Ignatius MacFarland Read Free Page B

and saw Frank Gutenkunitz staring at me. He mouthed the words
MacFartland, you are such a loser
and shook his head to himself, laughing at how stupid he thought I was.
    Can I have just
one
good day at school? I thought. Is that asking so much?
    Mr. Andriasco picked up his piece of chalk and turned to us. “And for the record, boys and girls, there is no scientific evidence that UFOs even exist. If Mr. MacFarland is waiting around for his alien friends to come and visit him, I’d say he’s got a better chance of meeting them by building his own spaceship and flying off to find them himself.” He then chuckled at what he thought was a joke and went back to his lecture.
    I, however, couldn’t concentrate once again. Because I suddenly had something else on my mind. Something really big.
    Mr. Andriasco had given me an idea.

4
    PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE
    The minute we were at our regular cafeteria table, I told my friends Gary and Ivan about my plan.
    “All right, you guys,” I said, leaning in and talking quietly so that nobody at any nearby tables could hear me. “We’re meeting at the barn right after school. We’re gonna do something big. Gary, did your brother make his Tennessee fireworks run this month?”
    “Uh-huh,” said Gary, his mouth full of the really terrible pizza our cafeteria made every Friday afternoon. Everybody always got excited the days our school served pizza, but then everybody always remembered the minute they bit into it that it wasn’t good. It always tasted sort of like a big stale saltine cracker with dried-out ketchup and melted-down wax lips on top.
    “Bring over as many fireworks as you can,” I told him. “Especially bottle rockets.”
    “But Rick’ll kill me if I take his stuff,” said Gary as he tried to wash down the hideous pizza with a big drink of chocolate milk that had an expiration date I believe was from the previous decade. Gary’s way-older brother, Ricky, was always driving down to Tennessee to buy fireworks because they weren’t legal where we lived. The police had even arrested him once for doing it but he just wouldn’t stop. I think he was a bit of a pyromaniac. (That’s a person who’s obsessed with fire, in case you didn’t know.)
    “This is really important, Gary. Just tell him that the police came and confiscated everything again.”
    “That’s a lie,” said Ivan as he chewed on the giant meatloaf sandwich his mom always sent him to school with. I’d known Ivan ever since we were in kindergarten and I’d never seen him eat anything other than a meat-loaf sandwich at lunch. Gary used to say that when Ivan went to the bathroom, the only thing that came out was a meat-loaf sandwich, which his mom then fished out of the toilet bowl and put back in his lunchbox for the next day. There was only one time Ivan’s mom didn’t give him a meat-loaf sandwich and that was the day he talked her into packing him a giant Slim Jim and a Twinkie and nothing else. But then Mrs. Jenkins, the cafeteria guard, came by our table and saw Ivan’s lunch and ended up calling his mom and accusing her of being a bad parent.
    Anyway, Ivan was pretty religious, so stuff like lying really upset him. He always said that God was just looking for an excuse to punish people. “Are you asking Gary to lie
and
steal at the same time? ’Cause that’ll pretty much guarantee that Gary’s going to H-E-double toothpicks after he dies.”
    “Yes, I’m asking Gary to lie and steal, but it’s to help
me
out,” I said, signaling Ivan to keep his loud voice down. “This is really,
really
important.”
    Gary and Ivan looked at me, confused. I leaned in even closer to them and whispered really quietly.
    “I’m going to build a rocket.”
    “YOU’RE GOING TO BUILD A
ROCKET?”
Ivan bellowed, loud enough so that people at all the tables around us looked over.
    “Shut up!” I whispered, then looked at the people who were staring at us and made a face that was supposed to show them I