“Okay, Gar, that’s enough. We’ll talk when you’re wearing that chicken suit.”
“Oh!” Gary exploded in laughter. “That’s a good one! Well, Jeter, just for that, I’m putting the whammy on you.”
Putting out his arms toward Derek and wiggling his fingers as if to cast a spell, he said, “Abbada-babbada boom! There. You’re cooked.” He wiped his hands together, as if to get something nasty off them.
Then he had another idea. “Oh, and here’s another, for your big baseball game. Abbada-babbada LOSE!”
Derek shook his head, trying not to let Gary’s antics get to him. He remembered something his dad had once said: “When somebody is spoiling for a fight with you, sometimes it’s better to just walk away. It takes a real grown-up to do that.”
So Derek turned away and headed into the classroom, leaving Gary laughing in the hallway behind him. But it was harder to leave his taunting words behind.
As he sat there during finals review, Derek couldn’t keep his mind on work. His thoughts kept drifting back to Gary. In particular, those whammies he’d tossed Derek’s way.
Derek wasn’t usually superstitious. But something about that smirk on Gary’s face when he’d laid the whammies on him…
Derek felt a shiver go down his spine. What if Gary’s jinxes really work?
“Come on, Vij…. We need to get back to work! It’s almost time for you to head home.”
“Sorry, Derek. Where were we?”
The two boys were sitting side by side at Derek’s desk. Textbooks lay open between them, along with sample pages of standardized tests that Ms. Terrapin had given them for practice at home.
“It’s almost six already,” Derek said, glancing at the alarm clock on his bedside table. “We’ve only got, like, ten more minutes. Did we make any headway at all today?”
“A little,” Vijay said weakly.
The two boys had spent more time talking about Dave moving away than about their upcoming finals.
“I still can’t believe it,” Vijay had said shortly after they’d sat down to study together. “It’s like he just moved here, and now he’s going?”
“It’s been two years,” Derek had replied. “Dave says it’s the second longest time his family has lived in one place. Can you imagine?”
“It’s not going to be the same without him,” Vijay had said sadly. He’d seemed really upset—as upset as Derek. And Vijay never got upset!
“I never thought about him leaving,” Derek had said, “and then one day, just like that—bam!”
They’d gone on and on about Dave. Then, after they’d finally gotten back to studying, Derek had kept flashing back to the image of Avery doubled over, holding her stomach. If she’d gone to Saint Augustine, like them, he would at least have known if she’d stayed home from school today.
When Vijay had asked what was distracting him, Derek had told him what he’d seen.
“She is under a lot of pressure, I think,” Vijay had said, nodding. “More than the rest of us.”
So they’d talked a little about her, wondering whether she’d be okay for their next game on Saturday. They agreed it would be tough to win without her.
They’d gotten back to work one more time, but that had lasted only about twenty minutes, and then they were talking about Dave again. They agreed to tag-team writing Dave letters, so he got one every week. That solution helped Derek felt a little better about things. But now their study time was almost up—and nearly all wasted!
“Well,” Vijay said now, shrugging, “what can we do in ten minutes to make up for lost time? Is there some big knot we can untie?”
Derek held up the practice sheets for the standardized tests. “I’m a little spooked about these, to tell you the truth.”
“Those?” Vijay sounded surprised. “Those are easy! Just like the ones they gave us in fourth grade. No problem for a smart kid like you.”
“I don’t know…. I kind of got messed up last time. The teacher said to make sure we filled in the circles completely.”
“So?”
“So, I spent so much time filling them in, and sharpening my pencil, which kept breaking from all the pressure I was putting on it…”
“I see where you’re going here.”
“…that I didn’t even finish the test! There were, like, three whole pages of questions left!”
“You still scored pretty high, as I remember,” Vijay said.
“Not as high as I should have.”
“So, quickly, before time is up—do you want to know a trick I taught myself to finish fast?”
“Seriously?” Derek asked, his eyes widening.
“Here’s how you do it,” Vijay said, rubbing his hands together as he warmed to his subject. “First time through, you only tackle the questions you know the answers to. Any doubts, leave it for now and come back to it later, in round two.”
“And round three?”
“Is for the ones you have no clue about. And make sure you at least answer all of those, too—even if you’re wrong. At least that way you have a chance of getting it right!”
“You taught yourself that trick?”
“Nooo,” Vijay said with a grin. “My parents knew these tests were coming, and they wanted me to score my highest, so they signed me up for a prep course last year.”
Derek smiled, and clapped Vijay on the shoulder. “Man, you are the best. I’m going to put those tricks to good use.”
“Look out, Gary Parnell!” Vijay said, and they both cracked up as they high-fived.
Derek was feeling much better, at least for the moment. Even if he lost Dave, he still had a best friend in Vijay—and there was no better friend in the world for a guy to have.
Chapter Eight AVERY’S QUEST
Avery seemed pretty much fine, Derek observed, as they threw the ball around what passed for the infield on Jeter’s Hill. She seemed, if not relaxed and happy, at least fairly normal. She wasn’t clutching her stomach and wincing. She didn’t even
