Masterminds (4 page)

The highlight of the day is the big water polo match between Team Solidarity and Team Community. Actually, that part's pretty good. Water polo is just about the only chance to take out some of my frustration at living here. I accomplish this by aiming the ball at my opponents' heads. I wouldn't exactly call it textbook strategy, but then again, I wouldn't exactly call Happy Valley a town either.

Believe it or not, people get pretty rah-rah about water polo around here, because the season synchs up with Serenity Day. Nobody gets this excited about our other three sports, badminton, gymnastics, and croquet. But it can be pretty wild at the pool when Community and Solidarity battle it out. Hector's parents always cheer the loudest. I think they're just thrilled that he's made it through another big game without drowning.

Don't get me wrong: I love Hector. Driving Hector crazy is my favorite form of entertainment.

All the dopey chores my parents cook up for me—he does them, no complaints, just to hear me say thanks. I can't say that too often, though. Don't want to spoil the guy.

I haven't had to cut the grass, rake leaves, or pick up some random thing at the store in years. Hector's the ultimate school accessory too. He did a great job on my research paper on tigers—it got a B-plus, which isn't bad for me. Any higher, and Mrs. Laska might get suspicious. Good old Hector.

I guess what I'm saying is he's fun to have around. And fun is hard to come by in Serenity, New Mexico, the most boring pimple on the rocky butt of the Southwest. Not that I have anything to compare it to. I've never
been past the city limits. And I use the word
city
very generously.

Wherever I go, I can count on Hector trailing along. Poor kid—when I ride my skateboard, he has to sprint. He sweats a lot. I try not to let him see me laughing.

Then there's the day I look over my shoulder, and the little shrimp's coming around the corner, struggling along on a skateboard of his own. He rides it like he has one leg instead of two. Or maybe it has square wheels. His parents don't seem to like him very much—it's kind of sad. They probably bought him a lousy one.

He looks terrified that he's going to kill himself. The only thing keeping him going is the hope that I'm going to see him and be impressed.

“Malik! Back here!”

I pretend not to hear.

“Hey, wait up!”

It goes on like this for a while. His pleas for attention grow more desperate as he runs out of breath.

Eventually I figure he's had enough, so I stop. The goofy grin on his face as he finally rolls up is totally worth it.

“I got a skateboard!”

So what? We get everything we want in Serenity—pools,
trampolines, video game systems. I remember when we were six, we got those big electric cars. Mine was the Hummer; Hector went for some kind of Mercedes. This, in a community where you can walk from one side to the other in eight minutes, max, even on first-grade legs. We should be the poster town for spoiling your kids. Maybe that's why Contentment is one of our main classes at school. I wonder how they teach Contentment in places where kids don't have as much stuff.

Now he's waiting—dying for me to say something.

So I don't.

He pushes. “What do you think?”

“About what?”

He gets shy. “I figured you could give me some pointers—you know, because you're so good.”

That gives me an idea. “Follow me!” With a few pumps of my leg, I'm up to full speed, leading him on an obstacle course through the hardest streets in town—rough road surfaces, speed bumps, sewer gratings. The houses glide by, white and immaculate, not a shutter out of position; the lawns are groomed and green, the flower beds well tended and perfect. Even the pink flamingoes have been freshly power-washed. It's like an insult to manhood.

I glance over my shoulder and feel a twinge of something close to pride. Hector's following—way behind, but give him props, he's following. I've got one more card up my sleeve, and it's the ace of spades. I wheel around the circle onto Fellowship Avenue, which runs past the plastics factory. The thing is Fellowship is the steepest hill in town. It took me years to get up the courage to attempt it on a skateboard. There's no way a newbie like Hector can handle it.

I fly down the grade, grooving on the wind, which is strong enough to cut into the heat of the day. Then I turn and look up. The least I can do is wait at the bottom to pick up the pieces as they land. Hector hesitates, but only for a second. Then he's on the way down, his body straight as a poker, his arms windmilling for balance as the board accelerates. I almost wish he would fall off now, before he picks up enough speed for it to be a total wipeout. My dad's the local doctor, but he doesn't need me to drum up business.

With a click, the factory's long electronic rear gate slides open, and a double-wide flatbed truck begins to nose out into the street. The payload is piled high with orange traffic cones—hundreds of them; maybe thousands. It's
a familiar sight around Serenity—a shipment of cones heading out of town.

The truck tries to turn up Fellowship, but it's too long, so the driver has to take another cut. That's when I realize that the whole street is blocked, and there's no way Hector is going to be able to stop a speeding skateboard in time.

“Hector—jump—
jump
!”

Doesn't it figure? All day he's been trying to get me to talk to him. And now he's too petrified to listen—although I probably would be, too, if I was hurtling at terminal velocity toward a giant truck.

I hop off my board and start up the slope, sprinting flat-out. I know a moment of real fear when I see how fast he's coming. But it's too late to think about that now. It's my fault he's on this hill to begin with. I can't let him get killed.

“Jump, idiot!”

He's frozen like a statue.

I slip past the transport before the driver backs up again for the second cut. I line the kid up, and snatch him bodily off his board, which rolls under the truck, and keeps on going. The two of us hit the pavement hard, somersaulting one over the other. We take a pretty big beating, bumping and scraping along the pavement. At one point,
I see that my shirt is covered in blood, and I kind of panic before I realize that it's coming from Hector's nose.

The driver jumps out of the truck and comes over to see if we're still alive. “Are you okay? Don't you know it's dangerous to skateboard down a hill like that?”

The guy seems to think that
I
was the one who almost got killed, since I've got the most blood on me. But Hector looks pretty bad, too, and his nose is still gushing. He struggles to his feet, steadying himself against the side of the truck and bleeding all over a stack of cones. Three big sneezes spray gore over a wide area.

The driver is worried. “Maybe I should call the Surety.”

That's all we have to hear. We're right by the factory, so there must be Purple People Eaters just on the other side of the gate. Those guys creep me out. And who knows the penalty for bleeding on their precious traffic cones?

“It's okay, mister,” Hector sniffles. “We're fine.”

Well, what do you know? Shrimp has the brains to be cool about something. We both get up, sidestep the truck, and run after our skateboards.

At the bottom of the slope, we pick up our boards and walk. Hector is impressed. “Do you believe that? We bled together! Like blood brothers!”

I have to laugh. “If you don't shut up, I'm going to take you back to the top of the hill.” His nose twitches. “And don't sneeze on me! You want me to get sick?”

“I don't have a cold. Didn't you see how dusty those cones were? I'm allergic.”

“Being a wimp doesn't count as an allergy.”

I learn two things that day. First, never skateboard with Hector Amani. I mean, I love messing with the kid and all that. But he's such a spaz that he's going to get himself killed one of these days, and I don't want that to be on me.

Second, the Serenity Plastics Works is about as intelligently run as everything else in this one-horse town. Whenever I see one of those trucks now, I check it out. Hector's right—those cones really
are
covered in dust. Who knows how long their product sits around before they bother to ship it out?

This is the factory that's supposed to be our claim to fame? Those cones aren't just dusty; they're dirty. On one of the trucks, there's this dark, crusty stuff on some of them. If I didn't know better, I'd swear it's Hector's nosebleed.

But all that happened days ago.

There's something different about Randy, and it isn't just because he's leaving.

He never comes to see me in the clinic, even though I'm there two nights.

“I knew you were okay,” is his shrugged explanation when I finally get over to his house. “What's the point of us hanging around a hospital bed, listening to Bruder's lame jokes?”

If it happened to you, I'd be there in a heartbeat!
I almost blurt.

I'm sort of hurt. When Randy broke his ankle last year, I spent even more time than usual at the Hardaways' because I felt bad for him being all cooped up. We even invented a new challenge—crutch-ball home run derby.

That's always been the best part of being best friends with Randy. You spend 80 percent of your time laughing. He can make a game out of anything. I had visions of us racing up and down the hall—me on the wheeled IV stand and him on a rolling instrument cart. Or something even crazier. There's no limit to the guy's creativity.

But now he doesn't even meet my eyes. “I have to pack.”

“I'll help,” I offer.

No good. “My mom's driving me nuts with it. She's got everything in these color-coded boxes. It's a train wreck up there.”

“I still don't understand why you have to go at all.”

“Yeah, tell me about it.”

I can tell I've hit a nerve, so I try to cheer him up. “Well, we should definitely get in a couple of challenges before you leave. How about the truck-tire scooter jump? We never quite nailed that one.”

Just for a moment, the old Randy shows up. His eyes dance. “It occurred to me to stick the boomerang back in the pool filter for old times' sake. I wouldn't even be here to get in trouble for it.”

I sigh. “At least you'll be with your grandparents.”

He looks at me as if I have a cabbage for a head.

“Randy, did you remember to pack your—” Mrs. Hardaway comes up behind her son and fixes me with an unreadable expression. Anger? Resentment? Fear, even? I'm taken aback. It isn't my fault her parents need help on their farm. That's what's sending Randy away, not me.

Then she stuns me even more. “Sorry, Eli, but Randy has a lot of things to do before he's ready.”

In other words, get lost.

My best friend is being shipped off to Colorado, and I'm barely going to have the chance to say good-bye.

We throw Randy a going away party at school, with a frozen yogurt cake and his favorite chips—fiery jalapeño and lime. There are only thirty kids in the whole town—nineteen of us in the upper school classroom, so it isn't exactly a big blowout.

“One of the unique things about Serenity is that we're all like a family,” Dad says in his capacity as principal. He chuckles. “There are some extended families larger than our entire population. But when one of our own moves on, it's like we're losing a brother or a nephew. It leaves an empty space that's impossible to fill. We'll miss you, Randy.”

I find myself suddenly annoyed. In the past, Dad
has mentioned at least fifty times how much he wished there was another school in town so Randy could go to it. Dad's not going to come close to missing Randy. Isn't that almost like lying?

Mrs. Laska speaks next, but she says some nice things you can tell she really means. At the end, she gives Randy a big hug and actually tears up a little.

“Speech!” calls Stanley Cole, and a few others join in.

Randy's face is bright red. “Who says I like jalapeño chips?”

Even Dad smiles at that one.

Tori Pritel sits down beside me. “I've never seen Randy so embarrassed.”

“You can't embarrass Randy. Remember the time he ran out of bathing suits so he played water polo in boxers?” I study the floor. “Then again, what do I know?”

She turns in surprise, her long dark hair shifting on her shoulders. “You should know more than anybody. You guys are best friends.”

“You'd think so, right?” I should probably keep my mouth shut, but there's something about Tori that puts me at ease. With Amber, you always feel like you're being judged; with Malik, you're afraid he'll make fun of you,
or worse, file it away so he can use it against you later. Tori's the opposite. “Every time I go over to Randy's, it's the same story: ‘I have to pack.' How much packing can anybody do? Lewis and Clark didn't pack this much. He's avoiding me.”

“He's sad, you're sad,” she contends. “Nobody ever leaves town, so we're extra sensitive to any change. Remember how weird it was when Mrs. Delaney got here?”

Mrs. Delaney is our water polo coach. She's super-nice and also a great source of information about the outside world. She came to town about six months ago when she married one of the Purple People Eaters.

“Maybe,” I concede, “but that doesn't explain everything. Like why all this is happening so fast. I've barely heard Randy even mention his grandparents before—have you? I'm in the clinic for
two days
and suddenly he's going to
live
with them?”

“I'm guessing the Hardaways have been considering this for a long time,” Tori reasons. “They just didn't tell Randy because they didn't want to worry him—you know how parents are. So when the decision gets made, it seems like it's coming out of nowhere. But it's really been brewing awhile.”