The Miraculous Makeover of Lizard Flanagan (2 page)

We turned to him.

“If people are made that small, they'd shrink right out of their clothes. Did the aliens take them all back
naked?
”

We all laughed, and Ed put Stinky in a headlock and rapped his knuckles on Stinky's head while he yowled.

I looked over Zach's shoulder and saw some girls staring at us.

“I think we're being watched,” I murmured.

Zach looked back at the girls. All of them laughed and squealed and turned the other way. Except for one girl. She stood tall, her long, wavy blond hair blowing behind her shoulders in the breeze. She was beautiful. She gazed straight at Zach, smiling slightly.

“What's with them?” I said.

“I think they like you, Walters,” Sam said, giving Zach a little shove.

“Yeah, right.” Zach grinned and shoved Sam back. He glanced over again at the girls, who squealed louder this time. He shrugged and then turned back to me. “When do you get your bike out of the shop?”

“Late this afternoon,” I said. “Back derailleur finally gave out.”

“Doesn't surprise me,” he said. “It wasn't working too well on our trip a couple of weeks ago.”

“Yeah, the shifting's been pretty ragged. It'll be great to have it working smooth again.”

“After school, do you want to come over and see my birthday loot?”

Zach had had his twelfth birthday a couple of weeks ago. Mary Ann, Sam, Ed, Stinky, and I had chipped in and given him a genuine, regulation-size pigskin football. It was a beaut and had set us back several allowances.

“Yeah,” I said. “What else did you get?”

Zach grinned. “Some pretty good stuff. You'll see.” He looked around at Mary Ann, Ed, and Stinky. “You guys want to come, too?”

“Sure,” they said.

The bell rang and all the kids started walking in one huge crowd toward the school.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and saw a girl with curly, short, dark hair. She'd been in the group of squealers who had stared at Zach a minute earlier.

“You know that guy with the dark hair?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. I started to say,
I
usually know the people I stand around with
, but I decided I might sound too smart, so I kept my mouth shut.

“What's his name?” she asked.

“Zach Walters,” I said.

“Zach Walters? Oh, he's gorgeous!” she said, rolling her eyes. Then she turned to the girl standing next to her, the beautiful girl with all that blond hair. “Zach Walters!” she said breathlessly. The blonde glanced at me, nodded to her girl friend, and they moved on.

Zach, gorgeous? I almost laughed. Good old Zach. I shook my head and pressed toward the door. These girls didn't know anything about him, but they were acting weird because of the way he looked. I didn't get it.

There were lots of girls in the crowd surrounding me. Most of them looked like the Heather Parks-Jennifer Wilkes-Tiffany Brady squealer types. Somehow I had the feeling there weren't too many girls like Mary Ann and me in the crowd. I decided that during the day when we were in the orange and black groups, I'd have to stick close to Ed and Stinky. Maybe I'd get to know some of the guys who'd played on the other metro teams last year.

I didn't know at the time, though, how tough that was going to be. I didn't know about the terrible thing that was already spreading through the school like some contagious disease. If I had, I might have headed home right then and refused ever to go to school again.

Because the kids in my class weren't the same kids I'd said good-bye to last spring at Washington Elementary.

They'd already started through The Change.

2

The first day of school is always hectic and crazy, but the first day of middle school was downright nuts.

Truman is big compared to Washington Elementary. It has three floors that all look the same: lockers line the halls in between classroom doors. I wondered how I'd remember what floor I was on, especially between classes when all the kids were rushing in every direction.

Kids were talking a lot in the hall as I made my way to homeroom.

“If you get Larson for social studies, don't be late. I heard he yells at you in front of the whole class.”

“I hope I don't have math before P.E. I can't go from the third floor way down to the gym in five minutes' passing time!”

“Don't let Mr. Brown hear you call him ‘baldy.' He threw a kid out of class last year for that. He's real sensitive.”

There was a lot to learn starting middle school. I hoped I could remember it all.

In homeroom everybody was assigned lockers. Our homeroom teacher, Ms. Embers, led us to our locker section along the wall on the second floor. We practiced opening them with the combination locks. The assignments were alphabetical, so I shared a locker with a girl named Ginger Flush. Turned out she was the squealer who'd asked me Zach's name before school.

I'm usually good at mechanical stuff, but my lock had me stumped. Of course, it didn't help that Ginger stood there flapping her mouth the whole time I was trying to figure it out.

“Do you know him?” she asked, pointing to a dark-haired kid tossing some of the stuff from his sports bag into a locker.

“Jeff Neidermeyer,” I said. “He's a great football player. Quarterback.”

Ginger twisted strands of her curly, brown hair between two fingers. “He's gorgeous.”

I stared at the paper with the three numbers on it. “I don't get it. I'm following the directions for this combination, but it still won't open.”

I was getting pretty frustrated because most of the rest of the kids had their lockers open already. I felt sweat bloom on my forehead.

Ginger poked my arm. “Is that cutie in the blue shirt over there from your old school?”

I looked up. “Hunh-uh,” I said. “He went to Jefferson. Mark McKey. He played third base for my metro baseball team.”

“How about that guy standing next to the water fountain?” she said.

“Matt Ryerson,” I said impatiently. “Ginger, I'm trying to get this locker open, okay?”

“Gee,” she said, “this is great. You must know every cute boy in this school.”

“I played on the metro baseball and football teams,” I said. “Just let me work on this lock now, okay?”

“So you're a jock!” she exclaimed. “What a super way to meet boys!”

I looked up at her. Ginger was some piece of work.

I tried the combination one more time.

She poked me in the back. “How about that boy with the reddish-blond hair over there?” she said.

I jerked around angrily and looked. “Yeah,” I said. “That's my brother, Sam.”

Her eyes practically bugged out of her head. “Your brother? Oh, wow, that's fantastic! He's a hottie!”

“You've got to be kidding,” I said.

“Hey,” she said, “I wouldn't kid you about a cute boy. Put in a good word for me, okay?”

I stared at her. “I don't even
know
you.”

“So?” she said. “We're locker partners!”

“Ginger,” I said, “we were thrown together because of the first two letters of our last names. I've known you for two minutes.”

“No, it's fate! Don't you see?” she said, beaming. “When we were born into our families—people whose names began with
FL
—we were destined to be put together. We're
supposed
to be friends. Isn't that great?”

What could I say to that? “Just great.”

I went back to the combination.

Ms. Embers strolled by. She had big glasses and very long legs. She stood about twelve feet tall.

“Ms. Embers,” I called out over the noise of lockers slamming and kids talking. “I can't get this locker open.”

She strode over to me in two gigantic steps. “Go ahead and try it again,” she said.

I did and, like magic, it opened.

I felt my face heat up. Boy, did I feel dumb.

“See? No problem,” said Ms. Embers. She strolled away.

The rest of the day wasn't much better. Most of the sixth-grade girls hung around in groups from their old schools, staring at and talking about kids from the other elementary schools. The boys hung around together, too, but they were quieter.

My classes, except for phys. ed., looked as if they were going to be pretty boring, even science, which is one of my better subjects. Language arts is my worst subject—all that reading and writing—but my teacher, Ms. Yeck (that's really her name; I wouldn't kid you) seemed kind of entertaining. Mary Ann said that her older sister told her that Ms. Yeck's name is Pearl, and the kids call her Squirrely Pearly, but not to her face. The word was that she was a fun teacher but you didn't learn a whole lot.

Anyway, Squirrely Pearly had each of us go up to the board and write our name. She said that you can learn a lot about people from the way they write their signatures. After she'd said that, all the girls tried to write in their most flowery handwriting. Heather Parks had the most rounded letters you ever saw, and Bonnie Wilson dotted her
i
's with little hearts. I almost laughed out loud at that.

The guys wrote in messy scrawls on purpose. Even Adam Matthews, whose handwriting usually looks like an electric typewriter, scratched his name in an unreadable scribble. I printed, as usual—I hate writing in cursive—and, as usual, you could read it, but you had to look close.

Ed Mechtensteimer, who sat two seats away from me, grinned as I walked back to my seat and gave me a thumbs-up sign. “Says a lot about your character,” he said.

“Oh, yeah? What does it say?” I asked him.

“That you're almost as smart as I am.”

I grinned and rolled my eyes. “You wish, Mechtenstupid.”

Nathan Morgan, sitting between us, cracked up at that. “If I have to look at someone's paper during a test,” he said, “I'm looking at Lizard's.”

“I heard that, Nathan,” Squirrely Pearly said. “We move our desks around the room during a test. You'll be right next to me.”

Everybody laughed, even Nathan, who got a red face.

It was kind of hard to sit there in class and breathe normally. Chris Mulray, a fun girl who had started a great food fight in the cafeteria last year, was sitting next to me. Chris was wearing even more perfume than my aunt Amanda, and you can tell that my aunt's been in a room a day after she's gone home.

Anyway, when Chris got up and walked to the blackboard, she stirred up the air as she walked by, and I nearly passed out. I looked at Ed, grabbed my throat, and stuck out my tongue. He and Nathan grinned and started coughing loudly.

I looked at the raised window next to the pencil sharpener and put up my hand.

“Yes, Elizabeth?” said Squirrely Pearly.

Ed stopped coughing, looked at me and snickered.

“Can I sharpen my pencil?” I asked.

“You won't be needing your pencil today,” Squirrely said.

“Then can I stick my head out the window? I need some fresh air.”

Some of the kids laughed, and Chris turned around from the blackboard. She'd just written
Christine
in big, loopy letters.

Squirrel Pearly tried not to smile. “Okay, but just for a minute.”

I walked to the window and took a deep breath of air.

Ed put up his hand. “Me, too?”

“How about a gas mask?” Tom Luther said from across the room.

Everybody cracked up except Chris, who glared at me and hurried back to her chair.

“
Christine?
” said Nathan, reading her name off the board. “You're Christine this year?”

“Yeah,” Chris snapped. “You have a problem with that, Nathan?”

I looked at Chris. Last year she'd aimed a spoonful of mashed potatoes halfway across the cafeteria and scored a direct hit on Tiffany Brady. Now she was almost acting like Tiffany. Why would Chris start dowsing herself with perfume and want to be called
Christine?
Normally, she would've decked Nathan Morgan for teasing her. And what was this Nathan stuff? Last year he was Morgan. She sure had changed over the summer.

“Ready for lunch?” Ed asked me after class.

“Yeah,” I said. “You too?”

“Yeah. Man, I'm hungry!”

I grinned at him. “You're always hungry, Mechtensteimer.”

We walked down the crowded hall, getting jostled on all sides. A bright-red poster welcoming everyone back to school was on the wall near the entrance to the cafeteria. Next to it was another poster announcing a Welcome to Truman Middle School dance for sixth graders. It seemed as if there were posters everywhere. I'd already seen them advertising the chess club, the math club, and tryouts for the fall play.

“Hey, Lizard!” Zach was standing with Stinky at the cafeteria door. He grinned at me. “You guys eat now?”

“Yeah.”

“Great.”

“At least we have lunch together,” I said.

We left our books on a table in the middle of the room and got in line behind Mike Herman and Andy Walinsky.

“So who's going to win the World Series?” Mike said.

“Atlanta,” Andy said.

“The Cardinals,” said Stinky.

“It doesn't matter who's going to win the World Series,” I said. “What's important is who the best team is.”

“Uh-oh,” Ed said. “Don't get Lizard started on baseball. She's obsessed with the Cubs.”

I ignored him. “The Chicago Cubs aren't getting to the World Series, but they're still the best all-around team in the country.”

Stinky snorted. “Yeah, right! If the Cubs are so good, why haven't they been in the top of their division for the last hundred years? If a team is good, they'll get to the World Series at some point.”

“You're full of it, Stinky,” I said. “Look at their long-term record. Look at Edwin Jackson. His fastball averages 95 miles an hour! And Starlin Castro's always a crowd favorite. In his very first game he set a record for RBIs in a major league debut!”