Tempestuous (13 page)

“Handcuffs, eh?” he said, eyeing Caleb and me. “Kinky. If I’d known you were into bondage, maybe we’d still be dating. Speaking of our past, isn’t it ironic that we’re spending the night under the same roof?”

“Try looking up irony in the dictionary before you go throwing it around like you know what you’re talking about. No wonder you needed someone else to take your SATs for you.”

“If I were you, I’d set the Funyuns down,” Brian said to Ariel.

“I don’t take orders from you,” she said with false bravado.

“Suit yourself. All I’m saying is, you’ll need your hands free….” He nodded at Harrison, who aimed the BB gun straight at us. “… so you can run faster. Ready, aim, fire!”

The first BB gun pellet hit the wall behind Chad’s head, Ariel dropped the box, and we took off running. Survival instinct must’ve kicked in to help us sync up, because, for once, Caleb and I were able to match our paces evenly until we were safely out of shooting range.

“Everyone okay?” Chad asked when we rounded the corner and paused to catch our breath.

“That’s it!” I said, bending over and gasping for air.

“They are so going down,” Ariel and I said in unison.

We booked it back to the food court to regroup. The gearheads had finally stopped experimenting with Diet Coke and Mentos and were diverting themselves with a remote-controlled helicopter.

“We found a kit at Craftworks,” said Raj, who normally worked a nearby cell phone kiosk. He stashed a retractable pencil in the pocket of his navy blue button-down shirt. “Mere mortals would require at least a week to assemble this baby. We figured it out in twenty-five minutes. Dude, ease up on the throttle! Ease up! You’re going to ditch it!”

Grady was among those watching the chopper climb and dive over our heads, but when he saw me he casually ambled over.

“I was waiting for you to get back. Everyone’s acting like you’re de facto in charge over here, so word to the wise: Management’s not going to take kindly to the mess down here.”

It
did
look like a disaster zone, but what were they going to do, fire us? These minimum wage fast-food service jobs were nearly impossible to fill. I ignored Grady and addressed more pressing issues.

“You don’t happen to have a set of handcuff keys?” I asked.

“Negatory. They rescinded our access to handcuffs here after the Cabbage Patch riots got ugly back in ’83.”

“I take it you don’t have a sidearm, either.”

Grady scoffed.

“Why on earth would you ask?”

“Well, have you been down to the other end of the mall lately? It’s like the North Korean border!”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve gotten a few complaints about that.”

“And? Can’t you do something?”

Grady scratched his head and shifted uncomfortably. It occurred to me that as the all-too-frequent butt of teenagers’ jokes he might be particularly reticent about interacting with that elitist end of the mall.

“Look, Miranda, they’re all pretty well corralled down there. Just give ’em a wide berth and they shouldn’t be any trouble.”

“Dude, they shot at us with BB guns,” Caleb interrupted angrily. “Why should they get to occupy an entire annex of the building? They’re not even mall employees.”

“Calm down, calm down,” Grady said, raising both arms defensively. “There’s not much I can do here on my own. I don’t foresee they’re going to pose any problem so long as they confine themselves to that end. And I’d advise the same to all of you,” he said, raising his voice as he scanned the room. “By morning the roads and parking lot should be cleared enough to let you all go home. But until then, no more running around the building willy-nilly. It’s just not safe, and I can’t be in ten places at once to keep an eye on you.”

After glancing disinterestedly at the mall cop, everyone pretty much ignored him and went about their business.

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen any sign of Mike?” I asked Grady as he turned to go.

“Can’t say as I have.”

“We’re also missing a clown named Colin.”

“See, that’s exactly why you all need to just stay put,” he said with a sigh. “I’ll keep an eye out for them. Be back in an hour or so to check in.”

Caleb watched Grady exit the food court before turning to me.

“I can’t believe he won’t do a damn thing about the Sons of Anarchy down there,” he muttered. “They shouldn’t be able to get away with that crap.”

“For once, you and I are in agreement. But what are we supposed to do about it?”

“Don’t look at me. Isn’t that your specialty?”

He was right. This was exactly the sort of thing I was supposed to be good at. And yet here I was, stumped. And tired. And, wow; I really needed to pee. Is this how a sitting president felt midway through the first term? I used to get a little rush every time I got to work my magic, so to speak, but the responsibility was starting to weigh too heavily. Everyone looked to me to solve their problems, but who did I get to lean on when I needed help? This whole “playing God” thing was getting to be exhausting. I glanced up at the helicopter circling the ceiling and a synapse fired in my brain. Like Caleb said, I
was
really good at this, and well, one last hurrah might not be a bad thing.

“Hey, Raj,” I said, raising my voice above the toy’s loud whirring. “Were there any more of those helicopter kits?”

“Yeah, sure. Why?”

“Grab some of your guys. We’re going back to Craftworks.”

• • •

We brought everything back to the food court to assemble. My team of junior engineer wannabes huddled together, hard at work on building six more copters (and a few
Star Wars
RC X-Wing Fighters—they’d insisted) while the rest of us squeezed out dozens of bottles of glue into plastic sandwich baggies. Ariel, no surprise, had already tapped into the cases of glitter we’d found in bulk. She shook a handful into her palm, threw it up in the air, and looked enchanted as it fell flickering around her.

“Yo, Tinkerbell,” I said, teasing her. “Don’t OD on the pixie dust. We need it for the bombs.”

Raj approached me with a progress report on the modifications he and his friends were working on.

“We superglued ‘L’ hooks to the underbellies. If we reverse direction fast enough in the air, the bombs should slide off and generally land in the vicinity of where we want ’em. Did I tell you what a bang-up idea this is by the way?”

“About twelve times already. But thanks. Let me know when everything’s ready on your end.”

“You know,” said Caleb later, holding open a baggie with his free hand while I emptied a bottle of glue into it with my right. “This is pretty much an overt declaration of war. It’s going to be a lot harder, after this, to carry out your stealth prank on Brian, whatever it is.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But I’m considering making this my swan song. I’ve had an epiphany interacting with those a-holes tonight and am finally starting to see that I’m better off now than I was before; well, apart from the whole being saddled to your sorry butt all night. There’s been
nothing
fun about that.”

“The feeling is mutual. Hey, there we go again, agreeing on things.” He paused for a moment. “Still, I would have loved to have seen whatever grand scheme you had planned for your ex. Your mind can be a scary-yet-enthralling place.”

“Aha! I
knew
you were secretly loving our spy games,” I said, ribbing him with both our elbows. “But yeah, it’s weird. I thought I was angry at Brian, and don’t get me wrong—he’s a total lowlife. But I think the person I’m most fed up with is myself. What could I have possibly seen in that creep? In any of them?”

Caleb silently shrugged, scooping a pile of pink glitter and adding it to the glue-filled baggie. How maddening. Here I am chastened and contrite, and he says nothing, a silent acknowledgment that, yes, I’m a detestable diva. Then again, he didn’t use the opportunity to make another one of his sardonic remarks. For someone who can read most people like a flimsy paperback novel, I still couldn’t figure this guy out.

For obvious reasons, everyone wanted to come along when we executed our strike, which made me wary.

“I don’t want anyone getting hurt, so don’t get too close. For any of you filming it on your phones, just stay alert.” I gave these orders to our rag-tag commandos as we approached the intersection between Worthington’s and Teasers, the site where we could get the most Eastern Prep kids all at once. “The plan is to catch them off guard, but if they open fire, everyone needs to fall back.”

Our glitter bomb blitzkrieg would only have been more exciting had a forty-piece orchestra been playing Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” as a soundtrack in the background. Instead, the buzzing clamor of the model aircraft drowned out the music that was emanating from Teasers and was enough to draw pretty much everyone from their encampment. I recognized a few of the kids as the same ones who’d badmouthed me when I’d first arrived at the food court at the beginning of my shift. Brian and Prince Harry were in the thick of it, craning their necks at the choppers with bemused, “That’s the best you can do?” smirks. As soon as one bomb dropped, I knew the spectators would disperse, so the plan was to drop them all on one command. I didn’t see Rachel or the Itneys in the crowd yet, but I couldn’t wait much longer to give Raj the go-ahead signal—he’d warned they wouldn’t be able to fly that many models for too long without a midair collision.

“Now!” I shouted dramatically, waving my free hand in a large clockwise motion, as if on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Raj and crew, with laser-like precision, maneuvered their whirring ’copters into position over the heads of our primary targets and, at my cue, started offloading the cargo. In a gooey, almost slo-mo fashion, the globs of glitter began their descent toward our unsuspecting victims. As the sticky, glittery gunk landed in their hair and glommed onto their clothing, the faces of Brian, Prince Harry, and several of their surrounding toadies morphed from derision into a hilariously unintentional reenactment of Munch’s
The Scream
.

“We nailed ’em!” I shouted into Caleb’s ear, as if he couldn’t see for himself. “This is even better than I hoped!”

“Their expressions are priceless. You’d think a flock of pigeons just torpedoed them with bird shit!” he shouted back.

I turned to high-five Ariel, but she had disappeared into the crowd. Chad was also nowhere to be seen.

Brian and Prince Harry tried to sling off some of the goop, to little avail. Even though we couldn’t hear them, we didn’t need a lip reader to tell us what they were shouting. The crowd around them seemed highly amused by the whole thing. I got the sense they might have enjoyed seeing the “big men on campus” squirm as much as we did.

Once the glitter bombs had been dropped, I signaled Raj to begin one last flyover before we hoofed it back to the food court to await Eastern Prep’s almost certain retaliation.

The helicopters arranged themselves in a V-formation and began the dramatic, choreographed finale we had practiced earlier. Instead of scattering to the four winds, the audience below looked up, mesmerized, perhaps wondering what fresh hell we were going to unleash next. At that moment, I looked up to see Ariel leaning over the side of the parapet of the floor above. She gave a thumbs up to someone in Teasers and I craned my head to see who it could be. I spotted Chad standing next to the deejay’s turntable and wondered what was up.

Ariel disappeared for a moment and then reappeared, her hands mysteriously cradling something. She reached out and flung the contents into the flight path of the helicopters. Glue-free glitter fell in small tornadoes, whirling in the air as though magically tossed by a coterie of errant fairy godmothers. What was she doing? We didn’t plan this. But it
was
breathtaking.

Though prepared for myriad responses to the earlier bombardment ranging anywhere from mild annoyance to outright anger, it would have taken Nostradamus to foresee what actually happened next. As the glitter fell like ticker tape onto upturned faces and outstretched arms, a pulsating beat began to pour from Teasers’ speakers and out into the hallway. The volume was maxed so high you could no longer hear the helicopters whirring overhead, though they were just above arm’s reach. The deejay was playing one of those inimitably danceable beats that you can’t help but lean into, and rather than devolving into chaos, most people were smiling and spinning as if Ariel was dispensing laughing gas instead of glitter. Several of our crew rushed in to join the festivities, paying no heed whatsoever to my earlier words of warning. Caleb and I glanced at each other in disbelief. In addition to exacting unholy vengeance on Brian and his minions, thanks to our good fairy, Ariel, we’d apparently unleashed an epic rave. Everyone—well, almost everyone—had put their differences aside to share the newly minted dance floor. Brian and Prince Harry were nowhere to be seen, while Rachel and the Itneys appeared to be having a
telenovela
-style squabble in the far corner.

“Now what?” Caleb yelled into my ear.

“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” I yelled back, leading him in the direction of the dance floor.