“You’re hilarious.”
“Chuckles is a noble leader of covert operations for the G.I. Joe team,” Max said. “You should be proud.”
Eric snickered. “And you should stop playing with dolls.”
“They’re not—”
There was a pause. Eric hoped he wouldn’t have to hear the lecture again, the one about eBay and nostalgia items and untapped gold mines. The one that comprehensively—just not convincingly—explained why Max had a pristine collection of Pokémon Beanie Babies on his top closet shelf.
“Never mind. Suffice it to say, that’s why you don’t get to pick your own code name,” Max said. “You don’t have the proper respect. Consider this your punishment. Chuckles.”
Eric scrambled over the edge and, with a thin sigh, planted his feet on the rooftop. Schwarz had already hurried over to the opposite edge, to get started on Phase Three. “So what’d Schwarz do to deserve Grunt?” Eric whispered.
“That’s not a punishment. That’s a description. Ever catch him with one of those vintage Playboys he loves so much?”
Eric made an exaggerated retching noise and flicked off the sound. Now if only, he thought, staring at Schwarz and wincing as he pictured what he desperately didn’t want to picture, he could shut off his brain.
Max was the one who finally explained it to me.
“Hacks. Not pranks. Never pranks. Pranks are for idiots.” He had his back to me. I’d interrupted him in pursuit of his other passion, hawking eighties nostalgia crap on eBay. That afternoon he was downloading photos of his latest acquisitions, a full collection of My Little Ponies, complete with Show Stable and Dream Castle. He’d pieced it together for a total of twenty-seven dollars, and planned to resell it for at least three hundred. Just another day at the computer for Max, who believed that if you didn’t clear at least a five hundred percent profit on any given transaction, you just weren’t trying.
“Pranks are for amateurs. Live-action jokes with a total lack of sophistication and purpose. Not to mention sobriety.” Warming to the lecture, he spun around to face me, skidding across the hardwood floor toward the couch. It was crimson-colored, like everything else in the Kim family’s house. I sprawled across it, my feet up on the side, shoes off, to keep Dr. Kim from having a heart attack on discovering I had scuffed his fine Italian leather. Max warned me that my socks would get Maxwell Sr.’s forehead vein pumping just as quickly.
They were a deep, rich, dark, true blue. A crayon blue. An M&M’s blue.
A Yale blue.
So I took my socks off too.
“Prankers have no vision,” Max complained. “Saran Wrap on the toilet, cows in the lobby, dry ice in the pool, chickens in the gym… .” He rolled his eyes. “So what? What’s the point? Gives us all a bad name. Even a good prank—even the best prank—is just funny. And then that’s it. Over. Forgotten. But a hack… you’re playing in a different league. Higher profile. Higher stakes. Higher calling.” His eyes glowed. I’d seen the look before, but only when he was talking about money. Always when he was talking about money.
“TP cubed,” he said. “Target, planning, precision, and purpose.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “That’s what we have, and they don’t. Worthy targets, long-term planning, technically sophisticated and precise execution—and a noble purpose. You want to make a statement, stand up for the right side. You want to take someone down who really deserves it.”
“And you want to be funny,” I added.
He glared at me like I’d just set fire to his My Little Ponies. “Funny’s beside the point. In 1961, the Cal Tech Fiendish Fourteen got sick of the annual invasion of Pasadena by football-crazed morons. So they hacked the Rose Bowl halftime flip-card show. They fooled two thousand University of Washington students into flipping over cards that combined to spell out CALTECH. There were more than ninety thousand people in that stadium. Millions more watching live on TV. You think they were going for funny?” His face twisted on the word. “It wasn’t about making people laugh. It was about achieving greatness.”
“Where’s the higher purpose in screwing up a halftime show?”
Max sighed, then turned back to his computer. “Forget it. Maybe it’s a guy thing.”
I glanced toward the stack of My Little Ponies.
He was lucky I didn’t have a match.
It took longer than expected, but by two a.m., Phase Three was completed.
Max stepped back, spread his arms wide, and gave the rooftop assemblage a nod of approval. “A masterpiece, boys. We’ve doneit again.”
Five rows of small desks and chairs faced an imposing, kitchen table–size desk and padded black office chair. Behind it stood one blackboard, complete with wooden pointer and blue chalk. Corny motivational posters hung from invisible walls—rows of fishing line strung at eye level. And, hanging above them, the pièce de résistance: one oversize, battery-powered clock, so that when Dr. Richard Ambruster, the desperate-for-retirement history teacher and current tenant of the now empty room 131, eventually found his classroom, precisely re-created on the Wadsworth High roof, he would be able to calculate his tardiness down to the second.
In his twenty-two years of teaching high school, Richard Ambruster had found only one thing in which to take any joy: giving detentions. Speak out of turn? Detention. Request an extension? Detention. Miss a homework? Detention. Refer to him as “Mr.” rather than “Dr.”? Two detentions.
But the crown jewel in his collection of detention-worthy offenses was tardiness. Thirty minutes or thirty seconds late, it didn’t matter. Excuses, even doctor-certified ones, carried no weight with him. “My time is valuable,” he would tell the unlucky latecomer in his haughty Boston Brahman accent. “And your time, thus, is mine.” Cue the pink slip.
Two days before, a bewildered freshman, still learning her way around the hallowed labyrinthine halls, had foolishly asked an upperclassman for directions to room 131. She’d ended up in the second-floor boys’ bathroom. Ten minutes later she’d slipped into history class, face red, lower lip trembling, sweat stains spreading under either arm. She hadn’t gotten two words out before Ambruster had ripped into her, threatening to throw her out of his room—out of the school—for her blatant disregard for him, his class, his time, his wisdom, and the strictures of civil society. As she burst into tears, he shoved the pink slip in her face and turned away.
And for this, Eric had decided, Dr. Evil needed to pay.
The freshman was blond, with an Angelina Jolie pout… and eyes that seemed to promise misty gratitude—so Max was in.
Schwarz didn’t get a vote, and didn’t need one. He just came along for the ride.
In the morning, Ambruster’s howl of rage would echo through the halls of Wadsworth High School, and Eric would allow himself a small, proud smile, even though no one would ever discover the truth about who was responsible. In the morning, Max would try to scoop up his willing freshman and claim his reward, only to get shot down yet again. In the morning, Schwarz would wake up in his Harvard dorm room, which, two weeks into freshman year, still felt like a strange, half-empty cell, and wish it was still the middle of the night and he was still up on the roof with his best friends. Because that was the moment that counted. Not the morning after, not the consequences, not the motives, but the act itself. The challenge. The hack.