The Worst Class Trip Ever (18 page)

The fork totally misses the fake Brevalov.

It also, fortunately, totally misses the lunging Secret Service agents, who are right behind the fake Brevalov.

What the throwing fork hits, somehow, is: the snake.

You can also see this in slow motion on the video. It was later called, by Gadakistani experts, the greatest Gadakistani throwing fork throw ever thrown, although it was one hundred percent pure
luck. In the video, you can see the deadly Gadakistan mountain snake coming out of the box with its mouth wide open, ready to strike me or the president with these long, sharp, mean-looking fangs.
Then you see the fork coming from the other direction, spinning in the air but miraculously getting into exactly the right position so that one of the prongs goes right into the snake’s open
mouth, then comes out the back of the snake’s head, and just like that the deadliest snake in the world got turned into a harmless snake kebab.

I didn’t see any of that happen in real time. By the time that fork hit the snake I had two Secret Service agents who could probably be NFL linebackers landing on top of me and—I
don’t blame them a bit; they were trained to do this, and it was the absolute correct thing to do, considering what the situation looked like—knocking me unconscious with some kind of
martial-arts blow to my head.

And that’s the last thing I remember.

I
woke up in a bed in some kind of military hospital. I still don’t know exactly where it was. I do know there were guards at the door and a
lot of people in uniforms around.

After I woke up two doctors came in and spent a long time checking me out and giving me tests to see if I had a concussion. I felt okay and kept trying to ask them questions, like could I talk
to my parents, and was I in really bad trouble, and what was going to happen to me, stuff like that. But they wouldn’t tell me anything.

After they left a soldier brought me breakfast, which I figured meant I had been there overnight. I was starving and ate the whole breakfast in maybe thirty seconds. After that two people, a man
and a woman, both wearing business clothes, came in and told me they were with the FBI, and they wanted to ask me “some questions.”

It turned out that “some” meant “about 263 million.” They, wanted to know everything about how I ended up decking the president, starting basically with my birth. They
were especially interested in everything I could tell them about Woltar and Lemi—how I met them, everything they did and said, why I was inside their dragon kite. They asked what I knew about
the fake Brevalov. They wanted to know all about the throwing fork, and they had many,
many
questions about the laser jammer. They asked me the same questions over and over again, changing
them just a little. Every now and then they would ask me if I was okay, and I’d say yes I was okay, but I wanted to talk to my parents. But they’d just go right back to asking me more
questions.

After a couple of hours they left, and a soldier brought me lunch. When I finished eating two new guys came in, both wearing suits. They didn’t tell me who they were with, and they
didn’t answer any of my questions; they just asked me more questions, and more questions, and then more questions. By that point I was feeling like, okay, put me in jail or shoot me or
whatever you’re going to do, just
please stop asking me questions
.

Finally they left, and the doctors came back to check on me. They didn’t tell me much, but it seemed like they had decided that I was basically fine.

Then they left, and I was finally alone. There was no clock, and I didn’t have my phone, so I don’t know how long I was alone, but it felt like hours. I tried to sleep, but I was too
nervous, worrying about what was going on out there in the world, and what was going to happen to me.

Then the door opened. I was expecting that it would be either a soldier with dinner, or the doctors again, or, worst case, people in suits coming to ask me more questions and not tell me
anything.

But it was none of those people.

It was the president of the United States.

With his arm in a sling.

“Hey, Wyatt,” he said. “Thanks for saving me, but next time could you try to land on the bad guy?”

S
o here’s what had happened while I was in the hospital:

The flying dragon attack and the injury to the president immediately became the top news story in the world. Every television station showed the video in a loop pretty much nonstop.

The news media went nuts covering the story, with experts providing hour after hour of informed speculation, pretty much all of which was wrong. At first everybody focused on the flying dragon,
which a lot of experts speculated was part of an assassination plot aimed at either the president or Brevalov, or both. There was no mention in any of the early reports about the deadly Gadakistan
mountain snake.

I immediately became the most famous eighth-grader on the planet Earth, except for maybe Justin Bieber when he was thirteen. The only thing the FBI was saying about me was that I had been taken
to an undisclosed location for questioning. There was a lot of expert speculation about how I might have been recruited to be a terrorist. There was also a lot of speculation about the identity of
the man who fell from the dragon and landed on the Secret Service agent. The FBI said only that he also been taken to an undisclosed location for questioning.

In Miami, a giant crowd of news media people surrounded my house and pestered my parents for a statement about how their son came to be mixed up with what appeared to be a terrorist
assassination plot. Finally my dad came to the door and told them that he and my mom didn’t know anything except what they saw on television, and they were trying to make arrangements to fly
to Washington, and they would appreciate it if the media would leave them alone. But the media kept ringing the doorbell and asking for statements, until finally my mom—I believe I have
mentioned that she is Cuban—opened the door and broke my dad’s golf umbrella in two by whacking it on the head of a Channel Seven TV reporter. This made international news, but also
backed them off for a while.

While all this media speculating was going on, the FBI was conducting a really intense investigation, with help from the Secret Service, the CIA, and the Washington, D.C., police. They quickly
picked up Suzana, Victor, Cameron, Matt, Woltar, and Lemi, who were identified by witnesses at the kite festival as having been involved in launching the dragon. They detained everybody—kids,
teachers, and chaperones—who was part of the Culver class trip. They also picked up Mr. Barto, who had finally managed to talk the TSA into releasing him from custody at the Washington
airport, only to be taken back into custody by four FBI agents and whisked off to an undisclosed location.

They questioned everybody, but the important people were Woltar and Lemi. They told the FBI about the fake Brevalov with the non-notched right ear, and they were convincing enough that the FBI
decided to check it out. That was a good thing, because the fake Brevalov and his fake interpreter were already headed to Dulles International to get a flight out of the country. The FBI caught
them at the airport. They refused to talk, but by then it was pretty clear that they were not who they claimed they were.

Meanwhile FBI crime-scene investigators were going over the site of the dragon crash, and of course they found the corpse of the deadly Gadakistan mountain snake. Then they looked at a bunch of
video in slow motion and saw how the fake Brevalov tried to dump the snake on the president just before I threw the throwing fork.

So it took a while, but they finally figured everything out and realized that Woltar, Lemi, and the rest of us were telling the truth. They reported everything to the president, who decided he
needed to go on television and address the nation, to clear up all the rumors and assure America that everything was okay.

But first he wanted to thank me.

Which is how I ended up having a ten-minute conversation with the president, just the two of us. I don’t remember that much of it; I was mainly happy I wasn’t going to jail. The
president said he would take me and my family and the whole Culver class on a personal tour of the White House after my parents got to Washington. I said a tour sounded great, assuming my mom
didn’t kill me first. He laughed. Because he didn’t know my mom.

A
whole lot of stuff happened after that. In fact, a lot of stuff is still happening. I’ll summarize the highlights:

• My mom did not kill me. I think she had been considering it, but a lot of people were telling her she must be very proud of me for saving the president, so she finally
  decided to go ahead and not kill me, although she told me that if I ever again did anything as stupid as attacking the White House in a kite, she definitely would.
  
• Woltar and Lemi got into trouble for violating a bunch of laws, including buying the stolen laser jammer. But as many people pointed out, they had to do these things because
  nobody believed them when they tried to tell the U.S. government about the assassination plot. The truth is, they were the real heroes, and in the end they were not charged with anything.
  
• On the other hand, the fake Brevalov and his fake interpreter were charged with a bunch of things. They haven’t been tried yet, but they definitely will not be going
  back to Gadakistan any time soon.
  
• Speaking of Gadakistan: when people there found out that the real Brevalov had been lying about being friends with the United States, he got chased out of office by an angry
  mob. He wound up hiding in the mountains, and just recently there was a rumor that he died after he got bit by a snake. Guess what kind.
  
• The taxi driver turned out to be a guy from Nigeria named Ogochukwoo “Ogo” Adebayo. He was questioned at length by FBI agents, who ultimately decided that he had
  not done anything illegal except fall on a Secret Service agent, which was not really his fault. You will probably not be surprised to hear that when they told him he could go free, he asked them
  where I was, because
  he still wanted his money
  . I’m glad to report that he finally got it, from my dad, who added a twenty-dollar tip, which didn’t seem like a lot to me after
  everything Ogo had been through. But Ogo was more than satisfied. He just wanted his money.
  
• Miss Rector and Mr. Barto were not thrilled when they found out all the stuff that Suzana, Matt, Cameron, Victor, and I did while we were supposed to be under their
  supervision. Mr. Barto was especially upset about us getting him busted by the TSA for the gun-shaped cigarette lighter. There was some talk of discipline, maybe even suspension. But in the end the
  school authorities decided that it wouldn’t look right, punishing what the
  Miami Herald
  , in a front-page story, called “The Kids Who Saved The President.” It helped that
  the president made good on his promise to host the whole class trip on a special tour of the White House, which was pretty cool except for the part where my mom decided to give the president, in
  the Oval Office, a lecture on all the things—she had an actual list, which she pulled out of her purse—that he was doing wrong. He took it pretty well and even joked that maybe he
  should appoint my mom to his cabinet. My dad and I gave each other a look that said
  Don’t give her any ideas
  .