Nessie Quest

by Melissa Savage

Maybe a Sunkist Lime or Watermelon.

  “I’m the number one reviewer in the Bookworm group. I need to keep up my quota because you just know that Emmanuelle Penney is champing at the bit to take my top spot. She’s only two away.” I hold up two fingers to show them both. “Two…away.”

  “This is going to be wonderful,” Mom goes on. “Do you remember how much fun you and your cousin Briony had last time?”

  “Remember? How could I forget? She shaved my Malibu Barbie doll.”

  “Oh…” Mom waves a hand. “You’ve long outgrown Barbies, anyway.”

  “Barbie was bald, Mom. Bald.”

  “I’m sure Briony’s grown up just like you have,” Dad chimes in.

  “Did I not mention that she also still sucked her thumb at six? And she smelled…shall we say questionable?”

  Mom isn’t listening. “I think it’s an amazing opportunity to get to visit family we hardly ever see,” she goes on.

  “Uh…try bizarro,” I mumble. “I mean, who spends an entire summer in a whole other country? People go for a week, maybe two. Not three months. That’s nuts.”

  Dad cocks his head to the side the exact same way that Britney B’s beagle, Cheez Whiz, does when you talk to her because she only understands certain words, like park, ball and pizza delivery. For all the rest of the words she just turns her head sideways, trying real hard to figure out what you’re saying. Me and Britney B call that look a Cheez Whiz. And it’s Dad’s Cheez Whiz that makes my heart start beating even harder because I realize that this situation is just like with Disney World.

  I don’t get a say.

  “Dad got a position at the University of the Highlands and Islands in Inverness,” Mom says. “To teach an advanced photography class for the summer term. We will be renting out our house at the end of the month to a lovely family. The Morgensterns. They have a five-year-old daughter named Delilah.”

  Some random girl rolling down Tennyson on my Razor scooter with the pink trim?

  Eating my raspberry-filled Funfetti cupcakes at Valhalla?

  Sleeping under my poster of Beyoncé—the I Am…Sasha Fierce album.

  It’s a complete and total nightmare is what it is.

  “What about Mr. Mews?” I demand. “He’s not going to like this one bit.”

  “The Morgensterns have graciously agreed to take care of him for the summer while they’re here,” Mom says. “They said their little Delilah loves cats.”

  “He’s not a cat,” I remind her. “He’s part of the family, and he’s not going to want to sleep with some random girl. Not to mention, he’s very particular about the way his whiskers are stroked. He’ll be very lonely without me here. Maybe one of us should stay home. Me and Mr. Mews could stay with Britney B. Her mom won’t care.”

  That’s when my mom’s head starts with the slow nod and I know exactly what’s coming.

  I give her a straight pointer finger and say, “Don’t even.”

  But she goes and does it anyway.

  “How does it make you feel, honey?” she says with…the voice.

  The smooth-as-silk one.

  Mom’s a child psychologist and teaches at the university and for her, feeling words are huge. It’s always feelings this and feelings that, and this isn’t any different.

  I cross my arms tight over my chest in protest. “Frankly,” I tell her, “I think it stinks.”

  “That’s a thinking word, honey, not a feeling word,” she reminds me. “Try again.”

  “Fine,” I say. “I feel…like it stinks.”

  She sighs at that one and pops a red jelly bean into her mouth.

  A Cinnamon or maybe a Very Cherry.

  “Why can’t Dad just go without us?” I ask. “Like he does when he goes to New York.”

  Dad’s a big-time photographer. And by big-time, of course I mean famous. Not limo famous because Mom and Dad share Prius Patty, but still. His pictures have been in some of the most popular newspapers in the world, like the New York Times, and well-known magazines like Smithsonian and National Geographic and even in some photography museums in Los Angeles and New York. He’s been asked to speak at some colleges on the East Coast, but never to teach full-time. Never for a whole entire summer.

  “Because it’s for a whole summer this time,” Mom explains. “And you’re out of school and…we’re a family and, well, we stick together. Anyway, we’ll be back by the time school starts.”

  “What about your job?” I ask her. “Who’s going to teach your summer classes?”

  “I’m taking a three-month sabbatical to research and write a journal article.”

  I don’t even have to ask what her article is going to be about.

  Feeling Words and the People Who Love Them

  By Dr. Libby Fitzhugh, Phd (a lover of feelings)

  So just like that, the Fitzhugh family summer vacation is decided and I don’t get a say.

  Again.

  It’s so unfair.

  Seriously, can someone please tell me, what is so wrong with Disney World?

  It takes about a gazillion hours to make it all the way to the town of Fort Augustus.

  First there’s the endless airplane ride to Glasgow and then the long drive all the way up to the Highlands of Scotland, where Fort Augustus sits on some humongous lake of ominous black water that, in pictures, looks more like an ocean than just a plain old lake. Lucky for me, Mom downloaded all the Harry Potters on my Kindle for the trip. Even though me and Dad have read the series together three whole times already, we agree you can never read Harry Potter too many times.

  Someone is tapping me on my leg.

  “Adelaide Ru,” Mom is saying. “We made it.”

  My eyes open.

  They’re both staring at me from the front seat of the backward rental car. Dad’s still sitting in the driver’s seat on the wrong side of the car. Which is actually the right side of the car in Scotland. But it’s still wrong to me because it’s opposite of the way we do things in America.

  And opposite is never good.

  The last thing I remember after leaving the Glasgow airport is the crazy cattle in the pastures of the green Scotland countryside. Long-haired cattle that need a serious appointment at Supercuts. I also remember Harry Potter seeing the dark and ominous Hogwarts across the vast black waters for the very first time.

  I yawn without covering my mouth and stretch, wiping a small circle of fog on the window with the back of my fist, peering out past raindrops racing each other to the bottom.

  Outside are gray, moody, low-hanging clouds that forgot they’re supposed to be up in the sky, along with a faint drizzle that chills you all the way to the inside of your bones. I squint through the rainy haze.

  “We are where…exactly?” I ask, yawning again.

  “Our home away from home,” Mom says. “For the summer, anyway.”

  I stare through the circle like it’s a peephole, then close my eyes tight and open them again.

  This can’t possibly be right.

  Maybe I’m still dreaming.

  That’s it. I’m still inside The Sorcerer’s Stone with Harry and Ron and Hermione and Neville. I must be right because emerging out of the fog and rain is a drab, gray stone castle sitting at a point surrounded by black water and casting a shadow of evil darkness upon us all.

  I stick one thumb toward the window. “We’re moving to a more haunted version of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?”

  Dad laughs. “Oh, my little Rhubarb.” He shakes his head and opens the driver’s-side door. “You’re a can of corn, you know that?”

  “It’s stunning.” Mom marvels at it through the window. “Remember I told you it’s a remodeled old abbey? They call it St. Benedict’s. Oh, hon, it’s just beautiful,” she tells Dad.

  I
motion to the haunted fortress that sits before us. “I mean, are you not seeing what I’m seeing here?”

  “You mean a summer filled with adventure?” Dad pulls himself up out of the driver’s seat.

  “Ah, no,” I say. “A haunted fortress with entities lying in wait to steal our very souls as we sleep.”

  Dad laughs and shuts the car door. I watch him dance a jig outside my window with complete and utter oblivion to the doom that awaits us.

  “Stay a Muggle if you want to!” I call to him through the glass.

  He’s still dancing and still laughing.

  “You know what?” Mom says then. “This would be a great time to pull out your new feelings journal.”

  “Just because you wrote those words on the front of it with a marker doesn’t make it so,” I tell her. “It’s a plain old spiral notebook. And it’s blue. You know my order of notebook colors goes red, then yellow, then purple and then blue.”

  Dad knocks on my window and makes a silly face at me.

  I can’t help but grin. “No one thinks you’re funny!” I call through the glass.

  He shrugs and heads toward the trunk of the car to unload the luggage.

  “Nonetheless,” Mom goes on, “I think it will be good for you to write about some of the things you’re feeling this summer.”

  “Fine. I will,” I tell her. “Do you want to know what I’m going to write on the very first page?”

  “What’s that?” She’s already scrolling on her cell phone.

  “Scarred for life.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” she says, her eyes still on the tiny screen.

  “Mom, I’m being serious here. There’s no way I can spend an entire summer in this place.”

  She’s moved from her screen now to focusing on reapplying her lipstick in the mirror of the passenger-side visor. It’s the Sun Kissed Mauve one that she bought special for the trip. She let me get a Dr Pepper Lip Smacker but I forgot it in the bathroom at the Denver airport on our way here. Now I’m cursed with dry, Dr Pepper—free lips for an entire summer while some random girl is smacking sweet, balmy, peppery lips all over Colorado.

  “Mom, are you even listening to me right now?”

  “Oh, Adelaide Ru, you’re so dramatic,” she tells the mirror.

  “You can’t see it because you’re a Muggle. Just like Dad.”

  “What’s that again?” She rubs the top Sun Kissed lip with the bottom Sun Kissed lip and then turns her head right and then left to examine whether it’s just the right amount of mauviness for her liking.

  “A person void of magical powers.”

  “Ahhh, right,” she says, snapping the visor back into place.

  “Lucky for you…you have me,” I go on. “Because I can see what you can’t. And I see a haunted fortress where our souls are vulnerable to extraction.”

  “Adelaide Ru, it’s an abbey. Monks used to live here before they made it into condos. It’s definitely not haunted.” She eyes it through the window. “It’s…you know…religious. Or at least it used to be.”

  “I think the words you’re searching for here are diabolical phantasms,” I mutter. “It’s probably filled to the gills with them.”

  “And those are?”

  “Ghosts,” I explain. “Dead monk ghosts wandering lost, shaking their chains in the attic above while the occupiers of the rooms sleep, completely unaware of their impending doom.”

  She’s staring at me.

  “You know, your garden-variety soul invasion…body snatching…or demon possession. That kind of thing,” I go on.

  She just blinks at me before finally saying, “Where do you get this stuff?”

  “The Syfy channel.”

  She rolls her eyes at that one and grabs the door handle. “Come on, let’s help Dad with the luggage.”

  But before she pulls herself out of the seat, she puts her arm around the headrest and turns her whole body to face me again.

  “I’m going to challenge you to make the best of this,” she says. “I’m sure you can do that for Dad. He’s so excited to teach at the university here. I want you to look at this like an adventure. When will we ever get this chance again?”

  I look her straight in the eye and cross my arms over my chest. “Hopefully…never.”

  “Well, I have complete and utter confidence that you can rise to this challenge,” she tells me.

  “I don’t know where you get that,” I say.

  “Please try to remember that this is a wonderful opportunity for us to visit with family we don’t get to see very often and maybe even learn more about the Fitzhugh heritage.”

  “I’m from Denver,” I remind her.

  “You may have lived your whole life on Tennyson,” she says. “But Dad’s story starts here. Now, let’s go and help him.”

  “Mom.” I put a palm on her shoulder. “I’m begging you. There’s still time. Let’s just get on a plane to Orlando and chalk this all up to one big mistake.”

  She smiles. “We’ll be fine, I promise you. Now, come on,” she says, pushing her door open and slipping out into the fog.

  I stare at the haunted hulk before us one more time and sigh before opening my door. Dad parked the car in the circular drive, right in front of the ancient double wooden doors, which are so tall, you almost can’t see the top of them because of the fat, low clouds swirling around us. Those doors remind me of the Wicked Witch of the West’s castle.

  “Zuma?” I hear Mom call to Dad while she goes back to scrolling on her phone. “What’s the name of the caretaker again?”

  “I can’t remember…Schnebly, maybe?” Dad calls with his head in the trunk.

  Everyone calls my dad Zuma. He goes short on his name too. Real short. It started with something having to do with the zoom lens and just morphed into Zuma Hugh for an artist name because it’s way shorter and easier to remember than his actual name. His given name is Marmaduke Siles Fitzhugh and I’m not even joking either. Only Nan and Granddad Fitzhugh and Uncle Clive still call him Marmaduke Siles. Which I laugh at every time I hear it and then Dad pretends to be mad about it even though he really isn’t.

  It’s kind of our thing.

  Actually, Dad doesn’t get mad. At least I’ve never seen him mad. If he had his own feelings journal, I bet it would never, ever say mad. I mean, I’ve seen him serious, real serious, like the time when I was five and drew a Crayola family portrait on the living room wall while he was out mowing the lawn and Mom was busy in the downstairs office working on another journal article. That time he got real serious…but never mad.

  He’s also the funniest person I know. But don’t tell him I said so. It’ll go straight to his head.

  He’s still stacking the suitcases on the ground from the trunk of the car while Mom is scrolling through the contacts on her phone.

  “Schnebly? Are you sure?” she says.

  Mom keeps searching, and Dad keeps stacking.

  I grab a blue duffel bag and pull the strap over my shoulder. “You believe in the undead, Dad?” I ask.

  Dad pops his head up from the trunk. “The undead?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  He bends down until he’s eye to eye with me, and all serious-like he says, “Do you really want to know what I think of vampires?”

  My eyes get wider. “Yes.”

  He leans in even closer, a heavy palm placed on each of my shoulders, his jaw clenched. He looks to the left and then the right and says, “They’re a real pain in the neck,” followed by a loud HA and a slap on his knee.

  I try my hardest this time not to smile, but I fail miserably. “No one thinks you’re funny,” I tell him with a big grin.

  “Are you kidding? I’m hiiiiilarious,” he tells me, setting another suitcase on the ground.

  And then before I eve
n have the chance to say anything more…it happens.

  All my fears are realized in a single, solitary moment.

  The tall, ancient wooden doors belch out a horrid creeeeeeeeeak.

  The door opens and it steps forward. An actual apparition, just like I warned them about.

  A ghostly image of a woman in an ugly black dress and hideous man shoes stands before us behind a curtain of gray fog.

  The undead coming to feast on our very souls and use our bodies as hosts.

  I knew it.

  Mom and Dad are going to get a big, fat, hairy I-told-you-so for this one.

  The Prince of Darkness has risen and lives in Fort Augustus, with lips the same color as the orange sauce in a can of SpaghettiOs and skin the color of Elmer’s glue. Well, not the white slop out of the bottle Elmer’s, more like the kind that’s dried and more translucent and is squeezed out between uncooked macaroni pieces on a kindergarten pasta masterpiece.

  And if I’ve learned anything from the Syfy channel, it’s this…steer clear of boogeymen, poltergeists, giant spiders and circus clowns at all costs. And the most important thing to remember, above all else…do not mess with the undead.

  “Cheers,” the disembodied spirit calls out to us in a voice that is anything but cheery.

  I grab Mom’s hand and weave her fingers with mine, not once taking my eyes off the figure standing before us.

  “My name is Euna Begbie,” the apparition says. “I am the caretaker for the university-owned flats here at St. Benedict’s Club at the abbey.”

  The apparition’s accent is thick just like Uncle Clive’s and Aunt Isla’s when they call us on the holidays. Dad has lost his mostly, more so than Nan and Granddad Fitzhugh, who moved to Boca ten years ago. Dad’s only comes out now on the words with rs that require a tongue roll and also the horking words, which are words with a hork from the back of your throat that sounds suspiciously similar to Mr. Mews coughing up a hairball.

  The ghostly figure is at least two heads taller than Mom and one taller than Dad and about ten over me. I can tell she’s skeleton skinny even though her black dress goes all the way down to her bony white ankles. And her sleek black hair is pulled into a slicked bun that is so tight, I’ll bet you any money her eyes can’t even close all the way when she blinks.