by Robert West
“Two!” Beamer gasped. “But I don’t need taking care of.”
“You will, dude, if you don’t pay,” the shortest of the gang members promised, giving him a twisted grin.
“What Slocum means,” added the leader in a suddenly formal voice, “is that the Fund is how we take care of kids . . . uh . . . less fortunate than us.”
“That’s right,” said an adult who suddenly appeared next to Jared. “Hi! You must be new,” she said, looking at the still-pale Beamer.
He recognized her as the “yard duty” volunteer.
“You know,” the smiling lady continued, “with many kids around here having trouble just getting milk money, Jared’s idea has been a godsend. I know you’ll be proud to be part of it.” She gave Beamer’s tormentor a friendly pat on the shoulder and walked off.
Beamer tried to wander off too, but Jared smacked him to attention with a backhanded blow to the chest. “Oh, and another thing,” he said in a hushed voice, “watch who you choose for friends.”
No sooner had Beamer gotten his breath back than he heard, “Don’t forget: two bucks . . . tomorrow!” Jared was looking back at him over his shoulder, pointing his finger like a pistol, “or it’s ‘Hasta la vista to you, baby.’ ”
Beamer finally drew his first decent breath. Every kid within fifty feet was staring at him. Tucking his hands in his pockets, he tried to whistle, but he sounded more like a sputtering teapot. Thankfully, his audience began to melt away.
Great! Beamer groaned to himself. My first day in school and I’m already public enemy number one to the school’s number-one public enemy.
* * * * *
Money . . . money . . . money was all that Beamer could think of as he walked home that afternoon. Maybe he could bring in a little cash by making a deal not to show his sister’s naked baby pictures to the ninth-grade drill team. Unfortunately, with Dad out of work so long, the idea of an “allowance” was ancient history.
As he turned to walk up his driveway, Beamer noticed a squirrel next to the backyard fence. It had something shiny in its mouth. Hey, maybe the little rodent had found a gold ring or a diamond or something. He quietly dropped his backpack and crept slowly toward it. Suddenly he crunched a puddle of leaves. The squirrel darted across the yard and up the bent trunk of the tree. Beamer dashed after it and ran halfway up the trunk before the little pipsqueak disappeared between two leafy branches.
Beamer sighed and leaned against a branch. He could barely see the tree house far above. It looked like a banana with outriggers . . . or something else. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. But, then, of course, he didn’t care.
No sooner had he slid back down to the ground than he heard a chittering sound. Looking back up the tree, he saw the squirrel again, chattering away like Aunt Bertha on Thanksgiving. Beamer started to walk away, but right when he thought he had a grip on reality, the squirrel’s noises started to make sense!
“Hey, brick foot!” the squirrel said in a high-pitched chirp. “Get those nut-crunchers off my turf!”
“What?” yelped Beamer, looking down at his feet, then back up in surprise.
“My acorns, you lunk head! You’re trompin’ all over ’em!” the squirrel chattered louder in a decidedly Southern accent. The squirrel suddenly disappeared again between the branches.
“Hey! Wait!” Beamer said, climbing hands and feet like a kid going the wrong way up a playground slide. “How come you can talk?”
“Squirrels only!” the little rodent ordered as it stuck its head out of a hollow in the tree — probably where it hid its hoard of nuts. “Didn’t you read the sign?” Then it giggled.
“Sign?” Beamer questioned, looking around. Hey, since when do squirrels giggle? Okay, maybe Chip and Dale, but they’re chipmunks, not squirrels, and cartoons on top of that.
Suddenly the giggles broke into laughter and out from behind the branches peeked a girl. “Had ya goin’, didn’t I?” she chortled.
At least Beamer thought it was a girl. The jeans, camouflage shirt, and four-barrel, super-charged squirt gun slung across her back didn’t help. Then she turned her head and there was a dishwater-blonde ponytail. Of course that wasn’t a sure sign, but it was a start.
“The squirrel and I are old friends,” she said. “His family’s lived in this here tree forever.” She stretched out her words in a drawl wide enough for Gone with the Wind.
Beamer climbed toward her. “What are you doing in my tree, anyway?”
“Your tree? Part of it hangs over my yard, ya’ know.” She pointed to a second floor window in the house next door. “That’s my room up there.”
Beamer looked around. Sure enough, he was standing where the bent trunk hung over the next yard. “Well, so what?” he shrugged. “The tree is planted in my yard and no court in the country would say this is your tree.” He looked up at the tree house. “And if you’ve been messin’ up my tree house, you’re in a lot of trouble.”
“Hah! That shows how much you know! It’s not a tree house!”
6
Spaceships Don’t Grow on Trees
“What are you talkin’ about?” Beamer said, rolling his eyes. “Of course it’s a — ”
“It’s a spaceship!” she trumpeted.
“A what?” Beamer stammered with a stunned look. He peered up through the branches like he was trying to use X-ray vision.
Of course! Why didn’t I see it before — the bullet shape, flattened out some — broader than it is high. The ship’s nose was tilted down slightly, as if it had crashed into the tree.
“If you’d cared the tiniest bit,” the girl chided him, “you’d have known.”
But he could barely hear her now. There was something — no more than a speck — way out in space. All of a sudden, it was like he could see . . . forever.
The next thing he knew he was inside it, looking out the window.
A lower half of a huge ball with rings around it loomed before his eyes. It’s the planet Saturn. The spaceship is doing the loop the loop around Saturn!
Bad move. Every star pilot from Rigel to Betelgeuse has heard of the rings. Forget the exploded moon dust theory and the ice cube ring-around-the-planet idea.
Where did that come from? Beamer thought. What made me think I knew that?
The truth is that the rings are an infamous graveyard of spaceships, which makes Saturn one major tombstone. For a million years, interstellar voyagers have been trapped in the giant planet’s super-cool, freeze-your-buns electromagnetic whirlpool.
Of course, at first nobody knows it is a trap. They just think it is the ride of their lives, whirling around that multicolored ball, playing big-time dodgeball with all the pretty rocks that make up the rings. Only too late do they discover that they are doomed to become one of those shiny chunks. Yes, by the time they figure out there is no exit to this ride, their spaceships will be halfway cocooned in a kind of sticky gook.
What am I doing here? For that matter, who’s talking in my head?
This time is lucky, though. One of those gooey rocks nicked the ship — actually splattered was more like it, exploding into something between fireworks and a huge geyser of multicolored paint. The ship recoiled, spinning away from the rings, end over end.
Inside the ship, Beamer was also spinning end over end. By the time his head cleared, the monster-planet Jupiter was outside his window. Unfortunately, the giant red spot in the middle of the planet seems to have taken a liking to the little rocket and it’s trying to suck it up like a Popsicle. It’s a tussle to escape the big planet’s puckered, red lips, but a little backfire from the rockets and those lips spit us back out into the cosmos.
Scenes change quickly. Now we’re shooting the asteroid belt like a pinball. Shields on full, we bounce off those little planetoids as if they are made of rubber. Even so, the ship doesn’t take it too well. Gravity control is going haywire and everybody and everything is bouncing around.
Somewhere this side of Mars, something
really goes wrong. The sensors fail to detect a passing comet. It whirls the ship around like a carnival ride and flings it toward a small blue and white planet — the third one from the star.
“Hey! Are you listening to me?” a voice piped in. “What are you doing, anyway?”
“Huh?” Beamer mumbled, shaking his head to clear his vision. Wow! I’ve had some hare-brained fantasies in my time, but this one —
“Nothing,” he said. “Go on. What were you . . . uhm . . . saying?”
“I was saying that it’s haunted!”
“Haunted? What is?” Beamer asked, thinking about the big house down the street.
“The tree ship!” the girl repeated impatiently. “What’s the matter with your ears?”
Beamer sat in stunned silence. Haunted cemeteries, haunted houses he could understand, but haunted spaceships . . . and in trees, no less. “That’s ridiculous!”
“Good grief! Don’t you know anything?” she scolded him. She started to shinny along a branch toward him. “It’s practically a legend!”
“Legends are for Indian mounds, foggy castles, and other ancient-type stuff,” Beamer cried impatiently. “Not tree houses!”
“Well, it’s practically ancient,” she insisted, hanging upside down in front of him like a tree sloth. “It’s been here as long as anybody can remember.”
“So what does the haunting? A ghost made out of leaves?” Beamer said with a smirk.
The girl straddled a branch above him. “Well, there’s one way to find out, kid.”
“Beamer, the name’s Beamer!” he retorted. “Beamer MacIntyre. And I want nothing to do with that thing, haunted or not — nothing to do with this house, this block, or anybody livin’ on it. And the last thing I need is a girl who thinks she’s a commando and talks about haunted tree houses!”
“Oooooh . . . major attitude problem,” she taunted him. “Seein’ how ya’ rescued Ghoulie today, I expected better.”
She swung to the lowest branch and dangled in the air a moment before dropping to the ground. Whether or not she was a girl, Beamer was pretty sure she was half monkey.
“Incidentally, my name’s Scilla — Scilla Bruzelski. And just you try and keep me outta my tree!” she yelled up at him as she huffed and strode like a peacock through her back door.
Beamer heard the screen door slam behind her. He wasn’t proud of the way he’d just acted, but he was too busy feeling sorry for himself to worry about anyone else. After all, besides leaving his old friends, having the local creepazoid on his case, being hero to a nerd, and being condemned to live on a prehistoric street, how many things could go wrong in one lifetime?
An insect landed on his hand. “Yipe!” he yelped, flinging it off. It landed on a branch nearby. He raised his foot for the death squish, and then remembered his mom’s words. “Oh, a cricket!” He crawled over for a closer look. It was such a pale green that it was almost white. It turned and faced him as if it was sizing him up, then suddenly sprang away.
Beamer was usually pretty much the Terminator where bugs were concerned, but it didn’t seem right to kill one that was supposed to sing. Of course, the crickets around here didn’t appear to sing at all, as far as he could tell. Maybe they all have laryngitis or something.
* * * * *
Beamer thought he had it knocked the next day. Good ol’ Mom came through with the milk money. After all, it was for a good cause — sort of. Before the first bell, Beamer headed straight for Jared in playground central. As confident as a mouse about to snatch cheese from a mousetrap, he dug into his pocket and pulled out a wad of crisp bills.
Luckily Jared never heard the vacuum-powered gasp behind him. Like the dutiful, trustworthy Scout he was, Beamer had put his mom’s money into his bank. The only trouble was that was where he’d also kept his old play money. Yep, you guessed it. He was standing within spitting distance of Jared holding a fistful of worthless colored paper!
As luck would have it, Jared chose that moment to turn around. Fortunately, or maybe thanks to a little angel dust, somebody opened the restroom door smack in front of Beamer’s face. And Jared stepped inside without even seeing him.
It was time for plan “B,” otherwise known as cold, sweaty panic! When that didn’t work, he opted for plan “C,” which was to lay low. It wasn’t particularly cool stopping to peek around every corner and through the hinges of every door. But it was either that or face the Matter Disintegrator —Jared’s fists.
The hardest times were lunch and recess. Once, Beamer had to hide inside a playground slide tube. Luckily, by the time the next kid slid down and bumped him out of the tube, Jared’s warp-brain goon was gone.
Five minutes after the final bell, however, Beamer’s luck ran out.
7
Life in the Toilet
Beamer was in the bathroom when he heard the door open and Jared’s laugh. One heartbeat later, Beamer was hiding in the handicapped stall, perched on top of the toilet seat.
“Yeah,” Slocum bragged, “that Henderson guy took one look at this fist and emptied his pockets into my hand.” He laughed like a hyena.
“Slocum, you taken care of the seventh graders?” asked Jeffries.
“Most of ’em,” Slocum answered. “Haven’t seen that new kid though. Hey, I heard he’s the dork who moved into that place on Murphy Street.”
“D’ya mean the one with — ” Jared started.
“I’d like to be there when he tries climbing up to it,” Jeffries chortled.
“In the meantime, find him,” Jared ordered. “If he’s not out sick, he’s gonna be.”
“Yeah,” Slocum added with another hyena laugh, “he looked pretty sick after our little talk on Monday.”
“My nose is bleedin’!” Jared yelped suddenly. “Jeffries, get me some toilet paper, quick!”
The boy bolted for one of the stalls. Unfortunately, it was the one where Beamer was hiding.
It’s amazing how many things can go through your mind when you’re a split second away from total annihilation. Beamer saw the latch turn. There was no place to go! Soon he would be history. No, he wasn’t old enough for history — the evening paper, maybe. It’d be kind of a short obituary. He hoped his mom wouldn’t give them his sixth-grade picture. The toilet — what a way to go.
The door swung open. Beamer, who at the last second had leaped onto the door coat hook, was slammed into the stall wall. “Oof!” he gasped, the blow knocking the air out of him. Jeffries ripped off the paper in a flash and was back outside, never noticing the kid hanging there like a side of beef. Beamer sighed in relief and stepped back onto the seat.
“Here you go, dude,” Jeffries said, handing the paper to Jared.
Jared stuffed it up his nose and tilted his head back. “Hey, get some more and put some cold water on it.”
Beamer braced himself and leaped back on the coat hook as the steps approached.
“No, you jerk!” Jared ordered, “a paper towel this time. That other stuff falls apart.”
The footsteps changed direction and Beamer sighed in relief. He heard water from the faucet.
Jared dabbed at his nose a minute, then turned around. “How’s it look, Slocum?”
“Pretty good,” he said, looking up Jared’s nostril as if it were a periscope. “I think it’s stopped.”
“Ya think so?” Jared flared. “I don’t need thinking. I don’t want nobody to think somebody got to me. Come on,” he said to his minions. He tossed the crumpled paper towel over his shoulder and walked out. The paper wad arched over the stall door and bounced off Beamer’s head. When Beamer finally heard the door shut, he let his breath out and slid to the floor like melting candle wax.
* * * * *
Beamer picked up Michael from the nearby after-school daycare center, and they set off toward home along one of many beaten paths through the park. While Michael chattered away about the social ills of the fourth grade, Beamer kept an eye out for Jared and company. They came out into a broad clear
ing. For awhile they were able to hug close to the tree line. Finally, though, the forest twisted right and the way home meant that they had to launch out across the clearing.
“Wait a minute,” Beamer said, stopping to make one last check.
“What for?” Michael asked.
“Nothin’.” Beamer finished his survey. “Okay, let’s go.”
Then, less than fifty steps into the clearing, they heard a shrill screech. Beamer’s head whipped around. A boy erupted from another forest path about half a football field away. The long, skinny legs that knocked with each stride told Beamer it was probably Ghoulie. He was running full tilt, school papers streaming out behind him like confetti.
A moment later three other boys blew out of the same opening in hot pursuit.
Beamer’s eyes popped wide. It was Jared and his clones out for the kill. “Run, Michael!” Beamer shouted to his brother, pushing him ahead.
“Hey!” Michael protested. “Stop shovin’ . . .”
“Move it! I haven’t got time to argue. It’s life and death!!”
They broke into a run as Ghoulie streaked by. “What happened?” Beamer yelled.
“I lost my contribution,” he said between gasps.
“Okay, he’s in trouble,” said Michael, breathing heavily. “So why are we running?”
“Because if those guys recognize me, you’ll be a witness to my execution and dead meat too.”
Michael’s stubby legs shifted into overdrive. A moment later the fugitive trio plunged into the middle of a football game, turning a long punt return into a messy four-way fumble. Shouts and shrieks erupted on every side.
There was no time for “Sorrys.” For that matter, Jared’s troops were already giving the football team an instant replay.
Dead ahead was the park’s museum surrounded by flowers and hedges. With no time for a detour, the threesome launched like awkward hurdlers over the first hedge. More of Ghoulie’s papers fluttered away. Two hedges later Michael took a tumble. Beamer skidded to a halt and yanked him back up.
