It Wasn't Me Read online

  “WOULD YOU SHUT UP OH MY GOD WILL YOU PLEASE SHUT UP YOU GUYS PLEASE BE QUIET OH MY GOD,” Molly whisper-shouts in a kind of constant stream-of-consciousness way.

  We round the corner after Jax and immediately smash into him, one after another, like dominoes, or like a bad Three Stooges movie. Alice, who is last, falls backward and hits the floor with a squeak.

  “Mr. Saunders. And some little kid. Back it up, and I mean right now,” Jax whispers, and we pretty much crawl all over each other trying to get back down the hallway the way we came. Erik has to bodily lift Alice off the floor, because she appears to have lost a shoe and managed to spill her messenger bag. Again.

  We skitter into the closest empty classroom, where Alice puts her shoe back on and the rest of us stare at each other. The mood is best described as treasonous panic.

  “This. Is. A. TERRIBLE. Idea,” Molly whispers.

  We all stay silent. Mr. Saunders the janitor is the sort of kindly, smiling, friendly dude who teachers and students all like, and who gets the yearbook dedicated to him every few years. But beloved though he may be, none of us has any doubt of what will happen if he catches us.

  His footsteps come closer. Alice squeaks again, barely audibly. Molly shoots her the patented I Am Freezing You with Ice Shards to Your Brain look, but Erik gives her arm a pat that I suppose is intended to be reassuring, though it looks like it might leave a bruise. Comforting? Threatening? Hard to know with Estrale.

  “Nice to have your company, today, Li’l Bit. We’ll finish up and go get some lunch, sound good?” He starts singing a peanut-butter-and-jelly song, and a boy—I guess his kid?—giggles. He’s got a decent voice, actually, deep and smooth and kind of slow-jazz-style.

  But the problem is, it’s getting closer.

  Before he gets to our door, the song breaks off. Instead, there’s the sound of a fuzzy, static-filled walkie-talkie. The footsteps stop.

  “Allo? What’s up?” Mr. Saunders says, presumably into his walkie-talkie.

  We all look at each other, except Andre, who’s over by the teacher’s desk. He mutters something that sounds like “supply closet,” but his hand is over his mouth and it’s impossible to understand him.

  “Anybody on here? You need me?” Mr. Saunders says outside the door. Then: “Shoot. Stupid technology. More trouble than it’s worth. Teddy, we gotta walk down to maintenance anyway, since I can’t understand the thing. I’m telling you, technology just makes more work….”

  His voice fades away as he walks, apparently toward the maintenance closet, which is by the cafeteria.

  We all turn to stare at Andre.

  “Kind of a dirty trick, but I wasn’t sure what else to do,” he says, and his face is sheepish.

  “What DID you do?” Molly asks.

  “Saved our butts, that’s what he did! You. Are. A BEAST!” Jax says, leaping at Andre and giving him a hug that looks a little like a headlock.

  Andre looks pained.

  “I hit the ‘maintenance’ button on this thing a bunch of times and whispered ‘supply closet.’ Wasn’t really sure what it would do,” he admits.

  I stare in admiration. But it’s Erik who sums it up, or at least attempts to.

  “Andre, man. There are team players and then there are teammates, and you, my friend, are the latter. I would throw you a no-look pass any day and twice on Sundays and trust you to get it and nail the shot, even if it were a three-pointer.”

  None of us knows quite how to respond to that, except Alice, who promptly says, “Same!”

  Andre shrugs. But I think I see a smile threatening to break out.

  Jax releases him and bounds toward the door. “Anyway, let’s get back to the job at hand, right, people? Candy!”

  “Skittles!” Molly adds.

  “Caramel bull’s-eyes,” I say before I can stop myself.

  Jax nods so vigorously his hat flies off. “Magical angel tears. Let’s do this!”

  And we’re off again.

  Back into the hallway, this time Jax going into Super-Stealth mode, bringing his knees up high and placing each foot down carefully, like the Pink Panther cartoon guy. One after another, we follow. Alice, I notice, lifts each knee exactly like Jax.

  Finally we’re at Jax’s locker, which is right outside the gym. He opens it and pulls out a crumpled bag full of candy.

  “Did you steal that?” Molly asks, her face a war between avarice and You Deeply Disappoint Me.

  “Naw, that’s you, remember?” Jax says, smiling so big that it takes a minute for Molly to get it.

  “Shut up! That was once, and I had to—”

  “Kidding! Just a joke. I’m messing with you,” Jax says, and his smile is real.

  Molly is back to Def Con Scarlet, but she gives a kind of half smile back. “I know you were kidding,” she mumbles.

  Meanwhile, we are too close to the gym for Erik to handle, and he’s making fidgety freak-out motions that look like a mix between a toddler who reallyreallyreally has to go to the bathroom and a cat trying to barf. (Also, I will note here that the motion of a cat gakking up a hairball, when set to dubstep, is oddly compelling.)

  “Duuuuuuudes. I’m just…We gotta go in. For a little bit!”

  “Absolutely not,” Molly snaps. “We should get back before—”

  “What’s in there?” Alice interrupts, standing on tiptoe to look through the small window. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in.”

  We all turn and stare at her, even Molly, who’s got one hand in the bag of Skittles.

  “I don’t really do sporty things,” Alice says, blinking (two of her three eyes), her voice as cheerful as ever.

  “We have to do sporty things,” Andre says. “I don’t do them either, but it’s not a choice.”

  I nod. In this matter, at least, we are Nerds United. I skateboard and got up to a brown belt in karate and can swim a mile at the pool, so I’m not a slug. But team sports, or even the sadly clichéd horror of PE dodgeball and floor hockey…not so much.

  Alice shrugs. “I just…don’t really do it.”

  I think about this. Alice is wack enough that she might have some special weirdo way of getting out of PE that works only if you regularly come to school in a tutu or wear six pigtails in your hair.

  Erik has been watching us with the kind of expression usually reserved for watching the Jaws of Life pull a motionless body out of a totaled car.

  “But…sports are LIFE. They’re EVERYTHING! They’re where the good guys get to beat the bad guys, and where you stand up for your teammates even if you don’t even like the dude outside of the game. And where everyone does his best for the team, even if it means sacrificing yourself. THERE’S NO I IN TEAM! I mean, that says it all!”

  Andre and I exchange startled looks. Erik’s a little dangerous, spit flying out of his mouth as he spews his clichés. I’m tempted to explain to him that it’s not exactly nirvana for those of us who are more likely to be the target than shoot for the target, but I don’t want to get into it with him when he’s this frenzied. I settle for rolling my eyes, which, if it were a sport, I would be on the Olympic podium.

  “That’s it,” Erik says, looking from face to face. “We’re goin’ in.”

  Given the new trend of threatening eye contact, I’m not about to be the one to defy him.

  “Little fuel for the game ahead?” Jax says brightly, offering around the bag.

  I grab a handful of caramels and start unwrapping them. Shoving one in my mouth, I look at Andre and Molly again and shrug.

  Molly, who’s scowling so hard it looks like she tried to bunch all her features into the center of her face, shrugs back.

  Erik opens the door to the gym, and the smell of several civilizations’ worth of sweaty gym socks hits us like a slap of olfactory nightmare.

 
Everyone cringes, except Erik, who takes a deep breath. “This!” he cries, gesturing us in. “This is the smell of joy!”

  We are all too busy breathing through our mouths to answer.

  It turns out you can get used to the smell of fermenting gym socks pretty quickly. Or maybe the delightful miasma of Skittles and chocolate overwhelms it. The fact is, once we realize that we’re the only ones in the gym, and no postpubescent, recently-started-shaving thirteen-year-old fascist is going to give us wedgies or dome us with the medicine balls, it’s actually not awful.

  That’s not quite true. It’s more than not-awful. It’s pretty freaking epic.

  First Erik—again acting oddly human and decent—takes Alice to the middle of the basketball court and shows her how to shoot a free throw. She squeaks and refuses to catch it when he throws the basketball to her, which slows the process down a bit. But finally he carefully places it on the floor a few feet away and rolls it to her. It stops right at her feet, and after staring at it for a few seconds like it’s a Magic 8 Ball, she picks it up and starts shooting. At the other end, Molly’s gotten out a soccer ball and is crashing it toward the back wall like she’s got a personal grudge against black-and-white spheres. She’s pretty excellent at it, not surprisingly, since her Overachiever status extends to sports. And she really seems to get a lot of happiness out of nailing that thing again and again.

  I stay far away.

  The rest of us get the giant yoga balls out of the pen where they’re kept and roll back and forth on our stomachs. But then Erik gets the idea of yoga-ball soccer.

  “Three to a team! Me, Alice, and Andre versus Theo, Jax, and Molly!” He takes a running leap toward his yoga ball and overshoots, flying off the front of it and landing with a huge, hollow crash.

  We all freeze.

  “OH MAN,” Jax whisper-shouts. “If there’s blood, we are so screwed.”

  But Erik pops up again with a spectacular red bump on his head. “My bad! But no worries. Let’s do this!”

  “Let’s put a little skin in the game,” Jax says, rolling quite gracefully over to the candy bag. “Let’s say…play to twenty, and winning team gets the candy bag.”

  “Ten,” Molly says quickly, rolling expertly behind him. “We have GOT to get back or we’re dead.”

  I try to mount my yoga ball and meet them center court but manage to get my foot stuck under it and make a loud foot-fart noise, then fall sideways off the ball.

  Jax nods thoughtfully like this is a technique I might want to teach the rest of them. “Theo, you’re going to be, like, goalie. You stay put.”

  Never have I been so gracefully told I suck.

  Not surprisingly, Alice is the other team’s “goalie,” i.e., designated pathetic non–yoga ball rock star. What is surprising is that Andre is not that bad. He scuttles around on his ball like some kind of beetle, his long arms and legs reaching around easily. He scores on me once, and I stop a second goal—an impressive combination of my flailing in the right direction while simultaneously giving the kind of war cry Satan’s minion might make if he hadn’t hit puberty yet that I think throws him off his shot. Then Jax gets serious, guarding him closely, chirping at him the whole time. Jax, I have to add, is the king of the chirp. Some choice samples:

  “Son, I’m going to be the milk in your cereal, the change in your pocket, the gum in your mouth. You even think of shooting and I’ll be there.”

  “Andre, we might as well be related, you know? Because I’ll be all up in your business right through Christmas. You hear Santa? That’ll be me, hanging out by the chimney with your stocking.”

  “You know your blood type, Andre? Because close as we are now, you might want to make sure we’re compatible!”

  After this last one, Andre falls off his ball from laughing too hard, and Jax quickly scores two goals before the other team can pull it together.

  At one point the other team seems to be everywhere at once, and they score three goals in a row, and when I scream for a time-out, I look over and Molly and Jax are sitting on the bleachers with the bag of candy between them. Molly doesn’t even look guilty.

  “Go team!” she yells.

  After a quick time-out, where I dig deep for the best pep talk possible (“If you could not hang me out to dry like somebody’s stained underwear, that’d be great”), we’re back at it.

  Molly faces off against Alice this time, which should be embarrassingly easy, except that Molly gives a most pathetic squeal, and Alice is past her like the world’s least graceful crab. I brace for her shot, but when she gets to me, I too give a pathetic squeal, and she scores immediately.

  That’s when we make the rule that it’s illegal to put a fake severed finger in a nostril.

  The game ends with Erik pushing past Jax, committing an egregious foul that would get him disqualified from official soccer-yoga competition for a decade if anyone had seen it, and scoring a winning goal. I brace for the anger and disappointment of my teammates, only to find that during their break they’ve eaten a cool half of the candy already so aren’t too fussed about the result.

  The sugar has so chilled Molly out that she barely even freaks on the way back to the classroom.

  As we tiptoe through the hallway, Erik gives me one of those dude-punches on the arm.

  “Admit it, that was sick,” he says.

  I shrug-nod, not willing to admit that I haven’t laughed that hard in years, but also not willing to flat out lie to the guy who gave me my first dude-punch. (It stings a little more than I expected.)

  “Come on! Teamwork! Fun!”

  “Candy!” Molly interjects.

  “I thought it was totally fun,” Alice says. Thankfully, she’s taken the fake finger out of her nose. Bad news is that she’s tucked it behind her ear for safekeeping, and the jagged severed edge is sticking out. I avert my eyes.

  “It was,” I admit. “It was pretty excellent.”

  Erik punches me again, and I try not to flinch. “Told you,” he crows. “You should join a team. It’s just…it’s the best.”

  I think about telling him that yoga-ball soccer is not yet a recognized sport, but somehow I can’t summon my usual snark. Total truth? He’s like a Labrador retriever…so excited you can practically see his tail wagging (metaphorically speaking, of course). It’s hard not to fall for it.

  “Sports are a pretty big deal to you, I guess,” I say. This is up there with the most obvious statements ever made, second only to the famous “Wow! That’s water!” statement by Dave Howe during the second-grade burst-pipe debacle.

  But Erik nods vigorously, like I’ve said something enlightening and intelligent. “Most important thing in my life,” he says, and for once his voice doesn’t sound like a Gatorade ad. He sounds…serious, and a little sad.

  I’m so startled that I blurt out my next question without thinking. “Why? I mean, why’s it such a big deal?”

  Erik slows a little, so that Jax, Molly, and Andre are a little ahead. Alice is still behind us. When I turn around, she’s lifting up her knees and taking exaggerated tiptoe steps again.

  “You wouldn’t get it,” Erik says.

  “Because I’m not a jock, you mean.” I roll my eyes. “Right. Secret handshakes and all that. Sorry.” I speed up, ready to get away.

  Erik speeds up right next to me, though. “No! That’s not what I meant. Because you’re not…because you’re smart.” He sighs. “Look. I’m really good at sports. Like, I’ve got natural talent, and I work. Wicked hard. And”—he pauses, glances at Alice, who’s still right behind us, apparently high-knee-tiptoeing faster to keep up—“well, let’s just say I’m not that good at school. Like, I’m dyslexic. Do you even know what that means?”

  I nod, though I’m not totally sure.

  “It doesn’t mean I’m stupid,” he says quickly.

 
; “I know,” I say just as fast. “Words look weird to you, right?”

  “Words and numbers. Yeah. It’s hard to read and write normally, so everything takes way longer, and it’s…Like I said, I’m not that good at it.”

  I slow back down and glance at him. “But…you’re supposed to get help for that. Doesn’t the school—”

  He interrupts, waving a hand impatiently. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have all that stuff. I have a tutor and all these accommodations. Like when Lewiston brought me that tape player. I can listen to the readings and stuff.” He pauses. “But still. Everyone in my family is wicked smart. Like Harvard smart. And that’s not going to be me, even with the tutors and everything.” He’s quiet again. “I’m nothing like them.”

  By now we’re at the classroom, and the others are inside. Molly’s waving at us.

  “Come on!” she says, her The World Is Too Idiotic for Me to Handle voice coming back. “Ms. Lewiston isn’t here yet, but she’ll probably be back any minute. Move!” She ducks back into the room.

  Erik and I pause outside the door, Alice right behind us.

  We all kind of stare at the floor, then at each other. My eyes accidentally snag on the severed finger again, and I snort-laugh, shaking my head a little.

  Erik sees the finger too and laughs.

  Alice laughs too. Then she takes the finger and shoves it back up her nose.

  “I’m not really like my family either,” she says.

  * * *

  —

  When Ms. Lewiston comes in, apologizing for how long it all took and telling us it’s time for lunch, we’re all sitting silently reading (or in Erik’s case, listening) and making notes. If she notices the faint smell of candy and sweat, she must attribute it to the permanent funk of the room.

  “We’ll circle up now,” she says. “And I want to say I really appreciate the dedication you’re showing to the process. I know it was a lot to ask you to be alone in here, and I’m grateful that you honored my trust.”

  I stare at her through my hair, trying to see if this is some kind of reverse-psychology move. But she looks earnest. I very definitely and clearly don’t look at my dishonorable classmates. I hear Alice give a faint squeak, and I close my eyes briefly, hoping that will be the end of it.