you.”
“Oh. Well … I guess I’ve been getting some not very nice calls.”
“Huh. Ah, listen, Elliot. Could I ask you about something? I’m kind of looking for an expert.”
“An expert?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Me?”
“Oh, definitely.”
“Hey, sure!” he said. “When’d you get interested in dinos?”
“It’s not dinosaurs, Elliot. It is kind of about predators, though. I’m suddenly sort of the target of one. If you know what I mean.”
“A predator?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
There was a long pause. Finally Elliot said, “Could we do this Streaming?”
“Uh, well, okay. I guess so. Why?”
“It’s more secure.”
“Okay, I’ll get on-line. What’s your address?”
“Troo.”
“What?”
“T-R-O-O. For troodon,” he said. “It’s small but sharp-eyed, with an unusually big brain area. And slashing claws.”
“Oh. O … kay.”
I hung up the phone and turned on the computer.
Our school has a LAN, a local area computer network. Officially it’s called SchoolStream, but everyone—every kid, at least—calls it KidNet. Everyone in school has an account, and a password that you keep to yourself. You can access your account from any computer in the school, or from your computer at home, if you have one. You can send any other kid e-mail, and you can send mail to your teachers—you can ask about homework, or other questions. If you’re sick they e-mail your homework to you. (Isn’t that great?) You can also access encyclopedias, and you can download practice problems for math tests, challenge quizzes for social studies, stuff like that. There’s a lot you can do.
One thing is MidStream. We called it Streaming. That’s where you and other kids get on together and talk by typing. Other networks call it Chat, or Instant Message, or whatever. Nobody can break into or eavesdrop on your conversation without everyone else knowing about it. I guess that’s why Elliot wanted to talk this way: he could tell if anyone else was lurking and listening, like if I was the front person for some new plot to humiliate him.
For your address on our system you get up to five letters. Mine was RussT, which I thought was pretty good.
For a minute there was nothing. Then finally:
where you go?
I sighed. Finally I typed:
Like I said, Elliot pretty much lived in the reptile ages. I realized if I was going to get anything out of him, I had to go there, too.
I thought for a minute.
At least I’d be safe, for a little while. And maybe, just maybe, there might be something I could figure out.
POP QUIZ
When I came into the library, Elliot already had a table spread with dinosaur books. I wondered if anyone else ever got to look at the dinosaur books. But who else would want to, in middle school?
He had each book open to a picture. When he looked up, his eyes were bright; then he quickly checked to see if I’d come alone. I thought how Elliot really does look like a bird—especially those tiny birds you see on beaches, darting back and forth on stick legs inches from waves that you think are going to drown them, but never do.
“Look at this,” he said before I was even sitting down. He was pointing to a picture of a scrawny dino. It looked like an underfed naked chicken.
“That’s gallimimus,” he said. “He didn’t have teeth or claws, but he could run at forty miles an hour.”
“Wish I could,” I said, slumping in the chair.
“Now these guys, the really big sauropods—the brachiosaurs and the diplocids—they could swing their tails at attackers.”
“Elliot …”
“I mean probably.”
“Huh?”
“We don’t know for sure,” Elliot said. “It’s even possible they could rear up on their hind legs. See this picture? I mean, can you imagine an eighty-ton brachiosaurus pounding down on you? Even a tyranno would have taken off.”
“Speaking of tyrannos …”
“But I think it’s also possible they stayed mostly in the water. They could be in pretty deep water, when you think about it. It’s conceivable the big meat-eaters didn’t like water. They might even have been afraid of it.”
He nodded proudly. “That’s one of my own hypotheses. What do you think?”
“Well, I mean, for me … swinging tails, deep water, massive tonnage …” I shook my head.
“I know—they don’t seem like defenses,” said Elliot. “But the plant eaters used what they had. You know?”
I shrugged. Elliot was opening more books, going right to certain pages. I was starting to wonder what I was doing there.
“Of course, stegosaurs had a spiked tail,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be something? And ankylosaurs, the armored dinos, they had a round bony club on their tails. Swing it around and, ooh … fractured skull.”
He grinned. I reached over and shut his book. His smile did a puzzled fade.
“I want to know wha
t I can do,” I said. Elliot blinked. “You know—in real life? Like I told you?”
He blinked again. I looked around, and leaned over the table.
“Okay,” I whispered. “This one guy is bent on basically destroying my life. He wants me to be scared all the time. What do you … I mean, no offense, but what do you do in a situation like this?”
Elliot didn’t say anything. He just looked down.
“Okay,” I finally said. “So … you’re talking about survival strategies?”
“Yeah! See, like dromaeosaurs. They had a huge sharp claw, just one claw, sticking forward from their back feet. They could slash a bigger dino’s belly right open.”
“Right open.”
“Yes,” he said, with a kind of dreamy look.
I sat back while Elliot started rummaging again in his books. At least I’m safe in here, I told myself Nothing bad can happen in a library.
“Here—see this?”
Elliot held up a picture of a huge striped head. It had a fan growing behind it, and a crown of spikes and a giant nose horn. It was, I had to admit, amazing.
“That’s styracosaurus,” he said. “He’d just have to turn and look at you with that head. I think you’d go find someone else to pick on.”
“Yeah, but what about the dinos that had no horns, or armor, or spikes or clubs or claws? And no speed and no hugeness. There were dinos without any of those things, right?”
“Oh, sure. Lots. Big ones and little ones.”
“So what’d they do?”
“Traveled in herds, mostly. They’d keep the young, small, and weak ones in the middle.”
“And that kept the killers away? Really?” I had this sudden mental picture of a whole bunch of kids—skinny kids, little kids, gawky kids, fat kids, kids with funny hair, kids with thick glasses, kids who trip over cracks in the sidewalk. They were trooping through the halls together, all wearing white T-shirts that said: NERD HERD.