Dinosaur Boy (12 page)

One of the perks of being a walking, talking science experiment is that when forced to come up with an idea for my science fair project, I didn't really have to strain my brain too hard.

My project was titled “What Part of Me Is Dinosaur?” All I did was order an online DNA kit, rub a cotton swab on the inside of my cheek, and send it, along with a blood sample (courtesy of Dr. Gilmore), to the address on the box. Several weeks later, I received a computer printout of my “Whole Genome Test,” which identified which of my genes could be classified as human and which were dinosaur.

My conclusion: I am approximately 12 percent dinosaur.

My dad helped me carry my foam board display into the school gym from the car. My mom followed, carrying a stuffed stegosaurus that she thought would look cute in front of my display.

The green plush creature had six fuzzy plates on its back and a stupid grin on its face. I had hidden it in the dryer earlier that day, hoping my mom would forget all about it. And she probably would have, if Fanny hadn't had an accident on the bath mat that afternoon, prompting an unscheduled load of laundry.

Whatever. I really could have cared less about my project or the fair in general. I just wanted to get it over with so that I could get back to trying to figure out what to do about Principal Mathis.

The gym was jam-packed with long folding tables, most of which were already occupied by a forest of foam core panels. A stage had been set up on the far wall, along with a microphone and a row of folding chairs.

“Sawyer! Over here!”

Elliot waved me over to a table that was near the stage and directly underneath one of the basketball hoops. He had probably picked the spot on purpose; his project was titled “The Physics of the Dunk.” It featured a blurry picture of him dunking a basketball, plus a lot of measurements and equations.

“Quick,” Elliot said, nodding to the empty spot beside his project. “Set yours up here. The judges are already making the rounds.”

He pointed. A few tables away, Principal Mathis and a herd of teachers were making their way slowly toward us, stopping briefly in front of each project and jotting down notes on their clipboards.

My dad set my project on the table, while my mom fussed over how to arrange the stuffed dinosaur.

“Where's Sylvie?” I asked Elliot.

“Bathroom. With her mom.” Elliot snickered and pointed to the project on the other side of his. “Get a load of
that
.”

Sylvie's project was titled:

Her conclusion:

“That Sylvia is quite a pip,” said Mom, studying Sylvie's project over my shoulder. “She certainly has her own opinions, doesn't she?”

“Yes, she does,” I agreed.

“WELCOME!”

The enthusiastic voice of Dr. Cook boomed out over the onstage microphone.

It was immediately followed by an earsplitting “
SCCREEEEEEEEEEEEEE
.”

“Ahhhhhh-
chooo
!”

Mr. Broome, who was wide awake and therefore sneezing uncontrollably, jumped onto the stage and adjusted a knob on the speaker behind Dr. Cook.

“THAT'S BETTER!” Dr. Cook exclaimed, still yelling, despite the presence of the microphone. “WELCOME TO THE J.J. ELEMENTARY SCHOOL SCIENCE FAIR! JUDGING IS CURRENTLY UNDERWAY, AND WE WILL BE ANNOUNCING THE WINNERS WITHIN THE HOUR!”

“Pssst!”

I looked around, trying to pinpoint the source of the summons. Finally, I saw an orange sleeve waving at me impatiently from the other side of the table, behind Elliot's project.

“Pssst!” Sylvie said again. “Sawyer! Elliot! Get over here!”

I met Elliot's eyes, and we both glanced at our parents. They were busy greeting Mrs. Juarez and weren't paying any attention to us.

We slipped around the table. Sylvie held out a sheet of paper.

“A sixth-grader handed me this when I came out of the bathroom,” she said. Her face looked very serious.

The paper had the slightly blurry quality of a photocopy. The words got straight to the point:

There were half a dozen signatures already, and room for at least half a dozen more. I didn't recognize the first few names, but the last two were kids I had known since kindergarten.

I felt like I had been punched in the stomach.

“We've got to tell Principal Mathis,” Elliot said immediately.

Sylvie slapped him neatly upside the head.

“Ow! What was—”

“We can't tell her,” I explained, as Sylvie snatched the paper from Elliot and crumpled it in her hand. “If we do, she'll have grounds to expel Allan and Cici. Then she'll have her last two, and she'll send all thirteen of them off to Jupiter!”

“Oh, right.” Elliot frowned. “Well, what do we do?”

“There are more of these being passed around,” Sylvie said. “We've got to find them before Principal Mathis sees them.”

I looked over my shoulder at the tables across the aisle.

“You guys get on that,” I said. “I'm going to go talk to Allan.”

• • •

I grabbed the paper out of Sylvie's hand and marched over to Allan's table, trying to smooth out the crumples as I walked.

I don't know what came over me. It was a strange sense of courage. Or possibly anger. Or both. Whatever it was, it was a new sensation for me.

Allan saw me coming and raised his hands up in a gesture of innocence.

“Nothing personal, Butt Brain. This is about a safe and sanitary school environment.”

I'll give you a safe and sanity environment
, said my inner voice.
On
Jupiter.

“Allan,” I said out loud, shoving my inner voice to the back of my brain. I held up the paper. “You've got to get rid of these. Hide them. Before Principal Mathis sees.”

“I'm not scared of her,” Allan sniffed, but not before he cast a wary eye around the gym. The judging had ended, and our principal, in all of her big-haired glory, was nowhere to be seen.

Cici came up to stand beside Allan. She was holding a huge pile of petitions in her hands. I couldn't tell if they had all been filled out or if they were more blank ones.

“Scared of who?” she asked.

“Mathis,” Allan answered.

“Praying Mantis?” Cici mocked, and giggled. “What's the worst she could do? Expel us? Ha! At least we wouldn't have to look at Sawyer's ugly face anymore!”

“It's worse than that—” I started, then hesitated. Was there any chance I could make them understand without telling them the whole truth? “You just have to trust me. Do
not
give her a reason to expel you.”

Cici scoffed. She handed Allan half of the petitions and turned away.

Allan looked down at the papers he was holding. Then he looked up at me, with a suddenly doubtful expression in his eyes.

I had his attention.

“Your name is on those,” I pointed out. “All she has to do is find
one
, and she has everything she needs to nail you.”

“So?” he demanded. “What do you care?”

“I don't,” I told him. And I didn't. Not really. But there were eleven other kids who I hated a whole lot less than Allan, and their only hope was that Principal Mathis didn't find two more victims.

And here, Allan and Cici were offering themselves up on a silver platter.

“Just believe me,” I implored. “I can't tell you everything. I wouldn't, even if I could. But trust me; it's worse than you could possibly imagine.”

Allan hesitated and flipped through the papers in his hands.

“Why don't you just leave school?” he asked me. “You don't belong here. And now you're messing things up for the rest of us.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, but the truth was, it's not like that thought hadn't occurred to me. Maybe I
didn't
belong in a human school anymore. But where would I go? There was no school for human-dino hybrids. And if there was, Elliot and Sylvie wouldn't be there. I'd have to be friends with the T. rex from Jersey.

“This is my school,” I informed Allan. “If you don't like that, then why don't
you
leave?”

“I'm not the freak,” Allan said coldly.

That word—
freak
—triggered something inside me. I felt it rise up, just like it had that day in the cafeteria. The day that I had roared. My hands started to shake. I felt a rumble somewhere deep in my insides. Like the growl of an empty stomach, only angrier.

I pressed my lips together, determined not to open them until I had gotten it together.

But before I could gather myself, a hand reached out and plucked the stack of petitions out of Allan's hands.

Principal Mathis adjusted her glasses and held the papers up until they were only about an inch away from the end of her nose.

“What have we here?”

• • •

It took Principal Mathis a few moments of fierce squinting to read the petition. Her eyes lingered near the bottom, where Allan's and Cici's names were spelled out, clear as day.

I could have sworn that the corners of her mouth twitched up into a smile, but it was only for a fraction of a second. Then the smile was replaced with the grim look of a no-nonsense educator who was being forced to do something unpleasant for a student's own good.

Standing this close to her, underneath the bright lights of the gym, it was more than obvious to me that her human face was nothing more than a mask. For one thing, there was a cluster of wrinkles near her ear, where the skin on the mask didn't quite match up with the skin on her real face. Elliot must have stretched out the mask when he was messing with it in her office.

How had nobody else ever noticed anything strange about her before?

“Do you have anything to say for yourself ?” she asked Allan.

“N-no, ma'am,” Allan stammered. He looked down at his feet, then back up at me.

There was real fear in his eyes. For all his bravado, he had believed me when I warned him not to let Principal Mathis catch him.

At least, he had believed me enough to be scared now that it had happened.

“Cici Craig!” Principal Mathis said loudly.

Half a table away, Cici turned around. She paled when she saw Mathis holding the petitions, but quickly turned on a look of defiance.

“Yes?” she said.

Mathis put a hand beneath Allan's elbow and guided him over toward Cici.

“I need to see you both in my office right away,” she chirped, and steered them both toward the door of the gym.

“No, wait!” I stepped forward, and tried to plaster a giant smile on my face. “It was just a joke, Principal Mathis. I made the photocopies. Allan and Cici had nothing to do with it.”

“Nice try, Sawyer,” Principal Mathis said over her shoulder.

She did not stop leading Allan and Cici toward the door.

Desperate, I looked around for help. But there was none. The science fair was going on normally. Allan's and Cici's parents were several tables away, talking with Dr. Cook, completely oblivious to the fact that their children were being taken away, possibly forever. Even if they were to look up and see them walking away with Principal Mathis, they probably wouldn't think anything of it. They'd probably think their kids had won the science fair or something. They didn't know our principal was a vicious alien, bent on selling her students to a pet dealer on Jupiter.

A wave of panic washed over me. When Principal Mathis paused to open the wide double doors that led out of the gym, Allan looked over his shoulder at me; our eyes locked.

Sylvie and Elliot appeared at my side, just as the doors shut behind Principal Mathis and her two latest victims.

Neither of them said anything. But I knew they were thinking the same thing I was. Principal Mathis had her thirteen. There was no more time to waste. We
had
to do something.

But what?

I didn't sleep much that night.

Allan, Cici, and their parents were still in Principal Mathis's office when the science fair ended. We had seen them in there from the parking lot, probably finalizing fake preparations to send them off to Camp Remorse.

Neither Elliot, Sylvie, nor I could think of a reasonable excuse to stick around school any later, so we'd had no choice but to get into our parents' cars and go home. Our only hope was that Principal Mathis would wait until morning to send everybody off to Jupiter. By morning, we would have a plan. By then, we would know exactly what to do.

But on the way to school the next morning, I had to admit I still had no idea what we were going to do. What
could
we do? Three kids, up against an evil Martian smuggler? Sure, one of us was half Martian. But I couldn't really see how that was going to help our odds.

I wanted to run to the portable first thing, to make sure the kids were still there. But instead, I headed for class. Maybe Elliot or Sylvie was there already. And maybe one of them had come up with a brilliant plan.

Elliot was there. But I could tell by the hopeful expression on his face when I walked in that he had also been counting on somebody else coming up with an idea.

“Nothing?” I asked him, feeling deflated.

“Zip,” he said, sighing. He was sitting on top of his desk, holding his basketball in one hand and a Pop-Tart in the other.

“Maybe one of us should go to the portable,” I suggested. “And see if they are even—”

“They're there,” came Sylvie's voice.

She came bounding through the door behind me, twirling something red around her fingers.

“I just saw them in the portable, running the obstacle course. Right before I got my hands on
this
.” She held up her hand, revealing a familiar red circle keychain.

My jaw dropped open.

“Mathis's key?” I exclaimed. “From your ‘source' again? The same one who left the door open for us the night we broke into the school?”

Sylvie nodded. I took the key from her and studied the red disk. It looked like some sort of team logo, but not one I recognized. It was a picture of a large volcano. The lava spewing out of the top spelled out the name “Red Razers.” At the base of the volcano was a flaming soccer ball and a warning to “Fear the Red.”

“Soccer?” Elliot asked, looking over my shoulder. “Mathis likes soccer?”

Sylvie nodded. “It's kind of a big deal on Mars.”

I handed her back the keychain.

“Sylvie,” I said, “Elliot and I are not doing another thing until you tell us who your source is. Seriously, we deserve to know. Who keeps helping you?”

Sylvie hesitated for just a second and then shrugged.

“Ms. Helen,” she admitted finally.

“Ms. Helen?” Elliot and I exclaimed together.

Sylvie nodded, looking fiercely proud of herself.

“Why would Ms. Helen do that?” I asked, confused, trying to picture the grumpy lady behind the fan going out of her way to do anything for anybody.

“Oh, she has her reasons,” Sylvie said mysteriously. Then she smiled. “Plus, she
really
likes the flan from my mother's restaurant.”

“Now that I believe,” Elliot mumbled.

Sylvie wrapped her fingers around the key and kissed her knuckles.

“Come on! Let's go!”

“Wait a sec,” I said, thinking about something. “What about the electricity? Is the doorknob electrified again? If it is, and if we put a metal key into it, we're going to get electrocuted.”

Sylvie reached into her backpack and pulled out a pair of heavy-duty work gloves.

“I stole these. From the janitor's closet down the hall. Did you know they don't even lock it? There's amazing stuff in there.”

“What time did you get to school today?” I asked, incredulous.

Sylvie just smiled. “Come on! Before everyone else gets here.”

She turned toward the door. I took a step to follow her, but Elliot, who had been mysteriously silent for the past couple of minutes, stayed where he was.

I threw him a questioning
are
you
coming?
look.

“I don't know,” Elliot hedged. “First period is starting in a bit…”

Sylvie stomped her foot.

“This is
way
more important than first period, Elliot!”

“
Why?”
Elliot jumped off his desk, suddenly quite intent. “Why is it more important? Why do you care so much about saving those…those
bullies
?”

Sylvie looked momentarily startled, and I understood why. This was the first time Elliot had ever put his foot down to her. In fact, it was the first time I had seen him put his foot down to anybody in a long time.

Elliot pointed a finger in her direction. “You're not the only one who has been doing some thinking,” he said. “You know what I've been thinking about? How those kids tortured me last year. And why? Because I got tall. I didn't want to be tall. I didn't ask to be tall. I just
am
.”

Elliot slammed the basketball down at his feet. Sylvie and I both jumped. The ball bounced three times, then rolled behind him. He ignored it.

“They acted like I had committed some sort of horrible crime, even though it had nothing to do with them. You saw it, Sawyer!”

“I did,” I admitted. I had. It was true. And yet…

“And this year they turned right around and did the same thing to you!” Elliot continued. “They made you into a ring toss game! They told you, to your face, that you belong in a zoo instead of a school. And now you're willing to risk getting in all sorts of trouble to rescue them?
We
could end up getting shipped to Jupiter right along with them. Or at least, I could. I'm not a hybrid, like the two of you. Have either of you thought of that?”

I sighed and looked down at my feet. It was true, all of it. It was. And yet…

“Elliot,” Sylvie spoke up. “Principal Mathis wants to
kidnap
them. To send them to another
planet
, where they'll never see their families again. I know they made you miserable, and I've seen them do the same to Sawyer. But do you really think they deserve what they're about to get?”

“If it was us in there,” Elliot pressed her. “If it was you, me, and Sawyer, do you think Allan would lift a finger to help us? No way! He'd probably volunteer to stand guard to make sure Principal Mathis got away with it!”

“We don't know that,” Sylvie argued.

“
I
do,” Elliot told her. “And don't try to tell me you know humans better than I do. You're only half human. You've only been on Earth for like a month. You don't get it.”

“I'm only half human too,” I piped up. “Does that mean
I
don't get it?”

“You're different,” Elliot sniffed, glaring at Sylvie.

“How?” I demanded. “How am I different?”

“You grew up here,” Elliot growled. “You know those kids. You know they're never going to change. Once they're done making fun of you, they'll move on to some other kid. Then another kid, then another one, and so on. They don't deserve to be saved.”

“Maybe not,” I agreed. “But I'm going to do it anyway.”

I took a step, one that brought me away from Elliot and closer to Sylvie. Sylvie gave me a grateful half-smile.

Elliot's face fell.

“Come with us,” I implored him.

He shook his head and bent to pick up his basketball.

“I'm staying here. If you end up as somebody's pet on Jupiter, don't say I didn't warn you.”