Baxter Bean was not the chosen one.
He was not handsome, gifted, or popular. He wasn’t the son of a god or goddess or wizards. His parents were humans, and they were not spies, ninjas, or royalty. They weren’t even very interesting. Baxter’s mom was a receptionist at a dentist’s office. His father repaired photocopy machines. Baxter had no special magical abilities or hidden superpowers.
In other words, Baxter Bean was a fairly ordinary thirteen-year-old boy.
Baxter was, however, a boy with a problem. Little did he know that by the end of the day, he’d have a lot more problems, each bigger than the last.
At the moment, Baxter was focused on getting out of the school and onto the number 7 school bus on time so that he could get home.
Believe it or not, this was a problem.
Baxter had to take a rather long and tortured journey through and around the school to get on the bus. This was because there was a certain hazard between Baxter and the bus, a hazard he was eager to avoid.
If Baxter missed the bus, he’d have to call his mom for a ride. If he called his mom for a ride, she’d have to leave work to come get him. If she had to leave work, her boss would be upset. And if Baxter’s mom’s boss got upset with her, she would be very angry at Baxter.
Mr. Norris, Baxter’s life-science teacher, was wrapping up class. The final bell wouldn’t ring for a few more minutes, but Baxter was getting ready to go. When he rather noisily unzipped his binder, Mr. Norris shot him a glance. When Baxter slid some papers into the binder and jammed the binder into his backpack, Mr. Norris spun around.
“Mr. Bean, if you please,” said Mr. Norris. “Settle down. Class isn’t over, yet.”
Baxter responded by pushing his glasses up onto his face, crumpling into the seat of his desk, and trying to become invisible.
More than almost anything, Baxter hated to be noticed. He never wanted to stand out. It helped that Baxter was rather average in appearance and height. He wasn’t exceptionally tall, but he was rather on the thin side. His posture was hunched, as if he were always ducking for cover. Baxter greatly resembled a walking question mark. This was appropriate, because Baxter himself was something of a question in the minds of those around him. Who was Baxter Bean? What was he like? No one really knew. No one really cared.
He didn’t play sports. Baxter sometimes tried out for a sports team, usually because his parents made him, but he was always a little too clumsy and unskilled.
Neither did Baxter excel in schoolwork. He wasn’t super brainy. Baxter didn’t get straight As, wasn’t captain of the chess club, and did not compete on the science trivia squad.
Baxter would have to deal with Mr. Norris later. Right now, he needed to focus on getting to that bus. He took a chance and sat up straight and tall in his seat, craning his neck so that he could look out over the class. He wanted to see if anyone else was planning a quick exit of Mr. Norris’s classroom. Most of the other students were hunched over their notes. This made Baxter suddenly stand out like a giraffe rising up after drinking from a desert watering hole. Mr. Norris noticed this and shot him another look. It was a risk Baxter had to take.
If he wasn’t first out the door after the bell rang, he’d be stuck in the after-school traffic jam. If he got stuck in the traffic jam, he’d miss his bus. The consequences of that have already been discussed. To negotiate his complicated route to the school parking lot, he simply had to be the first kid out of that door.
And so, Baxter crumpled again and readied himself, chewing his lower lip and keeping an eye on the clock. The second hand swept around the clock face one last time. The bell rang. Baxter lunged at the door.
He did not make it.
Jacob and Winnie got there first without really trying. Tyler B. was right behind them. More students crammed in, clogging the doorway like a massive wad of hair in the drain of a bathroom sink. There were only about twenty-eight students in Mr. Norris’s class. Now it seemed like fifty additional kids had somehow materialized. They shuffled toward the door and into the hallway like a horde of carefree zombies.
When Baxter finally broke free, he had fifteen minutes to reach the number 7 bus. For everyone else, this was a simple matter. Everyone else simply merged with the outgoing tide of students. Then they went through the main doors and outside, where the buses awaited. Fifteen minutes was more than enough time for every single student in the school to get on their buses. In fact, it was more than enough time. Lots of kids took bathroom breaks and even stopped by their lockers on the way out. Some got to their buses so fast, they sat and complained about having to wait for so long before getting underway. For everyone else, there was no problem.
But Baxter wasn’t everyone else.
And so instead of leaving Mr. Norris’s classroom and turning right, toward the front doors, Baxter dodged left. He went farther into the school. This was a problem because everyone else was trying to get out of the school. Baxter alone went the opposite direction, pushing through like a salmon struggling upstream. It was slow going. It took him nearly four minutes to reach the empty cafeteria.
Eleven minutes remained.
Under the bewildered gaze of the cleaning crew, Baxter zig-zagged around the tables stacked with chairs and out of the cafeteria. He emerged into another hallway that led past the science classrooms and the ceramic lab. Here he turned a corner to cut through the practice gym, where the drama club was gathering for annual try-outs.
If it seems like Baxter’s routine was a lot more complicated than it should have been, that’s only because it definitely was. But there was a reason Baxter swam upstream this way. There was a reason he took tortured, confusing long-cuts instead of the short kind. There was a reason for all of this, and his name was Garth Masters.
Garth was a handsome eighth-grader who was popular, got good grades, and was great at sports. Everyone liked Garth—teachers and students. He had a warm smile, a quick sense of humor, and school busloads of charm. Sadly, Garth had a secretly cruel and mischievous side. The year before, Garth had been caught lighting firecrackers and stuffing them into the little air vents in the door of Tim Bilotta’s gym locker. Tim’s gym uniform was left in tatters. His gym shoes and asthma inhaler had been blown to smithereens.
As punishment, Garth’s parents (who it seemed had a mean streak of their own) pulled Garth off the soccer team, canceled his allowance, and grounded him for the entire school year.
This may seem like it had nothing to do with Baxter Bean, and it really did not. However, Garth was convinced that someone had ratted him out, and he somehow got it into his head that this someone was Baxter.
It wasn’t Baxter, of course. Baxter would never rat on anyone, not because he was such a loyal friend (he really had no friends), but because Baxter always kept to himself. Baxter always kept his mouth shut. More than anything, he stayed very busy trying to attract as little attention as possible.
Baxter had a strict policy: never, ever get involved with anything at any time for any reason.
If there was one thing Baxter would admit to being good at, it was going unnoticed. It sometimes seemed like Baxter really could make himself invisible. He was probably better at this than any other kid in his entire school.
“It wasn’t me,” Baxter had told Garth. “I’m really more of a chicken than a rat. Ask anyone.”
But Garth didn’t believe Baxter. When he found Baxter hiding in the boys’ bathroom one morning, he pinned Baxter to the door of a toilet-stall.
“I want you to prepare yourself, Bean,” said Garth through clenched teeth. “Prepare yourself for the worst year of school you’ve ever had.”
Baxter had never had a really good school year, but Garth was true to his word. In the months that followed, he proved himself to be a tireless bully and one of exceptional talent. If he passed by Baxter in the hallway, he’d accidentally-on-purpose slam his shoulder into Baxter, sending him careening into other students. One time Garth’s aim was so good, he knocked Baxter into Jill Hive’s open locker. Or Garth would creep up behind Baxter like a ghost and then kick his feet out from under him, sending Baxter sprawling across the floor.
Baxter was thin and not very heavy. This made it easy for the muscular Garth to carry Baxter on his shoulder like a sack of potatoes to the nearest drinking fountain. There he’d set Baxter in the stainless-steel basin and press the button, soaking Baxter from the waist down. Garth pelted Baxter with snowballs when snow was available. He lobbed Baxter’s backpack onto the roof of the school. He tossed Baxter’s glasses into the toilet. Garth seemed to have an infinite variety of ways to torment Baxter. Everyone knew Garth was very athletic, but Baxter learned that he was also endlessly creative.
And it wasn’t just attacks of the hands-on kind. Garth also made a point of calling Baxter by his last name, Bean. He drew it out to make it sound like something disgusting. And of course he sang that stupid playground song, the one about beans being a “musical fruit.”
Despite his cruel streak, Garth was a studious eighth grader and managed his time wisely. To keep his grades from suffering, Garth worked hard while school was in session and scheduled his bullying activities for after school.
This was the reason Baxter had developed his elaborate and covert method of reaching the number 7 bus—to avoid Garth.
Baxter really should have reported all of this. He should have told his teachers or the school counselor or the principal or even his parents. Baxter's school had a very strict and effective rule against bullying. If Baxter had only made a report about it, he could probably have avoided the entire mess. But that would have required Baxter to speak up, draw attention to himself, and do what he had always least wanted—to be noticed.
Of course, Baxter didn’t have to report the trouble himself. Everyone knows that kids who are being bullied sometimes stay quiet about it. Anyone else in the school might have also reported Baxter’s problem. However, because Baxter did such a great job of going unnoticed, no one noticed him. No one knew him. A lot of kids didn’t even know Baxter’s name—even some of them in his very own classes. And so, it was difficult for other students to come forward on Baxter’s behalf.
By the time Baxter emerged from the practice gym, he had eight minutes left. This was more than enough time to exit through the rear doors of the school and slip between the foul-smelling dumpsters. Then he’d hustle down the baseline of the tennis courts and finally loop back around the north side of the school to the parking lot. There he’d hide among the ancient elm trees, check once more to see if the coast was clear of Garth, and then at last climb aboard Old Number 7.
Besides going unnoticed, there was one other thing Baxter would admit he was good at, and that was evading Garth Masters. Baxter seemed to have developed an uncanny sense of distance, direction, and pace. Even with Garth hot on his trail, Baxter had a way of ducking away unexpectedly.
Baxter had a scant fifteen or sixteen minutes to make it to his bus, and this was challenging. However, he’d also learned that he never wanted to arrive at his bus too early, either. If he got to his bus with, say, six minutes to spare, that would leave two minutes for Garth to locate Baxter, three minutes to torment Baxter, and one full minute for Garth to then go and catch his own bus.
A feeling of relief was growing in Baxter. If he could get on that bus, it would be three days in a row that he’d avoided Garth after school. This may not sound like much, but the record for Garth-free after-schools was only five days in a row. The only reason Baxter had managed that record was that Garth had some wisdom teeth pulled. And even then, Garth had managed to catch Baxter at lunchtime and fling a spoonful of mashed potatoes into his hair.
Baxter still had to make it to the bus, of course. He had a bad moment when he spotted someone skulking around the dumpsters. For an instant, Baxter felt his heart might stop. For an instant, Baxter thought Garth had finally figured out his maze-like trail from Mr. Norris’s classroom, through the entirety of the school and back out to the parking lot. But it wasn’t Garth. It was two kids Baxter didn’t recognize. Baxter moved on, stepping lightly past the tennis courts. Not far now. Baxter pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and glanced at his watch.
Two full minutes!
He came around the long side of the massive school and peeked around the corner. The parking lot lay vast and gray in the distance. Students milled about, but Garth was nowhere in sight. The ancient elms were in view and beyond them the yellow and black hulks of the school buses. He’d made it.
Just then there came a noise from behind him. He turned around and saw something that froze him in place and took his breath away completely. In that moment, his heart really did stop.
This, too, was a problem.
