bouts of rage? The nail-biting?”
“I’m trying, okay? Anyway, I mean the other-other-other thing.”
The nurse flipped through a manila folder stuffed with Dylan’s medical records. “I see from last time that you got those nasty scratches on your chest when you were playing a video game. Are you having another episode?”
“Yeah, I guess kinda,” he sorta lied.
“Hmmm. I can’t read this chicken scratch for your emergency contact—should I call your mother . . . father . . . other?”
“I tell you this every time! I don’t really have a family. I live with the Professor . . . I mean my aunt. She’s definitely more of an other than a mother.”
The nurse picked up the phone. “Well, we can contact her.”
“Do you have to get her involved? Can’t you just write me a note?”
She put down the phone. “This wouldn’t be about Chad Worthington, would it?”
Dylan nearly fell off the white stool he was sitting on. “Why does everyone know about this?”
“Chad is the new school superintendant’s son. News travels. He’s gotten into lots of fights—even with his buddies. Whatever you do, don’t let him give you the gas.”
“You know about that? You have to help me!”
The nurse’s rodent eyes stopped scampering, like they had been caught in a trap.
“I can give you a head start,” she said.
Nurse Barett let him go to his locker and get his stuff, but it was already 2:55 p.m. and classes were letting out in just five minutes. Dylan ran at full speed down the empty hallway. As he passed the gym, he saw some of Chad’s thugs pressing their faces against the windows of the double doors, chewing on wads of gum and pointing menacingly at him. Dylan reached his locker with two minutes to spare—and then the bell rang early. Did nothing in this crummy school work right? Kids spilled into the hall—Chad would be somewhere in the spillage. Dylan looked around. Maybe in all the confusion he could slip out the east wing side doors, near the science labs. Then it would be a straight shot to Webster Avenue and freedom.
“Dylan! I’m coming for you, Loopy!”
Too late. Chad burst out of Spanish class like a bull charging a matador. Dylan got a quick glimpse: his bonfire of red hair, his freckled face, his left cheek eternally bulging with a glob of gum. He had a little crimson fuzz on his lip, and word was that he sometimes even shaved his chin. As Chad passed, the crowds in the hall parted like a zipper unzipping, letting him roar by. Three of his crew, blowing bubbles as they ran, were right behind him.
“Game over, Loopy!” Chad bellowed. “That’s right, I said it!”
No way could Dylan outrun this jerk. But maybe there was another way.
He grabbed his skateboard out of his locker. He didn’t have the cash for a new board, so over the last few months he had built this himself from secondhand parts. He hoped all the work paid off now.
Dylan skated down the hall, weaving around students. A couple goons tried to grab him, but he slid right by them. The main door to the school was coming up, and Chad was closing fast, only two classrooms away. “I have you now!” he yowled.
“Fight! Fight! Fight!” the students all around started chanting.
“Get ready for the gas!” Chad reached out and managed to get a paw on Dylan’s ankle. Just then, Dylan heard a sound like a trumpet crossed with an elephant and something streaked out of nowhere and crashed into Chad’s legs. Dylan stumbled off his skateboard and kept running out the school’s front door; Chad lost his footing and went crashing to the floor along with whatever it was that had taken him out.
Eli had tripped up Chad. Anjali—who was also a Loopy but was weirder than most because she was always lugging around a French horn—had helped out by pushing Eli and his chair right in front of Dylan’s pursuer.
Chad, getting to his feet, turned angrily toward the pair, and Dylan kept running, too far ahead now to get caught.
“Keep going!” Eli shouted at Dylan. “What’s he gonna do, put me in a wheelchair?”
Should he stay? Should he go? Dylan glanced back over his shoulder at Chad, who was on a rampage, kicking Dylan’s abandoned black, gold, and green skateboard, tossing Eli’s laptop into a wall, and picking up Anjali’s French horn to slam it into the sidewalk. Anjali opened her mouth in a silent scream.
Dylan turned away from the school and kept running up Webster Avenue toward his house, as pea-colored clouds rolled across the late-afternoon sky.
Was he really a Game Changer?
Dylan was trying to get up the nerve to ask the Professor about Xamaica, and Emma was loving every moment of it. They were all in their cramped apartment sitting at the card table eating a dinner of burnt toast, burnt bacon, and this horrible lemonade made from powder the Professor bought in bulk. One sip tasted worse than sucking on a yellow marker. Two sips were as bad as eating yellow snow. Nobody made it to three.
“Gross!” Dylan grumbled, pushing his half-empty glass to the side. “You know, just because they sell it in bulk doesn’t mean we should drink it in bulk.”
“Forget that, ask her about the Game Changers!” Emma said.
“Shut up!” Dylan shot back.
At Dylan’s outburst, the tiny apartment, which was crammed with birdcages, suddenly came alive with the sounds of all the birds locked in them. The Professor taught avian studies at a small college and she regularly took her work home with her. Unfortunately, her work tended to squawk, chirp, and hoot round the clock.
The Professor sighed. “We talked about this,” she said to Dylan in the kind of calming voice that made everyone tense. “You’ve got to control yourself. You have to grow up.”
“Ask her about the thing,” Emma prodded Dylan. “You need parental permission.”
“Will you stop?” Dylan growled. “She’s not my parent and neither are you.”
“You don’t even remember Mom and Dad,” Emma huffed.
“I remember more than you,” Dylan countered, even though in truth he only had scattered memories of the accident, like tiny pieces of a puzzle, and not only did he not know how they fit together, some of them were missing.
The Professor, who had been reading Birdbaths of Ancient Rome: Volume Seven, slammed the book down on the card table, which nearly buckled under the weight. The glass of lemonade fell to the floor. Dylan and Emma stopped arguing, and even the birds shut up for a moment.
“Let’s not argue about your parents,” the Professor said. “Your father—my brother—wanted us all to be a family. And I know your mother would have wanted the same thing. She was a mysterious sort; there was something magic about her.”
“Why
