Malcolm Under the Stars

by Brian Lies

  Malcolm considered. Amelia was right. There was his friend Beert, the “ghost of McKenna”—otherwise known as the barn owl who used to be trapped in the clock tower. And Sylvia, too. Maybe she knew more than rodent rules and how to care for squirrelings. Didn’t she say her nest was seventh generation? Just because they weren’t Midnight Academy members didn’t mean they didn’t know a piece of the story. They simply might not know that they knew. If that made sense.

  “Thanks, Amelia. Don’t know what I’d do without you,” Malcolm spelled, then scrambled up onto her knees.

  Amelia gave him half a smile, scooped him up, and snuggled him under her chin.

  Crumb, it was the truth. Malcolm hoped things would always stay exactly as they were—Amelia and him together forever.

  Chapter 8

  Yearbooks

  Later that afternoon, the fifth-graders of Room 11 converged on the library. As soon as they entered, they spread out, most looking for books to read, but some for a hidden corner to visit with friends—you know about that, right, Mr. Binney? Amelia kind of fell into both categories. She settled at a table near Oscar’s aquarium and cracked open Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. After a moment, she pulled the green elastic band out of her hair, and Malcolm16 crept from her hood to her shoulder. He was dying to find out if the rats escaped the rosebush!

  But before they could get started, Kiera strolled up and Malcolm had to dive for cover. “Where were you at lunch, Amelia?”

  Jovahn’s attention had been zoomed in on the cars section, but he paused after hearing this. “Yeah . . . you never came back.”

  “Oh . . .” Amelia waved her hand as if to erase the conversation. “I didn’t feel well, so I went down to the office. All better now, though.” Deep in the hood, Malcolm frowned and bit a whisker. Since when had Amelia become such a good liar? Then she cleared her throat. “So, after you get your books, maybe we should talk about the school board presentation like Mr. Binney said?”

  Kiera shrugged. “Sure—give me a minute.”

  Amelia settled back with her book. She flicked through a few pages, but Malcolm knew she wasn’t really reading. Finally, she set it down and glanced over at the reference shelves. “Is that it, Malcolm?” she whispered. “Is that your dictionary? And the shelf?” And before Malcolm could even squeak an answer, she stood up and headed over to it. Oscar splashed as they zoomed by.

  At the shelf, Amelia knelt down. She pulled the giant dictionary toward her.

  From across the room, Mrs. Snyder, the librarian, called out, “Oh, Amelia, dear, that can’t be checked out.”

  “I know,” answered Amelia. “I just wanted to look up a word.”

  “Well, depending on what it is, you might have better luck with one of our online dictionaries,” Mrs. Snyder said. “That one hasn’t been used in ages.”

  “Or since last fall,” Amelia whispered so that only Malcolm could hear. She traced the shape scratched on the spine of the book. “So, this is a Mark, huh?”

  Malcolm, who had crept back to the top of Amelia’s hood to peer over her shoulder, nodded. He watched as Amelia felt the wall behind the bookcase and, with a little tug, popped open the cabinet door.

  Malcolm raced under her hair to her other shoulder. He darted a look left and right. What was she doing?! Oscar gave another splash, but the rest of the class seemed safely occupied. At the circulation desk, Mrs. Snyder was now arguing with Skylar, trying to explain the difference between renewing a book and returning a book.

  Amelia reached in. When she pulled her hand out, the coin with the dog carving was in it. She pinched it between her thumb and forefinger and studied it. “Yeah, that’s weird, all right.” She flipped it over. “1935.”

  “Where’d you get that?” Malcolm jumped at the sound of Jovahn’s voice. Where had he come from?

  Amelia paused. “It’s, uh, kind of a long story.”

  Jovahn raised his eyebrows and knelt down next to her. “Like write-it-all-out-in-a-book long?” he asked. Jovahn was one of the only nutters who knew everything about Malcolm and the Midnight Academy. Then he spied Malcolm. “Hey,” he whispered.

  Malcolm waved back, but Amelia shrugged. “I don’t know yet. I’ll tell you about it later.” Then she bent down so she was eye level with the bottom shelf. “Hey—look!” She shoved the dictionary back on the shelf and grabbed a different book. It was thick, but not dictionary thick. It seemed to be full of photographs. She scanned for a moment, then pulled several other books off the shelf. “Come on!”

  Jovahn trotted behind her back to the table. “What? What is it?”

  But she didn’t answer. Instead she thumped the books down on the table where Skylar and Kiera had gathered. “Yearbooks,” she crowed. “Skylar, remember your Gram’s idea about talking about the history of the school? Well . . .” She opened a book dramatically to a spread. “How about we show them? McKenna through the years. We can scan pictures from these yearbooks. From when McKenna was a high school. They go all the way back.”

  Kiera peered at the page and squealed. “Ew—look at their glasses! And their hair.” She flipped the cover. “What year is this, anyway? Do they have any recent ones? With us in them?”

  “Probably, but I think we should show the history. That’s 1952,” Amelia answered, pointing to the year on the cover. “I’m looking in . . . 1935.” Malcolm’s ears perked up. He knew she hadn’t picked that year off the shelf by coincidence. Amelia never did anything by coincidence. He watched as she flipped to the back of the book and ran her finger down the list of staff members. Colin Bertram, Mathematics. Miriam Bothelsby, Home Economics. Franklin Carter, Chemistry. She closed the yearbook, picked up another, and did the same. Malcolm suppressed a grin. Amelia was searching for Ernie Bowman!

  The group of four flipped through the books for a moment. “Sweet—they had a small engines class in 1979,” Jovahn said. He sighed dreamily. “They taught automotive arts.” Then he put his finger in the book. “What are we looking for, exactly, anyway?”

  “Pictures. Anything sentimental,” Amelia said, scanning another index.

  “What’s ‘sentimental’?” asked Skylar. He was chewing on the end of a pencil and staring at the bank of windows in the back of the library. A group of students had gathered there.

  “‘Sentimental’ means sappy,” Kiera answered. “Oooo—” She sat up. “They elected a Clearwater Queen each year.”

  Amelia snorted softly. “That’s sappy, all right.” She turned a page, read for a bit, then leaned forward so fast, Malcolm was almost knocked from her shoulder. “Like this!” She shoved her yearbook to the center of the table and jabbed at it. “In 1938, when they built the auditorium and gym addition, they buried a time capsule.” She looked around. “This is it, All-Stars! We could open it for the board meeting. How dramatic would that be? There’s nothing more sentimental than a time capsule!”

  “Look . . . there’s—” Skylar said, pointing toward the window.

  Jovahn interrupted. “What’s a time capsule, again?”

  Amelia gestured impatiently. “You know, a container of stuff from that time period. There’s usually a big ceremony when they bury it, and later you dig it up to see what it was like back then. It’s perfect.”

  Malcolm looked through Amelia’s hair to the black-and-white photo that had gotten her so excited. A group of students circled a man holding a metal box. Everyone was beaming, even the dog in the corner with his tongue hanging out. Malcolm read, “Walton McKenna, town benefactor and patron of the new school auditorium, watches on with pride as the materials for the time capsule are gathered. The capsule will be placed under the Council Oak tree when the addition is finished.”

  “What’s a ‘Council Oak’?” Jovahn asked.

  But Kiera tapped the page with a chipped purple-painted nail. “That’s Walton McKenna. The boss Skylar said our school is named after.”

  “Yeah,” Amelia said. “That’s what the caption says. That’s what captions do.�
�� She turned to Jovahn. “I don’t know. Let’s ask Mr. Binney.”

  Kiera rolled her eyes at Amelia. “What I’m trying to say is that I’ve seen that guy’s picture before. There used to be a painting of him in the back of the auditorium. Talk about sentimental. We should show that with the time capule!”

  “That’s a good idea.” Jovahn said, and poked Skylar. “But didn’t you knock it off the wall in third grade?”

  Skylar spun back around to face the group. He squirmed uncomfortably. “I got my foot caught in the seat. I was trying to get untangled, and my shoe accidentally—”

  A horrible squawking noise, like a thousand desks being moved all at once across a tile floor, interrupted him. Michael was trying to pry a window open. “Look! Over there,” someone said. Fifth-graders turned toward him.

  Mrs. Snyder’s head snapped up. She scurried around the desk. “We don’t open those windows!”

  More kids flocked over. Kiera set down her yearbook and joined them.

  Then, over all the kids’ voices and the old wooden window creaking open, a yowl. That’s really the only way to describe it—a yowl. A yowl that made Jovahn lose his page on automotive arts and Amelia stiffen so that Malcolm fell down into the bottom of her hood. It sounded awful. Like sadness poured into anger and mixed with rusty nails.

  “Is that a—” Amelia started. She stared at Jovahn.

  “It sounds like—” he answered, but it was Skylar who finished.

  “There’s a cat in the tree outside.”

  “What?” Amelia stood up. Her chair knocked over. “Where?” She plowed through the group of fifth-graders, elbowing her way to the window. Malcolm, deep in her hood, wanted her both to go faster and to run away, all at the same time. She reached the window and leaned her forehead against the glass. “Where?” she asked again.

  Michael pointed to a branch. “There. You see it?”

  “No, I—”

  But you pushed your way into the group then, Mr. Binney. “Okay, okay,” you said, steering kids toward the door. “We’ve all seen a cat before. If you have time for this, you must all be checked out. Let’s go. Line up.”

  The class started dispersing, but Amelia lingered. “It’s gone,” she whispered, and Malcolm knew that she was talking to him. “I didn’t see it.”

  Jovahn stepped up. “Me either. All I saw was the white tip of its tail as it slipped behind the trunk. I couldn’t see anything else.”

  “White tip?” Amelia repeated. Her voice shook a little. Subtly.17 You probably couldn’t notice unless you were also doing your own fair share of trembling deep in a green fleece hood. “A lot of cats have white-tipped tails. It could have been any cat.”

  She was right: it could have been any cat. But with a white-tipped tail, it also could have been a certain cat. A certain cat who had disappeared months ago yet still fueled Malcolm’s imagination whenever he faced a shadowy corner.

  Snip.

  However unlikely, it could also have been her.

  Chapter 9

  The Striped Shadow

  That night, the “what if’s” were burning up Malcolm’s brain. Logically, he knew that the cat probably wasn’t Snip. She hadn’t been seen in months, and like Amelia said, lots of cats had white-tipped tails.

  But still.

  Have you ever felt like that, Mr. Binney? When you know deep down that the worst likely isn’t true—but yet you can’t stop thinking: What if it is? And then that tiny sliver of possibility takes over your whole world.

  If only there were someone to talk to. To dismiss all this. Jesse and Billy would only poke fun. And Aggy was so busy with her own worries. Malcolm paced back and forth in his cage, too agitated to even get on his tail-safe exercise wheel.

  He tried to reassure himself. He had been all worked up over the shadow in the rafters, too, and that had turned out to be Sylvia and her squirrelings, not Snip. Then Malcolm paused, midstride. Maybe he should talk to Sylvia. Maybe she knew who the cat was. After all, the cat was outside and Sylvia was, as she put it, Outside. And then Malcolm could Know it was nothing. Then he could redirect his worries to what actually mattered: McKenna closing.

  And before he could do another lap in his cage, Malcolm was out the door and down the hall to the auditorium.

  Sylvia was almost exactly where Malcolm had left her—tucking her squirrelings in the tight space between the walls of the auditorium.

  “Who’s there!” she hissed, baring her teeth. “I will bite!”

  Malcolm held up his tail. “It’s me, Sylvia. Malcolm. Do you remember? From the other night? I won’t hurt you.”

  She snarled, “Oh, I’m not afraid of that. But I will hurt you if you wake up these squirrelings.” Then she saw Malcolm’s face. “What’s happened?”

  Before Malcolm could answer, she held up a paw and pointed a claw. “Let’s go where we can talk.” She led him up through the wall. They wound through insulation and wiring and bits of paper. Then they squeezed through the hole in the bricks and popped out on the other side. She crouched on the slanted roof. “Now—what?”

  “Whoa,” Malcolm said, gazing out, his nose and whiskers positively twanging. The air was clear and cold, and the tree stretched its branches tantalizingly close. He reached out a paw. He could probably make it, if he took a running leap—

  “Malcolm?” Sylvia pulled an acorn from a stash in the wall. She popped it into her cheek. “Have you ever been outside before?”

  Malcolm nodded. “Well, sure. Yeah, a few times.” He shrugged sheepishly. “Well, never like this. Usually when I’ve been outside, someone’s . . . after me.”

  “Once you’re Out, you’re never In,” she said, sitting back and sucking on the acorn.

  Malcolm sat next to her. “I thought there were . . . Dangers on the Outside.”

  “Dangers can be worth it sometimes,” she said, taking a deep breath and cracking into the acorn. She handed a piece of it to him.

  “Well, that’s kind of what I wanted to ask you about,” Malcolm said, taking it. He sniffed. Nutty, like sunflower seeds. “Do you know what a cat is?”

  She bounced a second acorn off his head, then caught it neatly on the rebound. “Of course! You might as well be asking me if I know what a maple is. There’s not a squirrel alive that doesn’t know about cats.”

  “Ow!” Malcolm rubbed his head. “Crumb, you can just say so, you know. We saw one today. In the tree outside the library. Do you know it?”

  “The beech? Yes—fine, springy branches. Great for hide-and-seek. I’ll be taking the squirrelings there later this spring.”

  “No, not the tree.” Gristle, was she being difficult on purpose? “The cat.” He stole a sideways glance at Sylvia and took a nibble of the acorn. Smoky and bitter, not unlike the air swirling around him.

  She twitched her nose. “Sorry, can’t help you. There are a few critters you don’t want to get to know too well. Cats are at the top of the list. Cats, dogs, owls—oh, and cars. Definitely cars.”

  Malcolm nodded. He munched on the rest of his acorn. That was that, then. He was right back where he started. A sliver of worry.

  Sylvia watched him. She reached out a paw and touched his shoulder. “Seriously, now. I wish I could help. What is this all about?”

  Malcolm hesitated. What did an Outside squirrel—who was kind of a pain in the tail, to tell the truth—know about anything he was worried about? But sometimes, it doesn’t matter what a person (or critter) knows. They just have to be willing to listen. And so, before he knew it, all of it poured out. Malcolm’s nightmares about Snip, the hamsters’ teasing, even the school closing and the fact that Amelia had been sneaking away and not eating lunch.

  “Whoa,” Sylvia said finally, after Malcolm had taken a breather. “The Outside may have Dangers, but I’ve got to say, it’s simpler. Eat and try not to be eaten. That’s about the extent of our worries.”

  It did sound wonderfully simple. But at the same time, Malcolm knew he could never give up al
l that he had Inside.

  “You know . . .” she said. She picked up an acorn that had fallen out of the hole and twirled it about on its point for a minute. “I’m not sure if I should bring this up. I wonder . . .” The acorn wobbled and toppled on its side. “Sometimes when Outside critters have problems—bigger than ‘eat and try not to be eaten’—they go to a . . . fixer of sorts.”

  Malcolm’s head jerked up. “A ‘fixer’?”

  She picked up the acorn again. “More of a broker, really. Someone who . . . arranges things.”

  “What do you mean?” Malcolm tried to tamp down the little spark of hope he felt. This might be exactly what the Midnight Academy needed!

  “He fixes critters’ problems. Run out of nuts for the winter? Your branch blows down in a storm? These are problems that Outside critters deal with all the time. But every once in a while, for whatever reason, a problem is insurmountable. A critter is desperate. And that’s when they seek out the Striped Shadow.”

  Insurmountable? Malcolm had heard that word before. Aggy—she had used it at the Tangerine meeting. And Mr. Binney had used it too. At the time, Malcolm hadn’t known exactly what it meant, so he had looked it up in his dictionary. “Insurmountable, impossible to overcome.” But none of them—Aggy, Mr. Binney, or the dictionary—had mentioned fixers.

  The fur on Malcolm’s neck prickled up. Then he asked, “The Striped Shadow? You mentioned him before—didn’t you? Isn’t he the one who set up your nest?” It was hard to imagine Sylvia desperate. “But does he solve Inside critter problems? What about problems involving nutters?”

  Sylvia set the acorn down and started it spinning again. “That’s the thing. I don’t know.” She swiped the acorn, and it spun faster. “And there’s more. The Striped Shadow fixes things . . . but there’s a price. There’s always a price.”

  Malcolm hardly heard any of that. Crumb, this was better than anything Malcolm could have imagined. So what if it was Snip in the trees? His worries about her seemed as puny as Sylvia’s acorn next to the giant tree’s branches. A fixer! Who knew such critters existed? Malcolm’s hind legs trembled in his effort not to start dancing. “Where do I find him? This Striped Shadow?”