“And you let him pour the stuff on your sneakers?” Evan’s mother demanded.
“I didn’t have a choice,” Evan replied unhappily. “I have to do everything Kermit wants. If I don’t, he tells Aunt Dee I was mean to him.”
Mrs. Ross shook her head. “I wondered why you came home barefoot yesterday.”
“My sneakers are still stuck to Kermit’s basement floor,” Evan told her. “They melted right off my feet.”
“Well, be careful over there, okay?”
“Yeah. Sure,” Evan replied. He pulled his Atlanta Braves cap over his head, waved to his mother, and headed out the back door.
It was a warm spring day. Two black-and-yellow monarch butterflies fluttered over the flower garden. The bright new leaves on the trees shimmered in the sunlight.
Evan stopped at the bottom of the driveway and lowered the baseball cap to shield his eyes from the sun. He squinted down the street, hoping to see his friend Andy.
No sign of her.
Disappointed, he kicked a large pebble along the curb and started to make his way toward Kermit’s house. Aunt Dee, Kermit’s mom, paid Evan three dollars an hour to watch Kermit after school every afternoon. Three hundred dollars an hour would be a lot more fair! he thought angrily.
But Evan was glad to earn the money. He was saving for a new video game.
And Evan was earning every penny. Kermit was impossible. That was the only word for him. Impossible.
He didn’t want to play video games. He didn’t want to watch TV. He refused to go outside and play ball or toss a Frisbee around. He didn’t even want to sneak down to the little grocery on the corner and load up on candy bars and potato chips.
All he wanted to do was stay downstairs in his dark, damp basement lab and mix beakers of chemicals together. “My experiments,” he called them. “I have to do my experiments.”
Maybe he is a genius, Evan thought bitterly. But that doesn’t make him any fun. He’s just impossible.
Evan definitely wasn’t enjoying his after-school baby-sitting job watching Kermit. In fact, he had several daydreams in which Kermit tried one of his own mixtures and melted to the basement floor, just like Evan’s sneakers.
Some afternoons, Andy came along, and that made the job a little easier. Andy thought Kermit was really weird, too. But at least when she was there, Evan had someone to talk to, someone who didn’t want to talk about mixing aluminum pyrite with sodium chlorobenzadrate.
What is Kermit’s problem, anyway? Evan wondered as he crossed the street and made his way through backyards toward Kermit’s house. Why does he think mixing is so much fun? Why is he always mixing this with that and that with this?
I can’t even mix chocolate milk!
Kermit’s house came into view two yards down. It was a two-story white house with a sloping black roof.
Evan picked up his pace. He was about fifteen minutes late. He hoped that Kermit hadn’t already gotten into some kind of trouble.
He had just pushed his way though the prickly, low hedges that fenced in Kermit’s yard when a familiar gruff voice made him freeze.
“Evan—were you looking at my yard?”
“Huh?” Evan recognized the voice at once. It belonged to Kermit’s next-door neighbor, a kid from Evan’s school.
His name was Conan Barber. But the kids at school all called him Conan the Barbarian. That’s because he had to be the biggest, meanest kid in Atlanta. Maybe in the universe.
Conan sat on top of the tall white fence that separated the yards. His cold blue eyes glared down at Evan. “Were you looking at my yard?” Conan demanded.
“No way!” Evan’s voice came out in a squeak.
“You were looking at my yard. That’s trespassing,” Conan accused. He leaped down from the high fence. He was big and very athletic. His hobby was leaping over kids he had just pounded into the ground.
Conan wore a gray muscle shirt and baggy, faded jeans cutoffs. He also wore a very mean expression.
“Whoa. Wait a minute, Conan!” Evan protested. “I was looking at Kermit’s yard. I never look at your yard. Never!”
Conan stepped up to Evan. He stuck out his chest and bumped Evan hard, so hard he stumbled backwards.
That was Conan’s other hobby. Bumping kids with his chest. His chest didn’t feel like a chest. It felt like a truck.
“Why don’t you look at my yard?” Conan demanded. “Is there something wrong with my yard? Is my yard too ugly? Is that why you never look at it?”
Evan swallowed hard. It began to dawn on him that maybe Conan was itching for a fight.
Before he could answer Conan, he heard a scratchy voice reply for him. “It’s a free country, Conan!”
“Oh, noooo,” Evan groaned, shutting his eyes.
Evan’s cousin, Kermit, stepped out from behind Evan. He was tiny and skinny. A very pale kid with a pile of white-blond hair, and round black eyes behind big red plastic-framed glasses. Evan always thought his cousin looked like a white mouse wearing glasses.
Kermit wore enormous red shorts that came down nearly to his ankles, and a red-and-black Braves T-shirt. The short sleeves hung down past the elbows of his skinny arms.
“What did you say?” Conan demanded, glaring down menacingly at Kermit.
“It’s a free country!” Kermit repeated shrilly. “Evan can look at any yard he wants to!”
