The Project (2 page)

Kerr’s office was dominated by a huge, ugly wooden
desk in the center of the room. The corners of the desk were carved knobs that looked like clenched fists, and the panel in the front was vaguely skull-like in design. The desk was in the middle of a bright circle of light created by four small ceiling-mounted spotlights. Two of the lights shone in Luke’s eyes, as if he were a spy under interrogation.
Ve haf vays of making you talk!
he thought.

Kerr was examining a book—
the book
, Luke saw and cringed a little. It had been their English assignment, but after seven attempts, he had given up trying to read it. The remains of the duct tape were still attached to the bottom and spine of the book, covering part of the title so that it said
The Last of the Mo
. Kerr leaned forward and slammed the book down right in front of them, one corner jutting out over the edge of the desk, pointing right at Luke. He and Tommy both stared at it.

Kerr glowered at them from under thick orange eyebrows. “Sit,” he said.

They sat.

Luke reached out and straightened the book so that it lined up with the edge of the desk. Kerr looked him in the eye, and Luke quickly glanced away.

“Was it worth it?” Kerr asked.

“Sir?” Tommy asked with an expression of utter innocence.

“Was it worth it?” Kerr repeated.

Luke began, “I’m not sure what—”

“Tell me why I shouldn’t call your parents right now. Tell me why I shouldn’t call the police.”

Luke drew in his breath sharply and caught Ms. Sheck’s eyes.

“I don’t think there’s any need for the police,” she said.

Mr. Kerr shot a glance at Ms. Sheck as if she had no right to interfere, but the edges of her mouth curled up into a smile, and even he couldn’t bring himself to stay angry with her.

His eyes fastened themselves firmly back on Luke. “I don’t know what they let you get away with in New Zealand,” Kerr continued, “but in America we have certain standards of behavior that are expected of our students.”

Luke considered telling him that he had once been suspended from a school in New Zealand for a “certain standard of behavior” but decided that it wasn’t quite the appropriate moment.

Kerr continued. “You have caused this school a lot of embarrassment. You could have been killed.”

It wasn’t clear which of those two he considered worse.

Kerr started to go on, in the way that vice principals do. Some words filtered through, such as
reckless
,
impulsive
, and
bad influence
, but the rest of it seemed just to wash over Luke as if Kerr were speaking a foreign language. He kept nodding his head, though, and looking sorry.

It had been a simple enough prank, involving the statue of the school founder, a toilet seat, a roll of toilet paper, a roll of duct tape, and a copy of
The Last of the Mohicans
by James Fenimore Cooper.

Isherwood High was a well-regarded private school founded by a Civil War hero named Jacob Isherwood. A fancy, life-size statue of Isherwood astride his horse sat on
a high pedestal out in front of the school. Isherwood was striking an action pose, with one hand on the reins, his rear end raised off the seat, his other hand trailing out behind him as the horse galloped into the distance.

It was Tommy who one day said, “It looks like he’s just wiped his ass.” But it was Luke who thought of the prank (during a particularly boring history lesson) and convinced Tommy to do it.

They had set out late the previous night and met up at school. By the time they had finished, a copy of
The Last of the Mohicans
was perched in Isherwood’s forward hand, as if he were reading it. His rear hand, close to his butt, held a roll of toilet paper, and a toilet seat had been attached to the saddle. The proud statue of the school’s founder had been turned into a toilet, and the hero of the Civil War was now reading a book on the can as he galloped into infinity.

They were laughing and climbing down from the statue pedestal when the security patrol drove onto the school grounds. They froze, hoping not to be noticed.

That was when the squirrel, drunk on acorn juice—or maybe it was just the stupidest squirrel in the world—had tripped over its own feet in a nearby tree. It landed on Luke’s back, and he leaped off the pedestal with a yell, catching the end of the toilet paper roll in his mouth on the way down.

It unrolled as he fell, twisting out behind him like a parade-day streamer.

Luke hit the ground and froze, with a mouthful of toilet paper and a terrified squirrel clinging to his back. At that point, as his dad would say, the
shoop shoop
really hit the fan.

The next morning, a hundred cell phone cameras snapped the statue, toilet paper and all. By lunchtime it was all over Facebook.

But they would have got away with it, if not for that drunken squirrel.

A fleck of foamy spittle appeared at the corner of Kerr’s mouth, and Luke watched it bubble and bounce around with each word.

“We had no choice, sir,” Tommy said with an air of wounded dignity when Kerr stopped for breath.

“No choice?” Kerr raised an eyebrow. It looked like a furry orange centipede had just crawled up his forehead.

“No choice,” Luke affirmed.

“It’s our religion, sir,” Tommy said.

Another centipede joined the first. “Your religion.”

“Yes, sir.” Tommy nodded. “We belong to the Seekers of the Wandering Goat.”

Luke nodded with him. “The Wandering Goat.”

“You, be quiet.” Kerr eyeballed Luke for a second, then turned to Tommy. “Do you boys seriously think you can get away with a prank like this by claiming to be followers of some phony religion?”

“Freedom of religion, sir,” Tommy said. “Under the First Amendment, we cannot be persecuted for our religious practices.”

“The Seekers of the Wandering Goat …” Kerr picked up a file from his desk and leafed through it. “The last time you used this excuse, you were the ‘Keepers’ of the Wandering Goat. Explain that.” He glared at Tommy as if to say,
Gotcha!

Tommy froze and started going a slightly off shade of white.

Luke jumped in. “The goat escaped.”

“It escaped.”

“The goat,” Tommy agreed.

“Yes, now we’re the Seekers of the Wandering Goat,” Luke said.

“I guess we weren’t very good keepers,” Tommy said.

“So where is this goat now?” Kerr asked with a sideways glance at Ms. Sheck, who was clearly trying not to laugh. She pulled her face back into line with an effort.

“If we knew that, sir, we’d be the Keepers of the Wandering Goat again,” Tommy said.

“Or maybe the Finders of the Wandering Goat. We haven’t decided yet,” Luke added.

Kerr picked up the book again. “It seems to me that you went to a lot of trouble just to avoid doing your book project.”

“Reading sucks,” Luke said without thinking.

“Luke!” Ms. Sheck said.

“I don’t think we should be forced to read a book that we don’t like, sir,” Tommy said. “And this is the most boring book in the world.”

“Hey, that’s just not true.” Ms. Sheck took a step forward, raising her hands as if defending herself. “It’s an American classic!”

“They could use it to cure insomnia,” Luke said.

“And in hospitals instead of anesthetic,” Tommy said.

“It starts a little slow, but it turns into one of the greatest adventures of all time,” Ms. Sheck protested.

Kerr picked at a fragment of duct tape on the spine of
the book. “I don’t care whether you think it’s boring or not. There is just over a week till summer vacation. So this is now your summer project. You have to read it and write a report on it, due to me the first day of school next fall.”

“It’s a human rights issue,” Tommy said.

“Human rights?” Kerr almost sighed.

“It’s our right not to die of boredom,” Tommy said.

“It really is the most boring book in the world,” Luke said, still staring at the book in question, duct tape and all.

“Yes, sir,” Tommy said.

“Okay. Let’s say I accept that,” Kerr said.

Luke risked a quick glance at Tommy, whose mouth had dropped open. This was too easy. Even Ms. Sheck was looking at Kerr with narrowed, confused eyes.

Kerr sprang the trap. “Now all you have to do is prove that it
is
the most boring book in the world.”

There was a long pause. Tommy and Luke looked at each other. Kerr smiled triumphantly from behind the desk.

“How exactly would we do that, sir?” Luke asked.

“That’s up to you. You prove it, and I’ll let you choose another book to read for your project. And I’ll accept your crazy Keepers of the—”

“Seekers,” Tommy interrupted.

“Seekers of the Wandering Goat story. I’ll give you till Tuesday. But if you can’t, then I will see to it that you spend your summer break reading the book, and I’m going to come down on you like a ton of bricks for the statue thing.”

“Sir, I think we need to define the terms of the agreement,” Tommy said.

“I bet if you went on Google and looked up ‘the most boring book in the world,’ you would find hundreds of books,” Ms. Sheck said. “And this one wouldn’t even make the list.”

“There you go,” Kerr said. “If you can find it on an official list of the most boring books in the world, I’ll accept that.”

“Anywhere on the list?” Luke asked.

“Top ten,” Kerr said.

“Sweet as,” Luke said.

“Thank you, sir,” Tommy said.

“I don’t know why you’re thanking me. If I were—”

There was a sudden, urgent rap on the door and then it flung open. The school secretary, Mrs. Seddon, stuck her head through the door.

“Yes, Jennifer?” Kerr asked, rather brusquely.

“I’m sorry to bother you, sir,” she said. “It’s the police on the phone.”

“Yes?” Mr. Kerr said, those two orange centipedes scurrying back up his forehead.

Luke felt his back break out in a cold sweat. Had the police somehow been involved already?

But he needn’t have worried.

“It’s the river,” Mrs. Seddon said.

I
n the months leading up to June in northeastern Iowa, it rained.

And rained.

And rained.

Thunderstorms crashed, colliding with the earth in massive explosions of light and sound and water. Lots of water.

Combined with the thaw from a heavy winter snowfall, it was too much for the saturated soil to cope with. The water began to flow to the rivers.

River levels rose, and rose some more. The Upper Iowa River, the Turkey and Maquoketa Rivers, and catchments of the Wapsipinicon and Iowa Rivers, including the Cedar, Skunk, and Des Moines Rivers.

The residents of those parts, remembering the great floods of ’08 and being the sort of folk who took matters into their own hands, got to preparing.

As Luke’s dad would tell them many times in the months
afterward,
When the shoop shoop starts flowin’, folks get shovelin’
.

And in June in Iowa City, the shoop shoop really started flowing.

So folks got shovelin’.

T
he sun was still high in the sky when Luke and Tommy biked over to the river straight after school.

Luke’s bike was a loaner from the Iowa City Bike Library. It was old and sturdy but nothing like Tommy’s high-tech, carbon-fiber, state-of-the-art, dream-machine bicycle with its computerized gear-changing system and built-in GPS. However, as cool as the bike was, Tommy wasn’t happy with it.

At fifteen, they both felt they were too old to be getting around on a bicycle. At least Tommy’s parents were going to buy him a motorcycle when he turned sixteen, and Tommy couldn’t wait. Luke was sure that whatever motorcycle he got, it would have built-in machine guns, ejector seats, and probably a button that transformed it into a gyrocopter once Tommy was done with it.

Luke had ridden plenty of motorcycles on the farm back home but thought it would be a few years before he
(or his parents) could afford one in America.

A trio of ducks was paddling aimlessly over by the far bank, and a light puff of breeze sucked some of the heat out of the afternoon.
Not a bad day
, Luke thought. A day for boating, having a picnic, or playing footy in the riverside park.

Except the riverbank looked like a construction site.

To the left and right, as far as Luke could see, there were people. Hundreds of people, all bustling around with shovels and sacks full of sand. Small front-end loaders were shifting pallets of sandbags toward the beginnings of a wall along the riverbank that would hopefully hold back the floodwaters.

A horn honked behind them as they approached, so they hopped off their bikes and moved to one side to let a truck pass. A fine drift of brown powdery grit was falling from beneath the rear tailgate. The truck stopped and dumped a load of sand in the middle of the street, near a pile of sacks that were bound together with wire.

An old guy with a Nike shirt, Converse sneakers, and a baseball cap on backward was directing the truck with hand signals.
All it would take are a few gold chains and he could be the world’s oldest rapper
, Luke thought.

The man noticed them arrive and walked over. Luke had seen him around the campus and the city center before and thought he was probably a professor of some kind. He seemed to be in charge, at least at this bend in the river.

“Volunteers?” the old guy asked.

Tommy nodded a little reluctantly. Physical labor wasn’t his strong point.

Luke said, “What can we do?”

“Fill sandbags,” the man said. “We could use some help.”

“No worries,” Luke said. “Where do we start?”

The man pointed at a pile of red-handled shovels lying near the sand heap. “There are work gloves in the cardboard box.”

Luke looked at Tommy. “Let’s give it a good kick in the guts and see if it moos,” he said.

“Kick what? Where?” Tommy shook his head.

Luke grinned.

Tommy locked his bike and Luke’s to a post using a high-tech chain that opened with his thumbprint, and they each grabbed a pair of gloves from the box.