Troublemakers Read online

  I swayed my way up to Armando in the hall and leaned against a locker.

  “Yo, what up, sweet thang,” I said.

  “There’s teachers in the hall,” he said, making like he was about to scream.

  “Oh, I’m not here to threaten to beat you up,” I said. He’d been right to assume that. I reached out to do that thing where you wipe the hair out of the guy’s face after he’s gotten all mussed and sweaty rescuing old ladies from a fire or something – Armando’s hair was short, but whatever – but he pulled back the way a cat does when you’ve got a Super Soaker.

  “Here’s how it’s gonna be,” I said. “You. Me. Together. Capisce? I always get what I want, and you’re driving me wild with the way you… um… you know….”

  He stared at me like I was a talking pile of poop.

  “No,” he said.

  Okay. First try was not optimal. I was gonna have to take it up a notch, really get into this performance.

  “I understand the pain you’re going through,” I said, “having to protect this city from all the scum making these streets so unsafe. It’s a difficult burden, the warrior’s life. I feel it too. Power makes us lonely. But maybe, just maybe… we can build a new world together.”

  Let’s admit how spicy and dramatic that was. It’s not my fault he’d put his headphones on and didn’t hear any of it. I’d closed my eyes to get into the passion of my monologue, so I hadn’t noticed that he’d walked away mid-speech.

  Armando was a few steps down the hall at this point, so I hustled after him and ripped the headphones from his ears.

  “Listen to me!” I yelled.

  “Kidnapping!” shouted Armando.

  Dang, this was hard. I considered stealing his headphones, but figured that would impede our courtship, so I handed them back.

  How do girls our age act when they like a guy? I wondered. I glanced up and down the hall at some of the other girls. They were all acting like complete dolts and laughing at nothing.

  There we go: act like a complete dolt and laugh at nothing.

  “You’re so funny!” I yelled. “Tee-hee!”

  I smacked him playfully, perhaps a bit too hard. He careened into a locker and fell to the ground.

  “What’s going on here?” said Mr. Koehn, grumbling from his classroom doorway.

  “Lover’s spat,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t notice Armando quivering on the floor.

  “Quit horsing around,” he said, returning to the depths of the science lab.

  I looked down at Armando. He wasn’t quite falling for me in the way I’d expected. I’d assumed luring men into a long con and then robbing them would eventually become a career for me, so this was troubling.

  “Here you go, honey,” I said, grabbing his arm and lifting him back to his feet.

  “What do you want?” asked Armando.

  “You, baby,” I said.

  “To do what?”

  I knew I couldn’t go straight for the trampoline – I’d have to romance him a bit first, lay the groundwork. I’m an old-fashioned girl, and trampolining is really more of a second-date idea. Besides, maybe if he fell for me hard enough on our first date, he’d just buy me a trampoline. I tried to suggest a quality outing.

  “We could, um… get a malt or something?” I said, struggling. “Or… a dance contest? We’ll go to Thunder Road and I’ll watch you race cars against the Scorpions? What do people do?”

  He seemed like he was considering it for 1.07 seconds (approximate).

  “No,” said Armando.

  “Invite me and my friends over to jump on your trampoline or I’ll pound you into oblivion, you worthless creampuff!” I yelled, balling my fists.

  He just stood there, expressionless.

  “Nnnnnnnnoooooooo,” he said.

  He put his headphones back on and walked away. He must have had some sort of spy training to resist my seduction techniques. That’s the only explanation. Or maybe he was a robot. Something had to be wrong, because my game is solid. The point is, somebody screwed it up for me, so we had to try something else.

  __________

  The Old Man Makes An Appearance

  That week was parent-teacher open house, a once-a-quarter session where teachers meet with parents to get to know them and get us grounded. My dad didn’t normally go, which made him the perfect accomplice.

  You see, what often happens at these things is parents start chit-chatting over coffee and decide to be friends. Then they’ll invite your family over to spend the afternoon with their family, and the parents talk about cabinets and get loaded while you have to spend time with some dweeb you’d never hang out with if someone didn’t make you. It’s happened to Carlos and Byron tons of times; they make it sound like they were forced to hang out with dweebs, but I suspect they were the dweebs in those scenarios.

  All we had to do was reverse-engineer the situation: have my dad make friends with Armando’s parents so they’d invite him, and by proxy me, over to their house. I’d show up with Carlos and Byron, and we’d jump on the trampoline and maybe burn the house down.

  A lot was riding on my dad here. We needed him focused. Ordinarily, he gets pretty ornery any time the three of us are at my house during the day (we seem to have that effect on adults), but this was an emergency. So, in order to get him ready for parent-teacher night, we skipped several classes and woke him up at noon for rigorous coaching on his part of the plan. We also tried pumping him full of coffee, but it turns out those paper things are not optional, and he very uncoolly forced us to clean up the mess.

  “Why don’t you just ask this boy if you can come over and jump on his trampoline?” he asked.

  “Because he’s a rich snob and we hate him,” I said.

  “Gauche new money,” said Byron.

  My dad sipped his grainy coffee.

  “Did this Armando do something to you to make you so mad at him?”

  “Not really,” said Carlos. “This is mostly a jealousy-based hatred.”

  “You know, money can’t buy happiness,” said my dad.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but poverty can’t buy anything. Now let’s review how you’re gonna helps us jump on that trampoline.”

  We did another hour of serious drilling, then walked over to parent-teacher night. Right away, there were a few curveballs, as several teachers asked why we were there after not being at school. We pushed them aside and found Armando’s parents to point them out to my dad.

  “Those are the marks,” said Carlos. “Notice her necklace and his tucked-in shirt.”

  “Rubbing their wealth in our faces,” I said with a sneer.

  “Hold on,” said Carlos. “What is Byron doing?”

  Byron had procured himself two sticks that he was treating like crutches. He hobbled up to Armando’s parents on one foot.

  “Hello, sir, ma’am,” he said. “Might I trouble you for some help getting up the stairs? It’s ever so hard with my condition.”

  “Oh,” said Armando’s mom, eyeing the sticks. “Of course. What happened?”

  “Fire at the orphanage,” he said, wincing. “Doctor says the only thing that will help my injured leg is… bouncing rehab. But sadly, our PPO doesn’t cover it….”

  I ran in and tackled Byron before he could say any more. All the parents looked horrified, but I’m used to that. I dragged him out of there while Carlos shoved my dad toward the targets and all the parents went inside.

  While grown-ups were in their little meetings, the school babysat us in the gym. Seventy kids whose lame parents wouldn’t let them stay home alone doing gym activities while foopy volunteer dads tried to get them excited about juggling. It’s brainwashing. They beat you down with physical torture so they can indoctrinate you with their propaganda about stuff. I’ve seen a bunch of videos about it. We huddled in the corner and discussed the status of our awesome plan.

  “I don’t see Armando,” said Carlos.

  “The butler’s probably watching him,” said
Byron. “Or maybe he has a personal valet to take him to Laker games or something.”

  “I think we should check on your dad,” said Carlos.

  “Agreed,” I said. “Let’s get out of here and—”

  “Hey, guys! Don’t just stand around!”

  A pathetic dad in gym clothes and headband walked up to us like he was about to change our lives.

  “Those ropes are for jumping, not for holding!”

  He unfurled his own jump rope.

  “Want me to show you some tricks?”

  He did what looked to me like normal rope jumping, but maybe just a little higher.

  “I could take both your eyes out with this in under one second,” I said, brandishing my rope like a whip.

  The guy stopped.

  “Hey, come on, now. Let’s have some fun. Why don’t we set up a double Dutch line?”

  “Listen, sir,” said Carlos, “I see what you’re trying to do, but don’t bother. Whatever persuasive powers you think you have over other children, I assure you, they will be wasted here.”

  “Now go away before we convince you to get a vasectomy,” I said.

  He sadly walked away and found some dumb girls to skip with. We snuck out of the gym. It had been 23 minutes, which meant they’d be visiting period three of their condensed mock school day. We quietly shuffled across the gravel outside the portables and peeked in the window of the computer lab.

  There were Armando’s parents, right at the front. And next to them, my dad had pulled up a chair from another station.

  “I can read lips,” said Byron. “I think he just threatened to kill their son.”

  “Nah,” I said. “He’s giving them a ‘Gee, I don’t know nothing about computers, I’m an old-fashioned guy’ speech. It’s how he sucks up to nerds, by acting like what they do for a living is over his head. Little do they know, my dad and I have pirated so many pay-per-view boxing matches, we’re basically like Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day. He is. I’m Will Smith.”

  The bell rang, and they got up. Armando’s parents laughed at something my dad said, and everyone headed to the door. We sprinted back to the gym so they wouldn’t see us as they walked to the next classroom.

  “Seems like he’s got it under control,” said Carlos.

  “That trampoline is ours,” I said.

  We spent the rest of the activity time gambling on four square and being lectured by dads about how we’re not supposed to gamble at school. They made us give all the money back. Ridiculous. It’s not our fault no one else understands how a three-team ten-point teaser works.

  Afterward, we were waiting out front when we spotted Armando. He had an In-N-Out cup. Our school is like fifty miles from the nearest In-N-Out.

  “His chauffeur must have taken him,” said Byron. “Everything he has should be mine.”

  “Whatever,” said Carlos. “We’ve got his number.”

  I confidently walked past him with a smirk.

  “Guess you’ll be seeing a lot of us real soon, huh?” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “You’ll see,” said Carlos. We headed to the other side of the front steps and watched with great anticipation.

  Just then, Tami Mayo approached, covered in sweat because she’d actually been playing basketball in the gym.

  “Hey, Tami!” shouted Armando. She bounded over to him, sipping from a water bottle.

  “My mom texted that she wants to invite you and your dad over on Saturday!”

  “Oh, cool!” said Tami.

  “We can jump on my trampoline,” he said.

  “Awesome!” she said. “I have a tramp too! I’ll show you this game my cousins and I invented. It’s super fun!”

  “Okay, great!” he said. “I’ll text you our address later!”

  “Cool!” she said. “See ya!”

  She raced over and climbed in an SUV that had just pulled up. Carlos and Byron looked at me, confused.

  “That was strange,” said Carlos.

  Armando’s parents came down the stairs, he took his mom’s hand like a chud, and they walked off. Then my dad came out. Soon as I saw him, I realized what had happened.

  “Father, dear,” I said, trying to hold back my rage, “please explain why you are wearing a sticker with Tami’s name on it.”

  He looked down at the nametag stuck to his shirt. It read: “My Student Is: Tami! Grade 6.”

  “Oh. Huh.”

  He peeled it off and looked at it.

  “Whoops.”

  “You picked up the wrong nametag!” I screamed. “They thought you were her dad! Now they’re gonna have her family over, and all the parents will be too polite to say anything, so they’ll all pretend you don’t exist, and Tami will get the trampolining that’s rightfully mine!”

  “I was wondering why all the teachers kept saying how proud they were of my daughter,” he said.

  “Yeah, Tami’s awesome. She’s like a genius and also good at sports. Maybe I’d be like her if you bought me a trampoline.”

  “This is not acceptable,” said Byron.

  “I knew we should have hired a trained thespian,” said Carlos.

  “You know,” said my dad, “when I was in sixth grade, I spent my weekends helping out my grandmother, and had perfect attendance at school.”

  “Yeah,” I offered, “and you ended up with a poorly-behaved kid and no wife. I’m trying to avoid your mistakes.”

  Byron and Carlos slinked away, disappointed. My dad may be a lot of things, but he’s a terrible criminal accomplice. He’d be one of those henchmen who gets his neck snapped by Keanu Reeves in like the first scene.

  “Well,” he said, “this has been eye-opening. Good to know what it is you do when you’re supposed to be learning. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go do manual labor all night so we can afford the college you’re gonna scam your way into.”

  “If I don’t go to college, can I just have the money?” I asked.

  “No. Go home and don’t watch TV.”

  “Can I eat a frozen pizza?”

  “Is there gonna be one left for me to have for afternoon breakfast tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, we still have two in the freezer.”

  “Then sure.”

  My father, the disciplinarian. I watched tons of TV, but made sure to put it back on the Golf Channel[2] and set the remote on the table at just the right angle so it perfectly aligned with the dust placement. I know what I’m doing.

  __________

  DEFCON 1

  Things got taken to a new level the following Monday. Armando showed up to homeroom right at the bell and scampered from desk to desk, handing out little postcards. He hit Tami and Melissa and Dustin and Malik, going up and down each row. After he passed Jason in front of me, I snatched the card out of Jason’s hand.

  “Hey!” said Jason. I shoved his Trapper Keeper onto the floor so he’d have something to do while I looked at the card. It was just as I’d suspected: Armando was having a birthday party.

  I knew exactly what this was, too. He was trying to pivot to popularity in middle school by throwing a sick party and showing off his new trampoline and whatever else he had at his giant house. See, in elementary school, being rich doesn’t do a ton for you in the popularity department. I mean, what can you offer a seven-year-old that everyone else can’t? We went to McDonald’s for my birthday party in second grade, and not because we were poor; I asked for that nonsense. But now, with video games and iPads and trampolines, Armando saw his chance. He’d wow everyone, get in with the cool kids, and solidify himself as part of the middle school aristocracy. There’d probably be a food truck. No, TWO food trucks. We had to be there.

  “You see this?” I said to Carlos, showing it to him.

  “I suspected as much,” he said. “Our only hope is that he succumbs to the guilt of excluding people and invites the entire class.”

  Just then, Armando made it up our row. He confidently handed invitations to R.J. and Ken
ji, and then stopped in front of the three of us. He stared at us, tapped the stack of invitations against his palm, then turned around and walked back to his desk and sat down. Jerkface.

  “Garb!” I shouted. “When is he gonna forgive us already? We said we were sorry!”

  “Actually, we didn’t,” said Carlos.

  “Well, I’m not gonna apologize now. That’d be a sign of weakness.”

  “Maybe we can just ask someone else to bring us along with them,” said Byron. “You know, one of the other kids that likes us. Our other friends.”

  We glared at him.

  “Okay, that was dumb. Let’s do a crazy scheme.”

  We couldn’t risk Armando finishing his inviting that day, so while he was in P.E., we broke into his locker and stole the rest of the invitations. But in a nice way. Like, we didn’t steal anything else.

  “Are these like movie tickets?” asked Byron. “Can we just show up with one and get in?”

  “They’ve got the person’s name on them,” said Carlos. “He must have gone to the copy store and paid to have these made up. Let’s flush them down the toilet.”

  I think the thought process was that with no invitations, he’d have to invite everyone in person by talking to them, so he’d still be asking people later in the week, and he couldn’t be all, “Oh, I don’t have any left, party’s full, sorry, can’t invite you, bloofy boo.” I guess he still could have done that. Actually, thinking about it now, throwing out his invitations might not have been a necessary part of our genius plan. But we were about to do a good deed, so that cancels it out.

  __________

  We Are Heroes

  Carlos came up with the idea that if we saved Armando’s life, he’d have to invite us because he’d owe us a life debt, like Chewbacca owes Han Solo. For that, we enlisted Laremy, the biggest and smelliest kid in the eighth grade. Laremy started smoking cigarettes when he was nine, so he’d do pretty much anything for ten bucks. Very useful if you’ve got a student teacher who deserves to have her windshield smashed.