The End of the World

by Michael Rex

  “My name’s Ricky,” said Ricky. “Are you Travis’s mom?”

  “Yes, I’m Mrs. Murphy,” she said. “But I asked you a question. Why do you look like a disgusting pile of mud, and why are you running through my yard?”

  “Oh!” said Ricky. “Because I drank some doughnut-flavored apple juice!”

  “Excuse me?” said Mrs. Murphy. She wasn’t smiling. “You’d better explain!”

  “Okay! Okay!” said Ricky, catching his breath.…

  Well, it all started today in school. Our teacher, Ms. Jay, had asked if we did anything interesting over the weekend, and Travis said he saw Bigfoot! Everyone was laughing, but Travis kept saying that he saw him. Even I was kind of laughing at first. But the thing is, I don’t know Travis that well, and maybe he did see Bigfoot, so I stopped laughing.

  And kids were like, “Did you see an alien, too? What about a ghost? What about a leprechaun? What about a UFO?” Travis put his head down on his desk. He looked pretty upset.

  Then Ms. Jay asked me if I did anything interesting over the weekend. I started to say that I didn’t do anything interesting, but then all of a sudden, I sneezed! Right in front of everybody. It was the hugest sneeze ever. Snot went flying all over my desk. I had all these boogies on my face and everything.

  Everyone started cracking up! Except Travis. He just handed me a tissue while everyone else was laughing. That’s when I realized that Travis was pretty cool.

  Things got calm in class, and we were getting some work done, and then I had my best idea of the day. I wrote a note that said, “Hey, Travis! If you want to see Bigfoot again, come to the path near Black Pond at seven o’clock tonight! Bring your camera!”

  I didn’t put my name on it, because I didn’t want him to know it was from me. I didn’t even tell Gus and Stew about my idea. If I really wanted my plan to work, it had to be a secret.

  Later in the day, I put the note on his desk while he was using the computer.

  When Travis read the note, he stood up and said, “You guys will all be sorry tomorrow when I bring in a picture of Bigfoot! You won’t be laughing then.” But everyone started laughing again.

  When I got home from school, I started working on the Bigfoot costume. I put on brown pants, a brown shirt, and my dad’s big brown snow boots. I stuck a big pillow under the shirt to make me look fat. I didn’t know if Bigfoot was fat, but it looked good. I dug around in my closet for something to wear on my head, and I found a big, crazy wig from when I was a rock star for Halloween. It was perfect for Bigfoot.

  In the closet, I also found a box that I had forgotten about. It was my pickle experiment.

  Did you know that a pickle is just a cucumber that has been sitting in this stuff called brine? I wanted to make my own pickles, but I didn’t have brine so I used apple juice. And I didn’t have a cucumber so I pickled other things.

  I made a pickled doughnut, a pickled brownie, a pickled slice of pizza, a pickled cupcake, a pickled piece of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and some pickled mac and cheese.

  I opened the jar with the pickled doughnut in it. I tried to taste it, but it had turned all mushy in the apple juice. Actually, everything else had gotten soft and mushy. But then I realized I had a new invention! Flavored apple juice!

  I tasted the doughnut-flavored apple juice, and it was pretty gross. So were the slice-of-pizza-flavored apple juice and the mac-and-cheese-flavored apple juice. But I tasted them all just in case one of them was awesome.

  None of them were. In fact, I couldn’t get the taste out of my mouth, so I found some of my dad’s minty gum. Usually I don’t like that gum, but it helped get rid of the gross taste. I kept sticking more pieces of gum into my mouth until I could barely chew.

  I looked at my clock and saw that it was almost seven! I had totally forgotten about my Bigfoot plan. As I ran out of the house, my mom asked me where I was going, and I was like, “Blown blob Black Plond!” because my mouth was full of gum. I tore down to the path by Black Pond.

  I never really finished my Bigfoot costume, so I started rubbing mud on my clothes and face and I stuck grass and leaves all over me. A worm was crawling on my head, but it didn’t bother me. It was getting dark now, so I figured my costume would look pretty good. I hid behind a tree and waited … and waited … and waited … but Travis never showed up.

  “Ricky!” called Police Officer Mackey from the road above the sewer ditch. “What the heck are you doing down there, and why are you wrapped in garbage bags?”

  “Oh,” said Ricky, “because no one in this town litters!”

  “What the heck are you talking about, son?” asked Officer Mackey.

  “You see,” said Ricky, “this is what happened.…”

  It all started when I went over to Stew’s house and brought my Cleanup Day stuff. I knocked on Stew’s door and he was ready for Cleanup Day, too. We both had a bunch of big green garbage bags and backpacks filled with water bottles and snacks. We went to get Gus. When we got to his house, he was like, “What’s Cleanup Day?”

  I told him that everybody in town picks up garbage and stuff, and at three o’clock in the afternoon, you bring everything down to Dumpsters parked at the fire station. Then the town throws an ice cream party for everyone who cleaned up. It’s awesome.

  Gus said he wanted to help, too. He got some garbage bags and some snacks, and he even grabbed a pair of work gloves in case we had to pick up anything that was really messed up.

  We walked down my street looking for garbage. There wasn’t any. We went down another street. Nothing.

  A lid from a coffee cup blew down the sidewalk. We chased it like crazy, but it was blowing all over. It blew back and forth across the street, and we just couldn’t catch it. Finally, we got close to it. We all jumped for it!

  I got it.

  We sat on the ground. We were sweaty and out of breath. I pulled out a water bottle and took a drink.

  Stew opened a can of soda.

  It sprayed all over like a geyser and soaked us with soda. I guess the running had shaken it up.

  We licked what we could from our arms and around our mouths.

  Gus said, “Yummm! Refreshing!” like a guy in a soda commercial.

  We started cracking up, but I was like, “We gotta get done by three o’clock if we want to go to the ice cream party.”

  So we walked down some more streets, finding practically nothing.

  Gus picked up a cigarette butt, Stew found a napkin from a doughnut store, and I found a receipt from a gas station. But that was it. Our town is really clean.

  “This is boring,” said Gus.

  “Yeah,” said Stew. “I want to pick up lots of garbage.”

  Then I had a good idea. I opened my backpack and took out the cereal bar that I had packed as a snack. I pulled the wrapper off and threw it on the ground. Gus and Stew were kind of freaked out, because I hate litter.

  Then I was like, “Hey, a cereal bar wrapper!” and I picked it up and put it in my bag.

  Gus and Stew got what I was doing. They both opened up their snacks and chucked the wrappers on the ground, too. Then they picked them up.

  “Hey, I found a cupcake package!” said Stew.

  “I got a Mini-Tart wrapper!” said Gus.

  Then I had my best idea of the day. “Why don’t we go down to the woods behind Black Pond?”

  “Yeah!” said Gus. “There’s tons of garbage there!”

  So we ran off to the woods.

  When we got there, we picked up all sorts of trash. We found a broken plate, some soggy books, some messed-up bedsheets, a bunch of rope, and a rusted-out bucket. We each filled a big bag with trash.

  We were really getting into it, and we walked deeper into the woods than we normally did. The farther we went into the woods, the more our feet sank in the mud, but we kept going. That’s when we saw the greatest thing ever!

  I was like, “Whoa!”

  Gus said, “Oh yeah!”

  And Stew said
, “All right!”

  It was a junky, rusted-out, beat-up car! The whole thing! And it had no tires!

  I said, “We have to clean this up!” We started pushing and pulling on the car, but we figured out that it wasn’t going to move.

  “I don’t think we can bring it to the fire station,” I said. “It’s too heavy.”

  “Yeah … we would have to be like superheroes to move it,” said Gus.

  I jumped into the front seat and said, “Maybe we can drive it there!” And I started fake-driving and screaming and stuff.

  Then Gus jumped on the hood of the car. “Mister! Slow down! I need a ride to the doctor! I swallowed an umbrella!”

  And then I said, “Get in! I’ll get you to the hospital!”

  Then we both screamed like I was driving really fast.

  Then Stew jumped in front of the car. He put his hand up like a policeman.

  “Stop right there!” he shouted. “You’re going two hundred miles over the speed limit!”

  “But, Officer, he swallowed an umbrella, and I have to get him to the hospital!” I screamed.

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?” shouted Stew, and he got in the car, too.

  I fake-drove like crazy, and Stew hung out of the window, shouting, “Out of the way! Out of the way! Official police business! This man swallowed an umbrella!”

  “Oh no!” I screamed. “We’re lost!”

  Gus screamed, “Check the GPS!”

  I screamed, “This old hunk of crud car is too old for a GPS!” And I jammed on the gas pedal.

  “We need a map!” screamed Stew. “We need a map!”

  “Look in the glove compartment!” I screamed.

  Stew opened the glove compartment, and a bunch of mice popped out!

  We started yelling like maniacs! The mice were running all over the car! One mouse ran down the dashboard and across my back. One jumped onto Stew’s head and then into the backseat. We were trying to get out and we were bumping into each other and falling and stuff.

  We climbed out of the car and ran. We jumped up and down and made sure we didn’t have any mice on us or in our pants or anything. Then we started cracking up. We’re not even afraid of mice, but they jumped out of that glove compartment like it was a horror movie.

  And then I saw something totally cool. “Hey, guys!” I said. “Look over there!”

  The tires from the car were piled up in some bushes. All four!

  “We can bring those downtown!” I said.

  “Yeah!” said Stew. “We should get going. We don’t want to miss the ice cream party at three o’clock!”

  We grabbed the tires and rolled them along.

  I had two tires and Gus had two tires, and Stew was trying to carry the filled-up garbage bags. He fell over after a minute.

  “They’re too heavy,” he said. “I can only carry one.”

  “We’ll have to leave two here. We’ll come back for them later,” I said.

  “Yeah, but what if someone takes them?” Gus asked.

  Then I said, “Who’s gonna steal a bag of garbage?”

  “A garbage thief,” said Stew.

  “Yeah,” said Gus, “a garbage thief.”

  Then I was like, “Okay, let’s put them in the trunk of the car. No one will find them there.” We opened the trunk, and there was only one thing in it. Cool ski goggles!

  Gus got them. We put our trash bags in the trunk and closed it, and then we started walking back to town. I rolled two tires, Gus rolled two, and Stew carried his bag of garbage. Our hands were getting black from the rubber, and water was sloshing out of the inside of the tires.

  We came to the top of a hill, and all of a sudden the tires started rolling really fast. We couldn’t catch them. They were totally out of control, and then they went off this little bump and disappeared.

  We went to see where the tires landed. They were in some greenish water in a ditch next to a big sewer pipe. It wasn’t deep at all, just kind of thick. Like soup.

  “Oh, man!” I said. “We gotta get them out of there, or we’re just rotten litterers!”

  I waded into the water, and Stew was like, “Stop! It’s polluted. I heard there are fish with toes in that water!”

  “If you go in there, you’ll get mutated, too!” said Gus.

  I had to get those tires out, but I also had to stay dry somehow. I don’t mind getting wet, but I don’t want to turn into a mutant. I needed something to put over my clothes.

  “I know!” I shouted. “We’ll make a hazmat suit!”

  “What’s hazmat?” asked Gus.

  “Hazardous material,” I said. “Like stuff that if you touch it, it will melt your skin or make you mutate into a mutant!”

  I dumped out my backpack and wrapped the extra garbage bags around my arms and legs.

  Stew started pulling stuff out of his garbage bag. We used the rope to tie the bags on me. Gus gave me his work gloves and the ski goggles. We ripped a hole in one garbage bag and put that over my head, like a shirt. Then I put the broken bucket on as a helmet.

  I looked awesome! We didn’t have much time to bring the garbage to the fire station if we wanted to go to the ice cream party, so I got right to work.

  I went into the water and started to pull the tires out, but they were heavy and the insides were all filled with water. When I handed them to Gus and Stew, the water sloshed everywhere! It was soaking through my hazmat suit, and my feet were sinking into the mud at the bottom of the ditch.

  Finally, all four tires were out of the water, but I felt something strange under my foot. I reached into the water and pulled out …

  A plunger! And as I pulled it up, tons of water splashed onto Gus and Stew.

  Stew started movie-screaming, “Oh no! I’m a mutant now!” He grabbed a messed-up sheet from his garbage bag and wrapped it around his body. Then he put both of his arms through one sleeve of his shirt and limped around.

  Then Gus pulled his shirt over his head and stuck his hands out the bottom.

  I started screaming, “Alert! Alert! It’s the end of the world! The mutants are coming! The mutants are coming!”

  Gus and Stew ran at me!

  And I was screaming, “See the mutant! Hit the mutant!” I swung the plunger at them. We started having an end-of-the-world mutants-versus-the-hazmat-guy battle! It was Mutant World War One! It was epic!

  Finally, they got the plunger, so I dropped a tire over their heads and trapped them.

  “You see?” Ricky said. “That’s how we got here.”

  “Well,” said Officer Mackey, “I’m glad you wanted to clean up the town. But I have bad news. Cleanup Day was last week.”

  “Ohhh …,” said Ricky. “That must be why we couldn’t find any trash.”

  “Must be,” said Officer Mackey.

  “So,” said Ricky, “we don’t have to get all of this stuff to the fire station by three o’clock for the ice cream party?”

  “Nope, sorry,” said Officer Mackey. “That was last week, too.”

  “Great!” said Ricky. “That gives us more time to play Mutant World War Two!”

  ICKY RICKY’S TIP FOR NEVER BEING BORED! #3

  “Repurposing” means finding something that is old and using it for something new. I’ve been doing this my whole life but didn’t know it had a name!

  If you have a sock and can’t find the one that matches it, it can be repurposed as many things. It can be a soft lunch box that you hang from your belt, or it can be a sleeping bag for a fish.

  If you have an old stuffed animal that is losing its stuffing, cut grass makes a great replacement.

  Old baby food jars can be used to store little, important things, such as a collection. Their tight lids and high-quality glass make for a museum-quality display. Here’s my collection of old Band-Aids!

  Ricky stood dripping in Travis’s backyard. Travis’s mom held the flashlight’s beam right on his face.

  “I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Murphy, “but I still d
on’t understand why you’re in my yard, and why you are soaking wet.”

  Travis never showed up. I got worried that if he didn’t get the picture, everyone would laugh at him even more. So I decided to go to his house. I knew what street he lived on but wasn’t sure which house was his.

  I started walking down the street, but I didn’t want anyone to see me because Bigfoot doesn’t just walk down the street. So I snuck into someone’s backyard and went through all the backyards toward where I thought Travis lived. That was a big mistake. The first yard I went into, I was face to face with the man-dog!

  It barked like crazy! I ran from the dog and jumped over a fence into the next yard. Wham! I plowed right into a grill and the charcoal spilled all over me, which was actually pretty cool for my costume. The dog jumped up on the fence behind me, and I ran to the next fence and climbed over that.

  I stopped for a moment to catch my breath. Then I heard a lady screaming. She was like, “Get out of my yard, you freak!” I guess I did look pretty freaky, especially in the dark.

  And then she started throwing eggs at me. She had good aim and totally beaned me! But I was wearing the pillow, and it didn’t hurt.

  I ran again. The next yards were divided by bushes, so I just kind of shoved my way through. I tripped and my gum fell out of my mouth. Then the weirdest thing ever happened!

  A duck, or a goose, took my gum. It was dark so I couldn’t tell what it was, but it seems that the people who lived in this house had a duck, or a goose, instead of a dog or a cat or something. The duck, or the goose, started running around with my gum.