Slob - Ellen Potter [15]
“Like the state of Texas?” one kid said.
“Like a mastodon?” another kid called out.
“Here. Go to the nurse,” Ms. Bussle said, quickly giving me the hall pass. She’d started something that she knew she wouldn’t be able to stop.
“Like a Twinkie factory?”
5
The nurse, a pear-shaped woman with a pointy nose, took my temperature but barely glanced at the thermometer. She seemed to know it would read normal.
“Bad day?” she asked.
“I’m feeling nauseous,” I told her.
I needed to leave the school. Now. I had things to do. She did a little sniffing thing where her lips pushed out and her nose wrinkled. She was considering. Or else she had highly developed olfactory senses that could sniff out when kids were lying to her. Either way, she decided in my favor.
“All right, let’s give Mom a call.” She pulled up the information from her computer and dialed. Mom couldn’t leave work—she’s usually in the middle of dealing with some hairy situation—but she sent over Mrs. Leaper, an elderly neighbor, to come fetch me from school then leave me alone in our apartment.
In my room, I carefully removed the Jaws of Anguish from my lunch sack and ate the sandwich. After that I ate my snack in the fridge.
The phone rang. It was Mom.
“How’s the belly?”
“Not so good.” I tried to make my voice sound weak and shaky, which wasn’t hard.
“Have you vomited?” she asked. Her voice was professionally level, but I could hear the anxiety seeping through.
“Not yet,” I answered as I stood by the kitchen window and stared at Andre’s apartment building, the Fuji Towers. It was directly across the street, a slick steel-and-glass apartment building with a steeply angled scooped-out steel roof on one side, like a giant snowplow had been nailed onto the side of the building. It was insanely ugly, but it probably was supposed to be very chic or something.
“Peppermint tea,” she said.
“Okay.”
“In little sips.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“I know.”
She might have been talking to one of her callers. “Stay calm. Deep breaths. Help is on the way.”
I ate another PB&J, a bowl of cereal, and a hunk of cheddar cheese. I scaled the chair and phone book and the dictionary to the Stop-and-Think Cabinet without stopping to think, and I grabbed five Oreos out of the package and devoured them in less time than it took me to get them. I’d be sorry later, I knew, when Mom discovered it, but it seemed totally worth it. After the cookies were finished, I had second thoughts, but of course it was too late to do anything about it.
That was why I climbed back up and ate seven more.
After that, I turned on Nemesis and got down to work—adjusting the dish, trying different channels. Nothing happened. Mason’s words started replaying in my brain. I tried to beat them back. I told myself that I was attempting to do something extraordinary, something that a thug like Mason would never be able to do. But staring at a blank TV screen for an hour was beginning to wear away at my confidence.
Then I heard a voice.
It was coming from my TV set.
There was a picture too, but it was so fuzzy I couldn’t make out anything. Still, I could hear someone talking about a tractor.
I must be picking up some farming channel.
I yelled and punched the air and did this little dance, but that part was embarrassing so I stopped doing it pretty fast.
My equipment worked!
But not well.
And it was going to have to work very, very well in order for Nemesis to do what I needed it to do.
I was going to have to boost the signal, which meant I needed an amplifier. Forty decibel or better.
I emptied out my backpack, slung it over my shoulder, and headed for the demolition site on West Eighty-second Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. Jeremy had told me about it. She had spotted it when she was on her way to a GWAB member’s house. She said that it was impressive: three old tenements that had been knocked down to make way for a high-rise condominium. Ripe hunting grounds for an amplifier.
I walked