B0160A5OPY (A) (20 page)

If Perkel was picking on any other kid like this, they’d complain to their parents who would take it up with the principal. But from what I saw of L.J.’s mother and father, he won’t get much help there. His mother looked too timid to say boo to a goose, and his stepfather would probably only tell him to toughen up and stop whining. I keep thinking that I should say something to somebody. I’m worried he’s going to implode. I’d probably only get into trouble again if I tried to tell Perkel to ease up, but perhaps Mrs. Copeman could do something – alert the school counselor, perhaps.

L.J. wouldn’t thank me for interfering, though. Maybe I should speak to him directly.

When Perkel has finished throwing his hissy fit, he walks out of the class, a self-satisfied smile on his face. L.J. lumbers back to his desk and starts shoving his things into his bag. His ears and beefy neck are flaming red.

“You okay?” I ask.

He grunts.

“Look, you could use some help.”

He glares up at me and I’m taken aback by the anger on his face.

“What do you mean by that?”

I review my words, realize they could be taken to mean that I think he needs a shrink. Actually, I think he does – and I could recommend a good one – but from the look on his face, I’d better not suggest it.

“I could help you. With the homework I mean. It’s not fair how he keeps loading you up with extra work.”

He is still scowling at me suspiciously.

“I could do some of it for you – I’ve got the time now that …” I trail off, looking at Luke. His face is half-tilted towards us. Is he listening?

“I’ve got the time,” I finish lamely.

“I don’t need your help. And I don’t need your pity.”

“I don’t pity you.” I do though. I think he’s wounded deeper than I am, and he could really use a friend. But I always seem to say the wrong things.

“Oh, don’t you? Now that pretty boy’s dumped you, you want to hook up with me – is that what you’re telling me? Must be my good looks and awesome personality.”

I’m sure
my
face is flaming now.

“Tell you what,” says L.J., heaving his bag onto his shoulder, “why don’t you come around my place tonight. I don’t need your help with my English, but I could sure do with some help in extra-curricular activities. I can think of many ways for you to spend your time helping
entertain
me. It would be fu-unn.”

He reaches out, trails a finger over my hand and then brushes past me before I can reply. A shudder of revulsion passes through me and I feel something close to fear. I take the pack of wipes out of my pocket, extract one and rub at my hand with it, trying to erase the feel of L.J. I look up to find Luke staring at me, quizzically.

“What?” I demand.

“Don’t you think you’ve got enough emotional baggage to be carrying around without trying to pick up L.J.’s, too? Jeez, Sloane! Haven’t you got enough pain and drama to deal with, without trying to help someone who doesn’t want it?”

“I guess,” is all I can find to say.

“Stay away from that guy. He’s … Just back off, okay?”

“Okay,” I say. “Luke?”

“Yeah?” He stops on his way out.

“Are you … doing okay?”

He shrugs, tilts his head in a way that could mean anything. “They told me – at the shelter – about what you did. Thanks.”

It’s my turn to shrug.

“Congrats on your new record,” I say, desperate to prolong the conversation. “A full two seconds faster – that’s impressive.”

There’s an awkward silence as we both look at each other. Heavy things hang in the air between us, blocking our way to each other.

“Luke –”

“Sloane –”

We both start to speak at the same moment. I wave a hand to indicate that he should go first. My breath is stuck in my throat. I can’t breathe it in until I hear what he says. And I can’t exhale.

“Sloane, I wanted to tell you … I mean, I want you to know that I –”

“There you are!” Juliet appears at the doorway, wraps her painted fingernails tightly around Luke’s arm and drags him out.

That you what? What do you want me to know!
The words scream in my head. I actually take a few steps towards the door to go after him, to ask him to finish what he started saying but then I hear, from down the hallway, the sound of her laughter. And his.

36

Most likely to … 

I’m sitting in Art class a week later squeezing thick, wet clay and trying to force it around the wire head of my horse statue armature when Mr. Como appears at the door of the classroom. The blob of clay falls off the wire frame for the umpteenth time and I curse under my breath. I’m going to wind up submitting a little wire horsey, rather than a fabulous sculpture of same, if I can’t figure out how this works. Sienna is much further along with her work. Perhaps I can pass mine off as post-modern deconstructed art – it seems to make about as much sense as some of the examples Miss Ling has shown us.

It doesn’t help my concentration that half the class is buzzing with some juicy new gossip – they’re bent over their phones, exclaiming and laughing. As usual, Miss Ling told us what she expects us to do, without showing us how to do it. She has spent the lesson ignoring the class while standing at the window chain-smoking cigarettes – in violation of school regulations and my respiratory health – and blowing the smoke outside. She starts and flicks the cigarette away when Como calls her name from the doorway.

“Excuse me for interrupting, but I need to speak to Sienna Southey at once,” he says. He frowns and runs a finger under the collar of his shirt.

Sienna and I look at each other. She shrugs.

“I hope it’s nothing bad,” I say with another glance at Como, but he looks more angry than worried.

“I need to clean my hands.” Sienna holds up hands covered in red clay.

“Well, be quick about it, young lady, and get yourself to my office straight away.”

Sienna washes the clay off her hands at the sink in the corner of the classroom, then hurries out in the direction of the admin block. I keep expecting her to come back, and I get more and more concerned when she doesn’t. I worry that something might have happened to a member of her family. I’m on my way to the cafeteria at lunch break before I see her again, rushing toward me in the crowded hall. Whatever the kids in art class were checking out on their phones, it’s gone viral throughout the school. Everywhere knots of students are buzzing with excitement and laughter as they stare down at the little screens.

“Are you okay?” I ask, handing over her bag which I brought with me from Art class. “What was it? What did he want?”

Sienna looks flustered and upset.

“He wanted to chew me out!”

“What for?”

“Someone hacked into the Underground website and posted a bunch of nasty crap on there, and he thought it was me. He kept bawling me out – telling me how much I’d hurt people – and wouldn’t give me a chance to explain.”

“What do you mean hacked the site? What happened?”

“Someone got into my site, as an administrator or something, and posted a list, a really mean one – and it wasn’t me! And Como’s fuming because they also apparently hacked into the school’s system and got information from private records. It took me ages to convince him that I didn’t do it, and then I had to shut down the whole site before he would let me go.

“That’s obviously what everyone’s been looking at all morning,” I say as we walk to the cafeteria. “What was on it?”

“It was one of those lists – ‘Most Likely To’. You know, the student most likely to succeed, or fail, or go postal or get pregnant before twenty, that sort of thing, next to photographs of the person. And some of it is really nasty.”

“Am I listed in it?” I ask, although of course I know the answer.

“… Yeah.”

“What was written about me?”

“You don’t want to know,” says Sienna.

But I do want to know and I can find out for myself. Whoever hacked the site and posted the most-likely list must have anticipated that the site would be shut down, because they’ve printed off a bunch of hard copies of the list pages and left them lying on top of the steel tables in the cafeteria. Everyone descends on them and starts reading. I grab one too. I see at once that I’ve made the front page.

Sloane Munster: most likely to be Miss World, Tatooine. Also most likely to get plastic surgery.

“What the heck is Tatooine?” I ask Sienna.

“It’s a planet in Star Wars, the one with all the mutants where Jabba the Hut lives.”

“Nice,” I say. “Kind.”

“I’m in there, too,” says Sienna pointing to an entry at the bottom of the same page.

Next to her name and picture, it says,
Most likely to: become a chimney sweep, because she’s so small she can fit into chimneys and she comes with a built-in brush.

“A built-in brush?” I ask, puzzled.

“They mean my hair,” she says, pointing unconcernedly at the mop of curls which form a springy halo around her head.

She doesn’t seem bothered by her entry and, to my surprise, I’m not much upset by mine either. I read through the list.

Some of it is harmless and funny, I guess. Keith, the anime cartoon artist, has been listed as
most likely to become a vampire.
Miss Ling is
most likely to win an appreciation award from the tobacco industry and least likely to win Teacher of the Year award.
But some of it, most of it, is unkind and cruel. Magda, the large girl from my Gym class, has an entry which reads:
most likely to work at MacDonald’s flipping burgers and get fired for eating too many of them, before being abducted by aliens – as a food source.
Jayster Jane is:
most likely to be forgotten … wait, who were we talking about?

The teachers haven’t been spared either. Perkel is listed as being most likely to come out of the closet and be dismissed for dating one of his (male) students, Coach Quinn to join Alcoholics Anonymous (was there something in his records about a drinking problem, I wonder?), and Mrs. Copeman to win the world’s worst-dresser award with a special mention of her “
ugly-ass shoes
”.

“Do they know who did it?” I ask.

“No, not yet, but
I’ve
got a fair idea,” says Sienna.

“Who?”

“I think maybe it’s Tyrone.”

“Tyrone Carter? Why would he do this?”

“He’s a real techie. I’ll bet he’s up to hacking into websites and school admin systems. He may have done it to impress Juliet. You know how she always wants to know private stuff about people. And check it out – she’s the only one who got something really nice written about her.”

I run my fingers down the columns of names, looking for Juliet’s entry, while Sienna speaks. “Maybe she asked him to do it, or maybe he was trying to get her attention.”

“
Juliet Capstan
,” I read, “
most likely to succeed, be prom queen, and marry a millionaire IT entrepreneur.
”

“And look what’s written about Tyrone himself,” Sienna says.

“
Most likely to become a self-made millionaire IT entrepreneur, and marry a beautiful prom queen,
” I read aloud. “Bit of a give-away that.”

It turns out that Sienna’s suspicions are correct. A minute later, Tyrone comes into the cafeteria smiling from ear to ear. A table of his friends applauds and Tyrone gives a little bow of acknowledgement. It looks like every student in the cafeteria has a copy of the list and is reading it avidly, pointing and laughing at the entries.

“For a genius, he’s not too smart. He’s going to be in real trouble when they put two and two together,” I say. “You think he’d try to cover his tracks.”

“Everyone wants some credit and acknowledgement. Everyone wants to be remembered,” says the Pixie, wisely.

“What’s he written about Luke?”

I’m guessing Tyrone is no fan of his rival in the Juliet stakes, and I’m right. The entry for Luke Naughton reads: “
Most likely to flub national swim trials, go prematurely bald, and have his abs turn to flab
.”

It’s so ridiculous that I laugh while I look around the cafeteria for Luke. He is in his usual spot. He’s also laughing, and our gazes meet for a brief moment as he crumples the paper and tosses it aside dismissively. Juliet is glowing next to him – she obviously likes the prediction about her future.

Someone who isn’t laughing or glowing – unless it’s with rage – is L.J. Wearing his usual red plaid shirt and big black boots, he stands in the center of the cafeteria – his face as white as his ears are red – with the paper gripped in his shaking hand. I quickly scan through the entries until I find his.

“Uh-oh,” I say.

“What’s it say?” asks Sienna.

“Lotus Jebediah –”

“Lotus?
Jebediah
?”

I nod. “That must be his real name.”

“No wonder he would never say. I’ve never seen anyone who looks less like a Lotus. Or a Jebediah.” Sienna, along with half the cafeteria, is staring at L.J.

“His mother looked a little out-there. Maybe she named him in a haze of hope.”

“A haze of something, all right. Probably dope.”

L.J.’s full entry reads: “
Lotus Jebediah: Least likely to leave a mark, except on his underpants. Also least likely to get into the Perkelator’s PANTS (Perkel Appreciation ‘n Thanks Society).
”

“Hey, Lotus Jebediah?” a few people call out, laughing.

I expect L.J. to shout at the hecklers, or perhaps to deck one of them, but he stays silent – rotating on the spot staring at the laughing faces around him. They’re not all laughing at L.J., but I guess it feels that way to him. I don’t laugh. For one thing, I don’t think it’s funny. For another, I’m really concerned. L.J. regularly annoys me, but I do care about him and I don’t want him to harm himself. I’m considering going over to him and saying something about how everybody – almost – has had bad things said about them, how this will all blow over in a day or two, how he shouldn’t let it get to him, but I remember how my previous efforts to help him have backfired. I’m still undecided about whether I should approach him when L.J. lumbers out of the room and I lose the chance.