Yeah, you did. Tell Mom and Dad to take you to an allergy doctor. Or a shrink.
Anyway, the point is, whatever my sister thinks, we’re harmless. We’re just four kids who call ourselves the Death Rays. The name is supposed to be funny, but of course she doesn’t get it. We don’t go around zapping people. We ride bikes and hang in our hideout. It’s nothing fancy. It’s just a cool tree. You ride down by the tracks and you walk your bikes over the tracks and into the woods between the tracks and the creek. It’s somewhere past the stone bridge, but that’s all I’m going to say. There’s this funny kind of tree—or maybe it’s a bush—whatever. The branches don’t stick up in the air but they bend and come down to the ground until the whole thing looks kind of like a big leafy umbrella. What you do is, you poke your way through the branches and—presto!—you’re inside this kind of dome-shaped natural hut. I mean, it’s just begging you to come in and hang out.
So that’s what we do. We sit down. We talk. We tell jokes. We compare penknives. If we picked up stuff at a store, we eat: Twinkies, hoagies, sodas. The four of us. Me. Bump. A freckled kid named Nacho. And a tall skinny kid named Burke.
Really evil, huh?
When we’re not in the hideout, we’re riding around doing stuff.
Like skipping flat stones across the creek.
Like ringing doorbells and running.
Like spit-bombing cars from the Airy Street bridge.
Like picking out someone on the sidewalk downtown and walking really really close behind them until they notice us and then we run and laugh our butts off.
But mostly we go goobering.
Goobers. That’s Bump’s name for somebody that’s funny. Funny-different. Funny-weird. A laugh magnet. No—a laugh target. When he spots one he calls out, “Goober!” If Bump were a hunting dog, his nose would stick out and his tail would go straight up.
Of course, we’d been coming across goobers all our lives. We noticed them, but just barely. They maybe registered 0.2 on a scale of 1–10. They weren’t important enough to give a name to.
Bump changed all that. He hauled them onto the stage. He threw the spotlight on them. Suddenly they were 10s.
Already this summer we’ve found some real winners:
A boy goober wearing big white-framed sunglasses. Probably stole them from his mother and thought they were cool.
A girl wearing a T-shirt that said BAN BISON BURGERS.
A girl walking out of the library with a stack of books up to her chin. (We called, “It’s summer vacaaaaaa-tion!”)
An old man we see every day who’s The Slowest Person On Earth. He shuffles along with one of those four-legged aluminum walker things. Bump brought a watch one day and we timed him crossing the street. It took him twenty-eight seconds curb to curb!
A lady in a purple sweat suit who doesn’t just walk or jog down the street. Instead she skips and dances and doesn’t even notice everybody staring at her.
Not all goobers are discovered just haphazard as we ride around. Bump goes out scouting on his own. He’ll spot a goober and check its location. All he says next day is, “Follow me.” Sometimes we ride clear across town, to neighborhoods we don’t even recognize. When he stops, he doesn’t have to say anything. There’s no “Goober!” call. We just sit there leg-leaning on our bikes, waiting for it to appear.
But what happened today was different from every other goober spotting so far. First thing this morning Bump said, “Let’s go to the hideout.” He was acting funny. Quiet. Something was on his mind. He just sat on the ground chewing his black licorice. He’s always got a wad in his mouth.
When we were all seated in the hideout, nobody said anything. Until I spoke up: “What’s wrong, Bump?”
So far Bump’s face had been a blank. Now suddenly his mouth cracked into a smirk. “Wrong?” he said. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong. It might be the rightest thing ever.”
Now he really had our attention. “What’re you talking about?” I said.
“I saw something,” he said. Now he seemed puzzled. He looked up, as if he was trying to see through the domed leafy roof of the hideout.
“What?” Nacho and Burke said together.
“Where?” I said.
Bump was shaking his head. “I…I…” He couldn’t seem to find words.
I tried to help him out. “You saw a goober?”
He laughed out loud. He wagged his head. “Goober? Goober ain’t even good enough.”
I poked him. “C’mon, Bump. What?”
He brought his eyes down from the leaves. He looked at each of us. He had a dreamy, blinky look, like he had seen a miracle. “Last night…after dinner…I was just riding….”
“Yeah? Yeah?” we said.
“I saw something…. I saw something and I…I almost rounded you guys up right then”—he stared at us—“right then. But”—he shrugged—“I didn’t. I rode home. I almost got run down by a car, I was so…so…”
“What’d you see, Bump?” said Nacho.
“You gotta tell us,” said Burke.
“That’s the thing,” said Bump. “I’m not even sure. I mean, I thought I was sure. Then I went to bed, and when I woke up this morning and the sun was shining through the window and all, I thought, Nah, couldn’t be. Musta been a mirage. A hallu—”
“Hallucination?” I helped.
“Yeah. I figured it couldna been real.”
“So what’re you going to do?” said Burke.
Bump took a deep breath. “I’m gonna check it out again. Today. And if it is real”—he spit out the licorice wad—“you ain’t never gonna forget tomorrow.”