The Word Eater

by Mary Amato

  The MPOOEs laughed. Bobby walked back and slammed the paper on his desk.

  Lerner couldn’t help noticing the headline of his article: JAY’S STAR MISSING. That was odd. The worm had eaten the name of that new star yesterday. Lerner looked over at the terrarium. It took her a while to spot the worm, but when she did she almost fell out of her seat. The worm had grown to the size of three rice grains and was standing up on a twig, wiggling back and forth as if he wanted to catch her attention.

  Lerner waited until Mr. Droan handed out the work sheets and submerged behind his grade book, then she pulled the school lunch menu off the board and scooped the worm onto it.

  “What are you doing?” Bobby whispered.

  “None of your business,” Lerner said, and set the paper on her desk. The worm raced over to the nearest word and began to munch. He ate the words Spinach Soufflé right off the paper. Then he turned around and lifted his head up at Lerner.

  Lerner smiled. “Glad to see you like spinach soufflé. None of us do!” she whispered. “Do you have a name?” She put her thumb on the paper and the worm crawled over. Fip . . . Fip . . . Fip. The noise he made as he inched along the paper sounded like a name.

  “Fip,” Lerner whispered. “What a nice name. I’m Lerner.”

  Mr. Droan’s voice cut through the air. “Ms. Chanse, do you have something you’d like to share with the class?”

  “She’s talking to a bug,” Bobby said.

  Everybody turned around to look. Lerner put a cupped hand over Fip and glared at Bobby.

  “Get to work, people,” Mr. Droan said. His head disappeared behind his propped-up grade book.

  Bobby reached over and grabbed the lunch menu off Lerner’s desk. Before she could protest, he crumpled it and threw it back at Lerner.

  The crumpled ball lay on Lerner’s desktop like a wrecked ship. Lerner’s heart sank. Nothing as frail and helpless as that baby worm could possibly survive the ordeal. She pretended to work and when no one was looking, carefully opened up the paper. There was Fip, curled up as tight as a peppercorn, dead for sure.

  But then he unfurled gracefully and gave a triumphant wriggle. He was alive! Lerner imagined trumpets blaring and herself putting a miniature medal of bravery around his tiny neck.

  She waited until class was over, then she put him back in the terrarium.

  A buzzer went off. Mrs. Gormano, Cleveland Park Middle School’s chief lunch lady, put on her heavy-duty oven mitts. “Spinach soufflés coming out!” she yelled to her assistant and pulled open the monstrous oven door.

  Twelve industrial-size pans sat empty in the hot oven.

  “What the heck—”

  “You forget to make it?” asked Mr. Ryan.

  “I filled those pans full!” Mrs. Gormano shook her head. Then she pulled out twelve more drums of spinach, twelve cases of eggs, and twelve gallons of powdered cheese substance. She mixed it all together and poured the slop in the pans.

  Everything was fine.

  Everything was fine because so far she had a mixture of spinach and eggs and cheese substance. Spinach soufflé only becomes spinach soufflé when it’s baked.

  Fifty minutes later the buzzer went off, and Mrs. Gormano put on her heavy-duty oven mitts. “Soufflés coming out!” she yelled.

  But when she opened the door, the pans were empty again.

  Mr. Ryan handed Lerner a lunch tray. Carrot sticks and a peanut butter sandwich.

  “What happened to the spinach soufflé?” Lerner asked. She had been trying to work up a nausea.

  Mrs. Gormano was sitting near the sink with her large, white-stockinged feet propped up, holding a bag of frozen peas on her forehead. “Don’t ask,” she said.

  “Good,” yelled Bobby Nitz from the back of the line. “I hate spinach soufflé.”

  A strange excitement buzzed in Lerner’s chest, and she forgot about her plan to throw up. Did the spinach soufflé really disappear? How? And did all the spinach soufflé in the world disappear or just the soufflé at school? Lerner ate lunch quickly, then got permission to use the pay phone in the foyer. She looked in the yellow pages under Spinach. Sal’s House of Spinach. That should do. She dialed, and Sal answered.

  “Sal’s House of Spinach. We got spinach loaf, spinach pie, spinach ice cream. Anything a green lover could want.”

  Lerner cleared her throat. “What I’d really like is spinach soufflé.”

  There was a pause. “Well, we usually have soufflé. But something seems to have happened—”

  “You have spinach, but no soufflé?”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  Lerner hung up. First Jay’s Star and now this. How incredible. The worm must have some kind of magical appetite! Lerner’s mind started racing. Could she make him eat the word for something she didn’t like, and then would that something disappear? She’d have to experiment. What should she try? She had to get him out of that terrarium. What if she couldn’t find him? She whirled around and smacked into Bobby Nitz.

  “What was that phone call about?” he asked.

  “Stop bothering me,” she said, and stepped around him. She didn’t have time for Bobby Nitz. She had to find out more about the worm, and there was only one person in the whole school who would understand. Mrs. Popocheskovich.

  The recess bell rang. Lerner ran to the science room and caught Mr. Droan before he went outside. She asked if he’d write her a pass to spend recess in the library doing science research. He stared at her as if she were speaking in Swahili, then wrote out a pass. While he was doing that, she found Fip in the terrarium sleeping under a rock and hid him gently in her closed fist.

  When she walked into the library, Mrs. Popocheskovich looked up from the Improve Your English book she was reading and smiled. “Hello, Cookie!” the librarian whispered. “Are you feeling so much happy today?”

  Lerner smiled back. On the very first day of school, Mrs. Popocheskovich had told Lerner that she was new to Washington, D.C., too. And Lerner liked her from the start. She liked the way she mixed up words in sentences, and the way she wore her paper white hair in an exotic twist on the back of her head, and the way she called her “Cookie.” With her accent, it came out sounding like “kooky.”

  Lerner showed her the pass, and then Fip. “I need a book about worms. I want to find out about this little guy’s species. And I need some kind of container to put him in.”

  “A book about worms. That I would not have guessed,” Mrs. Popocheskovich said. She was usually very good at guessing which books her students would like.

  The librarian found an old ink bottle and pricked the rubber top a few times. The container was perfect, small enough to fit in Lerner’s pocket.

  Fip woke up with a start when Lerner dropped him into the bottle, but when he saw her eyeballs through the glass, he relaxed. She was the one who gave him food. She would take care of him. He took one whiff of the residual smell of ink and fell in love with his new home.

  Word traveled fast. While Lerner was reading up on worms, the playground was buzzing with the news that she was not going to follow through with the dare. By the time she got to language arts, there was a note waiting on her desk in Reba Silo’s handwriting.

  Lerner read it over three times. Just this morning, those words had power over her. But now, they seemed silly. Who cared if the MPOOEs called her a SLUG? Lerner had something much more interesting than the MPOOE Club to entertain her: She had magic. Genuine, Grade-A magic. Lerner made a few corrections to Reba’s note:

  “Sharmaine,” Lerner whispered, tapping her on the shoulder with the note. “Pass this back to Reba.”

  As Sharmaine’s hand reached around to grab the note, Mr. Droan looked up.

  “Congratulations, Ms. Chanse. You’ve just earned an after-school detention for you and your friend, Ms. Cabott.”

  Sharmaine turned and glared.

  “I’m sorry!” Lerner said. Of all the MPOOEs, Sharmaine was the one Lerner was hoping would become her friend.

>   “Lerner is NOT Sharmaine’s friend, Mr. Droan,” Reba announced.

  “Thank you so much for that important news flash,” Mr. Droan said.

  Lerner reddened. Reba still had some power over her.

  After school, Bobby went to the library and called up the online edition of the news to see if there was any news about spinach soufflé. He typed the words into the search command field, and a new article materialized on his screen.

  “Welcome to after-school detention, Ms. Chanse and Ms. Cabott,” Mr. Droan said. “You may sit on opposite sides of the room and contemplate the errors of your ways.”

  Lerner sat down and smiled. Finally, some quiet time to think about this whole thing with Fip.

  “Do you think this is amusing, Ms. Chanse?” asked Mr. Droan.

  Lerner pressed her lips together. Mr. Droan snorted and tucked his hands under his armpits. Leaning back in his chair, he dozed off. Quietly, Lerner pulled out Fip’s ink bottle and put her head down on her desk so that she could stare eye to eye with him.

  She tried to think through what she knew and what she didn’t know about this little creature. He ate the words spinach soufflé and spinach soufflé disappeared, but not spinach. If he had just eaten the word spinach, would all spinach have disappeared? She smiled at the thought, then a little shiver crawled up her spine. Could the magic be that far-reaching? If Fip had eaten the word stars instead of Jay’s Star would all the stars in the world have disappeared? Lerner tried to imagine a sky without any stars. If the magic was that strong, she’d have to be very careful about what she let him eat.

  Vaguely, she remembered teachers complaining on Monday about thumbtacks that had disappeared. Was Fip responsible for that?

  Fip stretched, and the simple shape and small size of his body hit Lerner like a reality check. I’m crazy, Lerner thought. An itsy-bitsy worm couldn’t have the power to make things disappear, could it? She had to do an experiment. She emptied out her backpack to see what word or words she could give him to eat.

  No. She wouldn’t want flavor to disappear.

  Movies! Forget it. She loved them.

  Her pocket calendar caught her eye. What about a number? What would happen then? What about a whole date? Could a day disappear? Lerner thought about the day her parents loaded her into the moving van, the day her father closed the door on their wonderful old yellow house in Wisconsin. September 1. That was a day Lerner would like to erase.

  Lerner’s heart pounded. That was it! She’d let Fip eat September 1. If that day never occurred, then her parents wouldn’t have moved and she’d beam back in time to her old house.

  Before she could change her mind, she shook Fip out of his bottle. She had already torn out the page for September, but there was a mini calendar for the whole year on the back page. She set him on the number 1 under September.

  Fip sniffed it. Hesitantly, he took a bite out of the bottom of the number. Crunchly! Crunchly! Much different from a letter. Jaws working, he crunched the rest of the number. How would he describe it? Oaky with a smatch of iron.

  Lerner picked him up, her hand shaking. Was it nervousness or was something magical happening? It felt like a swarm of hornets were migrating from her stomach to her heart. She closed her eyes. Was she moving? Was something happening?

  She opened her eyes, and there was Mr. Droan with his eyes still closed, itching his eyebrow with a pinkie. She looked down at the calendar. The date was gone. Something magical should have happened. Then, she noticed that it was next year’s calendar, not this year’s.

  Oh great! What did that mean? What would happen next September? She wanted to change the past, but she wasn’t so sure about messing with the future. Would the world lose a day? Could the world lose a day? Lerner’s stomach turned. Did she just do something terrible? She’d have to wait a long time to find out. Why had she been so reckless? She needed to pick something uncomplicated to try. Something she could see.

  Mr. Droan stood up and stretched. A button popped off his shirt and rolled across the room. “All right, girls. Detention is over.”

  Lerner stuffed everything in her backpack, ran out the door and down the long, empty hallway. She had missed the bus, so she was going to have to walk again. Good. It would give her time to think. Her mind was spinning. As she raced down the hall, she noticed every word of every sign, poster, and label. For the first time, she was aware of how much print there was in the world, and she was aware of not just the words, but also the realities that the words represented. EXIT. FIRE ALARM. PRINCIPAL. LIBRARY. WELCOME KINDERGARTNERS! KOPPY DRINKING FOUNTAIN SYSTEMS. LEAD-FREE!

  She stopped in front of the vending machine in the foyer and looked at all the candy bars hanging from their metal hooks inside the glass. Giggle Bar. Nutty Munch. Goo Choo. Then she noticed a small white tag glued to the machine.

  Lerner glanced around. The hallway was still empty. On impulse, she shook Fip out and placed him on the label.

  Dizzy, Fip gripped the label tightly with his bristles. So much rustle bustle in one day! He’d been hoisted up and down and almost smooshed. Now he was expected to eat sideways! He sniffed the V. Not too fresh, but not bad. Steadily, he ate every letter and the crunchlies.

  Lerner plucked him off and took a step back. Nothing happened for a moment, then the machine started to shimmer. One, two, three seconds . . . and the vending machine vanished. Rows of candy bars and a massive pile of quarters hung in midair for a split second, then hit the floor.

  Lerner yelped. She looked around and saw Sharmaine at the other end of the hall coming her way. Quickly she put Fip back in the bottle, then began stuffing candy bars and quarters into her backpack, a smile spreading from ear to ear. Incredible! She felt like Santa Claus loading a sack full of goodies. Ho! Ho! Ho! She had magic power in her grasp. How did she get so lucky?

  Sharmaine’s footsteps slowed as she got nearer. Lerner stood up, hands full with candy bars. She piled the candy on top of the books in Sharmaine’s arms, laughed, and said, “Merry Christmas from a SLUG!” Hoisting her own pack over one shoulder, she ran out the door.

  At the Cleveland Park Middle School, Principal Eve Norker’s voice came booming over the intercom system into Mr. Droan’s room. “There has been a serious theft. It occurred sometime after school yesterday. The police are looking into it. I sincerely hope no students were involved.”

  The principal’s announcement flew in one of Lerner’s ears and out the other. For the fifth time since she got off the bus, Lerner checked the side pocket of her backpack. Nestled amid a dozen candy bars, Fip’s ink bottle was still there.

  Mrs. Norker continued. “The stolen vending machine was . . .”

  The words screeched to a halt in the listen-to-me section of Lerner’s brain. VENDING MACHINE! Mrs. Norker was talking about Vending Machine No. 203! The one Fip had made disappear. Lerner glanced out of the corner of her eye to see if anyone was looking at her. Just then, Sharmaine turned around, eyes wide with surprise.

  Would Sharmaine tell the police that Lerner had been at the scene of the crime? That she had walked off with candy bars and quarters?

  Somehow Lerner didn’t think Sharmaine was the type to tattle. But even if she did, nobody could prove a thing. Besides, Lerner didn’t steal the vending machine. Fip was really the one directly responsible for the disappearance of the machine. What would the police do . . . arrest a worm? Lerner imagined little Fip on trial in a courtroom, putting his bristles on the Bible and saying, I swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth . . .

  Mr. Droan’s voice brought Lerner back to reality. “All right, people. Clear your desks,” he said. “It’s test time.”

  Lerner’s stomach sank. Instead of studying, she’d spent the night eating Goo Choos and making a mental list of words she’d like to feed Fip:

  1. Tooth decay

  2. Fractions and long division

  3. Wool (she was allergic)

  4. Hot Days and Nights (the annoying television show Mrs. Chil
ling had to watch at 3:30 every day)

  5. Dust (her mother was allergic)

  6. Mad Cow disease and any other horrible animal infections (her father was a veterinarian)

  7. Airplane fares (then everyone could ride for free and she could fly back to Wisconsin every weekend)

  The list went on, and although making it had been fun, it had been stupid not to review the chapter. Mr. Droan’s tests were duplicates of the “sample tests” in the book, so if you just took a minute to look at the chapter before the test, you could pass with no problem.

  “Ms. Chanse. Backpack under your chair now.”

  Reluctantly, Lerner took a pencil out and was just about to set her backpack under her desk when she had an idea. She tucked Fip in her hand and put her pack away.

  Fip rubbed his underbelly bristles together. He’d spent the night replaying the vanishing vending machine scene over and over in his mind. He didn’t know how or why, but he knew that he was the reason that huge machine disappeared. Hungry and excited to see exactly what he was capable of doing, he skinched around and around in Lerner’s cupped hand until she giggled.

  Mr. Droan frowned and gave a huge stack of exams to Winny the SLUG to pass out. “I would wish you luck, but luck isn’t going to save you now,” he said.

  Nonchalantly, Lerner put her palm down next to the test’s title. Fip plopped out gracefully and sniffed.

  Her classmates scribbled away while Lerner watched Fip nibble the letter P. She bit her lip to keep from smiling.

  “Lerner Chanse, stop daydreaming and get busy,” Mr. Droan said and ducked behind his propped-up grade book to read the final chapter of Burning Heart of Desire.

  Careful not to smoosh Fip, Lerner wrote her name at the top. Growing more robust and agile every day, Fip munched away like a tiny deleting machine. He’d already finished eating the words PHOTOSYNTHESIS and was almost done with EXAM.