Edison’s Alley (9 page)

“Exactly. And it’ll only get worse from there.”

The door to Principal Watt’s office opened, and Sydney Van Hook ran out in a veil of tears. Watt beckoned Theo in with an intensity befitting the Grim Reaper.

Theo stood up, but before he went in, he turned to Mitch and said, “Whatever Nick’s doing, he won’t get away with it. Like they say, he’s going to find himself between
Iraq and a hard place.” And with that, he turned and walked into Principal Watt’s Office of Doom. The door closed behind him, and in a few moments Mitch could hear Theo crying.

Mitch found himself alone once more with only his thoughts and the penny in his pocket. Angrily, he tried again to fish it out, but it seemed to be stuck to some old chewing gum that had melded
with the fabric.

He wished there was some way he could get back at the corporate creeps who had framed his father, but such justice was even further out of his reach than the penny.

Then, out of nowhere, a voice said, “Mind if I try?”

Mitch looked up to see Ms. Planck, the lunch lady. Without waiting for an answer, she reached into his pocket with long, tapering fingers, strong from ladling slop day in and day out. She
grasped the penny and pulled it free in one try, then held it out to him.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

“Keep it,” said Mitch bitterly. “I don’t want it. I don’t want
any
of them.”

Ms. Planck sat down next to him. “I don’t blame you,” she said. “If it means anything to you, I don’t think your father took that money.”

Mitch looked at her, trying to figure out if she just wanted to make him feel better or if she meant it. She was a no-nonsense kind of woman. Mitch could tell she was sincere.

“What are you doing here?” Mitch asked. “Did you get called to the principal’s office, too?”

She held up a clipboard. “Next month’s lunch menu for Principal Watt to approve. He’s got his fingers in every pie.”

Mitch grinned. “I knew there were fingers in those pies.”

Ms. Planck raised her eyebrows. “Protein! Tastes good and good
for
you.”

From behind the closed door came Theo’s wailing pleas for clemency. Mitch resolved that whatever punishment was levied upon him when it was his turn, he would bear it stoically.

“So I understand you’re spending a lot of time with Petula Grabowski-Jones,” Ms. Planck said.

“Petula has a big mouth,” grumbled Mitch.

Ms. Planck shrugged. “There are worse things. She’s unusual, it’s true. But in a good way. And I told her the same thing about you.”

“Where is this going?” Mitch wondered aloud.

She put the penny in his hand and closed his fingers around it. “Someplace worth the price of admission,” she said. “I promise.” Then she got up and left.

When Mitch opened his hand, he discovered something remarkable. Through sleight of hand or some other clever trick, the coin in his palm was now a nickel.

Meanwhile, Caitlin was having her own troubles. She had always been a fairly decent math student, but during today’s test, she found herself stricken with such
inexplicable dread that she couldn’t catch her breath. She was not prone to panic attacks, and she was becoming more anxious over the fact that she was becoming anxious than by the cause of
the anxiety itself. Then, when she looked around, she realized that she wasn’t the only one suffering. Everyone in the room—including the teacher—was either sweating, or shaking,
or moaning. One kid was chewing his pencil with such nervous intensity that he bit it in half.

In the midst of the turmoil there was, however, a calm oasis of one: Carter Black, who always sat in the back of the room and had gone unnoticed for most of his life. He was now a hot zone of
focused energy and calculation. He was zipping through the test like it was nothing.

This was one of those “open book” kind of tests where calculators and other computational devices were allowed. Carter did not have a calculator. His stress-free hands were deftly
flipping the beads of a small abacus—the kind of counting device used in days gone by.

Carter Black was not a math whiz by any means. In fact, he had earned the nickname “Carter Black Hole,” because his brain seemed to have an event horizon beyond which mathematical
concepts broke down, leading to D-minuses on all of his tests. Any other kid would have to work pretty hard to achieve such consistency.

As Caitlin’s own math terror increased, Carter’s focus intensified, and although at the moment even adding one plus one was a difficult stretch, she managed it, and came up with the
only possible solution.

The abacus was from Nick’s garage sale.

Each time Carter flicked a metallic bead, the wire that held it sparked, giving him brainpower and confidence—by stealing it from his classmates.

And so, while the rest of the room became more and more mathematically unsound, Caitlin got up out of her seat, made her way over to Carter Black, and ripped the abacus from his hands.

“Hey, that’s mine!”

She slipped it into a rather heavy case that was, no doubt, woven from lead-infused fabric, and the moment she did, she felt her tension dissolve.

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” she told Carter. Now that his math skills had sunk back to caveman levels, he was left to grapple with the concept of nine-tenths while the
rest of the room breathed a communal sigh of relief, not knowing what had happened, or why it had ended.

“Pencils down,” said their teacher, blotting his sweaty forehead with his sleeve. “We’ll take this test tomorrow.”

Caitlin gripped the abacus to her chest as if at any moment it might be ripped away by Carter Black, or the Accelerati. She had an urge to run out of the classroom, find Nick, and hand it over
to him, but she knew she could make a better play. Nick hadn’t given her as much as the time of day since she refused his movie invitation, and the rift between them wasn’t helping
anybody. But now she had an excuse to bridge the gap. The abacus could be her peace offering. Peace offerings had to be treated with care and ceremony. She would bring it to him at his house when
she felt the time was right. She would watch as he placed it into the machine. And that would make them a team again, if not a couple.

As for Carter Black, he scowled at Caitlin, staring invisible daggers into the back of her head, but he didn’t try to get the abacus back. Truth be told, he was relieved that his fifteen
minutes of genius were over. Unnatural brilliance was uncharted territory for him. It was like rafting down a raging river, never knowing if the twists and turns would lead him to a deadly
waterfall. Now he could happily go back to being the lightless singularity he had always been…but with the heady memory of momentary illumination.

He had read somewhere that Einstein had failed math in school. In fact, some people had considered him an idiot. Carter Black could relate—and for the first time, he dreamed of aspiring to
that kind of idiocy. Thanks to the abacus, he was now motivated to do something completely foreign to him: he was motivated to try.

C
halking up one more failure was the last thing Nick needed, but the chest being sold online was not an antique card catalog, as the picture had
suggested. It was just an ordinary dresser. Nick and Mitch went to see it, dismissed it, and the closer they got to the door, the lower the price became, until the woman was ready to give it to
them for free if they would just haul the thing away.

Nick turned back to the woman and waved his hand like Obi-Wan Kenobi. “These are not the drawers we’re looking for,” he said, and left.

“It’s supposed to be ‘you’re,’ not ‘we’re,’” Mitch pointed out as they walked away.

“Either way,” Nick said with a sigh, “we’re back at square one, and we don’t know where to look.”

In the wake of their disappointment, Mitch suggested they go for comfort food at Beef-O-Rama. Not an unusual suggestion coming from Mitch.

But as they arrived, Nick saw Petula through the front window, sitting in a booth, waiting.

“Suddenly I’m not hungry.” He threw Mitch an accusatory glance and started to walk away.

Mitch stopped him. “I know you hate her,” he said, “but she
has
been helping us keep Vince alive, since she’s in math with him—and she feels really bad about
how she didn’t tell you he was gonna die in the first place…”

“She didn’t know
he
was going to die,” Nick pointed out. “She just knew that
someone
would. How do you expect me to forgive her for not telling me someone
was about to die in my house? It could have been you!”

“And it could have been
her
!” Mitch reminded him. “She put herself in danger by coming to your house—but she came anyway, because she wanted to save you. At least
give her credit for that!”

Nick was still not ready to give Petula credit for anything. But maybe his anger was as misdirected as Petula had been misguided that day. She wasn’t the enemy. That honor was saved for
Jorgenson and the Accelerati.

“Anyway,” said Mitch, “she has something to give you…”

Mitch slid into the booth next to Petula. Nick took the bench across from them and watched Petula put her hands gently on Mitch’s face, which was still bruised from his
knock-down-drag-out fight.

“Aw, my poor pumpkin,” Petula said.

“Did you really just call me ‘pumpkin’?” Mitch asked.

Petula nodded cheerfully. “Because after that fight, your head looks like a crushed one.”

“So?” Nick said to Petula, not caring to endure more sweet nothings between them. “You have something for me?”

Petula looked miffed. “No ‘hello’? No ‘how are you’? or ‘good to see you’?” She tilted her head back so she could look down her nose at him.
“Manners count, you know. Even in the Beef-O-Rama.”

The waitress, who, like Nick, wanted to be anywhere else, took their orders absently, and ripped the menus out of their hands.

“Well,” Nick said to Petula, “since it
isn’t
good to see you and I
don’t
really care how you are, let me just say hello.”

Nick meant his comment to be as stinging as it sounded, but Petula seemed genuinely pleased by it. “That’s an acceptable start. Hello to you, too. And although you can’t be
bothered with my personal well-being,
I
am gracious enough to care about yours. So how are you?”

“Not great,” Nick said honestly. “I’m pretty disappointed by the way things are going in general, actually.”

“Well, maybe this will cheer you up.” With that, she lifted her backpack off the bench next to her, revealing the box camera. She handed it over the table to him.

Nick didn’t know what to say. He looked over at Mitch, who was grinning.

“You convinced her?” Nick asked him.

“I only suggested it,” he replied. “She’s the one who decided.”

“Hold on,” Nick said, looking at the camera more closely, studying the bare aperture at the front. “Where’s the lens?”

“I’m hanging on to that,” she said. “For insurance.”

“Insurance against what?” asked Nick.

Petula shook her head and sighed. “If we knew the nature of the unexpected disaster we needed insurance against, we wouldn’t need insurance, would we?”

“Come on, Nick,” Mitch said. “Take it. It’s a step in the right direction, right?”

Nick took the camera. “Okay, fine.” And although it wasn’t easy, he added, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Petula said.

The waitress brought out their malts and a basket of chili-cheese onion rings, perhaps the messiest food in the known universe—which was made worse by Mitch, who tended to talk with his
hands while holding his rings, thereby flinging chili in all directions.

Mitch talked about the fight, and his visit to Principal Watt’s office. Chewing thoughtfully, he said, “I got a three-day in-school suspension.” Then he pondered the other half
of the onion ring in his hand, as if it held the answer to one of life’s unanswerable questions.

“How is it a suspension if you’re in school?” Nick asked.

“Don’t you know anything?” said Petula. “In-school suspension means they put you in a room with a teacher all day, but you’re not allowed to learn.”

Mitch shrugged. “Could be worse. I had a talk with Ms. Planck and she kind of made me feel better about the whole thing.”

Nick was surprised. “The lunch lady?”

“Yeah. Sometimes I think she oughta be running the school. I mean, she
knows
things.”

Nick had to agree. Like the way she had told him to dump his lunch on Heisenberg during his first day. That single act had made Nick a school legend. Ms. Planck always seemed to have the right
words of wisdom when kids needed them most. She
did
know things.

What if that’s not limited only to school?
Nick wondered.
What if she has feelers throughout town?
It wasn’t too farfetched to think that Ms. Planck had inside
information that no one else had.

The thought stayed with him as the waitress brought the check and Nick paid his share. Mitch put enough money on the table, Nick noticed, to cover his own and Petula’s tab.

“Do you think Ms. Planck might have a clue about where some of the garage-sale stuff ended up?” Nick asked as they left.