Twelve

I inched the door open and pressed one eye against the crack. Art Club squeezed in behind me in our dank, dark hole (a.k.a. the boys’ locker room), trying to steal a glimpse of the packed gym beyond.

Talking, laughing clumps of Earhart middle-schoolers had begun filing in. Their sneakers squeaked against the gym floor and thudded up the steps as they filled the bleachers. The rumble of voices swelled to fill every space in the gym, and the locker room door fairly quivered with the noise.

I sucked in a breath of the cool gym air that wafted through the crack and tried to push my pounding heart back into my chest. It had already siphoned all the blood from my brain, so now my head sort of floated above my body, numb and useless.

The video screens we’d built—the enormous main screen in the center, with two smaller screens on each side—were suspended securely from the gym ceiling, thanks to a very tall ladder, Coach Wilder, and some cables he’d rustled up from somewhere. He’d cranked the basketball goals up to the ceiling to make room. (And pulled down three pairs of dangling gym socks and a backpack while he was at it. It was getting weird. Almost every day something was hanging from the ceiling somewhere.) Once the gym lights went down and our video was beamed out, nobody would notice our amazing screens were just white paper enforced with stapled cardboard frames.

We’d placed the Drama Club spotlights at strategic points in the gym. Audiovisual Club had taken up their post behind the projectors at the top of the bleachers. Mrs. Frazee had appropriated my clipboard and now stood off to the side, where she could follow the action and get the whole thing back on track if it jumped the rails. Noah and Coach Wilder were stationed behind the sound system at the scorer’s table on the opposite side of the gym, ready to put the whole thing in motion.

As I stood there, waiting, I heard the first glimmer of music. It started low, so low I doubt the rumbling herd in the gym even heard it at first. It grew louder—gradually—till by the time the crowd realized what they were hearing, it had become part of the very air around them.

This was no cheery marching band tune. This was darker, with a thundering beat. More tortured superhero than perky pep squad.

The music swelled, louder and more insistent, till it blanketed the gym in a layer of sound. Voices dwindled as the crowd stopped talking and began listening. Exactly as Noah had predicted. The drums beat louder. Faster. Then—

BAM!

—the music stopped.

The gym went black.

Silence echoed through the dark.

As the crowd gasped and a few nervous giggles pierced the cavernous darkness, Art Club slipped silently from the locker room and stole along the edge of the gym. I led the way, head still numb, heart still pounding, my feet laced snug inside black combat boots.

I am normally not a combat boot sort of person. A basic pair of all-purpose sneakers takes me anywhere I need to go. But yesterday, after I’d gotten home from Art Club, after Sam had thumped out of our apartment and down the stairs, I’d headed to my room to dump my backpack—

—and found this pair of boots standing at attention in the hall outside my door, spit-polished and gleaming.

Beecher had motioned his head toward the boots. “Sam.” That’s all he’d said.

Now as I paced through the blackness of the gym, the heft of the combat boots swinging with each step I took, carrying my feet along almost without effort, I understood why Sam wore them. They made me feel taller somehow. Steadier. More powerful.

I took my place behind the row of footlights spaced along the edge of the gym floor. Art Club lined up beside me, and the music grew softer till it was merely a background for the sound effects: the roar and pop of a fire.

The footlights surged on, glowing orange and yellow. Coach Wilder’s squirrel fans whirred. We’d cut flames from tissue paper and taped them to the front of the lights, and now the fans whipped them straight into the air. The tissue flames danced before the glowing lights, and suddenly the whole side of the gym looked like it was ablaze.

The crowd gasped. Art Club strode forward, calmly, through the flames. We didn’t run. We didn’t try to get through quickly. No. We stalked through fire itself, almost in slow motion, as flames licked our boots, our fingertips, our black cargo pants.

And as we strode through the flames, Audiovisual Club projected the video of it directly onto our giant screen, with close-ups on the smaller screens at the sides, so that no matter where you looked, Art Club was rising from the flames.

The music grew louder and we strode to our assigned positions. I took my place behind one of the spotlights.

 

 

A giant image of Gretchen Klamm’s best woven belt beamed onto the center screen, with video of her weaving it on the smaller screens, with dramatic lighting, quick cuts between shots, and music thundering.

I swung my light around. Beamed it directly onto Gretchen, standing beside a display of her art, so she was in the spotlight at the same moment she was on the screens, a lone Art Club member lit in stark contrast to the surrounding darkness.

New artwork played on the screens: Martin Higby’s souped-up drawings of his dream racing machines. I dimmed my light as one of the other spotlights shone on short, round Martin, the last kid in the world you’d picture inside a race car.

The cars dimmed and new artwork filled the screens. Another spotlight shone on the artist.

Our black silhouettes were visible so the crowd could see we were in charge, moving the lights, directing the action. But the main action happened on the screens, with the photos and videos we’d put together—artwork, field trips, dazzling shots of paintings we’d seen at the Wheaton University Art Museum.

I stood behind my light, operating it smoothly, the way we’d practiced.

Still, I managed to sneak a peek at the bleachers.

And you know what?

Earhart Middle was watching. Sitting forward, eyes locked onto the screens, watching as images flashed and faded. I looked for Emma. Looked to see if she was sitting forward, eyes locked on to the screens too.

I couldn’t find her but I saw another kid, a kid so entranced, so captivated, he had his hands clasped tight together and was holding them to his chin, so tight, so stiff, he was practically shaking.

I blinked. I knew that shake.

It was Beecher.

That shaking kid was Beecher.

And he was sitting beside . . . my mother. She saw me looking at her and gave me a wave and a giant really-proud-mom thumbs-up.

The music thundered. The video changed.

That was my cue.

I swiveled my spotlight and shone it directly on Spencer, whose coil pots were playing on the screens.

We were almost at the halfway point, almost to the part about my comic book, the part where Art Club would beam their spotlights on me, ending with an animation that Audiovisual Club had helped put together, of Beanboy (the real Beanboy, not me) soaring through the skies above Amelia M. Earhart Middle School. It was really nice of them to do that. Extreme, as Noah would say. It was completely extreme.

And standing there in my combat boots, holding my spotlight steady, I started to relax a little. I don’t know what I’d been so worried about. I’d spent all that time convinced that this pep assembly thing would hurl Art Club down the middle school toilet of humiliation, and instead it might be the answer to everything.

It could get kids to sign up for Art Club.

We could become visible in our own school. We could get our bulletin board back. And Emma—I flicked another covert glance toward the bleachers—maybe next time Emma said, “Hey, Tucker,” maybe I’d actually—

Bam!

 

 

The music screeched to a stop.

The video screens went dark and our spotlights faded to black.

Then the gym lights snapped on, full power.

As the entire school blinked under the glare of the suddenly bright gym, the cheerleading squad bounced onto the floor, chanting and shaking their pom-poms.