Slacker by Gordon Korman
Katrina noticed me first. Her reaction was to pull the Darth Vader voice-synthesizer helmet off her friend’s head. I at least had the satisfaction of watching Melody turn green when she saw me standing there.
“Hey, Cam,” she managed.
“Mom and Dad need you at home,” I gritted through clenched teeth. “Right now.”
It was a miracle I wasn’t yelling at the top of my lungs. That lasted about three steps past the Bundys’ front porch. I unloaded on her—not just about Evil McKillPeople, but the web-page thing, too. All the quiet I’d managed before was out the window now. I was amazed streetlights weren’t exploding and satellites weren’t dropping out of orbit from the sheer volume of my fury. They probably heard me on the Death Star.
“How did I ever hurt you?” I raved. “What terrible crime did I commit that I deserved this? What did I do to you to make you hate me so much that you would devote your whole life to wrecking everything I care about?”
She had looked pretty scared while I was going off on her, but when she turned on me, her face was full of anger. “Seriously? What did you ever do to me? Try being a second-class citizen in your own family! Try watching your brother bamboozle your parents so our whole house can revolve around your dumb lifestyle! Try being such a nobody in your own home that you have to go to your friend’s house just to play a lousy video game.”
“I let you play,” I defended myself.
“Oh, sure—between four thirty and five a.m. on Tuesdays and alternate Thursdays! I moved a sofa cushion, and you blamed me for throwing off your aim!”
“You have no clue what it takes to game at a high level!” I accused.
“No,” she agreed. “I know nothing about it. I’m just the person who beats you every single time! I’m onto you, Cam Boxer. You’re not mad because I’m Evil McKillPeople. You’re mad because Evil McKillPeople is better than you!”
“You’re not better than me!” I stammered. “It’s just that—the Darth Vader voice throws me off … ” But she had me there. I’d never gotten the best of Evil McKillPeople. He—she—was a master who had grown up and surpassed me under my very nose.
“Well, what about the web page, huh?” I ranted. “You don’t care about the P.A.G. You never did. You figured out why I started the whole thing, and hacked into it just to stick it to me—so I’d get in trouble with Mom and Dad! And you’re still doing it so I’ll get in trouble at school, too!”
“You’re right,” she admitted, a little shamefaced. “It bothered me that Mom and Dad thought you were this big do-gooder when the whole thing was baloney. I wanted to make you suffer for it. And I thought it was funny when Mr. Fanshaw took over and turned the P.A.G. into a real club. But you know what? It only started as a goof. Once I saw how awesome it could be, I was on board just like everybody else. We helped so many people—and we helped ourselves at the same time. Everybody talks about school spirit, but all they mean is pep rallies and go-team-go! The P.A.G.—that was school spirit! Ask anybody who was in it. They’ll tell you how great it was.”
I thought of Xavier and his salsa bowl—currently full of Doritos, going stale and gathering dust in our basement. “Don’t I count?” I asked bitterly. “It wasn’t great for me.”
She shook her head. “You’re such an idiot, Cam. You’re ticked off about the web page when should be down on your knees thanking me for helping to take the P.A.G. to the next level. Why, at its peak, you could have snapped your fingers and mobilized an army hundreds strong, ready to do anything you wanted them to. How many kids ever get that kind of power?”
“Power has no place in my lifestyle.”
“Well, maybe it should,” she retorted. “A little power would be a nice change in our house while we watch our parents’ business—and the whole town—go down the drain.”
“Like I could ever do anything about that,” I said unhappily. “Even if the P.A.G. wasn’t history and … ” My voice trailed off.
Okay, the P.A.G. was over. But I thought of all those kids who’d come up to me to say how sorry they were, and how angry they were that we’d been blamed for something we didn’t do. The phone calls and text messages; the notes jammed in my locker. The defiant comments that appeared on the illegal web page faster than the school could take them down.
We were standing stock-still in the middle of the road, Melody looking anxiously into my face. “What is it, Cam?”
“The P.A.G. is gone,” I managed. “But we might still have the army.”
I never thought I’d love the P.A.G. as much as I did, or miss it as much as I was missing it now.
Then again, a lot of things were happening that I never thought could happen, like the Awesome Threesome not being friends anymore. That was so bad that Pavel and I could barely gag down our gummy worms. We were still friends, at least, but that was just a twosome. And not having Cam took the awesomeness out of everything.
Even Mrs. Backward could tell that something was wrong. “Melancholy, you boys are. Your friend is where?”
“We’re kind of fighting,” Pavel told her unhappily.
“Time, give him,” she advised us in her backward language that Pavel and Cam understood, but always took me a little longer. “Work out, it will.” Her brow clouded. “Our freeway ramp, not so much. The Transportation Department—hemorrhoids I wish on them!”
We still saw Cam at school, but he didn’t talk to us and we didn’t talk to him. He was keeping his distance, using his secret locker full-time because it was on the opposite side of the building from ours. I didn’t tell Pavel, but I even went online a few times just to check if Cam was on the gaming network. I never found him, not once. If there was anything weirder than the Awesome Threesome breaking up, it was Cam not playing video games.
Pavel was as sad as I was, but also pretty sore. “He deserves it. Where does he get off accusing me of messing with the web page?”
Speaking of the web page, it was back up again. At least, sometimes it was. One minute it would be there like before, filled with angry words and challenges like PAGGERS FIGHT BACK and DR. LAPIERRE UNFAIR and AXE FUZZY, NOT THE GOOD GUYS. But just a few minutes later, it was gone again. I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
“It’s no big mystery,” Pavel told me. “Some pagger’s hacking into the site and putting the page back up. And the school keeps taking it down.”
I looked deep into his face. “But are you the pagger who’s hacking in?”
He glared at me. “Don’t you start. It wasn’t me before and it isn’t me now.”
I must have seemed disappointed. The truth was, I liked what it said on the web page. I was ready to fight for the P.A.G. But because the page would only be there for a few minutes, there was never time to put in any information. Nothing about where to go, or what to do, or who to talk to.
Every morning while I ate breakfast, I’d check it on my iPad, hoping against hope for word that the P.A.G. might be getting back together again.
And then, one day, there it was:
“But where?” I almost shouted into my cornflakes. Desperately, I tried scrolling down for more details. That was when the page tried to refresh itself, flickered once, and disappeared.
I called Pavel.
“I saw it, too,” he confirmed. “We’ll just have to ask around when we get to school. Somebody must know what’s going on.”
He was half right. At school everyone was buzzing about the latest post. I guess we weren’t the only ex-paggers following the on-again, off-again page. The problem was that nobody knew where this big meeting was going to be held.
“Well, that makes sense,” Pavel reasoned. “The school is monitoring this. If they give the location, the first guy to show up will be Dr. LaPierre.”
It didn’t make me feel any better. “Yeah, but it’s not going to be much of a meeting if nobody knows where to go!”
Rumors started flying. It would be the gym, where all our meetings took place. The guidance department, since Mr. Fanshaw wa
Some kids even thought the Boxer home would be the spot. Only Pavel and I knew how wrong that was. Nobody cared less about the P.A.G. than Cam himself.
I’ll bet our school shattered the world record for cell phone write-ups that day. Everyone was on the school site, hoping for more information from the phantom P.A.G. page. You could hear the “Ahhhhh!” from every hall in the school when it suddenly reappeared just a few seconds after the three o’clock bell.
I stared at my phone’s small screen:
A buzz of confusion rose. Where it all began? What was that supposed to mean?
“I’ve got it!” crowed String’s voice in sudden triumph. “This must mean the playing field at the elementary school where The String scored his first touchdown!”
There was a general sigh of letdown. I liked String, but his suggestion made about as much sense as everything else he said.
“The P.A.G. started in Cam’s basement,” I mused to Pavel. “Or maybe at your house, where you set up the web page.”
He shook his head. “The only people who know about that are us and Cam. And there’s no way he has anything to do with this. I thought of the music room, where the P.A.G. first met—but we’d never fit in there now. No, ‘where it all began’ can only mean where we did our first good deed—the senior citizens’ garden project.”
We told as many paggers as we could, hoping that they would spread the word from there. But obviously we weren’t the only ones who remembered that great day when the P.A.G. changed from a club on paper to a real force for good in Sycamore. As we made our way across town toward Seventh Street, there were already a lot of kids ahead of us. The trickle turned to a stream, and pretty soon, the sidewalk was so jammed that a lot of walkers spilled over into the road, slowing traffic.
The closer we got, the greater the excitement level, the louder the chatter. I was feeling it as much as anyone. The fact that the P.A.G. was coming back to life awakened something in me, too. Not that we weren’t still shut down officially. But there was something more to us, something Dr. LaPierre couldn’t touch. And neither could the Friends of Fuzzy.
“Who do you think is doing this?” I asked Pavel. “It can’t be Mr. Fanshaw. He could get fired.”
Pavel shrugged. “We’ll know soon enough.”
We crossed the street and entered the garden. It wasn’t the whole P.A.G., but there had to be at least two hundred of us there, clustered around about ten kids at the center of the now frost-covered garden. I saw Xavier first—he was hard to miss. There were school co-presidents Jordan and Kelly, along with Felicia, the campaign manager, even though there was no campaign anymore. And—was that Daphne?
“I sure hope they brought a megaphone,” Pavel commented. “Listen to this crowd. We’re not going to hear a word.”
That turned out to be one of the rare times the great Pavel was wrong about something. As soon as Xavier held up his hands for order, all those paggers got real silent real fast. Then he squatted down, and for a minute I thought we’d come all this way to watch a former juvenile delinquent do knee bends. But no—he was hunkering down to boost somebody up onto his shoulders.
“That’s Cam!” Pavel blurted.
When everybody recognized the P.A.G.’s founder, the senior citizens’ garden project went berserk for five full minutes.
As soon as things quieted down again, Cam began to talk. “We helped a lot of people.” He didn’t even raise his voice, but we hung on his every word. “Now we have a chance to help ourselves. We have a chance to help the whole town.”
Pavel and I exchanged an astonished look. No one hated public speaking more than Cam. He was always telling us that it didn’t fit into his lifestyle. What was going on here?
“On Saturday morning,” Cam went on, “the Division of Highways is going to knock down our exit ramp, and everybody thinks there’s nothing we can do about it. But what the P.A.G. taught us is there’s never nothing we can do. If we could get hundreds of people to pick up garbage, we can get hundreds of people to stand on our ramp and block the demolition crew.”
I turned to Pavel. “That can’t work. Can it?”
He seemed stunned. “It’s so obvious. I can’t believe nobody thought of it before!”
“Yeah, but people aren’t stronger than bulldozers.”
“In a way they are,” he countered. “A highway crew’s not allowed to plow over human beings. If we pack that ramp and refuse to move, there’s nothing they can do!”
I was blown away. My parents, their friends, Mrs. Backward, the city council, the mayor, every adult in town was mourning over the loss of this freeway ramp. And the only person to come up with a plan was an eighth grader. And not just any eighth grader—Cam Boxer, the world’s greatest natural slacker!
“Maybe the school shut us down,” Cam concluded. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t be the Positive Action Group in our spare time. I think we’ve got one more good deed in us. And this one’s the most important of all.”
There was a low, thoughtful murmur as the audience chewed over Cam’s words. And when it began to sink in that this was something that could work, the hum swelled to a roar. We could do this! If we got a big enough turnout, we could stop those bulldozers. And for the P.A.G., bringing together hundreds of volunteers was something that used to happen two or three times a week!
The crowd rushed toward Cam, and Pavel and I rushed with them. The P.A.G. president teetered atop Xavier’s strong shoulders, reaching down to slap high fives.
Pavel was pink with exhilaration. “Cam was awesome! And not a word about aliens or his clan or Rule the World!”
I nodded happily. “Let’s go congratulate him!”
That was easier said than done. Everybody wanted a piece of Cam right then. He was the man of the hour, the star of the moment.
We shoved our way forward until we were as close as we could get in the mob.
“Hey, Cam!” I called, waving.
“Over here!” Pavel added.
The P.A.G. president’s eyes panned the crowd, passing right over us.
I still loved Elvis. There was no question about that. And I was still worried sick about him.
But facts were facts, and it was time to face up to a tough one: Elvis wouldn’t be showing his buckteeth around Sycamore anymore. No one had seen him since painting day at the Y. He had moved on. Or worse.
I didn’t want to think about “or worse.”
Like it or not, I had to be mature and accept reality. The P.A.G. was back and Elvis wasn’t. And the P.A.G. was good—great, even. What could be better than helping—even if the list of who we helped didn’t include a certain beaver.
Anyway, even Elvis wasn’t as important as saving our freeway ramp and maybe our whole town. Cam was right about that.
By Friday, every single kid at Sycamore Middle School knew the drill for early Saturday. At seven a.m., we were all going to meet at the freeway. We would stand on it, around it, and in front of it, and block the wrecking crew from getting anywhere near it.
Cam had only one rule for us: We had to keep it a secret. Mostly from our parents, who might think that taking on a bulldozer was a bad idea. Parents could be like that sometimes—getting obsessed over a couple of details and not seeing the big picture.
I took that rule really seriously when I snuck out of the house early Saturday, closing my bedroom door so my folks would think I was sleeping late. Outside, it was cold and clear, the sun a big fireball on the horizon. I’d deliberately left my bike hidden in the bushes so I wouldn’t make noise getting it out of the garage. I was meeting up with Cam, Melody, and Katrina for the ride over to the freeway.
I figured I’d have to wait for them, but they were already there, checking their watches impatiently. Dark circles ringed the bloodshot eyes of the P.A.G. president. The resp
Melody seemed nervous. “I sure hope we’re not the only ones crazy enough to do this.”
“Are you kidding?” Katrina crowed. “I pity the poor bulldozer that tries to get past the P.A.G.”
As we pedaled south toward the highway, kids began to appear on the streets around us—on bicycles, Rollerblades, scooters, skateboards, and on foot.
“Looks like it’s going to be a good turnout,” I commented.
Cam didn’t answer. He was really in the zone. Either that or he wasn’t completely awake.
As we moved along, the steadily growing stream of paggers began to converge on the main roads heading into downtown. There were waves and subdued greetings, but no one wanted to attract attention and give away our plans. I recognized String skateboarding with some teammates, and Jordan, Kelly, and Felicia on bikes. Xavier was among the walkers, his long strides keeping pace with the rest of us. I’d never seen him so serious.
Katrina looked around. “I’m kind of surprised there are so many cars out so early.”
She was right. It wasn’t exactly a traffic jam, but a surprising number of motorists were out for six forty a.m. on a weekend. And all of them seemed to be heading the same way we were.
Melody’s brow furrowed. “You don’t think a bunch of paggers got lazy and asked their parents for a lift?”