Waylon! One Awesome Thing Read online

  “These are dogs in here!” Waylon cried, running down the row after Baxter. “Dumpster Eddy is a dog!”

  Baxter was crouched at the last cage, hugging a scruffy brown dog through the bars. Dumpster Eddy wasn’t just any dog, Waylon could see. He was a great dog. He had one black eye patch and his lips curled up in a lopsided dog-grin. He was not too small, not too big, not too fluffy, not too slobbery. He was a perfect dog. YES! Waylon would say if he were playing Want This Dog? for real, YES! I DO!

  When Dumpster Eddy saw Waylon, he started jumping straight up and down on his stick-skinny legs and yipping his head off, as if he were playing Want This Boy? and answering YES! I DO!

  Baxter pulled the chicken patty out of his pocket and fed it to Eddy bite by bite. Then he stood up. “Nobody claimed him. The police only keep them here for ten days—he’s going to the shelter Saturday. He’s not exactly the kind of dog people want. Kind of patchy. Plus, anyone could see he’s a runner. No one’s going to adopt him, so…” Baxter made a slicing motion at his neck, and Waylon shuddered.

  Eddy watched as if he knew exactly what Baxter meant.

  “I’d take him, but our apartment is No Pets.” Baxter looked hopefully at Waylon.

  Waylon felt a lump of longing grow in his throat as he shook his head. “My mom’s allergic.”

  He knelt and stroked Eddy’s ears. Eddy locked his gaze on Waylon’s. And suddenly there were no bars between them. There was no boy skin; there was no dog fur. Waylon and Dumpster Eddy grokked each other’s souls in that steady look of Eddy’s.

  Get me out of here, that look said. Set me free.

  That look stabbed Waylon right through the heart. He hadn’t read about anything like this sensation in The Science of Being Human. But Baxter was apparently feeling it too. Tears bulged in his eyes.

  Waylon stood up. “Everybody cries,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Well, did you know that if we were in space, at zero gravity, our tears would just pop out and go floating around?”

  Baxter laughed and wiped his face. “No. That would be crazy,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” And then Waylon simply stood beside Baxter, grokking the freedom-hungering dog-ness of Eddy.

  “I could pick the lock to get in here, no problem,” Baxter said at last, his voice low. “Then I could set him free through the back door. But there’s always somebody at the dispatcher’s desk.” Baxter and Waylon looked back down the hall, and sure enough, the dispatcher waved.

  “I need something else. Something science-y. Like gravity…you got any gravity stuff that would help?”

  Waylon thought hard. “No. No gravity stuff. Teleportation would be ideal, but…I haven’t quite perfected it yet.”

  “So that’s it? The scienciest guy in school, and you don’t have anything?”

  Waylon tugged up tufts of his hair, over and over, until he figured he probably looked like he had spines.

  Spines. And then he knew.

  “The three-spined stickleback will pretend to be eating something delicious on the ocean floor to keep predators away from its nest. Shore birds fake a hurt wing.” Waylon’s voice rose with excitement. “A squid will drop one of its own arms and leave it glowing.”

  “So…?” Baxter asked.

  “So, distraction displays. They work. You need one.”

  “You think I should cause a distraction at the same time I’m picking a lock and letting Eddy out? That’s your brilliant idea?”

  Waylon gave Dumpster Eddy a final head scratch. Then he turned to Baxter. “No. My brilliant idea is: You’ll pick the lock and let Eddy out. Your accomplice will cause the distraction.” He stuck out his hand to shake.

  And Baxter took it.

  The instant the bell rang for Friday recess, Waylon and Baxter shot out of their seats and grabbed up markers and paper. The Shark-Punchers and the Others were still trudging out to their corners of the playground when Waylon and Baxter burst past them to the play structure in the middle. They flopped down with their heads together. Waylon began a diagram of the police lobby, and Baxter started sketching the cages.

  A few minutes later, a shadow fell over Waylon’s paper. He looked up. He hadn’t heard them gathering, but bunches of kids now ringed the play structure. More boys from both teams were heading over, along with some girls, too.

  Charlie bellied down the slide. “What are you guys doing?”

  “Yeah,” a chorus of other curious voices repeated. “What are you guys doing?”

  Waylon and Baxter ignored them and got back to work. Recess was short, and Dumpster Eddy had only hours left to live. “Behind the cells there’s a door to an alley,” Baxter said. “That’s where I’ll take him.”

  Rasheed and Joe climbed the monkey bars and dangled down. “Are those jail cells?” Rasheed asked.

  “With dogs in them?” Joe demanded.

  Baxter and Waylon ignored them, too. Dumpster Eddy needed their whole attention. Baxter pulled an old padlock and a bobby pin from his pocket and began practicing. Waylon wrote POSSIBLE DISTRACTIONS on a fresh sheet of paper.

  Baxter glanced over and tapped the paper. “So, which distraction are you going to use? Pretending to eat off the ground? Faking a broken arm, like a bird?”

  “No. None of those.” Waylon tugged his hair, thinking hard.

  Marco dropped down next to Waylon then. “Food is a great distraction,” he said. “But don’t eat off the ground.”

  Maria poked her head in between them. “I’m good at faking stuff. I could fake a broken arm, no problem.”

  Waylon ignored Marco and Maria, too.

  Just then, Baxter’s padlock sprang open with a joyful snap. “Yes!” he and Waylon cried at the same time, and then fist-bumped each other. And as Waylon’s knuckles knocked Baxter’s, it occurred to him: just a few days earlier, he’d been worried that Arlo Brody might see him with Baxter.

  It seemed so long ago. A dog’s life ago. It seemed ridiculous now.

  He looked over to the Shark-Punchers’ headquarters. There stood Arlo, watching. Alone. Waylon had never seen him alone before. Waylon’s hand rose, although he hadn’t told it to. It waved to Arlo. Arlo smiled and started over.

  Waylon looked at his hand. He didn’t know why it had waved. Alien Hand Syndrome—he might actually have it. But right now, Waylon couldn’t even get excited about this possibility—he and Baxter were planning a life-or-death escape plot, and it was hard to care about anything else.

  Baxter nudged Waylon then. “Remember, this is a police station. Cops have seen everything. You need to bust some kind of flashy moves to distract these people.”

  Arlo crouched down in front of them. “What people?” he asked. “Why do you want to distract them?”

  Waylon didn’t answer. There would probably be a price to pay for ignoring Arlo—King Arlo had probably never been ignored before—but Waylon didn’t care about that, either.

  Because suddenly he could see Dumpster Eddy’s face as though it was right in front of him. Eddy’s brown eyes were begging for freedom. “Don’t worry,” Waylon vowed to Baxter. “I’ll figure something out.”

  “Something epic,” Baxter said.

  “Epic,” Waylon agreed. “You just handle the getaway.”

  For the next ten minutes, he and Baxter plotted timelines, finished maps, and brainstormed strategy while the other kids watched.

  “The distraction has to be something really wild,” Baxter urged.

  Waylon tugged up more tufts. Recess was almost over. And then he grinned. “Or not!” He scribbled LIVING STATUE under EPIC STRATEGY.

  “Living statue?” Baxter asked. “Living statue?”

  Just then the bell rang. Waylon and Baxter scrambled to their feet. Waylon threw his arm around Baxter’s shoulders. “Trust me,” he said. “It’s going to be awesome!”

  “There’s a bus stop a block east of the police station,” Baxter called as they ran to line up. “We meet there at ten
fifteen tomorrow.”

  Waylon got to the bus stop early. He pulled on the Ben Franklin costume and cinched it as tight he could. “How do I look?” he asked when Baxter showed up.

  Baxter studied him for a minute. “Like Ben Franklin’s kid dressing up in his father’s clothes,” he said at last.

  “Fine.” Waylon took a marker and added JR. to the BEN FRANKLIN sign on the box, then handed Baxter the marble-gray makeup.

  When his face and hands were painted, he put on the spectacles. Waylon was happy to find that his dad had only smeared them thinly with paint. They looked like stone from the outside, but he could see through them perfectly well.

  Just then, a car pulled up to the curb. Marco got out, carrying a big tray. “Wow, you look really…gray,” he told Waylon.

  “Good,” Waylon said. “What are you doing here?”

  Marco lifted the edge of the tin foil. “Tamales. Food is a great distraction.”

  “Distraction? You’re going to help us?” Baxter asked.

  Waylon leaned over and sniffed. He was distracted already. Before he could thank Marco, Rasheed and Charlie appeared on their skateboards. Rasheed wore a sign around his neck that read HUMAN CALCULATOR—TEST ME!

  “I’ve memorized ninety-six knock-knock jokes,” Charlie said. “That’ll keep someone occupied for at least fifteen minutes.”

  Maria skidded up on her bike next. She grabbed her arm and groaned. “The hurt wing fake-out,” she explained. “If it’s good enough for birds, it’s good enough for me.”

  And then around the corner came Buddy, dragging Joe by the leash. “If there’s any get-away barking,” Joe promised when he caught his breath, “Buddy will take the fall.”

  “Thanks,” Waylon said. “And, hey…you look taller.”

  “My dad burned waffles this morning.” Joe beamed and pointed to his shoes. “They’re a little scratchy, but they’re giving me half an inch.”

  The police staff was pretty surprised that a bunch of kids had taken them up on their offer to visit any time. Except the dispatcher. She just sat at her desk looking bored.

  While the other kids spread out over the lobby, Baxter positioned himself near the padlocked door. Waylon dropped his box directly opposite.

  Just then, the lobby doors opened and Arlo Brody came racing in, carrying a soccer ball. He ran over to Waylon. “I can dribble continuously while reciting all fifty state capitals. Would that be okay?”

  For a moment, Waylon was speechless. Arlo Brody was looking at him as if it would be an incredible honor to do this thing for him. “That would be cool,” Waylon finally answered. “Thanks, Arlo.” And then he climbed onto his marble gray–painted box and struck his pose.

  It turned out Baxter was wrong about the police—you really didn’t have to put on much of a show to get their attention. Which made sense when Waylon thought about it—and standing perfectly still on his box gave him plenty of time to think about it. If your normal police station is full of robbers and drunks and people acting crazy because of the full moon, why wouldn’t eight kids doing regular things seem pretty bizarre?

  In just a few minutes, the lobby was filled with blue uniforms visiting the distractions. Police officers swiped tamale after tamale off Marco’s tray as if they hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks, they laughed at Charlie’s knock-knock jokes, and they wandered around Waylon, admiring him doing nothing.

  Two officers assured Maria her arm was fine but wrapped it in a sling anyway. For good measure, they bandaged her head and took her blood pressure.

  The police chief challenged Rasheed to a multiplication duel and lost every round. “Gambling is illegal, son,” he reminded Rasheed. “Otherwise, you’d have made a fortune.”

  Only Arlo Brody stood alone. As a distraction display, he turned out to be kind of a dud. But whenever he smiled, a predictable thing happened: the police officers smiled back as though they had been hypnotized. And that, Waylon had to admit, couldn’t hurt.

  Unfortunately, though, none of the distractions distracted the one person who needed to be distracted. The dispatcher kept working at her desk, only flicking her eyes over the scene from time to time.

  What would it take to catch her attention?

  Waylon’s legs started to tremble. But every time he thought about breaking his pose, he remembered grokking with Dumpster Eddy, and he locked his knees solidly in place again.

  Through the paint-smeared spectacles, Waylon saw Baxter take the tiniest step backward. And then he remembered: the trick to being a living statue wasn’t holding still, it was moving! The next time the dispatcher flicked her eyes over him, Waylon twitched his nose.

  She startled. She shook her head.

  Waylon held perfectly still as she studied him, then he dipped a quick bow.

  The dispatcher raised her eyebrows. Then she locked her drawer, got up, and perched on the side of her desk. With her back to the big steel door.

  Baxter dropped to his knees at the lock.

  Waylon held steady another full minute. Then he tipped his head and winked at the dispatcher over his glasses, his father’s best trick.

  The dispatcher threw back her head and laughed.

  And when Waylon checked again, Baxter was gone!

  Five minutes to set Eddy free and another ten for him to get safely away—that was the plan. Fifteen more minutes of holding still was a long time.

  The trick is to go inside yourself, his father often said. Waylon hadn’t understood before, but now he did. He set his gaze on the ceiling and went so deep inside himself that there in the middle of the crowded police station lobby, he heard his living sounds again.

  As before, every once in a while there was a little skip. This time, though, Waylon was thankful he wasn’t teleporting anywhere. Because there was no place in the universe he would rather be than right here, playing a part in Operation Free Eddy, with so many of his friends around him.

  And then, from the corner of his eye, he caught a brown streak flashing past the lobby doors. Waylon kept his face perfectly rigid, but inside, he grinned and whooped. The streak had zoomed by too quickly for him to have identified it, and yet somehow he had: a scruffy little dog with a lopsided grin, his ears flapping free in the wind, his stick-skinny legs just a blur.

  Waylon relocked his muscles. The last ten minutes were the hardest, his father always said. Your stomach does you in—you’re always starving the last ten minutes. And sure enough, his stomach was suddenly a hollow crater.

  Rosie’s Bakery was a block away, but he could swear he smelled cupcakes—chocolate with marshmallow frosting, three dollars each. Minute after agonizing minute, his legs ached and his mouth watered.

  Just when he couldn’t take it a second longer, Baxter Boylen sauntered in through the front doors and flashed victory fingers.

  Waylon jumped down from the box, the other kids dropped what they were doing, and the entire police staff erupted in applause.

  It took a while to get out, because the police officers all wanted to say “Thanks for stopping by,” and “Don’t forget to stay safe.” When Waylon finally gathered up his stuff, he was surprised to see that his hat was stuffed with tips. Twenty-four dollars and thirty-five cents!

  Waylon led the kids down the street.

  “Eight, please,” he told Rosie, handing her all the bills. “Chocolate with marshmallow frosting.”

  As he dropped the change into the tip jar, he heard a scratching at the window.

  Galaxy. Waylon recognized the hungry look on his face—Waylon had drooled at this same window with those same sad eyes the past seven weeks. Chocolate wasn’t good for dogs, but Rosie’s had plenty of non-chocolate things, too. He dug in his pockets. Nothing.

  And Rosie read his mind.

  She lifted a giant peanut-butter cookie from the case, bent down, and dropped it gently onto the floor. “What a shame,” she said, picking it up. “Now I can’t sell it.” She put it in a bag and handed it to Waylon with a wink.

&nbs
p; Outside, Waylon led the way across the street to the park.

  Galaxy gulped his cookie in a single bite. Everyone else sprawled on the grass, licking frosting slowly and reliving the rescue.

  “We were so cool,” Arlo said. “Hey, I know! We should form a team!”

  Waylon shot Arlo a glare—not as sizzling as Neon’s, but plenty hot. So did Baxter and Joe and Charlie and Rasheed and Maria and Marco.

  Arlo threw up his hands. “All on one team. I meant to say that!”

  Baxter leaned back on his elbows. “Eddy took off like a shot. I wish I knew where he went.”

  “I saw a dog hanging out at the ice cream stand this summer,” Charlie said. “He followed the littlest kids around, lapping up their spills. Maybe Eddy’s there.”

  Rasheed pointed to the pond. “I hope he’s chasing ducks. Ducks honk when you chase them.”

  “Or napping in the sun,” Joe said. “Buddy loves to nap in the sun.”

  Buddy cocked his head at his name. He stretched and then settled down in front of Waylon. Waylon scratched his neck while the others went on imagining the things Eddy might be doing.

  Waylon liked picturing them all. But when he closed his eyes he saw something else. He saw Dumpster Eddy running, his ears flapping free in the wind and his stick-skinny legs just a blur.

  After dinner, Waylon sat on his bed with his journal. Maybe Operation Free Eddy wasn’t a scientific achievement, but it was part of his life’s work. It deserved to be recorded for history.

  As he closed the cover, he heard a knock.

  “Play OAT,” Neon said from the doorway.

  Waylon crossed his arms and lay back. There had been a lot of awesome things in the day. But one, of course, was best. “Dumpster Eddy is free.”

  “And you and this Baxter—are you friends now?”

  “I don’t know. We’re not not-friends anyway. Actually, the whole class is not not-friends again now.”