Slugfest, p.4
Slugfest, page 4
“Mrs. Finnerty, don’t you know where we’re going?”
“Well, I thought I did,” she confesses. “But I never actually taught in this building. I was at the old middle school—the one they had to tear down when they built this place.”
“Just tell us where you want to go,” Sarah offers. “This is our school. We’ll know.”
She gives in. “Oh, all right. I’m trying to find the home ec room—excuse me, family and consumer science. Since next period is lunch, we’re all going to make our own pizzas.”
That means we have to go all the way back up to the second floor. And when we finally get to the FCS room, everything’s ready for us, with sauce, cheese, toppings, and a lump of dough at every workstation.
Yash is confused. “If she set this up, how can she not know where the FCS room is?”
Cleo rolls her eyes at him. “It’s so obvious. She knows we’re not so big on PE, so she’s being creative in finding ways to make us move our bodies.”
“By tricking us into running up and down stairs?” I don’t like the sound of that. I haven’t been in investigative journalism very long, but one of the first things Ms. Landkammer taught us was this: when people resort to deception, they’re usually trying to cover something up. But what? What has our pizza-making, brownie-baking PEE teacher got up her sleeve?
I can’t help noticing that Yash gets the best workstation in the FCS room—the one by the window with a view of the playground and the trees. Nobody gives it to him; he just takes it. Like it’s his privilege as big man on campus. It reminds me that unfairness isn’t just big things like the news stories Ms. Landkammer tells us about.
Pretty soon we’re all kneading and rolling dough and tossing it up in the air to flatten it into our crust. Maybe Mrs. Finnerty thinks that counts as exercise too. I’m kind of torn. On one hand, what do I care whether I do real gym so long as I get the credit to meet that state requirement? On the other hand, Ms. Landkammer says that real investigative journalists never back off when they smell something fishy.
That definitely describes me right now. It’s suspicious enough that PEE is being taught by an FCS teacher. But when you spend an entire gym class on pizza baking, that sets off alarm bells in this reporter’s head.
Pretty soon we’re done with sauce, cheese, and toppings, and our individual pies are in the ovens for eight to twelve minutes, “or until the crust is golden brown,” as Mrs. Finnerty puts it. And I can’t help wondering: How often should the phrase golden brown come up in a PE class? Never, maybe?
Kaden and Fiona are huddled in front of the glass window of their oven, watching the cheese bubble on their pizzas. They’re involved in a spirited argument over the chemical processes that are going on inside the dough while it heats, and it’s as if there were lives hanging in the balance. The two of them are scribbling on a notepad, performing mathematical calculations, trying to predict the exact moment when the gluten in the dough will be exactly right.
I swear I don’t understand more than one word in five, and the math is beyond me. But for some reason, the whole class gathers around their workstation, eyes riveted on the oven.
“What are we expecting to see?” Yash comments sarcastically. “Is the winning pie going to lift off and take a bow around the room?”
Jesse laughs appreciatively. “Maybe it’s going to explode.”
“Pizza can’t explode,” Kaden lectures. “Some of the ingredients might burn, but of course we won’t let that happen.”
“Am I the only one who thinks it’s weird that this is what we’re doing for summer school PE?” I put in.
“What have you got against pizza?” Yash scoffs.
“Nothing,” I reply. “But we’ve got a PE teacher who doesn’t know P from E!”
“Lay off Mrs. Finnerty,” Cleo puts in.
“I’m not a ‘laying off’ kind of person,” I inform her. “The world can be a tricky place. You have to look out for yourself.”
“Come on, Bella. Not everybody has a hidden agenda. Maybe she’s got us baking pizza because she thinks it’ll be fun.”
“She’s a great cook,” Stuart adds fervently.
“There’s no way she’s qualified to teach this class,” I insist.
Yash shrugs. “That’s the school’s problem, not ours.”
“Maybe.” An idea is taking shape in my head, and for the first time, I put it into words. “But what if there’s a rule that says your P-E-E credit doesn’t count unless you have a real PE teacher?”
“I don’t think it works that way,” Sarah tells me. “If you’re a teacher, you can teach anything, can’t you?”
“Are you willing to bet your summer on that?” I challenge. “I mean, we’re all here because the state has a lot of funny rules.”
Yash normally wears a confident expression, but the color drains out of his face when he hears that last part.
Before anyone can react, a series of loud pops comes from the oven, and Kaden’s pizza is dancing like it’s come alive. Blobs of melted cheese blow up like geysers, and toppings fly in all directions.
“Hey!” Jesse accuses. “You said pizzas can’t explode!”
Shocked, Kaden throws open the glass door to rescue his ruined lunch, crying out in pain as droplets of cheese and sauce burn his bare arms above his oven mitts. He drops the pan on the counter with a clatter, and out of the mess oozes a strange shape that doesn’t match any topping.
Yash reaches over his shoulder and plucks out a string of five spent firecrackers.
Jesse is practically hysterical. “I got you guys! I knew the firecrackers would go off when the oven got hot enough! You should have seen the looks on your faces!”
“You”—Mrs. Finnerty breezes onto the scene, backing Jesse away from the workstation—“have just forfeited your pizza because you’ve ruined someone else’s.”
Jesse wilts. “It was just a joke—”
It’s always “just a joke” with Jesse.
“Do you see anyone else laughing?” the teacher demands.
She isn’t yelling, exactly, but she’s also transformed from little old lady to something like tempered steel. All efficiency, she pulls out Fiona’s pizza without using an oven mitt! She must have asbestos fingers. “This one’s ruined too. Kaden, Fiona—you’ll share Jesse’s pizza. Everyone else—it’s lunchtime.”
As if on cue, a series of bells sounds in the FCS room, indicating that our “projects” are ready. Pretty soon, we’re spread out at the various tables, eating, while Jesse scrubs at the sticky mess in Kaden’s oven with a steel wool brush.
“This is the best pizza I’ve ever tasted!” Stuart raves, and there’s a chorus of agreement.
“That’s the satisfaction of making something yourself,” the teacher declares.
The room resounds with lip-smacking and loud mmmms. Everyone’s really enjoying lunch—with the possible exception of Yash, who still wears a pale and haunted expression. I think I really shook him up when I suggested that this class might not count toward graduation. Good. People need to be woken up sometimes.
I can’t make up my mind about our PEE teacher. On one hand, she really does seem nice and even I can’t argue with the fact that making your own pizza is kind of cool. But then I picture Juliet Landkammer feeling those first drips of not-hot wax puddling on her car. Where would we be if she’d decided to just let that slide? A whole town would be getting ripped off on every car wash!
Mrs. Finnerty is finally shaking off the Jesse incident. She brings out dessert—the red velvet cake.
Poor Jesse’s eyes practically bug out of his head. Like the rest of us, he’s been dreaming of this.
“Keep scrubbing,” she tells him. “When you’re finished, you can go down to the cafeteria and get some lunch. It’s tuna-melt day.”
He works faster after that, but only because he’s trying to get out of the FCS room before he has to listen to us raving about how amazing the red velvet cake is. And it is amazing. Every time we think we’ve seen the best of Mrs. Finnerty’s baking, she kicks it up to the next level.
When at last we’ve finished dessert, the period is over, so—big surprise—there’s no time for any gym class. That’s probably for the best, since we’re all so stuffed that if we tried to move, we’d throw up.
As we file out of the FCS room, Yash sidles up to me. “You think it could happen?” he asks nervously. “You know, that stuff about how our credits might not count?”
“Impossible to tell,” I reply honestly. “But by the time it happens, it’ll already be too late.” He looks so horrified that I add, “There’s a class here where a real pro teaches you how to cut through the noise and baloney and get to the real truth.”
“What class?” he asks eagerly.
“It’s called investigative journalism.”
5
Arnie Yashenko
The ball comes out of my hand hot and blazes across the concourse. Hammond snatches it out of the air six inches before it would have slammed into the I Fix Screens kiosk in the middle of the mall. Hammond is a natural receiver—great hands.
Amir and the girls applaud, but the I Fix Screens guy isn’t as much of a fan.
“Nice catch,” he grumbles. “Do it someplace else next time—like in Timbuktu.”
So of course we run the play again, because nobody tells us what to do. Mall football is strictly against the rules. But that shouldn’t apply to Hammond, Amir, and me. There are no bad throws, and we always make every catch.
“Go deep!” Sophie Kennedy urges.
Amir, who would do anything to get Sophie’s attention, rears back and heaves a long bomb over the crowded concourse. I take off after the ball, dodging shoppers and leaping over little kids. Uh-oh—the pass is way overthrown, spiraling like a missile toward the big fountain.
I vault the barrier, dance across the stepping-stones, and high point the ball with three fingers, bringing it into my chest. I may be a quarterback, but I’m good at all the other positions too.
“What do you think you’re doing?” The mall cop rolls up on his Segway. “All right, smart guy, you’re out of here—” All at once, he recognizes me and breaks into a big grin. “Oh, hi, Yash. Should’ve known that was you.”
“Sorry, Al.” I retrace my steps on the stones and jump back down to the mall floor. My hair’s a little wet from the fountain, but my feet are totally dry. “It won’t happen again.”
“Forget about it. Hey, are the Comets going to win seven-on-seven this summer?”
The question brings me crashing down from the high of that incredible catch. I have no idea what the Comets will do or not do in the annual tournament because I won’t be one of them.
“Well—”
“Of course we’re going to win, Al!” Hammond interrupts. “It’s money in the bank. My boy wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“His boy” isn’t even on the team, and he knows it.
The mall cop glows. “I’ll be in the front row, cheering you guys on. Have a great day—and be more careful with the ball, okay?”
He rolls off, and I turn on Hammond. “What was that supposed to be? You know I can’t play in the tournament!”
“You will be on that team,” Amir says positively.
“Not according to Coach,” I shoot back.
“Coach knows you’re the best player on the Comets,” Hammond assures me. “He might act like a stickler because you’re in Slugfest, but come tournament time, he’s going to do what’s right for the team.”
“Slugfest?” Sophie echoes. “How could Yash be in Slugfest?”
“It’s a long story,” I mumble, tight-lipped. I hate explaining all that stuff about the missing credit and the state education department. I’m freaked out enough by what Arabella said—that if Finnerty isn’t qualified, our PEE credit won’t count. The only thing worse than being a slug is being a slug for nothing.
Hammond and Amir jump in and babble out an explanation of my summer school dilemma that sounds as if it’s all a big mistake that’s going to be straightened out any day now.
“Yeah, isn’t Slugfest for the two-left-feet crew?” Erin Biyalik asks.
I’m tempted to lie because Erin is a cheerleader and I always sensed she had a crush on me. Anyway, Amir is more than happy to answer the question.
“Oh yeah, it’s a freak show who’s who in there. Kaden, Fiona, Stuart and his maniac sister, big-mouth Arabella, that Jesse kid who thinks he’s funny—”
“Like New Dork City,” Hammond chimes in. “And it’s run by some lady who used to teach FCS. All they do is eat—”
“Cleo Marchand’s in it too,” I point out in a feeble defense of the group. “She’s no dork. She just got unlucky, like me.”
“I guess,” Erin concedes. “But Slugfest—wow.”
I’ve been this town’s top athlete for thirteen years, but just the thought of me rubbing elbows with the likes of Fiona and the others sinks me in Erin’s eyes.
“We’ve been making fun of the guy all week.” Hammond snickers. “It lightens the mood.”
“Not my mood,” I grumble.
“I had science with Stuart and Sarah,” Sophie offers. “One day, he started screaming in the middle of lab. She’d put a drop of acid on his shoe because she knew it would take twenty minutes to burn through to his toe. I hear she’s kind of an evil genius.”
“Minus the genius,” Amir adds.
“Hi, Yash!” comes a voice from the direction of the food court.
Kaden stands outside the entrance to Science City, clutching a bulky parcel. He waves with one hand, which starts the other hand moving as well, and he drops the bag. He scrambles to pick it up, but not before a colored plastic ball and several springs hit the floor and bounce away.
Erin shoots me a disappointed look. I can’t help feeling like I’ve let her down, even though I haven’t done anything.
“Dude, it’s your fellow slug!” Amir exclaims in mock excitement. “We’ve got a Slugfest reunion right here at the mall!”
“Shut up,” I tell him wearily.
I try to ignore Kaden, but he hurries over, waddling around the weight of his package.
“Hi, guys!” he calls.
I’m praying for this interaction to be as short as possible, but Hammond and Amir are having too much fun. They can’t resist showing off in front of the girls.
“What have you got there, Kaden?” Amir pretends to want to know.
“It’s an atomic model construction set—deluxe edition,” Kaden replies proudly. “I can build complex molecules up to two hundred and fifty atoms!”
“Man, I wish I had one of those,” Hammond announces sarcastically.
“A guy can dream,” Amir adds.
The girls are working hard not to laugh.
Kaden can be pretty clueless, but it’s starting to sink in that he’s being made fun of. I’m the only one who sees that Hammond is brandishing our football, about to sidearm it into Kaden’s bag. I picture 250 multicolored atoms and their connecting springs and pegs scattering all over the mall, getting crunched and kicked down escalators and into potted plants. I’m no Kaden Cooperman fan, but I can’t let it happen.
With a pistonlike motion, I punch the ball out of Hammond’s hand. “Fumble!” I bellow, and jump on it.
The others, including Kaden, look at me like I’m nuts.
“We play a lot of mall football,” I explain to my fellow slug. “I just recovered a fumble. That’s a good thing,” I add with a meaningful glare up at Hammond.
Kaden mumbles a few words about being late and hurries away, hugging his purchase with both hands, like’s he’s defending it from attack. Which is more or less the truth, except I’m the one who defended it.
Hammond frowns down at me. “What did you do that for?”
I pick myself up off the floor. “Don’t pretend you don’t know. I can read you like a book.”
“Yuck,” Amir puts in mildly. “Who reads books?”
“I would have helped him pick it all up,” Hammond insists. “You don’t have to be a buzzkill.”
The girls are regarding me with disapproval.
“Fine,” I concede. “I’m a buzzkill. If you crawled around on your hands and knees for a hundred years, you wouldn’t find all the pieces that would have come out of that package.”
“Hey, check it out!” Amir exclaims excitedly. “It’s Nate!”
The new kid is loping toward us at a slow jog, a box from Foot Locker tucked under his arm. I saw him briefly at the high school, but this is my first good look at the guy. He’s taller than me, and his blond hair is short—almost a brush cut. His wide blue eyes give him a sincere and open expression.
“Who’s that?” Erin asks.
“That’s Nitro Nate,” Hammond supplies. “New kid on the Comets.”
“Quarterback,” I add. I’m trying to say it like I couldn’t care less, but it comes out like I care too much.
The girls exchange impressed glances.
Nate daps up Hammond and Amir, who introduce him to the girls.
Then Hammond says, “And this is our boy Yash.”
Nate smiles—perfect teeth. “Heard a lot about you—like you’re the kid to beat if you want to play quarterback around here.”
I bristle. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“No offense,” he puts in quickly. “It’s just that you’re kind of a legend. So anybody who wants to be QB has to get in line behind you. Except you can’t come to the workouts—something about summer school?”
“Slugfest,” Sophie supplies.
“Which is going to work itself out!” Hammond exclaims a little too sharply.
“But even if it doesn’t,” Amir goes on, “we’ve got another great quarterback right here.”
Nate can tell that this conversation is getting uncomfortable for everybody. “Anyway, gotta run. I’m meeting my dad. Can’t keep him waiting. He’s the guy who paid for these.” He hefts the shoebox and jogs off.
I’ll bet they’re new football cleats for stealing my job.
“Nate seems great,” Sophie announces. “Is he really that good at quarterback?”
