by Paul Noth
FOR PARNELL
Contents
Part 1: Why to Sell your Family to the Aliens
Chapter 1: My Family
Chapter 2: Squeep!
Chapter 3: The Twins
Chapter 4: My Tv
Chapter 5: Alice Steals My Tv
Chapter 6: I Stop Shaving
Chapter 7: Alphonso the Bee
Chapter 8: The Great Inventor
Chapter 9: Setting the Trap
Chapter 10: The Last Hexagon
Part 2: How to Sell your Family to the Aliens
Chapter 11: The Mansion
Chapter 12: The Black Room
Chapter 13: Gift Horse
Chapter 14: The Zookeeper
Chapter 15: Everything Out the Window
Chapter 16: Grandma
Chapter 17: The “Naturalists”
Chapter 18: The Young Master
Part 3: So you’ve Sold your Family to the Aliens
Chapter 19: Listen to the Lizard
Chapter 20: The Compact
Chapter 21: What the Aliens Look Like
Chapter 22: Gubbins
Chapter 23: Finally Happy
Chapter 24: Reunion
Chapter 25: Death Match
Chapter 26: The Return
Chapter 27: Lingering Side Effects
FBI WARNING:
THIS BOOK CONTAINS INFORMATION—PARTICULARLY THE PARTS ABOUT SELLING YOUR FAMILY TO THE ALIENS—THAT MAY BE DANGEROUS. THE AUTHOR, HAPPY CONKLIN JUNIOR, INCLUDES THESE PASSAGES IN THE INTEREST OF THE GENERAL PUBLIC’S UNDERSTANDING, KNOWLEDGE, AND BETTERMENT. THE AUTHOR NEITHER CONDONES NOR ENCOURAGES THE USE OF THIS INFORMATION FOR THE PURPOSE OF READERS SELLING THEIR OWN FAMILIES TO THE ALIENS.
CONTINUE READING AT YOUR OWN RISK.
A note from Happy Conklin Junior:
The lawyers say I can’t write this book unless I start with that FBI-approved warning. As you may know, my family has had a long history of trouble with the FBI, but I would like to state publicly that I have no hard feelings toward that fine organization or its agents. After all, they were only doing their job.
Sincerely,
PART 1
WHY TO SELL YOUR FAMILY TO THE ALIENS
CHAPTER 1
MY FAMILY
Before you assume I’m a bad person, you should know that I had originally only planned on selling Grandma to the aliens. Not my whole family. And I would not have sold her without excellent reasons.
First of all, I wanted money. Second of all, I had a grandma.
When I say “Grandma” I hope you’re not picturing some sweet old lady who baked me cookies every day. My grandma only baked cookies once a week, and even then they weren’t for me but for my dad. And actually she didn’t bake them herself either—her personal chef did. My dad’s inventions paid for her to have a chef, three maids, a butler, a bunch of security guards, a chauffeur, and a footman, who I guess did something to her feet. I don’t want to know what.
Dad’s whole purpose in life was to please Grandma. He did all the work, and she got all the money. So she had the five floors of our house all to herself, while Mom, Dad, my five sisters, and I shared two rooms in the basement.
Grandma’s security guards kept us kids out of her fancy part of the house, where there were chandeliers and windows and stuff. We weren’t allowed to use her elevator. We weren’t allowed to use the servants’ elevator. If Grandma saw me even reading the sign on the servants’ elevator, she’d throw open her window and scream, “Don’t you read that sign! That sign is for my servants!” and slam it shut.
But even though I was poor, I didn’t get any of that good poor-kid stuff, like people feeling sorry for you. Everyone assumed I was rich when they heard my name was Happy Conklin Junior.
“Your father’s the Hap Conklin?” they’d say, smiling as they remembered how famous Dad is, then frowning as they remembered how annoying he is.
The thought of my dad is probably making you frown too. I already know what you think of him, so you don’t have to tell me how much you hate his TV infomercials, radio fomercials, and Internet fomercials. I know you’re tired of his loud billboard fomercials, his bus fomercials, his blimp fomercials, and his tree fomercials. I get it. You just want to walk past a tree in peace, or have a little silence as you board a bus or a blimp, without him screaming down at you: “I’m Hap Conklin!” I know how those words have come to feel like a dental drill going into your eye. I know.
But remember, he actually invented all that stuff in those fomercials. He worked really hard on his inventions, and no one can say that they haven’t changed the world. Especially his bestseller:
Until Buns of Abs came along, people didn’t even know that they wanted ab-shaped muscles on their buns, let alone that it was achievable through diet, exercise, and corrective pants.
Of course, not all his creations have been so successful.
That’s One Handsome Baby, like most of Dad’s inventions, started out as Grandma’s idea for the next big moneymaking wonder product.
Babies annoyed her. “Too unpredictable,” she always said. She especially hated not being able to tell boy babies from girl babies. So Dad invented a topical cream to make boy babies grow beards. It worked instantly: a newborn grew facial hair faster than a lumberjack werewolf. Fortunately, Grandma only ever tested that product on one baby. Unfortunately, that baby’s name was Happy Conklin Junior. I have had to shave three times a day, every day, ever since I could hold a razor.
But of course, no one bought That’s One Handsome Baby. The public did not share Grandma’s feelings about baby gender appearance. Also, infants are terrible at shaving.
Most of us Conklin kids had one invention or another tested on us. I’m luckier than some of my sisters. Next to them, being a ten-year-old boy with a beard wasn’t so bad. Take my younger sister Kayla, for example.
Grandma still didn’t like unpredictable babies, bearded or not. So next she tested Hap Conklin’s Baby Master—a product that proved to be highly defective—on baby Kayla.
Nine years later, Kayla still wears a yellow headband every day and talks to an imaginary honeybee named Alphonso.
In short, my life couldn’t get any worse—or so I thought, until our mom had to go out of town for a few weeks.
A little background on Mom:
She was from a country called Moldova in Eastern Europe. Fifteen years ago, she came to the United States on a work visa to be a laundress at Conklin Manor. Mom didn’t speak any English, a fact that did not prevent her and Dad from falling in love. They had to hide the relationship from Grandma, who would not have approved.
But then Mom became, as they say, “with child,” and Grandma figured out what had been going on. Boy, was she furious! She had far grander things in mind for her genius son than a rushed marriage to a Moldovan laundress. So Grandma threw Dad out of the house. He moved into Mom’s servants’ quarters down here in the basement.
Eventually, Grandma agreed to let them remain a couple, but only if they both signed a bunch of legal documents giving Grandma the power to nullify their union and deport Mom whenever she felt like it. Since then, I think Grandma has regarded our family as a growing but manageable pest problem in the basement.
Now, after fifteen years, Grandma was finally giving Mom a promotion from laundress to Director of Laundry. But first Mom had to complete some sort of advanced laundry training program at a hospitality school in Nevada.
With Mom gone, our lives went off a cliff.
Dad could not manage the simplest household task. Most of us kids began acting out in our worst behavior. Morale was in the toilet, and the toilet wouldn’t flush.
; Then came the horrible incident of my sister Alice and Squeep! the lizard.
CHAPTER 2
SQUEEP!
It will come as no surprise that “Beard Boy” has never been the most popular kid at school. Grandma forbade us any contact with TVs, video games, the Internet—all the favorite topics at my school—so I always had trouble finding normal things to talk about with my classmates. The only other things kids wanted to talk about were my beard and my famous family of freaks. I endured years of constant teasing, and by fifth grade I felt sure that school could not possibly get any worse for me.
But then I lost Squeep!, my class’s pet lizard.
Maybe “lost” isn’t the right word. Everyone in my grade had to take Squeep! home overnight to help us learn personal responsibility. I knew the risks of bringing that cute little lizard into the same bedroom as my sister Alice—especially with Mom away. Alice had been at her very worst lately. I begged Ms. Jensen to excuse me from the assignment, but she insisted. All night long, I sat awake on my cot, holding Squeep! in both hands to protect him from Alice. But then, sometime close to morning, I accidentally fell asleep.
One of Grandma’s experiments had left Alice with an ability to steal things and hide them away forever. Tattling on her was useless. Alice would deny everything and never be caught with any evidence. Also, if I had told Ms. Jensen the truth about Alice stealing Squeep!, the police might have become involved. My family was already under investigation by the FBI, for reasons I’ll soon explain. I couldn’t betray my own family like that. So instead, I told my class that Squeep! had run away.
The whole school had loved Squeep! (aka “Squeepers,” aka “Sir Squeepsalot,” aka “Squeep City, USA”). When I lost him, I lost every ally I ever had at that place—kids and adults. A week later, this boy named Happy still walked home every day in tears. Until, wiping my eyes one Friday afternoon, I chanced upon the one thing I wanted most in the world, the one thing I knew could transform me from an isolated oddball into a regular kid:
A TV!
It sat out on a curb with a neighbor’s garbage bins. I stared down at it in disbelief. I felt like a genie had granted my greatest wish.
My parents fully supported Grandma’s ban on television, because they weren’t exactly normal people either. But with Mom away, it felt like all the rules were out the window. Everyone else was getting away with murder, why shouldn’t I?
It never even occurred to me that the TV might be broken. Fate could not be that cruel.
I could barely lift that boxy, old-fashioned TV off the grass. Yet somehow I carried it the whole two blocks to Conklin Grounds. I lugged it through the servants’ gate, keeping an eye out for Grandma’s security guards, all the way to our door, and then down the stairs to the two little basement rooms where my family lived.
If Mom had been home, she would have caught me with it before I had even reached the last step. But I only had to worry about Dad, and I could probably have driven a whole truckload of TVs straight through our kitchen without him noticing.
I peeked around the corner into what was both the kitchen and our parents’ bedroom. Dad stood by the stove. He held his newest invention, a braided ring of golden wires, in one hand while absently stirring a pot of beans with the other. An enormous plastic ketchup bottle stood at the ready beside the pot. With Mom away, Dad had been “cooking” for us.
He always squirted a lot of ketchup into our nightly dinner of beans. At breakfast, he sprinkled a little sugar on our breakfast beans. But lunch was the best. Just plain beans.
Well, it wasn’t so great on school days, when the bean juice soaked through the bottom of my paper lunch bag before I even got to homeroom. Then the other kids would usually steal the bag from me, smash it over my face, and yell, “Beard of beans! Beard Boy’s got a beard of beans!” Then they would all do the Make-Beard-Boy-Cry Dance. I didn’t like this dance, because it made me cry, but I had to admit that over the years some of the kids had gotten pretty good at it. Although in terms of rhythm, style, and flair, none of them could match Ms. Dalton, the principal. When she jumped into the Make-Beard-Boy-Cry Dance all the kids and teachers would dance back into a half circle to watch her amazing moves. You could really see why she was principal.
But that’s all in the past now, I thought, admiring my new TV. I would finally be able to talk to my classmates like a normal kid, and say normal-kid things like, “Yeah, I saw that show too,” without it being a bald-faced lie, or a stubbly-faced lie. Heaving the TV aloft, I tiptoed silent as a ninja into the kitchen. Suddenly, I heard a voice singing in Romanian. Had Mom come home?
But it was only Kayla, singing one of Mom’s Moldovan folk songs to our youngest sister, Baby Lu. Mom had set up a “Safety Schedule” so that one of us would always be watching Baby Lu during her absence. Kayla looked up and shook her yellow-banded head at the ridiculous sight of me lugging the enormous TV through the kitchen. But Baby Lu grinned and said my name, which she pronounced “Bapy.” Her eyes brightened, and she gave me such a big gummy smile that I had to smile back. “You can do it, Bapy,” her smile seemed to say. “You got this, big brother.”
Deeply encouraged, I carried the TV into the bedroom I shared with my five sisters. Here, I made a Sister Schematic, so you don’t get too confused:
See how there’s a Weirdness Axis and a Meanness Axis? Well, you can blame Grandma’s experiments for all of the weirdness, and probably a fair amount of the meanness too. But please don’t blame my parents. Granted, Dad is pretty out-to-lunch about most things. And Mom? I don’t think she realized how dangerous the experiments could be until what happened to Baby Kayla, nine years ago. After that, Mom stopped allowing Grandma access to any of her babies, which finally put a stop to the experiments.
CHAPTER 3
THE TWINS
As I lugged my new TV into our bedroom, I worried about how my three older sisters might react. Luckily, they were too distracted to notice.
As usual, the twins were screaming at Alice. Beth had her glasses off, so I couldn’t tell her apart from Eliza.
“You little thief!” screamed one twin. “Where’s my sweatshirt?”
“You steal everything!” screamed the other.
You wouldn’t be able to tell them apart either. Unlike so-called identical twins, Beth and Eliza were actually identical—physically and vocally indistinguishable from each other. The only thing that allowed anyone to tell them apart were those green-framed specs. The moment Beth removed the glasses, NOBODY—no parent, sibling, teacher, or facial recognition software—could tell Eliza from Beth or Beth from Eliza. In photos and mirrors, they couldn’t even tell themselves apart.
Ironically, the green-framed glasses that prevented their identicalness also caused it.
See, back when the twins were babies, Grandma had desperately wanted another blockbuster self-improvement product to build on the success of Buns of Abs. This new product wouldn’t just give you amazing abs on your buns, it would give you whatever kind of body you wanted. As usual, Dad rose to the challenge and created Hap Conklin’s Perfect-O-Specs.
The Specs were the first product Grandma ever tested on her grandchildren. It happened years before I was born, and nobody ever talked about it—the details of Grandma’s experiments were considered a dangerous topic in my family. But I had always assumed that Beth and Eliza had been born fraternal twins, and Grandma had used the Specs to make them identical. Beth, as you will see, had different theories.
However it happened, the experiment was deemed a great success. The Specs worked amazingly well, and they would have been an enormous commercial hit if the US government hadn’t banned them before the product launch. The feds claimed that glasses which allowed people to steal each other’s physical appearance would lead to a giant identity theft crime wave. This marked the beginning of my family’s troubles with the FBI.
In order to stay identical to Eliza, several times a day Beth would stare at Eliza through the Specs and flick them on. If Be
th neglected to do this, by the end of the day her skin would begin to freckle. She hated those freckles, probably because they reminded everyone of Alice. She never let a day go by without making sure she looked just like Eliza, because after the freckling process had started, who knows what other changes might follow? She didn’t really know who, or what, she might turn into.
For good reason, Beth guarded and protected the Specs as though her life depended on it. As far as we knew, they were the last pair on the planet. But she never wore them in public, for fear that she would suddenly be surrounded by men in dark suits and FBI windbreakers who would try to take her glasses away.
CHAPTER 4
MY TV
So there I was, lugging the TV into our bedroom, while the twins screamed at Alice.
“You criminal!” screamed one twin. “Where are my corduroys?”
“You steal everything!” screamed the other.
“Ha!” said Alice, denying it as usual. “What would I want with your disgusting corduroys?”
“You stole my strawberry shampoo!” screamed a twin.
“Ha!” said Alice. “As though I would ever even dream of touching your cheap pathetic shampoo!”
“I need my own room!” howled a twin. Actually, I knew this was Eliza, because Eliza howled “I need my own room!” about twenty thousand times a day.
I lowered the TV onto my cot. My sweaty arms shook with exertion, or maybe excitement. My own TV. I actually had one! I could finally start living like a normal human being.
The cord reached the nearest baseboard outlet. I plugged it in and sat down in front of the screen. After a long, deep breath, I turned the power button slowly.
