2015 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide Page 22

“How long does it take you to travel here?”

  “Well, it feels like an eternity with this woman!” George said, laughing and banging his hand on the table.

  “Oh stop,” chuckled Agatha. “Not as long as you’d imagine.”

  A new knock sounded at the door.

  “Please excuse me,” said Madalynn to her guests. “It appears someone else has arrived.”

  “I wonder if it’s Trinity,” said George.

  “You’d just love it if she were visiting today, wouldn’t you!”

  George winked, and Agatha let loose a hearty laugh.

  Madalynn left them to their cheesecake, and walked to the door.

  How Nana had kept this so tight a secret, Madalynn would have to learn herself. As badly as she wished to tell the world about her magnificent visitors, she knew that the novelty of it would be tarnished if she spoke of it to a single soul. These were her Nana’s visitors, and now they were hers. And so what if it was a store bought cheesecake. She realized that it wasn’t so much about the cake, as it was about the company, the journey, and the chance to make new and exciting friends. As her hand wrapped once again around the handle of the door, Madalynn knew that from this day forth, she would always have something to look forward to.

  “Who is it?” she called out, and swung open the door.

  A Smelly Problem

  Angela Penrose

  Angela Penrose lives in Seattle with her husband, five computers, and some unknown number of books, which occupy most of the house. She writes in several genres, but F&SF is her first love. She likes writing for anthologies for the variety, and the challenge of writing to a theme. This is her second anthology appearance, with three more scheduled for 2015. You can find her at angelapenrosewriter.blogspot.com

  Every kid wants to develop a cool talent – that’s just a given, right? The kids at Cody Markham’s high school weren’t any different, and he’d seen some pretty cool talents. Donna could make a flame jet out of her index finger, although only the left one. Octavio could teleport, which was awesome, even if he had to be able to see the place he was teleporting to. Sammy could make his clothes change instantly to any outfit he could imagine.

  So when Cody accidentally discovered he could make people smell different smells, he was pretty disappointed. What good was that? It was pretty stupid, and he hadn’t told anyone. He’d almost rather have people think he was a neuter without any talent at all than tell anyone he was the psychic scratch-n-sniff guy who was doomed to be called “Stinky” for the rest of his life.

  Right then, he had other things to think about, though. The tardy bell rang and Cody slumped in his seat, weighed down by visions of failing the midterm and trying to explain the screw-up to his parents. And in chemistry. He needed that if he was going to get into med school. If he screwed up in high school, he would have to take some stupid remedial class in college, and that would put him behind forever. He’d end up flipping burgers all his life just because he’d been too busy raiding with his Warcraft guild to actually study. It was stupid and he knew it, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it right then. He was going to fail because he sucked.

  An awful smell jolted him out of his spiraling panic. He leaned forward in his seat, fanning one hand in front of his face. “Turn that thing off!” he hissed at Tonya, who sat at the table behind him. She was messing around with the gas nozzle again, and the sour smell of the gas the Bunsen burners used made Cody want to leave the room even more than he already did.

  Someone told Tonya you could get high off the gas, and she was stupid enough to believe it. She nudged it on whenever she thought she could get away with it. It was frying her brain a little at a time – not that she had much to start with.

  Tonya mouthed a cuss word at him, but turned the nozzle off.

  That gave him an idea.

  Mr. Hong was up taking roll and would hand out the exams as soon as he was done. But what if there was some kind of emergency?

  Cody got out his pencil and calculator so it would look like he was ready for the test. Then he focused his power on Mr. Hong and sent him the smell of gas.

  Sure enough, that got his attention. He got up and walked right over to Tonya’s bench, scowled down at her and made sure the handle to the gas nozzle was all the way off. It was. Mr. Hong sniffed a few more times and probably thought he smelled some of the leftover gas from when she had been messing around. Cody shut off his power and let Mr. Hong just smell what was really there. After a few more seconds Mr. Hong went back to his desk.

  “Put away your books and notes,” he said.

  Cody gave him another shot of gas smell.

  Mr. Hong’s head jerked up and he sniffed again.

  He dropped the stack of exams onto his desk and asked, “Does anyone else smell gas?” Because of Tonya, a bunch of people said yes, including Cody.

  Octavio said, “It’s just Tonya screwing around again.”

  “Shut up, jerkwad!” Tonya yelled.

  “This smells fresh,” Mr. Hong said. “If there’s a leak, then it’s dangerous. Does anyone else who’s not near Tonya’s bench smell gas?”

  Cody sent the smell to a couple of other people in the front right corner of the room near one of the wall sinks.

  Mr. Hong prowled around the corner, sniffing like a bloodhound. Cody made sure he smelled something. Eventually, the teacher stood up and walked to the phone on the wall to report a gas leak in his classroom. Five minutes later they were all outside, clustered in a group near the baseball diamond. The rest of the kids who’d been in the science building were streaming out to join them. A little bit later, kids and teachers evacuated from the rest of the school.

  Hah, no exam today! And it was a Friday – Cody swore to himself that he’d study like mad all weekend and get a good grade on the stupid test.

  …………………………

  By Monday he was muttering “six-point-oh-two-times-ten-to-the-twenty-third” practically in his sleep. He was pretty sure he could figure out the mass of any compound and break it down into percent composition, with a calculator and enough scratch paper. Maybe his stupid talent was good for something after all.

  When he got to chemistry, there was a substitute. Ms. Dennison explained that Mr. Hong was on a leave of absence but refused to say why. Maybe she didn’t know. She handed out the exams, and that was the end of it.

  She seemed like an okay teacher – even let Joey borrow her calculator when the dummy said he had forgotten his – but Mr. Hong was a great guy. Cody was worried something had happened.

  Lunch was right after chemistry, and Cody asked around to see if anyone knew anything. By the time the bell rang, he’d heard from a kid whose mom was on the school board that Mr. Hong had been put on leave because the gas company had come out and gone over the room and all the rooms around it, but hadn’t found any leak.

  It had cost the school money and disrupted classes for the rest of the day. The students had been kept herded together in bunches outside, doing nothing except be bored and antsy until after one-forty. Some kids had snuck away, though, and Brad Menzies had been caught trying to shoplift a pair of pricey basketball shoes during what would’ve been school hours. They were blaming everything on Mr. Hong for calling in a false alarm.

  It wasn’t his fault, Cody thought. What if there had really been a gas leak? Teachers were supposed to report that stuff, so he’d just done what the rules said.

  It had to be the vice principal. Mr. Johnson had always had it in for Mr. Hong. He said he was a maverick and disruptive to the school routine because Mr. Hong didn’t always teach straight out of the book. He gave the class cool labs to do, and they’d watched a movie about Marie Curie that made Cody really glad he had modern equipment and stuff. After the magnesium lab, instead of putting all the little strips of magnesium away to use again next year, Mr. Hong had piled them up on top of a wire stand, turned off the lights, and set it all on fire with a Bunsen burner. The whole thing had flared
up white-hot. Cody had the image of that huge, hot flame of burning magnesium floating in front of his eyes for almost half an hour after.

  That was “wasting school resources,” though. When Mr. Hong had paid out of his pocket to replace all the burned magnesium, then it was “making a disruptive spectacle in the classroom.” Right, because it was a bad thing that all the kids were talking about it for the rest of the day. How many other teachers got kids talking around campus about what they did in class?

  Mr. Johnson was a jerkwad, though, and wanted Mr. Hong out. Cody thought half of it was because Mr. Hong’s talent was to know whether someone he was talking to understood him, which wasn’t exactly exciting but a good talent for a teacher to have. All Mr. Johnson could do was make dogs run away by glaring at them, which was probably some kind of telepathy, but it only worked with dogs. It was seriously useless unless you got caught sneaking around in a junkyard or something.

  Cody figured Mr. Johnson was probably jealous of Mr. Hong having a talent that was perfect for teaching, and just generally for being a popular teacher, while Johnson had something really pathetic and none of the kids liked him at all. So the fake gas leak had given him a chance to try to get rid of Mr. Hong.

  The obvious thing to do was confess. Cody didn’t want to do that. Aside from getting in trouble, he’d have to tell about his talent. Then he’d have to walk around with a bag over his head for the next two and a half years.

  There had to be something else he could do to fix it.

  …………………………

  The next day they had Ms. Dennison in chem again. That gave Cody an idea. A couple of times during class, he made her smell gas. She looked around and sniffed, but Cody never kept it up for more than five seconds or so. She didn’t say anything at first.

  After the fifth time, though, while the class was working on problems out of the book, she got up and went out the door.

  Ms. Dennison was only gone for a minute. She came back with Ms. Anza, the physiology teacher. Ms. Anza was a short, gray-haired woman who didn’t take crap from anyone. Her tests were so tough, Cody knew kids who’d gotten negative scores. He wasn’t looking forward to having Ms. Anza next year, but right then he was happy to see her. If anyone had the nerve to get in Johnson’s face after everything that’d happened, it was Ms. Anza. He made sure she smelled gas too.

  She sniffed around a few times, scowled, and said something to Ms. Dennison. Ms. Anza marched out looking grim, and Cody kicked back, trying hard not to grin. He got back to working on the problems, sure Ms. Anza would go chew Johnson’s ear off and prove Mr. Hong wasn’t a nut.

  …………………………

  The next day, Ms. Dennison was still there. The word around campus was that Mr. Hong was still in trouble and probably wouldn’t be coming back.

  Cody figured out that part of the problem was people only smelled gas in the classroom sometimes. Only during the class he was in, actually, and he really didn’t want anyone making that connection.

  He’d have to do something to make people smell gas when he wasn’t there. All he could think of was making it leak gas for real. Then anyone would smell it any time, and a real gas leak would show up on the detector when the gas company came. They’d fix it, and everything would be okay. Mr. Hong would come back.

  At the end of class, Cody dropped his calculator down by the side of his bench before he headed out with everyone else going to lunch. He ducked into a bathroom and combed his hair for five minutes. He wanted to make sure he didn’t drop any hairs over by where the gas lines were, because investigators would be able to nail him if he did, just like in the cop shows. When he was done, he took a couple of deep breaths and went around to the door that led into the heart of the building where the science office was.

  Students weren’t supposed to go through there unless a teacher was with them. The office was between the outside door and everywhere else, so you couldn’t sneak past without being seen.

  If you looked like you belonged, though, you could walk right through; anyone who saw a student just heading on in, not trying to sneak or anything, assumed they were meeting a teacher in their office.

  Cody walked past the department secretary who was on the phone. She didn’t even look up. He headed left down the hall and kept going, then slipped into the chem classroom and shut the door. The windows by the main door were tinted so you could see out, but you could only see in if you put your face right up to the glass with your hands cupped around it. No one would probably come in until the end of lunch. Cody expected to be done way before that.

  In fact, he’d better be done way before that. Ms. Brown, the principal, was great at catching kids pulling stuff, but only if she got to the crime scene right away. That was her talent at work: she could see one hour back in time, any place she was standing. Cody’s plan was to get the gas leak going right away, leaving at least fifty minutes or so of the lunch hour. He was betting that it would take longer than twenty minutes for people to figure out what was going on and think of calling Ms. Brown. He might get in trouble, but he might not. It was a gamble, and it was worth it to get Mr. Hong back.

  Cody had watched the guy hooking up the gas line when his parents bought a new stove, so he knew what they looked like. Just to make sure, he opened the cupboard under the sink at the end of his bench. There was a water pipe and next to it was a narrow copper pipe leading up toward the gas nozzle. Score.

  Once he was sure he knew what the gas lines looked like, he went to the bigger sink in the corner, and opened up the cupboard door. There was no gas nozzle on the counter, but there was a copper line coming through the wall between the chem class and the inner hallway. From there it split to all the benches.

  The metal pipes were pretty thin. Cody pulled his sweatshirt sleeve down over his hand, then reached in and grabbed the pipe right above the valve. He jerked it back and forth, first just a little, then more. It only took a minute of messing with it before he could smell gas.

  It was only a little, but that was enough.

  He got his calculator and headed back out the way he’d come. He was ready to wave the calculator at the secretary if she questioned him, but when he came back through the office area, she was standing at the microwave with her back to him. Cody was pretty sure nobody saw him.

  …………………………

  It was about fifteen minutes into Algebra Two when an announcement came over the speaker ordering everyone to evacuate. The math building was right next to the science building. While the students shuffled along, griping and laughing and generally taking forever to get away from a building that was about to blow up for all they knew, Cody spotted Ms. Brown heading across the quad toward the science building. She had long legs and was walking fast, but she wasn’t running. Cody glanced at his watch and kept an eye on her. There had been at least fifty minutes left of lunch, plus five minutes after the bell rang before classes started, then fifteen minutes into class – that was an hour and ten minutes, so she was too late and he was clear.

  Cody saw the gas company truck when it pulled into the parking lot. That was it; they’d find the leak, fix it, and it would all be over. Cody was so relieved that the mess was finally cleaned up, he sat down on the grass and worked on an English paper that wasn’t even due until Monday.

  …………………………

  The relief lasted until the next afternoon when Cody got a note in his last class telling him to report to Ms. Brown’s office right after school.

  Cody panicked. He had to be busted, and they were gonna expel him for... oh, man, he’d caused a gas leak! In a classroom. Deliberately. He hadn’t thought about it before, not all the way through. It had just been the easiest answer to the problem. It hadn’t really hit him that anything could happen. People could’ve been hurt.

  If someone had walked up with a cigarette, which some teachers did, and if they were late from lunch, sometimes they’d take the last couple of drags right outside the door.
There could have been a huge explosion.

  No way, calm down, you can’t possibly be busted, he thought, trying to get the voice in his head to stop squeaking and hyperventilating. Ms. Brown didn’t get there in time to get an image. You didn’t leave any fingerprints or anything, so there’s no way they know it was you. It’s gotta be for something else, so don’t panic or she’ll know something’s up just from that.

  After school, Cody wandered out to his locker like he always did, dumping books he wouldn’t need and stuffing books he had to have for homework into his backpack. Then he headed toward the main office. He gave his name to the secretary, and ten seconds later he was sitting on a hard plastic seat right in front of Ms. Brown’s desk. He’d figured he’d probably have to wait at least a few minutes before she was ready to see him, but it seemed she had been waiting for him. That was bad.

  Ms. Brown stared at him for half a minute or so, studying him like she was trying to figure out whether to step on him or just swat him with a rolled up newspaper.

  “Cody Markham,” Ms. Brown said. “Tell me what you were thinking yesterday at lunch, so I can figure out whether I should call a psychiatrist or the cops?”

  Cody’s heart blew up to fill his whole chest, then stopped. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. The only part of him working was his sweat glands, and they were on overdrive.

  He managed to say, “I didn’t do anything,” without choking on spit or squeaking.

  “I saw you.”

  “You couldn’t have!” A thought popped up and Cody added, “Because I didn’t do anything.” He was busted.

  She ignored his protests. “Why, Cody? You’re a good kid. You’ve never been in trouble, never even had detention. If it was just a stupid prank, I’m definitely calling the cops and I’ll tell them to test you for drugs, because this isn’t something you’d do in your right mind. You do know the building could’ve exploded, right?”