Secret Weapons Read Free Page B

Bucky were there that day because the three of them—the three PROs—were supposedly working on their science-fair project. Supposedly! Except at the moment, Eddy was about to walk out.
    Eddy was lucky, Carlos thought. It was a lot easier to walk out when you lived someplace else.
    “Look, Brockhurst,” Eddy was saying. “I’m outta here. It’s not going to work.”
    But Bucky, who was fooling around with an eggplant he’d swiped out of his mom’s refrigerator, wasn’t listening. He never listened when the three of them were trying to choose a subject for their science-fair project. Instead he just came up with an idea and that was it, no matter what the other two guys thought.
    Like his first idea, for instance, which had been that their experiment would be shooting free throws. They would take turns shooting one hundred free throws and see how many baskets they each got.
    Eddy and Carlos had looked at each other and rolled their eyes. “Oh sure, Brockhurst,” Eddy said. “And what would our hypothesis be?”
    “What’s a hypothesis?” Bucky said.
    Eddy and Carlos groaned. Mrs. Davis had been talking about practically nothing else for days. “It’s an educated guess,” Carlos said. “Like when you guess how a certain experiment would turn out, and then you do it to see if you’re right.”
    Bucky shrugged. “Okay, that’s easy. My educated guess is that I’d beat the pants off you two dudes.”
    It had taken a whole lot of arguing to convince Bucky that beating someone’s pants off wasn’t exactly a scientific experiment.
    Bucky’s next idea had been the “air” athletic shoes thing. What Bucky wanted to do was to compare all kinds of pump-ups by seeing if wearing a certain brand made a difference in how high you could jump. That idea had been a little less dumb than the free-throw one, but not much. The dumbest part about it was that each of them would have had to buy five or six pairs of humongously expensive pump-ups.
    After that there had been one about different ways of popping popcorn. Bucky had a thing about popcorn. He ate lots of it and he had at least a half dozen different kinds of corn poppers at his house. They’d actually gotten started on that one, but the batches of popcorn kept mysteriously disappearing before they could be weighed and measured. So that had been the end of that idea.
    And now there was this thing about cooking un-punctured eggplants and potatoes in a microwave oven. While Eddy was putting on his jacket Bucky went on fooling with the eggplant.
    “It won’t work,” Eddy said again. “And even if it does, what’s it supposed to prove?”
    “I don’t know,” Bucky said. “We can figure that out later. Maybe we’ll just prove that blowing up an eggplant makes a bigger mess than blowing up a potato.” He grinned at Carlos. “How’s that for a hypothesis, Garcia?”
    “Pretty lame,” Carlos said. “And besides, my mom is going to hate it a lot. Why can’t we do it at your house?”
    “I told you,” Bucky said. “Because compared to my mom, yours is a pushover. My mom has a real attitude about putting things in her microwave.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “Besides, your mom isn’t home right now.”
    Carlos’s mouth was open and he was just getting up his nerve to say that he was leaving with Eddy, and if Bucky was going to mess up the Garcias’ kitchen he’d have to do it all by himself. At least he was hoping he’d have the nerve to say that—when all at once he was saved by the bell. Actually, what he was saved by was the door from the garage slamming open and his little sister, Susie, coming in.
    Susie burst through the door, gave the three PROs a blank stare, and marched on past without saying anything. Normal behavior for Susie. But then she did something that definitely wasn’t normal. Halfway to the stairs she stopped and started talking.
    What Susie said, in a strange, tense-sounding voice, was, “I think I saw them. I think I saw the