Brandon had forgotten to email Jimmy last night, so he’d have to do what he had never done before — get to school early — and talk to him. He figured if he knew how Veero worked then at least something would make sense. He sucked in a sudden breath. He still needed to make up a codename, too.
Everyone knew that the geeks got to school before dawn and that they controlled the library. They also asked you fiendishly difficult questions if you started harassing them, so that even very dense people ran away screaming that their brains were melting. Their star running back had spent a week on the bench muttering about cosines once because of that. If they gave him trouble, he’d say, “I’m looking for Jimmy,” in his best tough-guy movie accent. Geeks respected fake accents, didn’t they?
He made his way over the new part of the campus, where the library and the gym were located. Construction was finished earlier this year, and the high school had divided up the old library and gym into offices and classes. The new library towered over him, a three-story white building in brown trim, with small windows that couldn’t be opened or closed. A white-on-black sign above set the glass double-doors read “Main Library”.
“Whew,” he thought, pushing open the doors. “There aren’t any of the geek guard around. Maybe they get every second Tuesday off or something.”
The library was quiet in the early morning before homeroom, not at all bustling like it was during lunch or even after school. It didn’t take him long to find Jimmy, sequestered in his usual corner, in his crumpled grey coat that was too short for him. The only problem? He wasn’t alone. Peeking above the cubicle wall the other side was a shock of red hair beneath a multicolored rasta hat. Dana! Brandon ducked out of sight before they could see him and got to his locker.
After he pulled out his books for his first three classes, he slammed the locker door. Jimmy wouldn’t wonder why Brandon asked him about holographs or projectors. Dana, though, was naturally curious. What if she joined them for lunch? He spent the rest of the morning sleepwalking through classes and figuring out how to answer the questions his friends would bring up. Lunch came too soon for him, and before he knew it, he was sitting at table number eight with Jimmy, Brian, Lauren, and Dana.
Jimmy waved Brandon on over. “Muscles mean justice,” he said. Brandon said, “Uh. Yeah.” He had grown accustomed to Jimmy spouting off random phrases for no apparent reason. Maybe he’d explain where he got this one from; maybe not. Jimmy was twirling a limp fry in one hand lackadaisically. Besides that, he seemed about the same as always — disheveled, stringy, black hair, an unfocussed distant stare, and crammed into the chair.
“So then are you saying that you’re a criminal?” asked Lauren as Brandon sat down. Lauren was a tomboy, with blonde hair and intense blue eyes. Her shirt read, “MOPAR Racing — Kick Asphalt”. She wore a Hemi baseball cap and leaned in towards the table.
Jimmy rolled his eyes and ate the fry. Brandon said, “Guess I got here before the brawl this time. At least I have good seats.” Brian nodded.
“It’s a joke,” piped up Dana, sitting across from Brandon. She pushed her hair out of her eyes and said, “Don’t you get it? It’s Gunparade Orchestra.” She sneered at Lauren.
“Whatever,” said Lauren. “The shows I watch are in English, thank you.”
Brandon took a bite out of his hamburger and thought that the way things were going, he wouldn’t have to answer any questions at all. Jimmy was in the thick of it, so he couldn’t ask him about Veero, either. He resigned himself to this fate when Brian asked, hoping to diffuse the tension, “So, how’d it go yesterday?” The table immediately fell silent and everyone turned towards Brandon.
He swallowed hard and shifted gears. “Time to see if the plan works,” he thought.
“Pretty good,” he said. “It’s an after-class class to help me with studying. Kind of like a mentoring thing. So I’ll be tied up after school for a while.”
“How long?” asked Lauren.
“I don’t know yet. It’s just my first day.”
“Oh, right.”
“It’s pretty important if the assistant to the assistant principal singled you out,” said Dana.
Brandon didn’t even blink. He was ready for her.
“Not really,” he said. “My mom’s talked with the administration before. It happens sometimes.”
Brian laughed. “Yeah, I remember that time in the fourth grade when you freaked out for a week.”
He was ready for that, too. “Shut up, Brian,” he said, laughing. “Don’t make me bring UP the Chicken Bone experience.” Brian laughed. “Good one, man!”
“So where’s it at?” asked Dana.
“Downtown.”
“Downtown like where?”
“Why? You planning to visit?” He grinned but he saw that determined look in her eye. She knew he was hiding something and she wouldn’t let up until she found out what.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Geesh Dana. Let it go already.” said Lauren.
“Ok, I’ll tell them that you need help — with fashion.”
Jimmy refocused his eyes and looked from Brandon over to Dana. “Youch.”
Everyone else chimed in with agreement.
She threw a fry at Brandon, which he ducked just in time. After that, they got down to eating and talking about the football game on Friday until the bell for sixth period rang. As everyone shuffled off to sixth period, Brandon sighed. He still didn’t have a codename.
* * *
He raced home, running through names as quickly as he could.
“The Psycho Cyclist?” He laughed.
“The Uncaped Crusader?”
“The Spazzalator? Ugh.” Why was that name in his head? Some help HIM had been.
“How about Captain Ordinary?” He pulled into the driveway and parked the bike in the garage. It wasn’t any good. He wasn’t coming up with anything.
Fortunately, he didn’t have much homework, so he got that done and spent the rest of the time before dinner playing Zombies Invade Littletown, hoping that video game violence would stimulate his creative juices. It didn’t work. By the time his mom called up for dinner, he was desperate. Today was the day he’d do two things he’d never done before, and the second one was ask his mom about himself. He knew that was at least as dangerous as picking a fight with Muscle-head Johnson, a junior, but he was running out of time.
Over peas and rice, they talked about the usual topics of gardening and homework. Then he saw his opening.
“You know, I’m not that great at writing. But what would you say I’m good at?”
She blinked and said, “Hmm. Let me think.”
“Well, how about this: how would you describe me? It’s for that after-school thing. And please no diaper stories.”
“Oh, rats.” She took a few more mouthfuls of chicken and said, “I think one of your greatest strengths is that you’re amiable. You get along with most people.”
Brandon tried to keep his face from falling. There were times when his mom made him feel like he was three years old, and disgustingly female. This was one of those times.
“And you’re good at several different things, though not everything. You blend in well. I guess I’d say you have an untapped strength.”
He mumbled a “thanks” and finished off his plate. “At least she saved it at the end,” he thought. After cleaning off the table, he said goodbye and rushed to get on his bike. Sure he’d be there a few minutes early, but he needed time to think. He also wanted to make sure that Dana wasn’t following him.
The dusky streets of early fall folded him in their capricious breezes as he pedalled his way downtown. His mom was generally right, but she wasn’t helpful. Getting along wouldn’t make a great codename. Neither would being good at several different things. How do I think of myself? That was a question that hit him out of nowhere and he almost fell off his bike realizing how profound a question it was.
He remembered having to “tough it out” quite a bit, because his mom kept reminding him. “Your father’s not here, so you’ll have to do this or that. I had to do everything before I felt ready for it.” He turned the corner. “I guess I’m good at surviving, then.” He pulled into Main street and parked his bike in the same place as yesterday. He felt like standing up like a marathon runner crossing the finish line, because suddenly he had a name. “You know when they say to fight to the last man, I am the last man! Yeah!” The adrenaline of self-discovery mingled with the physical exercise of bicycling combined into one perfect moment. He walked into the MIC with his head held high.
Veero wasn’t out front, so he went right on in to the lounge. He didn’t have any idea what to expect, but the sight of the MIC working somehow still managed to shock him. HIM sat in a chair too small for him, facing a screen that also seemed too small, with his fingers occasionally typing in short phrases on the keyboard. Velvet Katherine had draped herself across the couch, but indicated in a serious, and stern voice where the books were to go; Wenchy stood up on a ladder arranging the books according to her whim. O-Man and Veero were standing before the blue monitor set into the wall, discussing the finer points of scheduling and logistics. No-one seemed to notice him, so Brandon cleared his throat.
Wenchy stepped down from the ladder and adjusted the dark rimmed glasses. “I’m nearsighted,” she said. “And you’re…” She checked her watch. “Early.” Velvet Katherine allowed a faint smile to grace her lips.
“By your leave?” asked Wenchy, in mock royal courtesy.
Velvet Katherine waved her hand in a vaguely uninterested fashion. “Shoosh.”
Wenchy turned her attention back to him. “Ok, let’s get down to business. Did you read the material?”
“Yes, but…”
“Did it not all make sense?”
He shook his head. “The organizational stuff and the theory were hard.”
Her gaze softened. “Everyone has a hard time with that. Let’s go over it.” She lead him into the office and motioned for him to sit down at a steel table. A flip-chart hung on a nearby stand, and she flipped to the fourth page.
“Leaving aside the theory for a moment, let’s focus on how we fight incompetence,” she said. “The MIC is made up of chapters, and we are chapter two-fifty-seven.” Several shouts came from the lounge and other rooms, saying “two-five-seven” throatily. “That’s another thing. Whenever we say the number, everyone has to say the number.”
“Has to?” Brandon wondered aloud. He was starting to wonder about the maturity of the MIC.
“Yup,” said Wenchy. “Anyways, each chapter has a specific area that they are responsible for, called a section. So there are two organizational schemes at work — one of members, the other of the area we cover. It’s kind of like police. They have squads of people and they cover areas, like blocks and cities. Got it?”
It was starting to sink in now. He nodded. She gestured to the flip chart.
“The next level up is the region for land, and the conclave for people. So you’ll see the southeast region covers ours and two others; the conclave is a monthly meeting with all chapters in the region. They rotate it. This month it’s at chapter three one oh.” She wrinkled her nose. “Their coffee sucks. Still with me?”
“Yeah.”
“Ok, the next level up is pretty easy — state and then state body; after that, there’s the MSR, for multi-state region, and then the MSA for multi-state assembly.” She pointed dramatically to each section on the page. “Finally, there’s the yearly national convention, which every member of MIC attends.”
“Will I have to use this a lot?” Brandon asked.
“Not often, but you still need to know it especially when you’re attending a conclave or you’re on some task force. It happens sometimes. You never know when.” She shrugged.
“Each layer has its own governing body, although the ones below the state level are ad-hoc, which means we just wing it. The only other thing you need to know is that Bernie from Indianopolis is a jerk.”
Brandon’s head was beginning to hurt. “Will there be a test?”
“Yes, but I’m telling you about Bernie so you’ll know what we mean when someone calls you Bernie or says, ‘Don’t pull a Bernie!’ There’s no tests on that.”
O-Man stepped in the office for a moment, looking for something on the main desk. Today he wore a polyester white jacket over a tie-dyed ultramarine shirt. He chimed in with a downturned thumb. “Bernie bites it.” He found a piece of paper and then left.
“Hmm,” thought Brandon. “BBI.”
“Hey O-Man,” said Wenchy as he left the room. “Why don’t you show him around? The official guided tour is mas importante, capish?”
O-Man flipped up his swirled sunglasses and pretended to think about it for a minute. “I can’t believe we forgot that. C’mon.”
“Ok, you’ve seen the lounge and the office. Bathrooms are over there.” He jerked a thumb towards the doors labeled appropriately. “This is the strategy room,” he said, cracking open the door to a small room that was dominated by a humming circular table. “Out back is where the vehicles are.” He opened the door beneath the cursive pink neon sign and showed Brandon a forest green K-car sedan (with a 350 engine, O-Man assured him), and a boring white van (with a huge V-8 but terrible gas mileage, O-Man added). “And oh yeah. There’s a little side garage, too.” O-Man opened a side door and showed Brandon a wonderworks of steel, chrome, and tools. “This is where I juice ‘em up. I’ve got my eye on an old Mustang down at Ted’s Tires.” Brandon blinked. Amid all the steel and chrome, O-Man seemed to fade into the background for a moment. He blinked again and everything returned to normal. A moment later they were back in the parking lot, so he didn’t give it much thought.
Brandon wasn’t much into cars, but knew enough to recognize that O-Man was one of those guys that could do almost anything with a wrench. He noticed that none of the cars had official insignias. “That’s right. We don’t have any marked cars. Unmarked is all we do here!”
“So when do you go home?” Brandon asked as they re-entered the lounge. He figured that the MIC was like a normal job with set hours and such. “Most of us live here,” said O-Man. “And those of us who don’t, would rather.”
Veero smirked at that. “Wait ’til you hear the story!” she chirruped. He looked at her with some disdain. “Well, this is the end of the tour. I hope you got your money’s worth. If not, there’s no refund. Sorry!” Brandon smiled as O-Man rejoined Veero and Wenchy walked over towards him.
“So did you think about your code-name?” she asked.
“Yes, and I came up with one.”
“Ooh. Let’s hear it.”
“I think I’ll go by ‘The Last Man’.”
“Hmm. Why did you pick that?”
He could feel every eye in the room on him.
“I feel like I have a hidden strength,” he began, feeling a bit under the microscope. What was he saying? Those were his mom’s words. “I mean, that I survive. Whatever happens, I make it through. You’ve read my file. I’ve been through some things.”
Velvet Katherine nodded sagely. O-Man gave him a thumbs up. HIM stood up and said, “No matter what happens?”
“Uh, yeah.” He meant it to sound a lot more defiant than it did.
HIM got closer and stood an inch or two away from Brandon. “No matter what?”
“Uh?” Brandon looked around but couldn’t see around HIM’s massive frame.
HIM got closer still and Brandon shut his eyes, balled his fists and planted his feet.
HIM scratched his stubbly chin thoughtfully, stepping away. “Not bad. Resisting at all costs takes courage, and courage is beyond muscles.”
Brandon looked relieved. Somewhat dazed, he mumbled, “You mean that muscles don’t mean justice?”
O-Man shouted out, “Dude! This isn’t Gunparade Orchestra!”
Wenchy said, “Yes. Courage beyond strength. Strength that lasts until the very last minute; think of all the brave souls on forgotten battlefields who held out against impossible odds. That’s something worth dreaming of.”
Veero swooped in to hover beside him. “Not only that, but it abbreviates well. LM. Those letters are right after each other. We’ll call you LM!”
Velvet Katherine spoke. “Veero, please go rhyme ‘orange’.”
O-Man groaned out loud. “Why did you do that? We were planning!” Velvet Katherine held up her fingers in a V for victory sign and said simply, “V means me.” O-Man growled and left the room, mumbling about a reset switch. Wenchy and HIM grinned as Veero hovered in mid-air trying different words in the hopeless task of finding a word to rhyme with orange.
“Andy-ways,” said Wenchy, “Let’s cover the schedule.” She held open the office door and said, “For the first couple weeks, we’ll focus on how to study and train you for your role as junior MIC member. After that, you’ll meet the others your own age. Yes, I know you’re thinking that.”
Brandon bit his lip. Maybe there’d come a day when he knew as much about them as they did about him.
“So there are others?”
“Yes, just not here at the moment. But speaking of moments, here’s the schedule.” She pointed to the calendar on the wall. “For now, just remember that Thursday nights are strategy nights.”
“And pizza,” added HIM, raising his eyebrow mysteriously as he wandered into the office looking for something.
Wenchy didn’t miss a beat. “Yes, of course, pizza. Mostly pepperoni but sometimes we go crazy and get a pineapple or a barbecue. The calendar tells all. Now, to studying.”
Brandon sat down. “Let’s start at the beginning — why study?” she asked.
Brandon asked, “Because I have to.”
“Wrong!” said Wenchy, with a smile. “You study so that you don’t fail, because failing is bad, and failing makes you feel stupid.”
Brandon bit his lip. “Can I ask a question?”
“Sure, that’s what this is all about.”
“That’s not the real reason, is it? I mean, I’m supposed to do well at school so I don’t get yelled at.”
“Well, if you don’t fail, you don’t get yelled at.”
“Wait — wait. What I mean is that I have to do well at school so that I can get through it because that’s what’s expected of me.”
“And why is it expected of you?” she asked.
“I don’t really know,” he answered, shrugging. “It seems kinda pointless to me. Most of what we do I’ll never use and I’m not using it now.”
“That’s true,” she said, barely holding back a smile.
“What? That it’s pointless?”
“No. That you’re not using it now and there’s a bit of it you won’t use. That’s why it feels so pointless. So, to make it stick we’re going to use it now. And we’re going to figure out what you’re going to do after high school. That’ll help us figure out what to focus on.”
“I don’t know about after high school.”
“It’s ok,” she said, conspiratorially. “You don’t have to know right now. But someday, yes, someday, you will know. Hopefully you’ll find out before you’re out of high school.”
He blinked, trying to follow the logic of that. “But first, algebra.” She uncrinkled a piece of paper. “Our sources say that that’s your number one problem.”
“It sure is. I hate that class.”
“Because?”
“Because it’s pointless.”
“Not exactly,” said Wenchy. “There are a few points there, but most of them come later in geometry.”
“Wow,” Brandon said quietly. “I think that was one of the worst jokes I’ve ever heard,” he thought.
Wenchy shrugged. “You’re doing Cartesian coordinates right now, right?”
“Right.”
“Do you know why they’re called that?”
“No.”
Wenchy explained the history behind the name, which Brandon found not exactly boring, but he was better at history than math. History had a storyline, while math didn’t. Then before he knew it, she had him plotting lines and computing areas — although they weren’t the dry math he was used to. All of a sudden he was responsible for drawing up architectural plans for a tree fort, and computing how much concrete was needed to build a skate park. “The application is the thing,” said Wenchy, “it which to catch the mind of the king.”
By the end of the session, he had the first pale glimmering of understanding, and he could feel the pieces slowly coming together in his mind of a bigger puzzle. They were still far off and he had no idea what the puzzle would look like when it was completed, but as he rode home that night, he felt hope.
