What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World

CHAPTER 02

Flash Mob

For me, middle school was one never-ending game of dodgeball. Back in elementary school, I'd frequently been the victim of friendly fire. The ball always seemed to miss its actual target and hit me, no matter where I was on the circle.

Today, school started out kind of like that.

Out in the lobby, before the first bell, Morgue MacKenzie snagged me by the arm as I tried to pass his hulking frame. He looked down at me and said, "Quarter."

Morgue was standing in front of a Juice Express Refreshment Kiosk, the capitalized first letters of the words glowing a bright purple over his head. He needed an additional twenty-five cents for a can of Agra Nation^® Energy Blaster. I dug in my pocket and gave him the change.

"Why do you let him do that?" asked Freak when I joined him a few moments later.

"He's twice my size," I said. "And he never asks for more than he needs."

"Next time, tell him your money is radioactive."

"Why would he believe that?"

"You live on the edge of Hellsboro."

"Hellsboro isn't radioactive."

"Morgue doesn't know that. He's one of those people who thinks Hellsboro is the work of the devil. I've heard him say he'd never set foot in it. If he thinks your money has something to do with Hellsboro, he'll go bother somebody else."

I decided Freak might be right.

Hellsboro was the name the Cheshire newspaper had given to our local underground coal-seam fire. Hellsboro had turned eight hundred acres on the west side of town into a treeless, lifeless wasteland. The fire had been burning for twelve years. It could burn for a hundred more, or until all the underground coal was consumed. Coal-seam fires were almost impossible to put out. Ours had pretty much stopped spreading, although a small tongue of it had stuck itself out under Breeland Road that past summer and caused a sinkhole.

At Hellsboro's center was the abandoned Rodmore Chemical plant. Rodmore had once been a big employer for the town of Cheshire. Now it was like a cinder-covered castle in the middle of a burned-down amusement park. It had been closed since the fire started. Nobody went there anymore. People said the plant was even more dangerous than the fire that surrounded it.

The fire had made almost all of the houses in the nearby Sunnyside housing development uninhabitable. Only three families still lived in the development: Freak's, Fiona's, and mine. We had to walk several miles to get to the next inhabited place, if you didn't count Old Man Underhill's.

Most people in Cheshire feared Hellsboro. It hadn't stopped them from renaming the high school football team the Hellions or the middle school team the Devils (a faded banner in the gym says we used to be the Cheshire Cats) or having an annual dance at the town hall called the Hellsboro Hop. But nobody went near the actual fire zone. The mayor joked that it was a good way to get a hotfoot. If reminding Morgue MacKenzie how close I lived to Hellsboro would get him to leave my money alone, I would try it. As soon as I got up the nerve to tell him.

In English class, we got our spelling tests back. The one word I got wrong was renaissance. I put in too many n's. Renaissance means rebirth. I asked Mr. Hendricks, our teacher, why, if it meant rebirth, we didn't just say rebirth, which is easier to spell. This led to a long lecture from him about how important it is to have a large vocabulary. Mr. Hendricks started throwing around words like quintessential, lexicographer, and hyperdiculous. Everybody blamed me for the lecture, of course. Just as, the previous week, they had blamed me for the pop quiz on Tom Sawyer, just because I'd shown up wearing suspenders. I was used to it.

At the end of class, Mr. Hendricks admitted he had made up the word hyperdiculous. He wanted to see if any of us would raise our hand and ask him what it meant. None of us did. We were, I could tell, a constant disappointment to Mr. Hendricks.

It was during lunch that the school day really went off the tracks.

There was another flash mob.

It happened shortly after Rudy Sorkin slipped on a string bean. His feet went out from under him. He fell on the floor with his lunch tray, and we all applauded. Then the applause cut off in mid-clap. I brought my hands together two more times into the dead silence and then caught myself.

"Uh-oh," I said to Freak.

"Not again," he said, rolling his eyes. The last flash mob had been only a week earlier.

Almost everybody stood up, except Freak and me and two or three other kids. But the majority of the lunchroom, including Fiona, who was two tables away, and all the adult monitors and the food-service ladies, turned and faced the window.

"That's different," I said.

"Yeah," agreed Freak. "Last week they faced the wall."

Everybody clapped twice. Then they crossed their hands in front of their faces, tugged on their earlobes, put their hands on their hips, and launched into an ear-splitting performance of the song "Oklahoma." For two and a half minutes everybody assured us that Oklahoma was doing fine, it was grand, and, while it might not be terrific, it was certainly okay.

Then everybody sat back down, finished their round of applause for Rudy Sorkin, and picked up their conversations right where they had left off. The lunchroom filled instantly with its usual noise.

The first time this had happened, over a year earlier, it had been scary. We had been new to the school then, so we thought maybe it was a middle school ritual that no one had let us in on. That time, everybody had stood, faced the kitchen, and sung about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. And it turned out it hadn't been just the lunchroom. It hadn't been just the school. It had been the entire surrounding town of Cheshire. Or 90 percent of it. People had pulled their cars to the side of the road, gotten out, and sung.

I immediately decided it was alien mind control.

The next day, the newspaper said it was a flash mob. According to the report, everybody had been texting one another on their cell phones for weeks ahead of time. They had chosen what direction to face. They had picked out the song. They had agreed that everybody would perform together, no matter where they were or what they were doing, at exactly eleven forty-eight on the morning of September 28. After it was over, everybody who participated would deny having any memory of having done it if they were questioned by any nonparticipants. It would all be part of what the paper called "a grand and glorious lark."

To me, it seemed like a grand and glorious waste of time.

After that, it kept happening. Freak and I learned to expect a singing flash mob every eight to ten weeks. Sometimes, there was even a dance step or two.

Fiona was good at it. She followed instructions perfectly, and after each flash mob she always claimed she couldn't remember doing anything out of the ordinary.

I started to feel left out. Since Freak and I didn't have cell phones, we were out of the loop. We had almost gotten cells the summer we graduated from elementary school, when the Disin Tel store opened on Coal Avenue and had offered an irresistible limited-time promotion.

LISTEN TO DISIN! the cleverly rhyming banner in front of the store had proclaimed, going on in smaller print to offer free phones to every family member past the age of ten in any family that signed a one-year contract. It was so inexpensive that practically every family in town took advantage of the offer. Then Freak's father accidentally dropped his new phone down the garbage disposal, and he took Freak's phone to replace it. And my aunt Bernie pulled mine out of my jeans after they'd gone through the wash. I'd had the phone for one day.

"Even if we had cells, would we be doing this?" demanded Freak, after everybody had finished singing "Oklahoma." "How is it possible that there isn't one kid here with a cell who doesn't think this is totally stupid? Not a single person can decide to just sit it out? And why are they doing it again so soon?"

"Maybe the Elbonian overlords are stepping up their plans for world domination," I said, adding a couple of potato chips to my cheese sandwich. I like a sandwich with crunch.

"The Elbonian overlords?"

"Weird foreign people in the Dilbert comic strip."

"Why would you read Dilbert? It's about office workers."

"Someday I figure I'll work in a cubicle. That's what middle school is training us for. I think there's some serious mind control going on here."

"You mean the flash mobs."

"That, too."

Freak scowled.

"You can't be right," he said. "This is weird."

"No, it's not," I assured him.

"It's not?"

"No," I said. "It's hyperdiculous."

It was the only word that described it.

CHAPTER 03

Hellsboro

The next morning, I had a sword fight with the sofa. I hadn't planned to. The sofa forced my hand.

I arrived early, even before Freak. I wanted to examine the sofa on my own.

The upholstery was dark green, close to the color of the zucchini crayon. A long slit ran horizontally across the fabric of the back cushion, like somebody had slashed it with a knife. That, and the stain on the cushion, were the only things wrong with it that I could see.

I flipped the cushion over. The bloodstain lined up perfectly beneath the slit. If the sofa had belonged to my aunt Bernie, she would have made a slipcover for it. She never threw anything out.

My aunt Bernadette had started working double shifts at the medical center as soon as I got out of elementary school. We'd been together more when I was younger, but now I sometimes saw her only on weekends. It was just her and me in the house.

I lunged at the sofa with my sword. It had, after all, drawn first blood with its vicious fishhook attack. I duplicated the slashing motion that must have caused the slit, then pressed my advantage with a series of lightning strokes so fast, they were impossible to see. The fact that my sword was invisible probably helped.

"En garde, Monsieur Zucchini Couch! Stab me, will you? Taste my steel!"

"You think the sofa is French?" asked Freak. I whirled to face him. I hid my invisible sword behind my back. "What are you doing?"

"Forensics," I said, improvising. "I'm trying to figure out how the slit got in the back cushion. It might have been done with a sword."

"You think there are guys with swords in the Underhill place?"

"Who knows what goes on in the Underhill place," I said. Freak looked toward the house. I took the opportunity to slide my invisible sword back into its invisible sheath.

"We're wasting valuable sitting time," said Freak, throwing himself onto his favorite cushion. I took a seat, too, after flipping the bloodstained cushion facedown again. It wasn't long before Fiona joined us.

"I have news," she announced, and sat down between us. "It turns out," she said, "there are people out there who collect crayons."

"Yeah," said Freak. "They're called five-year-olds."

"No, they're called adults, and some of them might pay good money for the zucchini crayon we found. Especially if the crayon has never been used."

She looked at us to make sure she had our attention. She did. She continued.

"I looked up zucchini crayon on the Internet. It's one of over two dozen colors the crayon company doesn't make anymore. It's very hard to find. There were only five hundred made, for a special limited-edition box of crayons called Victory Garden." Fiona pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of a pocket in her book bag and consulted it. "This was during World War Two. The five hundred boxes were the prizes in a radio contest for kids. Sixteen crayons per box, all named after vegetables. But the new machine they were using in the crayon factory to pack the boxes left out the zucchini crayon and put in two rutabagas instead."

"Rutabaga?"

"Yellowish purple. Not a very popular crayon, according to the article. Most of the zucchini crayons wound up in a tray, and the tray got left on a radiator, and most of them melted."

"So," I said, "any zucchini crayon that survived the meltdown would be worth something?"

"How much?" asked Freak.

Fiona looked back at her piece of paper. "Five years ago a Victory Garden box of sixteen crayons, two of them rutabaga, none of them zucchini, sold at auction for five hundred dollars. The winner of the auction was quoted as saying he would happily pay the same amount or more for the missing zucchini."

"Holy cow!" said Freak. "Do you have the guy's name?"

"The article didn't give it."

"We don't need the guy's name," I reasoned. "We have the crayon. We could sell it through an Internet auction site."

"That's what I was thinking," agreed Fiona. "And since I'm the only one with a computer with Internet access, you should give the crayon to me." She looked innocently at Freak.

"Yeah," he said. "Like that's going to happen."

"I need to be able to describe it exactly and take a picture of it."

"I can do that."

"You don't have a computer."

"I'll go to the library."

Fiona stared at him for a moment. Then she said, "You'll get yourself killed."

Freak had no answer to that, because it was true. Freak risked his life every time he went to the library. That's because Freak insisted on taking the shortest route.

The shortest route went straight across Hellsboro.

Freak could get in and out of Hellsboro through a hole in his backyard fence. He insisted he knew all of the safe paths, but he risked falling into a sinkhole and roasting to death every time he returned a library book. He preferred to do that, rather than pay the late fee. He said the trick to Hellsboro was to keep moving, or the bottoms of your sneakers would start to melt.

"How about," I said, "Freak and I just come over to your house tonight and we use your computer? It's your parents' bowling night. We wouldn't be in anybody's way."