Super Rescue Mission! 💖

The thing about Snowball was that even though she wore more heart on her sleeve than just about anybody (sometimes, after her grodier experiments, literally), she was still a complete and total mystery to me. Even after months of her openly crushing on me, I still knew barely anything about her. One day, she was acting more calm and normal than usual, so I decided to rectify that.

Oh, and don’t get the wrong idea, by the way. This was strictly a “know your enemy” type deal. I figured if I couldn’t get rid of her, the least I could do was find out what made her tick so that hopefully, one day, I could shake her once and for all.

What? Don’t look at me like that. I’m serious. There was absolutely nothing more to this than that, ok? No ulterior motives. No deep, hidden meanings. Definitely no romance in bloom. Got it? Good.

Anyway.

“Hey,” I said, breaking the ice-cold silence between us. We were eating popsicles together in sub-freezing temperatures outside the gym before school. Such is the life of a high schooler with both first-period PE and the seemingly undivided attention of a crazy mad scientist whose favorite food was rainbow popsicles — “Because rainbow is my favorite color!” she had once told me, with a smile so wide you could drive a tractor on it. She seemed fine with the morbid cold. Meanwhile I was shivering top to toe and trying not to flash back to the time eating one of these things got my head blown clean off my neck. “Why do you like science so much anyway? And, like, inventing machines and stuff?”

She smiled slyly. “So you’re interested in me, Comb?”

“Yeah” — I just shrugged and told the truth — “I am. There has to be some reason, right?”

“Mhm. There is.” She looked off into the cloudy distance. “Don’t you think it would be amazing? To make a big discovery? To find something or create something that changes the world? Changes everyone’s life for the better? Makes life easier, or even just more fun for people?”

Really? That was why? All she had done so far was make my life more difficult, it felt like. More interesting, sure. And definitely more colorful. Almost as colorful as the tube of HFCS and artificial dyes I was eating for breakfast. But definitely more difficult.

“Then people would remember you forever. You would go down in history for having done something super, super good for everyone, and you’d be loved for as long as people remembered how you revolutionized things. That was what I wanted to do too. And it was why I wanted to become an amazing scientist in the first place.”

I gotta come clean: I didn’t expect that. I didn’t think her reason for liking what she liked would be so lofty and high-minded. I actually didn’t believe she’d even really have any decent explanation at all. I kind of just asked her that question on a whim. “Was? Past tense? So it’s not anymore?”

She laughed, but it seemed like there was a note of sadness in it. Maybe it was just the freezing weather getting to me so early in the morning. “Nope,” she said. “Not anymore. I realized pretty quickly that’s not me. I’m not that type of scientist and I’m definitely not that type of person. The type who makes a big discovery. Who invents something nobody will ever forget. Who makes waves in the world and whose super skillz make a great leap forward for all humanity. I just don’t have that kind of thing in me after all, I realized.”

“That’s kinda sad…” … is what I said, but really, that was how life was sometimes. Most of the time, actually. And I knew it. Sometimes when you have big dreams, reality comes knocking. Other times, it shows up, knees you in the gut, steals your wallet, insults your grandmother, and runs away laughing.

“However,” Snowball then said, perking up a little, “that’s ok. Even if I can’t make a big leap, I can still take a step forward. I think that sometimes it’s ok to follow the path that’s been laid out for you, and then take just one more step. Tread just that much more ground for whoever comes next. Add just a little more to what has already been achieved.”

“What do you mean?” I was genuinely curious and, to my surprise, genuinely interested in what she was getting at. Snowball seemed to have an interesting philosophy all her own. Well, she was nothing if not unique, I guess. Though she was also a great deal more than that.

“What I mean is I think I’m going to keep inventing and experimenting.” She smiled. I gulped. “Always. No matter what, Comb.”

I can’t say I was exactly picking up all she was putting down at the time. But now, funnily enough, after all that happened, I think I kind of get it. I’m getting ahead of myself again though. Back to the story: I had another question for her too. A less abstract one this time. One that had been bothering me for a while now. “Why do you always call me Comb anyway?” I asked. She’d been calling me that for months, ever since I met her. It wasn’t my name.

“Because you're my Comb, Comb!” She slurped the last scrap of rainbow slush off of her popsicle stick and pointed to herself with it. “Honey.” Then she pointed to me. “Comb. I’m doing my part. You can start calling me Honey whenever you’re ready, Comb!”

Oh, brother, was all I could think.

Yeah, Snowball was a mystery alright. Why the heck did she like me anyway? No matter how much I thought about it, I never came up with an answer to that question that made even a half lick of sense. Even now, I still don’t know what she saw in me. But at that time, as winter was winding down and, much like the season, Snowball herself seemed to be mellowing out, growing calmer and not instigating so many weird escapades anymore, I figured I could probably stop being so cold to her myself. If she could learn my boundaries and respect them — and it seemed like she was learning, acting less crazy and nutso all the time — then maybe I could loosen up a little too, I thought. I still didn’t like her like she liked me, of course, but I figured maybe we could meet each other somewhere in the middle. And who knew? Maybe one day we could even become pals.

The very next day she hijacked the school PA system to overwrite the usual fifth-period announcements with a 37-page mathematical proof of her eternal, undying love for me, though, and any sympathy I might have been building up for her dried up faster than a dish sponge stranded in the Sahara. That’s what was going through my mind as I sunk into my seat like a puddle of pure embarrassment to the background tune of a chorus of laughter from the entire class. Thus my insane, unsafe life as Snowball’s test subject number one continued.

#

Until one day, it didn’t continue. All at once, it all stopped. Almost as abruptly as she had shown up, Snowball had disappeared. She had seemingly stopped coming to school entirely. At first I thought she was maybe just sick — a few days’ reprieve for me. But as her absence stretched on, I began to feel more and more that she was somehow gone for good. Began to feel that just like that, I was free. No more wacko experiments. No more lamebrained lovebombing. Nothing. Just sweet, sweet nothing. And once the insanity finally came to an end, I had to say…

“... I kinda miss her actually.”

“Really, dude?” my best friend Fence asked. We were on the top landing of the staircase to the school roof — where the principal’s office was — on a Friday after school. For some reason we had both been called here.

“Hell no. I’m just pulling your leg. I’m glad she’s gone. Couldn’t be happier.”

“I dunno about that, dude…” Fence broke into a smirk that I sincerely wanted to wipe off his face.

“Well, know about it,” I said, then added a “Hmph!” and leaned back in my seat — they had some chairs set up here as a makeshift waiting room — and laced my fingers behind my head to show I really, seriously didn’t give a flying fart about Snowball. “I feel like I'm on top of the world now that she’s out of my life, hopefully for good.”

“Uh-huh. Whatever you say, dude.”

“Hmph.”

That was when we were called into the principal’s office proper. We stepped out onto the roof of the school, which was actually a massive tomato garden, and then into a small birdcage-shaped greenhouse that doubled as Principal Stuart Pid’s workplace. Inside the greenhouse was a quaint little kitchen where Principal Pid cooked up and bottled his very own catsu— err, ketchup.

Inside, we came across the principal at his desk. He invited us to sit. “You’re probably wondering why I’ve called you here today.” Principal Pid was a twig of a man in a tweed jacket and little round glasses like transparent quarters that made his eyes look like two magnified wet beans. As he spoke to us, the last remaining wisp of white hair cropping up out of his pinkish skull bobbed up and down. “And you have every right to. Before you ask: no. Neither of you has done anything wrong.”

“Thank goodness.” Fence breathed a relieved sigh.“I was worried someone found out about that piranha I’ve been raising in the toilet in the second-floor bathrooms.”

“Wait, what?”

“UHHH. N-nothing, sir. Didn’t say a word.”

“I’ll just pretend I didn’t hear that. For my own sanity. And because it has nothing to do with the more pressing problem of the hour.”

I guessed aloud that this “more pressing problem” was why we had been called here, and it turned out I was right.

“The reason I’ve called you both here today,” Principal Pid explained, “is very simple. As you are very likely aware, one of our brightest and most inventive students, Snowball, has recently stopped coming to school.”

Brightest and most inventive? Choice words from the principal. Choice words that I had a few of my own choice words about. Namely that even if Snowball really did have enough lights on upstairs to be counted on of the school’s brightest students, well, her usual antics still proved no one was home.

Regardless, I kept my trap shut and just listened. I already didn’t like where this was seemingly headed. But I needed the details. Needed them like a bystander needs to pry a space between their fingers to watch the car wreck, damage be damned.

“More precisely,” Principal Pid continued, “she’s gone missing. And you — yes, you” — he jabbed one of his gnarly, arthritic fingers right in my face — “are the only one who can save her!”

Never mind. I could stand not to watch the car wreck. Never wanted to watch one ever again, actually. I spun on my heels, hoping beyond hope I was quick enough to hightail it before I could get sucked even further into this mess. Fat chance of that though, with how much I’d been slacking on the cardio. Why oh why had I let my mile times in PE get so lousy? Oh, right. Because Snowball was glowing, gushing, and, most importantly and perilously, inventing so much off the so-called “inspiration” of seeing me run fast that I had to slow myself down on purpose just to get her to stop. So that was her fault too. Literally all of this was!

I crossed my fingers, toes — hell, even my eyes, why not? — and skedaddled. Ran like the wind, to put it a pint or two more poetically, I guess. Ran like the wind if the wind had its shirt collar crumpled in its principal’s fist and its legs suspended two inches off the ground, treading air and getting absolutely nowhere.

“Ugggghhhhh.” I groaned, hoping it would maybe help expel some of my frustration. It didn’t. “Fine. You got me.”

“You’ll help then?” Principal Pid asked innocently, as if he didn’t have me literally by the neck in a damn vicegrip and/or was about to take no for an answer. “You’ll accept your mission to rescue Snowball without running?”

Still hanging in midair, I cupped my chin in my hands, and replied with a rueful grin, a resigned sigh and a blatant lie: “I wouldn’t even dream of it.”

To be continued!