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  “Oh, great.” I shuddered when I saw Kenny Siznik heading toward us. He was the grossest kid I knew. Sometimes, the stuff he did was funny, like when he used his nose as a pea shooter. Other times, he was just disgusting. He was always spiting, sniffing, scratching, burping, or farting.

  I pointed over my shoulder at the door to my house. “Should we go in?”

  “Too late,” Julian said. “He already spotted us. We don’t want to get on his bad side.”

  “Good point.” I shuddered again when I thought about what Kenny had done to Danny Rabin’s sandwich last month when Danny wasn’t looking. I was pretty sure it would be years before I could look at chicken salad again without feeling the urge to throw up. No way I wanted Kenny for an enemy. It was bad enough being someone he liked.

  “Hey, guys. Wuzzup?” Kenny said when he reached us.

  I shrugged. “Nothing.”

  He opened his mouth to say something else, but then he got a funny look in his eyes. “Uh oh—breakfast is kicking in.” He spun away and bent over, pointing his butt right at us.

  To make things even worse, his pants were so low, his butt pretty much popped out. I rolled off the stairs as Kenny let out an enormous fart. The air seemed to ripple. Luckily, I managed to avoid the line of fire. Or line of fart, I guess.

  Unfortunately for Julian, he wasn’t fast enough to escape like I did. I looked up to see him getting blasted.

  “You idiot!” he screamed at Kenny, who was laughing so hard, he dropped to his knees.

  “Sorry,” Kenny said as he stood back up. “I think it was the turkey sausage I had with my pancakes. It’s a new brand. Farmer Browning’s Gooble Gobblers. Super tasty. Oh, man, that really was a stinker. Good thing we’re outside.” He waved at the air in front of his nose and grinned. “Mom buys them because they’re supposed to be full of healthy stuff, but I’m pretty sure there’s something in them that turns from solid sausage to gut gas the instant it reaches my intestines.”

  He plopped down on the steps, like we were the best of friends. We had to put up with him for half an hour before he got bored and wandered off. At least he didn’t fart again.

  “He makes me sick,” Julian said.

  “Me, too. Hey, what’s that?” I pointed to his shirt, where something glistened against the dark blue material just to the right of the Steelers logo.

  “Oh, no,” Julian said after he’d glanced down. “It’s stained.”

  There was a shiny patch on the front of his T-shirt, the size, and roughly the shape, of my thumb. But it didn’t look like a stain. Stains don’t glitter in the sunlight. It looked sort of hard. I reached out and tapped it, half afraid that, despite the shine, it would turn out to be mushy or sticky.

  Clink. It was neither of those things.

  “It sounds like metal,” I said.

  “It can’t be.” Julian touched the blotch, first with the tip of one finger, and then with his whole hand. “You’re right. It’s metal. That’s weird.”

  “It could be gold,” I said. “I mean, it’s gold colored, and it’s metal.”

  We stared at each other. Then we looked over toward Kenny’s house. “You think it was the fart?” Julian asked.

  “It had to be.” I pictured the way Julian had been blasted. “I’m pretty sure the gold wasn’t there before Kenny came over. I would have noticed it.”

  “Gold…,” Julian said. “That would be awesome.” He managed to peel the metal off his shirt. It was about an eighth of an inch thick.

  “Let’s get it tested,” I said.

  “How?” Julian asked.

  “There’s a place in the mall that buys gold. They have that big sign: WE BUY GOLD. They’ll know if it’s real.”

  Julian and I headed across town. The gold place was actually one of those little shops in the middle of the floor, like the coffee cart and the piercing stand.

  “Will you buy this?” I asked the guy behind the counter. He had short black hair and a thin mustache, neither of which stood out as much as his bright green blazer and gold bow tie.

  I was afraid he wouldn’t take gold from a kid, but he didn’t seem to care who was on the other side of the transaction. He looked at the gold, weighed it, then said, “Not very high quality.”

  “You’re not a very good liar,” I said. I’d watched him. He’d hidden his amazement pretty quickly, but I knew he’d been impressed by something.

  “Okay,” the guy said. “It’s not exactly the lowest quality.”

  “There are plenty of other places where we can sell this,” I said.

  “You got me, kid. It’s high quality. I can give you eighty bucks for it. Believe me, that’s a fair price.”

  “Eighty!”

  Julian and I both shouted the word. The guy put the gold into a large lockbox, and counted out four twenty-dollar bills.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Come again,” he said.

  “Oh, we will.”

  As we walked off, I handed half the money to Julian. “Fifty-fifty split?”

  “Sure.”

  That’s the kind of friend he is.

  “Why’d you say we’d be back?” Julian asked.

  “Because this is too good to quit,” I said. “It’s easy money, and lots of it. We need to get more gold.”

  “Which means we have to get Kenny to eat a whole lot of that new sausage,” Julian said.

  “That shouldn’t be hard.” I smiled at the image of Julian and me pushing turkey sausages into a funnel shoved down Kenny’s throat. “But how do we get him to fart on you again?”

  Julian looked like he was going to gag. “Maybe there’s a better way. Let’s kick around some ideas.”

  So we kicked around the problem. I’m not even sure which of us shouted out, “Camping trip!” first. But it was a great idea. We’d invite Kenny to go camping with us. We’d cook up a ton of those sausages for dinner. He’d fart all night in his sleep. (We’d learned the hard way, two years ago, how much Kenny farts in his sleep, thanks to the one and only time until now he’d been part of a sleepover.) The next morning, when we got into our swim suits to go to the lake, one of us would hang back and get the gold from his pajamas.

  Kenny was thrilled when we told him about the trip. It was the perfect plan, except, as we discovered to our horror that night, Kenny didn’t sleep in pajamas, anymore. Now, he slept in his underwear.

  As we expected, he farted in his sleep all night. Way before midnight, as the air inside grew from foul to deadly, Julian and I fled the tent. We dragged our sleeping bags outside, to sleep under the stars. Still, every time I heard another blast of gas fleeing Kenny’s intestines and trumpeting its way past his butt cheeks, my brain added in the sound of the crinkle you get when you clutch a stack of twenty-dollar bills.

  By morning, I guess Kenny was nearly farted out.

  “Last one in the lake is a loser!” he screamed, rushing out of his tent.

  That’s not the best way to wake up. It’s even worse when it’s accompanied by a rear view of Kenny running down the trail, his underwear sagging in the back like it was carrying a big load. The tiny remaining farts he released as he ran toward the water made it sound like he was being chased down the path by a flock of ducklings.

  “There goes our gold,” Julian said as he wormed himself free of his sleeping bag.

  “We’d better follow him,” I said as I unzipped my bag.

  We got to the lake just in time to see Kenny let out a whoop and do a cannonball off the dock.

  There was a huge splash at the impact spot.

  And then, nothing.

  Julian and I ran to the edge of the dock. “He’s trapped!” I said.

  Kenny was four feet down, in a seated position, anchored to the bottom of the lake by the weight of the gold in his underwear. He was thrashing his arms, trying to swim up. His lips were clamped shut, but his eyes were wide open. He was looking wildly around. I realized he had no idea why he couldn’t get to the surface.
r />   “He’s going to drown,” I said.

  “Maybe not,” Julian said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think he’s sinking under the silt on the bottom. So he might suffocate, instead.”

  Julian was right. Kenny was starting to sink beneath the lake bed, dragged down by the gold in his underwear. Not that suffocating would be any better than drowning. “This is awful!”

  “You have to save him,” Julian said.

  “Me? No way.” I definitely didn’t want to swim under that water and pull off Kenny’s underwear. Especially if I had to feel for it under the silt. “You do it.”

  “Are you kidding? This was your idea.”

  “Our idea.”

  “Mostly yours.”

  “Mostly ours.”

  Kenny, who was now halfway buried, opened his mouth to yell for help. I guess he’d spotted us. Screaming would be a very bad idea. There was no time to argue. I dived into the water. So did Julian. We really did make a great team. We swam down and yanked off Kenny’s underwear. It wasn’t easy. He fought us all the way. I guess he was panicking. But we did it. And once the deadly weight was removed, we managed to get him out of the water and back onto the dock before he drowned.

  I looked down at the lake bottom, trying to spot the underwear. There was no sign of it. Maybe we could try to recover it, later. But it was probably still sinking, dropping far out of reach. Right now, I just wanted to get into dry clothes and forget the past minute of my life forever.

  “Got any more of those sausages?” Kenny asked as we walked back to our tent.

  “No!” Julian and I shouted.

  Sometimes, the price of gold is just too high.

  ON ONE CONDITION

  I’ve got my little brother to the point where his right index finger never leaves his nose. It’s funny and disgusting at the same time, which is always a good combination. My older sister scratches her head pretty much nonstop. That’s also pretty funny.

  It didn’t take long to make those things happen, either. Brothers and sisters are easy. My parents were going to be harder. Dad’s at work most of the time. Mom only has a part-time job, so she’s usually here when I get home from school, but she doesn’t really listen to what I say. She just snatches the key words out of the sound stream—stuff like “broke,” “smashed,” “failed,” and things along those lines. I haven’t really tried it with them, yet.

  But Toby, my little brother, was ridiculously easy. It started when I was surfing the channels and came across a program about the history of science. I’d heard about the series, because I knew my teacher liked it. But I’d never checked it out until now, because history and science were not subjects I normally associate with entertainment. They were showing this dog. I stopped to see what the episode was about, because I love dogs. They explained how the dog would start to drool when it knew it was going to be fed. So, for a while, they’d ring a bell, and then feed the dog. Eventually, the bell, all by itself, would make the dog drool, even before the food came, and even if the food didn’t come.

  I sort of understood that. Donny Wackworth used to punch me in the shoulder every time I walked past him. After a while, just seeing him coming my way made me flinch like I’d been punched.

  The show got more interesting than just talking about drooling dogs. The thing that happened with the dogs was called conditioning. But there were two kinds. The kind with the bell was called stimulus-response conditioning. The bell was the stimulus. The drooling was the response. In the same way, Donny’s fist was the stimulus, and my flinch was the response.

  But there was another kind of conditioning, where you do something good or bad after the behavior, to reward or punish it, instead of before. It’s like, if every time you pick up your socks from the floor, you get a small shock, you’ll learn to stop picking up your socks pretty quickly. But it works the other way, too. Imagine if, every time you picked up your socks, you heard your favorite song. Or if, every time you scratched your chin, someone gave you a dime. After a while, you’d be picking up socks or scratching your chin all the time. You might not even be aware you were doing it.

  I didn’t have unlimited dimes. But I had something else that Toby ate up. He was hungry for praise. Every time he had his finger anywhere near his nose, I praised him. Like if he was doing a drawing, I’d say, “Toby—that’s an awesome drawing.” If his finger was actually in his nose, I praised him even more.

  It worked. I couldn’t believe it at first. It seemed more like sorcery than science. But I had definitely controlled his behavior. Then, I tried conditioning my sister. She was dying for nice words, too, so it was just as easy with her as it was with Toby. I guess I could have had her do all sorts of weird things, like standing on one leg, but head scratching seemed pretty funny, so I went with that.

  There was no way I could keep quiet about this forever, once I saw how well it worked. I needed to brag. I wanted someone to know how clever I was. I decided I’d tell Ricky Morales. He’s not a close friend, but he sits next to me in class, and we like lots of the same stuff. I got to school right before the bell rang. Our teacher, Mr. Skinner, was up front, ready to take attendance. We’re supposed to sit quietly when we’re in the room, but I couldn’t wait. I had to tell Ricky about the way I controlled my brother and sister.

  “Guess what?” I said to him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I came up with the coolest—”

  “You all look so smart and well-groomed and ready to learn,” Mr. Skinner said. “You are the best students I’ve ever had.”

  I clamped my hand over my mouth. So did Ricky. So did all of us.

  “You are such a marvelous class,” Mr. Skinner said. “You’re the best I’ve ever had.”

  I kept my hand there all day. I’m not sure why. I just couldn’t move my hand away. And Mr. Skinner kept telling us how wonderful we were. He’s a really great teacher.

  I still wanted to talk to Ricky about conditioning and how I totally ruled my little brother and sister. I knew he’d be impressed by my ability to control other people. But I guess that would just have to wait until class was over.

  GHOST DANCER

  I’m a nerd and proud of it. I love math and science. I want to make amazing discoveries and do brave things when I grow up, like my heroes, Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, and Grace Hopper. I want to explore superconductivity or invent a better battery. I want to discover a new type of laser. I want to become the world’s leading expert in stealth technology or seismic prediction. I want to change the world and improve the lives of people and animals.

  But right now, sitting on a chair in the gym in Alexander Fleming Middle School, all I want is to reach the end of the Spring Dance. I don’t even know why they call it a dance. It should be called a sit. Or a snack. They play music. One or two kids actually dance. I don’t really care whether I dance or not. I’m just as happy observing people. Most of the other girls want to dance. But a lot of them come from really old-fashioned homes, and they’ve been taught they have to wait to be asked. My friend Deborah’s folks are so strict, they won’t let her wear shorts to school. And Molly’s mom won’t let her go to sleepovers. It’s like we’re stuck fifty or a hundred years in the past.

  I think the boys want to dance, too. But they’re too shy to ask. Or too scared about getting rejected in front of their friends. That’s a shame. I know Deborah would love for Jayden Simmons to ask her.

  As I said, I don’t really care, either way. Whether any boy wants to dance with me or not doesn’t change who I am or affect my worth as a person. They don’t get to define me. But I also know there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be asked to dance. I hope Deborah gets her wish. If she does, it will have to be soon. It’s 7:40, and the dance ends at 8:00.

  I’ve been checking my watch all evening. So have the boys. They’re waiting for her. They’ve been whispering and looking over at the door of the girls’ locker room pretty much constantly. According to
the story, she always appears ten minutes before the end of the dance. Nobody knows who she is, for sure. The rumors are so old, my dad heard them when he was in school here. Most of the stories involve her dying on the way home from the dance. Though some say she died on the way there. There’s even one version that claimed she died during the dance, when a fire broke out. But there’s never been a fire in the building. I’m absolutely positive about this. It’s pretty easy to research stuff like that.

  Nobody even knows her name. They just call her The Girl in Blue. Not very imaginative, but pretty accurate. That’s one thing all the versions agree on. She wears a blue dress.

  “Wow, seven forty-five, already,” I tell Molly, who is sitting to my right. Out of habit, I glance from my watch to the clock on the wall, and then back to my watch.

  “Time for more punch,” Molly says. Her folks don’t let her drink anything with sugar at home, so she goes a bit wild whenever there’s punch.

  She dashes over to the snack table. But she bumps it, splashing a big wave of punch onto the floor.

  “Poor Molly. I’ll get some paper towels,” Deborah says. She leaves her chair and heads for the hall.

  I can’t resist calling after her, “Watch out for the Girl in Blue.”

  I check how Molly is doing. She’s grabbed some napkins. The teachers are helping her mop up. Just as they’re about to finish getting everything cleaned, Molly stumbles again, spilling more punch. She’s such a klutz.

  I know, before I even look back at the locker room, that something has happened. The music plays on, but the world beneath it goes silent. And then, the world gasps. As I turn my head, my eyes sweep past the seated boys. They’re all staring at the door to the girls’ locker room, with their jaws slack and their lips gaping.

  And there she is. The Girl in Blue. All blue, in a full-length dress with a very high collar. Half visible. You can see the locker room door behind her. She drifts toward the boys. Two of them hurdle the backs of their chairs and flee the gym. The rest remained seated. Some seem transfixed. Some elbow their friends and whisper, “Ask her.” On either side of me, I can sense that the other girls are transfixed, too.