19

NAME: ZACH POWERS

I saw a show last night with a bunch of scientists arguing over what the signs will be when the world is coming to an end. They talked about asteroids, volcanoes, and melting ice caps.

Small minds.

When Cap Anderson becomes the most popular, happening junior high kid at C Average High School, that's the end of the world. Especially when you consider that the man that he replaced was me.

It was all because of that stupid Halloween dance. How could a hippie who knew less than nothing about parties organize the middle school bash of everybody's dreams?

"It's your own fault," Lena accused. "You recruited half of our division to bug him, and he turned them into an army of volunteers."

She had a point. With the exception of me and the Hairball-in-Chief, everyone in junior high was working on the dance—even the cool people. Darryl was hauling huge rolls of construction paper to the decorations people in the shared art room. Naomi was designing reflective mobiles to hang from the basketball hoops. Lena was on the committee to cover the bleachers with orange-and-black bunting. Even cheap paper chains were impressive when you had eleven hundred kids stringing them.

"This is going to be the greatest party we've ever had!" Naomi enthused. "I'll bet we get a thousand kids."

"And that's just the planning committee," I added sourly.

"What's wrong with that?"

"Ignore him," Lena put in. "He's in mourning because he thinks Cap stole his year."

"Our year," I corrected. "And he's making it into 1967!"

"You shouldn't be so hard on Cap," Darryl told me. "Sure, he's weird, but he's the best eighth grade president we've ever had."

"Eighth grade president isn't a real job," I seethed. "It's a joke, remember?"

"Well, maybe it started that way," Naomi said earnestly. "But Cap Anderson is the most amazing person I've ever known."

I snorted. "Anybody can be amazing handing out thousand-dollar checks."

Now that had caught me off guard. What was up with all this charity? He gave eight hundred to the food drive in the cafeteria. Five hundred to cancer research. The same to Alzheimer's disease. They may have called it the March of Dimes, but that didn't stop Cap from forking over six-fifty. He even stuck checks into the slots of those cans designed for people to drop their spare change. The first few times, Cap's hot senior high housemate Sophie (who was spending more and more time with him at school but still refused to greet me, by the way) tried to talk some sense into him, but after she saw that he had no intention of changing his spendthrift behavior, she stopped trying to warn him that Kasigi was going to have his head on a plate sooner or later.

Mr. Kasigi had to be behind it somehow. Cap wouldn't be allowed to throw around big chunks of school money without permission from the junior high office. Maybe the whole thing was a lesson about philanthropy. It bugged me. The eighth-grade president wasn't supposed to set a good example. His job was to make an idiot out of himself and have a nervous breakdown. But no, our division's assistant principal had to set Cap up for sainthood!

Whatever Kasigi was thinking—if he was thinking—I was the one paying the price. I was spending more and more of my time arguing with my friends, and all because of that hairball.

My year. Yeah, right. More like my minute.

How do you think I felt at lunch on Tuesday when I walked out of the food line with my tray and found Cap Anderson at my table, in my seat? Okay, it was a big cafeteria, but I'd been working my way up to that position since the very first day of sixth grade. It hadn't taken me more than thirty seconds to look around the room and know that this was the place where the masters of the universe ate their tuna fish sandwiches. It was near the wall of windows, but not so close as to get too hot on sunny days. Yet, at the end of the period, a shaft of light always seemed to shine down like a spotlight on the person sitting in the end chair. My chair—at least until today.

Those filtered rays were shining now on the haystack of Sasquatch hair. I stared at Darryl. The gutless wonder wouldn't even look me in the eye. He was concentrating on the exit sign over the door, which may or may not have been a message for me to get out. Naomi was focused on Cap, which meant nobody else in the building existed. Lena was the only one with the nerve to face me. Her look plainly announced that not only had I lost my spot, but I wasn't welcome to pull up a chair and squeeze in either.

Fuming, I turned away.

Crash!

It was a tray-to-tray collision. My split pea soup sloshed onto his egg-salad sandwich; his Tater Tots flipped into my banana cream pie; his Snapple tipped over, raining down on my shoes.

I stared at the idiot as iced tea soaked into my socks. The last person I wanted to see just then.

Hugh Winkleman.

He stood frozen with fear, probably straining all those math brain cells to calculate how big a wedgie he'd just earned himself. Let me tell you, he should have been thinking huge. I had half a mind to stick a booster rocket under his waistband and launch it into orbit.

"You—"

And then I took in the expression on his face, and it was like looking in a mirror. He was staring at his hippie friend, who now had no time for him. And I was staring at my friends—same story.

In a way, it was more depressing than anything that had happened so far. I, Zach Powers, had something in common with this loser. That had to be rock bottom.

Still, there was only one other person in the whole school who was as disgusted as I was by all this hippie-mania. And that person had just dropped his lunch on me.

"Uh—sorry," he said nervously.

I felt an odd rush of emotion. It wasn't affection, trust me, but Hugh represented an earlier time at this school—before the space capsule landed and barfed up Cap Anderson. A time when things made sense.

Hugh was the one who should have been eighth grade president all along. Heck, if I'd met Cap twenty-four hours later, it probably would have happened exactly that way. Then this would still be my year, and Cap would be nothing more than a walking bad-hair day nobody really knew.

"Don't worry about it," I told Hugh. "Listen—we've got to talk."

He looked so suspicious that I felt a pang of remorse for all the mean things I'd said and done to him since kindergarten. In all the years I'd known him, we'd never had a conversation that hadn't been a sham to lure him through a door with a bucket of ice water balanced on top. Sure, he was suspicious. Wouldn't you be?

"About Cap Anderson," I elaborated, "and everything that's been going on."

Hugh expanded his tunnel vision on Cap to include an inventory of the man's tablemates. He sneered at me. "Oh-ho-ho! Looks like somebody's been replaced!"

I swallowed my pride. "You'll notice Cap isn't hanging with you anymore."

"I was his friend when no one else would talk to him," Hugh said resentfully. "When you and your cronies were trying to ruin his life."

"Well, whatever we were plotting, it obviously didn't happen. He's practically the king of junior high. Soon, he'll be king of the whole school, not just our division."

Hugh nodded slowly. "I don't like it either."

"It doesn't have to be this way," I pressed on.

He rounded on me. "You are such a jerk! Whoever told you that the whole world performs according to your instructions? That's what started this whole mess—you trying to make poor Cap dance to your tune!"

"I don't remember you warning the man off when we nominated him for eighth grade president," I snarled.

"Because I was grateful the nominee didn't turn out to be me."

I pounced on this. "So, you let Cap swallow the hook. Now who's the manipulator? You're just as guilty as I am."

"Maybe so, but I'm not stupid," he said hotly. "Making Cap your victim blew up in your face. Now you want him out so you can stick me in his place."

"It's not like that," I pleaded. "Look, Cap's president. We're stuck with that. But there's still time to puncture the tires of this bandwagon before the Halloween dance ratchets him up to icon status."

"No way! Just because I'm mad at Cap doesn't mean I'm going to help you stab him in the back!"

At my table, Naomi leaned over and dabbed delicately at a ketchup smear on the side of Cap's mouth. I almost upchucked. "Will you look at that!"

Hugh had been watching too, his face twisted with distaste. He said, "To be continued."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing," he muttered, not quite meeting my eyes. "What do you need me to do?"

I shrugged. "Simple. The whole school thinks he's immortal. We just have to show them they're wrong."