FROM OPERATION DO-OVER

CHAPTER ONE

Twelve Years Old

 

I’m standing next to the bumper cars when the first bolt of lightning splits the sky and strikes the main transformer. The explosion is like a bomb blast.

I almost jump out of my skin.

Oh, man, I didn’t even want to come to Harvest Festival, and now I’m going to get fricasseed before my thirteenth birthday!

A blinding shower of sparks rains down on the crowded fairgrounds as the lights blink once and wink out. The honky-tonk music from a dozen different rides and games suddenly stops, as the bumper cars grind to a halt. A new sound rises – screams, howls of protest, crying babies, shouts of alarm from people stranded at the top of the Ferris wheel. It’s like somebody flipped a switch, sending the fair from fun mode to full freak-out in the blink of an eye.

The storm comes out of nowhere. Just a few minutes ago, the sky was full of stars. Now it’s pitch black, hard to see your hand in front of your face. A howling wind rakes the midway. We get pelted with a barrage of flying dust and litter – ride tickets, napkins, wrappers, paper cups and straws.

You try to be a good kid – do your homework. Follow the rules. And what do you get for it? Blown away.

Something slams into the back of my head, nearly knocking me over. I wheel, expecting to see a cannonball – surely nothing less than that would pack such a punch. Smiling up at me from the ground is a pink teddy bear that must have sailed away from one of the game stalls. I reach for it, but the next gust of wind sends it tumbling away, where it’s stomped to shreds by many fleeing feet.

Where does everybody think they’re going? There’s nowhere to go!

People are running – most for the exits, but some just because running is what you do in an emergency. I catch glimpses of faces I recognize – kids from my grade –

But where is she?

She’s the only reason I’m here, even though she’s the reason I should be a million miles away.

I want to call out to somebody, but what could I say and who would hear me in this commotion? Flailing legs trip each other up, and bodies go down. That’s when the rain comes in, sweeping across the midway. Pelting, fire hoserain. The water causes the damaged transformer to burst into flames, casting an orange glow over the pandemonium.

It looks like the aftermath of Krakatoa – or maybe that’s just the science nerd in me.

Desperately, I fight through the panicked crowd, escaping behind a hot dog stand. There I’m almost knee-deep in scattered buns, but at least I can breathe, free of the crush of people. Wires and cables swing dangerously overhead, sparks spurting from every connection.

I wipe the rain from my eyes, noting that not even all that water can soften my bristly stick-up hairline. Story of my life.

“Mason?” comes a plea, faint in the howling wind and pounding rain.

I’d know that voice anywhere. I’ve been half-dreading it, half-hoping to hear it since I got to the fairgrounds.

I squint into the gloom. Ava Petrakis stands at the base of the Tilt-a-Whirl, her drenched auburn hair plastered to her scalp, hugging her light jacket around her.

I run to her underneath the big ride. “It’s okay! This can’t last long!”

She looks like a half-drowned kitten. In spite of the wildness of the storm and the danger all around, my first thought is that the two of us have never been alone together before this moment. Was it really only a month ago that Ms. Alexander introduced the new girl to our seventh-grade class?

With a deafening crunch, a  blast of wind tears the sign off the top of the Tilt-a-Whirl. For an instant, the heavy metal square twirls above our heads like a piece of scrap paper.

We watch it with terrified eyes. You don’t have to be a science kid to know the law of gravity: What goes up must come down.

 

 

CHAPTER TWO

Zero Years Old

 

Mason Rolle and Tyrus Ehrlich get born.

I don’t actually remember this, because I was zero at the time. But Ty and I are born just a couple of months apart – me first. And even though our families don’t know each other very well, he and I are destined to become the greatest friends in the history of humanity.

I’m the only three-year-old at Gymboree who’s too uncoordinated to figure out how to bounce a ball. At least, I am until Ty shows up. Compared to him, I’m Lebron James.

We’re not best friends – not yet. At three, you’re lucky if Pull-Ups are fully in your rearview mirror. It’s more like we’re aware of each other. When Ty face-plants on the playground, I cry. And when I get a nosebleed, Ty panics. Even though the word friend isn’t in either vocabulary yet, the two of us have a sense: We’re in this together.

At the sandbox tea party, we’re the only two who become so into the game that we forget what we’re doing and accidentally drink sand. That gets our moms acquainted – they’re the ones who have to come in to preschool to wash our mouths out. At make-believe we have no equal. It’s in the physical world that the problems start. But it’s okay, because there’s always this other kid who’s just as awful as you.

As we get older, this recurring problem in our lives starts to have a name: Sports. We’re bad at them. At tag, we’re not fast enough to catch anyone, so we’re doomed to be “it” forever. In musical chairs, we’re the ones left standing. In tee-ball, the bat flies out of our hands and conks somebody. At duck-duck-goose, we’re total turkeys. And don’t even get me started on dodge ball.

But as terrible as we are at sports, there are these other games that we seem to be really good at. Like Monopoly, where both of us can make change in our heads, even for the really big amounts. And chess, where we’re the only kids our age who can figure out how all the different pieces move.

I can’t remember how old I am the first time I hear the word “nerd.” But once I hear it, I hear it a lot. And although I know it’s meant as an insult, I’m kind of into it. I like the things that nerds like – science-y stuff, puzzles that make you think, shows and video games where characters fly through space, or travel through time. And it isn’t lost on me that there’s only one other kid in Pasco who hears the word “nerd” every bit as often as I do. Ty.

All this is leading up to the day in first grade where our class goes to the planetarium. It’s the first field trip I remember that isn’t all about things I’m bad at. I don’t have to scale a climbing wall, or follow a compass through some swamp, or make it over a rope bridge. I just have to lean back, look at the stars, and dream. It’s paradise. I wish it could last forever.

Afterwards, there’s a kid up at the front, and he’s giving the curator a hard time. It’s Ty – which seems weird, because if there’s one person who should love this field trip, it’s him.

Ty’s really heated, practically in tears. So I lean in to listen.

“What do you mean, Pluto’s not allowed to be a planet anymore? Of course it’s a planet – it’s my favorite one!”

It hits me then: What are the odds that two kids on the same little street of the same little town are both going to have a favorite planet? Mine happens to be Jupiter, because go big or go home. Still, it doesn’t matter which planet we choose. It’s the fact that we both chose one.

That’s the moment – right then. Not only do we become best friends, but it dawns on both of us that we’ve already been best friends for years.

“We’re not just friends – we’re old friends,” I decide.

“Either that or we went from zero to light speed in negative time,” Ty adds smugly.

I grin, because I was about to say exactly the same thing.

Oh, sure, lots of people have a close friend, a BFF, a brother-from-another-mother. This is different. Ty and I share a two-brain hive mind. We finish each other’s sentences. Sometimes we don’t even have to do that, since our thoughts are identical anyway. We can look at each other and crack up laughing at a joke neither of us has to say out loud. Our parents think it’s spooky.

We read the same books, watch the same shows, and play the same video games, usually together. If one of us gets grounded, the other one sits it out too, because what’s the point of doing anything without your other half?

In second grade, we get put in two different classes. We survive less than three days. That’s when the principal shows up to explain that there’s been a computer glitch, and I get moved over to rejoin Ty. Yeah, right. That glitch turns out to be our folks not being able to deal with the nonstop nagging we’ve been giving them at home.

“This whole place would have to shut down if the Einstein twins couldn’t be in class together,” is the complaint from Dominic Holyoke, star athlete, bigmouth, and slab of meat extraordinaire.

The “Dominator” is not our biggest fan. To be honest, we’re not that popular at Pasco Elementary School – or at Pasco Middle School after that. We’re not unpopular either. We’re just nobody. And that suits us fine. To each other, we’re everybody that matters.

We roll into seventh grade at the top of our game, as defending science fair champions and co-founders of the Astronomy Club. We’ve got Ms. Alexander – our favorite teacher – for homeroom, but it isn’t all perfection. Dominic is in the class too, and so is his sidekick, Miggy Vincent, master of spitballs and smart-alecky comments. I’m extra vulnerable to spitballs. I have this front section of bristly stick-up hair that catches them like a basket.

A classic Dominic and Miggy stunt: One September morning, I flop into my seat at the front table and find myself super-glued to the chair. I stand up again quickly and the chair comes with me. I try to pull myself free. No dice. My jeans are totally bonded to the wood.

It isn’t hard to identify the source of this prank. Partway across the room, those two boneheads are practically smothering themselves to keep from laughing out loud.

Without a word, Ty takes in the situation, walks calmly to the art supply closet, and comes back with a paintbrush and a container of nail polish remover that we use as a solvent. Dominic and Miggy watch in growing annoyance as he soaks the brush and works to free the seat of my pants. Within a few minutes, I’m up on my feet, rescued.

“Because … science,” I beam at the two culprits while Ty uses the nail polish remover to clean the rest of the super-glue off my chair.

“Shut up, Spaceman,” Dominic grumbles. His latest nickname for me – one that’s destined to last a long time.

That’s the power of the greatest friendship in human history. Ty and I may not be cool. But we’ve got each other’s backs one thousand percent. Plus we’re smart, so it’s hard to imagine that there’s anything middle school could throw at us that we couldn’t handle.

At that moment, Ms. Alexander walks into the class, leading a petite girl, with a heart-shaped face, blue-green eyes, and a silky cascade of auburn hair.

“We have a new student in our homeroom. Class, this is Ava Petrakis, who comes to us from New York City. Let’s all do our best to make her feel welcome.”

 

 

CHAPTER THREE

Seventeen Years Old

 

My reflection looks distorted in the smeared and speckled mirror of the high school bathroom.

I run some water over my hand and try to smooth down the section of standup hair at the top of my forehead. No amount of combing, brushing, gelling, and styling will convince that tuft to lie down or sweep to the side. It’s better than it was in middle school when the buzz cut Mom made me get only encouraged it to stand up straighter, like the bristles of a stiff brush. At least now, at seventeen, I’m in charge of my own hairstyle. If I keep growing it – in theory – at some point the force of gravity has to take over, and it will all lie down beautifully. As an A-plus science student, I have a lot of faith in physics. Newton explained it perfectly: I just need the downward pull of gravity to be stronger than the upward push of the tuft. At this moment, it seems like the tuft will have to reach halfway to Alpha Centauri before gravity gains the upper hand. It’s definitely not going to happen now, in the passing period between fourth and fifth hour.

I step out of the bathroom and wade into the hustle of kids on their way to the next class. At Pasco High School, if you’re not moving fast enough when you join the procession, you get trampled.

“Hi, Mason!” Clarisse Ostrov accelerates the motion of her long gangly legs to match my pace. “Have you signed up for the planetarium trip yet?” She has a way of looking at me through her coke-bottle glasses that makes me feel like I’m a lab specimen being examined under a microscope. “Better hurry,” she adds without waiting for my answer. “Once the bus fills up, they won’t take anybody else.”

“Oh, right,” I say sarcastically, indicating the crowd surging around us. “Nothing but planetarium fans as far the eye can see.”

A stray elbow comes out of nowhere, nearly catapulting me into the lockers. “Out of the way, Spaceman.”

“Jerk!” Clarisse exclaims, waving her long skinny arms at the class-change parade. She comes over to me. “Sorry, I didn’t see who it was.”

I shrug. It’s not hard to guess.  Dominic or maybe Miggy, my tormentors from way back. “Spaceman” is the nickname they gave me in middle school, thanks to my status as co-founder of the Astronomy Club. Clarisse was one of our first members. She knows as well as anybody that both those jerks have been on my case pretty much nonstop since then. Probably my own fault for starting a club about planets, stars, and galaxies. I guess I could have created a gardening group, but I didn’t want to be “Fertilizer Face.” Or worse.

“I’m okay,” I tell her.

“Sign up for the trip,” she says again. “Don’t get left out.” And she strides off.

I heave a sigh. Liking astronomy is nothing to be ashamed of, no matter what the Dominics and Miggys of the world think. Might as well head to the science office and sign up. Otherwise, Clarisse will never let me hear the end of it. Our local planetarium isn’t exactly the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, but don’t knock it. I love planetariums – ever since that first-grade trip. I had birthday parties there when I was little.

I poke my head in through the doorway. And freeze.

There’s only one person at the sign-up sheet – the other co-founder of the Astronomy Club at Pasco Middle School: Ty. And it means there’s no way I can go.

The disappointment is bitter on my tongue as I wheel and walk away. The class change crowd has thinned out now, so I’m partway down the hall when Mrs. Nekomis catches up to me.

“Where are you going, Mason? You haven’t signed up yet!”

“I can’t go,” I lie. “I have a doctor’s appointment.”

“You do not!” she exclaims. “This is about Ty, isn’t it? He’s going, so you won’t.”

I don’t even bother giving her an argument. Mrs. Nekomis knows better than anybody how it is with Ty and me. She was our seventh-grade homeroom teacher back when it all happened – Ms. Alexander in those days.

“It was five years ago, Mason,” she pleads. “Don’t you think it’s time for both of you to put it behind you? You were children back then. You’ll be going to college soon. You were such wonderful close friends. How can you throw all that away?”

I stare at her, my face hardening to stone. She’s 100 percent right. Ty and I were close. That’s the whole problem. The two of us had been best friends ever since Gymboree. No – the word “friends” doesn’t come close to describing what we had. We were synched, like two devices on the same identity. Each of our families understood that it had adopted an extra son.

Until Ava came.

It wasn’t her fault. That’s the one thing Ty and I still agree on. And when Ava realized what had happened because of her, she was totally devastated. Even now, five years later, she walks on eggshells around us for fear of doing any more damage.

But the damage is done. That’s what Mrs. Nekomis can never understand. When you’ve been that close to someone, and your friendship is ripped apart it leaves an open wound that can never heal. And just seeing that person – even on a planetarium trip – is unbearable. When I look at Ty, he’s more than some kid I used to hang out with way back when. I feel the loss of everything we had and everything we were ever going to have. It’s been five years, and it hasn’t gotten better.

And it never will.

 

 

CHAPTER FOUR

Twelve Years Old

September 27

 

Ava’s arrival is like four thousand volts of electricity shot through the walls of Ms. Alexander’s homeroom.

In the front row, I lean over to Ty at precisely the moment he leans over to me – and naturally, our eyebrows are raised at the exact same angle. Nothing new ever happens in a dinky town like Pasco. I mean, we started kindergarten with a lot of the same kids in this very class. So Ava might as well have the word NEW written across her forehead in chaser lights.

But even more than that, the girl has something. What is it? Style? Her clothes are pretty much the same as what everybody else is wearing. Maybe it’s just the way she’s wearing them. She’s got attitude, for sure. Here she is, the newbie, but there isn’t an ounce of shyness to her. It’s like she instantly belongs wherever she is – including here.

“How many times did you get mugged in New York?” Miggy pipes up. Typical him.

“Never,” Ava replies without missing a beat.

Ms. Alexander frowns at Miggy. “That’s not a very polite question.”

“It’s fine,” Ava says airily. “A lot of people think New York is dangerous. But you just have to put out a vibe that you don’t want to be messed with, and nobody messes with you.”

She has everybody’s attention now. Pasco isn’t exactly the boonies, but no one around here says anything like that. Ava is different.

Even Ms. Alexander is impressed. “Well, find a seat, Ava. We have a few things to take care of before first period.”

An odd tension rises in the room as Ava surveys the open spots. Suddenly it seems very important where the new girl will choose to sit.

Ty and I crane our necks to see where she’ll go. My money is on the empty seat in the cluster of desks where Miggy and Dominic hold court. They’re the big sports stars, so a lot of kids gravitate toward them. But in a rare disagreement with me, Ty seems to be looking over at a vacancy by the window, near Emma, Kennedy, and a few of the other popular girls – the ones who have the most Instagram followers, and who dominate the seventh-grade chat.

So many choices. Where is Ava from New York going to land?

Everybody’s so focused on the drama that I’m surprised by the scraping of the chair as Ava sits down at the table we share with Clarisse.

Ava beams at the three of us. “This seat taken?”

Ty and I are struck dumb. I don’t think he heard the question.

“I’m Clarisse,” Clarisse introduces herself from behind her large thick glasses. “And these two lunkheads are Mason and Ty. Believe it or not, they know how to talk. Sometimes.”

“Hi, Clarisse. Hi, guys.”

“We talk!” Ty and I exclaim in such perfect unison that the whole class laughs. Sometimes, there are drawbacks to being on the same wavelength as your best friend.

It shouldn’t be a problem that Ava’s sitting with us. But to be honest, I’m so extra aware of her that I spend all of homeroom in stiff-necked misery, forcing my total focus onto the teacher. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Ty doing the same thing. To make matters worse, Dominic and Miggy bombard us with spitballs the entire time. Yikes – I feel one of them catch in the mini-basket formed by my stick-up hair, but I don’t dare flick it away. What if Ava notices?

When the bell finally releases us to first period, Ty and I can’t get out of there fast enough.

“What do you think of Ava?” he asks on the way to the science lab.

“She’s – nice.”

“Nice,” Ty confirms. “Yeah, I thought so too.”

Funny – the two of us can go on for hours about any subject: video games; sunspots; Chipotle versus Five Guys; robots; does Batman count as a real superhero; toast; and our absolute favorite topic, time travel. But on the subject of Ava Petrakis, we can come up with exactly one word between the two of us: Nice.

In the lab, we’re waiting for the okay to begin the experiment when Ava appears in the doorway.

“Sorry, I’m late,” she greets Mr. Esposito, handing over her course card. “The room numbering in this school is totally confusing. I almost ended up in a closet.”

The teacher nods. “Everyone else has a partner, so you’ll just have to find one of the pairs to work with for the time being.”

“Pull up over here,” Dominic invites.

“Yeah,” Miggy adds. “Treat yourself to a free upgrade.”

Once again, the girl from New York marches right past them and establishes herself on the stool between Ty and me. “Hi, guys. Miss me?”

Going by the flush in Ty’s cheeks, I can only imagine my own beet-red complexion. The two of us nearly conk heads stooping to make room for her book bag. This time there’s no question about it. She’s choosing us. On purpose.

Ava lights the Bunsen burner with an authoritative flick of the flint and has a beaker of solution heating over it in no time at all. “I’m kind of a science dweeb,” she explains, grinning.

“No way!” Ty blurts.

“Us too!” I add. “I mean, not too dweeby –”

“There’s no such thing as too dweeby,” she lectures. “Never apologize for being smart. Hey, you got something in your hair,” she adds, flicking the spitball out of my bristles.

We regard her with a new respect. We’ve always gotten great grades, but it was kind of understood that there was a price to be paid in the coolness department for being good at school. We even developed an equation for it: P=1/GPA – meaning that your popularity is inversely proportional to your grade point average. Yet here’s Ava from New York, and she doesn’t believe in P=1/GPA at all. She thinks being smart is fine. Better still, she is smart! She runs through the experiment with such ease and authority that all we can do is watch in awed silence.

Later, in the cafeteria, I’m carrying my lunch to the usually solitary table I share with Ty, when a chair is suddenly kicked into my path. In an amazing display of body control, I manage to keep my balance, but a hard-boiled egg rolls off my tray, lying with a crack on the tile floor and lying in a circle of shattered shell.

When I bend down to clean up the mess, Dominic is glaring into my face.

“Listen, Spaceman. I know what you’re doing and you can forget it.”

“Doing?” I’m mystified. “I’m not doing anything.”

“If you two losers think you’ve got first dibs on the new girl, you’re bugging,” Miggy puts in. “It’s one thing that she sits with you in homeroom because maybe she’s nearsighted and can’t see the normal people. But the cafeteria isn’t school. It’s real life.”

I take stock of their long table, which is in the best location in the whole lunchroom – central, but just out of the glare of the large windows and not too close to the food line. It hosts a Who’s Who of the seventh grade – athletes and cheerleaders and even a couple of eighth graders.

I shrug. “Ava sits wherever she wants.”

“Right,” Dominic agrees. “And she wants to sit here. Now scram.”

As I start away, Dominic punches the bottom of my tray, and I lose a plastic fork and a small container of fruit cup. It’s worth it to get clear of those nouth-breathers.

“What was that all about?” Ty asks when I join him, making sure to take the seat facing away from Dominic and Miggy’s table.

“It’s a long story,” I grunt.

A few minutes later, Ava’s voice rings out in the cafeteria. “Oh, that’s okay. I’m sitting with friends.”

Ty’s eyes glaze over.

“She’s coming this way, isn’t she?”

He can only nod.

And then she’s upon us, and the conversation begins even before she takes her first bite. “This food is way more basic than my old cafeteria in New York. We had a sushi bar …”

Lunch periods at Pasco Middle School are an inhuman 24 minutes, but that’s more than enough time for Ava Petrakis to share her entire life story. Her old apartment in New York was less than three blocks from the Museum of Natural History; she likes Star Wars better than Star Trek, but only because the transporter is “problematic from a science standpoint;” her Xbox Live gamer handle is Darth Hamster; her mom is a molecular biologist who is sequencing the genome of a kumquat; and if a genie ever grants her three wishes, the first one will be to go back in time to meet the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe and see if he really had a silver nose.

I’m wide-eyed. “What about the second and third wishes?”

“I haven’t worked that out yet,” she admits. “Don’t rush me. I might not even need the genie. Time travel isn’t as impossible as it sounds. Do you know that the astronauts who travel to the international space station come back a tiny bit younger than they would be if they’d stayed on Earth?”

It’s that very moment – when the words “time travel” pass her lips – when it hits me: I’ve just met the most awesome girl who has ever lived. Seriously, she’s interesting; she’s smart; she’s nice; she likes time travel. She’s still talking, but I’m not hearing anymore. I’m thinking, what are the odds that, of all the schools in all the towns, Ava would come here?  What are the odds that she would be placed in my homeroom and choose to attach herself to me?

And Ty, I remind myself, noticing him across the table. And because I can read Ty’s mind as easily as my own, I know exactly what he’s thinking.

Which is: I’ve just met the most awesome girl who has ever lived.