Archvillain Read Free

invented for his top secret journal.
    (Kyle kept a written journal, as opposed to one on the computer. He had a very simple reason for this: Kyle’s business was his own and no one else’s, and after all, it’s impossible to hack paper.)
    The bus jerked to a halt, its brakes wheezing like an old man who has run a marathon, and Kyle’s best friend, Mairi MacTaggert, got on. Her eyes lit up when she saw Kyle, and she walked quickly to his seat.
    “Can I sit here?”
    “I was saving it for you,” Kyle said.
    Mairi smiled, her eyes shining green under her mane of red hair. She slid into the seat next to him.
    “I was worried about you, Kyle. That was the longest you’ve ever been sick. And when I called, your parents said they didn’t know what was wrong with you.”
    There was no one on the planet smart enough to know what had happened to Kyle. Except for Kyle, of course, and even he wasn’t sure.
    “I’m fine. They worry too much.”
    “You didn’t miss much in school. In case you were worried.”
    Kyle laughed. “I bet it was pretty boring without me around.”
    Mairi considered. “Well, it was
quiet,
I’ll tell you that. No remote-controlled mice. No purple water in the drinking fountains. No random burping noises from the computers.”
    “No one ever proved I did any of that stuff.”
    “Oh,
I know,”
Mairi said airily. “So I guess it’s just a coincidence that
nothing
like that happened while you were out sick?”
    Kyle shrugged, which was really the only safe response. He didn’t want to lie to Mairi. She was the only person who ever really understood him in the entire town of Bouring. She was the only one who never wanted anything from him.
    Sure, he was popular … but that popularity came with a price. “Hey, Kyle,” a kid would say, “can you pull a cool prank on my mom?” Or, “Can you help me get back at my big sister?” But Mairi never asked anything of Kyle. She just liked hanging out with him.
    “Hey, remember the time you rewired the loudspeakers so that the principal sounded like Dora the Explorer?” Mairi asked.
    That had been a classic from third grade. “That was a long time ago. I’ve matured since then.”
    “Sure you have.”
    Having someone as your friend for as long as youcan remember is great — but the downside is that they know everything about you. Mairi had actually been present the day Kyle decided to embark on a life of prankstering. It was back in first grade, when a group of middle school actors visited the elementary school to perform their own version of
The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Kyle had been captivated by the story of an arrogant, self-important monarch who was so impervious to common sense that he walked around naked, convinced he was wearing fine clothes.
    As he watched the play, Mairi had leaned over to him and whispered, “It’s just like real life!”
    Even that young, they’d both already recognized that many adults took themselves too seriously and needed to be taken down a peg or two. Or ten. The teacher who always said “supposably” instead of “supposedly.” The principal who walked the halls with his shirttail sticking out of his fly. The lunch monitor who couldn’t tell the difference between a stalk of asparagus … and a green bean. They were surrounded by clueless people.
    Mairi thought it was funny, but even in the first grade, Kyle — already a genius — knew that it was deadly serious. And a problem. Even though it would be more than a year before he actually wrote it down, the Prankster Manifesto was born that day.
    Now that he once again sat on the bus with Mairi, the world made at least a little sense. He tried to staycasual, but he couldn’t help it — he was happy to see her. Even though Mairi didn’t always appreciate Kyle’s pranks (the ones she knew about, that is), she also never hassled him about them.
    “Are you still doing the Astronomy Club thing?”
    The Bouring Astronomy Club was holding its monthly