But Kristy didn’t yell back. It was strange. Instead, she bowed her head. “I’m so, so, so sorry. I didn’t mean to make you sad.”
Penn felt more hot yelling rising up in him, like when you barf, then feel better, then barf again. “I’m not sad, Kristy. I’m mad! Okay?!”
“Okay, okay.” She stepped back. “I’m sorry.”
Was it Penn’s imagination or was Kristy looking pale? Her eyes filled with a familiar expression of guilt and sadness. Penn knew that feeling. He felt it every time Grabagorn Prime yelled at him for forgetting to do his daily chin-ups or doodling pictures on his napkin at Night Meal or asking about his parents. He’d been told they were both killed in the Great Scorch.
“It’s okay,” Penn said with a huge sigh. He forced himself to shake off his anger. “But what do we do now?”
“We get the heck off this scary bridge, out of North Greemulax, and straight to those Lemon Bubbles!” Kristy’s face broke into a smile as she edged past him and practically skipped the rest of the way to the other side.
Penn took a deep breath and followed her.
When they reached the wall, Penn remarked that it was much shorter than the section of the wall by the village. That part was tall and menacing and made of twisty iron with spikes on the ends. This section was made of splintery, loose planks of wood.
“I wonder why you guys built the wall to begin with,” Kristy said.
“The elders wanted to keep dragons out,” Penn said.
Or they wanted to keep you in, she thought but didn’t say.
Kristy pried a nail out of a piece of wood, swung it aside, and walked right through. She assumed that Penn was close behind and turned to talk to him, but he was still on the other side, looking shocked.
“That was easy,” was all he said as he finally stepped forward.
“Welcome to West Greemulax,” Kristy announced with pride. She spun around, arms out, and her rainbow skirt twirled around her hips. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Whoa. Everything you told me about—the fields of tall, green grass, the glittering streams, and the singing birds—it’s all real!”
“Of course it’s real!”
“And the sky is even blue!” He ran over to a patch of bright yellow flowers and yanked them from the dirt. He brought them to his nose and inhaled deeply. He sneezed.
Kristy laughed. “So what do you think?”
“It’s so… colorful,” Penn managed to squeak. “And the trees—they’re covered in tiny green things.”
He looked happy, truly happy, for the first time since they’d met. And that made Kristy happy. But these were just trees, and that was just sky, so it also made her a little sad to think about what life in North Greemulax was like.
Kristy led the way through the field and to a stream flanked by fruit trees. She knelt down and cupped her hands, filling them with cool water. Penn did the same.
“Even the water is better here,” he said. “It tastes cool and clean.”
After they drank, Kristy jumped up and plucked two apples from the nearest branch. She tossed one to Penn.
“What do I do with this?” he asked. “Throw it?”
“No, silly. It’s an apple. You eat it!”
“Huh. I’ve never seen a tree with meat on it.”
Kristy laughed again. “That’s not meat, it’s fruit. Four out of five worms recommend!”
He watched Kristy bite into her apple and did the same. “Wow,” he said. “That’s good.”
They ate as they walked, crunching happily. Kristy told Penn all about the bad luck that had brought their mission to a crash-landing in North Greemulax. It had been her first outing in the trolley as a Rainbow Knight. It was only meant to be a routine flyover, where the Rainbow Knights scan the land below to make sure everything looks okay. As Rainbow Knights, they had all sworn to protect the vulnerable. Kristy had been looking forward to her first trolley outing for weeks.
“I couldn’t wait for Jackelion and X to show me the ropes, and afterward, we were supposed to get cake sandwiches to celebrate.”
“What’s a cake sandwich?”
“Two cakes with a cake in between. But then…”
“You got trapped instead,” Penn said. He turned away, like he couldn’t bear to look at her, then he changed the subject. “Are you going to get in trouble for jumping off the trolley?”
“I don’t know,” Kristy said. “Probably. I just hope they don’t kick me out of the Knights. I love being a Rainbow Knight! But I couldn’t leave you behind. Rainbow Knights are supposed to help people.” She bent down and plucked one of her favorite things from the path. “A dandelion,” she said happily.
“What’s that?”
“You’ve never seen a dandelion before?”
He shook his head.
“You can wish on it.”
“Wish on it? How?” he asked.
“Here, look.” She closed her eyes, and after a few seconds she blew into it. She opened her eyes to see Penn watching as it broke into a hundred floaty bits of wish.
“That’s the coolest thing I’ve even seen,” Penn said, taking his last bite of apple, his hand now empty.
“Penn? Did you eat the whole apple? Like, the core and the stem, too?”
“I did. Was I not supposed to? I didn’t know!”
“Well, you might grow an apple tree in your stomach. But probably not,” Kristy said. “But if you choke on any of the seeds, let me know. I’m trained in the Ham Lick maneuver.”
According to everything she had been taught, Kristy was supposed to be scared of Penn. But how could she be scared of someone who smiled at a dandelion and ate the whole apple because he didn’t know better? X always told her that Grabagorns never listened and never changed. She said you couldn’t even get them to talk about their feelings or wear sweaters or floss their teeth. But Penn listened to her, and Penn had changed a lot from the boy who had trapped them in the first place.
Maybe he’d get the importance of flossing if she explained it to him slowly.
When they passed an oddly shaped bush for the third time, Penn stopped. “Kristy… this looks familiar. Are you sure we’re on the right path to the Lemon Bubbles?”
“Let me see.” Kristy licked a finger and held it up to the air. She narrowed her eyes as she decided what her readings had meant. “Interesting. Very interesting.” Kristy pulled out her compass and her Rainbow Knight map. After a moment of inspection, she folded the map back up.
Penn raised his eyebrows, hopeful. “Well?”
“I have a confession to make.” Kristy winced. “I don’t exactly know where to find Lemon Bubbles. I’ve never… um… seen one.”
“YOU WHAT?!” Penn hollered. He felt a vein bulge in his forehead. She’d been leading him across the entirety of Greemulax, and she didn’t even know where to find a Lemon Bubble?! “Why didn’t you tell me?!” Penn said, throwing his arms up and noticing, for the first time, that his elbows looked much larger than usual. A little more blue in color, as well. “Not my elbows! They’re my favorite part of my arms!”
“I’m so sorry, Penn!” Kristy collapsed into a pile of soft green grass. She hunched over and covered her face with her hands. Her voice was muffled as she spoke through them. “I thought I could just find a Lemon Bubble right away. I’m usually great at finding stuff. I’m sorry.” Kristy’s hands began to dull. Her red hair was looking grayish orange.
Even though he was having his own personal blue-elbow crisis, Penn was concerned about the changes. “Kristy, something weird is going on—”
“Wait!” Kristy interrupted. She pulled her hands away from her face and jumped up. “I have an idea. We’ll go to Lillibop.” Her eyes shone with excitement and her hands and hair were back to normal. Maybe he had imagined it? “She’ll know what to do! She knows everything!” Kristy paced back and forth, suddenly full of energy. “After my parents were…”
Kristy stopped. Penn had never seen her at a loss for words. An
d he knew that what she couldn’t say was that her parents were dead. Probably killed in the Great Scorch, like his.
“After my parents were gone,” Kristy started again, “Lillibop looked after me. She taught me all sorts of cool stuff, like how to tie my shoes and how to stand up to evil. I know she’ll be able to help us.”
As Kristy took off running into the lush forest, Penn realized he had no other option but to follow her. Perhaps this mysterious Lillibop would know something about Lemon Bubbles. In the meantime, Penn was going to have to try to stay calm.
It was a pretty long trek to the westernmost tip of West Greemulax, where Lillibop was rumored to have moved in order to live “off the grid” for a while and away from the rest of the women. Kristy told him Lillibop had relocated for some “alone time” and “self-care.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Penn said.
“Me either!” Kristy laughed. “But it seems like something the wisers do with candles and comfy sweatpants.”
He’d learned that “wisers” in the women’s community were what he called “elders.”
Penn laughed, too. Elders—and wisers, he guessed—were funny sometimes. He dutifully followed Kristy as she raced across the sunny paddocks and through shady forests. He quietly marveled at the dewy pine needles and red mushroom caps, along with lots of other little details that were waking up his senses. He hadn’t realized the Man Caves had such a distinctive smell until he noticed the absence of it. A mustiness that reminded him of feet crossed with the odor of a wet bathing suit left overnight in a bag no longer filled his nose. Now, when the breeze blew, something sweet and flowery traveled with it, and an image of his mother flashed in his mind. She had been gone so long that his memories were really daydreams he’d pieced together listening to the elders talk. Not a memory but a wish.
“Okay, we’re definitely close.” Kristy unlatched a pair of binoculars from her belt loop. There was an aqua-colored glitter K sticker on the side of them. She held them up to her eyes and craned her neck, scanning the treetops as they walked. “Tell me if you see a tugboat.”
“Why would we see one in the trees?”
“All women live in tree houses, silly.” Kristy laughed. She was clearly enjoying teaching Penn about everything. “And Lillibop’s tree house is a sideways tugboat.”
“But why?”
“Why not?”
They wove through the forest, searching every tree but finding zero tugboats. Kristy even climbed a few trees, just in case Lillibop had an invisibility tent over her tugboat. She counted her steps and licked her finger to determine the direction of the wind three more times.
“Does that work?” Penn wondered aloud.
Kristy looked wisely into the distance. “Well, truth be told, I just found a little maple syrup on my finger, so… it worked for that, yeah.”
When they’d finally reached another grassy clearing, Penn could feel himself getting upset again. Had Kristy led them into another dead end?
“Just as I suspected,” Kristy said with a satisfied nod as she surveyed the land in front of her. She began to jump up and down, elated. “It’s a mobstacle course.”
“A what?”
“A mobstacle course! A maze obstacle course. We have to walk through it to get to Lillibop’s house. Brilliant.”
Penn looked out to the field, confused. Every obstacle course he’d ever done had involved Garate-chopping random stuff and doing chin-ups, and had always ended with an eating contest. But here were tall hedges and twenty potential entranceways. “How do we know where to start?” he asked.
“The doors are all a different color.”
Penn hadn’t noticed that.
“So I think we have to find the right color,” Kristy said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, which he guessed to her it was.
“But how?”
“We have to listen.”
Penn started to say that that made no sense, but Kristy put her finger to her lips in a “shush” motion. There was a noise, but it was barely audible. It sounded like birdsong. “I think we have to find where it’s coming from!”
Penn and Kristy tiptoed to the different openings in the maze, listening. After the first three, Penn gave up. He plopped down on the grass, crossed his arms, and wondered what his life had come to. Kristy kept creeping around, cupping her ear. After stopping at ten of them, Kristy reached down into a patch of grass and triumphantly pulled out a purple plastic bird. “Found it!”
Penn rushed over, impressed. Was there nothing Kristy couldn’t do? “Now what?”
“Now we go this way,” she said, skipping to the purple door. They followed the twisty turns between the hedges until they came to a wooden pole about three feet off the ground, blocking their path.
“Is that for chin-ups?” he asked.
“No way, it’s too low.”
“I guess we’re supposed to step over it, then,” Penn said. He lifted his foot, but as soon as he grazed the top of the pole with his shoe, the pole zapped him. “Ouch!” he cried.
“No, silly,” Kristy said. “You gotta limbo.”
Penn had no idea what that meant, but he hoped it wouldn’t hurt as much as the zapping.
“Like this.” Kristy leaned back and shimmied and scooted under the stick without any part of her body touching it.
“Um, I’m not sure I can do that,” he said.
“Of course you can,” she said. “Give it a try.”
He tried to lean back while worming his way under, but he fell down.
He imagined what Marcus, Brandon, and Landon would think if they could see him now. His cheeks burned with embarrassment. He pounded the ground with his monster paw.
Kristy started to say something, and without even realizing it, he growled at her. At her startled look, he apologized but insisted she turn away so he could limbo in private. He was the most flexible of his friends—the only one who could touch his toes—so why couldn’t he do this? After a few more failed attempts, he was ready to give up.
“Bend your knees,” Kristy suggested, her back to him.
What did she know? he thought. On the other hand (paw?), she had made it through pretty easily.
He bent his knees as he leaned back and… it worked.
Finally!
“High five,” Kristy said. Penn lifted his paw and clapped it together with her hand. He loved high fives. Kristy’s huge grin told him she did, too.
They kept walking down the path. After more twists and turns, they saw a large nest with three speckled blue eggs inside.
Were they supposed to eat them?
Penn was getting pretty hungry. All he’d consumed since yesterday was some apples and stream water.
Kristy sat next to the nest. She carefully took one of the eggs out and held it in her hand. “Oooh, it’s warming up. I bet it’s a waiting game,” she said. “I activated it by touching it, and now we wait for it to hatch.”
“How is waiting a game?” Penn asked.
Kristy shrugged and continued to wait.
A minute passed.
“How long will we have to wait?” Penn asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
Another minute passed.
“I’m tired of waiting,” Penn grumbled. “And I have a better idea. I’ll hatch it.” He picked up one of the eggs and threw it against the tree. It exploded into a puff of blue dust and sparkles.
“I don’t think that worked,” Kristy said with a sigh.
“HOOBASTANK!” Penn let out. His entire left arm began to pulse. A giant blue bicep tore through the sleeve of his shirt. It bulged out like a giant blueberry.
Kristy gasped at his disgusting arm and shook her head. “I got this,” she said, settling in for a long staring contest with the egg in her hand. Only two minutes later, the shell popped open with an unceremonious, tiny crack. A shiny, golden key rose from the center. A curly letter L was engraved on it.
; “I did it!” Kristy held the key up in the air like a trophy in one hand and raised her other up to Penn. “High five!”
“Great job,” Penn offered, giving more of a low two. “You’re much better at all these obstacles than I am.”
“Don’t feel discouraged,” Kristy said in a slow, steady voice. “These obstacles were definitely designed with Rainbow Knights in mind. Lillibop’s gotta keep Grabagorns out somehow. Besides, you did help me! You showed me what not to do. That was the most important part.”
This made Penn feel much better. So why did Kristy look like she felt so much worse? As soon as the words had escaped her lips, the glow of Kristy’s face seemed to fade. Penn was worried about her, but he didn’t know what to do. Grabagorn Prime had obviously told some big lies, but it seemed like he wasn’t wrong about Grabagorns needing to keep womenfolk safe. He could see that Kristy was suffering and needed his protection—from what, he wasn’t sure.
The outline of a door began to glow through the tree bark. When Kristy inserted the key into the glowing lock, it swung open to reveal a narrow, winding staircase. Kristy and Penn stepped inside, but Penn’s monster arm kept scraping against the wall as they made the climb.
“Finally!” he whined, rubbing his blue elbows once they reached the top. He stretched out into the extra space on the landing of Lillibop’s tugboat.
The rest of Penn’s grumpiness seemed to melt away as they looked around the warm home. It was spacious and cozy, with fabrics of every color and texture draped over the furniture. Large, cushy pillows covered in tassels and fringes were tossed around the floor. Golden vases stood on every table and wooden chest. A jeweled lamp hung from the ceiling, casting sparkles over all the room.
A gigantic rainbow-colored button hung at the center of the only white wall in the house. It begged to be pushed, and Kristy could see Penn fighting the impulse.
“You thinking about that rainbow button?” she asked.
“What? No.” He looked away. “Yes. Can I push it?”
“Don’t,” she said. “Pushing other people’s buttons is considered rude.”
The Legends of Greemulax Page 4
