“Dylan! I’m coming for you, Loopy!”
Too late. Chad burst out of Spanish class like a bull charging a matador. Dylan got a quick glimpse: his bonfire of red hair, his freckled face, his left cheek eternally bulging with a glob of gum. He had a little crimson fuzz on his lip, and word was that he sometimes even shaved his chin. As Chad passed, the crowds in the hall parted like a zipper unzipping, letting him roar by. Three of his crew, blowing bubbles as they ran, were right behind him.
“Game over, Loopy!” Chad bellowed. “That’s right, I said it!”
No way could Dylan outrun this jerk. But maybe there was another way.
He grabbed his skateboard out of his locker. He didn’t have the cash for a new board, so over the last few months he had built this himself from secondhand parts. He hoped all the work paid off now.
Dylan skated down the hall, weaving around students. A couple goons tried to grab him, but he slid right by them. The main door to the school was coming up, and Chad was closing fast, only two classrooms away. “I have you now!” he yowled.
“Fight! Fight! Fight!” the students all around started chanting.
“Get ready for the gas!” Chad reached out and managed to get a paw on Dylan’s ankle. Just then, Dylan heard a sound like a trumpet crossed with an elephant and something streaked out of nowhere and crashed into Chad’s legs. Dylan stumbled off his skateboard and kept running out the school’s front door; Chad lost his footing and went crashing to the floor along with whatever it was that had taken him out.
Eli had tripped up Chad. Anjali—who was also a Loopy but was weirder than most because she was always lugging around a French horn—had helped out by pushing Eli and his chair right in front of Dylan’s pursuer.
Chad, getting to his feet, turned angrily toward the pair, and Dylan kept running, too far ahead now to get caught.
“Keep going!” Eli shouted at Dylan. “What’s he gonna do, put me in a wheelchair?”
Should he stay? Should he go? Dylan glanced back over his shoulder at Chad, who was on a rampage, kicking Dylan’s abandoned black, gold, and green skateboard, tossing Eli’s laptop into a wall, and picking up Anjali’s French horn to slam it into the sidewalk. Anjali opened her mouth in a silent scream.
Dylan turned away from the school and kept running up Webster Avenue toward his house, as pea-colored clouds rolled across the late-afternoon sky.
Was he really a Game Changer?
Dylan was trying to get up the nerve to ask the Professor about Xamaica, and Emma was loving every moment of it. They were all in their cramped apartment sitting at the card table eating a dinner of burnt toast, burnt bacon, and this horrible lemonade made from powder the Professor bought in bulk. One sip tasted worse than sucking on a yellow marker. Two sips were as bad as eating yellow snow. Nobody made it to three.
“Gross!” Dylan grumbled, pushing his half-empty glass to the side. “You know, just because they sell it in bulk doesn’t mean we should drink it in bulk.”
“Forget that, ask her about the Game Changers!” Emma said.
“Shut up!” Dylan shot back.
At Dylan’s outburst, the tiny apartment, which was crammed with birdcages, suddenly came alive with the sounds of all the birds locked in them. The Professor taught avian studies at a small college and she regularly took her work home with her. Unfortunately, her work tended to squawk, chirp, and hoot round the clock.
The Professor sighed. “We talked about this,” she said to Dylan in the kind of calming voice that made everyone tense. “You’ve got to control yourself. You have to grow up.”
“Ask her about the thing,” Emma prodded Dylan. “You need parental permission.”
“Will you stop?” Dylan growled. “She’s not my parent and neither are you.”
“You don’t even remember Mom and Dad,” Emma huffed.
“I remember more than you,” Dylan countered, even though in truth he only had scattered memories of the accident, like tiny pieces of a puzzle, and not only did he not know how they fit together, some of them were missing.
The Professor, who had been reading Birdbaths of Ancient Rome: Volume Seven, slammed the book down on the card table, which nearly buckled under the weight. The glass of lemonade fell to the floor. Dylan and Emma stopped arguing, and even the birds shut up for a moment.
“Let’s not argue about your parents,” the Professor said. “Your father—my brother—wanted us all to be a family. And I know your mother would have wanted the same thing. She was a mysterious sort; there was something magic about her.”
“Why don’t you ever tell us stories about them?” Dylan asked.
“The tales can wait,” the Professor replied. “What’s all this about a game?”
“There’s this tournament,” Dylan explained. “I want to enter.”
“What kind of tournament? Chess?”
“Not exactly. It is a game—a video game.”
“A video game tournament?” She said the last three words the way you’d say Aliens on Mars? or Cats speaking Italian?
Emma, who was at the sink rinsing out the glass Dylan thought he just saw break, interrupted: “It’s tonight—tickets are mad expensive.”
“Will you shut up?” Dylan said. He turned to the Professor. “I never ask for anything. But I’m good at this game called Xamaica. So that’s why I want to go. I just need to borrow . . .”
“Xamaica? I’ve heard of this game. I know it inspires truancy—and perhaps worse.”
“But . . .”
“Enough,” the Professor gently commanded, and something about her tone let Dylan know it really was. She took off her horn-rimmed glasses, wiped them on her blouse, and put them back on a little smudgier than they were before. She resembled a bird in many ways: she had a beaklike nose, a spindly cranelike figure, and a voice like a squawk.
“I have some news,” the Professor announced after several moments. “And it’s time you both heard it.”
“What kind of news?” Dylan asked.
“You’ve both been strong for so many years. Dylan, I know you wear your ripped jeans and T-shirts because you know we can’t afford more. And Emma, I appreciate that you wear a uniform because it’s less expensive than sporting the latest fashions like the other girls. I’m grateful for your sacrifices. But this tournament is out of the question. We’re out of money and out of time. In fact, we have to move.”
“What? Why?” Emma and Dylan cried out together.
“My work is controversial and the college eliminated my department to save money.”
“What’s controversial about birds?” Dylan asked.
“I have been on the hunt for a rare species—the missing link between dinosaurs and birds. My colleagues say it’s a myth, that I’m crazy—and now I’ve been forced out.”
Dylan was surprised but not shocked. Social services had paid the apartment more than a few visits, saying that there were too many birds and not enough space. The neighbors were always complaining about the Professor’s constant bird-watching because they were totally creeped out when they