by David Lubar
“Don’t do it!” I screamed.
Chelsea pushed the button.
I flinched, expecting some sort of terrible explosion. For an instant, nothing happened. Then I saw a tiny spot of total darkness hovering above the table. It was barely larger than a pinhead. It started to expand.
“Yes!” Chelsea screamed. “I was right. See, it’s exactly what I predicted.”
The sphere of blackness was the size of a golf ball now. I grabbed Chelsea’s arm and tugged at it.
“You can’t outrun it,” she said. “It will expand exponentially until there’s nothing left on the outside. That doesn’t matter. I understand everything. I know the secret of the universe.”
I turned and ran. Behind me, Chelsea kept talking, spewing a stream of words about subatomic particles. Then, suddenly, the sound of her voice was cut off. I didn’t look back. I kept running. I knew it was pointless, but I couldn’t help myself. Maybe that was the real secret of the universe. Even as the universe itself was being swallowed by blackness, life tried to find a way out. Life fought. Life never gave up.
A wall of darkness shot past me. I expected everything to go black, but the inside of the sphere wasn’t dark. It was shimmery, like a soap bubble. I looked back. Chelsea was there. Everything was there. I looked ahead. The sphere was expanding, revealing more and more as it swelled away from us. In a moment, I could see all the way down the street.
Chelsea came out of the shed and stood next to me as I watched the inside of the sphere fly past the clouds.
“I was wrong,” she said. “We’re still here.”
“That’s sort of a good thing,” I said.
I expected her to agree. Instead, she turned back toward the shed. “Wait. I know my mistake. I can get this to work.”
I grabbed her arm. “Can you hold off for a little? You don’t want to make another mistake.”
“But I really need to see if I’m right.”
“They’re having sidewalk sales at the mall,” I said. “We can try on skirts.”
“Skirts?” Her gaze wavered between the shed and me.
“Yeah. Skirts. Lots of skirts. And the Freezie Shack has a new flavor this week—peach ripple. Jillian got a kitten yesterday. We could go see her on the way to the mall.”
“I guess the experiment can wait,” Chelsea said. “I love kittens.”
I grabbed her arm and dragged her away from the shed before she changed her mind. Once I got her into the world, with its warm sunshine and blue sky, its ice cream and kittens, I was pretty sure I could convince her to hold off from doing any more experiments. Sure, it might be nice to know the secret of the universe, but nowhere near as nice as peach ripple ice cream in a waffle cone.
It looked like I’d saved the universe. I just hoped there wasn’t anyone else out there like Chelsea, who was willing to destroy the universe in order to briefly understand it. Or if there was, I hoped she had a friend like me.
LAPS
“Two wrongs make a right,” Joey said as he read the long list of regulations printed in large red letters on a sign next to the pool-room door. The third and fourth rules were the two wrongs he was about to violate.
No swimming alone.
Nobody under 16 allowed in the pool without an adult.
He’d noticed the sign on the way in, as he’d followed his parents past the pool to the elevator. Fortunately, they hadn’t bothered to look. He knew that because when he asked if he could go for a swim, they’d both said it was okay. All they wanted to do was relax in the hotel room after their long drive.
Joey didn’t care about the regulations. He was a good swimmer. A serious swimmer. He wasn’t going to do anything stupid, like dive headfirst into the shallow end. He checked the hallway in both directions to make sure no hotel people were nearby, then slipped through the entrance to the indoor pool.
“Warm.” Joey wiped sweat from his forehead. The air around the pool was hot and humid. The sharp scent of chlorine burned his nostrils. He tested the water with his toe. It was warm, too.
He climbed down the ladder at the side of the pool and waded through the chest-deep water to the shallow end. Then he pulled down his goggles and kicked off, starting with a breaststroke. After ten easy laps, he switched to freestyle and picked up his pace.
As he turned his head to the side for a breath on the fifth lap, he noticed that the room had gotten steamier. In the middle of the sixth lap, he slowed to a drift and raised his head.
The air was so dense, he could barely see the side of the pool.
Bad ventilation, he thought as he resumed swimming. He didn’t like breathing the damp air. But he had only four more laps of freestyle, followed by ten of the butterfly and ten of the backstroke, and then he could get out.
As he kicked off the wall on his next-to-last lap, he realized he couldn’t even see the sides of the pool through the steam. He stroked cautiously, afraid to ram his head into the far wall or hit the concrete with his hand. Normally, he had a good sense of exactly where he was in a pool, and where the wall was, but something felt different here.
Maybe that’s enough for one night, he thought.
Joey rolled on his side and did slow strokes with his left arm, keeping his right hand out in front. With each stroke, he expected to feel the smooth tiles of the wall. His hand met nothing. He made a quarter turn and tried to swim the short way across the pool. After more than enough strokes to cross the pool a half dozen times, Joey stopped swimming and treaded water.
He pushed up his goggles. The air was still dense. “Hey!” he shouted. He no longer cared about getting in trouble. He wanted someone to show up and yell at him to get out of the pool.
Nobody answered.
“Hey! Anybody!” His shout wavered in his throat.
Again, no answer. Worse, something sounded wrong about his voice. He let out a loud shout. “Hey!”
The cry didn’t echo back at him off the walls or ceiling.
Joey raised his hands above his head, exhaled all the air in his lungs, and sank, trying to see how deep the pool was. He was pretty sure that even the oldest hotel pools built more than a century ago rarely went deeper than eight feet—twelve at most. He could easily go that far.
He went much farther, but failed to find the bottom. Joey stroked back to the surface. When he broke into the opaque air, he realized the water was rolling all around him, rising and falling in gentle swells as if pushed by a distant wind. It didn’t seem like he was in a pool. It almost seemed like—no, Joey shook his head at the impossibility of that. But the thought wouldn’t go away.
There was one sure way to tell. He didn’t want to know. But he had to find out.
He touched a wet finger to his tongue.
Salt.
He sniffed carefully, then inhaled deeply, but he already knew what he’d find. There was no strong scent of chlorine in the air. No pool smell. If anything, the air smelled of salt and seaweed.
Joey put his goggles back over his eyes and rolled forward, starting another slow crawl. He knew it was pointless, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do.
Joey swam. Around him, the water lapped at his arms and legs, patient, waiting.
BEDBUGS
“Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” Dad said as the bus pulled into the rec center parking lot.
I laughed, even though it wasn’t really funny. Behind Dad, Grandma gave me a wink and a nod. I winked back and patted my pocket to let her know I had the bottle.
“Have fun,” Mom said. “Be careful.”
“I will.” I figured that answered both her sentences. Around me, a herd of kids charged toward the bus as the doors opened.
“This is going to be great,” Bobby Epstein said as he grabbed my shoulder and pulled me into the mob.
“For sure.” I pushed my way onto the bus, along with the rest of the kids. Our youth group was going to New York City for an overnight trip. Today, we’d get to go to the science museum, and then have dinner at a rea
l New York restaurant. Tomorrow, we’d see a Broadway show in the afternoon before heading back home.
It was about a two-hour ride from South Jersey up to New York. Most of us had been to the city before, but Bobby was just about the only one who had ever stayed there. Him and Trent Parnell.
“We stayed at the Ritz,” Trent said. “It’s the most expensive hotel in all of New York. We had a suite. That’s a whole bunch of rooms, all just for us. I had my own bed. It was king size. There was a TV in every single room. Even the bathroom!”
I didn’t bother listening. Trent always bragged about having the most expensive or the biggest or the best of everything.
“My dad and I stayed at the YMCA. It was fun.” Bobby held up the sheet of paper that listed our schedule. “I don’t know this hotel.”
“It’s whatever Mr. Drampner picked out,” I said.
Mr. Drampner was in charge of the youth group. He ran the sports and picked the movies for movie night. He did a pretty good job, but sometime he’d try to get the cheapest stuff to save money. I glanced at the sheet in Bobby’s hand. I’d never heard of the hotel, either. But that didn’t mean anything. There were a zillion hotels in New York.
After we came out of the tunnel, we headed downtown. It took a long time to get through the city traffic to our hotel.
“Ick,” Trent said as we got off the bus. “This place is a dump.”
I had to agree—it didn’t look very nice from the outside. The windows were dirty, and the walls were covered with graffiti. It was a little better inside.
“At least it seems kind of clean,” Bobby said.
“I guess it’s not bad.” The rugs were worn out and the wall paper was peeling, but someone had vacuumed recently, and there wasn’t any sort of bad smell.
Mr. Drampner got the room keys and handed them out. We were staying two kids in a room, except for Trent, who made a big fuss about not wanting to have to share a room since he had his own room at home. Luckily, there was an odd number of kids, so he got to be by himself. Bobby and I stuck together, of course.
“Cool!” Bobby said when we went into our room. “It’s got a big TV.”
He bounced on one of the beds.
“Careful,” I said. “Check it for bedbugs.”
“Are you serious?” he asked.
“For sure.” After Grandma had warned me about bedbugs, I’d actually looked them up online. It was a big problem in some hotels. And not just in cities. They were showing up all over the place. “The thing is, you don’t even feel it when they bite you. But you’ll itch like crazy later.”
I pulled back the bedspread and checked the sheets. “They say you should look for little blood spots.”
“That’s gross,” Bobby said.
“Maybe, but it’s not as gross as getting bitten all night and having them drink your blood.”
“I guess.” Bobby pulled down the cover on his bed. “So what do you do if you see spots?”
“You can ask for another room,” I said.
“Except the whole place is full,” he said. “They closed off all the rooms on the top two floors because of a bad leak in the roof, and our group took all the rest of the rooms.”
“Right.” The clerk had told us that when we checked in. I bent over and took a close look at the sheets. They were pretty worn. It was hard to tell if there were any tiny spots. I pulled the bottle from my pocket. “Just to be safe, my grandma gave me this.”
“What is it?”
“Neem oil,” I said.
“Never heard of it.”
“Me, neither. Not until yesterday. But she swears it keeps bedbugs away. Can’t hurt, right?”
I pulled the cork from the top of the bottle. A strong smell nearly knocked me over.
“Oh, man,” Bobby said. “That will keep everything away—bedbugs, elephants, asteroids. Phewww!” He pinched his nose.
I stuck the cork back, which cut down on the smell, though some of it lingered in the air. I put the bottle down on the dresser, then glanced at the clock. “Come on. It’s time to meet up.”
We joined the others and rode the subway to the museum, which was awesome, and the restaurant, which wasn’t all that good. Then we went back to the hotel. When we got to the lobby, I told everyone, “Wait here for a minute. Okay?”
I dashed to my room, got the bottle of neem oil, and returned to the lobby. “This keeps away bedbugs,” I said. “Anyone want some?”
I opened the bottle, put some of the oil on my hands, and rubbed it on my neck and arms. I have to admit, I got a kick out of how bad it smelled. It was sort of like a challenge.
One or two kids stepped right up. And then the rest of them joined in. Even Mr. Drampner took some. The only one who didn’t was Trent.
“You guys are idiots,” he said. “Stinky idiots.”
I ignored him. And I slept well that night. So did Bobby. We woke up when my phone alarm went off. We were supposed to all meet for breakfast.
As I rolled out of bed, the strong smell of neem oil reminded me I’d been worried about bedbugs. I didn’t feel itchy. That was good. I checked my arms and chest. No bites.
“Any itches?” I asked Bobby.
He paused for a moment, then shook his head. “Nope. That stuff worked great. Tell your grandma I said thanks.”
“Sure.” We headed down to the lobby. In a couple minutes, everyone was there except for Trent. Mr. Drampner called his room. There was no answer.
He got the manager and they went down the hall toward Trent’s room. The rest of us followed. With each step, I grew more worried.
“The neem oil kept the bedbugs away from us,” I said to Bobby.
“Yup. It definitely did.”
“And everyone except for Trent used it, right?”
Bobby nodded. Then he froze. I guess he’d figured it out, too. “Uh-oh. They had to go somewhere.…”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.”
By then, we’d reached the door of Trent’s room. The manager knocked real hard, waited a moment, then unlocked the door and opened it. Mr. Drampner stepped inside. I pushed in behind him.
There was something on the bed. It looked like a balloon that had lost about half its air. I gasped as I realized it was Trent. Or what was left of him after all the bedbugs in the entire hotel had been forced into one room.
“I guess we’re not going to see the play,” Bobby said.
“Trent’s definitely not going,” I said.
“It probably isn’t a good play, anyhow,” Bobby said.
I glanced at the faded carpet and peeling wallpaper in the hallway, and thought about the dinner we’d had last night. “You’re right. It’s probably not very good.” If we missed it, that was fine with me. I was ready to go back home and wash up. I still smelled like neem, but at least I had all my blood, and no itchy spots.
THE VALLEY OF LOST TREASURES
“Mom, have you seen my roller skates?” Mandy called. She was on her hands and knees, halfway inside her bedroom closet, searching through a jumbled mess of overstuffed boxes and scattered clothing. The jungle of pants and dresses hanging from the rod above made the search even tougher.
“Did you look in your closet?” her mom called from the kitchen.
“Great suggestion,” Mandy muttered. She sighed, backed out of the closet, and sat on the floor. Where can they be? She looked under her bed. The skates weren’t there. Lots of magazines, plenty of shoes, enough dust bunnies to stuff a pillow, but no skates.
After another half hour of searching, Mandy gave up and called her friend Charlotte. “I can’t go skating.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t find my skates,” she said.
“You can rent skates,” Charlotte said. “It’s not expensive.”
“I don’t feel like skating today. I’ll go with you next time.”
Mandy didn’t think it would be as much fun without her skates. They fit perfectly. And they were made of real leather. But maybe
they wouldn’t even fit now. She hadn’t worn them in months.
As Mandy headed downstairs, she thought about some of her other favorite things. She hadn’t been able to find her stuffed lamb last month when she was doing a multimedia biography for a school project. I haven’t seen Lammie in years, she thought. It wasn’t just the lamb and the skates. A week ago, she’d looked all over the house for a special pen her aunt had given her.
As she reached the bottom of the stairs, she saw something glitter. Behind the steps, right by the door to the basement, she spotted one of her favorite hair clips. As she bent to reach for it, she realized there was no way it could have gotten there. It had been in a drawer in the bathroom cabinet. She’d put it there on Saturday evening, and she knew she hadn’t worn it since then.
Something weird was happening. Mandy decided to leave the clip where it was. The next day, it was gone. She opened the basement door and switched on the light. She checked all the steps as she walked down, and then hunted around until she found the clip along the side wall, several feet past the stairs.
It moved, she thought. It almost seemed as if the clip was going somewhere. Mandy wondered where a clip could possibly want to go. There was no way she could stay in the basement and watch it all night. Even if she waited, she had a feeling the clip would never move while she was looking at it.
Maybe she could track it. She went upstairs and scooped a quarter cup of flour out of the canister her mom kept on the kitchen counter. She ran back down, half afraid the clip would have moved again, or maybe disappeared.
But it was there. She sprinkled a dusting of flour on the floor around it. Now, if it moved, there’d be a trail.
The next morning, Mandy checked the basement as soon as she woke up. She gasped when she realized the clip was gone. She could see signs that it had moved through the flour. She followed the streaky trail to the corner of the basement, beneath an old table.
She crawled under the table and touched the wall. Instead of the cold hard feel of concrete, her fingers met something like velvet. She pushed her arm through. There was emptiness on the other side.
