The Call

And phobophobia, a fear of phobias. Which makes more sense than it may seem at first because Mack was always finding new fears. And it scared him to have more scary things to be scared of.

Worst of all, the horror among horrors: Mack had claustrophobia, a fear of cramped spaces. A fear, to put it as unpleasantly as possible, of being buried alive.

So this was not a twelve-year-old you'd expect to become one of the greatest heroes in human historyânot the person you'd expect would try and save the world from the greatest evil it had ever faced.

But that's our story.

One thing to remember: most heroes end up dead.
Even when they don't end up dead themselves, people around them very often do.

Mack was an okay-looking kid: crazy, curly brown hair; medium height; medium build. He had a serious case of mediumness.

His eyes were brown, too, which is the most common eye color in the world. But there was something else about his eyes. They were eyes that noticed things. Mack didn't miss much.

He noticed how people looked at him, but he also noticed how they looked at each other and how they looked at things, and even how they looked at a printed page.

He noticed details of how people dressed, how they moved, how they spoke, how they trimmed their fingernails, and how they held their book bags. He noticed a lot.

This habit of noticing things was very useful when it came to Mack's hobby, which was provoking bullies and then fleeing from them.

Just five days before Mack learned that he was going to have to save the world, he was first concerned with saving himself.

Mack attended Richard Gere Middle School in Sedona, Arizona. (Go, Fighting Pupfish!) The school was blessed in a number of ways, but cursed in others. It was known to have a number of excellent teachers. It had advanced placement yoga classes, and something called noncompetitive bowling was an elective.

It also had more than its share of bullies, which meant that the bullies had to organize. The bullies at RGMS each had his or her own sphere of influence.

The jocks had a bully, the skaters had a bully, the prep/fashionistas had a bully. The stoners had a bully, but he tended to lose focus and so was not very effective at terrorizing people. The nerds had one bully and the geeks had another. Even the goth kids had a bully, but he was out with mono so the emo bully was filling in.

But there was one bully to rule them all, one bully to find them, one bully to bring them all and in the darkness pound them. And this bully was Stefan Marr.

Like Mack, Stefan Marr was in seventh grade. Unlike Mack, he was fifteen.

Stefan was big, blue-eyed, blond, and handsome.
And he was terrifying.

Stefan was not academically gifted. Let's just put it that way because the alternative way of putting it might be rude. But he was fearless. While Mack had twenty-one identified phobias, Stefan had zero. In fact, you could say his number of phobias was in the negative numbers because there were some scary things that even completely normal people avoided that Stefan went looking for.

When Stefan would see a sign that read, “Beware of Dog,” he would interpret that to mean “come on in.”

On this particular day, a Wednesday in October, Mack would have a run-in with Stefan that would change both of their lives.

The problem had started with Horace Washington III, a kid Mack kind of knew and kind of liked, who was being introduced to the concept of a swirlie. Horace was a nerd, and therefore the swirlie was being administered by Matthew Morgan, the bully for nerds. Matthew was ably assisted by his frequent partner, Camaro Angianelli. Camaro had never gotten over being named after her father's favorite car, and she expressed her sensitive nature by bullying geeks.

Strictly speaking, Camaro should not have been in the boys' bathroom at all, but the last person who had pointed this out to her now ate his meals through a straw.

In any event, Matthew and Camaro had Horace upended. His head was in the toilet and things were falling out of his pockets, but he was squirming and he was a bit on the heavy side, so the two bullies were unable to reach the flush button. So, hearing that someone else was in the bathroom, they called for help.

Mack opened the stall door and immediately saw the problem.

“It's a self-flushing toilet,” Mack pointed out.

“Duh, we're not morons,” Matthew said.

“Then you actually need to move Horace away from the toilet before the flush will activate,” Mack explained.

“That would defeat the entire purpose of a swirlie,” Camaro said. Camaro was not stupid; she was just hostile.

“Yeah,” Matthew agreed, not sure what he had just agreed to.

“There's a manual override button,” Camaro
pointed out, shifting her grip on Horace's ankle.

“Yes,” Mack agreed. “But I don't see why I should help you torture Horace.”

“Because we'll kick your butt,” Matthew said.

This is where a sensible kid would have said, “Good point,” and pushed the manual flush button. But Mack had never been accused of being sensible. He had an innate dislike for bullies.

So he said, “You can try.”

“Try what?” Matthew asked, baffled.

“He means,” Camaro explained patiently, “that we can try to kick his butt. He's implying that we are unable to kick his butt.”

Camaro was an attractive girl in a bodybuilder, zero-percent-body-fat, sleek, and predatory sort of way.

“You see,” Camaro explained in the pedantic manner that had made her a natural fit for the job of bullying geeks, “he's trying to trick us into putting Horace down and chasing him.”

Mack nodded, acknowledging the truth. “You see right through me.”

“Mack, Mack, Mack,” Camaro said. “You're cute.”

“I am,” Mack agreed.

“I don't want to beat you up,” Camaro admitted. “So why don't you just run away?”

Mack sighed. “Okay. But I'm taking this.” He reached down and snagged Matthew's book bag. It was surprisingly light since it contained no booksâjust a pack of Red Vines licorice, a Mountain Dew, and a pair of nunchakus.

This Matthew understood. He released Horace, which put all the weight on Camaro, who was strong but not that strong. Horace plunged but did not swirl. Matthew leaped, but Mack leaped faster.

Mack was out the door, racing down the hallway with Matthew in lumbering pursuit.

Timing worked in Mack's favor. (He had of course noticed the clock on the wall.) The bell rang, ending the school day, and kids exploded from classrooms like buckshot from a shotgun.

Mack unzipped Matthew's book bag, scattering Red Vines everywhere in the crush of frenzied kids.

Mack had a detailed map of the school in his head. He knew every door, every locker, and every closet. He knew which were unlocked, which exits were alarmed,
and where an open window might be found.

He had very little concern that Matthew or Camaro, who had now joined the chase, would actually catch him. He dodged into the chem lab and took the connecting door through to the former chem lab. It was being remodeled following an unfortunate explosion. He noted a ladder, and the roller tray of paint that was perched atop the ladder. He placed Matthew's book bag just so, beneath the ladder.

The windows were open to allow for ventilation, and the painters were on break outside. Mack slid out through the window just as Matthew rushed into the first lab.

Mack crouched outside, just out of sight but not out of hearing, and waited.

“Hey!” Matthew yelled.

Pause.

Mack heard the sound of Matthew's knees popping as he knelt down to pick up his bag.

And thenâ¦
thunk
! Followed by a soggy clattering sound and a cry of pain.

“Arrggh!” Matthew yelled.

Mack knew he shouldn't risk it but he did
anywayâand peeked. Matthew's head was dripping with pale yellow paint. It ran down his face and into his yelling, aggrieved mouth.

Camaro was a half step behind him.

She spotted Mack and was after him in a heartbeat.

Across the open space between Building A and Building C, Mack found an open door. He ran into a crush of kids very similar to those he'd left behind. He worked his way against the flow, intending to exit by the far door, the one that led to the gym.

But then, to his horror, he saw a massive blond beast just coming in through that very door.

No way he could have known that Stefan Marr would be coming from the gym, having previously forgotten his gym clothes and needing (badly) to take them home to be washed.

“Bluff it through,” Mack told himself.

He smiled at Stefan and started to walk very calmly past him. Ten feet and he would be safe. Stefan didn't even know Mack was fleeing.

But then Camaro's voice, a hoarse roar, rose above the happy hubbub. “Bully emergency!” she cried. “I'm
declaring a bully emergency!”

Mack's eyes went wide.

Stefan's eyes narrowed.

Mack leaped for the door, but Stefan wasn't one of those great big guys who's kind of slow and awkward. He was one of those great big guys who was as fast as a snake.

One massive paw shot out and grabbed Mack's T-shirt, and suddenly Mack's feet were no longer in contact with the floor.

He did a sort of Wile E. Coyote beat-feet air-run thing, but the effect was more comical than effective.

Camaro and a paint-dripping Matthew were there in a flash.

“Bully emergency?” Stefan asked. “You two can't handle this runt?”

“Look what he did to me!” Matthew cried, outraged.

“You know the rules,” Camaro said to Stefan. “We dominate through fear. A threat to one of us is a threat to us all.”

Stefan nodded. “Huh,” he said. The word
huh
was roughly one-third of Stefan's vocabulary. It could
mean many things. But in this case it meant, “Yes, I agree that you have properly invoked a bully emergency, in which all bullies must unite to confront a common threat.”

“Better round everyone up,” Stefan said. “The usual.”

Everyone
meant all the other bullies.
The usual
meant the usual place: the Dumpster behind the gym and up against the fence.

“I am going to mess up your face!” Matthew raged at Mack. He pointed for emphasis with a hand dripping pale yellow paint.

“Not the face,” Camaro said. “I like his face.”

Matthew and Camaro went off in pursuit of the others, while Stefan, seeming more weary than highly motivated, stuffed his sweaty shorts into Mack's mouth and dragged him outside.

This was the point where Mack should have started begging, pleading, whining, and bribing. But the weird thing about Mack was that even though he was afraid of puppets, sharks, the ocean, shots, spiders, dentists, fire, Shetland ponies, hair dryers, asteroids, hot-air balloons, blue cheese, tornadoes, mosquitoes,
electrical outlets, bats (the kind that fly and suck your blood), beards, babies, fear itself, and especially being buried alive, he was not afraid of real, actual trouble.

Which, when you think about it, is what tends to get heroes and those around them killed.

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