Captain Nobody (12 page)

Although this guy had just beaned me with a ball and his cousin had supposedly knocked out my brother, I couldn't help but gasp, “Man! Your cousin is one awesome defensive end! He played against my brother's team on Frid—”

“Yeah. Friday,” Ricky Ratner said bitterly. “And you know what's been happenin' ever since?”

I gulped. “I've heard.”

He put his face right up to mine. “What you didn't hear is that my cousin Reggie had nothing to do with punchin' out your brother's lights.”

“I never said he did.”

“But everybody else at Fillmore High School thinks he did
.
So, here's what I want you to do,” Ricky said, poking my chest with a thick finger. “I want you to call off your brother's friends and all those stupid football players who keep hasslin' my cousin, because if you don't . . .”

From behind him, Cecil shouted, “Yo!”

Ricky stop jabbing me and turned to face Cecil.

“Yeah, you.” Cecil tried to sound tough. “Can I help you?”

Cecil and JJ stood side by side, tiny and tall. Ricky looked them over and cackled. “Don't make me laugh.”

“He just did,” JJ said.

Ricky sneered. “Just did
what
?”

“Made you laugh,” JJ explained. “See, you said, ‘Don't make me laugh,' but by that time, you were already laughing, so—”

“How 'bout you shut up?” Ricky barked.

“Hey!” Cecil snapped. “If you got a problem with Captain Nobody, you got a problem with us.”

“Oh, I'm scared now!” Ricky scoffed. “I got a problem with
you
?”

Cecil started to respond when, from behind him, came a new voice.

“And us.”

We looked up. Behind Cecil and JJ, Basher and Evan McGee and all the rest of the fourth-grade boys—my classmates!
—
were lined up with
their
arms crossed the way the seventh-graders' were. And even though my classmates were younger and smaller, there were a lot more of them. Together they somehow managed to appear threatening.

Cecil looked to me and raised a single eyebrow, as if to say, “How cool is this?”

Everything was suddenly quiet. All over the school yard, kids from other grades had stopped playing and were watching the showdown. Then—all the way across the field—I saw Mr. Toomey step out of the school building, look in our direction, and fold
his
arms.

Ricky Ratner saw him, too. In the next moment, he seemed to deflate.

“Remember what I said,” he hissed at me. “You tell your brother's friends to back off my cousin. Or else.”

After a final poke, he turned and blended back into his crowd. Within a split second, the wall of my fourth-grade classmates had dissolved and life on the playground had returned to normal.

I looked at JJ and Cecil and exhaled.

“What was that?” I asked, baffled.

“It's happening just like we said it would,” JJ smiled broadly.

“
What's
happening?”

Cecil threw his arms open wide. “It's the power of Captain Nobody,” he crowed. “We're finally getting
noticed
!”

After school, I carefully scoped out the school yard, worried that Ricky Ratner and the rest of the seventh grade would be lying in wait for me. I didn't see any signs of danger, but just to be sure, I slipped out through the faculty parking lot and headed home. I guess my nerves were still a little raw from my earlier confrontation, or else I wouldn't have jumped about two feet off the pavement when, from out of my backpack, I heard:
“Captain Nobody? It's JJ! Do you read me? Over!”

“Now what?” I groaned to myself.

“Captain Nobody, I need your help!”
JJ yelled.
“Please come in. Or answer. Or whatever you're supposed to say. Over.”
After a pause, she continued.
“I'm serious. Captain Nobody, I wouldn't be calling if this wasn't really, really important, and since this is the first time I'm asking for anyth—”

I couldn't stand it! I ripped the walkie-talkie from my backpack and hit the button. “Captain Nobody speaking! Over.”

“Actually, JJ,” I said, “I'm supposed to go right home today. Sorry. Over.”

“But you don't understand.”
JJ was whining now.
“The most horrible thing has happened, and, oh, my god. . . . Nooooo!”
JJ suddenly screamed.

I gasped as my walkie-talkie went dead. I shook it and punched the buttons, yelling, “JJ! JJ? Do you read me? Come in, JJ! Over,” but there was no longer any signal.

I had no choice. I sprinted off toward Sullivan's Jewelry Store, terrified of what I would find when I got there.

I zigzagged through backyards and alleys to get to Duncan Street as fast as my silver sneakers would carry me. There I found JJ standing at the curb in front of Sullivan's Jewelry Store, her face buried in her hands.

“JJ!” I panted as I raced to her side. “What's wrong?”

“Oh, I don't even know where to start,” she moaned.

“Start at the beginning,” I suggested, trying to sound calm in the middle of what was surely a ghastly tragedy.

She shook back her hair and cleared her throat. “Okay. It all began with that.” She pointed to Sullivan's front window, where rows of sparkling rings and racks of colorful necklaces were on display.

“What am I looking at?”

“The sign!” she wailed. “That horrible, handwritten sign.”

It read:

“That's not how you spell ‘karat,'” I said automatically.

“Exactly!” JJ practically shrieked through clenched teeth. “And don't even get me started about the one over there.”

She gestured to another card:

“Ouch,” I winced.

“Right?” JJ shouted. “I can't tell you how many times I've gone in there and tried to talk to Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan, but do they listen? Do they correct these crimes against the language? No! They only say, ‘Thank you and good-bye, little girl.'”

I was starting to get annoyed. “And you're upset because of a few spelling mista—”

“Oh, if only that were all!” she cut me off. “Even as I stood here, talking to you on Cecil's walkie-talkie, look what Mr. Sullivan just slipped in, not five minutes ago!”

A piece of white cardboard leaning against the opposite display window proclaimed

“So?” I asked in disbelief. “He misplaced an apostrophe, and you screamed?”

“Oh, tell me you're not horrified!” JJ exploded.

“I'm not,” I shrugged.

“But it's so wrong! If I have to pass by one more day and see these . . . these
massacres
of grammar and spelling, I'm going to have to find another way to walk to school.”

I was speechless until JJ finally asked, “So will you talk to them?”

“Me?” I cried. “Why me?”

JJ threw her arms up. “You're Captain Nobody! ‘Defender of the little guy, champion of the downtrodden. ' Remember?”

“Why would they even listen to me, JJ?”

“Because,” she sighed. “People notice you.”

At that moment, JJ—who usually comes off as being so smart and confident—suddenly seemed so . . . not those things. It's funny how much clearer the world looks from behind a mask.

“Hold my book bag,” I said.

A door chime announced my entrance into the store. The square shop was bordered by glass counters, and four or five more display cases stood around in the middle of the floor. I had been there only once, years before, when Dad had a watchband replaced, but it didn't look as if anything had changed. The counters were still cluttered with mirrors and spinning racks of gold chains and silver bangles. Music played softly from speakers in the ceiling.

At the far end of one aisle, Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan—gray-haired and proper—stood side by side behind a counter, waiting on the only customer in the store. They looked up when I entered, and their mouths fell open. I guess they didn't get many masked shoppers wearing red sweatpants and silver shoes. The customer, however, peered at me over his sunglasses, and he didn't even blink. He was unshaven, and he wore a zip-up sweatshirt and a baseball cap pulled low over his face.

Once Mr. Sullivan got over the initial shock, he asked, in a thick Irish accent, “And how can I be helpin' you, little . . . person?”

“I . . . I . . . I can wait,” I stammered. “Or better yet, I'll come back when you're not so busy.”

I spun on my heels and would have marched out, but Mrs. Sullivan suddenly cried, “No, please!”

I turned back and looked at Mrs. Sullivan, really looked at her. Which was something new. When I'm around adults I usually spend most of the time staring at the ground under my feet. But the day before I had looked Mr. Clay in the eye as we stood on his front porch, and now I was meeting Mrs. Sullivan's look with a steady gaze of my own.

“Every customer is important to us,” she said with a tight smile, speaking with the same Irish accent her husband had. “What is it that you'll be needing?”

I got a strong feeling that it was important to her that I stay. So I stepped forward. “It's kind of stupid,” I began, pointing over my shoulder, “but it's about your signs.”

“Me signs?” Mr. Sullivan sniffed.

“The signs in the window? There's something wrong with a few of them,” I explained, moving closer. “Little things. Spelling things. Punctuation stuff.”

As I neared the countertop I noticed all the merchandise that the Sullivans had laid out for their customer's approval: bracelets and watches and diamond rings, all glinting under the fluorescent lights.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” I blurted. “I didn't mean to interrupt a sale.”

“Then don't!” the customer growled at the same time that Mrs. Sullivan exclaimed, “Don't be silly!”

“Okay, it's only three things.” I spoke very quickly. “First, ‘twenty-four karat' is spelled K-A-R-A-T. The way you've got it now, it's a vegetable.”

The customer sighed with annoyance, so I sped up even more.

“Second, the way you wrote ‘necklace' out there, it's like ‘neck-
less
,' which means ‘without a neck,' and without a neck, you'd have no place to hang a necklace, so you might want to take a look at that, okay?”