So that thing about me pretending to be Evan Forbes’s friend so he wouldn’t clobber me? Turns out I didn’t have to pretend. He was waiting for me when I got off the bus at school this morning.
“Yo, Mac! Buddy!” he called when he saw me. “I had this great idea last night when I got home from your place. You and me can start a baking business! Brownies and biscuits, dude. We’ll make a killing! And I’ll help bake. I’ll meet you at your house this afternoon, and we can get started.”
“Well, uh, I’m sort of supposed to go over to Ben’s house this afternoon,” I told him as we walked into the building together. Evan held the front door open for me, which was totally weird. “We’re doing this recipe contest, and we need to finalize our plans.”
“Sounds great,” Evan said. “What time should I be there?”
So that problem where Evan Forbes was my enemy? It was possible that my problem now was that he was my friend.
• • •
“Evan Forbes is coming over to my apartment this afternoon?” Ben asked when I told him at lunch. “Since when did Evan Forbes start hanging around with people like you and me?”
I told him about asking Evan to come to dinner the night before. Aretha, who was sitting at her usual spot one table over, leaned toward us and said, “Brilliant plan, Mac! You ought to get the Nobel Peace Prize for that one.”
“Yeah, but now he wants to go into business with me.”
Aretha thought about this for a minute. “Just tell him you’re a scientist and you don’t have time to start a business.”
“Yeah,” Ben said. “Tell him you could help him get started, though. I’ll do the PR.”
I stared at him. “PR?”
“Yeah, you know—public relations. Publicity, advertising.” Ben chomped on a pretzel stick. “If this recipe contest thing doesn’t pan out, I might need a new line of work.”
“So how is the recipe contest coming along?” Aretha asked.
“Oh, man! I can’t believe I haven’t told you guys this!” Ben’s face lit up. “I’ve got the best recipe idea ever: salted pizza brownies with bacon.”
I stared at Ben over my tuna fish sandwich. “Salted brownies?”
Ben nodded. “I’ve been reading all this stuff about food trends online? And salt is big. I mean, it’s huge, and when it comes to chocolate, it’s humongous.”
“But won’t the bacon add salt to the brownies?” I asked. Not that I was committed to the idea of putting bacon into a perfectly good pizza brownies recipe. But I like to be logical.
“The more salt the better, that’s my motto!” Ben exclaimed. “The thing is, last night I tried out the pizza brownie recipe the way we talked about—I used marshmallow fluff on top, which worked great, and sprinkled it with extra M&M’s just like Mrs. Klausenheimer said. And it was good, but it lacked a special something. So I made another batch, but this time I added an extra teaspoon of salt and half a cup of crumbled bacon. What can I say, Mac? They were genius brownies.”
“Too much salt’s bad for your heart.”
Evan Forbes sat down in the seat next to me and opened up his lunchbox. “It’s bad because it elevates your blood pressure. At least that’s what my nanny—er, my assistant—says.”
“But a little extra salt every once in a while is okay,” Ben argued. At the same time he was looking at me like, Really? Now we have to have lunch with him? “You only eat one brownie at a time, right?”
“Not if you’re me,” Evan told him, taking a huge bite of a turkey sub. “I eat ’em by the dozens. But hey, me and Mac will give your brownies a try this afternoon, and if we like ’em, then we can definitely move forward with the recipe.”
You know that cartoon thing where steam comes out of somebody’s ears?
That’s how you should imagine Ben looking right at that very second.
I glanced over at Aretha. You could tell she was finding this all very interesting. “You guys mind if I tag along this afternoon? I might be able to get something out of it for my food badge.” She turned to Evan. “I’m a Girl Scout.”
“That’s cool,” Evan said. “Sure, you can come.”
Then he crushed his milk carton and threw it at Mason Cutwelder’s head. Mason yelled when the carton hit him, and Evan called out, “Sorry, dude! I was aiming for the trash can.”
Only the trash can was in the opposite direction.
“Okay, I gotta go play some ball,” Evan said, standing up. “You wanna play, Mac?”
I shook my head. “I, uh, have some homework I need to do.”
“That’s cool. I’ll meet you on the bus after school.”
Me, Ben, and Aretha all watched Evan walk out of the cafeteria. Then Ben turned to me and said, “You have got a serious problem on your hands, Mac. I don’t know what’s worse—having him for an enemy or having him for a friend.”
Instead of going out to the playground for recess, I went to the library with my notebook. I needed to do some serious thinking.
First, I made a list called Good Things Right Now. That list included stuff like:
1. I am no longer worried about Evan Forbes clobbering me.
2. I know how to make the following things for dinner: chicken and mashed potatoes, spaghetti, waffles, biscuits, and Cheerios with milk.
3. I make the best brownies of any fourth-grade scientist in the United States, maybe the world.
4. I have about a hundred ideas for next year’s science fair, including experiments with yeast, baking powder, baking soda, lemon juice, colloids, and emulsions.
The Bad Things list looked like this:
1. Evan Forbes is my friend.
2. Evan Forbes wants to start a business with me.
3. Evan Forbes wants to take over my life.
4. I still haven’t figured out how to make brownies explode.
The good things on my Good Things list were definitely really good.
But the bad things on my Bad Things list?
I was pretty sure the first three were going to ruin my life.