Weird Kid

by Greg Van Eekhout

  Dedication

  To all the weird kids: Stay weird.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Books by Greg van Eekhout

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  TOMORROW I’LL BE AMONG PEOPLE, so tonight I practice my smile.

  Smiling should be easy. You pull up the corners of your mouth, maybe show some teeth, maybe don’t, and that’s it, you’re smiling.

  Or, if you’re me, you grow a forked snake tongue, just for fun.

  But only when nobody’s looking.

  Only when you want to.

  At least, that’s how it used to be.

  Tomorrow’s the first day of middle school, and I have to keep my mouth and body under control, or else.

  I face the bathroom mirror and try a smile, bright and friendly.

  My teeth are all wrong.

  Too small, too many, shaped like tiny, sharp arrowheads.

  “Piranha teeth, great,” I mutter, being careful not to cut my tongue.

  Things started going haywire in June. That’s when I started going haywire. I was at the grocery store with Mom, helping her pick out avocados for Tuesday Taco Night, and I had to get around an old man blocking the aisle. “Excuse me, sir,” I said, and he gave me a huge smile and told me I was very polite. For some reason the phrase “ear-to-ear grin” popped into my brain, and before I knew it, my mouth stretched so wide it curved around my face in an actual ear-to-ear grin. The top of my head might have toppled off if I’d smiled any bigger.

  The old man screamed and ended up needing EMTs and oxygen and Mom rushed me out of the store and we didn’t have guacamole with our tacos that night.

  That wasn’t my only accidental shapeshifting this summer. A week after the grocery store, I was bouncing on the trampoline in the backyard. On my last landing, my body flattened into a big tortilla. I managed to re-form my human shape after a few seconds, but if the neighbors had seen . . .

  Shifting in public is very dangerous.

  They could find out about me.

  They is the police.

  They is government agents.

  They is my teachers and classmates. They is my friends.

  They could be anyone.

  That’s what Mom and Dad tell me all the time.

  I try another smile in the mirror, just a tiny one.

  I can do this. I’ve smiled before, hundreds of times. I’m just having some new-school nerves. I’m just freaking myself out.

  Close my eyes.

  Take a breath.

  Think normal thoughts.

  I open my eyes. Staring back at me is a Venus flytrap.

  I am doomed.

  The drop-off curb in front of Cedar Creek View Middle School is a chaos of cars and slamming doors and screaming kids. Mom and Dad insisted on driving me, even though I could have walked or ridden my bike. They say delivering me to school makes things easier, but I know this is a test.

  Mom turns to look back at me. “Feeling good about today?”

  What she means is, “Have you accidentally grown eyestalks? Have you reverted to pure goo form? Do you need a bucket?”

  Mom and Dad wanted to start homeschooling me to prevent anyone from discovering my secret, but I refused. I want to do normal things. I want to eat stale chicken nuggets in the cafeteria. I want to hang out with my friends. I want to sketch guitars on my math worksheets instead of doing actual math.

  I won the fight, so I get to go to regular school, but if I have a shifting episode they’ll pull me right out.

  “Any cramps?” Dad asks.

  “No.”

  “Burning sensations?”

  “No.”

  “Excessive itching? Strange wriggling?”

  “No, Dad. No.”

  Dad’s a proctologist. That means he’s a medical doctor who specializes in butts. Asking about symptoms is how he shows he cares.

  As soon as the car stops I leap out. I’m ten steps away before they stop me.

  “Jake!”

  With a groan, I turn around.

  Dad’s holding out my lunch card.

  I tromp back and pluck it from his outstretched hand.

  “I love you, kid,” he says.

  Mom smiles. “Have a wonderful first day, Jake-o-lantern.”

  I wave but don’t smile back because I don’t want to risk my mouth doing something weird.

  A few minutes of shuffling and dodging through the clogged halls gets me to my first class, Advisory. “Sit anywhere,” the teacher says, not looking up from the stack of papers on his desk. Class doesn’t even start for another five minutes, and he already seems stressed. I get it.

  I gaze out into a sea of faces and instantly regret it, because now a sea of faces is looking back at me. What’s my mouth doing? Is it normal-sized? Do I have extra rows of teeth? Do I have tusks? Nobody’s screaming, so it’s probably good.

  Cedar Creek View Middle School takes students from all seven elementary schools in our district, so instead of a few hundred kids, now I’m going to school with almost a thousand. Only a few of the faces are familiar.

  I catch sight of Eirryk near the window and give him a nod. Our eyes lock for a second before he looks away, pretending he didn’t see me.

  Eirryk and I are best friends. Or we used to be. Things changed over the summer. He just wanted to hang out the way we normally did, jumping our bikes off a plywood ramp in front of his house, shooting hoops, playing putt-putt golf. But I couldn’t risk shifting into jelly at the water park, so I kept putting him off, making excuses. One day it’d be a dentist appointment. Then, I’d tell him I had a stomachache. Then, chicken pox. After a month of that, he gave up on me. And I can’t blame him.

  I duck my head and aim for a seat in the back row.

  A few more kids straggle in. The final one, a tall white girl, takes the empty seat next to me. I notice her backpack, stuffed so full that the zipper doesn’t shut. I also notice a purple-and-green snake poking out of it. After another second or two of looking at it, I realize it’s not a snake but a coil of climbing rope, which is maybe not as weird a thing to bring to school as a snake, but it’s unusual. And the third thing I notice is the patch sewn on the shoulder of her denim jacket. It’s the wing logo of Night Kite, my second-favorite comic book character. Night Kite doesn’t have any superpowers, but by training her mind and body she turned herself into a living weapon against evil.

  My first-favorite character is Star Hammer, an alien who lives secretly among humans on Earth.

  I look up from the girl’s patch to find her frowning at me.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, dreading the answer.

  Without breaking eye contact, she jots something down in a little black notebook. “You’re Jake Wind.”

  “How do you know—?”

  The school bell chimes, and Mr. Brown tells us to be quiet.

  He goes over some announcements and rules and the student conduct code. A lot of time is spent on the subject of chewing gum.

  “Gum is disgusting,” he rants. “I don’t want to see g
um stuck under your seats. I don’t want to see it between your teeth. I don’t want to hear it smacking in your mouth. I don’t even want to see it in its wrapper.”

  I find gum relatable since it can be transformed from a rigid rectangle into a shapeless wad, but Mr. Brown has a zero-tolerance gum policy.

  Now that Mr. Brown has expressed his feelings, he finally gets around to taking roll. I learn that the girl with the Night Kite patch is named Agnes Oakes.

  My nerves get jangly when Mr. Brown gets to the S names, because it means he’s getting to the end of the alphabet, which means he’s going to call on me soon, which means at least a few kids are going to turn around to look at me when I raise my hand. My heart pounds and my fingers twitch and my face tingles and there’s a big resounding hum between my ears and I wish I could just fly away like a bird.

  “Jake Wind,” Mr. Brown calls.

  Wishing bird-related thoughts turns out to be a mistake.

  I’ve sprouted feathers on my right hand. Actual bird feathers, speckled brown and gold.

  This is a first.

  “Jake Wind?”

  I tuck my right hand under my desk, between my knees.

  “Jake Wind, going once, going twice . . .”

  “Here!” I squeak, putting my left hand up.

  Mr. Brown looks at me. Kids look at me. All of them, looking at me. Please, oh, please, don’t let my mouth have turned into a bird beak.

  “Parker Zeballos,” calls Mr. Brown, moving on.

  I guess my mouth did not transform into a bird beak.

  The humming in my head softens and my hand reverts to normal and I let myself breathe now that everyone’s looking at Parker, a girl in the third row.

  Everyone but Agnes Oakes.

  She stares into my face and scribbles furiously in her notebook.

  Chapter 2

  I SURVIVE THREE MORE CLASSES, most of which I spend devising a brilliant scheme to protect myself from the prying eyes of Agnes Oakes.

  I, Jake Wind, will disappear.

  In my place will be a completely different kid.

  “Bonjour,” this different kid will say. “I am Marcel. I am from France.”

  There are only two small flaws in my plan.

  One: I can’t shift into a whole other person. Forked tongues, yes. Totally shifting from one thing into a complete other thing? No way.

  Two: I don’t speak French.

  It’s a garbage plan, pretty much.

  Lunch is weird and I don’t know what to do with myself. At my old school, each class sat together at the same cafeteria table, but at Cedar Creek View Middle School, you can sit wherever you want, at any table, inside or outside. It’s too many choices. I wander around with my recyclable cardboard tray of stale chicken nuggets and carrot sticks and nonfat milk and spot Eirryk squatting on a log next to the main office. I catch his eye and try a nod. For the second time today, he acts like he doesn’t see me and turns to the rest of the kids he’s sitting with. The only one of them I know is Adrian Thacker. Adrian was in swim club with me and Eirryk at the city pool for three summers in a row, but I didn’t join this summer because of my shapeshifitng problems. Adrian glances at me, says something to Eirryk, and they both laugh. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I’m pretty sure they’re laughing at me. I don’t know why. What’s so funny about me?

  I feel almost as weird as I did when I had a bird hand.

  And as if things weren’t bad enough, my bones are starting to ache from the Hum.

  The Hum is a low, deep vibration I started feeling early this summer.

  Right around the time I started losing control over my shifting.

  I know, right?

  Sometimes it lasts just a few seconds. Sometimes it’s sort of in the background, like a ringing in my ears, only through my whole body. And sometimes it’s really strong and I lose form and have to spend some time in a bucket.

  I wish I had a bucket right now.

  I find a quiet place on the edge of the soccer field and sit down to gnaw nuggets and hopefully not soak through the grass.

  “Jake Wind, I know all about you.”

  It’s Agnes Oakes, hurrying toward me like she’s late for something and angry about it. “I’ve discovered your secret.” She crosses her wrists and flaps her hands like bird wings.

  A million words gargle up from my belly. Fortunately, none of them spill out, because screaming “I am not an alien shapeshifter!” is a pretty bad way to keep a secret.

  “Night Kite,” Agnes says, impatient. “You’re a Night Kite fan.” She makes flapping wings again.

  “Oh! You saw me staring at your patch?” The flapping hands is Night Kite’s secret signal to her allies. I check to make sure my hands are normal before returning the gesture.

  Agnes nods. “My mom and I just moved to Cedar Creek View from San Diego, and your mom met my mom at the gym. They started talking and my mom said I don’t have any friends because I’m new and your mom said she’s afraid you’ll have a hard time adjusting to middle school, so our moms decided we should be friends. Which I wasn’t sure about, but since you like Night Kite, maybe it’ll be okay.”

  “Um,” I say.

  “Why do they call this place Cedar Creek View, anyway? There aren’t any cedar trees and there’s no creek.”

  “Right, so no view of either. I never thought about it.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about it. Can I sit?”

  I scooch to make room for her, even though we have the whole soccer field to ourselves.

  She munches on her own nuggets. “What’s your favorite Night Kite issue?”

  I don’t even have to think about it. “I like the crossover with Star Hammer.”

  She gives me a nod. “The power of Star Hammer combined with the brains and skill of Night Kite. They should give the two of them their own team-up book.”

  “Did you like her in Human Grenade 273?”

  She makes a face. “The art was kinda weird on that one. What did you think about Star Hammer double-sized issue 50?”

  That’s the one where the last survivors of Star Hammer’s home planet, Bahlpeen, come to take over Earth, and Star Hammer uses the Celestial Mallet to smash the Bahlpeenians into atoms, and that makes him the only Bahlpeenian in the entire universe, which I totally relate to since I’m the only one like me in Cedar Creek View and possibly the entire planet.

  “The art was kinda weird on that one, too,” is all I say.

  Before I know it, I’m blathering about comics with Agnes Oakes like we’re old friends. And feeling slightly less weird.

  I almost forget about the Hum.

  But only for a minute.

  Because the Hum gets stronger.

  My belly wriggles like it’s trying to escape my body. And those butt symptoms my dad likes to ask about? I have them everywhere. My eyes itch. My scalp convulses. My skin feels like bubbling oatmeal.

  Keep it together, I tell myself. You are Jake, a totally boring absolutely non-weird and completely solid individual.

  I can tell myself anything, but that doesn’t mean my body will listen.

  A tiny squeak escapes my lips as my right thumb sprouts little miniature thumbs like branches. A thumb tree is not something I’d ever imagined, and now I’ve got one.

  My whole world vibrates. Desperately, I shove all my thumbs in my pocket and search my head for French words in case I need to activate Marcel.

  Luckily, Agnes isn’t paying attention to me. I’m wriggling and weird, but so is the ground. The earth sags, and the grass we’re sitting on tilts down. Clumps of turf break loose and slide like puzzle pieces off an upended table into an expanding hole.

  Agnes and I scrabble backward, trying to get away from the arcade-air-hockey-sized chasm. Agnes grabs my arms to keep me from falling in, and I do the same to her with my non-thumb-tree hand.

  Finally, things settle. Red soil sifts. Pebbles click-clack into the hole.

  “What just happened?” I ask.<
br />
  Agnes springs to her feet and leans over the edge of the hole.

  “Sinkhole! Unstable ground gives way and everything above it collapses. And we were lucky enough to witness it!”

  I do not feel very lucky.

  Kids are running over as if there’s a cool fight to see. Whistles shriek as teachers and yard supervisors try to call them back.

  While Agnes peers into the darkness below, I check out my thumb-hand and touch my ears and run my tongue over my teeth. Everything seems normal on the outside. On the inside I feel like soft-serve ice cream.

  “Look at that!” Agnes says, pointing into the hole. “There’s some kind of ooze.”

  “More like goo than ooze,” I say like I’m an expert on the difference between ooze and goo. Which I am, but why announce it?

  The goo squirms from the ground near the rim of the hole, like an earthworm after a rain, except it’s big as a breakfast sausage link. It looks familiar. Not quite cake batter. Sort of what I look like when I go liquid. Like Jake batter.

  Now kids crowd around the hole, shouting, laughing, pretending to push each other in.

  Agnes takes a deep breath. “OH MY GOD THERE’S A DEAD BODY DOWN THERE!”

  Everyone gets excited, shoving each other out of the way to get a better look, even the teachers. While they’re all distracted, Agnes drops to her knees, spoons the goo sausage into a plastic cup, screws the cap on, and seals it with a strip of tape.

  Why is she equipped with a spoon and a cup with a lid and tape?

  “My mistake,” she says. “No corpse. It was probably just a trick of light.”

  The teachers and supervisors yell and herd us away. As we trudge off the field, lagging behind everyone else, Agnes holds her sample up, squinting.

  “Sinkhole. Strange goo. You know what this means, Jake?”

  Hum plus thumb tree plus sinkhole.

  “Not exactly,” I tell her. Which is the truth.

  “Me neither. Want to help me find out?”

  Do I want to encourage this person I don’t know to investigate something that, in some way, has everything to do with me?

  No.

  But do I want to spend time with someone who’s totally into Night Kite, a superhero with scary-good detective skills who suspends bad guys off bridges to get answers from them? And do I want some answers for myself?