This Is Just a Test

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue/Thank-You Notes

  Authors’ Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  The closest I ever came to being a hero was when our class took a field trip to McKimmon’s Farm. It was the middle of November, and we’d already had a couple of frosts, which killed off a lot of the green things and which made us wonder whose idea it was to visit a farm this time of year. Spring would make more sense, when they were planting stuff. Or if the farm grew pumpkins, which it didn’t. When we went, everything was dying on McKimmon’s Farm, and that included the poison ivy, which Mr. McKimmon wasn’t growing as a crop or anything; it was wild.

  Wild, and, like I said, mostly dead. The sun was shining down hard on us, in that cloudless blue postcard way that happens in Virginia.

  The teachers told a group of us to sit at the picnic tables so they could pass around seeds and dried gourds, which Mr. McKimmon actually did grow. Hector, my best friend, squirmed between the bench and the table and ducked underneath.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. The other kids were giving Hector a look.

  “It’s shadier down here,” Hector said. One thing I’ll say about Hector is that he’s not afraid to be unconventional. It used to be a quality I admired, like when Hector suggested that we do everything backward for a week, or when he signed us up for correspondence classes in French because he wanted to go to the Cannes Film Festival one day. But in junior high, unconventionality was usually another word for dork.

  “Knock it off,” I told Hector. I was pretty sure that under the transitive property of junior high social lives, whatever our group was thinking of Hector, they were going to start thinking of me. Hector popped back up.

  “My little brother does that all the time,” said Kelli Ann Majors. I happened to know that Kelli Ann’s little brother was eight; it was one of the facts I had collected about her. It was also exactly what I was afraid someone would think.

  “Watch this,” said Scott Dursky, who was in a couple of my classes. Under normal circumstances, I ignored Scott and his stunts. But now he was providing a distraction—the good kind. I watched him, hoping everyone else would, too, as he walked to an oak tree that had a bunch of vines attacking the trunk. They looked like tentacles. Scott grabbed one to try to get some climbing leverage, but the vine was loose and fell out of the tree while he was holding it.

  Terry Sutphin stood behind him and said, “Nice try. Let me show you how it’s done.” Scott grabbed a different vine for a better hold. It was furry. Even from where we were sitting, I could tell it was poison ivy.

  “That’s poison ivy,” I told Hector. “They shouldn’t be touching that.”

  “Hey!” Hector shouted. “That’s poison ivy.”

  “Says who?” Scott didn’t let go of the vine, though you could see his grip relax slightly.

  “Says David,” said Hector. We walked over to the tree.

  “I don’t see any leaves,” said Terry.

  “You can get poison ivy from the vine, too,” I told him. “You know: ‘Hairy vine, no friend of mine?’ It still contains urushiol.”

  “I’ve never heard that,” Scott said, but he let go of the vine.

  “He’s making it up,” said Terry. He patted the vine, which looked like the tail of a scruffy cat. “This is my pet, Lucky. He would never hurt me. Don’t you want to meet my pet?” He reached for the closest girl, who shrieked and ran away.

  “Why would I make it up?” I said. If I were going to make something up, it would be something like: studying too much for your bar mitzvah can stunt your growth, or eating only Chinese food causes premature baldness. Personally, I would like to spend less time studying Torah and more time eating pizza.

  “I thought the plant had to be fresh and shiny for you to catch poison ivy,” said Kelli Ann, who was fresh and shiny herself. She ducked behind me to avoid Terry, who went to chase some other kids across the field.

  “No,” I said. “Lead deaves and vines, too.” I resisted the urge to punch myself in the face. Kelli Ann had nice eyes, which made it hard for my brain to do normal things, like form words.

  “Group B!” yelled Mrs. Osterberg, our science teacher. She was standing near a tractor, next to a red barn that looked as though it had been painted just for our field trip. “It’s time for your hayride.”

  “Scott Dursky touched poison ivy,” said Kelli Ann. “So did Terry Sutphin.”

  Mrs. Osterberg took a first aid kit out of her purse and sifted through it. There didn’t seem to be much in there besides aspirin and Band-Aids. Then she looked toward the front of the farm, about a million miles away, where there was a small public bathroom. She seemed to be calculating something in her head.

  “Very well,” she said. “You can take the hayride with Group D. For now, go get those hands washed. With soap, Mr. Dursky. Lots and lots of soap. Mr. Horowitz? You go with him.”

  “But—” I said.

  “Go.” She turned to Hector. “Mr. Clelland, round up Mr. Sutphin and tell him to do likewise.”

  Kelli Ann waved as she went off on the hayride. Scott waved back, because Scott was the kind of person who always assumed that someone was waving to him. I did a low-key kind of wave, the kind that would count if she was actually waving at me, but one I could also say was for someone else if she wasn’t. It would have been nice to be on the same hayride as Kelli Ann, not that I would sit directly next to her, but maybe I would sit near her and practice not feeling nervous. Instead, I had to go with Scott to the bathroom. Even though Scott and I had gone to school with each other for a couple of years, I’d never had a real conversation with him.

  “If there wasn’t a bathroom,” I said, “you could rub lemon juice on your skin. The acid cuts through the oil.”

  “Where would we get lemons around here?” asked Scott. Mr. McKimmon didn’t grow those, either; Virginia had the wrong climate.

  “Maybe someone packed lemonade in their lunch?” I suggested. Scott seemed impressed by my idea, which gave me another one.

  “And bananas,” I said. “If you were too late to do anything about the oil, the inside of a banana peel will cut down on the itching.”

  “How does that work?”

  I thought for a minute. “Maybe some kind of oil in the peel? Banana skins are also good for shining shoes.” I had done a project in fourth grade on bananas. “You can even put a banana peel on your forehead to cure headaches.”

  “I’ll bet that doesn’t work,” Scott said. “Though if someone standing near you had a headache, they’d probably forget about it while you were wearing your banana bandanna.”

  Hector found us just as Scott finished up in the bathroom. “I told Terry to come to the bathroom, an
d he said he wasn’t interested in ‘doing likewise,’” announced Hector. “Even though he had to make.”

  “‘Make’?” repeated Scott.

  Hector’s mom hated what she called “bathroom” words, so Hector just said make, which, up to this point, had never bothered me.

  “Take a leak,” I translated.

  “He went behind the barn,” Hector said.

  Scott shook his head. “That’s Terry for you.”

  “Should we talk to him?” I asked. “Maybe he’ll listen, if you tell him to wash his hands.”

  “He’ll probably be fine,” Scott said.

  “You washed your hands,” Hector pointed out.

  “That’s me. To me, it’s a low risk/high reward situation to wash my hands.”

  “You really can get poison ivy from the vines,” I said.

  “He had his chance,” said Scott. “Besides, some people don’t get poison ivy.”

  If it hadn’t been for Terry, that might have been the end of the story for Hector and me. But instead, Kelli Ann greeted us the next morning with some serious news.

  “Terry Sutphin is covered in poison ivy,” she said. This was my world record for talking to a girl who wasn’t a family member. “Everywhere. He couldn’t come to school today.”

  I thought about Terry taking a leak behind the barn, and shuddered. “We tried to tell him.” Poison ivy would make a great weapon, but as far as I knew, the military did not engage in plant warfare. All everyone talked about these days was nuclear weapons. The thing about nukes was they were really, really powerful—there was no calamine lotion for nuclear weapons.

  “He would totally listen to you guys now,” she said.

  “Maybe,” I said. It was best to keep sentences short around Kelli Ann, but what I was thinking was: Now the entire seventh grade knows about poison ivy vines.

  “I’m not sure we learned anything else useful,” said Kelli Ann. “You and Hector saved the field trip. A lot more people could have gotten poison ivy if you guys hadn’t said something.”

  I was a tiny bit irritated by the you guys comment, since I was the one who had noticed the vines; Hector had only been the loudspeaker. But I supposed that part was critical, too.

  “You guys should get extra credit from Mrs. Osterberg,” Kelli Ann said. “Scott Dursky owes you, big time.”

  That part, I figured, was true.

  Scott found us at lunch. At first, I thought he was going to thank us for saving him. Instead, he said, “So I was thinking of entering the trivia tournament.”

  “Oh,” I said. Because I didn’t know what this had to do with me.

  “You should be on my team,” he said.

  “Me?”

  I saw Hector looking at me sideways. It was a suspicious look, the kind you see on detective shows.

  “You knew about urushiol,” Scott said.

  “Lots of people know about urushiol.”

  “Think about it,” he said. “But you have to let me know by the end of the day. That’s the deadline for the sign-ups.” He said this as if I hadn’t heard it on the morning announcements.

  “Who else is on the team?” You needed three people. This was on the announcements, too.

  “Me,” he said. “Duh. That’s it, so far.”

  “I know about old movies,” Hector said.

  Scott turned his head. “What else?”

  “Top 40.”

  Scott nodded, like he was thinking this over. “Who was the eighth president?” he asked.

  Hector counted on his fingers.

  “Van Buren,” he said.

  “What’s the first element on the periodic table?”

  “Hydrogen.”

  Scott nodded again. “Not bad,” he said. “Though not helpful, because I knew those answers, too.” He shrugged. “Okay. I’ll take you both.”

  Hector and I talked it over after he left.

  “Well, that was unexpected,” I said. I noticed that Scott still didn’t say anything about saving him from poison ivy.

  “He didn’t know about urushiol,” said Hector. “Maybe he doesn’t know about a lot of things. Maybe we should make our own team.” He opened his fruit cup. “We could get Robert Scanlon.” He held up the can, and then poured the juice and fruit into his mouth. Hector believed this saved on utensils.

  Robert Scanlon was the smartest kid in seventh grade. Not that Hector and I were stupid or anything, but teachers asked Robert questions when they didn’t know the answers. Robert would probably form his own trivia team.

  I didn’t think Hector and I would have much luck finding a third member better than Scott Dursky. While I was thinking about this, Hector reached his own conclusion.

  “But I guess it would be weird if we did that,” he finished. “I mean, form our own team without Scott.”

  “He asked us,” I agreed. This was not something that usually happened to me—the being asked part. In PE, for example, I was never picked until near the end. It’s not like I sucked at sports or anything. People made certain assumptions when they saw me because I am Chinese and Jewish. At the beginning of the year, the PE teacher, Mr. Multer, announced that I could be team captain if we were playing Ping-Pong; I pretended to laugh when everyone else did, but I was actually pretty steamed about it.

  “I just don’t get why Scott asked us,” said Hector. “He could ask anyone.”

  “He asked us because we know stuff,” I said. “Plus, we saved his butt.”

  Hector put the end of his backpack strap in his mouth and chewed on it. This is what he did when he wanted to think. “You know what?” he said. “Why not?”

  Actually, I had a few reasons why not.

  One was that it meant I’d have to answer questions in front of an audience of people. As someone who got flustered around certain attractive girls, this was not a comforting thought.

  On the other hand, it was a chance to show certain attractive girls that I knew about stuff besides poison ivy. It was a chance to be on a team. It wasn’t baseball (I made the first cut, but not the final), but it was something.

  So at the end of the day, when I saw Scott Dursky standing next to his locker, I walked right up to him.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’re in.”

  “Great,” said Scott. “We’re team 5.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You already signed us up?”

  “I knew you’d say yes.”

  “How?” I hadn’t known I’d say yes.

  “I know many things,” Scott said. “That was just one of them.”

  I had to admit, Hector’s question about why Scott chose us bothered me more than I wanted it to. Coming to junior high last year was hard, because suddenly there was this pecking order, and Hector and I were not at the top. Or the middle. Scott was one of the more popular kids at school. He was tall, which seemed to be one of the keys to junior high popularity. One month into the school year, he set a new school record for running the mile, and he was one of the first kids to get his own Atari game system last year. (Apparently, his allowance was higher than mine. Or maybe his grandmother gave him actual money for his birthday, instead of velour sweatshirts.) He had a Members Only jacket, which my parents said was too expensive for a (hopefully) about-to-have-a-growth-spurt boy. And he had his own group of people to hang out with. A large group of people.

  Hector and I did not have a large group of friends. It was just me and Hector, because a lot of kids found Hector a little strange. I kind of understood—Hector was a bit like a little old man, maybe because he spent so much time watching black-and-white movies with his grandmother. For instance, in the gym before school, Terry Sutphin (before he got poison ivy) was showing us this break-dance move called the worm. He lay on the floor and sort of rippled backward in a big wave.

  “Pretty good,” I said.

  “Not bad,” said Hector. “But you know who can really dance? Gene Kelly.”

  Terry jumped up from the floor, breathing a little hard. “Who’s that? Is
she hot?”

  “Gene Kelly is a man,” Hector said. “And he can dance. Have you ever seen Singin’ in the Rain?”

  I knew what Singin’ in the Rain was—it was an old movie with a bunch of people singing (duh) in the rain (double-duh). Sometimes Hector needed a filter, like in a fish tank, to help keep the gunk out of the conversation. Terry looked at Hector out of the corner of his eye. Then he shook his head and walked away.

  I wanted to give Hector a shove, but instead I just stood there, smiling idiotically, because Hector has been my friend since second grade. The rest of the morning in the gym—and the mornings after that—no one came to talk to Hector, and by extension, me. I guess they thought we didn’t have much to say.

  I figured one way to make more friends would be to become friends with popular people, which was another good reason to join Scott’s trivia team. When he nominated himself captain, I agreed, even though I was pretty sure Hector would have voted for me. And when Scott suggested that we all come over to my house to practice trivia and watch movies the Sunday before the contest, I agreed. My parents always insisted that you should never invite yourself to other people’s houses. But I pretended not to notice. “Yeah, that’s a great idea,” I said.

  We had been practicing together during lunch and on our own, but it seemed like a good idea to try to get a longer practice in. My parents normally didn’t let me have friends over on Sunday nights, but it was the week of Thanksgiving, and the teachers wouldn’t be giving us much homework because kids were starting to head over the river and through the woods to wherever their grandmothers lived. But mine were close by. Wai Po actually lived with us. I hoped she would behave.

  Wai Po was my mom’s mom, on my Chinese side. She moved in with us because she got kicked out of her old apartment. She wouldn’t tell us why, except that the management was totally unreasonable and that I was happy to leave anyway. I think it probably had something to do with her dog, Bao Bao, because he was yappy and has already destroyed two pillows and an ottoman since moving in with us. Bao Bao was a Lhasa apso. His name was pronounced like the bow in “bowwow” and it meant “treasure” in Chinese. It should have meant hairy, spoiled mop.

  Wai Po only liked Chinese food, but Dad said we could order pizza when Scott and Hector came over. He was happy to have an excuse to order pizza because we’ve only been eating Chinese food since Wai Po arrived. We decided on the double cheese, but the pizza place screwed up and instead we got something called “Hawaiian pizza.” Maybe ham and pineapple are popular in Hawaii (last state to join the union, in 1959) but to me, meat and fruit did not belong together. To me, fruit was fruit and meat was meat. It was wrong to mix them. Did you put bananas on meat loaf? Did you sprinkle blueberries on a drumstick? No. But then again, some people thought being Chinese and Jewish were two things that didn’t belong together, and here I was: David Da-Wei Horowitz. I might be the only person in the whole world with that name.