How to Outrun a Crocodile When Your Shoes Are Untied

by Jess Keating

  I blinked.

  “Um.”

  What a stupid answer. I should have let them have it. But one look at Mom’s empathetic face and my dad’s clueless one completely clammed me up. There was no use getting into it; they just didn’t understand. Already I could hear Liv’s voice in my head, threatening me for being such a wimp.

  “Well,” he went on, “thank you very much. And don’t worry. I’ll arrange at the gate for some free passes for you three. If there’s any trouble, tell them to call our house and we’ll be right there to let you in. We’re right by the lion enclosures,” he explained.

  I swear, I felt a part of me die inside. Ashley’s sneer (masked as a smile, of course, but she wasn’t fooling me) slowly shifted into a smug, tight grin. Ashley and Brooke looked at each other with raised eyebrows. Rayna—she wasn’t the swiftest—was still looking at my dad with a deadpanned face. I heard a sharp intake of breathe from Bella beside me.

  “You guys, like,” Ashley began, “live in the zoo?” She lapped each word up like a cat with warm milk. I wanted to slap her. Rayna finally clued in and gasped, then smiled again when Ashley poked her in the ribs. I felt my cheeks burning as I caught Brooke’s eye. And like last time, there was the tiniest hint of pity there, in the faint knot between her eyebrows, buried under her usual mask of snobbiness that she wears with Ashley. I shot her a pleading look, but she just clamped her mouth shut and stared at the ground.

  “Well, yes! I’m surprised Ana didn’t tell you. We’ve been living there for a few days now, in one of the research houses. It’s great fun—getting to hang out with the animals so much. Anyway, girls, we should get going—we’ve got a big television premiere tonight. Don’t miss it!” He straightened out his hat.

  My vision began to tunnel, and I could feel my balance waver. I tried to focus on Kev’s pep talk—something to ground me. Instead, awful words like presentation and Sneerers and television appearance began swimming in front of me like piranhas.

  Father. Shut. Up.

  The Sneerers seemed satisfied with their ammo. Ashley had the same look Louie had when I swung raw meat in front of him. Only this time, I knew that I was the meal. They were eager, I could tell, to have their little Sneerer huddle and decide my fate. Scales and her animal-obsessed, stinky family live in a zoo. To top it off, she’s giving lessons on being a loser if anybody is interested. Hat not included.

  I didn’t say a word to my parents before they left, and somehow navigated to my last art class of the year without crying. Ms. Fenton babbled about how she wanted us all to think about our true selves over the summer and to not forget to work in our notebooks if we were inspired. I could feel the burning get worse behind my eyes. Then, when I finally got home that afternoon, I could barely wait until I was in my room before the tears started flowing.

  Compose E-mail—4:15 p.m.

  AnaBanana: Liv, are you there? Where are you? I know I said I have something to tell you, but I’m too scared. And now I’ve gotten myself into a massive pickle and have no idea what to do. I said I would do a presentation. I don’t know why. It was only going to be a few people, but then… They know. They all know. The Sneerers cornered Dad at school (don’t even ASK about that) and he spilled everything. Not only are they coming to the big presentation, but they’ve convinced my dad that they should FILM IT AND PUT IT ON THE INTERNET. Like it’s not bad enough I have to go on television with my whole family in our zoo house so my grandpa can yak about his new movie. What am I going to do?

  WHERE ARE YOU? I’m freaking out. How can I get out of all this? What if I make an even bigger fool of myself on national television? HELP. I know you’re probably with Leilani, but I really need you right now. Everything SUCKS.

  I held my finger over the Send key for what seemed like forever, staring at my e-mail. But in the end, I couldn’t do it. She was out having fun without me. She didn’t want to come back. I had to do this without her too.

  I clicked Discard Message and sent it to the trash.

  Liv wasn’t there to read it, anyway.

  chapter 12

  “Whales and dolphins can literally fall half asleep. Their brain hemispheres alternate sleeping, so the animals can continue to surface and breathe.”

  —Animal Wisdom

  I’m pretty sure I do this too, in math class. Only instead of surfacing and breathing, I nod my head to Mr. Vince’s questions.

  It’s amazing how much can go wrong in such a short time. As if my latest ambushes and “Shep Foster buzz” at school weren’t enough to give me a permanent twitch and/or the desperate need for therapy, I barely slept a wink that night. To make things worse, I couldn’t figure out what to do for my true-self project. Ms. Fenton had been nice enough to give me an extension, but why was it so hard to figure yourself out? All I knew was that my crummy, black-and-white project was staying hidden. Just looking at it made me squirm with embarrassment. I was still awake when a loud roar of a lion snapped me out of my brainstorming.

  The last day of school is always the first Safari Night of the season, and this year, I totally forgot about it. That’s when visitors can camp in sleeping bags in the African exhibits with a zookeeper, and when it gets to be really late at night, they tell stories about man-eating lions and swat away mosquitoes like real safari tourists under the stars. It’s a “once-in-a-lifetime experience that will live on in their hearts forever.” (So says the brochure.)

  It can also get pretty spooky because the nocturnal lions pace and roar a lot when it’s dark. The brochure doesn’t say that.

  Sadly, it also doesn’t mention Daz.

  A few minutes after midnight, despite my droopy eyelids, I couldn’t fall asleep. I was too busy scribbling in my sketchbook, fantasizing about different ways my presentation could be canceled. Random elephant stampede. Werewolf apocalypse. Jell-O tsunami.

  I heard a scritchy-scritch noise outside my door, and thinking it was something that had escaped from Daz’s room, I peeked outside expecting the worst.

  And boy, did I get it.

  Daz was standing there in a leopard skin loincloth running from his left shoulder down to his knees. Mud caked his face and bare arms. His hair peeked out from underneath a dirt-crusted wig of dreadlocks, tilted sideways on his head. The mangled corpse of a gummy worm missing its head dangled out of his mouth, and everything, from his dreads to his toes, was covered in a dusty white layer of baby powder.

  “What the…”

  “Shh!” he said, waving his hand sharply toward the end of the hall, sending small clouds of powder drifting down to the floor. His fingertips were stained red. “Come on. I need your help. You’re going to miss it!”

  “I’m not going anywhere! It’s after midnight!” I hissed. “Mom will ground us till college! And why are you wearing a loincloth? Is that your Bob Marley wig?”

  His teeth flashed in the dim light, but he didn’t reply. The notion of Mom grounding us clearly made whatever he was doing that much more appealing to him.

  “Here, hold this.” He held out his laptop, which had some music program loaded on pause. “Quit being such a wuss and come on. Did you have a bad day today or what? It’ll take your mind off stuff!” he said when I gave him my best look of disapproval.

  I followed him in a huff, driven more by curiosity than anything else. There was also a tiny part of me (okay, maybe a bit bigger than tiny) that was still ticked off at my parents for everything that had happened earlier today. Who were they to tell me to stay out of trouble, when they basically brought it to me? I gripped the laptop tighter as we crept down the dark hallway, starting to enjoy the prickly feeling of sneaking around.

  We creaked open the front door and slinked out near the bushes. A crescent of sleeping bags lay a few yards away, with a large “Safari Night” banner spanning above the group of visitors below, hunched together in a circle around a small fire. Marshmallows. Little kids. Flash
lights. Teddy bears. Their anxious voices echoed over the quiet path to our house.

  “I heard they dug up a caveman,” one kid said, clutching a stuffed elephant. Red-orange shimmers of the fire reflected in the dark off his thick glasses as he reached into a bag of chips. “Right below the extinct animals display, where the big saber-toothed tiger is! Only he wasn’t really dead—just frozen! Now he could be anywhere.” He shivered, darting glances at his friends.

  “Nuh-uh!” A little girl with a messy braid shook her head, clinging tightly to her own teddy in the crook of her elbow. “It wasn’t a caveman! It was a ghost! That’s who left behind that big pile of bones outside the lion pen! There was even blood on them! He could be hunting here!” Her head bobbed furiously as she stuffed a double-decker s’more into her mouth. “A caveman couldn’t survive a million years frozen; that’s stupid! It had to be a ghost,” she said firmly, sending a spray of graham cracker crumbs into the air.

  The group nodded solemnly, fidgeting and sneaking peeks at the darkness behind them.

  It should have hit me earlier, but clearly my brain is leaps behind Daz’s when it comes to epic prankery.

  A pile of bones. The corn syrup. His stained fingers.

  Baby powder.

  “Daz! No!” I hissed, but he shushed me again before grabbing the laptop and stuffing it in the bushes beside our house and pulling out a netted bag of white sticks.

  No, bones. Spattered with what looked like a lovely imitation of blood.

  Oh, for the love of all that is holy…

  I tiptoed closer to the group, wondering if I should warn them. They were so caught up in their theories they didn’t see it coming at all.

  And then, it happened all at once. Just when the lionesses let out a guttural growl, Daz unpaused his computer and I jerked my hands automatically to my ears. The deafening sounds of ghoulish wails, primitive screeches, and clattering chains erupted over the circle, and the group of kids scrambled out of their sleeping bags faster than cats from a bathtub. Screams echoed through the exhibit, and marshmallows scattered and flew in the air. Even the zookeeper looked like he might pee his pants as his flashlight dropped to the ground with a heavy thud.

  But Daz wasn’t done yet.

  I have to admit, it was a little funny seeing the look on everyone’s face when Daz bolted through the trees and raced away from them, his bare feet thudding hard against the ground as he flung a chaotic trail of “bloodied” bones behind him.

  Okay. It was a lot funny.

  “Dead caveman ghost!” the little girl shrieked, pointing after Daz’s eerie, dusty white figure, which was already fading in the distance. I squinted to watch as he hopped the boulder past the pelican exhibit, disappearing from view. I knew he had rolled and ducked behind the vending machine, but to the wide, petrified eyes of the campers, it looked like he had just leaped from a boulder and…vanished. Even knowing there was no ghost, the whole scene gave me goose bumps.

  I couldn’t stop the giggle from burbling out of me as I watched them frantically searching for the caveman ghost. Then reality set in: Mom must have heard that. Mom must have heard that.

  With one last look at the cluster of shaking kids, I snapped the laptop shut and raced back inside with my stomach in knots. Holding my breath behind my door, I waited for the inevitable thump of Dad’s feet onto the hardwood. Marching out to lay down the punishments. We were so grounded.

  But…nothing came.

  After a few moments of tense silence, Daz crept back up the hallway. Opening my door a sliver, the grin on his face was hard to miss, even in the dark. I snorted with laughter as some of the powder from his hair drifted down to the floor. Mom would have some questions in the morning.

  “Nice work, accomplice,” he said, raising his hand for a high five. I tapped it lightly so the noise didn’t give us away. A smear of fake blood stained my palm.

  “They’re going to have nightmares for life, you know,” I said. It didn’t stop me from smiling. I had to admit, when he wasn’t focusing his prankery on me, Daz could be pretty funny.

  “Someone’s gotta teach them the ways of the world and prepare them for ghosts,” he quipped. He gave me an appraising look as he grabbed his computer. “Thanks for the help.”

  A loud creak snapped us out of our goofy mood. Daz’s eyes widened. We both froze, our feet nailed to the floor and our eyes locked on our parents’ bedroom door. It didn’t move.

  “Think that’s Mom?” I hissed.

  Another creak.

  “Abort mission!” Daz’s voice cracked as he tried to whisper-squeal. He slipped back to his room, leaving behind powdery, white tracks on the wood floor. The muffled sound of his giggling disappeared behind his door. Diving back inside my room, I leaped onto the bed. Even though we were almost thirteen, I still felt the panic of an imaginary hand—a ghostly hand—reaching out to grab my leg from under my bed every time I jumped onto my bed in my dark room.

  The air burned in my lungs as I waited for the telltale sound of Mom opening my door. Waiting. Breathing. Darwin stirred quietly in his cage. The house stayed quiet.

  I always thought Daz had a lucky horseshoe up his butt, and this confirmed it: Mom and Dad were still fast asleep.

  Anarchy, thy name is Daz.

  It was the first time in my life I had to acknowledge that Daz was right: for a moment, it had definitely taken my mind off everything. Maybe he was onto something?

  Of course, if anyone asks where I was for all this, I would say I was tucked in bed sound asleep. And definitely not an accomplice to the “Ghost of Cavemen Past” that hunted on zoo grounds and terrorized children with dead animal parts.

  Obviously.

  chapter 13

  “A large kangaroo can jump more than thirty feet with each jump.”

  —Animal Wisdom

  So it would take a large kangaroo like three and a half seconds to jump out of here. I, on the other hand, have to walk like a loser human.

  I used to get really nervous before getting a school picture taken. I’d take my hair out of its ponytail and try to style it in new ways, and I’d worry about what color shirt I should be wearing in order to bring the least amount of attention to any zits, blemishes, animal residue, or bad hair from my attempts at looking good. That was for one picture, that only my family would see, that would be displayed on the mantel of our fireplace for all eternity.

  But this? This was so much worse.

  Not only did I have to endure my grandpa’s fancy-pants interview for the local news, but I was told it will be syndicated. Which means broadcast all over the country into the homes of thousands—no, millions of people dying to make fun of me.

  What a perfect way to celebrate school being finished, right? Big-time wrong. What happened to the old days when Liv and I could celebrate with some girly magazines and chocolate lip gloss making sessions?

  While Daz and I had taken Sugar on a tour of the lion exhibit, the whole news crew actually came into our home, which, let me tell you, was not what Mom had in mind. She ran around cleaning and dusting and wiping anything with a surface for hours before they showed up, and then when they did show up, they shoved everything we owned to the side of the living room and put our couch in the middle, along with three chairs crushed in around it. A huge spotlight beamed down on the whole scene, and someone had put a zebra print throw on the back of the couch. They wanted us to look like one big jungle-weirdo family.

  “Okay, sweetie…hold still for one more second.” A makeup girl with dark eyeliner dabbed my chin with concealer for the tenth time. Apparently my zit was giving her team a run for its money. She squinted once more at me and finally nodded.

  “I bet you’re excited for your big debut!” She waggled her perm, and I tried to focus on not throwing up on national television. I had only gotten a glimpse of myself in the mirror before they shuttled me to the m
akeshift set, but what I had seen was not reassuring.

  I guess they wanted to make my hair bouncier too because I had to sit inside a loud hair dryer for forty minutes with curlers and then they sprayed the you-know-what out of it with about ten kinds of hairspray. I should be in a musical on Broadway with this getup. For once, why couldn’t I look like Sugar, with her “oops-is-my-hair-perfect?” charm?

  Daz, however, had never looked more comfortable. He sprawled one arm on the back of the couch. “Hey—can I get another one of these, please?” He held up a cucumber sandwich and finger gunned a woman at a small craft services table they had set up outside our kitchen. She raised her eyebrows at him but didn’t move.

  I shoved him with an elbow. “Stop being such a dolt. It’s a news segment. You’re not Johnny Depp.”

  He scoffed, swiping his hair back again. “He wishes. Hey, who’s your friend?” He grinned and pointed at my concealed chin pimple.

  “Shut up!” I smacked him on the back of the head.

  I sat awkwardly in the chair as I tried not to touch my face or ruin my makeup. Grabbing my notebook, I flipped to the page where Sugar had given me some tips for going on television. I guess they must teach this stuff in Hollywood because she didn’t seem nervous at all. With any luck, I could get through this with my dignity in one piece. Or at least, without it seriously maimed.

  Sugar’s Top TV Tricks to Looking Beautiful and Not At All Insane:

  1.Never look the camera head-on. If you do, people could notice that your eyes are lopsided. Sugar assured me that everyone has lopsided eyes, and ever since she mentioned it, I can’t help but stare at myself in the mirror trying to figure out which one of my eyes has decided to slip off into the no-man’s-land of my face. I think it’s my left one. Stupid left eye. Or maybe it’s my right eye that’s too high?

  2.Don’t fidget with your hands. You will look crazy. Sugar told me about one time when she fidgeted so much during a grape juice commercial audition that she spilled it all over her white dress. I’m pretty sure if there was grape juice within fifty miles of me right now, I’d probably find it and spill it all over me. Because I’m lucky like that.