She’s right about that. But it seems so unfair. You can’t pile all your unpleasant tasks on somebody’s shoulders just because he doesn’t complain.

  Or should that depend on the somebody?

  Paul Perkins doesn’t agree. He thinks the staff is going too far in passing off all their extra duties on Mr. Aidact. I want to support my teachers, but if this continues, Paul might report us to the Department of Education. That would be an unnecessary complication.

  It’s such an honor that Brightling was chosen out of thousands of middle schools to host this project. What a vote of confidence in me as principal that the Department of Education entrusted me with this responsibility. I wish I could tell everyone about it—but, of course, secrecy is part of the original agreement. The teachers know, naturally, but not the students or their parents. At the end of the year, this will all become public. Then the name Brightling Middle School will be in every newspaper, magazine, and podcast. It’s hard to keep silent on such big news, but the rewards will be more than worth the wait.

  I lean back in my swivel chair and gaze out into the hall at the 1974 state cup on its pedestal. Oh, sure, I know the kids think it’s no big deal, but it represents field hockey supremacy—our school being the best at something. And 1974 was such a long time ago. Especially since we’re not going to be winning that trophy again anytime soon. Maeve Delisle—who coached the team forever—retired last year. The girls should be in training already. The competition almost certainly is. If we can’t find a new coach soon, Brightling will have to withdraw from the season.

  I offered to coach the team myself, but our superintendent put the kibosh on that idea. She called it a “poor message for the community that our principals have extra time on their hands.” It was disappointing—especially since I considered myself the Bobcats’ last chance. For sure, today isn’t the perfect time to recruit a field hockey coach. The commodore of a yacht club, maybe. The pitch is practically underwater. Any potential coach would picture themselves slogging through this weather, trying to run a practice in a swamp. Why, you’d need a candidate who doesn’t have the sense to come in out of the rain. . . .

  I whip back around to face the front window and the unloading of the last bus. There’s my next field hockey coach, half-drowned and incapable of knowing it. Of course! Why didn’t I think of it sooner? Kelly Tapper had the answer when she needed a colleague to cover detention during that plumbing emergency. He doesn’t complain. Those were her exact words. He’ll take over detention or lunchroom duty or cover recess. He’ll even unload the buses during a certifiable hurricane. And when a girls’ field hockey team needs a coach, he’s your man.

  Suddenly filled with energy, I leap to my feet, grab my umbrella, and head for the front entrance. As I pass the trophy in the hall, I reach out my elbow and polish away a fingerprint with my sleeve.

  The instant I step outside, the wind tears the umbrella out of my hands, sending it tumbling across the lawn. Soaked to the skin, I press on until I’m standing next to Mr. Aidact. I’m like a waterlogged rat, but he looks great, in spite of the droplets streaming down his face.

  “Good morning, Principal Candiotti,” he greets me, as if, for all the world, we’d just met over tea in the faculty lounge.

  “Mr. Aidact,” I bubble, “I have a question for you. What do you know about girls’ field hockey?”

  He tilts his head slightly in that way he has. Five or six seconds go by before he announces, “I know everything about it.”

  I beam at my newest staff member. “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”

  8

  Rosalie Arnette

  When I see that they posted the roster for the Bobcats’ girls’ field hockey team, my heart jumps into my throat. And when I see my name partway down the list—

  “I made it!” I breathe, punching the air.

  Cassidy shoots me a quizzical look. “Everybody makes it. If you show up at tryouts, you’re in.”

  Well, being a Bobcat might be no big deal for Cassidy, who’s a multisport athlete and our captain besides. But for me, it’s huge. This might be the proudest moment of my school career—except for the time I got 104 percent on the state math exam because I nailed both bonus questions. And maybe my first-place finish at the science fair last year. And that chess tournament—

  Okay, so maybe this is only my fourth-proudest moment, but I’m celebrating it anyway. I’m terrible at tennis, I stink at softball, and at track I have two left feet. Soccer’s a problem because I refuse to bounce the ball off my head. Sorry, not doing it. It looks goofy and it hurts. Field hockey is my only chance to have something on my record that says Rosalie Arnette is more than just brains and ambition. She’s an athlete—and at a good sport too, not one of those other ones. I’m probably getting ahead of myself here, because I’m only in seventh grade, but this is going to look great on my college applications.

  The field hockey coach is Mr. Aidact. That surprises me at first. Shouldn’t a girls’ team have a female coach? But just like he’s supersmart at teaching, he’s supersmart at field hockey too. At our very first team meeting, he stands up in front of the whiteboard and starts diagramming Xs, Ys, and Zs, with arrows all over the place. I swear, I’ve never been so confused in my life. So I look over at Cassidy, and she’s just as lost as I am. That has to be brilliant coaching, confirmed.

  We change into our teal-and-white “skorts”—kind of hideous, but what middle school has its uniforms supplied by a fashion designer? It’s time to start training.

  I’ve held an ice hockey stick a few times. This is totally different. It’s shorter, which forces you into kind of a bent-over position that is even more bent-over when you’re tall to begin with. And there’s no real blade—it’s rounded into a hooklike shape. Not only that, but only one side of the stick is flat. The other side is rounded, so you can’t use it. It’s not just hard—it’s actually illegal. If you touch the ball with the rounded side of your stick, the whistle sounds, and your team loses possession.

  “Don’t worry about that too much,” Cassidy confides to some of us seventh-grade newbies. “The field is so big that the refs miss a lot of those fouls.”

  Wrong. Mr. Aidact catches every single one of them. Even if the ball bounces off the round part of your stick by mistake, he sees it from sixty yards away. He must have eagle eyes or something. At practice, his whistle shrills constantly, like a cicada infestation. After the first few days, I’m hearing it in my sleep.

  Coach Aidact also has us doing shooting drills. After all, you’ll never win if you can’t score goals. In theory, it should be easy. The nets are gigantic—twelve feet wide and seven feet high, with only one goalkeeper standing in the middle. But it’s practically impossible because the sticks are so awkward. The first time I try it, I miss. Not the net; the ball. The second time, I fan over top of it, and the ball rolls about a yard and a half, coming to rest at the feet of Leticia Dooley, our goalie. Even the eighth graders struggle for power and accuracy.

  So the coach decides to demonstrate for us. He practically has to fold himself in half to hold that super-short stick. “You use your body to aim,” he explains. “Draw an imaginary line through your shoulders. That’s the path your shot will take.”

  I’m surprised. “Did you play field hockey, Coach?”

  “Never even once,” he replies honestly. “Now, watch as I step into my shot with the opposite leg—”

  He lunges forward, rears back his stick, and takes a mighty swing. There’s a sharp tock and the ball takes off like it was fired out of a bazooka. By the time Leticia sees it, it’s already behind her. It tears through the netting, bounces off the side of the field house, and soars into the parking lot. There’s a crash followed by the wail of a car alarm.

  Mr. Perkins, who’s been seated in the bleachers, watching our practice and writing in his notebook, suddenly leaps to his feet. “My car!” High-stepping along the seats, he exits the stands at speed, his giant briefcase smacking against his knee. He runs into the lot, stopping at a white Toyota Prius. The windshield is a spiderweb of broken glass, with the ball lodged dead center, like a pimple.

  It’s a strange moment. Half the girls are horrified, while the others are holding in laughter. Weirder still, Coach Aidact goes on with his explanation of shooting technique like nothing just happened and his student teacher isn’t melting down in the parking lot.

  “Coach?” I venture shyly. “Shouldn’t you go over there and—you know—help Mr. Perkins?”

  He gives me that blue-eyed stare of his. “Do you have a field hockey question, Rosalie?”

  “Uh—I guess not.”

  “Then let’s save it till after practice,” he concludes. “Now, everybody take a ball. . . .”

  An all-too-familiar voice declares, “Snack time!”

  Across the grass marches my mother, a medium-size carton balanced on her shoulder. I squint at the logo: FLAXPLOSION.

  I rush over. “What are you doing here, Mom? We’re in the middle of a practice!”

  “Well, surely you can pause for a little quick energy,” she reasons. She puts the box down, throws open the lid, and hollers, “Come and get it!”

  The Bobcats, eager for a break, gather around. But when they see the contents of the box, everyone backs off. Nobody reaches for a single one.

  People tell me I look like my mother. But at this moment, I’m trying to look like anybody else.

  Mom plucks a bar out of the carton, tears off the wrapper, and hands it to me. “All right, who’s next?”

  There are no takers.

  “Is this your mom, Rosalie?” Leticia pipes up.

  The girls are all looking at me like I’ve done something unforgivable.

  I swear I’m tempted to say no. She means well, and she works hard for the PTA. But why, oh why, does the entire field hockey team—including the eighth graders—have to know that I’m the daughter of the person who chose these awful bars for the fundraiser? The school office is piled high with boxes just like this one. The students are supposed to be selling them to raise money for the Halloween dance. And anybody who’s tried has had a lot of doors slammed in their faces, because they look terrible and taste worse!

  “I would have one,” Cassidy ventures carefully, “but if we eat too many ourselves, we won’t have any left to sell.”

  “I might have been a teeny bit optimistic when I placed the order,” my mother admits. “Sales aren’t as brisk as I was expecting.”

  “I took two dozen to sell,” Ainsley whispers beside me. “I had to throw them in the garbage and pay the money out of my own pocket.”

  “It’s worth it,” I hear somebody else comment.

  My face feels so hot I’m sure my cheeks are bright red.

  Coach Aidact picks up a bar and examines the ingredients on the wrapper. “It seems healthy enough.”

  “Thank you!” Mom exclaims in an exaggerated tone. She holds out her hand. “Peggy Arnette, PTA president.” She adds, “Well, Arnette is my married name. I’m recently divorced. The old habits die hard, don’t you know.”

  Suddenly, I’m praying for the cleats on my shoes to turn into tiny drills to dig me down to the earth’s core.

  “Rob Aidact. Nice to meet you.” They shake hands.

  “Aidact,” she repeats. “Is that German? Maybe Dutch?”

  “A little of this and that,” Mr. Aidact replies.

  “Well, this is really interesting,” I lie, “but we’re wasting practice time.”

  “I’m sure you can break early just this once.” Mom’s eyes are on Mr. Aidact, not me.

  Mr. Perkins slouches onto the scene, heels dragging, the picture of dejection. “We’re here for a while,” he announces tragically. “The auto-glass repair people can’t make it for another hour.”

  “Well, then”—Coach Aidact hefts his stick—“let’s get back to work.”

  “Take a bar at least,” Mom insists, pushing a Flaxplosion in his direction and not giving in until he accepts it. “It builds muscle tone.” She looks him up and down. “Not that you have any problem in that department.”

  Oh, barf.

  He slips it into the pocket of his sweatpants, but I notice that, for the rest of practice, he never takes a bite.

  9

  CONFIDENTIAL REPORT

  * * *

  To: Department of Education, Washington, DC

  From: Paul Perkins, PE

  Project: AIDACT

  A concerning trend has begun to appear. Teachers are sloughing off unwanted duties on AIDACT. This results in AIDACT being involved in activities outside the parameters of the project, including even coaching a sport. There is increased risk of a security breach when AIDACT interacts with anything outside Department planning (see attached document: field hockey ball). A PTA member could present a future problem, but this is under control at the moment.

  PROJECT STATUS: Green

  SPECIAL EXPENSES

  One windshield for Toyota Prius

  10

  Nathan Popova

  Oliver punches in the code and I watch as his garage door slowly rises off the concrete floor.

  “What do you think?” he asks proudly.

  A Big Wheel sits in the middle of the garage—the girl kind, pink, lavender, and white, with multicolored streamers coming out of the handlebars and the back of the seat.

  I frown at him. “What are we supposed to do with that?”

  He beams. “We’re going to change history at our school.”

  When you’ve been friends with Oliver as long as I have, you get used to the big talk. In kindergarten, when we poured the milk for snack time into the finger paint, he called it “cowification.” Last year, he spent half of sixth grade wishing everybody a very loud “Greetings!” because hi wasn’t good enough. He’s kind of larger-than-life. So when I hear “change history,” I don’t take it too seriously. It’s just Oliver being Oliver.

  “Change history how?”

  “We’re rule-wreckers.” He shrugs. “And it’s time to take down the great-grandfather of all dumb rules.”

  That’s when it comes to me. “Not the Big Wheel thing!”

  He nods, and I can see the excitement in his eyes. “I’m going to do it! I’m going to ride this Big Wheel up and down the main hall, and the whole school is going to see me.”

  My Oliver Alert kicks in—not a full alarm yet, but a steady warning beep. “Seems to me we’re already in detention because of the prank with the cars. How do you think you’re going to get away with this one?”

  “Easy. I’ll do it when there’s nobody else around. You’ll shoot it with your phone and post it on the seventh-grade chat.”

  “Teachers can get on the seventh-grade chat too, you know,” I point out. “They’ll see your face, and that’ll be the end of you. You’ll get expelled, and me too, because who else would let you talk them into shooting the video?”

  “They won’t recognize me,” he declares triumphantly. “I’ll be wearing a mask.”

  “Oh, sure,” I snort. “Like a guy in a mask can just waltz past security into a school.”

  “That’s not going to be a problem.” His eyes light up the way they always do when he’s figured something out. “Because we’re going to do this on the one night that everyone’s wearing a mask.”

  “When’s that?” I challenge.

  “Halloween. They’ll be letting people into the school to go to the dance. But since everyone will be in the gym, the hallways will be empty. We can film to our hearts’ content.”

  The Oliver Alert volume level swells to a deafening horn. It’s so loud that all I can say is, “Wow.”

  “I know, right? Simple, yet brilliant too. Tell you what—I’ll even give you a turn on the Big Wheel.”

  Oliver Alert! . . . Oliver Alert! . . . Abandon Ship! . . .

  The weirdest part is I know I’m going to do it. I hear the Oliver Alerts, but for some reason, I never listen to them, even though I totally get that we’re headed for disaster. There’s just something irresistible about the guy. And sooner or later, I’ll be in—just like I was in for the cars and Fire in the Hole and all those other pranks dating back to the milk-in-the-finger-paint stunt. When the milk went sour, our classroom stank, and nobody could figure out why. But I listened to Oliver and kept my mouth shut, even when the school called in an exterminator because they thought there might be a dead raccoon in the walls.

  We were five years old, but nothing was different. Rules were made to be wrecked.

  The whole week leading up to the Halloween dance, the excitement growing inside Oliver threatens to lift his feet off the ground and carry him away. For him, the only thing better than the perfect prank is the anticipation. Even when we’re sitting in detention, I’ll look over and see him smiling. In his mind, he’s already on that Big Wheel, tearing up and down the school.

  Also, he’s constantly whispering in my ear, fine-tuning the plan. It’s hard to understand whispering during a full-blown Oliver Alert.

  “Have you figured out what your other costume is going to be?” he hisses on Wednesday.

  I check to make sure Mr. Aidact is on the far side of the room, out of earshot, before I reply. “Other costume? I thought we’re both going as the Grim Reaper. Why do I need another costume?”

  He’s way ahead of me, as usual. “If we wear our Grim Reaper suits on the Big Wheel, everybody’s going to know it’s us. We need two costumes—one for the dance and one for the video.”

  “I’m not changing clothes in the middle of the school,” I protest. “The only thing worse than getting expelled is getting expelled in your underwear.”

  He shakes his head. “The Reaper robes go over the other outfit. So when we’re ready to film, we throw off costume number one and we’re already in costume number two. I’d go with something tight for the inner layer. I’ve got a Batman suit from fifth grade that might still fit. We’ll check out your closet after school.”