Pirates of the Retail Wasteland (7 page)

Taking over the Wackfords might not prove any real point. It might not save Sip. But at least I’d be doing something.

I went downstairs, brewed a pot of coffee, and drank it black.

The next morning was the first activity period of the semester. The semester before, I’d had “advanced studies,” an activity led by Mr. Streich back before he was in charge of the gifted pool. That was the class I actually did the avant-garde movie for. This semester, they hadn’t offered advanced studies as an activity at all, probably just because of my movie. I hated to think I’d ruined it for everyone else.

Since I was sick on the sign-up day, I wasn’t able to sign up for the art history activity Anna was taking, or even the politics one Edie would be terrorizing. By the time I got to sign up for an activity, most things were full, and I was left with a choice between Skills for the Job Market and something called Social Problems, which I imagined was full of those stupid things where you read a short story about someone dealing with peer pressure and then discuss how they should react. I didn’t want to meet the kids who signed up for either of those very much, and decided on Skills for the Job Market strictly by tossing a coin.

I knew I was in hell even before the bell rang. The class was mostly a bunch of “career track” kids who were already working on their college applications and reading books about how to be a rich asshole instead of just a regular asshole. There were kids there who had joined the football team because it would be “a good place to make connections.”

Joe Griffin, the biggest religious creep in school, was there, too. His dad was a sleazy ambulance-chasing lawyer who advertised on television, and he seemed to think he was God’s own Angel of Judgment, vested with powers to tell the rest of us we were going to burn in hell. Joe had been instrumental in getting me suspended over
La Dolce Pubert
. He later apologized for that, and I forgave him, but he was still a creep. He sat in the front row of Skills for the Job Market. I couldn’t see his face, since I naturally sat in the back, but I imagined that he looked awfully smug, as usual. All the kids there looked pretty smug.

The teacher was a social studies guy called Mr. Morton who always tried to come off as a dynamic young go-getter. He was wearing an orange button-down shirt with a yellow tie, a combination that made him look like he was dressed as a fruit smoothie or something. He spoke fairly rapidly and quite confidently, and talked about what a great leader he was for the first ten minutes. Humility was clearly not a virtue the guy treasured—but the rest of the kids ate it up.

For the first class, his topic was motivation. He recommended putting up those motivational posters, the ones my dad loved so dearly, in our “study environment.” Joe Griffin then told him he’d be granted more success if he used posters with Bible verses on them.

“If that’s what inspires you, go for it,” said Mr. Morton.

“You should surround yourself with inspiration.” I wondered how many of these jerks would be putting up pictures of Mr. Morton.

“I’m inspired by porn,” I said. “Should I fill my study area with centerfolds?”

Joe turned around and gave me a dirty look.

“Stick with the motivational sayings,” said Mr. Morton. “Porn would give you the wrong kind of inspiration.” Everybody snickered, and Mr. Morton went right back to talking about how great he was.

“I’m not going to be teaching social studies forever,” he said. “Just a couple of years. It’s the kind of experience a lot of companies love to see. You see, you can’t just get a job by having a college degree anymore. You need things to fill out the resume, and working as a teacher in a successful school will make me much more desirable to employers. After a couple of years, I’ll use what I’ve learned here to help me out in the business world.”

Well, I thought, I’m very happy to be your guinea pig. I hope I teach you well, dingle-dorf. When the bell rang, I was the first one out the door.

I practically ran down the hall and ended up being the first one to arrive in Coach Wilkins’s history class, except for Coach Hunter, who came in at the same time as me.

Coach Wilkins nodded at me and smiled as I took my seat, then turned his attention to Coach Hunter.

“How ’bout it, Gene?” asked Coach Wilkins.

“I found another one,” Hunter grumbled. He held out a sheet of paper, and I pricked up my ears.

“Let me see,” said Coach Wilkins. It was “The Final Push-up,” the one Dustin had read at Sip. Wilkins read it and chuckled. “It’s hardly vulgar,” he said.

“Whatever,” said Coach Hunter. “I’m at the end of my rope, Ron. In this one, it sounds like they want me to put my head in the oven! Hang on to it in case I need it for evidence.”

“It’s just a poem, Gene,” said Wilkins. “It can’t hurt anybody.”

“That’s what you think,” he said. He then turned and looked right at me. “Who was it, Harris? If you don’t tell me now, there’s going to be a locker search of every one of you gifted-pool types.”

“That can’t be legal,” I said. “Do you have a warrant?”

“You don’t need a warrant for locker searches, actually,” said Coach Wilkins. “The lockers are school property, not student property. But I think he has a point, Gene. What makes you so sure it was someone from the gifted pool?”

“Who else is it gonna be?” he asked.

“I’ll keep my ears open, Gene,” said Coach Wilkins. “But I think your best course of action is to ignore it.”

“This is out of hand, Harris,” said Coach Hunter. “I’m turning every one of these in to Dr. Brown. If I find out you’ve been holding out on me, you’re in enormous trouble. You and every last one of your friends!”

“I’m not sure that’s legal,” I said.

“I don’t think it is, Gene,” said Coach Wilkins. “You might have a case if the poems were threatening or obscene, but there’s no rule against poems that are just depressing. If Leon hears anything, I’m sure he’ll let you know.”

And he winked at me as Coach Hunter left. I hate it when teachers wink at me. And I’m pretty sure they only wink at kids they think are dorky enough to think it’s cool. All the more reason to become a pirate, I figured.

When the class filled up, Coach Wilkins went into his usual routine, and Jonas spent the whole class period using his fingernail to scrape at a crayon. About midway through the class, he tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention and showed me that he’d been sculpting it to look like a penis.

“Cram it, Jonas,” I muttered, rolling my eyes.

“Ha ha ha,” said Jonas, thinking I was being funny.
“Leon.”

Two hours later, at lunch, I relayed Coach Hunter’s latest rant to James and Dustin, who were thrilled.

“Man,” Dustin said. “Two days’ worth of my poems and the guy’s already out of energy. I’m a king, man!”

“Yeah,” I said. “And I get to be your whipping boy. You should see what he’s doing to me in gym!”

Anna came in and nudged me in the arm.

“Hey,” I said. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Go for it.”

“I think we should go ahead with the pirate thing.”

She took a sip of Coke and then looked at me with an eyebrow raised. She had the cutest eyebrows I could possibly imagine, and when she raised one of them, that alone could usually get me to change my mind about something. But I was resolved to stand firm.

“Edie’s idea?” she asked. “The illegal one? I thought we were just going to set up an office there.”

“We could only do that for a few minutes before someone kicked us out,” I said. “We need something more drastic. It looks like Sip is going to be closing this summer.”

“No way!” she said. “How do you know?”

“I heard George talking to Troy about it.”

“No shit? I should have known. Those bastards!”

“So we’ve got to take Wackfords over. Instead of just pretending that there’s an office in there, we’ll actually take it over like pirates and try to stop people from buying coffee. Make a stand. I’m even game for getting arrested right about now.”

She paused for a second and played with the little metal thingie on top of her Coke can. “It’s still kind of a risk, though,” she said. “Even if it’s a nonviolent takeover. They might try to make an example out of us.”

“Sure, it’s a risk,” I said. “That’s part of what makes it such a good idea for a movie. And I’m into risk taking.”

“I still don’t know,” she said. And she pulled a sandwich out of her bag and started eating. A second later Brian and Edie showed up at the table.

“Man, you wouldn’t believe the kids in the politics activity,” said Edie, clearly annoyed. “I don’t think they’ve ever met a communist before.”

“Well, isn’t that obvious?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. “It’s like I’m a monkey on display for them in there,” she said. “But I’m the only one who knows anything about politics.” She smiled, obviously quite pleased with herself. “Anyway, Leon, did you talk Anna into it?”

“Not yet he didn’t,” said Anna cheerfully. “I keep thinking we can find a better way to do it that won’t get us arrested.”

“If we get arrested, we’ll be legends,” said Edie. “And it’s a small price to pay if it might save Sip.”

“I don’t know if we can save Sip like this,” I said. “It’s probably too late for that. George has probably signed all the papers and stuff. But we can at least make a blow for them before they go.”

“Yeah,” said Anna, “but is striking a blow worth going to prison?”

“Small price to pay,” said Edie. “We’re all under eighteen, so we wouldn’t be locked up for long. Then when we get out, we can get jobs on the lecture circuit or something.”

I laughed. “Oh, God,” I said. “I’d be a motivational speaker.”

Now Anna was smiling for the first time since I’d told her Sip was closing. “You? A motivational speaker?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, “why not?” Somehow, her thinking the idea of my being a motivational speaker was funny bothered me a lot less than her thinking my records were kind of dorky. I deepened my voice and said, “Make yourself invaluable and there’s no limit to what you can do!”

“Yes,” she said, deepening her own voice, like she was doing a really bad impression of me, “you, too, can succeed in life by going to jail before you’re even in high school. Believe in yourself and anything is possible!”

Anna moved over ever so slightly and put her hand on my knee. I just about melted.

By the end of lunch, we hadn’t really reached any conclusions about what to do about taking over the Wackfords, and Anna hadn’t done anything to indicate that she thought I
wasn’t
a bit of a dork, but I felt immeasurably better. About everything. Even if she did think I was a dork, I felt like she was okay with that. Maybe she even
liked
it. And even if Sip was closing, we’d at least be able to help make sure it went out with a bang, leaving a documentary about how much better than the Wackfords it was.

Gym class was a repeat of the day before, but I was in a much better mood. I ran the laps and just ignored it when Coach Hunter shouted things about where my butt ought to be. In fact, when he told me to get it up in the air, I wiggled it around a bit and got a laugh from the kids who noticed.

After I finished cruising through the rest of the day, I met up with Anna outside school, just like normal.

“I think I figured it out,” she said. “I know how we can make the takeover work.”

“Really?” I asked. “How?”

“Mutiny,” she said. “We’re going to turn Troy into a pirate.”

Turning Troy into a pirate didn’t seem like it would be impossible—he didn’t seem to be dripping with company loyalty or anything. He’d even offered to help us find a good time to set up an office. I spent most of the rest of the day coming up with more ideas as to how to make the movie work and trying to decide exactly what kind of point we could make by taking over the Wackfords.

Just on the off chance that I’d started to think my troubles were over and things weren’t going to be complicated or weird from here on out, about an hour after I got home, I got a phone call from Anna.

“Can you call Jenny?” she asked. “I tried to get her to join us for the movie, but she’s nervous. Maybe you’ll have better luck.”

I sat still for a second. Did she know that Jenny liked me? If she did, would she be bringing this up at all? Most people wouldn’t, but then again, Anna wasn’t most people.

“I can try, I guess,” I said.

“Good,” Anna said. “So you call her up. I’ll work on arranging another summit meeting. Just the pirates.”

“Okay,” I said. “You want to meet tomorrow?”

“Tonight,” said Anna. “Sip at eight. We’ll plot for tomorrow then.”

“Okay.”

We hung up, and I stared at the phone, trying to get my nerve up, for quite a while.

But reasoning that it was Anna’s idea, not mine, I finally dialed Jenny’s number, then said all the right things about schoolwork to get past her parents.

“Leon!” Jenny said as she took the phone. “More homework questions?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I was wondering if you understood the bifactoring of the square root of the prime directive on the third…”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m out of their earshot. We can talk like normal people.”

“Hmm,” I said. “I’m not really sure I know how to do that.”

She laughed. “You’re so funny, Leon. What’s up?”

“Well,” I said, “I heard you were worried about helping us with the movie, and I thought I’d call and try to convince you.”

“God, Leon,” she said. “You just, like, make me melt.”

Okay. I blushed and shook my head a little bit. I was just trying to tell her about a movie project, not come on to her. I had to sort of admire her frankness, though. I couldn’t have brought myself to say something like that to someone I liked for anything. Not even Anna, even though she knew it.

“Well, anyway,” I said, ignoring her comment, “we want you to join in on it. We’re meeting at Sip at eight.” If it sounds like I wasn’t really trying to convince her, it’s because I wasn’t. Having to work with both her and Anna would be all kinds of awkward.

“Oh my God, that would be so cool…but there’s no way. Just sneaking out to Sip is hard for me; if I snuck to Wackfords and took it over and my parents found out, they’d probably send me to reform school.”

“That’s totally understandable,” I said, feeling greatly relieved.

“But anyway,” she said, “thanks for thinking about me, okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “See you in school.”

Well. That could have gone worse, I suppose. I still wasn’t sure where she got off thinking it was okay to tell me I made her melt, considering she knew all about me and Anna and everything. But on the other hand…I sort of had to admit I liked it. Who wouldn’t want a girl to say he made her melt? I imagine that even a gay guy would be pretty flattered.

An hour later, I went downstairs, knowing that I was going to need a ride to Sip at eight, and found my dad in the garage, mixing a bunch of green gunk together in a beaker.

“Hi, Leon,” he said. “Watch this!”

He put down the beaker, which looked like it had formerly been a mayonnaise jar. It was full of some stuff that I really hoped was not bear snot but that looked like it couldn’t be much else. I suppose it could have been some other kind of snot, except that there was too much of it for it to have come out of a human.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It’s a lot of things,” he said. “And it’s about halfway to being a new prototype for the hair dye. And check out what happens when I heat it way up!”

He lit a Bunsen burner, then picked up the jar of bear snot (or whatever it was) with some tongs and held it over the flame. Nothing happened for a few seconds, but slowly, the color started to change. The inside of it started to look like it was almost glowing or something, and gradually, the glow spread until the whole pile of snot was glowing green.

“Whoa!” I said. “That’s awesome!” Finally, a practical use for chemistry besides blowing things up: making stuff glow.

He took the jar off the flame and the stuff stopped glowing and went back to looking like regular snot. “Pretty cool, huh?” he said.

“And that stuff is supposed to dye hair but not skin?”

“Well, not yet, but it’s getting there. I’ll be ready for an actual test tomorrow night. Care to volunteer?”

“I’ll pass, actually,” I said. “When you know you have a working model, we’ll talk, but I won’t be the lab rat.”

“Fair enough.”

I hadn’t really considered getting green hair myself; I sort of worried that if I did, I’d just look like I was trying to keep up with my dad. On the other hand, though, it might be fun to tell people my dad had given me green hair. Maybe I could say it was a form of creative punishment my parents had read about in some parenting magazine.

“Anyway,” I said, “can I get another ride to Sip after dinner tonight, like, at eight?”

“I don’t see why not,” he said. “Maybe I’ll come in myself for once. I wouldn’t mind a good cup of coffee.”

“Um…okay,” I said, trying not to let on that I was terrified. It would be awfully hard for anyone to plot a takeover with their father sitting at the table—unless he thought it was a good idea and wanted to help, which was a distinct possibility. But that could be even worse.

Dinner, to my great relief, was not a food disaster that night—just regular tuna casserole. It wasn’t tuna with Spam casserole, or tuna and liver pâté, or watermelon tuna, just regular tuna casserole, and my parents called each other by their actual names, not Lester and Wanda. The Grilled American food wasn’t really that bad, as far as the food disasters went, but I couldn’t handle another dinner with Lester and Wanda right then.

Ten minutes after the table was cleared, Dad put on his knit cap, and we drove off toward Sip.

“So,” he said, “what’s good at this place?”

“Oh, it’s all pretty good,” I said. “I usually just get the coffee, personally. Sometimes I have a mocha or something.”

“I like a good cup of coffee,” he said. “But I can’t get used to it being expensive. I remember when coffee was a dime.”

“Oh yeah, those were the days,” I said, trying to sound like an old man. “Back in my day coffee hadn’t even been invented yet. We just poured some mud into hot water. And in those days, most of my friends had named like Ugh and Grunt.”

“Oh really?” said my dad, appropriately amused.

“And we didn’t have coffee shops, just caves with better-than-average mud. And we didn’t have cars to drive to those, oh no. We had wagon trains. And these caves didn’t serve sandwiches—we had to eat poor Ugh. But he was an accountant, so no one was too sorry.”

“Okay,” Dad said, even though he was chuckling a bit. “I’m not that old. Your mom and I haven’t even started to talk about moving to Florida yet.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “But I wouldn’t recommend complaining about the cost of coffee in there.”

“Of course not,” he said. “It’s a coffee shop. You expect people to be snotty in those places. I’m not that clueless, you know.”

“And don’t get too attached to it,” I said. “I overheard the owner say they’re closing in six months.”

“Figures,” he grumbled.

All the while, as we drove along, I was plotting a way I could ditch Dad once we got inside. I was pondering it all down Venture Street.

As it turned out, though, I didn’t have to worry. Inside Sip, I saw Anna, Brian, and Edie all sitting in our usual corner, and in an opposite corner, Anna’s dad was sitting and chatting with Trinity.

“Warren!” said my dad.

Anna’s dad smiled. “Hi, Nick,” he said. “Grab a chair!”

My dad walked over to the table and took a seat.

“Hey,” Trinity greeted him.

“Nice blue hair!” said my dad. “Check mine out!”

And he whipped off his knit cap to show her the green Mohawk. She sort of looked like a deer caught in headlights for a second, then started laughing.

“Do you believe it, Warren?” my dad said. “I’m hip!”

“It’s adorable!” said Trinity, running her fingers through it.

Compared to Warren Brandenburg, my dad was probably the least hip person in all of suburbia—and that’s saying something. I slinked away from him, using my good old ninja swiftness, and gravitated toward the table where Brian, Edie, and Anna were sitting. There was no sign of Jenny.

“Your dad came too, huh?” Anna asked. “Mine insisted.” She rolled her eyes a bit.

“I don’t mind if he wants a cup of coffee now and then,” I said. “I just don’t see why he had to pick the day we’re planning a piracy.”

“Anyway,” she said, “since they’re both here, we may only have a minute, so let’s get started. We’ve gathered here tonight, at the last independent coffee shop in Cornersville Trace, to become pirates.”

“Avast!” said Brian. Edie patted him on the head.

“Though our original plan was merely to make a movie contrasting the old downtown with the new, including a scene of us setting up an office in Wackfords to see if anyone even noticed,” Anna went on, “recent events necessitate more action. So the mission is as follows: as soon as we can determine that it’s feasible, we’ll arrange to take over the Wackfords on Cedar Avenue. We’ll decorate it to look like an accounting and midlevel management strategies office and attempt to disrupt coffee sales, inviting people who want a proper cup of coffee to go to Sip.”

“Should we talk a bit about what sort of point we’re supposed to be proving?” I asked.

“The point of the takeover is to get people to go to Sip,” Anna said. “And the point of the movie will be to show that the old downtown is cooler than the new one. Sip is a place where you go for intellectual discussions and stuff like that, whereas Wackfords is a place where you go to set up an accounting office.”

Brain thought this over. “Sounds reasonable enough,” he said. “Plus, it’ll be fun.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Edie. I nodded in agreement.

“All right,” said Anna. She dug in her bag and pulled out a yellowy brown sheet of paper and a permanent marker.

“Let’s put down a charter and mission statement for the crew.”

“Mission statement?” said Edie. “That’s a bunch of crap.”

“All lame offices have mission statements,” said Anna, writing “HMS PIRATE SHIP” at the top of the paper. “And I’ll bet you anything that Wackfords has one. So if we’re starting our own office, we’ll need one, too.”

“What the hell’s a mission statement?” Brian asked.

“It’s a bunch of nonsense that businesses throw together to tell what kind of business they intend to do,” I said. “Most of the time, it’s just a bunch of buzzwords and gobbledygook.”

“Well,” said Edie, “maybe ours can be that mission statements suck!”

“Yes!” I said. “That should be our mission statement. ‘Mission statements suck.’”

Anna shrugged. “All righty,” she said. And she wrote it down in capital letters.

“We don’t need to sign in blood or anything, right?”

“We should!” said Edie, reaching for one of the safety pins on her coat.

Anna, to my great relief, shook her head as she folded up the charter. “That wouldn’t be very sanitary,” she said.

We will probably go down in history as the first pirates ever to be all that concerned with sanitation.

“All right,” said Brian. “So we have a crew, and we have a mission.”

“And I have a camera we can use,” I said.

“Me too,” said Brian.

“All right,” said Edie. “What do we do next?”

“Next up is the mutiny,” said Anna. “If we’re gonna pull off a takeover, we’ll need inside help. We’ll need to get Troy to join the crew.”

“Or at least work with us,” I said.

Edie grinned. “I love it!” she said. “Treachery on the high seas of Cedar Avenue!”

“He will join us or die,” said Brian, a bit over-dramatically.

“So it’s all set, then,” said Anna. “Tomorrow, after school, we’ll meet at the flagpole and set sail for Wackfords to organize a mutiny.”

“I don’t know,” said Edie. “I signed a petition online saying I’d never go there.”

“It doesn’t count if you’re going there to plot to overthrow it,” said Anna. “And you’ll have to go there sooner or later for the takeover. We’ll need to go and recruit Troy to start with, and we’ll need to get a good feel for the whole layout of the place and make a map.”

“Arrr!” said Brian. “An ‘X’ will mark the spot!”

“So tomorrow while we’re there, everyone try to memorize the layout so we can draw up a map of the inside of the store. So we’re all agreed to set sail tomorrow?”

“Agreed,” said Edie.

Anna put her hand out in the middle of the table, and Edie put her hand on top of it. Brian and I put our hands on top of that.

“Then I declare the crew of the HMS Pirate Ship to be officially formed,” Anna said. And we all withdrew our hands.