Ms. Bixby's Last Day: List 3

He knocks over a metal trash can, tipping it onto the middle of the sidewalk with a reverberating gong.

I hit the sidewalk hard, sprawled out, chin scraped, backpack catapulting up over my head.

I wince as Brand pokes at my ankle, gingerly peels down my sock.

I look back at the metal trash can lying impertinently in the middle of the sidewalk.

Maybe they are somebody else’s teeth. They can’t be yours, because your teeth are in Neverland. Or Toothtopia. Or outer space. Or wherever kleptomaniac fairies live.

Because sometimes it’s better to believe in the impossible. To believe you are a secret agent or a private detective or a superhero and not just a kid with freckled cheeks and gangly arms who is too clumsy to leap a tipped-over garbage can in a single bound.

I sit and wait on the bench and poke tentatively at my already swollen ankle.

Michelle’s formerly divine white-chocolate raspberry supreme cheesecake now looks like a giant, heaping turd of white and red Play-Doh mixed together.

I make it three hobbling steps before Steve is beside me, propping me up.

She ran through her gamut of card and coin tricks and even managed to pull a ribbon out of her mother’s nose.

She secreted him away in the hat’s trick bottom, complete with small holes for air and cushioned with extra black cloth so that he wouldn’t get jostled during the performance.

Now, with the crowd enthralled and her father videotaping, young Maggie Bixby pulled out her hat, quickly showed that there was nothing in it, and reached inside.

The young magician barely managed to save her furry assistant, throwing herself into the fray and grabbing him by his tail.

There was a good chance, with a lot more physical therapy and rehabilitation, that Abe Walker would get the use of his legs back.

Topher nods, conceding the point.

“Theologically speaking, billions of people currently believe in Jesus, and probably only a handful still worship Thor. Advantage Jesus.”

It was right after the accident. They stood on our front lawn and sang a song called “Rise Up!” I don’t think they were being ironic. They really thought he might do it.

The bus pulls up to the next stop and Steve starts to unzip his pack, shimmying the dilapidated box free.

I wasn’t sure what I needed, but I looked at the car with its heater and music both blasting and the mile of foot-high snow I still had to trudge through and figured a ride wouldn’t hurt.

The odds of surviving a snakebite from an inland taipan are one in a hundred thousand, unless you’re a herpetologist and carry antivenom in your back pocket.

Ms. Bixby was intrigued. She leaned forward in her reading chair, which I assumed was my cue to continue.

Assuming that you meet a new person every minute of your life from the day you are born—which is completely impossible, by the way—and assuming that you live to be, let’s say, eighty-five, which is generous, especially for boys, that means that you could conceivably meet...forty-four million, six hundred seventy-six thousand potential soul mates before you die.

The bus is only half full, plenty of space, but there is a chance—a statistically significant one—that George Nelson could come all the way to the back, sit down right across from us, right next to Brand.

But for all the adventures Topher and I have been on together—battling ninjas and pirates, defusing nuclear bombs and piloting renegade spaceships—we’ve never faced a real criminal before.

I sent him a note from Mindy Winkler asking if he would sit by her at lunch instead, but that backfired when Mindy had to get her braces tightened the next day and didn’t even bother to come to school, making Brand wonder who the note was from.

We are ninjas. That’s what Topher says as we get off the bus. Stealth and subterfuge.

Actually he says subtlety, but I think he means subterfuge. Though I suppose a ninja could be subtle too.

He says ninjas don’t talk about peeing either and that we should maintain mission silence from here on out, so I just follow the sidewalk, keeping one eye on our target and the other on Brand, waiting for just the right moment.

I run a little faster, thinking about the lumpy cheesecake still jouncing around in my backpack, getting lumpier, and what a terrible idea this is, running to confront a grown man—a criminal named after a cop killer, no less—in a deserted alleyway in the middle of downtown.

...I am going to die, right here, in this alley, without having even graduated from elementary school, and it’s strange, but my very first thought is who will come to my funeral, and will my sister even bother to wear black, and what will my father say about me. Probably something about not being able to realize my potential.
I don’t have time to imagine the rest of the eulogy, because at that moment, George Nelson turns and bolts toward the other end of the alleyway.

The two of them topple over and wrestle for a moment, limbs flailing, hands in faces, though Brand actually seems to have the advantage as George fights one-handed, the other one still holding his bag out of reach, protecting it like it’s the Holy Grail.

“Well, about three seconds ago, I was getting some awesome up-close video of you punching my friend. Except it’s not called punching, not when you’re doing it to a twelve-year-old kid unprovoked. What’s that called again?”

George holds out the paper bag that he’s been coddling.

“I mean, did you see the look on his face when I said I got it all on video? A grown man punching out a twelve-year-old kid, and with glasses no less. And then you did that spinning drop, like all in slow motion, keeyrunch, smloosh, thunk.” Topher pantomimes my misery with his hands.

“You mean you were bluffing?”

The three of us stare at the dead phone in my hand, as if waiting for it to spontaneously come back to life.

“He could have actually killed us,” Brand grunts, and for some inexplicable reason, this strikes me as funny.

I start to giggle. Topher looks at me and smiles, and then it catches, as it usually does between the two of us, and he starts to laugh—high-pitched and giddy.

Finally Brand sits up and takes the torn paper sack and pulls out the bottle of amber-brown liquid, holding it up to the sunlight. “Better than wine?” he says skeptically.

The best that I could come up with is this: There may not always be a plausible scientific explanation for why humans do what they do. Not everything can be plugged into an equation or reduced to the lowest common denominator.