Downright Dangerous

by Ellen Potter

  “Let’s see,” she said as she started jotting down numbers. “It takes about forty hours for a sandwich to be digested. You gotta figure an alien baby might take a little longer than that.” She added a whole bunch of numbers, then looked up at us. “According to my calculations, Trevor will poop out the alien baby tomorrow afternoon at approximately four thirty.”

  That was pretty impressive. I started to tell her so, but suddenly we heard “Ai-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi!!!!!”

  The same face appeared in three different window holes. And each face was upside down. It was such a strange sight that I just sat there, shocked.

  “Where did they come from?” Perry asked.

  That’s when I realized it was Cat’s younger siblings, the triplets, Linus, Lucy, and Hobbes.

  “I don’t know,” Cat said. “They’ve been hiding somewhere. They’ve been doing this all day.” She jumped to her feet. “Run back and forth and slam into the walls!” she ordered.

  We did. It made the whole room rock like mad.

  “Ai-yi-yi … gaaaaaaaah!” cried Lucy. Then she disappeared and we heard a thump on the floor.

  “Is she okay?” Perry asked.

  “They bounce well,” Cat said. “Keep running!”

  “Ay-yi-yi-yi … eeeeeee!!” Linus dropped away, too.

  Hobbes was hanging on pretty well though. I began to feel sorry for him. Or her. To tell you the truth I’m not sure what Hobbes is. So I reached out and pulled Hobbes in.

  Cat was not happy with me. Hobbes, on the other hand, jumped on my back, wrapped his or her legs around me, and stayed there, like a human backpack.

  “So what do we do about the alien baby?” Perry asked Cat.

  “We prepare ourselves,” Cat said.

  “How?”

  “Your dad has a whole box of BOY STUFF he doesn’t need until the weekend, right?”

  Perry nodded.

  “So after school tomorrow, we let everyone have a Bubble Blaster or a Belly Button Popper and whatever else is in that box. That way, we’ll be ready for an all-out alien invasion! Are you guys in?” She put out her fist for us to bump.

  Perry bumped it.

  Behind me, I felt Hobbes’s head shaking NO! NO! NO!

  And I kind of agreed. Putting Bubble Blasters in the hands of someone like Myra, for instance, just seemed to be asking for trouble.

  Cat glared at me. “Well, Otis?”

  I bumped her fist. Because, as you know, I am a big chicken.

  I just hoped that alien baby was a real fast runner.

  The next day in school Cat passed this note to all the kids who lived in Tidwell Towers:

  It did make me wonder if Cat really believed the alien babies would come, or if she just thought it was a good way to pick up a few bucks.

  In any case, the kids loved the idea. In the lunchroom, there was a line of Tidwell Towers kids at our table handing us their milk money to rent Anti-Alien Gear, even Sid Frackas. After he paid his fifty cents, Sid bent down and whispered to me, “Hearing any mysterious sounds in your bedroom, Dooda?”

  Then he laughed with that weird tongue-flapping thing he does and walked away.

  So it wasn’t my imagination! There was a bzzzzzing sound in my room!

  I looked over at Sid. He had sat down at his table and was staring at me with this creepy grin on his face. It was very disturbing.

  “Hey.” Boris nudged me. “Want to see me stuff a tater tot up my nose?”

  I figured anything would be better than watching Sid Frackas grinning at me.

  Then I got a look at the tater tot. It was one of those super-jumbo kinds, about the size of a small kitten.

  “There’s no way that thing is going to fit up your nose,” I said to Boris.

  “Oh, you’d be surprised,” Cat said. “I once saw Boris stuff a hard-boiled egg up his nose. His nostrils are very stretchy.”

  She wasn’t kidding! First, Boris did a little warm-up with his nose. He flared it a couple of times, then rubbed it and flared it again. It actually got bigger and bigger until … SPLOOOOCH! He shoved that tater tot straight up his left nostril!

  “Wow! That’s amazing!” I cried.

  But he wasn’t even done yet. In his right nostril he shoved a chicken nugget, a brussels sprout, and a cheese stick.

  By the time he was finished, he had all five food groups up his nose.

  “Okay, your turn,” Boris said to me.

  I looked down at my lunch tray. I had a turkey sub.

  “There’s no way that’s going to fit up my nose,” I said.

  “How about a baby carrot?” Cat suggested, handing me one from her plate.

  “I don’t know…,” I said. The thing is, my nostrils are skinny, like the rest of me.

  “But it’s a BABY carrot,” Boris said. “It’s not even a grown-up carrot.”

  I glanced over at Sid, who was still smirking at me. I don’t know, I guess the pressure got to me. I took the baby carrot and shoved it up my nose. Sid suddenly quit smirking. Now he looked completely disgusted.

  That’s why I stuck a baby carrot up my other nostril, too. You know, to annoy him even more.

  Then I started making seal noises. I wanted to make walrus noises, but I wasn’t sure what a walrus sounds like, so I settled for a seal.

  For my big finish, I was going to blow those carrots out of my nose like two missiles. I figured that would really ruin Sid’s lunch. I took a big, long, deep breath, then …

  Shluuuurp!

  Uh-oh.

  I must have had a funny look on my face because Cat said, “Did you suck those baby carrots farther up your nose?”

  I nodded.

  “Do you need the nurse?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  Then sighed.

  Because that woman was not going to be happy to see me.

  The thing you should know about baby carrots is that they go up your nose a lot easier than they go back down your nose.

  After I told the nurse what had happened, she said, “What face-hole are you supposed to put your food into, Mr. Dooda?”

  “My mouth,” I said glumly.

  Actually, I said, “By bowth,” because another thing you should know is that you sound funny with baby carrots up your nose.

  “Correct, Mr. Dooda.” She said it just like I was about three and a half years old. “From now on let’s put the right things in the right face-holes, okay?”

  Then she muttered something about counting down the days until her trip to Bermuda.

  She tried to get me to blow the carrots out of my nose, but those little suckers were wedged in there tight. After that, she tried to get them out with tweezers. No luck.

  In the end, she called my mom and told her she had to take me to the doctor.

  Mom was even less happy to see me than the nurse was. When I asked her if we were going to the doctor, she said she wasn’t going to wait in an emergency room for the next six hours. She said she was going to take matters into her own hands.

  “Maybe we can just leave the carrots where they are,” I suggested nervously.

  “Those carrots are coming out of that nose one way or another, buster,” she said.

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  To my horror, the first thing Mom did when we got home was march to the closet and pull out the vacuum cleaner.

  “What are you going to do with that?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry,” she said.

  But I was worried. Not about my nose. I was worried because the vacuum cleaner’s motor was currently sitting in my hovercraft.

  Of course when Mom flipped the vacuum cleaner switch, nothing happened. She flipped it a couple more times while I tried to look innocent.

  “Darn old thing!” she said.

  I shook my head in disgust at the vacuum cleaner.

  I was just congratulating myself for getting off so easily, when Mom said, “All right, we’re going downstairs to see Julius.”

  That made me nervou
s all over again. I like Julius, but he is kind of scary, too. I wondered if Mom was going to have him flip me upside down and shake the carrots out of me. It turned out, though, that she only wanted Julius to get her the lobby’s vacuum cleaner.

  “It’s to suck the carrots out of Otis’s nose,” Mom told Julius.

  Julius looked at me for a long time. Then he said, “Don’t you know which face-hole to stick your food into, son?”

  “I do dow, Juliuth,” I mumbled.

  Julius rolled out the lobby vacuum cleaner, which looked like a jet engine on wheels. It was something called the Mighty Mack 500, and Julius said it could suck the skin off a lemon.

  “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” I said.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Mom insisted. “I once removed a candy cane from your brother’s nose this way.” Then she got red in the face, like she hadn’t meant to say that.

  “Is that why he never picks his nose anymore?” I cried. “Because you used a vacuum cleaner to suck a candy cane out of his nose? Listen, lady, that’s not going to happen to me—”

  But before I could finish, she flipped the switch on the Mighty Mack 500 and stuck the nozzle against my nose.

  BROARRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!

  The thing not only looked like a jet engine, but it sounded like one, too. And boy oh boy, was it powerful! I felt the carrot in my left nostril begin to vibrate. If the nozzle had been any bigger, I’m pretty sure my whole body would have been sucked right into the hose.

  Within a few minutes a crowd had begun to form around me in the lobby. I guess most people have never seen a person with a vacuum cleaner up their nose before. They seemed like they were really enjoying themselves, too.

  one lady said.

  “From the size of that vacuum, he must have stuck an entire cash register up his schnozz,” a guy said.

  “Wow,” said someone else, “it looks like that thing is going to suck his brains right out of his head!”

  Now that really worried me. In fact, the very next second I really did begin to feel like my brain was getting tugged through my nose. Everything got really tight in there and I felt this pressure building and building …

  “Turn off the Mighty Mack!” I cried out. “It’s sucking out my brains!”

  But between the roar of the vacuum and the carrots up my nose, no one understood what I was saying. Right then I felt something shoot out of both nostrils and clatter around in the vacuum hose.

  “Oh no, my brains, my brains!” I cried.

  Mom shut off the Mighty Mack 500. She looked up my nose. Then she smiled.

  and everyone in the crowd applauded.

  I guess I should have been happy. The carrots were out of my nose, and my brains were still in my head.

  But now there were two things I knew for sure:

  1. Miss Yabby was going to hear about this.

  2. I was never, ever going to put anything up my nose again. Not even my finger.

  After that traumatic event I planned to spend the rest of the day relaxing on the couch.

  Mom had other plans for me, though. Apparently getting baby carrots stuck up your nose doesn’t count as a sick day.

  Mom’s plan was to pick up a whole bunch of creams:

  In other words, my whole family is totally disgusting.

  (In case you don’t know what hemorrhoid cream is, I’ll just say that it has to do with an itchy heinie. I didn’t know my father had this problem, but it does explain why he gets so cranky on long car rides.)

  To make matters worse, Mom took Archie and Diablo along to buy this stuff. Every time Diablo tried to attack another dog, Archie began to stagger around, whizzing all over the place. We had to dodge the whiz each time. Plus Mom couldn’t bite Diablo’s neck unless she wanted to get whizzed on.

  When we got to the drugstore, Mom told me to hold on to the dogs while she went inside.

  “No way,” I told her. “You can’t leave me alone with these maniacs.”

  “Fine,” she said, and handed me a twenty-dollar bill. “You go in and buy the stuff.”

  That seemed like a better deal. I went into the drugstore, found all the items on the shelf, and brought them to the cashier. She smiled at me.

  “No school today?” she said.

  “Oh, I just, um … had a few medical issues,” I told her. I figured that was less embarrassing than explaining about the baby carrots.

  After she rang up the zit cream and the foot fungus cream, she gave me this sad look. But when she picked up the hemorrhoid cream she looked like she was about to cry.

  That’s when I realized she thought they were all for me! I was just about to tell her that they were for my disgusting family and I was the only normal one, when she pulled out a box of lollipops from under the counter.

  “Go on. Help yourself, you poor little guy.”

  Well, I can’t resist a freebie, so I took three of them.

  But I scratched my heinie on my way out, just to make her feel like she had done a good deed.

  The last disgusting item we needed to pick up was Pandora.

  There was no school in Hog’s Head that day, so she was taking the bus to New York City. It dropped her off close by, so we strolled over to the bus stop to meet her. On the way, Diablo tried to attack no less than fourteen dogs while Archie sprayed everyone in the vicinity.

  “I’m beginning to think that Diablo is a hopeless case,” Mom said finally.

  I started worrying about his raisins all over again.

  The bus had just pulled in when we arrived at the stop. We watched as people got off the bus, but no Pandora.

  “Maybe she decided not to come,” Mom murmured.

  The way she said that made me wonder if she was hoping Pandora wasn’t on that bus. She doesn’t think Pandora is a good girlfriend for Gunther. I know this because I read a text message that she wrote to Dad.

  Finally, we caught sight of Pandora stepping off the bus. It was hard to miss her actually, because she had dyed her hair bright green. Plus she was wearing a silver cape. That’s right, a cape.

  She said a word that I can’t put in this book.

  Just at that moment a dog walked by and Diablo started going crazy as usual. I guess Mom was too surprised to keep Archie from whizzing all over the place. Instead, Archie just whizzed right on Diablo’s head. And guess what? That devil dog was so shocked, he stopped barking on the spot! The whole way home, Diablo was quiet as a mouse.

  I hoped that meant he could keep his raisins after all, because this whole raisin thing was giving me the jim-jams.

  By the time we got back home, Gunther was there. When he and Pandora saw each other, they were so happy they started picking and scratching at themselves like crazy. You won’t believe this, but Gunther didn’t even seem to notice that Pandora’s hair was green. I guess if you don’t notice that your girlfriend looks like a leprechaun it must mean that you really are in love.

  Mom announced that Pandora was going to share my room, and I had to help her get settled in. I wasn’t too thrilled about that plan, let me tell you. Pandora followed me into my room and plopped her bags down on my bed. The very next second, the bzzzzing started.

  “Did you know there are robot yellow jackets in your wall?” Pandora said.

  I could have hugged her for that!

  So I told her about Sid Frackas. She listened very carefully while she scratched at her green head. Every so often she frowned and nodded. I started to think that maybe I had misjudged Pandora all this time.

  When I was done, there was a long pause.

  Then she said, “Do you think Gunther liked my hair?”

  Seriously. That’s what she said.

  The bzzzzing was getting louder. Now it sounded like the swarm of robotic yellow jackets had tripled.

  “Pandora,” I said, “listen carefully.”

  She immediately started scratching her head.

  “And stop scratching your head,” I told her.

  And you kn
ow what? The second she stopped scratching her head, she got this very alert look in her eyes. I think all that scratching makes her brains vibrate too much.

  “Take this”—I handed her the hovercraft—“and run—”

  Before I could finish telling her to run to the living room with it, she grabbed the hovercraft and bolted out the door. I heard Gunther call out, “Pandora? Pandora! Where are you going?” And then the front door slammed shut.

  Never mind, I thought. It’s okay as long as Pandora keeps the hovercraft safe from Sid.

  I grabbed my Super Soaker out from under my bed. The minute those robot yellow jackets burst through my walls, I’d be ready for them.

  Suddenly the bzzzzzzing sound stopped. The very next second there was a new noise.

  Something was banging against my wall, trying to get in.

  My heart was drumming against my chest like mad. I also might have been making that hee-hee-hee sound again.

  Then … KUNK! BLAM!

  Something came shooting right out of the air vent in my wall and landed on my bed. It happened so fast I didn’t even have time to aim my Super Soaker. I just stared and blinked.

  Because this was NOT what I expected.

  “Linus, Lucy, Hobbes,” I said, staring down at the three of them piled up on my bed. “What the heck are you doing?”

  Hobbes put a finger behind each ear and pushed them forward so that they stuck out.

  “Sid Frackas put you up to this?” I asked.

  All three nodded.

  “What did he want you to do?”

  Linus took a hammer out of his back pocket. He pointed to my hovercraft sketch and pretended to whack, whack, whack it with the hammer.

  “Awww, man.” I shook my head at them in disappointment. “I thought you guys were my friends.”

  The triplets all looked ashamed of themselves.