by Ellen Potter
“Oh no, oh no, oh no!” I cried when I realized what had happened. I hadn’t seen where I was going with all that smoke, and I had passed Potted Plant Guy without putting something in his pail.
Potted Plant Guy’s pinky and thumb were pointed directly at me. Between the leaves, his demented eyes were glinting.
He declared his curse: “You will be attacked by a swarm of angry bees!”
“Bees?!” I shrieked. “Not bees!”
Back in Hog’s Head we had bees living in our walls one summer. I found out because I accidentally poked a hole in the wall with a fork and I got stung seven times.
“Make it something else, Potted Plant Guy,” I begged. “How about angry squirrels?”
To my amazement, Potted Plant Guy actually looked like he was considering this.
Then he said: “Okay. Instead of bees, you will be attacked by … a swarm of angry yellow jackets.”
“What?” I cried. “Yellow jackets are even meaner than bees!”
But Potted Plant Guy had stopped pointing at me. “The curse has been set. It cannot be lifted!” he said.
I made a squeaking sound.
“Just remember, little man,” Julius said, “run in a zigzag pattern. It will confuse the yellow jackets. Don’t swat at them either. And they like sweet smells.”
He paused and made a face.
“I think you’ll be fine in that department,” he said.
After that, things went from horrible to extra horrible.
When I stepped into our apartment, Mom said, “You have a visitor, Otis. Hmm, what was his name … what was it…?” Then she said in a whispery voice, “He has very big ears.”
“Sid?” I asked, my voice already rising with panic.
“Sid! That’s it,” Mom said.
“Sid Frackas?! You let Sid Frackas in??” I screamed.
“Calm down, mister,” Mom said.
“Where is he? Is he … he’s not??… IS SID FRACKAS IN MY ROOM??!!” I ran down the hall and threw open the door to my room.
Sid had been standing on my desk, doing something sneaky. I didn’t know what it was because he jumped down really fast and shoved something in his pocket.
“So I see you decided to enter the contest,” he said, gesturing to my hovercraft sketch and the printed-out copy of the Crazy Vehicle Lego Contest application form on the floor. “That was unwise.”
“Did you do something in here?” I demanded.
“Are you still going to enter that contest?” he asked.
I guess I could have said no.
“Yes.”
“Too bad,” he said, as he backed out of my room. “If I can make rice pudding explode, just imagine what else I can do.”
One of my problems is that I have an excellent imagination.
After he left, I searched the whole room for things that could possibly explode. I’ll admit it, I was pretty freaked out. I was beginning to think that it would be a whole lot easier to forget all about the Lego contest.
That was when I heard a strange ree-ree-ree noise.
I followed the sound. It seemed to be coming from my dresser. Pressing my ear against each drawer I listened closely. The sound was definitely coming from my top drawer. My underwear drawer.
It might be a trap, I thought. I’d open the drawer and KER-SPLAT! Or KA-SPLOOSH!
Or worse … KA-BOOM!
I put my hand on the drawer knob. The ree-ree-ree sound was getting even louder. I started to sweat. I considered just leaving the drawer closed. I could probably wear the underwear I had on for another week.
After a week, though, I’d have to wear Gunther’s underwear.
That decided it. I’d just have to risk exploding myself.
I pulled the underwear drawer open very, very slowly. The ree-ree-ree noise suddenly stopped.
That was even creepier.
Okay, I said to myself. You might as well just do it. Get it over with. Squeezing my eyes shut, I yanked the drawer all the way open.
Nothing happened.
I opened my eyes.
There, sitting in the middle of my underwear, was Smoochie. He looked terrified. At least I think he looked terrified. It’s hard to tell with a possibly brain-damaged rat.
“Sid locked you in there!? Aww, Smoochers! Poor little guy!” I picked him up and put him on my bed. He was shaking. That made me mad. Really mad. I’m not a big Smoochie fan, but being mean to a rat like Smoochie is just plain diabolical.
That settled it. I was going to enter that contest.
Even if it killed me.
The next day there was no school because of something called Teacher Development Day. Schools always have a bunch of these kinds of days. I’ve noticed that when the kids go back to school the next day, the teachers are always happier than usual. I am beginning to think that the teachers use these days to sit around and laugh at some of the dumb things we write in our homework. You know, to put themselves in a good mood for the rest of the week.
I worked on the hovercraft all morning. I had to admit, it was looking pretty good. I just had one little problem.
I needed a vacuum cleaner motor.
Luckily, we have a vacuum cleaner.
I snuck down the hall as quietly as possible. Mom was in the living room training Archie to sit. Excellent.
I opened the hallway closet where we keep the vacuum cleaner and started to pull it out when RARF RARF RARF! Diablo came charging at me.
That made Mom stop what she was doing to see what was going on. She took one look at me and the vacuum cleaner and she narrowed her eyes.
“What?” I said, trying to look insulted. “Is it a crime to want a tidy room?”
“It might be,” she replied.
Luckily the doorbell rang just then. Quickly, I rolled the vacuum cleaner into my room while Mom tried to keep Diablo from mauling the person at the door.
It turned out to be Perry and Cat. They were all excited about something Miss Yabby had posted on the Tidwell Tidbits. They practically dragged me out of my room and into the thirty-fifth-floor hallway to see it.
So of course we rushed downstairs to touch the alien eggs.
When we got to the playground in the back of the building, there were a bunch of kids all crouching down by the pavement. Two kids from my class who also live in Tidwell Towers, Myra and Trevor McBride, were there, too. Perry, Cat, and I crouched down with them. Sitting in one of those little paper ketchup cups that you get at McDonald’s were tiny yellowish eggs. Perry gave them a poke, and then I did.
After a minute, Trevor said, “Hey, I think one of them just moved!”
“Maybe they’re hatching,” another kid said.
We all watched for a few minutes. It was actually pretty suspenseful. When nothing happened, Perry said, “The thing is, if they’re aliens’ eggs, what are they doing in a McDonald’s ketchup cup?”
That was when Trevor took one of the eggs out of the cup and ate it.
“TREVOR!!” everyone screamed. “THAT’S DISGUSTING!!”
“Now you’re going to poop out an alien baby,” Myra told him.
I don’t think Trevor had thought things through very well, because he got really upset when he heard that. He started crying. I felt sort of bad for him, so I told him that they probably weren’t alien eggs anyway.
“Yeah,” Perry said,
That made Trevor feel better.
Which is a little disturbing.
I spent the rest of the day tinkering with the hovercraft. I managed to get the motor out of the vacuum cleaner and installed in the hovercraft. I figured that once the contest was over, I could slip it back into the vacuum cleaner without Mom knowing.
Everything was going great … right up until I heard this weird metallic bzzzzzzzzing noise coming from somewhere in my room. I wondered if it was something that Sid had hidden. After all, he did threaten that the next thing he did was going to be ten times worse than the rice pudding.
I walked around the room
, listening carefully. It was weird but the sound seemed to be moving. I just couldn’t figure out where it was exactly. It was almost like it was in my walls.
Like the bees back in Hog’s Head.
And then another thought occurred to me: That bzzzzing sounded an awful lot like a swarm of robotic bees.
Or robotic yellow jackets!
Boy, that really made me jittery. Because here’s the thing about Potted Plant Guy’s curses—they never happen the way you think they’ll happen. I started imagining all those robotic yellow jackets swarming into the room and attacking me. Just the thought of that made me hyperventilate. But then I forced myself to calm down and think.
That’s when I got a terrific idea.
Dogs have supersonic hearing. Maybe one of Mom’s crackpot students could actually make himself useful.
“Hey, Mom,” I said, “can I borrow Archie for a minute?”
I expected her to say no, but she said she had to walk Diablo and didn’t feel like dealing with Archie’s nervous whizzing problem again, so she said I was welcome to him.
“Okay, boy,” I said to Archie once I got him in my room, “find the noise, find the noise!”
Archie got all excited. He started hopping all around my room, sniffing at everything. The only problem was that his leg with the cast on it stuck straight out and was smacking into all my stuff. He knocked a whole row of Lego Star Wars ships off my shelf and he swatted the garbage can to the ground. Then he jabbed me right in the thigh with that thing. But he really did seem to be onto something, so I let him keep hopping around. Finally, he stopped in front of my nightstand and barked at it.
“Here? Is it here?” I asked.
He barked again.
I’m telling you, the dog was some kind of genius.
I opened the drawer of the nightstand. The only thing in it was a comic book, some pencils, and a candy wrapper. But Archie kept staring at it with this wild look in his eyes.
Maybe it’s behind the nightstand, I thought.
So I started moving the nightstand to look behind it. Archie got really excited then. That’s when I knew I had found it! Ha! I was outsmarting Sid Frackas with a dog!
I moved the nightstand far enough away from the wall so that I could see what was back there. Sure enough, there was something balled up in the corner. It was gray and nasty looking. The bzzzzzing sound stopped.
Which was even creepier than the bzzzzing.
I took a pencil and poked at the thing lightly. It didn’t explode. That was encouraging. So I stuck the pencil deeper into it and lifted it onto the top of the nightstand. Archie kept sniffing, then barking, then sniffing.
I sniffed, too.
It smelled familiar.
But familiar in a bad way.
I gathered up all my courage. I don’t have a lot of courage, so it didn’t take too long. I picked the thing up with my hands. Then I knew why it smelled familiar.
It was one of my old socks.
Filled with mayonnaise.
Archie’s tail started wagging and he grabbed the sock in his mouth and hopped out of my room.
And of course, that’s when the bzzzzing started up again.
So I did the only thing I could do. I fished out my Slinky from my closet and listened to the sound of Star Wars blasters until the bzzzzing stopped again.
Trevor wasn’t in school the next day. That got the kids from Tidwell Towers talking. Some of them said he was home sick with an alien egg in him. Myra said that the FBI was waiting outside his apartment to catch the alien baby when Trevor pooped it out.
I was beginning to feel really sorry for that alien baby.
“What’s all this about aliens?” Boris asked.
“Didn’t you see the alien eggs yesterday?” I asked him.
“Nah. I was doing my farm chores all day.”
“Trevor might have eaten an alien egg,” Cat told him.
Boris snorted. “That’s ridiculous,” he said.
“Probably,” I agreed.
“Aliens don’t lay eggs,” he said. “They spit into a cup and put it in the fridge. Ten days later … poof! A baby alien is born.”
“I don’t think aliens have fridges, Boris,” I said.
“Of course they do! Where else would they keep the leftover pizzas?”
* * *
The day got even weirder if you can believe it. Right after attendance, Mr. K announced that we were having a special guest speaker to talk about his career. The classroom door opened and this guy walked in. He had on thick black-rimmed glasses and was dressed in a black suit. No one in the class seemed too excited, since he looked like a guy who fixed computers.
But then he said, “My name is Mr. Shaw and I am an agent for the FBI.”
The kids from Tidwell Towers sort of gasped and looked at one another. Because this was a real coincidence.
“I know!” Mr. K said. “Cool, huh? Now everyone pay attention, because Mr. Shaw is going to give us an inside peek into the life of an FBI agent.”
Mr. Shaw started talking about his training and a typical day for an agent. It was pretty interesting, especially the part about fingerprints and catching a thief who stole famous paintings from museums. But still, I think a bunch of us just kept thinking about Trevor.
After Mr. Shaw was done, he asked us if we had any questions. So of course every hand shot up in the air.
“Yes?” Mr. Shaw pointed to Myra.
“Are people from the FBI going to take Trevor McBride’s alien baby?” she asked.
Mr. Shaw looked confused.
“Any other questions?” Mr. K said.
“If you did find an alien baby, what would you do with it?” another kid asked.
“Hmm, well.” Mr. Shaw started looking uncomfortable. “I suppose we’d take it to a lab and examine it…”
“Yeah, but what if it flew around the room and you couldn’t catch it?”
Mr. Shaw shuffled around. He folded his arms across his chest, then cleared his throat. He looked as if he wished he were back at work right now, chasing psychotic criminals.
“Okay, okay, gang!” Mr. K said. “Do you have any questions that are not about alien babies?”
I raised my hand.
“If you thought there was a dangerous robot or something hiding in your bedroom what would you do?”
Mr. Shaw sort of sighed. “Do you think you have a dangerous robot in your bedroom, young man?” he asked.
I got the feeling that Mr. Shaw was not going to volunteer to talk to any more classrooms for a long time. Also I was getting funny looks from Cat and Boris, which made me think I probably shouldn’t mention the bzzzzing to them.
“Just in case I ever do,” I said.
“Well, the other week we found a suspicious-looking package in a donut shop. We called in the bomb squad and they shot a water cannon at it.”
“You mean like a Super Soaker?” I asked.
“Something like that,” he said.
I nodded, satisfied.
Because now I knew what I was going to buy with my $25.00.
That afternoon I went out to buy my Super Soaker. When I got back to Tidwell Towers, I noticed a new Tidwell Tidbits by the elevator buttons. This one said:
I dropped off my Super Soaker at home. Then I went straight to Perry’s apartment and told him about Miss Yabby’s breaking news.
“I don’t believe it about the alien babies,” he said.
“Neither do I,” I said.
We were quiet for a minute.
“But maybe we should have an Emergency Meeting anyway,” Perry said.
“Right,” I agreed.
We always hold our Emergency Meetings in Cat’s bedroom, so we went across the hall to apartment 35F and rang the doorbell.
Cat’s mom answered the door. She is just a little bigger than Cat and she doesn’t speak English very well.
“You maybe looking for Cat Girl?” she said.
That made us giggle because Cat’s mom
named all her kids after comic strip characters. Cat’s real name is Cat Girl.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Perry.
“Hey.” Cat’s mom poked me in my chest. “How come Cat Girl not have any girl friends?” She seemed to think that was my fault somehow.
“Maybe because she’s so scary?” I suggested.
“Mmm. Could be, could be.” Cat’s mom nodded. She let us in and we hurried down the hall to Cat’s room.
Cat has the coolest room I’ve ever seen. It’s probably the coolest room you’ve ever seen, too. It’s a big wooden box that hangs in the air from chains attached to the ceiling. It looks like a gigantic cat condo, with holes cut out for windows, and carpet on the floor and walls.
Perry and I climbed up the rope ladder to get to her room and crawled in through one of the holes.
“We need to hold an Emergency Meeting,” I said.
“Sssh!” Cat said.
She was sitting cross-legged on the floor.
“What are you—?” I started to ask her.
“SHHHHHHH!!!” she said. Then she looked all around the room suspiciously.
Perry and I looked all around, too. But the only thing we saw was Cat’s room. We both shrugged at each other.
“All right,” Cat said finally. “What’s up?”
“The mother ship has landed,” Perry announced.
“What?” she said.
“The hamster has lost his niblets,” Perry said.
He always uses spy speak during Emergency Meetings. The problem is, no one ever knows what he’s talking about.
Cat sighed. Then she looked at me for a translation, so I told her about Miss Yabby’s newsletter.
I thought Cat would laugh at us. But instead she got a serious look on her face.
“Get me paper and a pencil,” she demanded.
I found a pencil and notebook on her shelf and brought it to her.
