The Trouble with Mark Hopper (15 page)

I should just stick with what I'm good at, Mark thought. I should just focus on winning the Mastermind competition. I'm good at getting A's and writing essays and playing the bassoon. Clearly I am, because I am a finalist.

The thought cheered him up, but only slightly, because clearly he was not good at being a person other people like being around. No matter how many “how was your weekend”s and “thanks for your help”s he said, no matter how genuine his smile, no matter how many impolite remarks he stopped himself from saying, he was still the Mark Geoffrey Hopper who reminded the teacher to give the quiz she seemed to have forgotten about, not the Mark Geoffrey Hopper who got invited to birthday parties on purpose. No one liked him. And there was no way he could win the teamwork component if no one liked him.

If I have to do the teamwork part, Mark thought, I am not going to win. The truth weighed heavily on his body, and he sank deeper into his bed.
I'm not going to win.

From the crack of the door his mother had left open, Mark could see the empty glass shelf where his father's trophies used to be. Not even his own dad liked him enough to stick around. And he was going to fail in the only way he knew to bring him back. He whispered it out loud, his hushed voice sad but certain. “No one likes me, and I'm not going to win.”

For the second time that day, Mark cried.

Mark had never seen Mark so glum. When he said hello to him in homeroom, Mark let out a pitiful little huff. And when Miss Frances said, “Welcome to the start of a glorious new week!” like she did every Monday, Mark grunted feebly.

“Gesundheit!” chirped Miss Frances.

“Is everything okay?” Mark whispered.

Mark didn't turn around. “Yeah, fine,” he muttered.

Mark ripped off a piece of notebook paper. “Are you sure?” he wrote on it. He folded it up into a rectangle and tapped Mark on the shoulder with it. Mark didn't turn around. Mark tapped again, a little harder. Mark shrugged his hand off. So Mark turned around to Jasmina, his eyes wide with concern, and whispered, “Do you know what's up with Mark?”

Jasmina turned her lips down and nodded. But before she could say anything, Mark turned around from in front of Mark and gave her a please-don't-say-anything look. If it had been a say-something-and-regret-it-the-rest-of-your-life look, neither Jasmina nor Mark would have been so worried. “I'll tell you later,” Jasmina mouthed.

But Mark didn't have to wait until much later.

“Hey, Hopper!” shouted Pete Dale in the hallway after homeroom.

Mark turned around, but he saw Pete was calling after the other Mark.

“I'm having a party on Friday,” Pete shouted, “and I just want to make it clear that you are
not
invited!”

Mark turned around and yelled, “You couldn't give me a million dollars to go to a party of yours, buttface!”

“But Laurie Campbell had to give you a million dollars to go away!” Pete called after him. The crowd around Pete snickered, and everyone in the hall turned to look after Mark as he pushed his way toward social studies.

“Shut up, Pete,” said Jasmina. Her expression was one of pity, not for Mark but for Pete.

“Oh, look,” said Pete. “Jasmina is standing up for that loser.”

“Just shut up,” Jasmina said. She spun around and rolled her eyes at Mark before walking confidently into the girls' bathroom.

“Be careful, Horace!” Frank Stucco yelled after Jasmina. “Mark Hopper might think he's invited and follow you in there!”

Pete and the others roared. “Hey, Hopper,” Pete said, signaling toward the Mark who was watching the scene from the side. “
You
probably
are
invited into the girls' bathroom!”

“Yeah,” said Frank. “You'd better hurry up in there before the other Mark goes in instead.”

Mark stared at the floor and gritted his teeth. He wasn't exactly sure of what was going on, but clearly Mark had done something that made everyone but Jasmina make fun of him. That meant just as much trouble for him from the people who thought
he
was the Mark Hopper who was supposed to be pushed into lockers and given wedgies. But he found that he didn't care what Mark had done to further damage their shared reputation; he cared about Mark. Mark took a deep breath and silently commanded himself to stand up for Mark the way Mark was teaching him to. He opened his mouth. He wasn't sure of what was going to come out, but he hoped it would be venomous. “Stop it,” he said forcefully.

Pete looked up from the headlock Frank had him in. “What?” he said.

Mark prayed Pete could not somehow see the knot in his stomach or sense the sweat on his hands. “I said stop making fun of Mark.”

“Aw,” said one of the girls in the group. “He's sticking up for him.”

“Aw, how cute,” said Frank Stucco. His voice was sticky like pancake syrup.

The bell rang to signal the start of first period. Mr. Portman, a stern-looking biology teacher with a sharp crew cut, stepped into the hallway. “That was the bell,” he said. “What is going on here?”

Pete and Frank disappeared down the hall. Mark stared up at Mr. Portman, his pulse still racing from his brief encounter. “What happened?” Mr. Portman asked. From inside his classroom, bodies were stretched out of their desks and craned toward to door. He knew Mark would have told Mr. Portman what was going on. Mr. Portman towered over him. “What's your name?”

“Mark Hopper.”

“Okay, Mark Hopper. Get to class, or I'll give you detention. That goes for the rest of you, too,” Mr. Portman said. He walked back into his room to get a pack of detention slips.

Mark and the rest of the crowd hurried away.

“That's Mark Hopper?” Mark heard one girl ask another.

“Yeah,” said the girl. “He showed up at Laurie Campbell's birthday party in a suit!”

“Even though he wasn't invited?”

“Yeah.”

“He found an invitation in a garbage can and thought that meant he could go,” a third girl explained. “And he wasn't wearing a suit. It was a tuxedo!”

“Did you hear that?” Mark heard an older boy say to another around the corner. “Some kid named Mark Hopper crashed Laurie Campbell's birthday party, wearing a polka-dotted bow tie—and her dad threw him out with the trash!”

“Oh yeah, I know,” the boy said. “But the dad didn't throw him out. They had to call the police.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. My mom's friend's son goes to karate with someone whose friend was there.”

“Wow.”

Though the story became more and more exaggerated as the day wore on (by third period, Mark had reportedly gotten down on one knee and recited a haiku inside Laurie's living room before being dragged away to spend the night at a mental institution), Mark figured he had a good idea of what had happened. So Laurie did invite me to her party after all! he thought during math, absentmindedly doodling a smiling face. But he felt guilty the moment he thought it. How was Mark supposed to know the invitation wasn't meant for him? Why did Laurie have to be so mean? He was sorry he had ever wanted to be invited in the first place. He gave the doodled face V-shaped eyebrows and pointy teeth. He wondered why Mark never mentioned that he had been invited. Had he not wanted to hurt Mark's feelings in case he hadn't been invited, too? Mark stopped drawing and looked over at Mark, who was slumped so far into his seat he might slide under the desk. Even though it didn't look like it right then, Mark really had come a long way.

Before lunch, Mark found a note on his locker. Inside it read, “A NON-invitation just for Mark Hopper. You are NOT invited to Jimmy's Burger Shack after school today. OR TOMORROW!! So DON'T come!!!” A few girls who were chatting nearby shushed one another when Mark opened it, then ran away giggling and crashing into one another once he looked up.

Mark crossed his arms. When you mess with Mark Geoffrey Hopper, he thought, you mess with Mark Geoffrey Hopper.

Mark, Jasmina, and Jonathan walked around the whole perimeter of the library before they finally found Mark at a desk by a rack of paperback books. Mark tapped him on the shoulder. “My sister has a lot of slimy, crawly things.”

Mark looked up from the social-studies questions he was working on. He had chosen to spend lunchtime in the library doing homework to avoid having to talk to people. “What are you doing here?” he asked, secretly glad Mark was there.

“He came to tell you that his sister has a lot of bugs,” said Jasmina from behind him. Mark turned and saw her and Jonathan.

“I know it's weird,” Mark explained. “But she really likes bugs.”

“And we were thinking we should put some in Pete's locker!” Jonathan said.

Mark raised his right eyebrow. He had gotten many people in trouble over the years, but never himself. But this might not be a bad time to start. “Maybe Frank's locker, too,” he said.

“Oh, definitely,” Mark agreed. He and the others sat down. “And Laurie Campbell's, obviously.”

Mark looked away quickly, but not quickly enough that Mark didn't see him blush. Mark ripped a piece of paper out of Mark's binder and drew a quick picture of a group of snails. “I say snails for Frank,” he said. He wrote Frank's name next to the snails. “Since Frank's kind of round and slow.”

Mark couldn't help but let out a laugh. A librarian looked over at them with a finger to her lips.

“And how about spiders for Pete?” Jasmina whispered. “No, knowing him he probably likes spiders.”

“We could do ants, though!” Mark said. “I think Beth was planning on letting one of her ant farms loose next weekend anyway. We can let them loose in Pete's locker!”

Mark looked at the earnest expressions on his friends' faces. He imagined the look on Pete's face when he opened his locker and found it teeming with little black ants. They could spill some soda on his binders first so that the ants congregated, and then every time Pete turned a page during the day, he'd find more ants. “What about Laurie?” Mark asked.

“Mosquitoes!” Jonathan cooed.

“Good one,” said Mark, his eyes as round as the mosquito bites he had gotten all over his legs when he and Sammy had gone camping with their dads. “Then she won't be able to forget about it for a long time . . . at least until the bites stop itching.”

Mark thought about the time a few summers ago when his family went hiking and he pointed out a clump of poison ivy to Beth. She accused him of lying and rolled in the ivy to prove it . . . and her whole body looked lobsterlike within the hour. He pictured Laurie red with bites everywhere from her ears to her ankles, including out-of-the-way places like behind her knees and beneath her toes. He pictured her with too many itches for her pink polished nails to scratch.

Mark tapped Mark on the shoulder with his pencil and pointed to a sketch he was drawing. The cartoonish figure looked
just
like Laurie Campbell running from a swarm of angry mosquitoes.

“I'm a finalist in the Mastermind tournament,” Mark said quietly.

“Hey! Congratulations!” Mark said cheerily. “That's so cool.”

“Mark!” said Jasmina. “That's awesome.” She patted him on the back.

“I don't know what that is,” Jonathan said. “But it sounds really important, so good job.”

“Thanks,” Mark whispered. He thought about the painting and a bowling-ball-size lump formed in the pit of his stomach. He didn't like stealing from Mark when he did it, but now he felt absolutely miserable about it, since Mark was here, cheering him up and offering his sister's insects for revenge. What made it even worse was the fact that it was all for nothing, since he had no chance of winning the teamwork part.

“Okay,” said Jasmina. “I need to go eat. Come down to the cafeteria, Mark. I'll buy you a chocolate milk to celebrate.”

“Yeah, let's go to lunch,” said Jonathan.

Mark shrugged.

Mark was worried. If being a Mastermind finalist didn't make Mark feel better, nothing would, except for maybe winning the whole contest. “We'll meet you there,” he said to Jasmina and Jonathan. Once they'd left, he said to Mark, “We'd better get going on practicing the teamwork part. I thought of a lot more games to tell you about, and tricks on what the teachers are looking for when you do them.” He raised his eyebrows a few times.

Mark shook his head. “I'm not going.”

“What?”

“I'm not going to the finals.”

“What do you mean? Why not? You
love
the Mastermind tournament. You've been talking about it forever, and you've been preparing for it for longer than forever.”

“Well, it was a waste of time, okay?” Mark snapped. The librarian looked over at them again and shook her head sternly. Mark did not have the energy to return her glare with a sterner one. “I'm not going to win the teamwork part. I know I can't.”