by Andrea White
“OK,” Zert interrupted. “I’ll go.” He had been thinking that if he could find a water bottle at the parking lot, he and his father could float down the trickle with their herd. They still had some details to work out, like how to get out before they drowned, but they had the beginning of a plan.
“We can look for some magazines. I’d like to see some photos of designer animals. What did you call the one that had me?”
“A bassetduck,” Zert said.
Beth had stopped pacing next to his desk and was gazing down at his paper. “Are you finished with your short story?”
Henry Popter. The fastest lifter racer in the land. Garage. Shanghai. Casey had warned the class that students would have to read their story out loud.
If I read that out loud, Beth will think I’m showing off. Zert shook his head. “Nah. It needs a lot of work.”
Beth turned to leave. “I better go home and write mine.” At the doorway, she slowly pulled her hand out of her pocket to shake Zert’s hand.
Zert shook her hand. Strange. Her skin no longer felt rough.
As Beth scampered away, he examined his own hand and counted three calluses. He turned it over and saw the same old patches of freckles on the backs of his hands. Some looked like couples hugging. Others like colonies of ants. One bloated one resembled a clover leaf.
A month ago, shrinking had felt like the most radical change possible. But not anymore.
Walking over to the desk, he noticed a bunch of tiny red wildflowers tied with a leather bow. It smelled like licorice.
He turned over his short story and started writing on the back of the rough paper.
Once upon a time …
35
A ROACH’S KISS
The next morning as Zert walked to school, hurried footsteps pounded the trail behind him. He broke into a jog down the path to get away.
“I’m sorry,” Millicent called out.
Zert stopped and faced her. She stood in the middle of the trail. Her hair hung straight to her shoulders, and bags of seeds and insect parts hung out of her pockets. She wore a green T-shirt under her overalls that made her eyes seem greener.
“Why’d you go along with those other kids?” Zert asked. “I thought you were my friend.”
“After you scared Beth with the knife, she was always calling you a coward.” Millicent paused. “I knew you weren’t.”
“You could have warned me,” Zert charged.
Millicent’s pink cheeks flushed red. “We don’t tattle on each other here. Besides, you did show Beth. And then you saved her. You’re brave, Zert.”
“Yeah, well,” he said. “Thanks.” He tried to keep his pleasure from leaking into his voice.
“I told my father about what we did to you and to Abbot,” Millicent continued. “And he says that I was wrong to go along with the game.” She paused. “I mean, I had no idea that a real rat would be around. But still …”
“It was worse than a game,” Zert insisted.
“I made a mistake,” Millicent said, looking at her sandaled feet. “Not just with you but with Abbot.”
“I can’t speak for Abbot,” Zert said. “But everything’s OK with me.”
As Millicent’s face broke into a smile, he felt as if he had stepped inside a 3-D Mag Lev with a maximizer button and grown BIG again.
“Today, we are going to start our unit on short stories,” Mary Kay Casey said. With a black skirt, a red T-shirt, and a red-and-black pin, she looked like a … ladybug. “Zert, will you be the first to read to the class?”
Zert pulled his paper out of his backpack. Last night, he had written a new story on the back pages of his first draft.
“Stand up, please,” Casey said.
Zert hitched up his pants and cleared his throat. He worked to keep his hands from trembling as he began.
Once upon a time, there was a mother witch who had two witch daughters named Prunella and Crunella. The mother witch had a hump in her nose that the other witches thought was attractive, but she had a cruel temper, and for that reason, her friends nicknamed her Red. One day, Prunella and Crunella were supposed to be cleaning their broomsticks. Instead, they were staring into a mirror, combing their coarse hair and arguing about who was the most beautiful.
Their mother, Red, flew into a rage and yelled, “May you both turn into roaches until someone kisses your ugly lips!”
Just as the sisters felt their thin witches’ arms, legs, and face dry up into hard shells, a horrible wind blasted through their yard, and they were blown away.
Poor Red! Their mother immediately regretted her harsh words. She ran out into her front yard and down the street, searching frantically for her daughters. Neighbors stared as she got down on her hands and knees and kissed every roach she saw. She was trying to break the spell, but none of the kissed roaches turned into her daughters.
“Zert,” Casey interrupted, “I just want to remind the little ones that they’re not supposed to kiss roaches unless they’ve been boiled. Don’t do what Red did, OK?” Zert looked at the smaller kids and nodded. A few weeks ago, her warning—Don’t kiss a roach—would have seemed insane. But it made sense now.
Red kissed brown roaches, black ones, skinny ones, fat ones, until by late evening, she had kissed one thousand four hundred and thirty-three.
At midnight, after kissing a baby roach that she found in a breadbox, Red began to feel sick. A bad stomachache, she thought. But red itchy spots popped out all over her, even on her fingernails. Her hair turned bright orange and fell out in clumps. Just before midnight, she died of pox.
John Gibson and Dawn Nelson gasped.
Meanwhile, Crunella and Prunella were wandering around town searching for someone to break their mother’s spell. They spotted a sweet-looking woman, surely a mother, in front of Hatch’s Corner Market.
Zert paused. Hatch’s Market was the name of a store in Low City DC that he and his father had shopped at.
“I want to go first. I’m prettiest,” Crunella said.
“No, I want to go first. I’m the most beautiful,” Prunella said.
They argued so long that the woman with her basket filled with all different kinds of delicious chips began heading toward the checkout line.
“OK,” Prunella gave in, for she saw that the woman would be leaving soon. “You go first this time.”
Crunella walked slowly up to the mother and batted her eyes and tried to look as sweet, pretty, and friendly as she could.
The woman’s sweet face contorted. “Argh!” she screamed.
A store clerk rushed toward her. “What’s wrong?”
Speechless, the woman pointed at Crunella. The woman looked as if she was going to faint.
Crunella scampered away, but the clerk chased her. Before she reached the safety of a shelf, he beat her with a broom.
“Vermin,” he yelled.
Zert thought about how much Cribbie hated it when people mispronounced his last name, but he couldn’t share this with the class. There was so much he couldn’t share with anyone.
When Crunella found Prunella, she was hiding between some boxes of dodo pellets. The sisters looked at each other. Neither wanted to confess what she was thinking. Getting kissed by a human was going to be harder than they had thought.
A short while later, a policeman passed by. “He’s mine,” Prunella said, trying to sound confident. She scuttled out from under the box of dodo pellets toward him.
Her head still aching from the broom blow to her head, Crunella yelled, “Be careful!”
Prunella swiftly climbed the cliff of the policeman’s pants and shirt and onto the plank of his arm. While she waited patiently for the policeman to notice her, she smiled ever so prettily.
As the policeman reached for a sack of meatloaf chips, she saw his face convulse in horror. He swatted her, knocking her to the ground. He stomped the floor and tried to crush her with his big black shoes.
Barely escaping with her life, she scurried to the
ir hiding place, the box of dodo food.
While Crunella licked Prunella’s bruises, they plotted their next move.
Things did not go well.
Over the years, they traveled by lifter and 3-D Mag Lev all over the world. They said “hello” to thousands of men, women, and children. In one spectacular move, Crunella dropped from the ceiling of a toy store onto a little boy’s arm. She hoped that the little boy would think that the maneuver was as crunchy as the moon colonist action figure that he was holding. But he tried to pull off her wings. Crunella almost didn’t get away.
When Zert stopped to catch his breath, he looked around the room. In his old school, kids would have been shuffling their feet, playing with their RASM portals. But here, all the faces turned toward him, listening.
Prunella said, “Crunella, I think we are on the right track. I think that we need to find a boy.”
Crunella shook her head. “Not that boy. He was mean.”
“We need to find the right boy,” Prunella said.
“We need to give up,” Crunella said, her voice despondent.
The sun had set when Crunella and Prunella left the Colorado town where they had spent the afternoon and started walking aimlessly into the forest. At first they were lonely for the sights, sounds, and smells of people, but then they decided that the forest was peaceful. No one screamed when they saw the two sisters. No one tried to smash them.
They spotted a campfire glowing in the darkness.
“Do we dare?” Crunella said.
“Try again?” Prunella finished her sister’s sentence.
They looked at each other. “One more time,” they said together and crept up to the campfire.
“Why, he’s a little guy,” Crunella said.
“A fairy,” Prunella said.
“Yeah,” Crunella said.
A boy, only a little taller than them, sat near the campfire. He was barbecuing a wormdog.
“Whose turn?” Crunella said.
“Yours,” Prunella said.
“No, yours,” Crunella said.
“Eenie, meenie, miney, mo, catch a witch by the toe. Prunella, you’re it,” Crunella said.
“No,” Prunella said. “It’s so quiet and peaceful. I don’t want to get hit on the head tonight.”
Crunella looked deeply into Prunella’s eyes. Only the two of them knew how much each had suffered. “OK. Let’s both go, Prunella.”
Together, they walked toward the boy, smiling widely but with their hearts full of fear. They had been bruised and stomped on so often.
Bezert Jackson Cage, a Rosie in Paradise, was cooking dinner and worrying about his homework. A short story was due tomorrow, and he had no idea what to write. He saw two roaches creeping toward him.
“That’s it,” Zert said. “I’ll write about you for my English paper.” He was so happy that he leaned over and kissed first one roach and then the other.
Prunella was happy because he kissed her first, and Crunella was happy because he kissed her longer. But all Zert saw were two long black shadows flying off into the night. The End
Beth whistled. The class clapped.
“Zert, your father told me you’re a gifted writer,” Casey said. “And it’s true.”
Zert blushed. “Thanks.”
Millicent clapped him on the back. “Good job,” she said.
“Millicent,” Casey said. “Are you ready?”
Through the walls of the PeopleColor Schoolhouse, the sun shone brightly and cast the schoolroom in a greenish hue.
Millicent stood and faced the class. She patted her straight hair as if to style it as she said, “My story is called ‘The Caterpillar’s Bad Hair Day.’”
Zert laughed along with the rest of the kids. Until he remembered: He was going to get kicked out of this school.
In the old world, you couldn’t get anywhere without an education. Here, he wasn’t going to get to finish seventh grade.
Dumb Thumb.
36
I’LL SETTLE FOR LIVE
Zert’s last week at school passed in a blur of insect husbandry and stories about Millard R. Dix. But Beth no longer accidentally stomped on his feet when she stood up, and he no longer felt John’s eyes glaring at him. Rudolpho helped him rig an archery target so he could practice with a bow and arrow. And in art, he started carving his own sculpture. It was of Chub.
“Be at the campfire before dark,” his father had said as Zert left Saturday midmorning to go to the parking lot. He had been standing at the door to their cave, wearing his tan sock shirt and holding the Cinderella broom in his hand.
“I’m not an idiot, Dad,” Zert had said. “That’s the third time you’ve told me.”
“The vote is tonight, and if you’re late, you’ll give Don G. an excuse,” his father had called as Zert had started down the trail.
“OK,” Zert had called back. He had penned five roaches, three beetles, and six doodlebugs. Now he had to figure out a way to transport them to wherever they were going. He’d find a plastic bottle at the parking lot and pull it back to Paradise on a string. Plastic bottles didn’t weigh much. Then, he and his father could drag it to the trickle, and they could float away and live happily ever after.
I’ll settle for live.
As he and Beth hiked down the winding path, Zert was sorry that Millicent hadn’t come with them. She’d had to stay behind to help her father dig up slugs. He wished he could have spent one last day with her before he and his father were voted out.
He wanted Millicent to see that he was keeping up with Beth. His lungs weren’t burning. He wasn’t even breathing hard. As his dad had promised, his feet were snug as two bugs inside his rat-skin boots. And with his rat cloak around his shoulders, he wasn’t cold. The canteen that he brought still sloshed with water. And they were almost at the parking lot.
Beth cast an anxious glance at the sun. Even though she was barefoot, she wore a blue cloak around her shoulders. She had tied her hair back in a matching blue ribbon. “We better hurry,” she said.
That’s when he noticed that the sun was drooping in the sky. It was midafternoon already. The hike must have taken longer than he thought.
They bypassed the light pole and, a few minutes later, stood on the edge of the parking lot.
A sleek new Banana model lifter and another model called a Hummingbird were parked on the huge concrete slab. The lifters looked bigger, broader, heavier, and shinier than he remembered.
Bits of old foil gleamed in the sunlight, as if a treasure chest had spilled its contents. Mongo is beautiful.
“Zert, I found a newspaper,” Beth called from a few paces away. “Help me turn the pages.”
He stared down at the front page. The photo was of a boy a little older than thirteen whose hairline grew just above his eyebrows. He held a Shock Wave bomb between his teeth and the detonator in one hand.
“I want to see the ads,” Beth said.
“Wait a minute,” Zert said. He had to hop around the page to see the letters. Reading through a funny dance, he made out the headline: “Rogue Nations Conducting More Nuclear Tests.”
“Oh no,” Beth said, her bushy eyebrows drawing together. “Is that serious?”
“It says something about a war to control Venezuela.” Zert looked up from the page when he heard feet pounding and branches breaking.
“What does that mean?” Beth asked as she turned to scan the parking lot. “What’s that noise?”
A group of BIG boys wearing backpacks started to cross the parking lot. They must have parked on the hill. Some were holding nets; others fishing poles. They were dressed in blue uniforms: blue shorts and short-sleeved shirts with a splash of white at the collar. Boy Scouts.
So many kids together in one place. The epidemic must be over. St. Lulu’s must have started up again. His class would all be wondering where he was.
He felt that familiar ache in his chest.
But in the BIG world, there would be a new quarantine someday
soon. The war to control Venezuela might spiral into a global conflict. No matter what happened here, at least he would be able to enjoy the outdoors.
“Who are those weirdos?” Beth asked as they lay down on the edge of the parking lot to stay out of sight and to observe the boys.
“They’re called Boy Scouts. I was one once,” Zert said, gazing into her eyes. Ever since he had noticed the freckles on her face, he hadn’t been able to look at her without seeing them. They rosied up the plain of her cheekbones and then spread all the way to her sunburnt nose.
“Why are they all dressed exactly alike?” Beth asked.
“It’s the tradition,” he said. He struggled to think of a way to explain uniforms. Rosies wore the outfits of a hundred pockets because that’s what they had to wear, not for a purpose.
“Why?” Beth asked.
Zert wouldn’t say an If you! no matter what. “To show they’re a team.”
“What did you do when you were a scout?” Beth asked.
“We helped the Nature Hotel maintain the outside-in trails.” Zert smiled. Back then he had thought that the fake grass, Instant Trees, and indoor weather system were the real outdoors. “The rest of the time, I went to meetings and learned how to tie knots.”
“But who are the scouts?” Beth asked in a puzzled tone.
Zert thought about her question. “They like the outdoors, like us Rosies.”
Beth’s dark eyes grew wide. “Those BIGS want to be like us?”
“Yep.”
One of the boys took a soft drink out of his backpack and shook the can. When the boy opened the lid, the green, sticky liquid spewed all over his neighbors.
“What are they doing now?” Beth asked.
“The boy with the can is just horsing around,” Zert explained.
He hadn’t seen Cribbie stop up the drain with leaves and pour PeopleColor into the water fountain to get the birds to turn pink. But when the security guard told the scoutmaster that a boy had tampered with the fountain, the scoutmaster had headed straight over to Cribbie and Zert and said, “Leave, and don’t come back.”
