Making an Honest Buck

Buck Meltsner has recently moved away from Odyssey and started at John Harrington High, a big school where he doesn't know anyone. On the phone with his friend Jules Kendall, he admits he misses everyone back home, but he's hopeful: football tryouts are that night, and making the team would help him meet people. Then, hurrying to class while juggling his football bag, his phone, and a giant slushie, Buck slips and tumbles down a crowded stairway.

At the hospital, the doctor says Buck's shoulder is badly sprained, and his mother, Katrina, gently insists there's no way he can try out. Buck is frustrated with himself for having a "Klutz of the Year moment" on the worst possible day. Things get worse at school, where the fall has already become legend. A classmate greets him as "Trainwreck" and cheerfully retells the story, which has grown to include a kid with a tuba, a teacher with a birthday cake, and a shattered clay statue of Albert Einstein's face. As one student puts it, "You're famous, bro. I mean, in the worst way possible."

Meanwhile, Jason Whittaker comes to the Meltsner home with an unusual request. He explains to Katrina, and to Buck's dad Eugene by phone from Lisbon, that the NSA has been watching a man named Malcolm McKellum, who they believe has been selling government secrets, but they can't prove it. Investigators have a DNA sample from a meeting at Stella Watson Industries where illegal trades were made; if they can match it to McKellum, they can arrest him. The problem is that McKellum is intensely private. He never leaves his house, allows no visitors beyond family and a few business associates, and even has deliveries left outside the gates. But his stepson, Brayden, goes to Buck's school and sits in Buck's literature class. Jason wants Buck, who is cool under pressure and reads people well, to get paired with Brayden on a school project, get invited to the house, and quietly collect something with McKellum's DNA on it, like a used water bottle or a hair from a brush. Buck will wear a microphone and earpiece, and agents will wait just outside the gates. Katrina gives permission and even agrees to help, and Buck accepts on the spot: "Sounds like my day just got a whole lot more interesting." Jason warns him he can tell no one, not even Jules.

The plan rolls into motion when Katrina appears in Buck's literature class as a substitute teacher called Ms. Shanks. She assigns paired presentations on The Grapes of Wrath, each requiring a handmade visual aid, and conveniently pairs Buck with Brayden. Brayden hesitates about hosting; his stepdad is so private, maybe even a germaphobe, that no one comes over. But since the project practically requires it, and since Brayden doesn't get C's, he agrees to ask his parents. When a boy named Liam mocks Buck with the Trainwreck nickname, Brayden sticks up for him, and the two start to become real friends. Over lunch, Brayden shares that his father, a Navy sailor, was killed when Brayden was little, and that every birthday he wished for a dad. He hoped Malcolm would be that dad, but Malcolm skips his baseball games and stays shut in his office. Buck, adopted himself, understands the wish better than Brayden knows.

Buck's conscience begins to prickle. When Jules confesses over the phone that she betrayed her friend Bridget in a band dispute, Buck urges her to make it right, telling her that being at a new school has taught him how much good friends matter. But when Jules predicts Buck and Brayden will soon be friends, Buck says quietly, "Not sure I'm the kind of friend he wants."

Jason equips Buck with evidence bags and an earpiece, studies the house blueprints, and leaves him with one instruction: "Don't do anything foolish." At the McKellum mansion, Brayden excitedly welcomes his first guest since the move, and his mom, Gina, lays out a junk-food feast. When Malcolm briefly appears asking for bottled water for his scratchy throat, Buck sees his chance: he claims the bottle looks unsealed and offers to throw it away, hoping to pocket it, but Gina drops it in the trash compactor herself. Malcolm ducks out to a phone call before Buck can draw him into conversation.

Brayden shows Buck his model room, filled with impressively detailed planes and cars, including a 1936 Buick Roadmaster that once sent him to the emergency room glued to its bumper. The boys decide to build a model of the truck from The Grapes of Wrath for their project, and Brayden admits that before his mom married Malcolm, they were dirt poor; Malcolm may not be a great dad, but he's given them a home. Later, while Gina steps away to clean yogurt off her sweater, Buck excuses himself to find a bathroom. Instead, guided by Jason's voice in his earpiece, he slips upstairs toward the master bedroom, where a DNA sample might be found. What Buck doesn't know is that at that very moment, Malcolm is telling Brayden he's heading upstairs for his allergy medicine. Believing McKellum is still down in his office, Buck presses on, and the story ends with him sneaking through the one part of the house where he's absolutely forbidden to be, with Malcolm on his way up the stairs.