Boys in the Back Row Read online

  Skye eyeballed me and Eric like an old Korean auntie as we walked into orchestra practice, which she’d been doing since the fourth grade, not long after Eric and I became best friends. It started when I made the mistake of telling Mom and Dad there were three other Korean American kids in the band. They were so excited to know there were other Asian people in town that they called Skye’s parents and invited the whole family over for dinner without even asking me. I mean, seriously! Stuff like that should be illegal!

  I felt a little bit excited about it too, though, at least after I stopped being mad about the not-asking-me thing. I really thought I’d become friends at least with Skye, and maybe Summer and Graysin too. It was fourth grade, you know? I was more optimistic back then. This is how it actually went down.

  “Hello!”

  “Welcome!”

  “So nice to meet you!”

  “Thank you for having us!”

  Adults always say the exact same things to each other when they go to someone else’s home for the first time. Mom always says “welcome!” to guests like she’s happier than she’s ever been in her whole life. Summer and Skye both said “hi, Matt,” while Graysin just said “hey” and waved. He smiled in a way that was cool and collected but also legitimately friendly, and I instantly liked him.

  “Nice to see you outside of school,” Summer said, nudging me on the shoulder, then walking past me into the living room.

  “Thanks,” I said with a big smile.

  “Hey, don’t get too excited,” Skye said, giving me more of a punch on the shoulder. “It’s not like we don’t see each other practically every day already.”

  I laughed. There was a lot of shuffling around, shoes being taken off, jackets being thrown on the futon in Mom and Dad’s office, and “I love your house” and “oh, it’s such a mess” kind of comments by the parental units. Mr. and Mrs. Oh turned out to be super nice, which was a relief—I mean, you never know about other kids’ parents—so it felt like a good start, at least until we all sat down for dinner, where Summer and Skye spent the whole time talking to … my parents. Mostly my mom.

  “Here’s what I think,” Skye said, waving a carrot stuck on a fork in the air for emphasis.

  “Look out, Skye’s thinking.” Graysin ducked his head when Skye waved a fist in his direction.

  “Hey, hey, watch it with the hands,” Mr. Oh said.

  “Yeah, and how about eating that instead of using it like a sword?” Mrs. Oh said.

  “I think the person who’s the doctor should have their name listed first, the end.” Skye nodded her head like she was agreeing with herself, then took a triumphant bite of carrot.

  “You’re such a child,” Summer said. “That’s not the point.”

  “Well, it should be, and you’re a child too, you know.”

  “You know what, it’s not a bad point,” Mom said, passing the saltshaker to Dad. “Getting that ‘Dr.’ in front of your name takes a lot of work, and if that’s the reason one person’s name is first on the envelope, it should be the reason for everyone, including women.”

  “And girls,” Skye said, raising an index finger above her head.

  “And girls,” Mom said, laughing along with the other adults. Summer didn’t laugh, though.

  “But that’s my point,” she said. “What if two people are married and they’re both doctors? Who comes first then? And what if they’re nonbinary?”

  “What if they’re both nonbinary?” I said. “I’m just say—”

  “Here’s what I think,” Summer said, like I wasn’t even there. “The woman’s name should always come first, even if it ends up like ‘Mrs. and Dr. Lee’ or something like that. It’s been the other way for too long.”

  “It’s like evening the historical scales,” Mrs. Oh said.

  “Also a good point!” Mom looked like she was having the time of her life. “Just because something’s always been a tradition doesn’t mean it has to stay that way.”

  “Unless it’s a good tradition—” Skye said.

  “Yeah, like—” I tried to jump in, but Skye just kept on going.

  “—though I guess it depends on who thinks it’s a good tradition.”

  “Uh-huh—”

  I definitely wasn’t used to being interrupted so much at dinner, and it must have shown on my face, because Graysin caught my eye and leaned in my direction.

  “You get used to it,” he said.

  “You guys doing okay over there?” Dad said with a grin.

  “Yeah, no side conversations,” Skye said, hinting at future bossiness to come.

  “What does that even mean, ‘no side conversations’?” Graysin said.

  “Lot of interrupting going on,” I said to Dad. He shrugged.

  “It’s okay.”

  Which I guess it was, but as Dad turned to say something to Mrs. Oh, Mr. Oh told Skye and Graysin to stop arguing, and Mom and Summer got into what looked like a very intense conversation between just the two of them, I wondered what Eric was doing, and how soon I could get Mom and Dad to invite his family over for dinner.

  It’d be nice to say that was all ancient history, but dinner with the Ohs became a once-a-year-or-so thing at our house, and each time Skye sank her teeth a little deeper into the bossy sister role. I still liked Skye, and in a way it was nice to know she cared, but if I had to pick between fantasy siblings, Eric would win in a landslide. Besides, planning for Operation Get Jonah Burns’s Autograph required serious planning in the present. We even decided to do some of it at school, during lunch, as a fun way to kick off February.

  We’d printed out a new copy of the DefenderCon schedule, plus copies of the conference center map, and maps of the neighborhoods around World of Amazement and the conference center. Then we plotted out how to get there from World of Amazement, which turned out to be exactly 0.68 miles away. We didn’t bring all that stuff to school, of course—that was just asking for trouble. Bringing any of it to school was asking for trouble, which we were forced to remember the hard way.

  “Piece of cake,” Eric said. He pinned the printed-out neighborhood map onto the cafeteria table between us and took a bite of his sandwich that was in his other hand. “That’s a third of the way from here to Hero Worship.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not the part that worries me,” I said, eyeballing Eric’s bag of potato chips. The open end of the bag was turned toward Eric, meaning it was turned in the wrong direction. “We can walk to Hero Worship and buy comics without having to sneak out. We need a way to get out of the amusement park without being seen.”

  It was simple, actually. The first day of the trip we’d mostly be on the bus (which could either be fun or a total nightmare), and when we got there we’d check into the hotel and have dinner with all the other middle-school marching bands. The second day we’d practice in the morning, have lunch, and do the actual competition part. The third day we’d be at World of Amazement. Going on rides, playing games, checking out the gift shops, and eating candy.

  For the whole day.

  “This is awesome, isn’t it? It feels like, I don’t know, an adventure or something.” Eric took his finger off the map, then used it to turn the potato chip bag around and push it toward me. I took a few out, being careful not to break the big ones left in the bag.

  “Yeah, if you define ‘adventure’ as ‘the possibility of being grounded for life.’” I took one of the two peanut butter cups I’d snuck into my lunch box and tossed it onto the map, where it sat for two or three nanoseconds before Eric scooped it up. “But yeah, it totally is.”

  “Sometimes the risk of being grounded for life is what makes life worth living,” he said, holding a finger up into the air, then cramming the whole peanut butter cup into his mouth at once.

  “Dude. That is profound.”

  “Yup.” Eric smacked his lips. “I’m a deep thinker.”

  “I was being ironic.”

  “I know. I wasn’t. Embrace the risk, Matt!”

/>   “Are you kidding? I play a girl’s instrument—that’s, like, the riskiest thing a person can do at our school.”

  Eric grinned, then poured the potato chip dust at the bottom of the chip bag straight into his mouth.

  “Okay then, Captain Risktaker, when’s the best time to do it?” he said, spraying a few chip fragments out of his mouth.

  “We can’t do it at lunchtime,” I said.

  “Definitely not,” Eric said, nodding. “Everyone’s sitting and eating.”

  “High surveillance.”

  “We need chaos.”

  “Maybe we should just get it out of the way and take off right after we get there,” I said. “Everyone’s gonna be super excited, running around …”

  “Yeah, but you know what the teachers are like at the start of a field trip,” Eric said, pointing first at his own eyeballs, then at me.

  “True. End of the day’s not gonna work either.”

  “Nope.”

  “Right after lunch would be perfect,” I said. “If you look at the World of Amazement map, the food court is really close to the entrance.”

  Eric chewed on his thumbnail as he thought about it.

  “Huh. That could work.”

  “Yup.” I started to get that feeling when something’s coming together, like playing a note-perfect piccolo solo during an assembly, or looking at a picture of Cloudsplitter and knowing I got every angle of his helmet exactly right. “And all the kids will scatter again, but the teachers’ll be less on it, you know?”

  “That doesn’t give us a whole lot of time to get to DefenderCon, though,” Eric said. “Remember the schedule? The Jonah Burns signing is at one thirty.”

  “I know, but I think we can make it. There’s a bus that leaves from the main WoA entrance right around one and gets to the conference center in about ten minutes.”

  “It takes ten minutes to go less than a mile? That’s bananas,” Eric said. “We could walk there faster … Wait, that’s your point, isn’t it?”

  I nodded my head, feeling smug, and Eric laughed.

  Somebody said “queers!” in a loud voice on the far side of the cafeteria, and we instinctively froze and looked around without moving our heads too much—whipping your head around to see which nerd exterminator shouted “queers” isn’t a winning strategy—but nobody seemed to be sending their orc soldiers to our table, so we relaxed.

  “Okay, right after lunch. Do we need some kind of—”

  “Dudes, what’s up?”

  It was Hector. For once he didn’t have his usual super-toothy grin in place, maybe because he was too busy frowning at the other side of the room. Someone gave a harsh seal-bark of laughter, and someone else (I mean, pick a bully, they’re everywhere) said “sit down, Carlos!”

  “My name’s not Carlos!” Hector shouted. Of course that’s when Vice Principal Falano decided to pass by the cafeteria doors, and because our usual table is close to both the bathrooms and the doors (making a fast escape is super important for bathrooms and cafeterias), Falano heard Hector shout. He stopped, pivoted, took one step through the cafeteria doors, and pointed at Hector.

  “You. Come with me.”

  “What? Why??” Hector said.

  The laughter from the other side of the room was muffled, but still harsh.

  “Don’t make it worse,” Falano said, still pointing.

  Hector leaned back and turned his face to the ceiling, knees bent and arms flopping. I heard him mutter something, but his lips were mashed together so I couldn’t hear exactly what.

  “I want to talk to you guys,” he said to me and Eric as he stood up straight again. “About drummer stuff.”

  “Totally,” I said.

  “Dude, so unfair,” Eric said in a low voice.

  “Welcome to my life,” Hector said.

  “Mr. Morales. NOW.”

  “Yes, sir.” Hector walked out after Mr. Falano with his head up and his fists clenched.

  The cafeteria was mostly quiet while that was all going on, but when the door closed behind Falano every person in the room started talking at once.

  “What do you think he means, ‘drummer stuff’?” Eric said.

  “Beats me. I guess we’ll find out, unless Falano has him expelled or something.”

  The bell rang, and the already super-loud noise level went through the roof. We usually had our stuff ready to go before the bell rang, but the Hector Saga totally distracted us, and of course the map showing the route from WoA to DefenderCon was still on the table, just waiting for Kenny Delacroix to run over and grab it. Which he did, of course.

  “Hey, losers, is this yours?” he said. Sean, who was trailing behind Kenny like a loyal sidekick, snorted and laughed.

  “OH, COME ON!” I said. I lunged across the table to try to take it back, but Kenny gave my shoulder a fast, hard push, and I had to grab the edge of the table to keep from falling off as he took a closer look at the map.

  “What is your problem??” Eric said, but Kenny just ignored him.

  “Dude, what’ve you got?” Sean asked as he walked up to the table. He put a hand on Kenny’s shoulder, and Kenny shook it off.

  “It’s a World of Amazement map, see,” Kenny said, pointing at the big, gray rectangle labeled “World of Amazement” that filled up one whole corner of the page. Kenny and Sean looked at each other and shook their heads as if carrying around a map was a horribly tragic thing to do.

  A map of the neighborhood around World of Amazement isn’t the same as a map of World of Amazement, I thought.

  “Can I see?” Sean asked, reaching for the map.

  “NO!” I said. “Give it back!”

  Sean and Kenny looked at me with straight faces, then looked at each other and cracked up.

  “A map,” Kenny snorted, still giggling like a serial killer. “What a couple of dorks.” With two quick motions he tore the map into pieces and sprinted for the cafeteria doors, throwing the pieces into the air as he ran. Eric and I gave each other a tired look. Replacing the map would be easy, but it was the principle of the thing, you know?

  Sean looked at us and shrugged as he slowly started walking after Kenny. I glared at him for a second, then turned my back on him.

  “Why does Kenny do stuff like that?” I asked. Eric shrugged.

  “Why do dogs eat their own vomit?”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “What the heck are you talking about?”

  “You haven’t heard that before? It’s in the Bible.”

  “I’m Unitarian, you know, we don’t read the Bible.”

  Eric snorted. “I forgot. It’s totally in there, though—‘a dog returns to its vomit,’ or something like that.”

  “Why are you so weird?”

  “I don’t know!” Eric said. “Why are you best friends with someone so weird?”

  “I don’t know either, but let’s go.”

  I didn’t want to be late to class—I never want to be late to anything—and everyone was following Kenny out of the cafeteria, so we stood up and slung our bags over our shoulders. There didn’t seem to be much point in looking for the pieces of the map now that everyone was walking right through the place where Kenny dropped them, and when I saw Sean up ahead of us looking at a scrap of paper in his hand, I wondered why he hadn’t run to catch up with Kenny like he usually did.

  I didn’t even think about what he was looking at, and I definitely didn’t remember that I’d written “DefenderCon” right there on the map in big, black letters.

  The thing with Kenny and the map was a big downer, even with jokes about dogs eating vomit, and the rest of the day wasn’t a whole lot better, maybe because it was February and everyone was getting crabby that it wasn’t spring yet. By the time the last bell rang, Eric and I were both in serious need of cheering up.

  “You know what we need after a day like that?” Eric said as I shut my locker and shrugged into my jacket. It took me a second to get it, but when I did, we looked each other in the eye
and said it at the same time:

  “HERO WORSHIP!”

  It was a long walk in the depressingly cold weather from school to Hero Worship, but it was worth it, because Hero Worship is the best comic book store in town. The surprising thing is that it’s not the only comic book store in town. Not that I hate Paradigm Shift—we go in there every once in a while just to check out what kind of weird new toys they have in stock—but they’re all about independent publishers and stuff that’s mostly about regular people, and mostly adult regular people. They don’t carry any superhero comics, so there would have been no point in asking the first question we asked when we got to Hero Worship.

  “Do you have the new Sandpiper omnibus?”

  The girl with the BAMF! tattoo who was working the front counter laughed, throwing her head back. It was a friendly sounding laugh, though, and she’d always been nice to Eric and me, so I didn’t mind.

  “I guess that’s a no, huh?” Eric said, leaning forward with both hands on the comic shop counter. A pile of stickers that said “Keep Reading Comics” tipped over and spilled between his hands, but Tattoo Girl scooped them up in one deft motion and put them back in a pile on the counter in front of me. We knew the answer was gonna be no, but why not ask anyway? Miracles happen, right?

  “I’m sorry, guys, but no, we don’t,” she said with a shake of her head. The single lock of green in her otherwise brown hair fell over one eye, and she tucked it back behind one ear. “That book is super limited edition. It’s not even being sold in stores. Your best bet is probably DefenderCon.”

  “We’re going to DefenderCon!” Eric and I said at the same time, like a couple of dorks.

  Tattoo Girl smiled big, showing all her teeth. She had an amazing smile. “You guys are so cute,” she said.

  “Er … thanks?” Eric said.

  “That’s really cool that you’re going to DefenderCon! How’d you talk your parents into it?” Tattoo Girl said.