Happy Kid! (18 page)

This is not a brushfire, I thought as Mrs. Lynch started handing papers back to us. This is what people mean when they talk about a raging inferno.

Fortunately,
Happy Kid!
opened to another new page that afternoon on the bus ride home.

“Make the Best of It!” would have been a lot more helpful if I'd actually wanted Jake Rogers drawn to me so I could form a “satisfying relationship” with him. But I didn't.

Of course, had any of
Happy Kid!
's advice and warnings been very helpful?
I
didn't think so.

The phone rang about fifteen minutes after Lauren and I got home.

“When is your mother picking me up tonight?” Jake asked.

“Oh. I haven't checked the paper yet. We might have to go another night,” I suggested, hoping “another night” would end up being not at all.

“Good thing I went on-line and got the show times. There's one at eight-fifty-five tonight. We'd better get there at eight o'clock. Oh, nah. We'd better get there at seven-forty-five. So be at my house around ten after seven.”

“We'll be more than an hour early,” I said.

“It's opening weekend. We'll stand in line with everyone else. That's the fun of opening weekend. Gotta go. I've got to make some more calls,” he concluded, and hung up before I could say anything else.

“You want to go to the movies with
Jake Rogers
?” Mom asked when I told her I needed her to drive the two of us there.

“Isn't it wonderful?” I said. “I'm going to see
Master Lee II: The Undead
on opening night. I am ‘fun and easy to be with.' ‘Others are drawn to me.' Like Jake.”

“I guess you're going to want a dollar because you read another chapter in
Happy Kid!
” Mom replied.

“And a ride to and from the movies. I'm not getting in a car with one of Jake's parents.”

My mother got us to the theater at exactly 7:45. She had just driven away when Jake pointed toward the glass wall at the front of the building and said, “Oh, look! Brian and Kenny are already in line.”

If ever there was a bad situation, this was it.

Brian and Kenny were the guys Jake ate lunch with. Brian Coxmore stayed back in third and fifth grades and was now doing his second year of eighth. He wore a goatee and had a driving permit. Kenny Ferris was the only thirteen-year-old I knew who shaved his head.

I guessed I was going to the movies with them. I hoped they wouldn't hurt me.

“Isn't that your sister over there? The one making out with some guy over against the wall?” Jake asked after we'd paid and joined the line of ticket holders.

Sure enough, there were Lauren and Jared, waiting in line to see another movie and carrying on the way they do when they were home on our couch.

“That's her boyfriend,” I said.

“He can't do that to her. This is a public place. Let's go beat the crap out of him,” Brian suggested.

“Really. She doesn't mind,” I said.

“I don't, either,” Brian replied. “I just feel like beating the crap out of somebody.”

Kenny and Jake laughed. Several people near us shifted a few steps away.

Lauren just happened to look over Jared's shoulder then and saw me. She pushed Jared away and signaled for me to come over. I shook my head. She stamped her foot and signaled again. I shook my head again. Then she looked as if she were going to come over to me.

“I'm going to go beat the crap out of him myself,” I told Brian as I took off across the lobby.

“We'd come help, but we don't want to give up our place in line,” Kenny shouted.

“I'll go!” Brian offered.

“Don't sweat it,” I heard Jake tell him. “Ol' Kyle knows taekwondo.”

“You are in so much trouble,” Lauren hissed when I was almost near enough to her to carry on a normal conversation. “When Mom and Dad find out who you and Jake met here, you will never be allowed to leave the house again.”

“I didn't know Brian and Kenny were going to be here.”

“This is what you get for going somewhere with Jake Rogers,” Lauren said, sounding more like somebody's mom than somebody's sister who had just been groping with her boyfriend in a theater lobby.

“I'm going—to—to—make the best of this bad situation,” I stammered.

“Who are you trying to kid? You have never made the best of a bad situation in your entire life,” Lauren objected. “As soon as you find yourself in a bad situation, you go right off the deep end and make it worse. Just how do you, of all people, plan to make the best of this?”

“I don't have a clue,” I admitted. “I'm hoping something will come to me.”

“Well, good luck. And I am sorry, but Mom is going to have to hear about this,” Lauren announced.

“Yeah. Just like she's going to have to hear about the little show the two of you have been putting on for the hundreds of people in this lobby,” I said.

“We're dressed. We're standing up. We're not doing anything wrong,” Lauren insisted.

“You stop it or the guys I'm with are going to come over here and beat the crap out of Jared. They said so. I don't know if I'll be able to stop them.”

“Really?” Lauren asked, sounding interested.

Jared held up his hands. “I won't touch her again until the lights go out in the theater.”

“You're not touching me then,” Lauren announced. “I want to be able to watch the movie.”

Jared looked so disappointed that I had to wonder just what he'd expected to be doing once the lights went out.

“Be careful,” Lauren told me as I turned to get back in line.

“You too.”

I was heading back through the crowd in the lobby when I saw them.

A-kids. Four of them. Melissa Esposito, Bradley Ryder, a girl who sat over by the windows in English, and . . . Chelsea.

How come I wasn't there? How come I had never been invited to go anywhere with them?

And wasn't Brad standing awfully close to Chelsea? Were they . . . a couple?

I quickly turned so they wouldn't see me. See me there. Without them.

I am seeing
Master Lee II: The Undead
on opening night, I reminded myself. Someday Brad and Chelsea will be “drawn to me” because I made the best of this bad situation. I hope that day will come soon.

I huddled up with Jake, Brian, and Kenny while they talked about some girl in the line Jake thought was hot. I would have loved to see what a girl had to look like for Jake to consider her hot, but she was standing somewhere in front of us and I was trying to keep my back to the front of the line to make sure Chelsea and the others didn't see me. At the same time, I didn't want Jake and his posse to know that I was trying to keep Chelsea and the A-kids from seeing me with them. And what if Luke was here somewhere? What if he saw me and shouted “Hey, Kyle!” from across the lobby? Which normally would be great, but not now, when he'd give me away to Chelsea and the others.

Talk about things not going the way you expect them to, surprises . . . oh, there must have been five or six
Happy Kid!
words of wisdom that would have fit that situation.

“Catfight!” Kenny suddenly said, way too loudly.

I spun around. “Girls fighting? Really? Where?”

“Melissa Esposito is getting ready to pop Chelsea Donahue,” Jake explained, pointing up ahead to where Melissa was waving her hands at Chelsea and leaning in toward her while her mouth went a mile a minute. “Go! Go! Go! Go!”

I held my breath. Was Chelsea going to kick Melissa the way I'd imagined that afternoon? No such luck. Chelsea just stood with her arms crossed and looked disgusted while Melissa talked and talked.

I turned my back to them again. “I saw Melissa arguing with Chelsea at school today, too. I think they were fighting about a teacher Melissa thinks cheated or something on one of the SSASies. I don't know what she expects anybody to do about it.”

“A teacher cheating? Cool. How?” Jake asked.

“He gave us an essay question for SSASie practice that he found on an old test, and then it ended up being on the real test,” I explained.

“So you got a chance to practice writing the essay before the test? That's not fair,” Kenny complained. “Not that I wouldn't have done it myself, if I'd had a chance.”

“We didn't do it on purpose,” I told him.

“I would have.”

“We didn't try to cheat,” I said, trying to make myself very clear.

“I would have,” Kenny said again. He shook his head sadly. “How come I never get teachers who cheat?”

“He wasn't
trying
to cheat! He didn't know it was going to happen.”

“Oh, that wasn't cheating then. That was an irregularity,” Jake told us.

Kenny and Brian nodded their heads while I said, “A what?”

“I've heard them talking about irregularities in guidance when I'm down there,” Jake explained.

“Me too,” Kenny said.

“I heard it a couple of years ago when I had that old lady guidance counselor who died,” Brian said. “Hey, don't look at me like that. I said she was old. I didn't have anything to do with it.”

“How do you get an ‘irregularity' with a test?” I asked.

“It's anything other than cheating that can mess up the scores. Like if a student had an unfair advantage—the way you did—or a teacher gave the wrong instructions. I remember because ‘irregularity' is another word for ‘constipation,' ” Jake concluded.

“That's right,” Brian said.

“It is,” Kenny agreed.

“Is it a big deal?” I wanted to know.

“Constipation?” Brian asked.

“No! This messing up the scores thing,” I said.

Jake shrugged. “If I know the people down in the guidance office—and I do—they'll probably just throw out the tests involved and make everyone take them over again.”

“Oh, no!” I exclaimed.

“He's right,” Brian said while Kenny nodded.

“I don't want to take the test again!”

I looked over my shoulder to see if I could find Melissa. This was just the kind of thing you could expect from her, I thought. She could wreck everything.

But I
am
seeing
Master Lee II
on opening night, I told myself, thinking positively.

“Hey, look. Alldredge is in back of us. I didn't know he was into Master Lee. We can talk about the movie when I'm in his office on Monday,” Jake said.

I froze. I couldn't turn away because I didn't want the A-kids to see me with Jake. But if I stayed where I was, the school principal might see me with him, and Mr. Alldredge already thought I was Jake's “man.” I finally crouched down to retie both my shoes a few times, and when I stood up, I was hidden between Jake and Brian and turned so that if Chelsea and Brad or Mr. Alldredge caught a glimpse of me, they wouldn't see more than my profile.

“Is that his wife he's got with him or his mother?” Kenny asked.

“She's not old enough to be his mother. She's kind of porky, though,” Brian observed.

“What do you think?” Jake asked me. “Wife or mother?”

I gave Mr. Alldredge a break and said, “Wife.”

“She's not over there,” Jake complained when he noticed where I was looking. He grabbed me by my shoulders and spun me toward the back of the line. “See Gus? See the woman standing next to Gus?”

“Gus” looked our way as if he'd heard someone calling his name. He ended up staring right at me.

“Wife,” I said again as Mr. Alldredge made a face and looked away.

By the time we finally got into the theater, I was thinking that this better be the greatest movie ever made.

We ended up in the very back row, as if I couldn't have seen that coming. Chelsea and Bradley were a third of the way down. Their group had good seats, high up but not in the section where the tough kids liked to hang out. No, that's where I was.

Mr. Alldredge got stuck two rows ahead of us. The woman he was with, who really was pretty chunky, had taken so much time deciding where she wanted to sit that a lot of the good rows had filled up.

“You know, I've heard that Master Lee dies at the end of this thing,” Jake said.