by Mo O'Hara
“Take it away!” the chef shouted. “Far, far away.”
I carried Fang (still licking the peanut-butter-jar lid) in the saucepan out into the woods. I took off the lid of the saucepan and gently emptied her onto the grass, when I heard the voice behind me. “That kitten is going to get you kicked out of camp in the first week.” Geeky Girl shook her head and folded her arms.
“And why do you care?” I said.
“I don’t care about you or Fang,” she said. Fang looked up at Geeky Girl and hissed. Then went back to licking her peanut butter. “But if they find her, then the camp counselors might start looking more closely and eventually find Boris too.”
“You worry about Boris, and I’ll worry about Fang.”
“Just keep her out of sight,” Geeky Girl said. She looked at her watch. “We’re going to be late for Evil Getaway practice.”
“No one is stopping you,” I said.
She looked around. “Look, you can’t expect a kitten to stay hidden. You shouldn’t have brought her, but since you did, you’re going to have to find someplace safe to keep her.”
She turned to walk away. “I might have an idea.”
I picked up Fang and the saucepan and followed Geeky Girl farther down the path into the woods. She pointed up to her right into the trees. “Do you see it?”
I squinted through the sunlight up into the branches and saw what looked like a tree house.
“Boris showed it to me this morning. I was going to use it as a non-evil hideout, but you know, if the kitten wants to stay there when I’m not there…”
I put Fang on the ground and pulled myself up the couple of branches into the tree house. It wasn’t bad. Fang could totally hang out here. Safely up out of the way with some water and food.
Before I knew it, I felt a brush of fur against my leg. Fang had climbed up behind me.
“What do you think? An evil lair fit for an evil kitten?” I said.
“Meoooooow.” She purred and curled herself around my leg.
I shouted down to Geeky Girl. “OK, she’ll take it. Pass me that saucepan.”
Geeky Girl handed me the saucepan, which I filled up with water from my water bottle. Then I rolled up my sweatshirt and made a bed for Fang. She clawed around it, checking it out, and then lay down.
“Do you think she’ll stay there?” Geeky Girl called up.
“Fang,” I said, stroking her ear, “you have to stay out of the way.”
“I have to get back to practice evil getaways. I’ll see you after lunch.” I crouched down and looked her right in the eye. “Stay out here; don’t let anyone see you.” She licked her paws and rolled over.
“Good kitty,” I said. Fang hissed. “I mean, evil kitty, evil, evil kitty.” I scratched her just behind the ears. “Now I gotta figure out how Mark the Snake-in-ator can get that Evil Plans Notebook from Sanj. An evil plan will come to me.”
“Dum, Dum, Dum, da da Dum, da da Dum,” the Darth Vader trumpet sounded.
“Right. Gotta go. My fans back at camp are waiting for me. Mwwwhaaa-haaa-haaa-haaa-haa,” I said, and scratched Fang on the top of her head.
“Hey, thanks for finding…,” I started to say as I jumped down from the tree house, but Geeky Girl was already gone.
11
I got back to the lake just in time for Trevor the Tech-in-ator’s talk about hot-wiring speedboats for getaways. Then he moved on to the more advanced bit about defusing the bombs that were on the boats. This was in case the good guys you’re stealing from, or some evil rival group, might have rigged the boat so it blows up if you steal it. Either way it was hot-wiring and driving a speedboat. That sounded fun.
I stopped listening to the bomb-disposal bit sometime after he said, “Never cut the red wire.” There was more interesting stuff to eavesdrop on.
Diablo was talking to one of the killer Goth evil girls and kept pointing over at me. I couldn’t hear everything, but I caught “totally evil hombre” and “muy grande serpiente.”
“It means ‘really big snake,’” Geeky Girl interrupted my eavesdropping, making me wonder if she could read my mind. “You had that trying-to-figure-it-out-and-not-having-a-clue look on your face, so I thought I would translate,” she explained.
“I don’t need you to translate,” I lied.
“So you understand Spanish?” Geeky Girl responded.
“No, but I understand…”
I was just about to come back at her with a totally evil and cutting comeback that I hadn’t thought of yet when Trevor the Tech-in-ator interrupted.
“If you two are talking during my demo, zhen you must know all zhere is about hot-wiring a getaway boat, defusing zee potential bomb and circling zee lake to escape your enemies? Right?”
“Ummmmm?” I said. There had to be some way to get out of this. I was the Snake-in-ator, right? That must count for something.
“Sorry, we were ummm…,” Geeky Girl started.
“So come up here and demonstrate, then,” Trevor said, and stepped back from the boat.
“Both of us? ’Cause she was really talking more…,” I said.
“Both,” he barked. “Now.”
We both shuffled forward and looked at the boat. It actually looked a bit like a boat I had driven in the water-sports activity center a few months before.
“I think I can drive it,” I whispered to Geeky Girl. “If you can do the bomb?”
She nodded and looked over at Trevor. “Are we being timed?”
“The clock started vhen I said ‘now,’” he said, and smiled a really evil smile. I mean, that man could patent that evil smile. “You have three minutes.”
Geeky Girl huffed, jumped into the boat and started working on the pretend bomb. At least I hoped it was a pretend bomb.
* * *
I jumped into the boat too and went to the front.
“You have to hot-wire zee boat first to get it to start,” Trevor shouted to me.
“Not when you have a universal getaway starting key that works on almost all getaway boats, cars and motorcycles,” I said. “Ninteen ninety-nine plus twenty Evil Scientist magazine coupons in the last issue.” I pulled it out of my pocket and started up the engine.
“That’s cheating,” Trevor shouted back. “Extra points for cheating. Vell done,” he added, and wrote something down in his notebook.
As we sped away out into the water, I could hear Sanj back on the pier saying, “So that’s where all my Evil Scientist magazine coupons went!”
My mind started to wander a bit as I drove the boat.
They wouldn’t let a bunch of kids practice on a real bomb, right?
But we did have to sign that next-of-kin form.…
My wandering mind was brought back to the boat with a bump. Literally.
“Hey!” Geeky Girl shouted from the back of the boat. “You think you could not make the boat jump every wave? Defusing a pretend bomb here. A little less bumping would be nice.”
“So you’re sure it’s a pretend bomb, right?” I said. “It is EVIL Scientist Camp.”
“So you think it might be real and you’re still going over bumps?” Geeky Girl added.
“Right,” I said. “I’m on it.” And then one of the kids on the pier waved to me as I circled past again and crossed over the wake from my own boat. “Whooooaaaa.”
I could feel the boat surge up at the front and come down with a slam at the back. I looked over my shoulder to see Geeky Girl flipped up into the air by the force of the wave. She was heading overboard!
12
“Got ya!” I shouted, and reached back and grabbed Geeky Girl’s backpack before she was bounced out of the boat.
“So that is LESS bouncing?” she said.
“I am re-creating authentic getaway conditions,” I said. “So there. People would be chasing us, and chasing sometimes involves bumps.”
She mumbled something at me, but I couldn’t make it out. Actually, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
I wait
ed a few seconds and then shouted again over the roar of the engine, “How’s that bomb going, Geeky Girl?”
“Nearly done. I think,” she mumbled. “I hope this works.”
I wished that she sounded surer.
We headed back to the pier, having circled the lake, and jumped out of the boat just as Trevor clicked his stopwatch.
“Made it!” I shouted, and punched the air.
“Just,” said Trevor. “And did you manage to defuse ze bomb? Who vould like to check?”
Sanj strode forward. “I’m a wiz at all tech devices. I could have defused that bomb in my sleep. I’ll check out the shoddy work of this amateur,” Sanj said, and stepped up on the deck of the boat.
“Sanj, I think you’ll want to check…,” Geeky Girl said.
“I don’t think I need advice from you,” Sanj sneered, pushing past Geeky Girl.
She stepped off the boat, folded her arms and smiled. Then she started quietly counting as Sanj fiddled with the wires on the bomb.
“One evil genius, two evil genius, three evil genius,” she mumbled.
“What on earth are you doing? It’s distracting,” Sanj started to say, when suddenly a loud siren sounded, and you could hear a recording of Geeky Girl’s voice saying, “Danger, this person is planting a bomb and needs to be apprehended at once! Danger!” on a repeat loop.
Sanj staggered back from the pretend bomb, covering his ears.
“Look out!” Geeky Girl shouted over her own booming recorded voice.
But Sanj toppled right over the side of the boat and splashed into the cold lake.
Geeky Girl shook her head. “Yes, sir, I defused the bomb, but I had some extra time, so I added a fail-safe so it couldn’t be reactivated again without the alarm going off.”
Then she smiled a pretty evil smile, and added, “I hope that’s OK?”
Sanj clambered back onto the pier, dripping as he walked, and joined the others.
“Zhis is more than OK. You can both head back with zee others now, and maybe you can give zhem some tips, as zhey’ll all have a go at zhis before lunch,” Trevor said.
I went back and high-fived with Bob, Diablo and Igor.
While the rest of the campers practiced their getaways, I got lots of slaps on the back and nods of “top evil getaway, dude” from some of the guys. Geeky Girl and Trevor talked the whole time about her pretend bomb tampering. “So it’s really just a simple modification of the secondary circuit that shorts out the primary detonator and circumvents the auxiliary widget.”
OK, so I don’t think she actually said “widget,” but my brain was full with big words by then, so I stopped listening.
“It’s time for lunch,” Trevor announced once the last kid pulled himself out of the lake after crashing the boat into the pier. My stomach had started growling already.
When I get hungry I think more. That’s kind of why I don’t like to be too hungry. I don’t want too much thinking to turn me into Sanj or anything. But my growling stomach did get me thinking.
Me and the guys. I liked saying that. It was always just either “me and Sanj” or “me and some kids I made do what I want,” but these were guys who were choosing to hang with me. I kinda liked it. So me and the guys headed back to camp for lunch.
Trevor called after us. “Remember zhis afternoon is set aside to work in your pairs for ze Evil Trap-Making Competition. The winning team gets named Evil Emperors of the Week and gets points toward the end-of-camp prize, Evil Emperor of the Camp.”
Great. That means a whole afternoon of working with Geeky Girl. She’ll be really smug about acing the bomb thing too. Although I gotta admit it was really cool to see Sanj land in the lake. But it’s not fair. Bob and Diablo have been thinking of stuff since last year. Igor is just excited to be carrying evil stuff back and forth to help out the evil Goth girl he’s paired with, and I’m stuck with Geeky Girl. She’ll probably want to build some eco-friendly, not-even-remotely-evil trap. Plus Sanj and Dustin are probably already working on something really amazing from our notebook of evil plans. I gotta get that notebook back. I need an evil plan, and I need stealth and off-the-chart sneakiness to do it. I need Fang.
13
When we got to the mess tent, the cook was waiting for me. “I prepared my specialty to thank you for disposing of the rat this morning. Evil superburgers for you and your table.” He plonked down a tray of yummy-looking burgers in front of us.
“Result! Dig in,” I said as I moved the plate out of the way of the string of drool dangling out of Igor’s mouth. I gobbled down a few and pocketed one for Fang.
I looked over at Geeky Girl and Sanj eating the lunch slop casserole that was the dish of the day and smiled. This was the life. I was Mark the Snake-in-ator. I had respect. I had a posse. I had burgers.
“I’ll see you later,” I said as I walked out and headed down to the woods to try to give Fang her lunch. I checked out the tree house, expecting to find her all curled up like I’d left her. No Fang. I looked all around the spots that seemed like they would be a good size for an evil kitten to hide in, but no Fang. I had to find her fast, before one of the other campers or, worse, one of the camp counselors found her! I thought if I gave her a safe place to hang out, she would stay put. I headed back to the tent. Maybe she went there looking for me? That’s when I heard Bob, Diablo and Igor inside.
“It was in my backpack! It stole my food!” Bob shouted.
“Is the snake back?” I said as I inched into the tent, staying very close to the door in case there actually was a real snake in the tent.
“No, more like a squirrel,” Diablo said.
“It was bigger than a squirrel,” Bob said. “But all I really saw was a gray tail, so I don’t know.”
Fang. Guess I know why she wasn’t in the woods. She was getting her own lunch here.
“What did she take?” I asked.
“She?” Bob said. “Why do you think it’s a she?”
“Um, just thinking … it’s a mother animal getting food for her young?” I made up quickly.
“Well, her young are lucky, then, because she stole my cookie stash. But it mostly just licked out the creamy inside and left the cookies.” Bob held up a well-cat-licked cookie to show, and Igor took it, mumbled “urggh” and ate it.
This had Fang written all over it. Eating the creamy filling out of the middle is her favorite thing to do with Oreo cookies. She was totally going to get caught if she kept this up.
Just then, the trumpet sounded again to tell everyone to assemble into their pairs for trap making. I was saved by the off-key Star Wars tune.
They were still talking about the cookie theft, though, when we got to the clearing to meet up with our partners.
“Maybe someone brought a pet to camp?” Diablo said. “It could be someone’s cat or dog scrambling around for food.”
Geeky Girl’s voice piped up from next to Bob.
“Around here, your most likely culprit for food theft is a raccoon,” she said. “They are clever and can easily get into bags and even cupboards.”
“Who asked you?” I said.
“Yeah,” Bob added.
“I’m just saying, no one would be stupid enough to bring a cat or dog to camp, would they?” She glared at me. “So it must be a raccoon.”
“Maybe it was,” I said, grabbing her arm and pulling her away from the guys, “but we gotta get working on our trap. Better get moving.” And I stomped off out of earshot of the guys.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Saving your butt. Again,” she said. “But don’t thank me.”
“I don’t need you to save me like that,” I said. “You could have made it a lot worse. Now I gotta find Fang before she does anything else that could get her caught, and I need her help to do a little sneaky mission too.”
“What about our trap?” Geeky Girl said.
“We can plan while we look for her. I have an idea where she might be,” I said.
14
We headed over to the food tent to see if Fang was around, looking for extras for her lunch. If she was hunting for food in our tent, I thought I knew where she would look next.
“There are all kinds of traps we could do,” Geeky Girl said. “I made a list of the different general trap categories.”
“Of course you did,” I muttered. Why did she want to talk about this now? Couldn’t she see I was thinking about Fang?
She took out her tablet and read off: “The kinds of traps that catch you in a big net, drop you in a big pit, trap you in a cage, tie you up in ropes, freeze you in a block of ice—”
“Kinda tricky in summer,” I interrupted.
“Zombify you, make you fall asleep, trap you in a giant bubble and shoot you into space. Can you think of any more?”
“A trap that bores you to death,” I said.
“You got up on the wrong side of the sleeping bag,” she mumbled.
“You might not have noticed, but I’m not thinking traps now, OK. I’m thinking pain-in-the-neck disappearing vampire kittens.”
Then I spotted Fang. Just inside the kitchen of the mess tent, I could see the gray tail sticking out of a big catering-size can of pork and beans.
At least she’s OK. She’s going to be found any second and get us both sent home on the Canoe of Shame, but at least she’s OK. There are times I wish I could zombify that kitten.
The cook had his back to us and to Fang. He was clattering around pots and pans, washing them in the sink and singing what I think was a Beyoncé song in Italian. Truly evil. It made enough noise, though, to cover us.
“Can you be lookout for me?” I said to Geeky Girl.
She looked over my shoulder and saw Fang’s tail. She rolled her eyes but nodded. “You better be quick. The cook’s nearly at the chorus of that song, and I don’t want to be here if he starts dancing.”
I crept in behind the cook, waiting until the music swelled and the pot banging reached a peak. Then I swooped in and grabbed Fang by the tail with one hand and then immediately covered her mouth to prevent a “MEOW!” with the other hand. I was in and out in a few seconds, and Geeky Girl and I were walking back down to the woods with a muffled, baked-bean-covered Fang stuffed under my jacket.
