by Robert West
“A one-trick light switch does not a happy home make,” Erin grumbled.
“No, that’s true,” their dad agreed. “There’s a lot more to making a home than living in a house.”
“Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain,” their mom said. “That’s from someplace in the Psalms, I think. God’s given us a good start. Your dad has a good job at the university. Things are getting off the ground for my pediatrics clinic. We’ll be starting out at a new church Sunday, and school’s only a couple of weeks off.”
“School?” the kids groaned in unison.
Mr. Mac picked up his napkin and wiped his chin. “I know it’s tough, guys, making this move. But you’ve got to give it a little time, treat it like . . . like an adventure.”
“There’s lots more here that you didn’t have back there,” her mom added, “like fireflies and . . . tree-covered hills and — ”
“Aiiiiiii!” Erin’s scream sliced through Dr. Mac’s dreamy landscape. Something with antennae and long, hairy back legs had just hopped onto Erin’s arm. She scooted across the floor in full reverse until she banged her head on the windowsill. That caused the window to slide closed with a bang, which in turn brought three other windows crashing down: Bang! Bang! Bang!
Stunned by the shooting-gallery sound effects, no one moved . . . except for Michael, who was already lunging for the misguided insect. “I got it!” he cried, but missed.
“No, you don’t,” Beamer said, jumping in for the kill. “He’s mine!” He scrambled after it on hands and knees, scattering boxes everywhere in his wake.
“Beamer!” his mother cried as she lurched to her feet and saved a box of teacups from a shattering experience. “Stop, Beamer!” she called again, grabbing hold of him by his belt loop. “It’s a cricket!”
“Mo-o-o-o-ommm,” he protested, “it’ll get away!”
“That’s exactly what I have in mind,” she said, planting Beamer and the box of teacups at the same time. Then, as smooth as honey, she glided into the corner and caught the cricket, cupping it gently in her hand. “You can’t kill a cricket the first night in a new home,” she said, carrying it toward the kitchen. “It would bring terrible luck.”
“Bad luck?” Erin complained. “What do you call what happened to my head?”
“Since when are you so superstitious, honey?” Mr. Mac asked with a grin.
“Oh, it’s just that crickets don’t do anything but good,” she answered, peeking into her hand. “They eat parasites and fill the night with singing, that’s all.”
Beamer rolled his eyes. Only Mom could get misty-eyed about a bug.
“The song of the cricket is supposed to guarantee a happy home,” she added with a grin to her husband as he opened the door for them to disappear into the kitchen.
Still holding her head, Erin pushed one-handed to her feet. “Maybe that’s why it’s not singing,” Erin yelled, following her parents out.
Reaching the door at the same time, Beamer called through it, “It doesn’t have to move in with us, does it?”
His mother stepped down into the covered back porch off the kitchen. “Oh, no,” she said with a laugh, “The great outdoors will do just fine.” She opened the screen door and gently dumped the bewildered cricket onto the step. “Into the backyard with you,” she said. “Go.”
“That reminds me,” said Mr. Mac, pivoting around on his heel to face his kids. “I’ve been holding out a surprise for you all . . . uh, y’all, I mean.”
“Surprise?!” The three kids tuned in at the same time.
“It’s out back. Just follow the cricket.”
“Coming through,” Michael yelled, diving toward the door headfirst.
The two boys flew out in a whirlwind. Erin, with slightly more dignity, was close behind.
Their eyes scanned the terrain like radar. It was just after sunset, and a crescent moon hung high in the sky. It had indeed rained that afternoon and the leaves were still dripping — tap, tap, tap — and glistening in the moonlight.
All they saw, however, was a couple of large trees . . . or was it one tree? It was hard to tell. Two tree trunks were growing out from the same spot, making the shape of a V. The V was bent on one side where one trunk leaned so close to the ground you could almost run up it — no hands. The trunk straightened up after it crossed over the fence into the next yard.
“Hey, I don’t see anything!” Michael complained.
“Take a look up that twisted old tree. It’s pretty high up, so you may have to shift around to see it.”
Beamer and Michael craned their necks. The sky had cleared since the shower, but the wind was rising again. Insects chirped and buzzed all around them.
Yikes!! It isn’t civilized to have so much wildlife right where people lived.
Michael scampered around, peering between the leaves.
“I see it!” Michael yelled.
“Where?” Beamer cried as he ran over to look up.
Then he saw it — a long, dark shadow across one horn of the crescent moon.
* * * * *
“A tree house!!” Beamer exclaimed, angrily pounding his fist into his pillow. Maybe if it had been digital, had a supercharged video card and network connection, that would have been something else. But a shack in a tree?!
Beamer had stormed back into the house, complaining about the “stupid tree house,” the “stupid yard,” the “stupid house,” and every other “stupid” thing about the “stupid move.” The next thing he knew he was marching up the “stupid” stairs early to his “stupid” bed.
Beamer groaned and rolled over. If it’s like everything else around here, that tree house is probably close to falling out of the tree anyway.
Okay, so his dad had lost his job. No big deal. It was sort of a thing that happened in Southern California. Half the dads in his Scout troop had lost their jobs before it happened to his dad. So why’d they have to move? And, of all places, why here in Middle America?
Beamer slid his pillow over to escape the light from the street lamps. It was just his luck that one of the few working street lamps on Murphy Street was right in front of his house. With no curtains on his two front windows, that was liable to be a problem for awhile. It occurred to him that a well-thrown rock could take care of it. Unfortunately, he was a Christian kid, and they didn’t do that sort of thing.
Sounds picked at his ears — a distant siren, the rumbling of a heavy truck, the hiss of tires on wet pavement. McCauley Boulevard, one of the city’s main drags, was only half a block away. He found himself wishing for the freeway back home, with its soothing eight-lane rumble. It always made him think of the surf.
What he didn’t hear was what his mom said he should be hearing — crickets. Oh, he heard buzzing and chirping, but it wasn’t from crickets. That much he knew from visiting his grandparents in Kentucky.
“Man!” he groaned. “Even Mother Nature doesn’t work right around here!”
Suddenly, just over the roof of the house next door, Beamer saw a light flash toward the horizon. A meteor! Without thinking, he made a wish, licked his thumb and squashed it with a twist into the palm of his other hand.
Beamer was too cool to do stuff like making wishes when anyone was around. But he believed in wishes. He figured God listened to wishes as much as he did to prayers, at least from kids. Of course, Beamer prayed too. But right now, he needed all the help he could get. And if a “falling star” could help get him home, who was he to quibble?
4
Planet Murphy Street
For the next few days, Beamer wouldn’t even look into the backyard, let alone the tree house. Xbox controllers and Lego confabs were his thing.
Erin wasn’t taking the move any better than Beamer. So far, all expeditions into the city had failed to reveal a single decent-sized mall. Not that she’d been out that much. After all, washing and drying her hair took most of her time.
Beamer figured if the air conditioner didn’t come s
oon, she’d probably go bald, after which she’d go crazy and they’d have to lock her up in the attic with the web and cover the noise of her unearthly shrieks by playing loud music. That’s when the neighbors would start picketing the house . . . until they’d be forced to move back home. Pretty neat scenario!
At the moment, though, nobody was allowed in the attic except for bug scientists and engineers who were bringing in enough chemical and electronic equipment to find E.T. Traffic through the house was up there with rush hour on the freeway, much to his mother’s frustration. In the meantime, with all the zaps, hisses, and bubbling sounds above his bedroom ceiling, Beamer’s latest Lego masterpiece was beginning to look like a sci-fi creature feature. He couldn’t really understand their high-tech muttering, but, so far, they hadn’t found the mutant arachnid who built that web metropolis.
Finally, Beamer’s mom kicked her juvenile hermit out of the house. There he was, face-to-face (or knee to pavement) with Murphy Street. Actually, it wasn’t much of a street — only one block long. The houses on Murphy Street were large by Shadow Beach Lane standards, and most had something strange about them, like the one that had a garden on the roof — flowers, bushes, trees — the whole plant kingdom. One side of another house was built into the trunk of a humongous tree — a live tree! There was also a house with rows of high, narrow windows and tons of carved wood and stone and glass. Beamer gagged when he saw it. It was so . . . pink!
A high brick wall ran behind all the houses on the other side of Murphy Street. And on the other side of that wall was “the park” — Michael’s park.
“Gotcha!” the little know-it-all bragged to Beamer. They were on their bikes, looking through the small park gate on Parkview Court. Since Parkview crossed the northern end of Murphy Street, the park was, in fact, just around the corner.
“All right, so there’s a park,” Beamer grumbled. “Big deal! Every city’s got parks.” He had to admit, though, that this one did look big. He couldn’t even see the other side. “So, where’s the zoo?” he asked with a cynical smirk.
“That-a-way,” Michael answered triumphantly, pointing off to his left. There, about a football-field-length away, was a large gate shaped like two elephants standing on their hind legs. Michael was definitely on a roll in the I-told-you-so department.
“See that?” Michael said, pointing a different direction.
“Yeah,” Beamer shrugged as he looked beyond a picnic area and a baseball field to a wide range of tall trees.
“That’s where the dinosaurs live,” Michael announced knowingly.
“What dinosaurs?” Beamer gave him the standard big brother put-down.
“The ones that make the cracks in the sidewalk over on Murphy Street.”
“Ri-i-i-g-g-h-t,” Beamer drawled out of the corner of his mouth. “Dinosaurs are extinct.”
“That’s just it. They’re not!” Michael jumped back in. “They were just shy around people, so they went and hid. That forest has places that haven’t even been explored yet! I’ll bet they come out to hunt on Murphy Street at night.”
“Yeah . . . sure,” Beamer muttered, peering into the dark depths of the woods. Secretly, he thought the idea sounded promising. After all, he’d never seen cracks in the streets back home.
Near sunset Beamer was skateboarding around the fire hydrants and lampposts along Murphy Street when a jagged slash of lighting jolted him nearly off his board. It had started a couple of hours ago. “Heat lightning” is what his mom had told him it was, but it sounded just the same as the normal kind, and something about it happening in a clear sky made it all the more spooky. Lights were beginning to come on up and down the street.
The biggest house on Murphy Street, however, was still dark, except for the tower. A large shadow stood in the third-story tower window, peering out at the street. Since Beamer was the only thing in the street at the moment, it gave him a particularly eerie feeling.
Another flash ripped open the darkening sky, followed quickly by a deafening Kaboom . . . Shreee! Beamer looked up in time to see lightning sizzling down the lightning rod on the big house like it was being sucked up. The tower lights immediately blipped out. Beamer skidded to a stop to take a closer look.
People called it Parker’s Castle. With turrets on each corner and a tower in the middle, it looked like a transplant from Transylvania.
Right now, though, it was a dark hole in the block, its windows looking like dark eyes in a dead body. Suddenly the lights came back on, not just a few as before, but all of them, like a giant Christmas tree. Somebody must have gone through the house, flipping light switches while the electricity was off. The startled Beamer tripped off his board, which shot out from under him like a cruise missile.
Beamer chased it down the street and jumped on it just before it got to his house. By the time he slammed the MacIntyre front door behind him, his lungs were nearly bursting from the effort.
Then his mother said something even more frightening — “To the showers, everyone! School tomorrow!”
The very thought sent Beamer searching for his mom’s credit card. A plane ticket home, a corner in a boxcar, slave quarters in a riverboat — he’d have taken anything to avoid P.E. in a new school.
Suicide — that’s what it would be . . . him against the natives — seven hundred middle-schoolers all anxious to push his buttons. A personal force field was what he needed, or, failing that, a deep gulp of laughing gas. Unfortunately, he was fresh out of both.
* * * * *
Lacking an invisibility cloak, Beamer tried to look as inconspicuous as possible that first day. It worked . . . until he opened his mouth. All he said was “I’m Beamer MacIntyre,” and everybody started giggling. It was like he’d just dropped in from Neptune. He couldn’t believe it. Those turkeys think I’m the one who talks funny! They’re the ones who pronounce words like they’re wrapped around inner tubes.
Then the sky fell in. It happened during recess, right after a disgusting ravioli lunch. Figuring that basketball hoops, a place on a kickball team, and balls in general would be hard to come by, especially for a new kid, Beamer had brought his own bat and tether baseball. A little batting practice couldn’t hurt, and it would be a heck of a lot more fun than waiting in line.
Finding an out-of-the-way spot, he drove a stake with the attached tether baseball into the ground. After a few early misses, Beamer started getting his old ball-slugging form back. Unfortunately, he failed to notice another kind of slugging behind a nearby row of bushes.
Three overgrown eighth graders had a very skinny seventh grader backpedaling full throttle.
“So, where’s your money, huh?” a Hulk clone demanded as he jabbed a muscle-bound finger into the smaller kid’s chest.
“Yeah, Ghoulie,” a second boy sneered, giving him another poke, “a rich dude like you — come on now — what’s the problem? Where is it?”
“I . . . I forgot,” the trembling boy said, faltering back with each poke. A few more pokes and the kid would be limited to a career as Swiss cheese.
Mr. Big Cheese grabbed him by his shirt. “You forgot?! Not very smart for a nerd,” he snarled. He yanked the boy off the ground by his shirt, swung him around, and dropped him to the ground like a bag of elbows and knees. “What did I say would happen,” the bully continued, “if — ”
He didn’t get to finish. Beamer didn’t mean to do it. Actually he just missed the tetherball when it jerked back toward him after a hard smack. It zipped past Beamer’s outstretched hand and straight into the chin of the smallest goon. It bounced from chin to knee to forehead around the rest of them like a pinball before it wrapped — Wha-Wha-Wha-Wha-Wha-WHAPP! — around the leader’s chest and arms.
“Argghhh!” the suddenly-mummified bully shrieked.
Wasting no time to figure out what was happening, Ghoulie took advantage of the confusion and shot out of there like a spit wad.
For Beamer, though, there was no escape, and one look at the converging circle o
f goons suggested he had come to a major moment in his life — like maybe the last moment in his life.
5
Goons, Geeks, and Other Life Forms
“Hey, look, I’m sorry,” Beamer stammered as two kids carried him by the elbows over to the teen mummy. Kids all around were snickering and giggling. The bully’s head whirled around with a vengeance and immediately the pockets of laughter choked off. “I . . . I didn’t see you,” Beamer said anxiously, fumbling to unwind the tether wrapping.
Then the big kid burst out of the remaining strands like a cartoon hand grenade exploding, sending the ball careening off the chin of one of his yokels.
“You dolt,” he growled, grabbing Beamer by the shirt collar. Two of Beamer’s buttons popped off in a trajectory that took them right across his nose. “Are you ready to die?”
“Who? Me?” Beamer squeaked, feeling like a chicken about to get his neck wrung. “It was an accident.” Actually, with his throat crushed to the size of a toothpick, what actually came out was “Oooo? mmmmeee? Iiik aaaahs an aaaxcccnnn.”
“Look, nobody gets away with making Jared Foster look bad,” the guy with the vice grip hissed. “Nobody!! Do you understand?”
“Sh . . . shh . . . sure,” Beamer gurgled, his only air supply coming from the bully’s hot ravioli breath. Any closer to terminato-kid’s flared nostrils and Beamer could have checked out his sinuses.
“You’ve got a few things to learn” snarled Jared, suddenly pushing Beamer away. Then, before Beamer could remember how to breathe, a bulging finger jerked in front of his nose. “One!” Jared growled. “You don’t get in my way. Two . . .” A second finger snapped up next to the first. Beamer’s eyes crossed, trying to focus on them. “I run the local charity. And, as of today, you’re my biggest contributor!”
“Con-tri-bu-t . . . ?” Beamer squeaked, his voice box not yet thoroughly decompressed.
“Money, stupid,” one of the other goons explained.
“You give two dollars to ‘The Fund,’ ” said Jared, “and everybody gets taken care of.”
