Unbelievably Boring Bart Read online

  Almost everybody in the audience was surprised by this new wave of Lerkians. They were absolutely ferocious!

  In the normal phone version of the game, Lerkians do their destroying in a slow, methodical way. This gives the player plenty of time to shoo them away. But not these 2.0 Lerkians. They attacked the screen like they were wild dogs and the jumbotron was a giant pile of raw meat.

  All of which was completely on purpose, of course. During my all-nighter of coding, I amped up the Lerkians’ aggressive behavior to an extreme.

  CyberGirl03: Is it me, or are these Lerkians extra mean?

  BoringBart: Maybe it’s just because they look bigger? You know, on a giant screen?

  CyberGirl03: No, I’m watching this on my laptop and they’re still scaring me.

  BoringBart: Well, don’t worry. There are three players fighting them all at once. I’m sure they’ll be fine.

  (Note: They will not be fine. I designed it that way. Heh heh heh.)

  The Lerkians appeared to be quickly ripping apart the very fabric of the screen to reveal the chips and wires beneath. More sparks flew. Gotta hand it to the ChickenHead LavaLamp physical effects team—it all looked really dangerous to be up there on that stage! The audience flinched and gasped with every sizzle and pop.

  Nick said, “I’ve got this,” then stepped forward, texting device in his hands.

  Now what Nick typed was this: “Alien punks! Nick the Awesome is here. If I were you, I’d start running!” A typical opening gambit. Serious Hecklr players know to start with a general threat and save the big guns for later.

  But on-screen, his command appeared like this:

  GREETINGS, MY NEW ALIEN MASTERS! IF YOU SPARE ME, I’LL HELP YOU DEFEAT THE OTHER HUMANS!

  The audience began to laugh and boo at the same time. Nick looked down at his texting device, then up at the screen, then back down to the texting device. He pulled off his headset.

  “Wait, I didn’t say that! What’s going on?”

  But it was kind of hard to hear him over all the booooos.

  Giselle stepped in. And by “stepped in,” I mean she stepped into Nick’s space and knocked him over with the delicacy of a wrecking ball hitting the side of a one-hundred-year-old building.

  “I’m not gonna let you double-cross us, jerk!” Giselle said.

  And then she typed: “You’d better not let me catch any of you Lerkians. Because if I do, I’ll use you to floss my teeth!”

  But what appeared on-screen was a wee bit different:

  I’M SO OBLIVIOUS TO EVERYTHING AROUND ME, I’M SURPRISED I HAVEN’T KNOCKED THE JUMBOTRON OVER YET.

  The Lerkians, of course, ignored this weird moment of self-reflection from Giselle and continued destroying the giant jumbotron screen. I watched Giselle do a double take before she removed her own headset. Which was poor timing on her part, because that was the exact moment the Lerkians had done enough damage to trigger…

  A gross, wet lava burst!

  That nailed her right in the kisser.

  Commander Magma told the audience, “Uh-oh… lava bursts this early in the round mean the Lerkians have a serious advantage.” Then, to the players: “You’d better step up your game, people.”

  Nick, meanwhile, had climbed back to his feet and was furiously typing, trying to turn the tide. But he noticed that Tigran wasn’t really doing much of anything.

  “Yo, T! You going to play this game, or what?”

  Tigran didn’t bother typing anything on his texting device. But somehow his words began to appear on the screen anyway:

  I BORROW STUFF FROM PEOPLE ALL THE TIME BUT NEVER RETURN THEM. HA HA HA, SUCKERS!!!

  Now that got Tigran’s attention. He ripped off his headset and looked at the screen with a defiant sneer. “Hey! I didn’t say that!” A fresh round of jeers came out of the bleachers. I’m guessing these came from every student who had “loaned” Tigran something over the years.

  Commander Magma cautioned him: “Tigran, buddy, you might want to take this game more seriously. Because you’re about to—”

  Whoops, too late. A deluge of organic, allergen-free lava came out of a nozzle below the screen like water from a fire hose. Tigran was knocked off his feet. But that didn’t prevent another text message appearing on the jumbotron screen:

  OH, IF I EVER BORROWED ANYTHING FROM YOU, SEE ME AFTER THE GAME AND I’LL GIVE IT BACK.

  When Tigran saw that, he didn’t even bother getting up to resume the game. He bolted. And let me tell you, about a dozen or so middle schoolers stood up from the bleachers and went after him.

  CyberGirl03: Are you watching this???

  BoringBart: Crazy, huh?

  Nick, meanwhile, was trying his best to gain some control over the on-screen Lerkians. But they were feasting on jumbotron parts like it was an all-you-can-eat buffet at Jo-Jo Ann’s Giant TV Screen Emporium.

  (Okay, so maybe that store doesn’t exist. But if it did, I’d shop there all the time.)

  “Please don’t lava me, please don’t lava me, please don’t lava me,” Nick mumbled, probably forgetting he was still wearing his headset and the entire crowd could hear him. Cue: waves of laughter. And then on-screen: a message from Nick that he didn’t write.

  GISELLE, YOU LOOK LIKE A GIANT RASPBERRY. HAH HAH HAH!!!

  Nick’s jaw dropped the moment he caught a glimpse of the screen. A very red (and dripping wet) Giselle followed his gaze up to the screen.

  “I d-d-didn’t wr-write that!” Nick stammered.

  Which was true. This whole time, I had been the one writing their messages, in real time, right from my phone from my seat in the bleachers.

  Now in all the time I’ve known Giselle, she’s never made eye contact with anyone. Her MO was to slam into you and pretend like you didn’t exist. At this moment, however, she locked eyes on Nick, and I swear, I could feel the heat from the fireballs of pure rage in her eye sockets from a hundred yards away.

  Commander Magma could see it, too.

  “Guys! Seriously! You don’t want to fight each other. The Lerkians are going to win! And that means death by lava and chicken feathers for everyone in this field!”

  YOU’D BETTER START RUNNING, NICK

  Wait! I didn’t type that—it must’ve come straight from Giselle!

  Nick was no fool. He scrambled toward stage left, with Giselle the Heat-Seeking Missile close behind. Only he was a fraction of a second too late, because another air-raid siren blasted through the air. And then the biggest lava burst yet hit Nick and Giselle with the force of a tidal wave, knocking them clean off the stage and onto the grass.

  This left poor Commander Magma alone on the stage. I sort of felt bad for him. He was hoping for a fun demonstration of Hecklr, but instead ended up refereeing a lava-soaked embarrassment that was being live-streamed to a million people.

  And it was about to get worse.

  “Heh heh,” Commander Magma laughed nervously. “Well, I suppose Nick, Giselle, and Tigran couldn’t handle the pressure of planet-wide invasion. But unless we have someone stop these Lerkians, all of you—yes you, in the audience—are going to know what it feels like to drown in lava, followed by a new suit of chicken feathers.”

  A few people in the crowd laughed nervously.

  “No… um, I’m being serious. I have no way of shutting off this game. And unless someone steps forward to fight these things, we’re all in for an incredibly messy evening.”

  I could see everyone on the field and in the bleachers murmuring to each other. You go up there. No, you go up there. Are you nuts? I don’t want to get sprayed by lava in front of a million gamers! We’re going to get sprayed by lava, anyway! And so on.

  And I know I should have kept my head down, but I couldn’t resist. Even though I went against everything I stood for (namely, staying seated, keeping my head down, attracting zero attention), I rose from my seat and shouted:

  “I’ll do it!”

  BARTHOLO-WHO? PT. 2

  WHAAAAAAAAT was
pretty much the reaction from the entire crowd as they turned to look at me up in the bleachers. Even my dad turned to look in my direction with shock on his face. Is that my son? Speaking out loud? In public?

  Commander Magma ordered the tech crew to swing the spotlights in my direction. Everybody around me took a step back, leaving me brightly lit and completely exposed to the whole field. Gulp. What was I thinking?

  My phone buzzed with an incoming message.

  CyberGirl03: OMG. Is that YOU up there on the top bleacher? Did you just say that you’d play the game onstage?

  BoringBart: Um… BRB.

  “Well, come on down, bro!” Commander Magma bellowed from the stage, thrilled to have someone volunteering for this sure-to-be-suicidal mission. The whole joint might end up covered in fruit juice and feathers, but at least they’ll have gone down swinging.

  The rest of my body realized what my mouth had just done. I froze.

  Commander Magma said, “Time is of the essence, dude. You don’t want the Lerkians to win, do you?”

  Well, it was too late to turn back now. So I started trotting down the bleachers, feeling a billion eyes on me. I could practically hear the questions rattling around their minds: Who the heck is this guy? Does he even go to Rancho Verdugo Middle School?

  But by the time I reached the stage, one person recognized me. And that was Nick the Mimic, dripping wet with fake lava. And weirdly, he seemed genuinely happy to see me.

  “Hey, is that you, Bartholomew Bean? I didn’t know you played!”

  And as I ascended the stage, Nick had succeeded in getting a chant going. It was quiet at first, but within a few moments had reached fever pitch. The only problem is, they misheard Nick. So instead of the crowd chanting my actual name, this is what I heard:

  MART! MART! MART! MART!

  Up close, Commander Magma didn’t seem as tall as I thought. He handed me an AR headset—Giselle’s, I think—and tried to give me a texting device.

  “No thanks,” I said, showing him my pay-by-the-minute phone. “I brought my own.”

  “Go get ’em, Marty!” Commander Magma shouted. Then, under his breath, he whispered: “Because if you don’t, I think I’m out of a job.”

  For a moment, under the heat of those lights and the shadow of the jumbotron, I felt crazy nervous. After all, I haven’t really played the game since… well, since I was testing the beta version back at the beginning of the school year. Sure, I knew the game down to its tiniest scrap of code.

  But what if I was no good at playing it?

  The Lerkians resumed their destructive rampage. And looking at it through an AR headset… wow! It was more impressive than I realized. They were seriously determined to take out this jumbotron and turn the entire audience into sticky, feathered embarrassments. I didn’t have much time left.

  So I typed:

  YOU UNDERESTIMATE ME, LERKIANS. I MAY APPEAR TO BE QUIET AND SHY, BUT I HAVE FRIGHTENED AWAY MILLIONS OF YOU.

  Ooh, that gave them pause. A hush fell over the crowd.

  What few people realize is that Hecklr is mostly a word game. Sure, you’re supposed to go outside and track down these things. That’s the physical part of the game I thought would impress my dad. But when you’re squaring off against a Lerkian, it’s not about how fast you can swing a bat or throw an inflated chunk of pigskin or kick a ball into a net guarded by some kid who looks like a psycho killer from a horror movie.

  It’s about creativity and confidence.

  I had loads of the former, but as for the latter… well, that’s something I really needed to work on. So essentially, I faked it.

  I HIDE AMONG THESE ORDINARY BEINGS. THIS IS MY DISGUISE. BUT I WAS SENT HERE TO PROTECT THIS PLANET FROM THE LIKES OF YOU.

  The Lerkians, it seemed, were calling my bluff. They ramped up their attacks, digging deep into the guts of the jumbotron. Behind me, I could see the hiss of nozzles and maybe even the rumble of giant bags containing millions of chicken feathers. This was going south, quickly. CyberGirl03 was watching. My dad was watching. I had do something.

  Namely: I had to cheat.

  On the jumbotron, these words appeared:

  I CAN BANISH YOU WITH A SINGLE GESTURE, LERKIANS.

  But on my pay-by-the-minute phone, I entered in the secret code that would cause all Lerkians, everywhere in the game system, to suddenly disappear for an hour.

  Then I made a tiny bye-bye wave.

  And then the Lerkians…

  … went bye-bye.

  Every last one of them vanished from the screen.

  Throughout the field, there was complete, utter silence. What the heck just happened? Even Commander Magma looked confused. Did this boring kid from the bleachers just win the game?

  Nick finally broke the silence. He looked up at me from below the stage, blinking.

  “Dude.”

  THE BILL BEAN FACTOR, PT. 3

  And then, of course, the crowd went wild when they realized they weren’t about to be covered in cold sticky lava and billions of chicken feathers—which were probably not organic, unless there were currently entire farms of naked chickens out there.

  Commander Magma, realizing he wasn’t about to be fired from his YouTube gig, was overjoyed. “Dude, what is your name? Marty? Hardie?”

  “Uh, Bartholomew Bean?” I said, glancing at the screens all around the field. My own dumb face stared back at me. The cameras had found me, and gone in for an extreme close-up. Yikes.

  “Marty, man, how did you do that? You banished the entire Lerkian fleet with just a wave of your hand!”

  “Practice?”

  “How long have you been playing Hecklr?”

  “Er, ever since it was available for download.”

  “You discovered some kind of cool, next-level backdoor code, didn’t you? Come on, you can tell us, the millions of people streaming ChickenHead LavaLamp right now. It’ll stay between us, I promise!”

  “Um…”

  “If you had a message for the secret creator of Hecklr, what would it be?”

  “Keep up the good work?”

  “Do you think he’ll someday create versions of the game for other cities besides Rancho Verdugo?”

  “Maybe?”

  Commander Magma put his arm around me. “Marty, my main brain man, you play it close to the chest. I like that. And congrats on kicking serious Lerkian butt. But hey, Chicken Heads, don’t go anywhere. We’ve got loads of Hecklr walk-through videos streaming on our site right this very second…”

  After what felt like an eternity, I finally climbed down from the stage. Nick the Mimic was all over me like we were long-lost war buddies or something. “Dude! That was wild! Can you show me how you did that?”

  Giselle, meanwhile, stared at me with her big cow eyes. She didn’t know how I’d defeated the Lerkians, but she also knew she didn’t like it. On the plus side, she was a.) making actual eye contact, and b.) not pummeling into me like a steamroller.

  Tigran? Who knows where he was. Maybe he was still running from the angry mob of kids who had “loaned” him things.

  Before Nick could drag me away to teach him my secret tricks, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I spun around to face…

  Gulp. My dad. Coach Bill Bean, who had the most curious expression on his face. As if he couldn’t figure out if he should be angry, or confused, or proud, or maybe a combination of all three.

  “Interesting game,” Dad said, gesturing with his head toward the stage. “I thought you didn’t play.”

  “Honestly, I don’t,” I replied, which was sort of kind of the real truth. I didn’t play the game so much as code the game. “I may have checked it out once or twice to see what the fuss was about.”

  “I’m still not sure what you did to win the game.”

  “Beginner’s luck?”

  “What’s that in your hand?”

  I looked down. He meant the cheapo pay-by-the-minute phone I’d bought earlier today. Uh-oh. Busted.

  “A friend
of mine borrowed my phone yesterday, and, um, I forgot to get it back.”

  “So you bought another phone?”

  Double busted! Oh so cleverly, I tried to change the subject. “So, what did you think of the game? Kind of cool, right?”

  Dad sighed. “I’ll be honest, I still don’t understand what was going on. What was the stuff with the lava and the chicken feathers? Is that part of the game?”

  “No, not really. And they were kind of playing it wrong. It’s about teamwork, really—”

  “And the players insulting each other?”

  “Uh, that wasn’t part of it, either. Hecklr is really about—”

  “Were those kids up there friends of yours?”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call them friends.”

  “Good. Because they really embarrassed themselve. I’d hate to be in their shoes walking around school tomorrow.”

  Now I was about to tell my dad: Seriously, don’t worry about them. They’re all jerks! But then I thought about Nick, cheering me on like a loon. I thought about the hurt look in Giselle’s eyes. And I even felt bad about Tigran, who might still be running through the streets of Rancho Verdugo.

  “C’mon, buddy,” Dad said, squeezing my shoulder. “Let’s stop off at Frosty’s before heading home. I’m sure Pickleback will appreciate the treat.”

  Once again, my dad was offering me one of my favorite treats on the planet. And once again, I was pretty sure it would taste sour.

  As we walked, however, my cheap pay-by-the-minute phone buzzed. I thought it might be SlapTalk, but instead it was a message from the Hecklr servers. It was an anonymous post from a player:

  I know who you are. And I know what you did tonight.

  Whoa… what?