How to Merit in Monsters

by Matthew Cody

  The Dead Gentleman

  The Pharaoh of Hong Kong

  (with Brian Clevinger)

  Powerless

  The Secrets of the Pied Piper 1: The Peddler’s Road

  The Secrets of the Pied Piper 2: The Magician’s Key

  The Secrets of the Pied Piper 3: The Piper’s Apprentice

  Super

  Villainous

  Will in Scarlet

  An imprint of Rodale Books

  733 Third Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit us online at RodaleKids.com.

  Text © 2018 by Matthew Cody

  Illustrations © 2018 by Steve Lambe

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Rodale Kids books may be purchased for business or promotional use or for special sales. For information, please e-mail RodaleKids@Rodale.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher

  Hardcover ISBN 9781635650594

  Ebook ISBN 9781635650433

  v5.2

  a

  Cover

  Also by Matthew Cody

  Title Page

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE: Stand on Your Own Two Feet

  CHAPTER TWO: Getting Off on the Wrong Foot

  CHAPTER THREE: One Step at a Time

  CHAPTER FOUR: Walk a Mile in My Shoes

  CHAPTER FIVE: Trouble Afoot

  CHAPTER SIX: Toe the Line

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Foot for Thought

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Toe-Tally Blown Away

  CHAPTER NINE: Agony of De-Feet

  CHAPTER TEN: Going Toe to Toe

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Head over Heels

  CHAPTER TWELVE: No Small Feet

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: One Foot Forward, Two Feet Back

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Time to Foot the Bill

  HOW YOU CAN HELP BIGFOOT (and Other Forest Friends)

  About the Authors

  Do you like stories about monsters? Secret societies? How about stories about real monsters and real secret societies? Now, I know what you’re thinking: there’s no such thing as monsters and people who believe in secret societies wear tinfoil hats to keep the “alien thought-probes out.”

  Well, I don’t know about the thought probes, but I can promise you that this story here is totally true. Like, nonfiction-level true—monsters and secret societies and all.

  It’s also a story about the scouts, and the outdoors, and the three kids who would end up becoming my best friends ever. But I thought leading with the monsters would be more, I dunno, attention-grabby.

  My name is Ben Billingsley, and my story begins the day my mom and dad sent me off to the Nature Scouts’ sleepaway camp. Maybe you’ve heard of the Nature Scouts? Maybe you’ve seen pictures of smiling kids doing all kinds of outdoorsy stuff like camping, canoeing, and hiking? Maybe those pictures made you want to be a Nature Scout?

  Yeah, not me.

  See, before that, I was more of what you’d call an indoor kid. Indoor soccer, indoor TV, indoor movies and games. To me, the outdoors was just the place you had to go through to get back to the inside. No need to hang around in it!

  My mom and dad, on the other hand, were always going on and on about camping trips they took when they were younger and bragging about how they once backpacked the Appalachian Trail before I was born. I don’t know what the Appalachian Trail is exactly, but if it’s an outdoor thing, I’m glad they already got it out of their systems.

  These days their lives are pretty busy with work, so there’s no time for camping. That’s why, one sticky summer day, I found myself waiting in line with a bunch of other kids outside the entrance to Camp Nature at the base of Bear Mountain. It was my first day as a Nature Scout and my first-ever sleepaway camp. The wooden sign above the gate was simple enough, with the words Camp Nature painted across it in faded letters.

  A thick-necked troop leader walked up and down the line reading names off a clipboard. “Collins? Martinez?” When your name was called, you were sorted into one of four troops. I didn’t know if the sorting was random or if it was based on the answers we gave to that huge questionnaire they sent home in the mail. If that was the case, then I was in for it.

  “Billingsley? Ben Billingsley!”

  “Oh, that’s me. I’m Ben Billingsley.” I’d been too busy weighing my escape plans to hear my own name.

  “Pay attention, son! This here’s your uniform and Nature Scouts Handbook, revised edition. Keep this handbook with you wherever you go, unless you want to be cleaning the latrines!”

  He turned to face the rest of the scouts and said, “My name’s Bill Spitzer, and I am your Senior Scoutmaster for this year’s camp. I don’t want to ruin the surprises, but believe me you are in for a camp experience like no other!”

  Spitzer gave himself an enthusiastic round of applause. Maybe two or three kids clapped out of pity. “Now, scouts, you’ll find your troop letter posted outside your cabins. Grab a bunk, get changed, and report back here in half an hour.”

  I raised my hand. “Uh, excuse me. I never got my troop letter.”

  Spitzer checked his clipboard. “Billingsley, right?” He paused. “Troop…D.”

  Was it my imagination or did someone snicker when Spitzer said my troop letter?

  The kid next to me, who looked like he was already shaving, jabbed me in the ribs. “Heh. Troop D! Good luck, dweeb!”

  So no. Not my imagination.

  Camp Nature was basically a ring of cabins arranged around a wide-open lawn. Beyond that, woods stretched on for as far as I could see. The first few cabins didn’t look so bad. They kind of reminded me of those fakey theme-park cabins my family sometimes stayed in when we went on vacation. You know, where the idea of “roughing it” means the coffee maker only makes one cup at a time. Shiny new vending machines were scattered all around the camp, filled with soda and junk food. Maybe this whole camp thing wouldn’t be that bad…

  “Keep walking, Billingsley!” called Spitzer. “Those cabins belong to the troop leaders.”

  More kids started to laugh. This day was starting out swell.

  Unfortunately, the scouts’ cabins were more…cabiny. Each troop had its own pair of side-by-side girls’ and boys’ basic log cabins. At least they looked clean and sturdy. I saw signs for Troops A, B, and C…

  But then something barreled into me and knocked me on my butt. I looked up to see the big kid with the five o’clock shadow staring down at me. “Keep moving, dweeb! You gotta long way to go.”

  He was with a group of what looked like biker-movie rejects disguised as kids.

  “Nice, Butch. Score one for Troop C!” said one of them, chuckling.

  Of course the kid’s name was Butch. Why did bullies always come with tough-sounding bully names? Just once I’d like to get picked on by an Englebert or a Maurice.

  So far, I’d seen cabins for Troops A and B and, of course, Troop C. So where was Troop D’s cabin?

  I ended up trekking all the way to the edge of Camp Nature to find out. There, in the shadows of the mountain forest, were two of the most
run-down piles of boards and nails that ever passed for cabins.

  “No, it can’t be,” I groaned.

  But it was. On a signpost I found the name I’d been searching the whole camp for: Troop D. Only someone had added a few more letters to the D so that it read: D-W-E-E-B.

  Troop Dweeb.

  What had my parents gotten me into?

  It took me a few minutes to work up the courage to knock on one of the doors. When I finally did, it seemed to open all by itself.

  “What?” someone said.

  That’s when I realized that the person who’d answered the door was right in front of me, just…lower.

  A tiny girl in a Nature Scouts uniform stood in the doorway impatiently tapping her foot.

  “Uh, is this Troop D?”

  “Can’t you read?” asked the girl.

  Okay, there was no reason to be rude. “Yeah, but someone’s been messing around with the sign.”

  “Again? Oh, for Pete’s sake!”

  With an annoyed mutter, she disappeared back inside the cabin and came back a few seconds later with a stepladder, scrub brush, and bucket. Then she marched over to the defaced sign and began viciously scrubbing. “When I find out who did this, I’ll make you eat this brush!” she called out to the empty woods.

  I didn’t think it was possible, but the inside of the cabin looked even worse than the outside did. The floorboards were loose and squeaked when you stepped on them, and the rafters overhead were like a spider-web city.

  There were only two bunk beds, one on either side of the cabin, and neither one looked very comfortable. I’d hardly taken a step inside before someone said, “Hey, wrong cabin!”

  It was another girl. Man, was Troop D nothing but shouty girls? Was this some kind of a joke?

  “This is the girls’ cabin,” she said. “The boys’ cabin is next door. And could you please not step on our floor with your shoes on? Sorry, I kind of have a thing about dirt.”

  “She’s a total germophobe!” called the tiny girl scrubbing the sign outside. “Also a hypochondriac.”

  The other girl rolled her eyes. “I’ve just had a series of rare and undetectable diseases, that’s all. Ginger makes a big deal about everything.”

  “Uh, no problem. I’ll just head over to the boys’ cabin.”

  “Thanks!” She followed me next door. “I’m Asma, by the way.”

  “Ben.”

  She had tried to be sneaky about it, but on our way out, I’d caught Asma wiping down the doorknob I’d touched. Oh, brother.

  “So, uh…am I the only boy?”

  “Oh, no.” She knocked on the other door. “Manuel?…Manuel?”

  Ginger poked her head out from the girls’ cabin. “He’ll never hear you if you don’t shout. Manuel!”

  A boy wearing headphones answered the door. He was deep into his handheld video game. “Oh, hey, bro,” he said, without looking up. “Grab a bunk. Can’t talk now, no save point, and I’ve got 2,000 xp to go!”

  And just like that, he disappeared back inside.

  Asma shrugged. “He’s into games.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “No, like really into them. He’ll forget to wear shoes if we don’t remind him to wear them.” As we stepped into the boys’ cabin (which was no better than the girls’), she began fogging it up with a can of spray disinfectant. “Some people can be so quirky, right?”

  Holding my shirt over my nose and mouth, I tossed my bags onto an empty bunk. “Is this everyone? Just the four of us?”

  Asma nodded. “Me, Ginger, Manuel. And now you. We’re Troop—”

  But we were interrupted by the clatter of something getting smacked. Hard. And again.

  K-Clang! K-Clang!

  “Gah! Stupid thing!” We rushed outside to see Ginger drop-kicking the bucket. Then she spiked the brush and stomped off.

  So, a germophobe, a superobsessed gamer, and a girl with serious anger issues. To tell you the truth, I wondered how I would ever make friends with these kids, or if I even wanted to. But we were stuck with each other.

  Welcome to Troop Dweeb.

  I’ve already explained that up until that point I’d never been a big fan of nature. Walking in it, climbing in it…stepping in it. So I’d been hoping that they’d keep the first day kind of chill. You know, indoors—someplace with couches, and maybe a few foosball tables. But no such luck. Troops A through D gathered on the assembly lawn in the middle of camp. Despite my disappointment, the rest of the kids seemed pretty excited.

  Well, not all of them.

  “I’m worried that today’s going to be a real workout,” Asma was saying. “I keep two inhalers on me at all times just for situations like these.”

  “Oh, what do you need the inhalers for?”

  “Well, nothing. Not yet. But you can never be too careful.”

  Actually, you could. But I kept that comment to myself.

  “My mom made me join the scouts so I can move around,” said Asma. “I don’t get much exercise otherwise.”

  “Don’t you have gym class at your school?”

  Asma took a thick, stapled packet of papers out of her pocket. “Doctor’s notes. I’m on a strictly limited activity routine due to my poor health.”

  “Uh, you look pretty healthy to me.”

  “Yeah, well, Amazonian Brain Fever can appear asymptomatic to people who don’t suffer from it.”

  I stopped in my tracks. “Wait, you have brain fever?”

  “Well, no. Not yet.” Asma stuffed her doctor’s notes and inhalers back into her pockets.

  Spitzer was waiting for us on the main lawn. “Okay, scouts! Today you’ll meet your troop leader who’ll then lead afternoon activities. Tonight’s the opening night campfire, and tomorrow we start bright and early with swim lessons at the swimming hole. And thanks to a new corporate sponsorship deal, I’ve managed to add a few surprises to the swimming hole. No spoilers, but it’s going to be great!”

  Then Spitzer began calling out the troops by letter to meet their troop leaders for the week. Troop A got a spunky junior leader named Marcie. Troop B’s leader was mom to two of the girls, and when you blurred your eyes you couldn’t tell the three of them apart. And Troop C’s bruisers were assigned to Spitzer (no surprise there).

  Every troop got a leader, but what about us?

  Our answer was a loud snore. It came from a little old man in a wrinkled troop leader uniform who was napping in a nearby lawn chair, his whiskered chin resting on his chest.

  “Walter!” said Spitzer. “Walter, wake up!”

  The old man gave a start, knocking his thick black glasses off his nose. “Huh? Wassit…who in tarnation went and stole my glasses?”

  “They’re in your lap, Walter,” sighed Spitzer. “Troop D, meet your senior troop leader, Walter Simmons.”

  The old troop leader grabbed his walking stick and hauled himself out of his seat. “I’m awake! I was just conserving my strength for the big first day. Eh, where’s my troop?”

  “Right in front of you,” answered Spitzer. “Troop…D.”

  I heard the troglodytes from Troop C snickering at us.

  “Hmm.” Walter adjusted his huge glasses. He didn’t look impressed, but then again I wasn’t exactly blown away, either. This guy was old enough to be my great-grandad’s great-grandad.

  “Okay, Troop D,” said Walter. “The rest of you troops, listen up, too. We are Nature Scouts! That means starting with the basics of real scouting. Turn your Nature Scouts Handbooks to page 29.”

  Spitzer cut in. “Eh, Walter, I think as this year’s Troop Scoutmaster I should…”

  But the old man either couldn’t hear Spitzer or was pretending he couldn’t hear him. “Now you’ll find instructions in your books for making the sheepshank knot. Darn useful for a lotta things.�
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  I reached into my back pocket for my handbook…and it wasn’t there! Oh no, I must’ve left it back in the cabin, or worse, maybe I’d lost it entirely.

  Spitzer’s words drifted back to me: “Keep this with you wherever you go, unless you want to be cleaning the latrines!”

  My first day at scout camp wasn’t even half over, and I was already about to scrub my first toilet.

  I faked a bathroom emergency and ran back to the cabins. I hoped my handbook was back on my bunk, but I had a sinking feeling that I’d dropped it earlier that morning when Butch had knocked me on my rear.

  The first place I checked was outside Troop C’s cabin. I scoured the area but found no handbook. What I found instead was a shocker—a busted-open vending machine and a totally ransacked cabin. The door hung open and it looked like someone had tossed out all of Troop C’s pillows and sleeping bags. Was someone playing some kind of camp prank?

  Then, in a patch of soft dirt, I spotted a single footprint. A big one. Super extra-large. Man, what did they feed those Troop C kids anyway?

  I was measuring that crazy footprint against my own shoe when I heard a rustle in the woods behind me. Actually, it was more than a rustle. Someone big was moving around in there, and I could only imagine what would happen if one of those Troop C ogres found me snooping around outside their cabin.

  How many kids die every year from wedgies and toilet-bowl swirlies? I wasn’t sure that those classic camp terrors could actually be fatal, but I wasn’t ready to find out, either. So I hid in the bushes and didn’t make a sound while whoever it was crashed through the trees behind me. For a moment, he paused and started sniffing the air like some wild animal, but then, thankfully, he continued plodding deeper into the woods.