Slob - Ellen Potter [46]
“I don’t have your (really bad curse word) cookies, if that’s what you want,” he said.
“I know you don’t,” I told him.
“Then what do you want?” He didn’t look mad. He looked nervous. Of me! Owen Birnbaum. Professional Boulder.
“I want Penny Marshall’s birthday to be before October 25.”
No, I didn’t say that.
“I want to tell you something,” I said. An opportunity for improving my karma had just popped into my head. “First of all, could you still be exempt from going to gym class?”
“I guess,” he said cagily. “If I wanted to be.”
“Then ask for an exemption today,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because Wooly has it out for us,” I said. From the corner of my eye, I could see the computer screen light up and the little ta-dring sound. “He thinks that we somehow knew there was going to be a fire drill on Friday and we deliberately put ourselves last so we could get out of the triathlon. He’s going to make us do something totally humiliating today, you can count on it.”
This didn’t seem to impress Mason the way I had hoped. He turned back to his drawing and started working on it again.
“I did know,” he said.
“Know what?”
“I knew about the fire drill.”
“But how?” I asked.
“I hear things,” he answered mysteriously.
“So you put us last deliberately?” I asked.
Mason nodded. His pen was adding tiny slashes of fur to the wolf’s cheek.
Two things occurred to me:
1. I had really misjudged Mason. He was actually a pretty nice guy.
2. I had a hell of a lot of work to do in the bad karma department.
“Everyone wanted to see you make a clown of yourself,” Mason explained. He drew a full moon in the left corner of the page. “I hate clowns,” he said.
Oh.
Well, maybe I had slightly less work to do in the karma department.
“Anyway,” I said, edging toward the computer station, “just remember about the exemption.”
He nodded without looking up.
I walked away hoping it was enough to erase all the bad stuff I had done. It felt like it was enough. In fact, I thought it was downright heroic considering that when Wooly saw that Mason wasn’t in gym class, he’d pour out all his wrath on me. And believe me, I’m no hero.
I sat down in front of the computer and signed on to the Internet. I typed in penny marshall birthday in the search engine. Before I hit Enter, I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and thought, Pleasepleaseplease.
Then I hit Enter.
There it was, right on top of the page. I didn’t even have to click on a website. Penny Marshall Date of Birth Oct. 15, 1943.
I did the math. That Brady Bunch episode was aired on October 15, 2006. Ten days before my parents were killed. The timing was right. It was perfect, in fact, since it gave me ten days to hook Nemesis up to the deli’s surveillance camera receiver and attempt to capture the signals from the night of October 25.
Amazing what some good karma could do.
Now I just had to get through gym class.
I stayed at the computer workstation for twenty minutes, looking up stuff about hieroglyphics for my paper, because Rachel was interested in them and I was hoping to impress her.
As 11:40 crept closer, I began to feel queasy—so queasy, in fact, that I considered telling Ms. Bussle that I was sick again and needed to go home. The idea began to appeal to me. No gym class. No public humiliation.
It would also give me an entire day at home to work on Nemesis. That was much more important than anything I was going to do in school today.
“I feel queasy,” I said to Ms. Bussle very quietly. I didn’t want Mason to hear. For now, he might actually think that I was brave enough to face Wooly on my own. Of course by tomorrow he’d know that I was in fact the biggest coward in the Northern Hemisphere, but I wasn’t thinking about tomorrow. Or even about two hours from now. I was thinking about 11:40, which was in exactly fifteen minutes.
Ms. Bussle squinted at me suspiciously. She was going to give me a hard time, I could tell. And it was going to be in a loud voice. I quickly clapped my hand over my mouth and made a small lurching movement