The Rule of Won Read online

  At the bus stop I finally saw good old All-den Moore. He was bogged down with all these books and loose papers. I hadn’t spotted him earlier because he’d changed. He used to be a heavyset kid who wore pants that were too short. Now he’d lost some weight and either shrunk or gotten clothes that fit. Still seemed the nervous sort, though—the kind who’d twitch if you raised your hand too fast, like you might hit him.

  He was busy trying to shove some of those papers into the old khaki army backpack he used for books. The thing was so full, you could see the thread unraveling at the seams. The more stuff he shoved in, the more slipped out, but he wouldn’t give up. With both hands busy, he tried to catch the falling papers under his foot. It was like this weird, awkward dance.

  I scooped some of the papers off the ground and held them out to him.

  As soon as he recognized me, he was like a squirrel, looking all around and wincing.

  “Caleb Dunne. You want to kill me,” he said.

  He snatched the papers from me and hopped about a yard or so away before trying to stuff them into his pack.

  “All-den, it’s okay, really. I don’t want you to die. Not prematurely anyway.”

  “Just suffer, right?”

  Once he realized I wasn’t coming any closer, I got him to stay still long enough to say what I had to.

  “No, I just want you to know, you did what you thought was right and I don’t blame you. I’m not the bullying sort. Too much effort. You don’t have to be afraid.”

  He looked around again, then at me. “I’m not afraid of you. I’m only sorry they didn’t throw you in juvie,” he half muttered under his breath.

  “But I didn’t do anything!”

  “Then why’d you run?”

  “Unbelievable. Because I thought if someone saw me there, they might think I had done something. And I was right, wasn’t I?”

  He grunted. He still didn’t believe me. I guess no one did. Maybe Vicky didn’t either.

  His bus pulled up. He backed up to the doors, keeping his eyes on me like I was going to steal his precious papers. Then he squinted at the button Vicky gave me and did a double take.

  “The Rule of Won?”

  “Yeah. What of it?”

  He shrugged. “It’s only the most incredibly inane book on the entire planet.”

  I wanted to say I was just wearing the damn thing for Vicky, but that’d sound pretty lame, too, eh?

  “No, wait, I don’t . . . I’m just . . .”

  As I babbled, he got on the bus.

  If that little encounter didn’t make me feel all warm and cozy, as the bus pulled out, it farted a big black cloud of exhaust right in my face.

  I guess Ethan would say that I’d asked for it.

  3

  • Ten million dollars would be terrific. I’ll do the rest. Thanks. All best. —Dylan

  • What I really want most of all right now is to earn the trust of our student body by being elected its president. I just know I could do the best job of anyone running, and I want to devote all my spare time to making our school a better place. So please vote for me! —Vicky

  • I want the proportional strength of a spider. If granted this boon, I swear I will always remember that with great strength comes great responsibility. —Jacob

  • The picture is simple and stark: Curly paper edges crammed with handwritten solutions to the Great Unknown X. Red check after red check. No blood, no error, only certainty. It’s algebra, sweet algebra, oh hated friend and foe. I want to pass you, ace you, beat you, swallow you whole, so that even Mr. Eldridge, with his great unclean mustache, shall smile his smile upon me, and the sun will shine and I will get the scholarship that will enable me to go to Hampshire Arts College. Absolutely totally. —Erica

  • OMG! I’m so thrilled we finally have a place to talk about this amazing book and its ideas! Thank you, Ethan! I’ve been a fan ever since its first edition and I can’t wait to see the results I know we’ll get. Do you guys know that Jasper Trelawney didn’t exactly write the book himself? He’d self-published another book, Sitting on the Secret Self, that only sold, like, a hundred copies. I mean, the guy was in his thirties and living in his mother’s garage. One day he got a copy of it back in the mail. He figured it was someone asking for a refund, but then he noticed all these notes written in the margins, correcting his ideas. It was from those notes that he wrote The Rule of Won, which has sold tens of millions of copies and changed millions of lives! So I guess what I’d like for myself most of all is to meet the person who really wrote The Rule of Won. They must be totally amazing, right? —Grace

  • If we’re all going to be working on this together, why not do something that helps all of us? The school budget was cut by, like, half a million dollars last year; the arts program is practically gone; and aside from the fact that we don’t have a gym, there’s no cash for new equipment for the sports teams. How about we all wish for money for the school? —Dana

  • I’m not sure my religion allows me to believe in the fulfillment of all my desires until after I’m dead, so I think I have to quit your club. Sorry. —Luke

  • I would like the greatest gaming system in the world, the Xbox. A 733 MHz Intel main processor and 233 MHz graphics processor from nVidia create photorealistic graphics in real time. A huge hard drive stores saved games and characters, and a built-in Ethernet port enables super-fast multi-player online gaming over a broadband Internet connection. —Landon

  • My parents are going away next weekend and I would absolutely love it if they decided to let me stay home alone, despite the ugly incident last time involving sixteen kids, some of whom I didn’t even really know, and Mom’s collection of porcelain figurines, which really wasn’t my fault. —Jane

  • A new iPod. I lost my old one, right out of my locker. I think someone knows the combination. —Sally

  • There’s someone I really care about who doesn’t know I care about him, and I’d like him to know how I feel without having to tell him. We’re sort of in different cliques, though. Do I have to mention a name? —Kathleen

  • Sorry, my dog ate my craving. —Mike

  • Okay, I’m taking this seriously. I want people to stop staring at me like they want to kill me. I want them to believe me when I say I had nothing to do with the gym collapsing. All this glaring makes me want to scream and make a scene, and if I do, I’ll get expelled. So, a little help here? —Caleb

  • I’ve always wanted exactly what I want whenever I want it, so this club seems great for me! There’s this terrific tank top that would look killer on me if only it came in slate gray to match the highlights on my jeans. They have every color, pastels to neon, except a nice slate gray. I would love it if one of those showed up. —Beth

  • I want to be able to do an ollie, like my brother, but I keep landing on my ass. You’ve got to roll forward and pop down hard on the tail with your back foot. When the nose starts to point up, you drag the front foot up, which causes the skateboard to drag up and get higher. You lift your back foot and eventually stop the drag while the skateboard stops rising. The back rises up to the same level as the other side of the skateboard. Then you land on all four wheels, rolling away. —Alex

  • Nicole and I were BFF since grade school, but now that we’re at Screech Neck High she’s gone all tech-nerd on me and I can’t understand a word she’s saying. Last week she got this seriously tricked-out iPhone that makes everyone’s eyes bug out. It’s not that I’d like an iPhone like that myself, but I’d really like hers to break. —Sophia

  4

  You never know what you can do until you do it. Then again, you also never know what you shouldn’t do until you do that. For instance, the moment I finished writing my Crave, even if I didn’t believe in magic, I actually felt good about it. It was an honest, fearless expression of my feelings of alienation, a cry for help from my fellow man. Maybe it would even make people be nicer to me.

  Seconds later, though, when it was posted on
the board, I felt like a jerk. What was I thinking? Everyone who already hated me would laugh their asses off when they read it—Juvenile Delinquent Dunne doing the sensitive New Age guy thing.

  Crap.

  I even tried hiding my head under my overshirt as I made my way out of the Screech Neck Public Library, where I’d used the computer. Probably no one would have noticed if I’d just walked out, but because of the funny way I was moving, everyone stared.

  Almost everyone. Ethan Skinson was at one of the terminals, straight-backed, shoelaces shining. It was surprising to see someone like him stuck at a public computer. I figured he’d have his own rig.

  I didn’t say hi because, well, I was trying to hide, but past that, I wasn’t sure whether to call him Ethan or Mr. Skinson or My Crave Master. He was too busy to notice me anyway, probably reading my post and struggling to hold back the laughter.

  As the days passed, though, the mockery I feared never materialized. Not everyone knew about the message board, I guess, and those who did had their own Craves to feel uncomfortable about. They rat me out, I rat them out. Mutually assured destruction. Like we all had nukes.

  It did score me points with Vicky. She not only called it “brave,” but by Wednesday, she had agreed to have a meal with me. Yeah, it was lunch, during school hours, and in the cafeteria, but it was a start. At least I thought it was a start.

  After we’d loaded up our Styrofoam trays with steaming heaps of God-knows-what, instead of finding a quiet spot to chat, she led us right next to the table traditionally occupied by our b-ball team, the Screech Neck Basket Cases (I know . . . I didn’t name them). They were hooting and carrying on as if they hadn’t lost every single game they’d played. I guess you could chalk that up to the lack of a gym, but really, they just sucked. And they were loud. I could barely think, let alone talk.

  “Get together after school?” I shouted at Vicky as one of the players leaped up on the table and poured some soda on his screaming teammate.

  “What?” she said, holding a hand to her ear. This week her fingernails had little rainbows on them. With her fingers all together against her head, they made a multicolored wavy line.

  Annoyed, I tried to stab a soggy french fry with my spork. Damn spud was so springy, the tines kept bouncing off. Then the cheap spork snapped. Fed up, I grabbed a pen and paper from my notebook and wrote in nice block letters:

  DO YOU WANT TO GO OUT TOGETHER AFTER SCHOOL?

  I held it up for her to read.

  “Oh,” she said. “Not today, sorry! I’m hanging campaign posters!”

  I scratched that out and wrote:

  HOW ABOUT I HELP U?

  “Uh . . . you don’t have to do that! It’s very, very sweet, but it’s okay! I. . . I like to use it as an excuse to talk to people one on-one!”

  WOULDN’T WANT TO ROB U OF THAT JOY.

  She gave me a look. “You don’t have to write everything out!”

  I’M IMANIFESTING.

  She didn’t laugh. She hadn’t laughed at anything I’d said or done in a long time. Back in middle school, before we were dating, she used to break into hysterics whenever I so much as put a pencil halfway up my nose. Good times.

  Frustrated, I tightened my hand on the pen and was about to jam it up my nostril when she grabbed my hand and mouthed, “Read the book.”

  I really didn’t want to do that. It seemed like such a commitment for something I didn’t believe in at all. Then again, I was still wearing that stupid “1” pin. I told myself I’d just forgotten to take it off my overshirt, which I wore every day, but I guess I was still hoping to impress her. I’d look at it every morning, sigh, and figure taking it off was more of an effort than leaving it on.

  With the pin on, though, I noticed other kids wearing them, too—on shirts, backpacks, coats. One senior wore it in her pierced navel, which was certainly attention grabbing. Turns out there were more Crave People, or Cravers, or whatever they call themselves, at school than came to the meeting. It made me wonder if The Rule was really all that stupid.

  Speaking of the meeting, at the end of the day, when I trotted out of the main building through a rainy afternoon and into that moldy stink-fest of a trailer, Mike, the jock who’d made a joke about his dog on the board, actually smiled and said, “Caleb, how’s it going?”

  A few of the others gave me “hello” nods when I sat.

  Whoa. Maybe my Crave hadn’t been so stupid.

  Or maybe The Rule of Won sort of worked? Nah.

  No one new showed. We even lost maybe five people, but those who remained seemed pretty into it. Erica was there again, writing away. I’d been so busy fretting about my post and trying to get Vicky to go out with me I hadn’t realized until now that she hadn’t been at creative writing all week. Probably skipped it to study algebra.

  Vicky sat next to me and scratched gently at the back of my hair. Given how well lunch had gone, I shook my head, and she stopped. I do have some self-respect. Not a lot, but some.

  Soon the dulcet tones of Ethan Skinson and his vocal stylings filled our ears. “Thanks for coming back.”

  He looked nervous this time. Not All-den nervous. More like he had too much energy. Every now and then his eyes would flash this wild mad scientist look. You’d think it would make him seem more human, but it didn’t.

  “I’ve brought something a little special that I’m pretty excited about, but before we get to that, I want to tell you how great it is that so many people posted Craves. Some weren’t exactly serious, but like the book says, we have to understand things superficially before we understand them deeply. I guess making fun of something you don’t understand is one way to get started on that.”

  You could tell he didn’t mean that. Ethan obviously took this very seriously and didn’t like it when someone else didn’t. I turned back to Vicky, planning to whisper a joke about his shoelaces, when I noticed how serious she looked, and how her pupils dilated a bit as she watched him.

  I knew she liked this guy. Now I was wondering how much. What with the way she’d treated me lately, it was starting to piss me off.

  “Anyway, I’ve decided which Crave we should work on first. . .”

  My hand shot up. “Mr. Skinson?”

  Vicky stiffened. Everyone gave me a look. I was the first person other than Ethan to talk during a Crave. Whoop-dee-doo.

  “Ethan,” Ethan said, clueless I was joking with him.

  “Mr. Ethan,” I shot back. Mike and Erica stifled a chuckle. “I’m just, you know, wondering why you get to decide. Why don’t we all vote on it?”

  I felt Vicky shifting. I figured her hand was reaching for the back of my hair to yank it, but I leaned forward so she couldn’t grab me without making it really obvious.

  The question didn’t bother Ethan. He seemed pleased someone had actually spoken to him.

  “Fair enough, but when you vote, you have a ‘winner’ and a ‘loser,’ right?” he said. Yeah, he did that bizarre air-quote thing with his fingers. “If someone feels they’ve ‘lost,’ it makes it harder to give the ‘winner’ their full effort. Make sense?”

  “Sort of,” I said. But I was also remembering something Joey had said once—that the problem with democracy is that most people are idiots, but the problem with dictatorships is that all dictators are idiots.

  “How about this?” Ethan said. “Anyone think it’d be a bad idea for Screech Neck High to get more funding?”

  Dana, a lean girl with frizzy hair, the one who had written that Crave, beamed. It was a good move from Ethan. Who could object to that?

  “Great,” he said, clapping his hands and rubbing them. “Before we get down to actually imanifesting, I downloaded a meditation read by Jasper Trelawney and brought it along. I thought we could start by giving it a listen.”

  He half turned, and I noticed an iPod on a desk connected to a couple of speakers. Before he could press PLAY, Grace, the giddy Trelawney groupie, raised her hand and shook like she had to pee.

&nb
sp; Apparently now that I’d broken the ice, it was okay for everyone to talk.

  Even Ethan furrowed his brow at her a little. “Yes?”

  She sang out, “Are you sure it’s really him? There’s a big rumor he hired a famous voice actor to play him. Some people say it’s Russell Crowe, but I think it could be Ian McKellen.”

  “I don’t know. But that’s what it says on the download,” Ethan answered.

  “Oh,” Grace said. “I thought maybe you knew more.”

  He shrugged good-naturedly. “Nope. Anyway, as far as I know, he wrote it, so relax, close your eyes if you want, sit back, and . . . listen.”

  Before anyone else could interrupt, he hit PLAY on the iPod, then sat down and closed his eyes. A high voice filled the room, nothing like Ian McKellen or Russell Crowe, or even Ethan. I glanced around the room and saw that most everyone had closed their eyes, even Erica. Mike hadn’t yet. He eyed me with a shrug. I shrugged back and closed my eyes, too.

  And the voice said:

  I dream, sometimes, I’ve swum to the bottom of the ocean. I’m down so deep, have so many miles of water above me, there’s no way I can ever swim back. It’s a one-way trip. I knew that when I started. I’ve sacrificed my life to reach a door, a hole in the bottom of the world. Why? Because on the other side of the door lay the secrets of life, the universe, and everything.

  Once it was easy to reach, as instinctive to embrace as breathing, but I’ve spent too many years away from it, too much time enslaved by petty distractions. It slipped away slowly at first, then faster, but now it’s gone so far away the only thing left for it to do is vanish forever. The only chance I have to reach it again is by being willing to die for it.

  Or maybe it’s always been this far, and I’ve only imagined being closer. It doesn’t matter. My lungs are about to pop like swollen balloons. I grit my teeth, wobble my diaphram up and down, trying to fool my body into thinking I’m giving it some air. My hands wrap around the iron rung in the door’s center. They nearly slip off because of all the slime, but I hold on and pull myself down the final yard. I plant my heels on the sandy floor, brace my legs, brace my soul, and pull.