Operation do over, p.2
Operation Do-Over, page 2
But even more than that, the girl has something. What is it? Style? Her clothes are pretty much the same as what everybody else is wearing. Maybe it’s just the way she’s wearing them. She’s got attitude, for sure. Here she is, the newbie, but there isn’t an ounce of shyness to her. It’s like she instantly belongs wherever she is—including here.
“How many times did you get mugged in New York?” Miggy pipes up. Typical him.
“Never,” Ava replies without missing a beat.
Ms. Alexander frowns at Miggy. “That’s not a very polite question.”
“It’s fine,” Ava says airily. “A lot of people think New York is dangerous. But you just have to put out a vibe that you don’t want to be messed with, and nobody messes with you.”
She has everybody’s attention now. Pasco isn’t exactly the boonies, but no one around here says anything like that. Ava is different.
Even Ms. Alexander is impressed. “Well, find a seat, Ava. We have a few things to take care of before first period.”
An odd tension rises in the room as Ava surveys the open spots. Suddenly it seems very important where the new girl will choose to sit.
Ty and I crane our necks to see where she’ll go. My money is on the empty seat in the cluster of desks where Miggy and Dominic hold court. They’re the big sports stars, so a lot of kids gravitate toward them. But in a rare disagreement with me, Ty seems to be looking over at a vacancy by the window, near Emma, Kennedy, and a few of the other popular girls—the ones who have the most Instagram followers, and who dominate the seventh-grade chat.
So many choices. Where is Ava from New York going to land?
Everybody’s so focused on the drama that I’m surprised by the scraping of the chair as Ava sits down at the table we share with Clarisse.
Ava beams at the three of us. “This seat taken?”
Ty and I are struck dumb. I don’t think he heard the question.
“I’m Clarisse,” Clarisse introduces herself from behind her large, thick glasses. “And these two lunkheads are Mason and Ty. Believe it or not, they know how to talk. Sometimes.”
“Hi, Clarisse. Hi, guys.”
“We talk!” Ty and I exclaim in such perfect unison that the whole class laughs. Sometimes there are drawbacks to being on the same wavelength as your best friend.
It shouldn’t be a problem that Ava’s sitting with us. But to be honest, I’m so extra aware of her that I spend all of homeroom in stiff-necked misery, forcing my total focus onto the teacher. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Ty doing the same thing. To make matters worse, Dominic and Miggy bombard us with spitballs the entire time. Yikes—I feel one of them catch in the mini basket formed by my stick-up hair, but I don’t dare flick it away. What if Ava notices?
When the bell finally releases us to first period, Ty and I can’t get out of there fast enough.
“What do you think of Ava?” he asks on the way to the science lab.
“She’s . . . nice.”
“Nice,” Ty confirms. “Yeah, I thought so too.”
Funny—the two of us can go on for hours about any subject—video games, sunspots, Chipotle versus Five Guys, robots, does Batman count as a real superhero, toast, and our absolute favorite topic: time travel. But on the subject of Ava Petrakis, we can come up with exactly one word between the two of us: nice.
In the lab, we’re waiting for the okay to begin the experiment when Ava appears in the doorway.
“Sorry I’m late,” she greets Mr. Esposito, handing over her course card. “The room numbering in this school is totally confusing. I almost ended up in a closet.”
The teacher nods. “Everyone else has a partner, so you’ll just have to find one of the pairs to work with for the time being.”
“Pull up over here,” Dominic invites.
“Yeah,” Miggy adds. “Treat yourself to a free upgrade.”
Once again, the girl from New York marches right past them and establishes herself on the stool between Ty and me. “Hi, guys. Miss me?”
Going by the flush in Ty’s cheeks, I can only imagine my own beet-red complexion. The two of us nearly conk heads stooping to make room for her book bag. This time there’s no question about it. She’s choosing us. On purpose.
Ava lights the Bunsen burner with an authoritative flick of the flint and has a beaker of solution heating over it in no time at all. “I’m kind of a science dweeb,” she explains, grinning.
“No way!” Ty blurts.
“Us too!” I add. “I mean, not too dweeby—”
“There’s no such thing as too dweeby,” she lectures. “Never apologize for being smart. Hey, you got something in your hair,” she adds, flicking the spitball out of my bristles.
We regard her with a new respect. We’ve always gotten great grades, but it was kind of understood that there was a price to be paid in the coolness department for being good at school. We even developed an equation for it: P=1/GPA—meaning that your popularity is inversely proportional to your grade point average. Yet here’s Ava from New York, and she doesn’t believe in P=1/GPA at all. She thinks being smart is fine. Better still, she is smart! She runs through the experiment with such ease and authority that all we can do is watch in awed silence.
Later, in the cafeteria, I’m carrying my lunch to the usually solitary table I share with Ty, when a chair is suddenly kicked into my path. In an amazing display of body control, I manage to keep my balance, but a hard-boiled egg rolls off my tray, landing with a crack on the tile floor and lying in a circle of shattered shell.
When I bend down to clean up the mess, Dominic is glaring into my face.
“Listen, Spaceman. I know what you’re doing and you can forget it.”
“Doing?” I’m mystified. “I’m not doing anything.”
“If you two losers think you’ve got first dibs on the new girl, you’re bugging,” Miggy puts in. “It’s one thing that she sits with you in homeroom because maybe she’s nearsighted and can’t see the normal people. But the cafeteria isn’t school. It’s real life.”
I take stock of their long table, which is in the best location in the whole lunchroom—central, but just out of the glare of the large windows and not too close to the food line. It hosts a Who’s Who of the seventh grade—athletes and cheerleaders and even a couple of eighth graders.
I shrug. “Ava sits wherever she wants.”
“Right,” Dominic agrees. “And she wants to sit here. Now scram.”
As I start away, Dominic punches the bottom of my tray, and I lose a plastic fork and a small fruit cup. It’s worth it to get clear of those mouth-breathers.
“What was that all about?” Ty asks when I join him, making sure to take the seat facing away from Dominic and Miggy’s table.
“It’s a long story,” I grunt.
A few minutes later, Ava’s voice rings out in the cafeteria. “Oh, that’s okay. I’m sitting with friends.”
Ty’s eyes glaze over.
“She’s coming this way, isn’t she?”
He can only nod.
And then she’s upon us, and the conversation begins even before she takes her first bite. “This food is way more basic than my old cafeteria in New York. We had a sushi bar . . .”
Lunch periods at Pasco Middle School are an inhuman twenty-four minutes, but that’s more than enough time for Ava Petrakis to share her entire life story. Her old apartment in New York was less than three blocks from the Museum of Natural History; she likes Star Wars better than Star Trek, but only because the transporter is “problematic from a science standpoint”; her Xbox Live gamer handle is Darth Hamster; her mom is a molecular biologist who is sequencing the genome of a kumquat; and if a genie ever grants her three wishes, the first one will be to go back in time to meet the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe and see if he really had a silver nose.
I’m wide-eyed. “What about the second and third wishes?”
“I haven’t worked that out yet,” she admits. “Don’t rush me. I might not even need the genie. Time travel isn’t as impossible as it sounds. Do you know that the astronauts who travel to the International Space Station come back a tiny bit younger than they would be if they’d stayed on Earth?”
It’s that very moment—when the words time travel pass her lips—when it hits me: I’ve just met the most awesome girl who has ever lived. Seriously, she’s interesting; she’s smart; she’s nice; she likes time travel. She’s still talking, but I’m not hearing anymore. I’m thinking, what are the odds that, of all the schools in all the towns, Ava would come here? What are the odds that she would be placed in my homeroom and choose to attach herself to me?
And Ty, I remind myself, noticing him across the table. And because I can read Ty’s mind as easily as my own, I know exactly what he’s thinking.
Which is: I’ve just met the most awesome girl who has ever lived.
5
Twelve Years Old
OCTOBER 12
By the time Ava has been in Pasco for a couple of weeks, it’s hard to imagine a time when she wasn’t there. She’s a mainstay at our table at lunch, our astronomy club after school, and our Fortnite and Halo battles online. She’s in class with Ty and/or me for seven of the eight daily periods. Homework is rarely done without the three of us together. Ava is plowing through our favorite books, TV shows, and movies at a record pace, and we—a little more slowly—are picking up on her interests, including Tycho Brahe, the guy with the silver nose. We even agree to combine on a science-fair project this year—the first time Ty and I have ever included an outsider. The topic: What else? Time travel.
“Really?” Clarisse whispers in the Spanish room. “Last year, when I wanted to work with you guys, you said no third wheels.”
Spanish is our only class without Ava, who takes French.
“Mason and I are always a team,” Ty explains. “You know that.”
“And we won first prize,” I remind her.
“So why Ava this year?” Clarisse persists. “Isn’t she a third wheel?”
“Of course not,” Ty replies. “The whole thing was her suggestion. Obviously, we can’t build a time machine as a working model, so we’re going to focus on examples in science when time gets distorted, like around black holes.”
“Ava’s idea,” I add.
“I have ideas, too, you know,” she says icily.
“You’re great at science,” Ty agrees. “I’ll bet you’ll take second place again. After us and Ava.”
“In your dreams,” Clarisse shoots back.
“I have great dreams,” Ty informs her. “They’re exactly like reality.”
Those two go back and forth at each other forever sometimes. Neither one of them can resist having the last word.
Clarisse runs her hands through her curly, dark hair and comes up smiling just a little too sweetly. “So which one of you guys is dating her?”
“Nobody is,” I tell her in surprise. “We’re just friends.”
“And science-fair partners,” Ty chimes in. “Why would you ask that?”
“Open your eyes,” Clarisse says sharply. “Seventh grade is all about who’s dating who. Kennedy is dating Miggy. Emma used to go out with DeShaun, and now she’s with Dominic. Gabriella broke up with Jake, but they’re getting back together again. So which of you is with Ava?”
Ty blurts, “It’s not like that —”
“En español, por favor!” Señora Kaufman’s rule is that all conversation in her class must be in Spanish. No exceptions. “You can stand in the hall until you’re ready to show your fellow students some courtesy!”
“Way to go, Clarisse!” I mutter as soon as the door closes behind us. “Now Señora Kaufman hates us!”
“And for what?” Ty adds. “A conversation about nothing.”
Clarisse sighs. “I guess it’s for the best that neither of you guys has the guts to date Ava.”
“Yeah,” I confirm. Then, “Wait—why?”
“Isn’t it obvious? If one of you ends up with her, there’s no way whoever gets left out is going to be mature enough to handle it. It’ll be like the end of the world.”
“Not mature?” Ty crows. “Who’s more mature than me? I lost all my Halo coins in a power failure, and I didn’t even call tech support. I sucked it up and started again from zero.”
“You’re an animal,” I assure him with a fist bump.
“It’s not the same kind of mature,” Clarisse points out, rolling her eyes.
“Nobody’s dating anybody,” Ty informs her evenly. “Ava is just one of the guys.”
But the next time I see Ava, just outside math class, I have to admit that “one of the guys” is the last description I’d apply to her. She smiles, and I feel it in my liver. Then I remember that she’s smiling at Ty too. Not only that, but Ty steps back to allow her to enter the doorway first. What’s that supposed to mean?
Clarisse’s words come back to me: If one of you ends up with her . . .
I shake myself—almost like Rufus, my English sheepdog, when he comes out of the water at the beach.
Get a grip.
We take our usual seats on either side of her. All through the class, I look straight ahead at Mr. Sorenson while peering at Ava out of the corner of my eye. And what do I see? Ty, peering out of the corner of his eye at Ava.
After school, we walk Ava partway home as always. She’s her usual bubbly self. It never ceases to amaze me how many topics she can bring up during a fifteen-minute walk. Today it’s:
1) Possible backgrounds for the display board of our time-travel project;
2) How many Chinese restaurants were within half a mile of her old apartment in New York City (seven);
3) What purpose in nature is served by parsley, when it has no taste and no nutritional value; and
4) What happened to Tycho Brahe’s original nose that he had to get a silver one? (It got cut off in a duel, which proves that not all science nerds are boring.)
We drop her off and head for our part of the neighborhood.
“What are you up to tonight?” I ask Ty before starting for my own door.
“Nothing.”
Ty says that pretty much every day. How come today it sounds like a lie? Nobody can do literally nothing. Everything is something—fiddling with your phone, lying on the couch, watching Netflix, maybe even . . . sneaking over to Ava’s place without your best friend.
“It’s like you’re a million miles away, Mason,” my mother comments at dinner. “Did something happen at school today?”
“Maybe Mason’s got a girlfriend,” my nine-year-old sister, Serena, suggests in a singsong voice, lisping past her palate expander.
I start. “What? Why would you think that?”
“I don’t,” she replies. “No girl could ever be desperate enough.”
“Serena,” my father warns.
After dinner, I take Rufus out into the garage for our nightly routine. The sheepdog is so hairy that he has to be regularly vacuumed with an industrial-strength Shop-Vac, or he’ll leave clumps of fur all over the house. I know it sounds like animal cruelty or something, but it’s actually Rufus’s favorite part of the whole day. When he sees other dogs being brushed or combed, he puffs up with pride, knowing that grooming for him is much more special and requires earsplittingly loud equipment and a fifty-foot extension cord.
But as Rufus rolls around on his back, exposing his underbelly to the Shop-Vac’s brush attachment, I’m finding it impossible to focus. I just can’t get the conversation with Clarisse out of my head.
What total garbage. Why should I listen to her? She doesn’t know anything about Ava. She isn’t even really friends with Ty and me. And yet, there’s no denying that the stuff she said about the seventh grade is a hundred percent legit. All anybody wants to talk about is who’s dating who, who broke up with who, and who dumped who for somebody else. So it makes sense that Clarisse might extend all that to include Ava, Ty, and me.
It isn’t garbage. It just happens to be wrong.
Correction, I remind myself: It’s wrong so far. After all, Kennedy and Miggy weren’t together either—until they were. Now they spend all their spare time leaning against each other and everybody calls them Miggennedy. No wonder I got suspicious when Ty said he was doing “nothing” tonight. Not that I believe the guy will sneak over to Ava’s place, but because it’s possible.
Rufus barks in confusion and more than a little impatience. Lost in thought, I’ve pulled the Shop-Vac’s hose off the dog’s belly, and I’m holding it up in the air. From Rufus’s perspective, that is an unacceptable shirking of responsibility.
“Sorry.” I flip the sheepdog over and start vacuuming his furry back. But my heart just isn’t in it anymore. Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, kids going out with each other became the new normal around here. And nobody kept Ty and me in the loop!
Unless—once again, the Shop-Vac ends up pointing at the ceiling—Ty has been in the loop this whole time. He’s just not telling me because that gives him an advantage with Ava. How could my best friend be so devious? How could he be such a jerk? We have to have this out before it goes any further!
No sooner has that thought crossed my mind than the garage door begins to rise, and there stands Ty, silhouetted against the dusky sky. I shut off the Shop-Vac and quiet descends in the garage.
“We have to talk!” we chorus at exactly the same instant.
It lightens the mood and we smile at each other. Even at this moment of tension, our thoughts seem to be synchronized.
“I’ll go first,” Ty volunteers. “I’ve been thinking about what Clarisse said—about which one of us is going out with Ava.”
“Which is nobody,” I put in pointedly.
“Right! And remember she told us that no matter who it is, the other guy won’t be able to handle it?”
“Baloney!” I exclaim. “Pure baloney!”
“On the annoying scale from one to ten, Clarisse is at least an eleven,” Ty complains. “I was so ticked off!”
