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  Bryan turned and looked at Heather, who quickly glanced back down at her Stonehenge. It was the longest string of words he’d ever heard her tie together.

  “So you know about me and Chris Wattly?” If Heather knew, that meant everyone knew.

  Heather nodded self-consciously. “How you called him a fart-eating orangutan and said his mother was so dumb she ate twelve boxes of Wheat Thins hoping to get skinny?”

  Oz snorted. Mr. Jenkins looked his way to make sure he didn’t have a jar of rubber cement in his hands. Bryan gave his best friend another piercing look, then turned back to Heather. “I never said that.”

  Heather met his eyes. “Oh,” she answered. “That’s too bad.”

  Bryan looked at Heather McDonald—all four and a half feet of her, bangs kept long to hide her hazel eyes, tucked into a sweater a size too big, so that she looked like a turtle with an oversize shell. Heather McDonald, who had probably been teased most of her life just for being an introvert and having freckles. “Guys like that need to be brought down a peg,” she added, blushing at the very idea.

  Bryan finished gluing the top of the Eiffel Tower and set it aside to dry. “Not by guys like me, they don’t,” he said.

  Heather shrugged. When she scrunched her shoulders up, her head nearly vanished inside the wool. “Do one thing every day that scares you.” She placed the final candy on top of her Stonehenge cairn.

  “Winston Churchill?” Bryan guessed, half jokingly.

  “Eleanor Roosevelt.”

  “Wasn’t she on the last season of Survivor?” Oz said, desperate to be part of the conversation.

  Heather groaned and shook her head. Bryan glued the base of the Eiffel Tower in the general vicinity of France, though it was large enough to dwarf most of western Europe. Oz finished repairing a section of the Great Wall of China by regluing the LEGO that had come loose. The three of them sat back and stared at their project. It was, by far, the best in the class. Heather said it was beautiful, and Bryan said, “Yeah. It really is.”

  Oz reached out and fingered the top of the Play-Doh Mount Rushmore. “This must be exactly how God felt.”

  Bryan and Heather both looked at him funny. Then Heather carefully set the globe aside to finish drying and excused herself to go use the restroom. When she was gone, Oz and Bryan hunkered down behind their earth, away from Mr. Jenkins’s sweeping gaze.

  “So . . . you still mad?”

  Bryan looked at Oz’s dopey face, then up at the clock. He had managed to stay angry for nearly thirty minutes. It was a record. But he wasn’t going to let Oz off that easy. “You owe me,” he said.

  Oz nodded. “I know.”

  “No. Literally owe me,” Bryan continued. “You want to make me not mad at you anymore, give me some money.”

  Oz stopped pouting. “You’re serious?”

  Bryan patted his nearly empty pockets. He literally had only a cent to his name. “I’ve only got one coin left, and I don’t know how many I’m going to need. I’m desperate.” He snapped his fingers.

  “This is extraction,” Oz said, reaching into his own pocket.

  “You mean extortion,” Bryan said. “And it isn’t. This is you making up for ruining my life.”

  Oz held his hands up, palms out. Empty.

  “Nothing?” Bryan asked. Then the Wizard of Elmhurst Park reached behind Bryan’s ear and produced a shiny quarter with a flourish, holding it between two fingers.

  “Ta-da.”

  “Neat,” Bryan said, pretending to be impressed by a trick he’d seen Oz perform a dozen times. “What else you got?”

  Oz shrugged. “That’s it, man. Sorry.”

  One measly quarter. That’s all Bryan’s forgiveness was worth. It would have to do.

  “All right, people,” Mr. Jenkins called. “Let’s start cleaning up.”

  Bryan helped Oz put the supplies away, then went back to his desk, pulled his knees up, and shed the second skin of cement from the tips of his fingers. As he peeled, he thought about Jess and the time they’d spent half of art class looking at each other’s fingerprints in the films of dried Elmer’s. Anytime he used glue, he thought of her. And lots of other times too.

  Mr. Jenkins was inspecting everyone’s progress. “I see some groups still have work to do. Those of you who are finished, why don’t you bring them up to the front and show them to the rest of the class. Bryan, it looks like your group is done.” Winston Churchill motioned for someone in Bryan’s group to step forward. Bryan started to get up but then thought better of it.

  Not today. That would just be asking for it. He wasn’t about to make himself the center of attention—again. Oz could do it. It would be part of his atonement. But as Bryan turned around, he caught Heather’s eye.

  Heather, who was sitting all the way in the back, closest to the table. Right next to their project. Bryan pointed at their globe and raised his eyebrows. She shook her head emphatically. Bringing things to the front of the class was not something Heather McDonald did. Not any day. Not ever. But Bryan shook his head right back at her. “El-a-nor Roos-a-velt,” he mouthed. Do one thing every day that scares you.

  Heather groaned, but she pushed herself out of her chair with a louder-than-usual screech and carefully picked up their monument-laden papier-mâché globe with both hands. He could see by the look in her eyes that she despised him at that moment. She made her way toward the front of the room, warily maneuvering between the aisles, careful not to bump into anyone, the planet cradled in her hands. Bryan watched with satisfaction. She might hate him now, but he knew this was good for her. Later she would appreciate it. She would tell her husband how some boy in middle school named Bryan Biggins helped pull her out of her shell, turning her into the determined, outgoing woman she was today. Bryan smiled, then looked down the aisle.

  He stopped smiling.

  He saw the foot a second too late to do anything about it. It was Tiffany Collins, one of the girls who sat at Missy Middleton’s table at lunch, upper echelon of the pyramid. It was a sly maneuver. A no-look move so that she could plead her innocence afterward if necessary, but it was obvious to Bryan, who had been tripped enough times to know.

  He watched as Heather’s toe caught on Tiffany’s outstretched boot. Saw one knee buckle. Saw the look of horror on Heather’s pale-as-snow face, the recognition of what was happening, all too late, her loss of control. He saw her immediate future, sprawled out on the floor. Saw the two dozen fingers stabbing at the air around her, pointing and laughing. She squeaked as she fell.

  Bryan watched the world spin.

  And then everything slowed way down. Or it seemed to slow. Except for Bryan, who was still moving at normal speed. He practically leaped out of his chair, heading toward Heather and the world they had built together. She juggled it—the earth. Once. Twice. He saw it on her fingertips. She didn’t take her eyes off of it. She was more concerned with holding on to the world than catching herself, but she just couldn’t. It slipped out of her fingers and hit the desk beside her, smashing the LEGO Great Wall to pieces. The earth bounced once, still in slow motion, as if time itself were drawing to an end. The Eiffel Tower splintered and collapsed. It was Armageddon.

  Bryan dodged between chairs, between the seats of his wide-eyed classmates, watching the earth roll forward to the edge of the desk, none of them bothering to stop it. They were bystanders, half of them observing the globe roll toward its doom, the other half staring at the body of Heather McDonald spread across the floor. Even Mr. Jenkins stood there, unmoving.

  The earth hit the edge of the desk.

  Bryan leaped over Heather’s prone body.

  The world plummeted.

  He dived. Arms outstretched. Chest and knees and elbows slamming into the cold, dusty cement floor, knocking the wind out of him. Reaching. Reaching. Reaching.

  He felt it. Dropping into his palms, the paint still tacky in places, the fingers of one hand knocking over the Great Pyramid. Yet he held on, even as he hit the f
loor, even as the air was ripped out of him, not daring to take his eyes off of it. The whole world in his hands.

  Everything sped back up again.

  Bryan shook away the dizziness and chanced a look around. At his classmates, who all stared back at him. At Mr. Churchill-Jenkins, whose own hands were clasped over his heart. At Tiffany, swiftly pulling her foot back under her desk but scowling at him as she did.

  At Heather McDonald. Who lay on the ground beside him. Who, for some reason, was not being laughed at, despite the fact that she had gone down like the Titanic. Who looked at him with a strange gleam in her eyes, as if he had just saved her life.

  And at Oz, who was finally out of his chair, well after the fact, and was crouched next to them.

  “Dude,” he said, staring at Bryan, his voice couched in awe. “You did it. You actually did it.”

  He pointed to the globe, mostly intact, nestled in Bryan’s grip.

  “You actually saved the world.”

  1:30 p.m.

  The Beast in the Darkness

  Fifty XP.

  That’s how many experience points you get for saving the world. The equivalent of reading aloud a scene of Shakespeare. Fifty experience points. And he hadn’t even leveled up.

  “Seems kind of cheap,” Oz said when Bryan told him about the words he saw arcing above their papier-mâché globe at the end of social studies. The same color as always, hovering right over Earth like a vibrant blue cloud.

  +50 XP.

  Much better than the experience points, at least, was the mumbled thank-you from Heather, who then turned and shot daggers at Tiffany Collins, who rolled her eyes right back.

  Bryan’s knees and elbows hurt from the landing. He had jarred his teeth slamming into the floor. Who said saving the world would be easy? He walked with Oz through the halls.

  “So that wasn’t it, then. Saving the world,” Oz wondered. “That wasn’t enough?”

  “I don’t think that was it.” Fifty experience points was good and all, but keeping their social studies project from smashing on the floor wasn’t what he was destined to do, apparently. It was a side quest, if anything. A lucky catch. The game wasn’t over. Bryan would know when it was over. He didn’t know how he would know, but he would know.

  “So there’s still something left, right? Something big? Something important?” Oz prodded.

  Bryan knew what his friend was thinking. He knew because Bryan had been thinking the same thing. All through fifth period. Ever since he’d left the cafeteria. They stopped in the hall outside of Bryan’s next class, the last one before band.

  “It’s him.” Bryan didn’t even have to say his name. “I have to face him.”

  Oz nodded. “The Demon King,” he whispered.

  “The Sovereign of Darkness.”

  “It makes perfect sense,” Oz said.

  Bryan shot Oz a dirty look.

  “I mean, in its own completely messed-up way it makes sense. Sort of.”

  He was right. There was a certain insane logic to it. All of this had to be building to something. A final confrontation. Bryan checked the time on his phone. He had less than two and a half hours left till his rendezvous with Tank.

  “And what happens if you don’t meet him?” Oz asked. “Do you lose?”

  Suddenly Bryan didn’t see any way he could win. “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t worry,” Oz said, putting both hands on Bryan’s shoulders. “We’ll think of something. Just make it through . . . what do you have left?”

  “Science,” Bryan muttered.

  He could tell Oz wanted to say, What could possibly go wrong in science? Except Myra had said the same thing about social studies. So he just kept his mouth shut and gave Bryan’s shoulders a squeeze. “Hang in there,” was all he could offer.

  Bryan watched Oz go, gently prodding at his purple nose. In the room, Mr. Tomlins, the science teacher, was bent over one of the lab tables, messing with something underneath. The other kids were all seated already, whispering to one another. One of them, Vanessa, who had been sitting next to Tiffany in social studies, pointed at Bryan and smirked. Everyone else at her table laughed. He couldn’t imagine the kinds of things that were being said about him behind his back today.

  Mr. Tomlins motioned for everyone to be quiet as Bryan found his seat by the door. Tomlins was wearing his lab coat today. Not a good sign. Bryan had been hoping they would just watch a video or something, anything to keep him out of trouble, but lab coat meant hands-on learning, which even on a normal day usually meant disaster.

  “Today we are going to continue our discussion of behavioral science—specifically the idea of conditioning: training your brain to respond a certain way to outside stimuli.” Bryan watched Mr. Tomlins pace back and forth behind his giant granite-topped desk in the front of the room. The man was short—barely over five feet—and wore thin glasses that seemed to get lost on his wide red face. His balding forehead glared in the overhead lights. He reminded Bryan a little of that Muppet—the puffy-faced science guy with glasses but no eyeballs on his melon head.

  “For example, the next time that bell rings, all of you will immediately forget everything I’ve told you. You will scramble for your backpacks, and you will rush out that door without so much as a simple thank-you for all the mind-blowing knowledge I bestowed upon you today. You will do so mindlessly, as you have for the last several weeks of school, because it is a conditioned response. The bell is a stimulus and you are conditioned to act a certain way when you hear it.”

  Like ducking behind someone taller as soon as you spot Tank Wattly coming down the hall, Bryan thought. Or losing your ability to say anything witty or intelligent whenever this one girl in particular so much as looks at you.

  “We are all conditioned by our environment. We are all creatures of instinct, driven by our need to survive, but capable of learning through experience. In that way we are actually no different,” Tomlins said, reaching beneath him and pulling up a wire cage from under the table, “from mice.”

  Susan Onesacker screamed, but the rest of the class bent forward to get a better look at the tufts of white fur huddled against one another in the cage. There had to be at least a dozen of them in there. Beady little red eyes. Twitching noses. Some of the mice lifted their snouts to the air. Others started clawing to find an exit. They didn’t look that smart. Of course, neither did half the people in the room as far as Bryan was concerned.

  Bryan moaned softly to himself. He didn’t like where this was going at all.

  “You’re going to give us rabies,” Kaitlin Spencer said.

  “My religion forbids me from dissecting animals,” Alisha Patel said.

  “Do we get to electrocute them?”

  Mr. Tomlins shook his head emphatically.

  “No, you are not electrocuting them, Jordan. Or dissecting them. They are just ordinary mice, and they are probably cleaner than you are, Ms. Spencer.”

  “Probably cleaner than Miner, anyway,” someone whispered. Bryan looked over at Charlie, who was sitting at a lab table by himself. He either hadn’t heard or was pretending not to. Any other day Bryan would have felt bad for him, but today he had his own problems. Mr. Tomlins shot a disapproving look in the direction of the comment, then turned his attention back to the cage.

  “These mice are hardly dangerous; however, they must be handled with care.” Tomlins poked a pinkie between the slats of the cage, earning a sniff from one of the more inquisitive rodents. “Now if you look under your tables, you will find a kit containing a plastic baseboard and several walls. Your first job is to follow the instructions and build the maze. I will come around and pass out the other materials you will need for your experiment. Be sure to have your lab journals out as well, as you will need to record your data. Once your mazes are finished, I will come by and give each table its test subject.”

  “So disgusting,” the girl sitting across from Bryan whispered, but Bryan just ignored her. He didn’t reach beneat
h the table for the maze or get out his lab journal either. He just watched the cage full of mice, waiting, counting down in his head.

  Because he knew it was coming. That was just how the day was shaping up. He had been conditioned to expect the worst.

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  It was sheer clumsiness. An accident. Or maybe not. Bryan didn’t know anymore. Mr. Tomlins, giving directions, holding the cage in one hand, swung it around and knocked it against the edge of the table. Just hard enough to cause two of the latches to pop and the plastic bottom of the cage to come loose, dumping a pile of mulch on the floor. The science teacher’s knees buckled as he bent low to slam the thing back together, but not in time. Four of the mice tumbled out through the opening, landing in the mulch pile, and were now scurrying in four different directions, making a break for it. Free at last.

  “Oh jeez!” Mr. Tomlins cursed, fumbling to put the cage back together and ensure no more critters escaped.

  Susan Onesacker screamed again, but this time she was joined by several others. Students jumped up on top of their chairs or tables. Micah Parker—who everyone knew owned a small petting zoo in his house, including seven cats and a boa constrictor—immediately started chasing after one of the escaped rodents, cooing at it to “come here and be still.”

  “Don’t just stand there, help me!” Mr. Tomlins roared. The science teacher was on his hands and knees now, trying to corner another escapee. Bryan leaped to his feet and followed a flash of white. The mice were surprisingly fast. One ran over Kaitlin’s foot, causing her to swoon, crashing into Tamara Brown, who barely caught her. Bryan heard the sound of foot stomps and looked to see Jordan trying to smash one under his heel.

  “Stop it!” Tomlins yelled. “No stomping! Your orders are to capture only!”

  It was chaos. Chairs were flipped. Bags were emptied to try and make traps. The science teacher upended a wastebasket, dumping the trash right onto the floor, then used it to ensnare one of the mice. Bryan watched as Micah scooped another into his hands, whispering to it softly. There were only two left.