by Jon Scieszka
I stared at her in shock.
“What?” was all I could say.
My mom sighed and put her teacup down onto the saucer she was holding. It clinked loudly.
“Carl also listens and hears what we say the first time so we don’t have to repeat things constantly, unlike with you, who never seems to listen to a word that comes out of our mouths.”
“How could you give away my room?” I asked, feeling like I was losing my mind.
“How couldn’t we?” she said as her eyes went back to the TV. She then motioned with her head toward something next to the front door. “Your father pulled his old tent out of the attic. You can sleep in the backyard for one week. After that, you need to find somewhere else to live.” She then pointed at a garbage bag lying next to the tent. “And take that bag of horrible stuff with you.”
“But…”
“Don’t make me count to five,” she said as she glared at me out of the corner of her eye, then over at the broken window in her china cabinet. “You do not want to make me count. Trust me.”
Completely freaked, I walked over to the front door and grabbed the rolled-up tent and the garbage bag next to it. I looked inside the bag.
It was filled with all the broccoli that had been in our refrigerator.
I stared back at my mom, who was now engrossed in her show, and then went outside.
Boy, she really was mad at me.
I set up the tent, which was really small and old and smelled like the inside of somebody’s gym shoe. If I thought it was humid outside, being in an old canvas pup tent was like being inside of a boiling teakettle. I dumped all the broccoli in the corner in case I needed something to eat later, crawled out, and went over to my bedroom window. I peered inside and saw that Carl was still sitting on my bed. However, he wasn’t reading my comic book anymore. He was now looking through my journal and laughing really loudly.
“Hey!” I yelled, tapping on the window. “That’s mine! It’s private. Give me that!”
“Sorry.” He shrugged. “It’s in the room, so it’s mine.” He then flipped the page and read some more. “Man,” he said, laughing and shaking his head at whatever he just read. “You are such a loser.”
Look, since I know what’s in my journal, I couldn’t argue with him about how embarrassing my personal life was, but that didn’t erase the fact that he was reading something of mine that was supposed to be super top secret.
“Give it to me!” I yelled as I pounded on the window with my fist.
“HEY, YOU’D BETTER NOT BREAK THAT GLASS!” my father yelled as he came storming toward me from around the corner of the garage.
“Dad!” I said, happy to see him. “Mom gave away my room to some guy!”
“No, she didn’t,” he said angrily as he grabbed my arm and pulled me into the yard. “We did and his name is Carl, for your information.”
“I know his name is Carl! I’m sorry that I forgot to take out the trash and broke the china cabinet! I’ll pay for the window and I’ll drive the garbage over to the dump on my bike, I promise. Just let me have my room back!”
“Too little, too late, my friend,” my dad said with a snort. “I wish I could say it was nice knowing you. But I don’t like to lie.”
And with that, my dad walked around the corner and into the house. I looked back at my bedroom window and saw Carl staring at me. Carl then held up my journal, made a super mocking face at me to show what a whiny little girl he thought I was, then laughed and pulled down the shade so I couldn’t see in anymore.
In case you couldn’t tell, something really weird was going on.
Life got very strange over the next two days.
Through the front window, I could see Mom and Dad sitting around the dining room table with Carl for each meal. He would talk really loudly and act out things like fighting with people and shooting guns and pretending to stab things with a knife, and my parents would laugh and smile at him like he was some kind of hilarious comedian. He even ate with his hands and put his feet up on the table and burped so loudly once it rattled the windows, and yet they just acted like they thought he was the most charming, witty guy they had ever seen in their lives. If I had ever raised my voice or tried to be funny at the dinner table, my mom would yell at me to “settle down,” and the one time I accidentally burped because I drank some soda too quickly, you would have thought I had murdered somebody, the way my parents both shouted and carried on about what a pig I was.
On top of all this, that Carl guy looked like he hadn’t taken a bath in about a year. Every part of his body was dirty and his hair was greasy and stringy and his beard had food in it from every meal I think he’d ever eaten in his life. He wore the same exact clothes every day, and from the way he’d smelled when I talked to him in my room that first day, I can guarantee he hadn’t changed his socks or underwear since socks and underwear were first invented. The guy was pretty much everything my parents used to hate in people, and yet for some reason they seemed to be in love with this guy.
Maybe they had lost their minds. Maybe my parents had always been secretly crazy and it just took me not taking out the garbage to make them snap. Maybe whatever was holding my mom’s sanity together came unglued the minute that golf ball went through her china cabinet window. Maybe I really was better off being out of the house and out of their lives and moving on to a different life in a different town.
But my parents weren’t crazy. I’d known them too long to believe that they were. If anything, they were too normal. And so them suddenly kicking me out of the house and being all in love with this super scuzzy guy just didn’t make sense on any level.
And so for the sake of my parents and for the sake of us as a family, I vowed to figure out just what the heck was going on.
The next morning, I heard a loud engine start up.
I crawled out of my tent and ran around the side of the house just in time to see Carl roar out of the driveway and head off down the street on a huge motorcycle. I then waited until my dad left for work and for my mom to drive off to go shopping. Once she was gone, I got the spare key that we kept hidden in a fake hollow rock under the bush next to our front door and went inside. Everything looked pretty normal except for a lot of scuff marks and mud stains from Carl’s boots all over the house. When I looked in the refrigerator, it was filled with beer, which I knew had to be Carl’s since neither my mom nor my dad drank alcohol. And when I looked in the bathroom next to my bedroom, I saw the toilet seat was covered with pee, which meant that Carl didn’t put it up when he whizzed. The inside of the toilet also was covered with skid marks, which meant that Carl was taking some pretty huge dumps in there and no one was making him clean it up with a toilet brush the way my mom always made me do even if there was the smallest stain in the bowl.
But it wasn’t until I walked in my room that I almost fainted.
The place was totally destroyed. There were garbage and pizza boxes and empty beer cans and half-eaten sandwiches lying all over the place. All my sci-fi posters had been torn down, and pictures from biker magazines of women in bikinis were hanging everywhere. All the clothes from my closet had been thrown on the floor, and inside the closet were stacks and stacks of boxes that looked like they had been stolen from some warehouse.
Just as I was about to open one of the boxes, I heard the front door open and Carl yell, “Anybody home?”
Panicked, I tried to run out of the room but heard Carl’s big boots clunking down the hallway at top speed. I looked at the window and thought about trying to jump out it, but I knew that my window always stuck and so by the time I got it opened, Carl would already be in the room. And so I crawled under the bed and held my breath, trying not to make a sound.
Carl said, “In here,” and then he walked in the room, followed by two other sets of big black, clunky boots.
“Man, this room really is the worst,” a voice even scarier than Carl’s said.
“What nerd used to live in here?” a thi
rd even scarier voice asked.
“The nerd who’s living in a pup tent in the backyard.” Carl guffawed as they all laughed with him. “Speaking of nerds, you have gotta hear this!”
I heard Carl crack open my journal and clear his throat to start reading.
How embarrassing.
“‘Dear Journal,’” Carl read in a super insulting, mocking voice, “‘wore my new jeans to school today to impress Sheila Kaufman. When I walked into homeroom, everybody including Sheila stared at me. I was sure they thought I was cool until they all started laughing, and it turned out that my fly was wide open, wide enough for the whole class to see my Superman underwear. I wanted to die.’”
Carl and the other two guys practically fell on the floor in hysterics, and I debated whether I should jump out from under the bed, grab my journal, and make a run for it. But since I was trying to figure out what was wrong with my parents, I decided that I would have to sacrifice my dignity for the time being.
“All right, enough screwing around,” Carl finally said. “Let’s get to work.”
I heard them start tearing open the boxes from the closet and then heard a bunch of clinking and clanking as they started pulling stuff out. I tried to peek out from under the bed to see what was inside the boxes, but they had their backs to me and so I couldn’t tell.
After a few minutes, the scariest voiced guy said, “Where do we keep these?”
“Look and see if there’s room under the bed,” the second guy said.
Oh no…
“Wait, we have to take these to the place,” Carl said. “We can’t leave anything important in here because pretty soon there’s going to be nothing left of this room.”
The guys all grunted in agreement and then headed out. I heard them open the front door and slam it shut. I wiggled out from under my bed and ran to the living room window to see what they were carrying, but all I saw was the smoke from their motorcycles as they rounded the corner and roared off toward the main avenue.
I ran back to my room and looked at the now-empty boxes scattered everywhere. Inside them were tons of packing peanuts. I stuck my hand down into them and felt around, but there was nothing left in the boxes. I spun them around to see if they were labeled, but they were all blank. The only thing I really knew was that whatever had been inside those boxes had been metal and that Carl and his friends had taken the items somewhere. I wasn’t sure what those things were but I could pretty much guarantee they weren’t something good.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN HERE?!”
I almost had a heart attack as I spun around and saw my dad standing in the doorway. His hair was messy and greasy and he hadn’t shaved in days.
“You are not allowed in this house!” he yelled, his face red with anger. “You know that!”
“But Dad,” I blurted, “Carl is going to do something terrible to my room. He was just in here with two other guys, and I think they were taking guns or weapons or something out of these boxes.”
“You were spying on them?!”
Before I could answer, my dad grabbed me by the arm and dragged me through the house. He smelled pretty bad and I realized he’d been wearing the same clothes since the day he gave my room away. He pulled me out the back door, then grabbed my pup tent and yanked it up out of the ground, sending the tent stakes flying. When he did, the broccoli I had inside the tent flew all over the place.
“AAGGH!” he yelled as the broccoli hit him in the face, freaking out like it was a bee trying to sting him. “Why do you have that?! Your mother told you to throw it away! WHY DO YOU NEVER LISTEN?!”
Stepping around the pieces of broccoli like they were dog turds, he bunched up the tent into a ball and shoved it into my arms. “Here! Take your tent and your disobedient self and leave our yard. For good!”
“But Dad, something weird is going on! I heard Carl say they were going to destroy my room. He and his friends are going to do something bad!”
“Maybe if you spent a little more time trying to fix yourself instead of inventing stories about fine, upstanding people, you wouldn’t have been kicked out of this house in the first place.”
He then dragged me over to the gate, threw it open wide, and pushed me through it into the front yard.
“Do not come back, do you hear me?” he said as he glared at me. “Because if you do, I will call the police.”
CLINK! My dad slammed the chain-link gate shut and stormed back into the house. Not sure what to do and afraid to upset him even more, I started walking down the driveway toward the street.
As I did, I looked back and saw my mom peeking out at me from behind the living room curtain. She was also wearing the same clothes from days ago and her hair was a mess. The minute we locked eyes, she turned away from the window and pulled the curtain closed.
I looked around the corner of Brian’s house at the six motorcycles sitting in our driveway next to my dad’s SUV. I had been standing there for hours in the morning heat, waiting to see if Carl and his ever-growing gang were going out on their motorcycles again today. Since my friend Brian and his family were out of town on vacation, I had spent the night in their backyard tree house and decided to use it as my trying-to-find-out-just-what-the-heck-is-going-on headquarters.
Finally, Carl came out of the house with his big scary biker friends. They were carrying huge duffel bags filled with some long things that were clanking loudly as they walked. They got on their motorcycles and fired them up. Just as I was about to jump on Brian’s bike that I had taken out of his garage to try and follow them, I saw my mom and dad come out of the house carrying two more duffel bags. Carl waved to them and yelled over his noisy motorcycle, “We’ll see you there!”
“We’ll be right behind you!” my dad yelled back. “We’ve just got a couple more bags inside.”
As Carl and his gang roared off down the street and around the corner, my parents opened the back of my dad’s SUV and put the bags inside. Then they went back into the house. Knowing this was my chance, I ran as fast as I could across the street and jumped into the back of my dad’s truck. I pulled open the hatch that the spare tire was hidden in, then yanked out the tire and rolled it into the bushes. I squeezed myself into the small tire space and pulled the hatch down again.
Man, it was a good thing I was a skinny kid who was pretty flexible because it was awfully tight in there.
A few seconds later, something heavy got dropped on top of the hatch door and almost crushed me. It must have been the last of the bags my parents were loading into the truck. Then the truck engine started and I felt the car start to move.
Wherever my parents were going, I was now going with them.
By the time the truck finally stopped a half hour later, I felt like a bug that someone had stepped on. Every bump we’d hit on the road bounced the duffel bags on top of me, and I was pretty sure that if we had driven just a few miles farther I probably would have been flat as a really thin, dead pancake.
The heavy bags were lifted off the hatch as I heard Carl say, “Just put them in the middle of the field.” Not being sure where we were or how close anyone was to my dad’s truck, I carefully opened the hatch a tiny crack and tried to peek out. All I could see at first was my parents carrying the duffel bags away from the truck. But soon I saw the bikers and my parents placing all the bags in a pile in the middle of a big lawn. I opened the hatch a bit wider and was really surprised at what I saw….
My parents and the bikers were standing at the fifty-yard line in the center of our city’s football stadium!
A fat older guy wearing a suit walked up to the bikers. I immediately recognized him from TV as the owner of our city’s football team. His suit was pretty rumpled, though, like he had slept in it, and his face was all stubbly from not shaving. He held up a big manila envelope and began to speak.
“All right, everybody, here’s how this is going to work. Each of you will take a map and place the canisters from these bags in the specified locations around th
e stadium. Then tonight, once the crowd is in here for the game, I’ll trigger the gas using the master remote as soon as we start the National Anthem. Then, once everybody is unconscious, which will happen quickly because this is very strong stuff, we can get down to business.”
The bikers all exchanged excited smiles and laughed like a bunch of pirates. I couldn’t believe my ears. Was this all some big plot to steal things from passed-out football fans? Why would the owner of the football team help them do this? Wasn’t he already a rich guy? And most important…
I looked at my parents, who looked at the bikers and then started laughing, too.
And then they all high-fived.
What was happening? Were my parents hypnotized? Or were they some kind of criminals who had hidden their true selves from me for all these years but now, in the face of such a big job, had decided they were going to be so rich that they would get rid of me and take their ill-gotten gains and travel the world without the son who broke windows and forgot to take out the garbage?
Whatever the answer was, I knew I couldn’t let it happen.
Once my parents had driven the SUV back to our house and gone inside with the bikers, I snuck out of the hatch and tried to find a phone so I could call the police. I went to all our neighbors’ houses, but none of them would let me in. They were all really mean to me and wouldn’t let me tell them what was wrong and told me to get lost, even though in the past they had all been pretty friendly. But the weird thing was that they were all very dirty and smelly, too, like there had been some order that nobody in town should ever take a shower or wash their clothes again. Even Mrs. Hatfield, the old lady who always baked us cookies and pies, screamed at me to get out of her yard. It was like the whole neighborhood had gone as nuts as my parents.
Realizing I had no other options, I knew I had to ride over to the police station and tell them what was going on. I ran back to Brian’s house to get his bike. Since the police station was a few miles away and since I was starving, I went into my tent and grabbed the last pieces of broccoli that were still in there. They were pretty wilted and soft and kind of gross and I had to eat them raw, but when you’re trying to stop a major crime from being committed without getting a hunger headache, then beggars can’t be choosers.
