by Robert West
Ghoulie laughed. “I thought you wanted reminders of home.”
“Yeah, I had everything in California,” Beamer said wistfully. “Friends, sports, secret bases all over the place, and no — read my lips — no Jared. Here, I’m an alien, just like those bug-faced guys in the fleet are gonna be.”
“I’ve been here all my life and I’m still an alien,” shrugged Ghoulie. He turned to Scilla and said, “You’re just lucky you’re a girl.”
“Hey, it isn’t so easy being a girl either, especially if you hate skirts and hair straighteners,” she retorted. “You don’t have to have muscles to be a bully, you know. Girls have other ways to bully.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize,” Ghoulie said with a sheepish look.
“So I guess we’re all aliens, huh,” shrugged Beamer.
“With our very own hostile indigenous life forms,” Ghoulie grumbled.
“What’s in-didge-nous?” Scilla asked, her head popping back into sight.
Beamer and Ghoulie gave each other a knowing look, then looked back at Scilla and said, at the same time, “Jared!”
* * * * *
Defeating their hostile indigenous life form wouldn’t be easy. In fact, Beamer figured that finding Jared’s Achilles’ heel was going to be something on the order of finding a snowflake in the Sahara. Here was a pimple-faced muscle-machine who had manipulating adults down to a science, and who also happened to be the principal’s pet. The prospects didn’t look good.
Then, out of nowhere, the Star-Fighters got a break.
14
Achilles’ Heel
It didn’t seem like much of a break at first. Jared and the other eighth graders were doing math problems at a blackboard when the teacher stepped out to answer a call. Jared, meanwhile, turned the place into a casino, and by the time the teacher got back, he had fleeced a schmuck who didn’t know how to play 3-D tic-tac-toe and had a week’s worth of the kid’s milk money.
It didn’t figure to be a major setback for Jared — not with his connections. Everybody expected the principal to just waggle a friendly finger, make him give back the money, and send her regards to his mother. In fact, that’s what actually happened.
The break came from the fact that Jared had to wait for the principal. All he had with him was his notebook. So, he sat alone in a corner and waited . . . and waited . . .
He eventually started fidgeting. One particular fidget allowed him to see a pencil under the bench. He picked it up and, after a quick look around to make sure nobody was watching, started to doodle.
* * * * *
Jared left the principal’s office just in time for the final bell. Kids were scurrying up and down the hallway like mice in a cheese factory.
Beamer and Ghoulie entered the hall in time to see a worried-looking Jared dash into the restroom. What was this? Jared without the smirk? Jared . . . afraid?
Barely half a minute later, Jared came out of the restroom, still looking worried and glancing around. Something is missing. He’d had something when he went into the bathroom that he didn’t have now. What was it? Then it struck Beamer. He’d ditched his notebook. Why?
Beamer and Ghoulie quickly pretended to be in a heated discussion. “Come on, Ghoulie,” Beamer insisted, “Nestle makes the best chocolate.”
“Hey, forget it,” Ghoulie shot back. “Hershey . . . man . . . that’s the ticket.” (Well, what would you expect from seventh graders, the stock-market report?)
Jared quickly assumed his cool, macho look and swaggered off down the hall.
“Let’s check it out!” Beamer said, and streaked into the bathroom like it was a candy store.
“What do you suppose he was up to?” Ghoulie asked as he peered into the corners of the starkly institutional bathroom. Then he dug into a trash can.
“I don’t know,” Beamer said, searching through another can, “but he was in a big hurry to get rid of that notebook. I got a good feeling about it.” Beamer pulled several crumpled sheets of paper from the trash can.
“Find anything?” Ghoulie asked, walking over to him.
“Just a bunch of drawings — butterflies, birds, flowers, trees, and stuff.”
“Hey, they’re not bad,” Ghoulie said. “Not bad at all. Who do you suppose drew them?”
“How should I know?” Beamer responded, reaching deeper into the trash can. He pulled out a notebook. “Here’s some more,” he said as he leafed through half-torn-out pages.
Ghoulie took the notebook and turned it over. “Cowabunga!” he said in a hushed voice, staring at the back cover.
“Skullcross!” Beamer exclaimed, looking at a picture of a skull and crisscrossing dollar signs drawn in masterful strokes. “These are Jared’s?” he gasped.
“We got him!” Ghoulie said, his eyes as bright as searchlights. He stuffed the drawings into the notebook and bolted out the door.
“Drawings? He wanted to hide drawings?” Beamer asked in confusion as he hurried up behind Ghoulie. “Why?”
“This is Jared we’re dealing with,” Ghoulie said, cruising down the hallway wearing a first-class grin. “Bullies don’t draw cute little pictures.”
“But they’re good!” Beamer said with a troubled look.
“Maybe!” Ghoulie said through clenched teeth. “But to Jared they’re an Achilles’ heel.”
“Ghoulie, are you sure . . . ?” Beamer murmured.
“Sure about what?” he returned as he shot out the rear entrance. He stopped to scan the playground. “Come on,” Ghoulie said as he ran out across the playground.
“Hey, y’all!” called Scilla, who was running after them. “Whatch y’all up to?”
“Look at this!” Ghoulie said, thrusting a crumpled paper into her hands.
“A drawing,” she said with a shrug. “So?”
“It’s Jared’s,” Ghoulie announced, like he’d just discovered the ruins of Atlantis. He accelerated down the block toward the boulevard.
When they finally stopped for the light, Scilla grabbed Beamer’s arm. “What are y’all goin’ to do?” she asked, gasping for air. Across the street the park spread out before them like a vast wilderness.
“Look, he’s scared of people finding out he draws these things,” Ghoulie explained impatiently. “That’s his Achilles’ heel! All we have to do is threaten to show these all over the school and he’ll stop buggin’ us.”
“Ghoulie . . . ,” Beamer started to say as the light changed. Ghoulie ran across the street with Beamer and Scilla in his wake and plunged into the thick woods.
The forest path was like a tall corridor walled with trees. Racing around a curve they saw Jared far ahead.
“There he is!” Ghoulie exclaimed. “This is perfect! We can do it now!”
“Ghoulie, shouldn’t we think this over?” Beamer stammered, half out of breath.
“What’s to think over? He’s alone now, can’t you see? Who knows when we’ll have another chance like this. Scilla can hide out in the bushes with most of the drawings while we show Jared a few samples to let him know we have the goods.”
“Ghoulie! No!” Beamer cried, grabbing Ghoulie’s arm and whirling him around.
“What’s the matter with you?” Ghoulie asked, looking at Beamer like his brain had come unscrewed.
“This isn’t right!”
“Are you crazy?” Ghoulie yelled, about to come unscrewed himself. “We’ve got what we’ve been looking for. We’ve found his Achilles’ heel!”
“No we haven’t!” Beamer said, breathing hard. “We said an Achilles’ heel was a weak spot. This isn’t a weakness,” he said, gesturing to the notebook. “It’s a . . . a . . .”
“Come on!” Ghoulie said, turning away from him. “He’ll get away.” Suddenly Beamer grabbed the notebook and dashed into the forest.
“Beamer!” Ghoulie shrieked as he rushed after him.
In the distance, Jared turned to see what the ruckus was all about. All he saw, though, was a small flurry of paper fal
ling to the ground.
Squirrels screeched and birds scattered as Ghoulie pursued the cartoon crook deep into the woods. Through underbrush, over and under fallen logs they ran, until Ghoulie tackled Beamer, plunging with him through a tall thicket.
“What are you doing?” he shouted as he sat on Beamer’s chest.
“You can’t do it!” Beamer grunted, tightly clutching the notebook. “Not with this!”
Finally, Scilla charged up to them. “Hey you two!” she yelled as she pulled Ghoulie off of Beamer. “Cut it out!”
“It’s not right,” Beamer gasped as he wiped the dirt from his face. “You can’t threaten somebody with something they do good. It’s not right!”
“But this is Jared we’re talkin’ about! It’s the only way — ”
“There’s got to be some other way!” Beamer said as he scrambled to his feet.
“Beamer,” Ghoulie complained, pacing in a little circle, “we finally get a chance to . . .”
Ghoulie stopped pacing and gave Beamer a long look. Finally, his shoulders slumped and he plopped down atop a fallen tree trunk. “Look, I know. I’ve had it done to me all my life. But just once I’d like to give a little back!”
“You haven’t lived long enough for ‘all my life’!” said Beamer with half a grin. His voice softened. “If it’s not right when it’s done to us, it’s not right for us to do it to Jared,” Beamer said. “This,” he said, holding out a drawing, “is a gift — a gift from God, not a weakness — whether he knows it or not.”
“All right, all right,” Ghoulie sighed finally, “I just hope he’s got more than one Achilles’ heel.”
* * * * *
At that moment Jared was where the others had left the trail a few minutes earlier, staring at a crumpled cartoon drawing. His face was as hard as granite. Something was going on. These guys were messing around in his business.
He shifted his mind into bash’em-and-trash’em overdrive. Drawing was his private thing. Nobody was supposed to know . . . Nobody! It wasn’t cool. Kids would laugh. They had three years ago, when he’d lived in Molterville. Since then, he’d shot up a foot and moved, but he’d made himself a solemn promise that nobody would ever laugh at him again.
Jared was now determined to finish the job he had started a year ago when something in that tree — he couldn’t remember what — had stopped him. Those — what did they call themselves? Ah, right, Star-Fighters. Those Star-Fighters and their weird tree house would soon be history — ancient and in ruins. Beamer and Ghoulie didn’t belong in Jared’s world. If they refused to scurry away before him, he would simply have to squash them . . . like bugs.
15
Freak Storm
A few minutes later Beamer, Ghoulie, and Scilla pushed through a wall of bushes heading back toward the main path.
“C’mon,” said Ghoulie impatiently. “I’ll be late!”
Scilla turned to Beamer and said mischievously, “I found out how you got the name Beamer.”
Beamer whirled about, ready for a fight. “Who told you? Did my brother — ?”
“No, my grandma heard it from your mom.”
“Aw . . . come on, Beamer,” Ghoulie goaded him. “Out with it, Scilla.”
“Grandma said that when Beamer was little, he always watched old Star Trek episodes with his dad.”
“Scillaaaa . . .” Beamer growled.
“He’d laugh when people would sizzle away on the transporter pad after they said, ‘Beam me up, Scottie.’ So they called him Beamer.”
“Well, it beats Scilla!” Beamer shot back at her. “Scilla sounds like somethin’ a doctor shoots into you with a needle.”
“It does not!” she yelled as she jabbed him with her fist. “Take that back, or I’ll start calling your real name out loud during recess!”
“You do and I’ll — ” Beamer yelled, fighting off a flurry of fists.
“Benson! Benson! Benson!” she taunted.
“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” Ghoulie said, as they came back to where they had left the path. He began searching around the area. “Didn’t we drop a couple of drawings around here somewhere?”
“You’re right!” said Beamer, flipping through the sheets he’d stuffed into Jared’s notebook. “Maybe they blew away.” In truth, the wind was beginning to pick up.
Feeling a pit forming in his stomach, Beamer’s search became more frantic. “We’ve gotta find them! I’ve got a very bad feeling about this.”
But the wind was churning up the forest, whipping leaves and brush into their eyes.
“Hey, guys!” Ghoulie yelled, looking up at the sky. Clouds were swooping over the tree tops, churning and boiling as if they had a life of their own. It was suddenly very dark and cold.
Then they heard something strange — like static when the cable TV gets knocked out. The tall buildings and hills in the distance seemed to be hidden behind a white fog.
“C’mon, let’s get home,” Ghoulie said. They started off in a loping trot, glancing furtively over their shoulder at the ominous cloud bank. The crackling sound grew louder. Soon they were running.
When they shot out into the open area of the park, the distance to home seemed like miles. “The shortcut!” Scilla cried. “Let’s take the shortcut. We’ll never make it around Parkview.”
“No way,” Beamer answered, shaking his head firmly. “I don’t want anything to do with that place.”
Suddenly a blast of cold wind nearly drove them to the ground. Something began to fall — gently at first, but there was a sharp sting with every pitter-pat.
“Come on, Beamer,” Ghoulie insisted anxiously. “We got through all right last time.”
Reluctantly Beamer changed course and followed. With the wind at their backs, they practically flew through the bushes toward the wall. Then the sky burst open.
A torrent of tiny ice pellets pummeled them like machine gun fire. It was Noah’s deluge in ice. Hail, to be more precise, coming down in waves and stinging like a zillion mosquito bites. By the time they reached the wall, the ground was already white with crunchy “snow.”
They dived into the tunnel beneath the wall and scrambled through the cavern and up the rock steps. Soon they were scurrying through the fantasy-land garden. Halfway to the gate, the castle lights blinked out. Each dark window now looked like a gaping mouth.
The hail coating the ground was two inches deep and growing thicker by the second when Beamer yanked the gate handle. It didn’t move. “Hey!” he shouted and tried it again.
“Hurry up, Beamer!” Scilla cried out, squeezing in to force the handle.
“What is it, stuck?” asked Ghoulie, who had pulled his jacket up over his head.
“No,” Beamer replied. “It’s locked . . . tight. Somebody has fixed the gate!”
Lightning ripped open the sky and the hail came down even harder. “Yiiii!!” they yelped, crowding their already snow-coated bodies tightly against the house.
A sharp rapping sound spun them around. Beamer instinctively recoiled. A stern figure holding an oil lamp loomed in the window above them. It was her — Old Lady Parker, in the flesh!
16
Castle Quest and No Pants
Her face masked by dark shadows, the old woman gestured stiffly toward the back of the house. Another burst of lightning reflected brightly in the window. Then the window was dark and empty.
Realizing they had no choice, they meekly shuffled along the wall, cringing beneath the force of the hail, until a door creaked and swung open in their faces.
“Come on now,” said a maid holding a candle. “Get in here before you catch something dangerous.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Scilla said with a gulp. They all nodded sheepishly and clattered up the steps.
“And don’t forget to wipe your feet,” she added firmly, pointing to the mat. “We don’t want you trackin’ the whole neighborhood inside.” Her voice was almost musical, each syllable a different note. Beamer checked through his movie memor
y banks and concluded she was probably Irish or Swedish or something.
As the door closed behind them, the house lights suddenly came back on.
“Well, now, that didn’t take long.” The maid sighed and blew out the candle.
They were in the laundry room, clearly once a screened-in porch about the size of a long, narrow bedroom.
Beamer started to step into the adjoining kitchen when the maid called, “Hold on there! You’re sopping wet with that stuff meltin’ off ya. I don’t want to have to clean up more than one room.” She shuffled through a pile of large, newly washed towels.
“Here,” she said, handing one to each of them. “Dry yourself off. Come to think of it, you’d better take these things off,” she said, fingering Beamer’s soaked sleeve.
“But I live just down the street!” Beamer protested.
“Maybe so, but there’s no way Ms. Parker will hear of me sendin’ ya back out into a downpour like this. So get those clothes off. I’ll stick ’em in the dryer and they’ll be dry in no time. You can wrap another towel around you while ya wait.”
Beamer and Ghoulie looked at each other, then at Scilla. Suddenly the maid realized the problem. “Oh, my . . . of course,” she said apologetically. “Sorry, deary. In your present state I didn’t realize what . . . ah . . . who you were.” She giggled in a high-pitched squeal, then reached out and wrapped Scilla in a towel. “Here, you can come with me. I’ll take care of you.” As the maid ushered her through the kitchen and out the far door, Scilla looked back at Beamer and Ghoulie as if she were being marched off to a firing squad.
“If we’re gonna get out of here,” Ghoulie said, fumbling with the door latch, “it had better be now. Our whole lives could be ruined if we have to escape without pants.”
“Hey! We can’t leave Scilla here alone!” Beamer said, pulling him back into the room.
“What makes you think we’ll ever see Scilla again?” Ghoulie croaked.
Beamer gave him a wry grin and started unbuttoning his shirt.
The maid returned minutes later to find the boys wrapped in towels like Sitting Bull at a powwow. Seeing their clothes strewn across the floor, she shook her head and placed her hands on her hips. “Boys . . . I should have remembered. Come with me,” she said with a sigh.
