I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class (3 page)

 

I sit on my bench. Fifth from the back, left side, alone. Always alone. That’s one of the benefits of being me. The children who are my age or older think I’m a stupid freak. The children who are younger are scared of me. Either way, nobody wants to sit with the dummy.

 

It’s spring, but there’s still a nip in the air, so I reach under my bench and turn on the seat warmer. The on/off switch is disguised as a dried-up wad of bubble gum. If I twist the booger next to it, the bench will give my buttocks a gentle massage. Not the green booger, the yellow one. The green booger controls my air-purifying unit. But I won’t need that today—I’m almost home.

 

Or so I think. The first sign of trouble is when the sub-human squealing of my classmates goes up an octave. The bus brakes to a grinding, unhappy halt. Somebody screams, “It’s Sheldrake!” And that’s that. A mad dash by everyone to squeeze onto one side of the bus (annoyingly, mine) so they can catch a glimpse of the great man.

 

Lionel Sheldrake is the third-richest man in the world, but he still lives here in Omaha. We actually have two billion aires in Omaha, which is far too many for a city this size. Everyone in town is excited to have such rich people living here. It’s like they think being rich can rub off on them.

 

Sheldrake’s even better than the other billionaire, though. For one thing, he’s richer. For another, Sheldrake
looks
like a billionaire (
see plate 3
): tall, sharp-eyed, lean-cheeked, hawk-nosed. And he travels in style. What’s stopped my bus is a Sheldrake motorcade: Two giant black armored SUVs, one in front and one behind Sheldrake’s armored black Rolls-Royce. That’s how Sheldrake travels. If Sheldrake were going to the 7-Eleven to buy a Big Gulp (which he wouldn’t—he’s too rich to run errands for himself), he would drive there in his Rolls, with SUVs full of bodyguards surrounding him. The third-richest man in the world needs to be safe.

 

The moment Sheldrake exits the Rolls, my classmates emit a collective gasp of awe, like a thousand tiny farts. The great man strides imperiously toward his destination—a small bank he owns—never once looking around him. His bodyguards surround him and clear his path. When he is out of the road, the chief bodyguard waves us on—traffic may resume.

 

As we drive past the bank, Sheldrake looks back and gives the bus a small worried look.

 

“Jeez! Why’s the seat so hot?!” says Stephen Turnipseed, who’s forced himself next to me. I give him my winningest
let’s be best friends forever
smile. He backs off. “Your butt radiates heat, man. Hey!” he yells, as he heads down the aisle. “Fatso’s butt radiates heat!”

 

I let my lip quiver like I’m going to cry and stare out the window.
¹⁶

 

“Home is the fisherman, home from the sea. . . .” and home is Oliver as I enter the kitchen through the garage. My pretty dog Lollipop barks happily, then squats on the linoleum and squirts a little to show her subservience. Mom sits at the counter, chin propped in her hands, staring sadly at an overcooked grilled-cheese sandwich—burned-black bread and cold hard cheese. “It’s ruined,” she moans. The Sheldrake motorcade has made me late, throwing off Mom’s delicate timing. I try to cheer her up by smacking my lips as I bite in, even though it tastes like I’m eating Elmer’s glue slathered between charred rubber mouse pads.

 

I allow her to hug me, then I give her the feeble description of my school day that she finds so thrilling. (“It was fine. I got a D on my geometry quiz. Somebody puked in the library.”) She laps it up,
¹⁷
chin still propped in hands, as she watches me consume my sandwich and tomato juice. Lollipop stands sentinel at my feet, waiting for me to drop something.

 

Descriptions are in order. Mom, as I’ve mentioned, is fat, bad-haired, big-breasted. She wears tentlike sweaters and corduroy skirts, which she buys at a store that hides in a dark corner of the mall, next to Hickory Farms. Her hair is long and stringy and tainted with ugly veins of natural gray.

 

Lollipop is another type of creature entirely. Long, lean, lithe, she is a pit bull mix who is very, very muscular and very, very striped. She has teeth like ivory daggers, legs like dappled stalactites, and eyelashes both more beautiful and more delicate than fairy wings (
see plate 4
).

 

Currently, I like my mother slightly more than I like my dog. Both Lollipop and Mom share a slavish devotion to me, and both tend to drool when they’re happy. But Lollipop can’t make grilled-cheese sandwiches.
¹⁸

 

Mom is talking: “. . . and then I saw Mrs. Albers at the No Frills Supermarket. She was buying eggs and food coloring so she could make Easter eggs. She said Ferdinand is going to have some little friends over to roll them on the front lawn, and she was wondering if you wanted to come. Isn’t that wonderful?”

 

Ferdinand Albers is five years younger than myself. He is morbidly obese, has bright red ears and yellow hair that smells like tuna salad. If I show up for his egg roll, I’ll likely be the only “little friend” who does. Still, maybe I should go; it would be a good cover. And it would make Mom happy.

 

I think what’s comforting about my mother is that she would love me even if I were as dumb as I pretend to be. She genuinely believes I am the boy who couldn’t tie his own shoes until he was ten—and yet she still thinks the sun and moon revolve around me! Call it what you will—stupidity, hormones, self-delusion. I call it Mom.

 

Her devotion stands in stark contrast to some other parents I could name.

 

“And your father just called. He’s going to be home early.”

 

“Yippee for him,” I say, perhaps a trifle unenthusiastically, and with maybe—
maybe
—a slight roll of my eyes.

 

That was a slip. Mom looks at me a little funny. There’s a question on her lips. I save the situation by suddenly slapping my hands together like a seal and giving a moronic grin. “Yay, Daddy! Yay!” I dance in a little circle, hopping from foot to foot, with Lollipop barking at my heels. Mom smiles, all doubts erased. “Ollie loves Daddy!” I scream, like a brain-damaged baby, then I skip—
skip
—like a happy fairy in a shiny green forest, out of the kitchen with its peeling, urine-colored linoleum floor, down the hallway with its turdly brown carpeting, and into my room, with its
delightful
brown and yellow color scheme. Lollipop gambols happily beside me.

 

As soon as my bedroom door hisses shut behind me, the cretinous smile leaves my face. I walk past the shelves full of broken toys and ripped-up Archie comics, past the bed shaped like a race car and the posters of cute kittens, and reach for the framed photograph of my father shaking Ralph Nader’s hand. I give the nail from which it hangs three swift tugs. Silently, the floor I’m standing on descends into the ground. The photograph and the kitten posters remain suspended above me as Lollipop and I are swiftly lowered through my house’s foundation into the earth—ten feet . . . twenty feet . . . thirty. Finally my bedroom floor comes to rest at the center of an enormous concrete cavern, the length of ten football fields. Lionel Sheldrake is waiting for me there. He’s on his knees.

 

“I’m so sorry,” he says.

 

I rap his noble cheek with the back of my hand. “You made Mom sad.”

How does a twelve-year-old boy become the third-richest person on earth?

 

The easiest way is to inherit a bunch of money. Unfortunately, my parents are neither rich nor dead. I’ve been forced to rely on my genius, which, in all modesty, has made making money pretty darn easy. I’ve gone from small-scale investments in the stock market to large-scale manipulation of that same stock market to titanic-scaled feats of corporate piracy in just a few short years. I now own land in all fifty states and most of the capitalist countries of the world. I own investment banks, baseball teams, borax mines, and banana plantations. I own one movie studio, two television networks, and three newspaper syndicates. I own the tobacco company that makes Mr. Moorhead’s cigarettes; he’s literally
paying
me to kill him. How delicious is that?

 

All my businesses are scrupulously legal.
¹⁹
Not because I have any moral problems with crime. It just makes my life easier to obey the law. Crime is for poor people; you don’t need to rob the bank if you own it.

 

That said, my tender age is a problem. Strictly speaking, I’m not allowed to own or do anything. A twelve-year-old can’t sign a contract or negotiate a deal with a third-world dictator. I have to hide my age and identity behind a screen of shell corporations, limited partnerships, and holding companies. And I need a figurehead—a patsy—to be the putative leader of this financial juggernaut.

 

Which is why Lionel Sheldrake is quivering at my feet. “Get up, Sheldrake,” I bark gently, “and walk with me.”

 

Sheldrake is the cornerstone of my cover. Cover is deception. Cover is why I pretend to be stupid when I’m not. Cover is why magicians’ assistants are always beautiful—so they can distract you while the magician takes a peek at your card. Cover is safety.

 

One of my minions throws a silk cape over my shoulders—it gets chilly this far underground. The cape is purple, to match the color of the walls. The color of royalty. Sheldrake and I stroll through the massive cavern. Above us, in an iron web of scaffolding, technicians in white lab coats build and test prototypes of my latest inventions. On either side of us, less-skilled “worker” minions dressed in red jumpsuits drive carts in and out of the tunnels that lead to some of my skyscrapers, warehouses, helipads, and airstrips.
²⁰
This is the nerve center of my Empire. I started building it two years ago, and completed it last summer during a two-week vacation in Hawaii. Daddy thought he won the trip in a raffle; in reality, I needed my parents out of the house while my workmen excavated beneath it.

 

Sheldrake is babbling an excuse. A meeting he was in ran late, which is why his motorcade was running late, which is why my bus was delayed, which is why Mom burned my sandwich. I’m not in the mood for his whining: “You should have left the meeting at the scheduled time,” I murmur darkly.

 

“But I was talking to the
president
. He’d traveled halfway across the country to see me. I couldn’t just walk out,” he sputters.

 

“You’re Lionel Sheldrake. You can do whatever you want.”

 

Sheldrake doesn’t always grasp just how important my money has made him. In private, he may be my cringing lackey. But to the rest of the world, he is a god.

 

Five years ago, I stole twenty dollars from my mother’s purse. This is the great crime my fortune is based on. I used the money to play bingo with my grandmother in a church basement. I’d noticed on previous bingo trips with Granny that certain letters and numbers came out of the hopper more often than others; I suppose it was the shape of the Ping-Pong balls they were written on. Equipped with that knowledge, I picked bingo cards that were likely to win—and went home five hundred dollars richer.
²¹