Slob Read Online Free Page B

and balancing, and potentially falling, gives you time to stop and think if what’s in that cabinet is really worth the trouble. It was. But here’s the thing . . . let’s say I did take a few unauthorized Oreo cookies. There was a chance that Mom wouldn’t notice they were missing. But there was also a chance that she would. If she did, she wouldn’t get mad. She wouldn’t yell or anything like that. What she’d do was worse. She’d look me in the eye and tell me that I had broken my promise to her. Pow . That’s like getting the worst sucker punch right in the gut. If you don’t believe me, you don’t know Mom.
    Three more hours till dinner. I went to my room with a sickish rumbling in my stomach. In the center of the room was a tripod on which stood an eighteen-inch satellite dish. On the floor was a black receiver, an old television set, a mass of wire coils, connectors, and various hardware.
    Her name is Nemesis.
    I’ve been researching and building Nemesis for a year and a half. She’s nearly finished.
    I’m not going to tell you what she will do once she’s complete. You don’t know me well enough yet. You probably think you do. Everyone thinks they know the fat kid. We’re so obvious. Our embarrassing secret is out there for everyone to see, spilling over our belts, flapping under our chins, stretching the seams of our jeans.
    That doesn’t mean we don’t have other secrets that you can’t see.
    I pulled out the metal toolbox from under my bed and opened it. As always, I took a moment to admire the sight—neatly organized nuts, bolts, and screws in the top shelf, tiny to medium-sized wire clippers and an X-Acto knife in the middle shelf, and needle nose pliers, wire strippers, and screwdrivers in the bottom shelf, arranged according to size, along with bottles of oil and grease and an ancient soldering iron.
    Thomas Edison once said, “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”
    I definitely had the junk. There was also a carton in my closet, full of old motors—motors from electric fans, automatic jewelry cleaners, and toy cars all the way up to a boat’s outboard motor—tangles of wires, spare parts from the auto salvage, an elevator cable, and much more.
    I sat down and started to work on Nemesis. When an hour flew I began to realize something alarming.
    I could try her now.
    After a year and half of researching and scavenging and tinkering, she was ready for a dry run. It made me feel squirrelly in my stomach. But maybe I was just hungry.
    I switched her on, tuned the TV to Channel 37, a station which we don’t get on our regular television. Then I waited. Nothing happened. I adjusted the angle of the Satellite dish a dozen times. Nothing.
    Two more hours flew by. There was a quick knock at my door, and Mom popped her head in. I’ll give you a description of Mom’s head. She has heavy-lidded green eyes without many eyelashes, which is, unfortunately, very apparent due to her thick glasses. The glasses have pink frames. Her nose is . . . just a nose, nothing remarkable there. Her lips chap pretty easily. Her hair is blond and thin, and she often wears it in a short ponytail. You wouldn’t notice her in a crowd. Or if you did, you might mistake her for the woman who makes appointments for you at the orthodontist’s office.
    It’s her voice that is unusual. It’s velvety. It brushes against your eardrum and slips down your ear canal and it makes you feel like everything will turn out okay, no matter how bad things look at the moment. Which is a good thing since Mom is a 911 dispatcher for the NYC Police Department.
    Every year, she gets Christmas cards from people who have spoken to her on the 911 line, thanking her. They address the letters to The Woman with the Beautiful Voice or The Lady Who Sounds Like an Angel. The guy who distributes the mail always knows who they mean and he drops the cards on Mom’s desk.
    “What’s cooking, good-lookin’?” she