The Homework Machine Read online

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  I don’t remember whose idea it was, but somebody said we needed a nickname for the homework machine. We needed a code name so we wouldn’t have to say “the homework machine” out loud in front of other people.

  I wanted to call it Doris, myself. Snik said the homework machine wasn’t a girl. We had this big argument about whether or not a boy’s computer had to have a boy’s name or not.

  We tried to think of all the names that could be a boy’s name or a girl’s name. You know, Pat. Chris. Casey. Nicky. Randy. Alex. Jamie. Jordan.

  Then Snik let out this really loud burp and we all laughed. After we finished saying what a disgusting pig Snik was, Brenton suggested we nickname the homework machine Belch.

  I thought it was a little crude, but the others thought it was perfect. So from that moment on, we started to call the homework machine Belch.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  I said fine. Belch. Whatever you want to call it is fine with me. As long as it works.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  My dad had an old chessboard in the bookcase. So I pull it out one night and put the pieces on the squares. No way I was gonna try to play in front of a genius like Brenton, but it was kinda cool fooling around with it. Brenton was right. The game is a lot like war, but in slow motion.

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  I knew from the start that what we were doing was wrong. In the back of my mind, anyway. There was no question about that. I should have stopped everything before it ever got started. But I didn’t. The only thing that I thought about back then was making sure we didn’t get caught.

  We had an informal agreement that Belch would be our little secret, but I thought it should be more official. So all four of us put our hands together and promised not to tell anybody, anybody about Belch.

  If any kid ever found out, we agreed, the person who leaked the secret would be doomed for the rest of his or her life, and afterward, too. They would live a horrible, unhappy existence and they’d get straight F’s on their report cards and they’d never go to college and all their pets would get run over by SUVs. And if anybody’s parents ever found out, well, you could just forget about your childhood. It would be over.

  Everybody agreed, and then we played kickball.

  MISS RASMUSSEN, FIFTH-GRADE TEACHER

  I noticed sometime in November that the D Squad seemed to be coming together as a unit. They were very different in background and so many other ways, but they seemed to be becoming friends. They gravitated toward one another during lunch and recess. They left school at the end of the day as a group.

  I was very pleased. It’s so rare to see a boy like Sam forming a friendship with a boy like Brenton or a girl like Kelsey bonding with a girl like Judy.

  Looking back, I feel like a fool. How could I have been so blind?

  BRENTON DAMAGATCHI, GRADE 5

  About a month after I got that mysterious e-mail, I got another message. I had completely forgotten about him, until I saw the name at the bottom: Milner. This time, the guy sent me an instant message. He asked me what part of the country I lived in, and what kind of computer equipment I used. He said he would pay me if I answered his questions. I didn’t feel comfortable. I probably should have told my parents. But I didn’t particularly want them to know about Belch. I changed my screen name and e-mail address.

  Chapter 4

  December

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  So Brenton keeps asking me if I wanna play chess with him, and I keep saying no because I know he’d beat the snot out of me and I don’t like losing. But I did think the game was cool, and my dad said he’d teach me how to play. He wasn’t an expert or anything, but he was pretty good.

  So Dad says you wanna play a game and I say okay and he says I could be white because white goes first and I’m a beginner.

  I didn’t really know what to do. For my opening move I push the pawn in front of my right knight two squares forward. Dad moves the pawn in front of his king two squares forward. This didn’t look so hard. So I move the pawn in front of my right bishop forward one square. Then Dad slides his queen diagonally all the way to the edge of the board and he says, “Checkmate.”

  I say, “What?!” He says, “You heard me. Checkmate.”

  I ask him how he could checkmate me in just two moves and he says look at your king. So I look at my king. He’s right. My king can’t go anywhere. He’s stuck. Two stinking moves and my king was a dead man. The game was over.

  I say to myself he’s never gonna do that to me again.

  BRENTON DAMAGATCHI, GRADE 5

  I never thought Belch was such a big deal, the way the others did. It was just a tool to make a job easier, like a hammer or a screwdriver. It never interested me very much.

  What interests me? I’ll tell you what interests me. When a whole bunch of people all start doing the same thing at the same time for no apparent reason. That interests me. It’s psychology, I guess.

  I found it fascinating that all the boys would suddenly come to school wearing backward baseball caps. Or that all the girls would start wearing ankle bracelets or ponytails. Why? Those things have to start somewhere, right? Somebody somewhere has to be the first one to do something. I thought it would be interesting to create a fad.

  So I designed this software program. It was fairly simple. It took the words “wear red socks to school on Thursday” and duplicated it and inserted it randomly into documents. I guess you’d call it a virus because I sort of let it loose all over the Internet and people passed it around. I didn’t tell anyone at school about it. I just did it for the fun of it.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  I was in a chat room one night and somebody said something about wearing red socks to school. It sounded like a cool idea and everybody said they would do it, and we’d all tell our friends to do it too.

  MISS RASMUSSEN, FIFTH-GRADE TEACHER

  Every so often we have a “Funny Hair Day” or “Silly Hat Day” at school. But when I came in one Thursday, just about every student in the class was wearing red socks. In fact, just about every student in the whole school was wearing red socks. That was curious. I didn’t recall receiving a memo about it or a flyer that was sent home in the kids’ backpacks. It couldn’t have been merely a coincidence.

  So I asked the kids why they were wearing red socks and they said somebody sent them an e-mail or an instant message or they read it on the Internet. When I came home that night and turned on the TV news, there was a report that kids all over America had worn red socks to school. It didn’t mean anything. It was just for the fun of it.

  There was only one student in my class who, I noticed, wasn’t wearing red socks that day. It was Brenton.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  Sure I wore red socks. Everybody did. Except for Brenton. I figured, of course not. Brenton’s out of it. He probably didn’t get the word.

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  We were over Brenton’s house doing our homework after school that day. I remember we were talking about the whole red socks thing while waiting for the printer to finish. Everybody had on red socks except for Brenton, so I asked him why he didn’t wear red socks. I figured he just never paid attention to fashions or things like that. But he made this cute little smile and we knew something was up because he doesn’t usually smile that much. We made him tell us, and he admitted that he was the one who started the whole red socks fad in the first place. Can you imagine?

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  The red socks thing blew my mind! Think of it. This one kid took his computer and with a few keystrokes got just about everybody in America to do this dumb thing. It was cool! And that kid was sitting next to me. Think of the power! He could make every kid in America hop backward and recite the “Pledge of Allegiance” if he wanted to.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  I remember the night of red socks day, everybody online was chatting about how cool it was.
I couldn’t resist. I told everybody I knew the guy who started the whole thing. I didn’t mention Brenton’s name. Right away, I got an IM from a guy asking me who pulled off red socks day. I didn’t tell him. I didn’t think Brenton wanted everybody to know. The guy gave me his name and an e-mail address in case I changed my mind. The name was Milner.

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  One of the nicest things about Belch was that I had more time after school. I asked my mom if I could take a ballet class on Wednesdays and she said sure, as long as I still had time to do my homework. Before we had Belch, I spent just about every day after school doing my homework. There was no time for anything else.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  Sometimes, when I was sitting at home playing video games or watching TV or just hanging out, I would think about the other saps in my class who were doing homework right then. Ha! Suckers! This is the life. I felt like I won the lottery or something.

  RONNIE TEOTWAWKI, GRADE 5

  I had been watching those D Squad jerks from across the room. I knew something was up way back in December. One day I saw Snikwad, who is relatively cool, walking home from school with that dweeb Brenton Damagatchi. What was up with that? No way the two of them could be friends. Not in a million years. It didn’t make sense. I was suspicious. Something was up. I just didn’t know what.

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  I thought that I would just try Brenton’s machine a few times and then go back to doing my homework the old-fashioned way. But I realized that I liked not having to work so hard on my homework. I liked the extra free time I had. It was so easy to just slip the homework assignment into the scanner and watch the finished homework come out the other end a few minutes later.

  It was like microwave popcorn. My mom told me that when she was a girl, they popped popcorn in a big pot on the stove with oil, and it was greasy and hard to clean up. Now she makes popcorn in the microwave, and she says she would never go back to the old way. That was how I was starting to feel about homework.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  My dad said that if we played a game of chess every night, I would get better and better. So we started playing every night.

  The first thing Dad told me is that wars aren’t won or lost because of guns and soldiers and shooting. They’re won or lost because of strategy. He said the way to win is to build a strong position by slowly accumulating advantages. Like, you want to try to control the four squares in the center of the board.

  It was little things like that. Stuff you don’t normally think of. Like, when your king is in the middle of the board, he has eight squares he can escape to. But when he’s at the edge of the board, he has just five squares he can escape to. And if he’s in the corner, he only has three squares. He’s just about dead.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  I was hanging around doing nothing and my mother starts in giving me a hard time. “When are you going to do your homework, Kelsey?” And all that. So I told her I did it already, over at Brenton’s house.

  Well, she doesn’t believe me, of course. She says, “If you’re lying, you’re grounded, young lady.” So I showed her my homework and she looks it over real carefully. Finally she says I did a good job and if I kept it up like that she would let me pierce my belly button. Ha! It was great.

  BRENTON DAMAGATCHI, GRADE 5

  After we finished doing everybody’s homework, they went home. They didn’t usually hang around, and that was fine with me. I had my own projects to work on.

  Every so often I would ask Snik if he wanted to play a game of chess, but he always turned me down. He said he had a dentist appointment or he wasn’t feeling well or something. I knew that it was just an excuse. He didn’t like me enough to get together unless we were doing our homework. That was fine. As I said, I really don’t need or have time for friends. But it did please my mother to think they were my friends, and I like to please my mother. After a while, I stopped asking Snik to play.

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  Every so often I would stay after we finished our homework. Unlike most boys, you can talk to Brenton about things other than sports and motorcycles and dumb things like that. I could bring up something about, say, classical music or politics, and he would be able to discuss it. Nobody else was like that. Brenton knows about everything. He’s like an encyclopedia.

  MISS RASMUSSEN, FIFTH-GRADE TEACHER

  It was getting close to the holidays and I noticed that the kids in the D Squad were doing remarkably well. I certainly expected it from Brenton and Judy, but Sam and Kelsey were working on A’s in all their subjects, which was a surprise. Their parents thought I was a miracle worker.

  In the back of my mind, I suspected that Sam and Kelsey might be copying off Brenton and Judy. But I wanted to believe that all my lessons about hard work were starting to pay off. Now, of course, I realize I was just fooling myself.

  KELSEY’S MOM

  When Kelsey brought home her end-of-the-year report card with all A’s and B’s on it, I just about fell off my chair. She had always been a C student. I figured there had to be some kind of mistake. I thought Miss Rasmussen switched the report cards around or something.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  My mom said that because my report card was so good, I could get my belly button pierced. We drove over to the place, but I chickened out at the last minute. It was too scary. I couldn’t go through with it.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  So I thought of a great idea. You know how McDonald’s and Burger King and all those other fast-food joints are in just about every town? Well, what if there was a Belch in every town? Kids could go there after school to get their homework done. That would be cool.

  Kids could ride in with their bikes, drop off their homework assignment at the first window, and then ride up to the second window a few minutes later to pick up their finished homework. We could call it McHomework.

  Just think of it! There are millions of kids in the United States. If each of those kids paid a dollar a day to get their homework done, we would be rich. We would be richer than Bill Gates!

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  Snik told us about his harebrained idea to franchise Belch and have kids ride their bikes up to the drive-through window like it was a fastfood restaurant. I told him he was out of his mind. If any parents ever found out about Belch, it would be all over. Nobody would ever let their kids go to a place like that.

  He admitted I was right and said, “Well, it was a good idea while it lasted.” Yeah, and it lasted about three minutes. I also reminded him that we had a pact to keep the whole thing a secret.

  BRENTON DAMAGATCHI, GRADE 5

  Sometime in October, I noticed a subtle shift in the way the other students were acting toward me. It appeared that they were no longer calling me “dork” or “nerd” or “geek” and they had started to refer to me as “dude.”

  It was difficult to explain. I certainly had not changed. The only difference in my life, as far as I could see, was that I was often in the company of Snik. So my hypothesis was that other kids thought I was cool because I was with someone who they perceived to be cool. I had become cool by association.

  This was easy to test, using the scientific method. I had been compiling data for months. When I plugged it into the computer, the results confirmed my hypothesis.

  I showed my graph to Snik. He laughed and said, “If you ask me, you’re still a dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork, dork.”

  I believe that will change the results of my experiment.

  SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

  I couldn’t stop thinking about red socks day and how cool it was. So I tell the others we should start a fad, and they say what kind of fad, and I say I don’t know, something really stupid. We start batting around some ideas like green socks day or pink socks day or no-socks day and they all sound lame. Be
en there, done that.

  I say we could do a thing where every time Miss Rasmussen says the word “class” we all drop a pencil on the floor. Or something like that. But Judy gets all bent out of shape because she thinks we’ll get in trouble.

  Kelsey says we should do something really twisted, and I think it was Brenton who said he always thought it would be interesting if everybody came to school wearing our clothes inside out. No harm in that. We all agree that would be the greatest, so Brenton does his thing with the computer like last time and we go home.

  The next day, like every kid in America comes to school with their clothes inside out. It was awesome.

  MISS RASMUSSEN, FIFTH-GRADE TEACHER

  It was the last day of school before Christmas vacation, I believe. I walked into the class and they were all just sitting there with their hands folded on their desks, grinning these little grins. Then I noticed their clothes.

  JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

  Miss Rasmussen just stood there and looked at us. Then she said she had to go to the office. I thought for sure that we were all going to be in big trouble. Maybe we would all be suspended. It was going to totally ruin the holidays.

  A few minutes later, she walked back in the class, and she was wearing her clothes inside out! It was the greatest. She’s pretty cool for a teacher. We gave her a standing ovation.

  KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

  After inside-out day, I got another IM from that Milner guy. He asked me if the same kid who started red socks day had anything to do with inside-out day. He was creeping me out. I told him it was none of his business, and if I ever heard from him again, I would call the police. I also said my dad would find him and beat him up. So he types back, “Kelsey, you don’t have a dad.” How did he know I didn’t have a dad? How did he know my name was Kelsey? That really creeped me out. I was going to tell everybody about it, but then all that stuff happened with Snik’s dad.