The (Almost) Perfect Guide To Imperfect Boys (2 page)

“Why do they need to? It's you being gymnastic.” I took the camera. “And by ‘people' we're talking about Dylan, right?”

“Puh-lease,” she said. “I'm so over Dylan.” She scooped up some snow and packed it into a ball. “Actually, didn't I tell you my New Year's resolution? I'm giving up on middle school boys.”

“You are?” I said, laughing. “You mean including Wyeth Brockman?”

She didn't even bother to smile at that. “I mean all of them—Tadpoles, Croakers. Even the Frogs.”

“Really? What's wrong with the Frogs?”

“Nothing,” she answered. “Except they go to middle school.”

I watched her throw the snowball. It landed way off, in the field between Fulton Middle School and Fulton High School, where the older kids hung out during the school day, cutting class or listening to their iPods or whatever they did when their teachers weren't looking. I knew Maya couldn't wait until next fall, when we would both be on that field, but to me it seemed the same as here, only bigger. Scarier.

The warning bell rang, meaning lunch was ending and Spanish was next on our schedule.

I blew on my fingers. “We should go,” I said.

“No, wait, Fin, we still have four minutes.” Maya was squinting down the field; she hated wearing her glasses, even though she was semiblind without them. “Hey, can you see who's that kid in the hoodie?”

I shaded my eyes from the low sun. I couldn't make out very much either, just a tall kid with dark
hair standing over by the soccer net. Maya and I could name just about all of the ninth graders, and a few of the tenth, but this one didn't look familiar.

“Maybe he's a junior,” I guessed.

“He couldn't be. If he was in my brother's class, I'd have seen him before this.” She grabbed the camera. “Okay if I use the thingy?”

“You mean the zoom lens? Be careful.”

“I won't break it; I'll just spy with it. What do I do?”

I showed her how to zoom in. “Just don't let him see you, all right?”

“Don't worry; I'm invisible. One of my many superpowers.” She looked into the viewfinder. “Whoa. He's cute. I mean
really
cute. At least from here.”

She took a few quick steps toward him, keeping the camera up to her face. “Although maybe we need a better angle.”

“Are you serious?” I trotted behind her, my feet cracking the top layer of snow. “Stop doing that—he'll see you!”

“He's not even looking this way. Huh. Yes, definitely cute. No, definitely don't know him.” She handed me the camera. “Want a peek?”

“This is so tacky.” But I looked through the zoom lens at the boy, who'd started wandering around the net. His head was down, so I couldn't make out his face.

Suddenly he stopped walking. And looked up. Right at me.

“Oh, shoot, let's go,” I muttered, yanking Maya's arm.

“Why?”

“Because he just saw me!”

“And?”

“
And
I was basically stalking him. This is a teeny bit awkward, don't you think?”

“It doesn't have to be. We could introduce ourselves.”

“
You
could introduce
yourself
. Because he didn't see
you
following him around with a
camera
.” I glanced over my shoulder. Now he was heading toward us, waving his arm, walking even faster than we were.
Oh, great, great, great.

“Why is he coming this way if he goes to the high school?” I whispered.

“Maybe he dropped out.”

“Don't joke, Maya, okay?”

“Maybe he's chasing us. Maybe he thinks we're paparazzi.”

“Argh, this is excruciating.”

Maya sighed. “All right, Finley, then just tell him the truth.”

“The
what
?”

“Tell him I made you spy on him. Tell him—”

“Finley?” the tall boy called. He had a deep voice, not at all croaky.

I glanced at Maya in panic. Then I turned around.

The boy was a few yards away now, close enough for me to see that he had longish brown hair, high cheekbones, a narrow nose that pointed sideways at the tip, and blue eyes so dark they could qualify as purple. He was dressed in slouchy jeans, with a long black thermal and a light gray hoodie. Standard boy wear, nothing fascinating, so I took a second peek at his almost-purple eyes.

“Finley?” he repeated. “Finley Davis?”

“Yes?” I squeaked.

He grinned. “It
was
you. You had that camera covering your face, so I wasn't sure.”

“No, yes, it's really me.” I slipped the camera into my jeans pocket, so now it was bulging out of my thigh.
Lovely. “Um, I don't mean to be rude or anything, but do I know you?”

“Well, you did.” He was watching my face. “But maybe you've forgotten. Zachary Mattison?”

I blinked.

No,
I told myself.
It couldn't be.

Because the last time I'd seen Zachary Mattison, he'd been a Tadpole. Actually, no—even less mature than a Tadpole, more like a Tadpole egg. A skinny, doofy little egg with a chirpy voice, sticking-out ears, and an incredibly obnoxious sense of humor.

And that was when? Not even a year ago? It was like he'd fast-forwarded through the whole
Amphibian Life Cycle
.

My mouth froze; I couldn't speak.

But Maya could. “Wait!” she shouted.
“Freakazoid?
”

“Yeah, exactly,” the boy replied. “Freakazoid.”

His smile changed, but he was still smiling.

“Sorry,” Maya blurted. “It just came out. I didn't mean—”

Zachary shrugged. “Hey, no problem. I've been expecting all that Freakazoid stuff. And I'm fine with it, in fact.”

Maya shot me a look. “You
are
?”

“Yeah. I think it's funny.” He blinked at me. “Don't you think it's funny, Finley?”

“Not really,” I said, trying to spot his ears underneath the new hair.

The second bell rang, but we didn't move.

“So anyway. What are you doing here?” Maya asked, probably a little too curiously.

“Waiting for my mom,” he said. “She's in with Fisher-Greenglass.”

Maya and I exchanged glances. Ms. Sara Fisher-Greenglass was the principal of Fulton Middle. You were “in” with her only if you were “in” big trouble. Or possibly getting out of it.

“Huh,” Maya said. “So that means you're coming back?”

“Maybe. Don't know yet.”

“Then you might? Didn't you get expelled for fighting with Jarret?”

He looked surprised. “They said that? Oh no. Not expelled.”

“So what happened to you, exactly?” She folded her arms across her chest, the way she did when she thought someone was lying. “You basically disappeared in the middle of seventh grade.”

“It's kind of complicated,” he said flatly. “You know, family stuff.”

“Really? Like what?”

“Maya, we're late,” I muttered. “Señor Hansen's going to kill us.”

Zachary looked at me. “Hansen?” he repeated. “You have Hairy Hands for eighth-grade Spanish?”

“Yeah, we do,” I said. “Unfortunately.”

“How did
that
happen?”

“Who knows. Maybe he liked torturing us so much in seventh grade he wanted a second crack.”

“But that's not fair,” he argued. And right then he sounded exactly like the old Zachary, the one I remembered.

“Okay, well, we'd better get going, then,” Maya said. “See you around, Zachary.”

“Yeah,” I said. “See you.”

“Bye, Finley,” he said, catching my eye.

Maya and I started running down the hallway. My legs were twice as long as hers, but she was still half a step ahead of me. “
Bye, Finley,”
she repeated. “What was I, invisible?”

“No, of course not. But you were sort of rude.”

“How was I rude?”

“You called him Freakazoid,” I said.

“
Everyone
called him Freakazoid.”

“And you were grilling him about getting expelled. Like you didn't believe him.”

By then we were almost outside Spanish, so we slowed down. “Well, sure,” she murmured. “Don't
you
think it's slightly incredible that he's back, all of a sudden? In the middle of eighth grade?”

“We don't know what happened with his family,” I pointed out. “And anyhow, he might not
be
back. He said
maybe
.”

“Fisher-Greenglass wouldn't be meeting his mom just for girl talk, Fin.”

“I guess.”

I didn't say anything for a bit. Then I blurted out, “He did seem different to you, didn't he?”

“You mean Froggier?”

I laughed. “Well, yeah.”

“What a shocker, right? Zachary the Frog. It was like he did all his Croaking in private.”

“I know. Or maybe he jumped over the whole Croaker stage.”

“He couldn't have,” Maya insisted. “Croaker is when Tadpoles get legs. You can't jump if you don't go through the getting-legs stage.”

“True.” I glanced over my shoulder, but the hallway was empty. “Or maybe,” I said, “he was just a totally different person.”

By then we'd reached room 302, so we stopped.

“What do you mean?” Maya said, laughing. “Are you saying that cute boy was an
imposter
?”

“Well, it's possible, isn't it? He could be this normal,
cute Frog boy only pretending to be Zachary Mattison.”

Maya covered her mouth. “Interesting theory, Nancy Drew. Except for one thing: why would anyone pretend to be Freakazoid?”

She turned the doorknob. As the door screeched open, it was obvious that the class was in quiz mode. Olivia Moss looked up at us in desperation, Chloe DeGenidis grumbled, and Jarret Lynch, well, grunted. I hated to even say that word to myself, “grunted,” because it was such typical Croaker behavior. But he really did grunt, and so loudly that Kyle Parker punched him in the arm.

“Hola,”
Señor Hansen boomed from the back of the room. “You girls are now seven minutes late for my class, which I find extremely disrespectful. But instead of reporting you both to the principal, I'll allow you to wrestle with a little pop exercise.”

“Fabutastic,” Maya murmured.

Señor Hansen flashed a fiendish smile. This gave him a unibrow, one dark werewolfish fringe above his eyes. “Excuse me, Señorita Lopez,
what
did you say?”

“I said sorry we're late, Mr. Hansen,” Maya answered calmly. She always called him that, “Mister” instead of “Señor”; if he noticed, he never said anything.

He hulked over and with his scary-hairy fingers gave us each a double-sided paper titled
Quiz #15—Irregular Verbs in the Preterit
.

Help,
I thought.

I hadn't studied for this quiz, and even if I had, this was exactly the sort of thing I was horrible at. For me to memorize something it needed to make sense—I couldn't just mindlessly recite a list of meaningless verb variations. Whenever I was stuck studying history or science, Mom suggested memory tricks (“mnemonic devices,” she called them)—silly rhymes and acronyms, mostly, but they made the facts stay in my head like friendly ad jingles. Except you couldn't use Mom's tricks for cramming irregular verbs in the preterit—you just had to drill them, over and over.

Plus the whole “preterit” business was ridiculously complicated. Why did the Spanish language need
two
past tenses—one for completed actions (the preterit) and another for past actions done over time (the imperfect)? It all seemed random and unfair, if you asked me.

I peeked at Maya, whose table was in the back of the classroom over by the windows. Totally apart from the fact that she spoke Spanish at home, my best friend
was a superstudent, so of course she was already busy conjugating.

All right, Finley, get to work,
I scolded myself. I took my chewed-up pencil out of the other pocket, the one without the camera. Somehow I made it through the first three conjugations, but by
numero quatro
, all I could think about was Zachary Mattison.

Not the one I'd just seen. I mean the Tadpole-egg version, the skinny, doofy little kid with the chirpy voice and the sticking-out ears, who wore rugby shirts in primary colors, and who was always telling the world's stupidest jokes. Jokes about boogers. Also about smelly armpits, fat butts, farts, burps, and other assorted body functions. Not to mention his specialty: jokes about people's names.

I remembered how crazed he made Chloe DeGenidis, insisting her name sounded like a disease. One time in the middle of the cafeteria, she yelled, “Zachary, I've
had
it, you are
such a total loser
!” Then she threw her cell at his head, and when it hit his forehead, he actually
laughed
.

Oh, and when he laughed, he usually fell on the floor, so a lot of the time he was dusty. Or smeary or full of crumbs. Which didn't do much for his Total Loser status, especially with the girls.

And of course neither did his obsession with gummies. Zachary had this thing for the grossest ones: worms, squid, octopi, slugs. (Did they even make gummy slugs? Whatever, you get the idea.) He'd chew them a little, get them soft and semiliquidy, then dangle them out of his mouth until people (specifically, female people) screamed,
“Eww, Zachary, stop!”

Obnoxious, right?

And beyond-Tadpole immature.

One time he almost kissed me like that.

Well, okay, it wasn't intentional; he had leftover gummy spit on his face and he kind of bumped into me at the lockers. And when I turned my head to see who was stepping on my heel, Zachary's sticky lips were right there.