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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 Zing!onomatopoeia (n) when a word sounds like the object it names or the sound that object makes; for example: sizzle, hiccup, gurgleIf Evan had known what would be hidden in his shoebox later that day, he might not have minded decorating it so much. But for now, he stared at the box in disgust. He hated projects like this. Cutting projects, gluing projects. Projects with scissors and paper and markers and tape. Why did he have to decorate the shoebox anyway? "Can I have that?" asked Jessie on her way back to her desk group. She pointed at the ruler on Evan’s desk. In her hand, she held her box. All four sides and the top of the box were covered in red construction paper, and the slot on top was outlined with a perfectly measured crinkle-cut rectangle of white paper. "Why? Aren’t you done?" asked Evan. "No!" said Jessie. "I made spirals for the sides and flowers and hearts for the top." Evan looked over at her desk, which was in the group next to his. Lined up in neat rows were four perfect paper spirals, four curly paper rosettes, and twenty identical paper hearts. Jessie’s decorations were so precise, they looked like they came from a factory. It was at times like this that Evan wished his little sister wasn’t in the same fourth-grade class with him. Jessie was good at math and writing and science and just about everything that counted in school. She had even skipped the third grade. Why did she have to be so smart? Evan slumped a little in his seat. "Go ahead, take it." Jessie reached for the ruler, then said, "That’s sloppy. You should cut the paper so it’s even. You want me to do it?" "No, I don’t want your help, Miss Perfect." Jessie shrugged. "Suit yourself." Then she went back to her seat. "What are you going to put on your box?" asked Megan, who was returning to her desk on the other side of the room after showing her box to their teacher, Mrs. Overton. Her long ponytail swung from side to side as she walked up to his desk. Evan felt his face go hot. It was bad enough that his shoebox looked like nothing—now Megan Moriarty had to go and notice it. "I don’t know," he said. "I don’t like flowers and hearts and things." "Me neither," said Megan. "I put pictures of cats all over mine. See? This one looks like Langston!" Megan pointed to a picture on her box that looked almost exactly like Mrs. Overton’s cat. Langston was a twenty-one-year-old gray Persian who was seriously overweight. There were laminated pictures of him posted all over the classroom, with speech bubbles coming out of his mouth saying cool cats read; numerator on top, denominator on bottom; and a simple machine is a mechanical device that applies a force, such as a plane, a wedge, or a lever. In every picture, Langston looked like he’d just coughed up a hairball. Evan’s favorite was the one posted right above the daily homework assignment. In giant black letters it said bleh! "There are some sports magazines in the Re-use It bin," said Megan. "You want to see if there are any pictures of basketball players?" "No. Well. I guess," said Evan, embarrassed that he was tongue-tied. When Megan and Evan were in the same desk group, neither one of them could get any work done. Mrs. Overton had called it a lovely problem, and Evan was both disappointed and relieved when she’d changed the seating arrangements. Whenever he talked to Megan, he got a strange spinning feeling in his stomach, and it was getting worse every day. It was just like the time two winters ago when he and his mother hit a patch of black ice in their old Subaru. The car spun around three hundred sixty degrees before smashing into a guardrail. No one was hurt, and even the car was okay once it had been repaired, but Evan would never forget that feeling of spinning and spinning completely out of control, waiting for the smash. Being around Megan felt like that. Evan walked o
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