Evan Forbes ate eleven biscuits.
Eleven.
He smeared the first two with butter, and the next nine he just sort of inhaled straight from the basket.
It was actually pretty impressive.
“So, Evan, Mac tells us you boys are in the same class?” my mom asked in her polite hostess voice. She was buttering up her third biscuit.
Not that I was counting.
Evan shook his head. “Not the same class—just the same grade,” he told her through a mouthful of crumbs. “I’m in Mr. Burch’s class. He’s a lot cooler than Mrs. Tuttle. She’s got this weird thing about frogs.”
“She’s okay,” I said. Actually, I think Mrs. Tuttle is awesome, but I thought it would be rude to argue with my guest.
Also, I didn’t want to get clobbered.
It took Evan only about three minutes to eat. After he ate eleven biscuits, he chowed down the chicken in three bites and slurped up three servings of mashed potatoes in under sixty seconds.
He spent the rest of dinner making silly faces at Margaret to make her laugh.
And when dinner was over, he helped clear the table.
It was almost like he was an actual human being.
“You got an Xbox, Mac?” he asked when we were done taking the plates to the sink. “That’s how I like to wind down after dinner—playing a few hours of video games.”
“What about homework?” I asked.
Evan shrugged. “What about it? Some people do it, I don’t. Next subject.”
“We don’t actually have an Xbox,” I told him. “Or any gaming systems. My mom is sort of against them.”
I waited for Evan to explode. Amazingly, he just shrugged again and said, “So what do you want to do? My nanny—er, assistant—isn’t picking me up until seven thirty.”
Here’s the funny thing: Evan Forbes looked smaller in my house than he did at school. Maybe that’s why I actually had the guts to ask him to help me with my survey.
“Let me get this straight,” he said as he followed me up the stairs to my room. “You want me to help you come up with questions about bullies?”
“Not just about bullies,” I told him. “But about kids who’ve been bullied.”
He seemed to think about this for a second. “Yeah, I could help you. I mean, I got bullied a lot in second grade. Remember Jason Thedrow?”
“Sort of. But he doesn’t go to our school anymore, does he?”
“Nah, he moved. But he was, like, totally all over my case in first and second grade.”
I had to use all my willpower not to turn around and stare at him. Evan Forbes used to get bullied?
Totally weird.
I opened the door to my room and waved Evan in. A person’s reaction to my room is a big test for whether or not we can be friends. If you are the sort of person who likes rooms that are neat and tidy, with all the clothes put away and all the books in the bookshelves, we’re probably not going to get along all that well. Because my room is the total opposite of that.
In other words, if you can deal with chaos, we’ll get along just fine.
“Awesome!” Evan exclaimed as he looked around. “I wish I could have my room like this.”
That’s when I had a very strange thought. Question: Was it possible that Evan Forbes and I might become friends?
“I mean, like, I never knew that a dweeb like you could have such a cool bedroom.”
Answer: highly doubtful.
Evan walked around, admiring my mold museum, which is two shelves of mold samples I’ve been growing for a few months now, and checking out my collection of the Mysteries of Planet Zindar books.
“I have to keep my room totally neat,” he told me. “Like, not one thing out of place. My dad does an inspection every night when he gets home from work, whether I’m still awake or not.”
“What happens if your room doesn’t pass inspection?”
“Then I have to clean it up immediately. Even if it’s eleven at night and I’m asleep. My dad makes me wake up and make everything perfect.”
I thought about my mom and dad and Lyle. None of them could care less whether or not my room is clean. Mostly all they care about is whether or not I’m happy and if I’m doing good at school.
All of a sudden I felt totally lucky.
“So, anyway, you want to work on that survey?” I asked as Evan dive-bombed onto my bed. “I kind of need to get it done.”
Evan sat up and shrugged. “Not really, but I guess I owe you for the biscuits, so, like, whatever.”
I thought he owed me for a whole lot more than the biscuits, but I decided not to mention it.
We spent the next twenty minutes coming up with questions. We had two lists, questions for kids who had been bullied and questions for kids who had bullied other kids.
“Maybe we ought to have questions for kids who’ve had both things happen,” I suggested. “Like, maybe one year you might have been really mean to somebody, and the next year somebody was really mean to you.”
“I hope somebody’s jumping all over Jason Thedrow at his new school,” Evan said, nodding. “He totally deserves it.”
I stared at him.
Here’s the funny thing: All of a sudden I realized that my stomach didn’t hurt. It hadn’t hurt all night, even though Evan had been in my personal space the whole time.
I had to wonder, scientifically speaking, what was going on.
Scientifically speaking, I’m pretty sure what was happening was pretty simple.
I wasn’t scared of Evan Forbes anymore.
There were a lot of good explanations for this. One, the odds that Evan Forbes was going to clobber me in my own home were pretty small. Two, the odds that Evan Forbes was going to clobber me in my own home after eating eleven biscuits I’d made myself were even smaller.
So, we’re talking minimal fear factor here.
But there was another thing. Eating dinner with Evan, showing him my room, learning a little bit about his family—well, he was actually seeming sort of human to me. Like a real person.
And sure, you can be afraid of a real person, but it’s hard to be afraid of a real person who spent half of dinner stuffing his face with biscuits and the other half making funny faces at your little sister.
Thinking about how Evan made Margaret laugh, I came to a decision. Tomorrow, no brownies. No waiting by the Dumpsters, no stomachache, no nothing.
Tomorrow I’d pretend me and Evan Forbes were friends.
I mean, at least we weren’t enemies anymore, right? And scientifically speaking, there’s one thing I know for sure about friends, and that’s that friends don’t clobber each other.
At least that’s what I was counting on. I’d have to look it up in The Big Book of Best Friend Rules.
