back and forth as if she was excited and a little scared, but not as if she was about to enjoy a good laugh at his expense. He studied her face for a long moment, then nodded. But then he scowled and pinched the back of her hand.
“Ow! What was that for?”
“It’s no fair!”
“What’s no fair, for chrissakes?”
“You always get to do everything first! I wanna see that dragon, right now!”
“You’re the one who told me Gloria wanted to meet me, turd-breath. Anyhow, you’ll have to wait till morning. The school library is closed now.”
Arnold was about to say he was telling Dad, but for once his brain caught up with his mouth, and he followed her back into the house in sullen silence. Dad was already helping Mom up the stairs to their bedroom. Last month she’d had to go to the emergency room after she tripped at the top and ended up with a mild concussion.
“What was your buddy doing here in Chincoteague, anyhow?” she was asking Dad. “I thought he lived in those barracks outside the fence, over at Wallops Island.”
“Man does not live on ramen noodles alone, Ray,” Dad said.
Arnold had been to Mr. Nomura’s place once. The barracks had been cut into individual apartments with drywall, but the living room still felt barren even with several Japanese prints on the walls and framed family pictures on the end tables he’d scavenged at a yard sale in Salisbury. After Mr. Nomura beat him in three quick games of chess Arnold lost interest and wandered around daydreaming outside in a grassy square that had obviously been used for morning line-ups when the Navy ran the place. He respected the guy for not treating him like a kid, but it sucked to lose at one of the few things besides school that he was actually good at.
Now Arnold followed his parents up the stairs and shut his bedroom door behind him. Finishing his homework didn’t take long. Afterwards he played with the strangely lively spider plant and thought about Gloria. Could Alison be telling the truth? It seemed impossible, but so did a dancing plant. Maybe it was all for real!
* * * *
In the morning, when she shook him awake ten minutes early so he’d have extra time to get through security at school, Arnold jumped out of bed without protest.
Sis clutched her chest and staggered backward. “It—it cannot be! Stupid-head is getting up without having water poured all over him!”
Arnold aimed a kick at her and missed. She stuck her tongue out at him and ran out the door so she wouldn’t have to stand in line with him, which suited him just fine. Still, she had put his bowl of oatmeal with sliced bananas and milk out on the kitchen table for him (for a while, “Banana-Man” had threatened to displace “Gross-Fart” as his nickname at school). Arnold slurped up his breakfast, dribbling oats and milk on his T-shirt in his haste, grabbed his jacket and pounded out the door, not even grunting goodbye to Dad the way he usually did.
On an ordinary morning he would have been early enough to beat the rush at the security checkpoint, but a lot of other families had had the same thought as Alison and he ended up smack in the middle of the line.
Madison was right in front of him, and she put out her hand and shoved him in the chest. “Not so close, spaz.” Her sidekick Kayleigh put her hand over her mouth and giggled. In front of them, Darla Murray, who wore braces and was sometimes almost nice to him, told them to lay off.
“Gonna make us, metal-mouth?” Madison said, and Kayleigh giggled again.
God, Arnold hated them. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Matt’s buddy Jared Nichols was behind him and kept pinching his legs and arms while he had to pretend not to notice.
“Hey Grosssssss-fart, try not to stink up the changing room for us, okay?” he hissed. In case that wasn’t humiliating enough, Madison heard and started snickering. Just ignore them, Arnold told himself. I’m on my way to another planet. Another whole planet! Maybe there, being a nerd will actually be cool! Because it sure isn’t here. But ignoring was awfully hard, especially when Jared gave him a hard shove just as he reached the guards at the entrance. He fell against the huge, perspiring bulk of Mr. Ramsey, who had been fired as a deputy sheriff but found full employment in the schools.
Mr. Ramsey scowled and pushed Arnold away. “Sorry, I tripped,” he muttered.
“Bubba, you can do clumsy here,” Mr. Ramsey said. Arnold followed the tall, skinny guard into the boys’ “changing room,” a windowless box that had once been a supply closet. Everything had been removed from the room, including the dangling, bare light bulb, and fluorescents had been installed, along with a roundish, black bulge just below the ceiling that Arnold presumed was a video camera.
He undressed under the guard’s bored gaze, shoving his tattered jockey shorts under his other clothes for fear Bubba would make the same kind of remarks Matt and Jared and some of the other boys did in the locker room. Bubba snapped on a pair of green rubber gloves and quickly patted Arnold down. He tried to stand still and pretend it didn’t bother him. After all, little kids didn’t get strip searched, so this did prove he was grown up, didn’t it?
A grunt from Bubba let Arnold know he could get dressed again. He picked up his book-bag and put it through a wide slot in the wall, onto a conveyor belt for atomic analysis. This technology, a gift of the High Ones, posed no risk of radiation exposure, unlike old-fashioned human-invented X-ray machines. He wished the High Ones had some way of making the stuff in his backpack shrink temporarily so it wouldn’t be such a struggle to shove it through that slot every morning. Walking out the door, he reached out his right hand to grab it by the strap, when a long-fingered, hairy-backed hand came down on his wrist.
“Not so fast, chief,” Bubba said. “I got to go through your bag.”
“But it was just scanned,” Arnold pointed out. “That machine can pinpoint anything hazardous down to an angstrom across—one ten-billionth of a meter.”
Bubba’s head bobbed up and down as if his neck was loose—Arnold thought of dinosaurs. The guard sniffed and rubbed his upper lip with his forefinger. It looked like he was trying to grow a mustache. “Got to go through your bag, chief.”
“But the machine is always good enough. You never go through bags by hand!”
“Come on, chief, you’re holding up the line.”
Arnold’s knees began to tremble. Being strip searched was embarrassing and uncomfortable, but when it came right down to it he could always pretend he was somewhere else, doing something else. He despised his runty, clumsy, ears-sticking-out, pale little body that everyone else made fun of, anyway. But the stuff hidden among the chaos in his binder—that was where he really lived. Where the real Sir Arnold, Warrior Prince, lived and had adventures drawn in pencil and written down in a furtive, blocky hand. Where he rode out every day to rescue Princess Hailee from the endless series of threats she was helpless to escape from—fire-breathing dragons, bone-crushing trolls, tentacled creatures almost too terrible to draw in all their horror. And she knew how to express her gratitude to her gallant Sir Arnold, did Princess Hailee.
If anyone else got a glimpse of that, he was dead. So he stuck out his chin—his pasty, pointy, pimple-bedecked chin—and said to Bubba, “No, you can’t go through my bag.”
On such tiny acts of defiance, fate sometimes turns.
CHAPTER 5
At lunchtime in the high school Alison was hanging out with Shaniqua. They were both eating their brown-bag lunches (egg salad for Alison, ham and cheese on rye for Shaniqua) when Sydney sashayed over, swinging her hips as if every boy wasn’t already staring at her while pretending not to. She tossed her curly blond hair back and said to Alison, “Didja hear what your spazzo little brother did?”
The bite of sandwich Alison was working on almost went down the wrong way. She choked and took a sip of her cardboard-flavored skim milk. “No, but you’re going to tell me, right?”
“He