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  For Charlie and Pete

  PROLOGUE

  A HERO ALWAYS SAVES THE DAY

  Although he was six foot five and super muscular, Bruce Paxton moved unnoticed through the shadows outside the high-security lab. For one thing, no one was around to notice him. Also, it was nighttime.

  Paxton, who was on a mission of totally dire importance, crept alongside the back wall of the concrete building. His luchador mask, which always covered his face, was barely visible in the darkness.

  “This is kind of scary, right?” I whispered to my dad, whose face was also barely visible in the darkness of the movie theater in Florida where we were watching Tito the Bonecrusher’s newest movie, Steel Cage 2: Back in the Cage. Tito is a former pro wrestler who is famous as the highest-paid action star to never be unmasked. Steel Cage 2 was the long-awaited sequel to Steel Cage, in which Tito had first played former wrestler Bruce Paxton and launched his career as an action-movie superstar.

  Dad’s eyes stayed on the screen, but he nodded.

  “I think this is scarier than Steel Cage,” I added. I had to turn my whole head every time I wanted to say something to Dad. I was wearing the Tito mask that Dad had gotten me for my tenth birthday, and it didn’t exactly fit anymore, so I couldn’t see out of the corners of my eyes. But that was okay, because the mask still looked amazing.

  “Shhh,” my sister, Louisa, hissed on the other side of me.

  “You shhh,” I replied.

  I turned my attention back to the screen, where Bruce Paxton had stopped moving. He eyed a nearby bush that was making a loud rustling sound. Someone else was out there.

  Bruce Paxton knew better than to make the first move. He waited for whoever was in the bushes to reveal himself.

  I held my breath.

  A bunny hopped out of the bush and away into the night.

  “Whew,” I said.

  “Would. You. Shut. Up. Oliver,” Louisa murmured.

  Dad patted my hand.

  Bruce Paxton reached a door marked DELIVERIES ONLY.

  He punched in an access code on the keypad. It beeped once. Then the DELIVERIES ONLY door whisked open to show a large, dimly lit concrete space.

  Paxton stepped inside. “Hello?” he called into the emptiness.

  No answer.

  Paxton began to cross the dark room. Suddenly, the lights came on, and out of nowhere a MAN appeared in front of him.

  “Ahhhhh!” I hollered.

  I could feel my dad jump about six inches out of his seat beside me.

  “He startled me,” I whispered.

  “Obviously,” my dad whispered back.

  Louisa sighed almost louder than I had yelled, and she got up and moved to the end of the row.

  “Hey, masked man,” said the guy who’d just shown up out of nowhere. He was wearing a lab coat with DR. CEREBRO, HEAD SCIENTIST embroidered on it, but we all recognized the actor as John Rancid, the United Wrestling Entertainment (UWE) wrestler who’d stolen the U.S. Champion belt two years ago, because he’s one of the biggest jerks in wrestling. “You’re in the wrong place. This is an important laboratory for scientific geniuses.”

  Paxton pretended to be confused. “Isn’t this the delivery entrance?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Cerebro growled. “Only we aren’t expecting any deliveries at this hour.”

  “Oh yeah? Were you expecting this?” Paxton asked.

  “Expecting what?” Cerebro said.

  “This,” Paxton replied as he jumped onto a stack of boxes.

  Before Cerebro knew what was happening, Bruce Paxton did a springboard moonsault off the stack of boxes and landed on Cerebro.

  Everyone in the theater cheered.

  But that was just the beginning of the action. Cerebro had fallen into a huge pile of packing material, so he was completely unharmed. He got up and began wrestling Bruce Paxton for real. They went to the top of the boxes about ten times, knocking each other down and getting back up over and over again.

  It was amazing.

  “You’re a cuss-word fool,” Cerebro growled when Paxton had him pinned to the floor for good.

  (If my parents ever hear me saying a real cuss word, I’m never allowed to watch a Tito the Bonecrusher movie again, so when I quote dialogue with cuss words I just say cuss word.)

  “I’m a fool who’s going to rescue someone from this fancy lab of yours,” Paxton replied.

  “Oh, really? You think you can come in here and rescue a person like some kinda cuss-word hero?” Cerebro continued as Paxton started tying his wrists together with shipping tape. “My security team will catch you. You aren’t going to save the day.”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, Dr. Genius, it’s not daytime,” Paxton said. He finished with the shipping tape and stood up. “Maybe I’m not a scientist, but I’m Bruce Paxton,” he proclaimed. “And Bruce Paxton always saves the day—even when it’s night.”

  We all clapped.

  * * *

  The rest of the movie was just as great, and when it was over we got dessert at this place we had never been to before on any of our visits with Dad in Florida. It was called AW, SWEET!, and it had something called the Li’l Sugar Bar, which was this buffet of mini cupcakes, teeny-tiny pies, and other shrunken versions of desserts. You could put as much as you wanted on your plate, and they charged you by the weight.

  “It’s too bad they don’t have an AW, SWEET! in Virginia,” I said after we sat down with our desserts.

  “See how you feel after you eat what’s on your plate, Spaghetti-O,” Dad said, laughing. Dad gave me the nickname Spaghetti-O because when I was little, I thought all the Spaghetti-Os were Os for Oliver. I used to feel sorry for Louisa that there were no Spaghetti-Ls.

  Dad turned to Louisa, who never cared that there were no Spaghetti-Ls. “I know it’s almost six months away, but do you know where you want to celebrate after your graduation?” he asked her.

  “Not a steakhouse,” Louisa said.

  Dad had moved to Florida from Virginia (where Louisa and I live with our mom) to help open some new steakhouses owned by this famous restaurant guy Walker Stewart. But Dad wasn’t working for the steakhouse chain anymore, because Walker Stewart turned out to be a total jerk.

  “Definitely not a steakhouse,” Dad said with a half smile.

  “Maybe O’Connell’s,” Louisa said. “I don’t know. I can’t really think about graduation and dinner at the same time.”

  Louisa was going to graduate in June from Haselton High School and had to give a speech at the graduation ceremony because she was going to be valedictorian, which is the person with the best grades in the whole senior class. Or maybe salutatorian, if she came in second. It was pretty close between her and this girl Mitzy Calhoun for the top spot, and they wouldn’t know until the spring. But either way, she’d be giving a speech, and Dad was super-duper proud of her and told everyone about it, even s
trangers.

  “Do you want me to holler ‘That’s my daughter!’ at the beginning or the end of the speech?” Dad joked.

  I thought Louisa would be embarrassed, but she looked worried. “You’ll be there, right?” she said.

  “Of course,” Dad said.

  “Why wouldn’t he be there?” I asked.

  Louisa looked at me like my brain was empty.

  “I’ll be there,” Dad said to Louisa.

  I realized Louisa was thinking about the legal stuff. There was some issue with Mr. Stewart and a bunch of tax paperwork that the government thought Mr. Stewart had lied about. Dad couldn’t leave Florida until it was all sorted out. He had to get a lawyer and go to court and everything.

  “Are you sure?” Louisa said.

  Dad nodded and kind of waved his hand like Don’t worry about it. “Everything is going to be fine,” he said.

  “Do you promise?” Louisa pressed him.

  Dad paused. He looked at me and then back at Louisa. He took her hand. “I promise,” he said.

  “He said he’s coming, Louisa,” I said. “Relax.”

  Louisa was always so worked up about stuff that was no big deal. Dad hadn’t done anything wrong, so as soon as he got a chance to explain that in court, he’d be able to leave Florida. He had told us it was almost figured out, and the graduation was still months away. I didn’t know why Louisa was making things awkward. I focused on eating my micro-doughnuts without getting powdered sugar on my Tito mask. Dad had said it: Everything was going to be fine.

  1

  EVERYTHING WAS NOT GOING TO BE FINE

  Around two months before Louisa’s graduation, I found out that everything was not going to be fine.

  It was late afternoon on a regular weekday. I was doing homework with my best friend, Brain, at her house after school. We were in the same fifth-grade class at this private school called Haselton Academy that Brain’s been going to since kindergarten, but where I just started this year. Anyway, we were about to do our science assignment when I realized I’d left my workbook at home.

  Brain lives three houses down from me. I used to live all the way across town before my mom married my stepdad, Carl, and we all moved in with him. Moving three houses down from Brain has been convenient for lots of reasons, including that it takes about two minutes to run home and back if I forget something.

  So I ran home and up the stairs to get my science workbook from my room, figuring it wouldn’t take long at all. But as I was digging around in a pile of stuff next to my desk, I heard a weird noise. It sounded like someone was laughing in the walls.

  At first I thought maybe it was a ghost, and I started wondering if anyone had ever died under suspicious circumstances in Carl’s house, like way back in the 1970s or something, before he even moved in.

  Then it occurred to me that the sound was probably coming from Louisa’s room, which didn’t make sense, since she was supposed to be at her part-time job.

  I went to investigate.

  I got to Louisa’s doorway and saw that she was facedown on her bed, laughing into her pillow, making noises like huh, huh, huhhhh. I had no idea what she was laughing at, but just the sound of it was funny to me. So I started laughing, too.

  That made Louisa sit up and whip her head around toward the door, and that’s when I saw that her face was all blotchy and her eyes were puffy and she wasn’t actually laughing. She was crying. Hard.

  But before I could say sorry for laughing and ask her what was wrong, her face twisted into something completely angry. She leapt off the bed and yelled, “GET OUT OF HERE!”

  I took a step back when she was roaring at me, so I managed to be out of the way when she slammed the door in my face.

  I didn’t react at first, really. I stood there for a few seconds. Then I heard my mom calling to me.

  “Oliver? Can you come here?”

  I hurried down the stairs. Mom was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.

  “I didn’t do anything to Louisa,” I started to explain. “I thought she was at work. She just started yelling at me—”

  “Let’s sit down,” she said, and she took my hand and led me over to the couch. “Your father…,” she began. Then her face got all red, which meant she was trying not to cry. Mom is super, super white, so when she’s trying not to cry, she looks sunburned. I wasn’t too worried yet, because a lot of things make Mom cry. “Your father appeared before the judge today, and he entered a plea bargain.”

  “Okay,” I said. That just sounded like more of the courtroom stuff we’d been hearing about for a while.

  “Do you know what that means, Oliver?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t know, really, but I didn’t feel like hearing my mom describe the boring details. Plus there was something else about Mom’s face that was making me nervous.

  Mom grabbed both my hands and looked at me. “Your father has to serve a two-year sentence.”

  If someone had said that in a Tito movie, I would have understood what it meant. It meant that the character had to go to jail. But hearing my mom say it, it was like the words didn’t go together. I was thinking of sentence like a group of words, and serve like serve food at a restaurant. I was thinking, How can someone serve a sentence? And I couldn’t make sense of it. So I just sat there looking at her.

  “Because the case was in Florida,” Mom said, “he will be in a federal correctional center there.”

  “What’s a correctional center?” I asked.

  “It’s … it’s a prison,” Mom said.

  Now my brain was telling me that the thing I was hearing was not right.

  “Dad’s not going to prison,” I said. “He’s coming here to visit us in two months.”

  Mom shook her head.

  “Yes,” I insisted. “He’s going to be at Louisa’s graduation. He promised her.”

  “No, honey,” Mom said, her eyes wobbly. “He’s not. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and has to serve two years. So he can’t come back. Not yet, anyway.”

  I stared at her, and something in my bones started to itch.

  “You and Louisa can still go to visit him,” she said, squeezing my hands.

  “Who will pick us up from the airport?” I asked.

  Mom looked surprised. I guess she hadn’t thought the first question I’d ask her after she told me my dad had to go to jail would be about getting picked up from the airport.

  In Coyote Willis, Pioneer Cop, which is one of Tito the Bonecrusher’s movies, Tito plays Coyote Willis, a pioneer cop in the Wild West. Tito’s former manager, The Germ, plays Cactus, who is Coyote Willis’s best friend and deputy. There’s a scene where Coyote Willis is trying to help this lady after her family and all of her things are taken by bandits. Instead of answering Coyote’s questions about where the bandits may have gone, she keeps wailing, “I need my haaaats!” And Cactus gets furious. He says, “Stop worrying about your stupid hats! We are trying to save your family!” But Coyote Willis says, “I think she’s in shock. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” Then he talks to the hats lady in this serious but calm voice to get her to relax before he finds the bandits and does a corkscrew moonsault onto their villainous leader to slam him into the dust.

  I think I was in shock when I first heard that Dad had to go to jail. And that’s why instead of asking an obvious question, like Why is Dad serving a sentence if Walker Stewart is the one who broke the law? or They can send you to jail just because your boss is a criminal?, I asked who would pick us up at the airport.

  It was still an embarrassing question, though.

  “Uncle Victor will pick you up, honey,” my mom said. Uncle Victor wasn’t my real uncle, but he was like a brother to my dad. They basically grew up in the same house, and so when Dad moved to Florida, he got a place near Uncle Victor, who had already lived there for a while. Other than being close to the beach and going to places like AW, SWEET!, the only good thing about Da
d moving to Florida was that we got to see Uncle Victor a lot more.

  “Oh, okay,” I said. “That makes sense.”

  “What other questions do you have?” Mom asked hesitantly, like my next question might be about something even less important than getting picked up at the airport.

  I tried to think of more questions. But the only question in my head was How can we make this not happen? Somehow I knew not to ask my mom. Maybe I could ask Louisa.

  “Um, I don’t have any more questions right now. I just want to go back to my room.”

  “Are you sure?” Mom asked. “I can come with you.”

  “No thanks,” I said. I stood, patted Mom awkwardly on the arm, and walked as fast as I could out of the living room and up the stairs.

  Louisa let me into her room, but she didn’t say a word.

  “This is not good,” I said.

  No response.

  “We have to do something,” I added.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” Louisa finally said. “It’s final. He’s going to jail, and he totally lied to us. He’s such a liar.”

  “He didn’t know!” I said.

  “He had to know it was a possibility,” Louisa said. “And he promised me anyway that he would come. He never should have made a promise he didn’t know he could keep.”

  “He didn’t break the law!” I said. “Why would he think he was going to jail?”

  “He must have done something wrong,” Louisa said. “If he lied about coming to my graduation, he probably did something wrong.”

  “No,” I said. The only person who was wrong was Louisa. “Don’t say that. We know he didn’t do anything. We need to help him.”

  Louisa laughed at me, and not in a nice way. “You’re eleven years old. You’re literally the last person who could do something to help.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said.

  Just then the landline rang, so I took the opportunity to get the heck out of Louisa’s room. I ran into Mom and Carl’s room and picked up the receiver.