The first thing I do when I get back to the down under is backflop on my bed and stare up at the ceiling while my brain goes, You idiot, now the gang-bangers will be after you. You’re toast, you moron, toast!

The down under is this room in the basement, with cheesy paneling and an old rug that smells like low tide. Not that I’m complaining. The down under is my very own place, my hidey-hole from the big bad world. My grandmother wants me to move upstairs, into the light of day, she says, but I tried that for a while and thanks but no thanks. If things get really bad I can still crawl under the bed and just veg out until my brain starts working again.

There’s all kinds of books and games and junk lying around, but I’m not really in the mood. All I want to do is stare up at the ceiling and try to figure out why a scrawny girl would make such a big deal out of an old miner’s helmet. I mean, she really went ballistic over it, right? Totally bonkers.

“Maxwell! Are you there?”

That’s Gram, who raised me ever since my mom died. She’s calling down from the cellar stairs like she always does. Just checking to see I’m not doing something stupid, like making my own firecrackers, which I don’t do anymore since we had that small explosion. Really small, but I guess it sounded pretty bad from upstairs.

“Supper’s almost ready!” she calls out in her cheery grandma voice. “Your favorite, spaghetti and meatballs!”

That hasn’t been my favorite for about five years, but I haven’t got the heart to tell Gram because she tries so hard. She and Grim are old and out of it — they’re my grandparents, my mother’s people — but they’re okay most of the time. Grim still has this way of looking at me sideways, like he can’t believe his poor dead daughter gave birth to this huge beast of a boy. Monster Max, the thing in the cellar. But mostly he’s a pretty neat old dude, if you don’t mind hearing stories about the war for the umpteenth time, and how when he was a lad the grass was greener and the air was cleaner and nobody wore T-shirts with rude words on them.

No bad T-shirts back then, I say, just those yellow stars they pinned on six million people who got sent to the gas chambers. And he’ll shake his head and say I give up, the boy reads too many books. Like he’s been testing me and I passed. Because once upon a time I couldn’t read worth beans, and like he says my brain is now this big sponge that soaks stuff up, and he’s still kind of surprised I’m not as stupid as I used to be.

Of course, if Grim knew I’d been messing around with a gang-banger, he’d figure I really was retarded after all.

The next time I see Worm is on the bus. Normally I walk home from school, but that day the whole junior high went on this field trip to the Museum of Science, where they’ve got a lot of neat stuff like a giant see-through model of the human intestine, and robots that talk like R2-D2, and this really excellent planetarium where they can make the stars look like dragons breathing fire in the sky.

The bus is super crowded, so I never notice Worm until we’re almost home. She’s all scrunched up in one of the seats way down in the back, reading this paperback book. A thick one, too. All around her the other kids are going mental and making faces out the window and yelling goony stuff, but she never takes her nose out of that book.

When the bus driver finally comes to her stop he opens the door and waits, like he knows what happens next. The really strange thing is, Worm gets up from her seat but she never stops reading. She walks down the aisle with the book up close to her eyes and she doesn’t look anywhere else, not even at her feet to see where she’s going. Like nothing is going to stop her reading, not even for as long as it takes to get off the bus.

She keeps reading even when some of the other kids make fun of her. “Bookworm, bookworm, ugly little bookworm.”

Worm acts like she doesn’t even hear them. As far as she’s concerned she’s not even there, she’s walking inside her book and nobody can touch her.

Because of what happened when I saved her miner’s helmet, I’m figuring she’ll at least glance at me when she goes by, but she doesn’t even notice me. Which if you know how big I am is like not noticing an elephant in your living room.

Weird. Definitely weird.

Even when she’s off the bus she doesn’t stop reading. She walks away from the bus stop, heading for the crummy end of town, but she never takes her nose out of that book.

“Hey, Frankenstein, what are you looking at?”

“Nothing,” I say, but everybody laughs.

They go: “Max and Bookworm sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”

But they’re wrong, because I’m not going gooey for any girl.

No way.