Fuzzy Mud Read online

  Marshall kept glancing behind him. Every time he looked back, Tamaya instinctively did too, but she didn’t see anything or anybody.

  Tamaya still remembered her first day at Woodridge. She’d been in the second grade, and Marshall had been in the fourth. He had helped her find her classroom, pointed out where the girls’ bathroom was, and personally introduced her to Mrs. Thaxton, the headmistress. The new school had seemed like a big, scary place to her, and Marshall had been her guide and protector.

  She’d had a secret crush on him all through second, third, and fourth grades. Maybe it still lingered a little bit inside her, but lately he’d been acting like such a jerk, she wasn’t sure she even liked him anymore.

  Beyond the soccer field, the ground sloped down unevenly toward the chain-link fence that separated the schoolyard from the woods. As they moved closer to the fence, Tamaya could feel her heartbeat quicken. The air was cool and damp, but her throat felt dry and tight.

  Just a few weeks before, the woods had sparkled with bright fall colors. Looking out the window from her classroom on the fourth floor, she’d been able to see every shade of red, orange, and yellow, so bright some days that it had looked as though the hillside were on fire. But now the colors had faded and the trees looked dark and gloomy.

  She wished she could be as brave as Marshall. It wasn’t just the woods that scared her—and what might or might not have been lurking within. Even more than that, Tamaya was scared to death of getting in trouble. Just the thought of a teacher yelling at her filled her heart with fear.

  She knew that other kids broke the rules all the time, and nothing bad ever happened to them. Kids in her class would do something wrong, and then her teacher, Ms. Filbert, would tell them not to do it, and then they’d do it again the very next day and still not get in trouble.

  Still, she was sure that if she went into the woods, something horrible would happen to her. Mrs. Thaxton might find out. She could get expelled.

  A dip in the rocky ground created a gap big enough to crawl through under a section of the fence. Tamaya watched Marshall take off his backpack, then push it through the gap.

  She took off her backpack too. Ms. Filbert had once said that courage just meant pretending to be brave. “After all, if you’re not scared, then there’s nothing to be brave about, is there?”

  Pretending to be brave, Tamaya shoved her backpack through the gap. There was no turning back.

  Now who’s the goody-goody? she thought.

  She wiggled under the fence, careful not to snag her sweater.

  Marshall Walsh wasn’t as brave as Tamaya thought.

  He used to have lots of friends. He used to like school. He had taken band in the sixth grade, and his music teacher, Mr. Rowan, had written on his report card that what he lacked in talent, he made up for with enthusiasm.

  Marshall plays the tuba with gusto.

  He wasn’t enthusiastic about anything anymore. Each day brought him nothing but more misery and humiliation. And it had all started with a new kid in his class, Chad Hilligas.

  Students attended Woodridge Academy for one of two reasons. Either they were really smart, or else their parents were really rich. Tamaya was one of the smart ones. Marshall was an in-betweener. His parents weren’t rich, but they both had good jobs, and they considered education to be extremely important. They cut back in other areas, like family vacations and going out to restaurants.

  The reason Chad Hilligas came to Woodridge was entirely different. He’d been kicked out of three schools in the last two years. The social worker assigned to his case believed that if he was placed in a more positive environment and made to wear a school uniform, he would stop fighting and become a more conscientious and motivated student. If his parents hadn’t agreed to pay for him to go to Woodridge Academy, he would have been put in a school at a juvenile detention center.

  So Chad had started with everyone else in September. The boys in Marshall’s class were in awe of Chad. The girls seemed drawn to him too, even if he also scared them a little bit. And for the first few weeks of this year, Marshall had been right there with everyone else, hanging on every word Chad said, nodding along in agreement, laughing at his jokes.

  Some people were terrified of being expelled from school. Chad bragged about it.

  “My fourth-grade teacher kept giving me a hard time, so I locked her in the closet.”

  “What’d she do to you when she got out?”

  “Nothing. She’s still in there.”

  And Marshall had laughed right along with everyone else.

  Chad claimed he’d been kicked out of five schools, not just three. He was always coming up with new stories about things he had supposedly done. The more he got in trouble, the more everyone seemed to admire him.

  Marshall remembered the moment Chad had turned against him. Chad had been telling about the time he had ridden his motorcycle to school.

  “Did anyone see you?” Gavin asked.

  “Yeah, they saw me,” Chad replied. “I rode it right up the steps of the school and into the principal’s office!”

  “No way!” Marshall exclaimed.

  Chad stopped talking and slowly turned to Marshall.

  “You calling me a liar?”

  Everyone became very quiet.

  Marshall hadn’t meant it that way at all. He just as easily could have exclaimed, “Awesome!”

  “No.”

  “You all heard him,” Chad said. “He called me a liar. Anybody else think I’m lying?”

  Marshall tried to explain, but Chad shredded his feeble words with a cold, hard stare.

  For the rest of the day, that stare seemed to follow Marshall wherever he went. And for what seemed like no logical reason to Marshall, slowly but surely, everyone else seemed to turn against him too.

  “Whose side are you on?” Chad would ask. “You’re either with me or you’re with Buttface.”

  At first, Marshall tried to pretend that nothing was wrong. He’d walk right up to a group of his friends and try to join in whatever they were doing, but one glance from Chad would send him away, his eyes cast down in shame.

  Snide whispers followed him wherever he went, along with not-so-accidental bumps in the hallways. He became afraid to speak up in class. His grades got worse. Often when taking a test, he could feel Chad’s stare burning through the back of his neck, and his mind would go blank.

  In other schools, where seventh-grade students changed classrooms every period, Marshall and Chad might have had only one or two classes together. There were only forty-one seventh graders at Woodridge, however, and it was Marshall’s bad luck that Chad was in every one of his classes except his last period, Latin.

  Marshall had a brother and sister, twins, who were four years old. Even when he’d had friends and lots to do, he’d always been happy to look after them when necessary, or even when it wasn’t necessary. Daniela and Eric liked to pretend they were lions in the circus. They’d crouch on top of the kitchen barstools and growl, and Marshall would be the lion tamer.

  Since losing his other friends, Marshall no longer liked playing with the twins either. It made him feel like a loser. When his parents questioned him about his bad grades, he blamed it on them. “How am I supposed to study when they’re roaring at me all the time?”

  It was the same with Tamaya. Everyone picked on him all day at school, and now he took it out on the only person who was nice to him. He’d hear himself say mean things to her and hate himself for it, but he couldn’t seem to stop.

  As bad as it had been for Marshall lately, today it had gotten even worse. He’d answered a question in class, right after Chad had given the wrong answer.

  Afterward, as he was heading up the stairs on his way to Latin, Chad grabbed him from behind, pulled him down three steps, and shoved him against the railing.

  “Listen, Buttface, we need to settle this once and for all.”

  “Settle what?” Marshall tried.

  “After sc
hool, on the corner of Woodridge and Richmond Road,” Chad told him. “And you better be there, you thumb-sucking coward.”

  Marshall and Tamaya always walked right past that corner on their way home. They’d been going the same way every day for three years. But today, he suddenly knew a shortcut.

  By the time Tamaya made it to the other side of the fence, Marshall had already disappeared through the trees. She picked up her backpack and hurried after him, slipping her arms through the straps as she ran. Ducking under a low branch, she spotted him climbing over a small mound of boulders. “Wait up!” she called.

  Again, he disappeared from view.

  Her knee banged against one of the boulders as she scrambled over the mound. He was waiting for her on the other side, hands on hips, an annoyed look on his face. “What’s the point in taking a shortcut if I have to keep stopping and waiting for you to come pokeying along?”

  “I’m not pokeying,” Tamaya insisted.

  “Well, hurry up, then,” said Marshall. He turned and started off again.

  She stuck close to him as they followed a path that zigzagged through the trees. It had rained the night before, and damp leaves stuck to Tamaya’s sneakers. Leaves continued to fall around them, one here, one there, gently drifting downward.

  They must have missed a zig or a zag somewhere, because after a while it became clear to Tamaya that they were no longer on any kind of path. She had to fight her way through tangled branches and then step over a thick patch of thorny bushes.

  “You think we should turn back?” she suggested.

  Marshall’s answer was short and blunt. “No.”

  Tamaya pretended to be brave. Every little noise made her heart leap. She got down on her hands and knees and crawled under a very low branch. “Is this the shortcut?” she asked as she straightened back up.

  Marshall didn’t answer. He just kept moving forward.

  Her sock was torn, and her skirt was splotched with dirt. She didn’t know how she’d explain that to her mother. One thing she couldn’t do was lie. She would never lie to her mother.

  Her parents had divorced back when she’d been in the first grade. They had been living in an apartment in Philadelphia at the time. It was a different apartment from the one her dad lived in now.

  Even back then, everyone always talked about how smart she was, which had surprised her, because it wasn’t something she gave much thought. She was who she was, and that was all. She’d been given an aptitude test, and then she and her mother had moved to Heath Cliff so she could attend Woodridge Academy.

  One thing she wasn’t smart about was her parents. She couldn’t figure out why they’d separated and why they didn’t just get back together. After the divorce her mother seemed very sad for a long time. On Tamaya’s last visit to her father, he said to her, “You know I still love your mother very much. I always will.” But when she repeated those words to her mother and suggested that maybe they should all live together again, her mother got all sad again.

  “That will never happen,” she told Tamaya.

  Even now, as Tamaya was scared to death that she and Marshall might be lost in the woods forever, she couldn’t help but think that maybe if she did get lost, her mom and dad would come looking for her together. She was imagining what it would be like when they found her, and how they’d all hug each other, when a small animal darted right in front of her.

  She stopped. “What was that?” she asked Marshall.

  “What was what?”

  “You didn’t see it?” She wondered if it could have been a fox. “Some kind of animal practically ran over my foot!”

  “So?”

  “So, nothing,” she muttered. She didn’t know why he was being so mean.

  They came to an old dead tree lying on its side. Much of its bark had rotted away. Marshall climbed up on it and looked around. “Hmmm,” he muttered. He looked back the way they had just come.

  “Are we lost?” Tamaya asked.

  “No,” Marshall insisted. “I just need to get my bearings.”

  “You said you knew a shortcut!”

  “I do,” he answered. “I just have to find the exact place where it starts. Once I find the starting point, we’ll be home in a snap.” He snapped his fingers as if that proved it.

  Tamaya waited. She heard something crackle behind her, but when she turned around, there was nothing there.

  Marshall hopped down from the tree trunk. “This way!” he declared, as if he knew exactly where he was going.

  Tamaya scooted around the tree and followed. She had no choice.

  They made their way down the side of a hill until they came to a ravine, then followed the ravine upward. Tamaya’s backpack felt heavier with every step. She kept thinking she heard something or someone behind her, but when she looked back, there was never anyone there.

  Marshall continued to walk quickly. She constantly had to run to catch up but soon would lag behind again. Each time, it became harder to catch up.

  Out of breath, she watched him disappear around a curve in the hillside. She shifted the weight of her backpack, gathered what strength she had left, and started to run after him.

  Something grabbed her from behind. She felt her sweater being pulled up against her neck, choking her.

  She twisted free, then screamed as she fell to the ground. Rolling over, she looked up, but there was nobody—no deranged hermit, no bloodstained beard, just a tree limb with pointy branches.

  Marshall came hurrying back down to her. “Are you okay?”

  She felt more embarrassed than anything else. “I just fell,” she said.

  She realized her sweater must have gotten caught on the branch. That was all.

  Marshall continued to look down at her. “I’m really sorry, Tamaya,” he said finally.

  He seemed really worried.

  “I saw a rocky ledge up the hill,” he told her. “You wait here. I’m going to climb up to it. I should be able to get a good view from up there.”

  “Don’t leave me,” she pleaded.

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  He took off his backpack and set it down next to her. “I’ll be right back.”

  She watched him head back up the hill and disappear again around the curve. She took off her backpack and set it next to his. She was too worn out to follow.

  She took off her sweater to see how badly it had been damaged. It was worse than she’d thought. There was a hole almost as big as her fist just above the right shoulder. She definitely didn’t know how she’d explain that to her mother.

  Even though she had been given a full scholarship to Woodridge, her mother still had to pay for the school uniform. The sweater had cost ninety-three dollars.

  It wasn’t fair.

  She would never admit it to her friends, but she loved the school uniform. Monica, Hope, and Summer thought it made them look like dorks. They could go on and on about what they would wear on the last Friday of each month when they got to wear “real clothes.” But Tamaya always felt proud to put on her sweater with the words Virtue and Valor written in gold, and the year 1924. It made her feel important, like she was a part of history.

  As she was thinking about this, she found herself staring at a large puddle of some kind of fuzz-covered mud. Her mind barely registered it at first, but the more she gazed at the odd-looking mud, the more it drew her attention.

  The mud was dark and tar-like. Just above the surface, almost as if it were suspended in midair, there was a fuzzy yellowish-brown scum.

  Something else struck her as strange about the fuzzy mud, although it took her a moment to realize what it was. There were no leaves on top of the mud. Leaves had fallen everywhere else. They completely surrounded the mud puddle, right up to its edges, but for some reason, no leaves had landed on top of it.

  She looked back up the hill. There was still no sign of Marshall.

  Her gaze returned to the fuzzy mud. It was possible, she thought, that the leaves had
sunk down into the mud, but the mud seemed too thick for a leaf to fall through it. She wondered if that fuzzy scum somehow swept the leaves off to the side.

  A noise crackled from below. She turned toward the sound, and then heard it again. Something was moving through the trees.

  She rose to one knee, ready to run, then caught a glimpse of someone wearing a blue sweater and khaki pants. It was the boys’ school uniform.

  She stood and waved her arms. “Hey!” she shouted.

  The figure stopped.

  “Over here!” she called.

  As he came toward her, she recognized him as the boy who had sat next to her in the lunchroom. He was the one who had stood on the bench and said a wolf had bit a hole in his pant leg. She wasn’t sure, but she thought his name might have been Chad.

  She looked back up the hill and shouted, “Marshall! Marshall, we’re saved!”

  The following is another excerpt from the secret inquiry into SunRay Farm:

  Senator Wright: As I understand it, you invented Biolene while you were still in college?

  Jonathan Fitzman: Well, not exactly. I got a C-minus on the paper I wrote about my idea for the ergie. So then I dropped out of college and continued to work on it in my parents’ garage. They weren’t too thrilled about that, if you know what I mean.

  Senator Wright: Mr. Fitzman, would you please try not to swing your arms so much as you answer our questions.

  Jonathan Fitzman: Was I swinging my arms? Sorry. I have trouble sitting still too long. I think better when I’m moving.

  Senator Wright: So what exactly is this ergie of yours?

  Jonathan Fitzman: [Laughs.] That’s just what I call the little guy. It’s short for “ergonym.” It’s a single-celled, high-energy microorganism. Very intense! Totally awesome. I got a tattoo of one on my arm, if you want to see what it looks like. It’s an exact replica.

  Senator Foote: I can’t see anything.

  Senator March: Me neither.

  Jonathan Fitzman: Well, like I said, it’s an exact replica. [Laughs.] It’s the smallest tattoo in the world! [Laughs.] You need an electron microscope to see it!