Sven Carter & the Trashmouth Effect

by Rob Vlock

  So when Mom ended up with an entire disgusting wedding cake and no wedding to send it to, I smuggled it out of the house when she wasn’t looking, got Will, and pedaled over to the skate park to use it as a prop in my sure-to-be-a-megahit YouTube stunt. The rest you know. I crash, my arm comes off and reattaches itself. Then I pass out.

  And that’s where my dad came in.

  “Sven!”

  I slowly opened my eyes.

  “Sven!”

  A blurry shape hovering over me drifted into focus. A face. A squashed-up nose. Tight-set mouth. Nostril hair practically long enough to braid. I’d know that nostril hair anywhere.

  “What are you doing sitting on the ground?” Dad barked gruffly.

  “I, uh—”

  “And what in the name of Joe Namath’s jockstrap are you doing covered in cake?”

  My dad, Alexander “Big Al” Carter, stood a couple of inches over five feet tall. But to say he was a small man would be dead wrong. Well, technically it would be right. He was a small man. But he acted like a big man. It was his way of making up for being so very little.

  Being small was the worst thing that had ever happened to my dad. Because, from the time he was a toddler, all he ever wanted to do was become a professional football player. But he was never big enough.

  That was bad for him.

  And probably even worse for me.

  Because Dad wanted nothing more than to make me an all-American football star. Sometimes I wondered if that was why he and Mom had adopted me. Every day he’d wake me up at five thirty to practice throwing a stupid football through a stupid tire he hung from a tree in the backyard while he’d yell, “You can’t throw to save your life! Lift your elbow next time! Extend your arm! You’re not rotating enough! Your strumfobbler needs to be level with your fartwaddles!”

  He probably didn’t actually say that last one. But he may as well have, for all the good his coaching did. No matter how much we practiced, no matter what we tried, I just never got any better. I’d get the ball through the tire once in a while. And I’d miss a whole lot. I stank. And we’d repeat the whole stupid exercise the next morning. Every morning.

  So it didn’t surprise me a bit to hear that the next words out of my father’s mouth were: “How’s your throwing arm?”

  Still too freaked-out to explain, I just made a sort of lame croaking sound.

  He squinted at me. “Are you okay, son? Your friend told me your arm fell off. Is that some kind of new slang you kids are using these days? Like, ‘that party was so the bomb that my arm fell off’?”

  I found my words. “No! My arm actually came off! It did! Only then it went back on! And now it’s on and not off but it was off before it was on!”

  Even I didn’t know what I was talking about.

  For a few seconds, he looked at me like I was some kind of lunatic. Then he marched over to me and pulled up my sleeve.

  “Hmm,” he grunted. “I’ve seen worse. Move your arm.”

  “Dad,” I protested, “I can’t! What if it falls off again?”

  “Sven,” he insisted, “quit kidding around. Move your arm.”

  I ventured a glance at my left arm. I wasn’t sure what I’d see there.

  My arm was right where it was supposed to be. On my shoulder. Just like it always had been.

  Had I dreamed the whole arm-coming-off-then-coming-alive-and-climbing-up-my-shirt-and-reattaching-itself thing? Maybe I went into shock or something and it had all been a hallucination. But where it had reattached itself, a deep red band of raw flesh ran clear around my shoulder. It hadn’t been a dream!

  “Dad,” I cried. “Look! This is where my arm fell off! See? Really! It did!”

  A look of concern spread across my dad’s face. “Um, Sven? You didn’t happen to hit your head, did you?”

  “No, my head’s fine! My arm fell off! It’s . . . Just take me to the hospital, okay? So they can fix it and we can . . .”

  I trailed off as I noticed the way my dad was looking at me. He obviously thought I was crazy. Maybe he was right. I mean, noncrazy people didn’t usually see their arms come off, then crawl back into place and reattach themselves. Did they?

  Dad ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “You know, son, maybe you’re right. We probably should have a doctor check you out. But I’ll be Tom Brady’s tutu if I’m going to spend all night in a hospital waiting room. I’ll call Dr. Shallix instead.”

  I had a feeling he was more worried about my sanity than my arm.

  Dad helped me to my feet, pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, and used it to wipe as much cake off my bike as he could. Then he loaded the bike into the back of his beige minivan. While he was doing that, I noticed Will’s phone lying on the pavement, so I picked it up and slipped it into my pocket.

  A few minutes later, we were driving toward the doctor’s office.

  CHAPTER 4.0:

  < value= [Please Don’t Call Me Trashmouth] >

  I WAS A LITTLE DISAPPOINTED that he was taking me to Dr. Shallix instead of to the hospital. For two reasons. First, even though he had been my doctor for my whole life, that dude still seriously weirded me out every time I saw him. Second, I kind of wanted to go to the hospital for once. Just to see what it was like. I know that probably sounds bizarre. But I had never been to one before. Heck, I had never even been sick in my life. Literally never. Not a cold, not a cough, not a sniffle. And that was yet one more reason I felt like a complete and total weirdo.

  You see, there’s something you should know about me—something I haven’t wanted to mention until now. I was always a little strange compared to, well . . . just about every other kid at school. Or on the planet, for that matter. At least that’s how it felt.

  Why? Because I ate things. Gross things.

  Chewed-up gum from underneath movie theater seats. Cockroaches. That brown stuff that kept growing on the side of the fish tank no matter how clean I tried to keep the water.

  And when I came across gross things I couldn’t eat, I’d lick them. Like the nozzles of water fountains and the poles people hold on to on the bus.

  Don’t get me wrong. I never liked doing these things. I found eating them just as disgusting as you probably find hearing about them. It’s just that I . . . had to. I couldn’t help myself.

  You know how when you’re at a party and there’s a big bowl of potato chips sitting right in front of you and you can’t help eating pretty much all of them? It was just like that for me every day. Only, instead of potato chips, it was used tissues and old eggshells and about a thousand other things no normal kid would ever want to eat. It was like my mouth had a mind of its own.

  I had always tried to keep this habit secret. I might not have been able to stop myself, but at least I could keep other people from seeing it. For a long time, nobody knew anything about it. Unfortunately, that all changed the day I ate a moldy, dust-bunny-covered blueberry muffin I found under the bleachers in gym.

  I tried to make sure nobody saw me. But right after I stuffed the muffin into my mouth, I looked up to see Brandon Marks staring right at me. After that, I was known as Trashmouth. Brandon made it up. And he did everything he could to get the whole school to call me that.

  Just my luck, the problem got a whole lot worse whenever I was nervous or stressed. At the precise moment I needed to look like a dude who had his act together, I’d need a taste of the gray sludge from the janitor’s bucket more than I needed oxygen. Before a big test, I’d lick the top of my desk when nobody was looking. If I was talking to a pretty girl, I’d have an uncontrollable urge to eat a handful of dirt from a nearby potted plant. Which never did much to impress pretty girls.

  My parents knew about this little habit of mine, of course. It’s kind of tough to keep something like that secret from your mom and dad. Especially when every time they’d take me to the dentist, I’d end up eating a bunch of those cotton things they stuff in people’s mouths. I’d fish used ones out of the garbage can
next to the dentist’s chair whenever she would turn her back to pick up an instrument.

  “Oh, that’s just Sven being Sven. He’s fine,” Mom would always say when Dad mentioned that he caught me eating yellow snow or scarfing down a dead worm I picked out of a puddle or licking dried bird droppings off the car’s windshield.

  “Hmmmph,” Dad would scoff, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. “When most people find a Band-Aid in their soup, they send it back.”

  “Come on, Dad,” I’d argue. “That only happened once. And it wasn’t soup, it was chili.”

  Then Dad would sigh and rub his temples with the tips of his fingers, the way he always did when I disappointed him.

  Eating gross stuff never made me sick or anything, though. So Dr. Shallix said they shouldn’t worry about it. That I’d outgrow it eventually. And yet there I was, more than ten years later, still drawn to clumps of cat litter like a fruit fly to overripe bananas. (That was why we didn’t have a cat anymore.)

  And all the while my social life went right down the toilet. I mean, I was in seventh grade. Chester A. Arthur Middle School. Home of the Fighting Lungfish, Upstate New York’s third-best middle school water polo team. Anyway, at CLAMS—that’s what we called our school for short (I don’t know where the L came from)—if you weren’t popular, you were no one.

  I was no one.

  Will had a theory about why I never got sick. He said he thought all the gross stuff I ate gave me kind of a superhuman immune system. Like my body got so used to dealing with all the germs I was putting in my mouth that a regular old cold virus wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Maybe. It wasn’t a bad theory. I mean, it would explain why I had never had so much as a runny nose in my life. I had never even sneezed before. Not once. Ever.

  But whether or not his theory was right, the fact that I had never experienced what it was like to sneeze made me feel like even more of a freak.

  Just once I wanted to get sick. Nothing terrible. Just a cold. Or maybe the flu. Not only so I could take a day off from school for the first time ever, but so I could know how it felt to be like everybody else, instead of, as usual, some strange kid who never sneezed.

  CHAPTER 5.0:

  < value= [My Weird Doctor Wants to Kill Me] >

  DR. SHALLIX WAS ALREADY WAITING FOR us when we got to his office. He hadn’t bothered to turn on any of the lights in the office, and in the gloom I could see his teeth illuminated by the glow of a streetlight outside. The overall effect was creepy as anything. Even worse than that time I looked in Will’s grandma’s underwear drawer on a dare.

  The doctor flipped the light switch on the wall and a row of fluorescent tubes flickered on overhead.

  That was a bit better. But I was still creeped out.

  Dr. Shallix was a thin man, about sixty years old, with a thick, bristly tuft of white hair sticking up from his oversize head. His big noggin, coarse white hair, and scrawny body reminded me a little of the scrub brush my mom used to clean the toilet. The toilet brush never put an ice-cold stethoscope on my chest or told me to turn my head and cough while touching me you-know-where, though.

  His teeth were a little too big and a little too white, and he was always smiling this huge perma-smile of his. I mean, always. Even though he never really seemed all that happy.

  Dr. Shallix had an accent I could never quite figure out. It might have been German or French, or maybe Russian. Whatever it was, he always spoke in a soft, reassuring way—a little too slowly, ending most of his sentences by asking, “Yes?” as if he thought you were a baby and wanted to make sure you understood everything before moving on to his next point. His voice never actually reassured me, though. More like gave me the willies.

  “Now, Sven.” Dr. Shallix smiled. “Let us take a look at that arm of yours. Mr. Carter, you will stay here in the waiting room, yes?”

  Dad had already settled into a vinyl-upholstered chair and started thumbing through an issue of Overbearing Parent Magazine, so he just nodded distractedly.

  Dr. Shallix led me down the hall toward the examination rooms. Over the years, I had visited each of them at one time or another when I had my annual checkups. They were all decorated for little kids. The first had pictures of kittens and bunnies. The second was plastered with decals of race cars with stupid faces on them. And the third was basically one big mural of a monkey that was either singing or throwing up a bunch of musical notes it had just eaten. We went into that one.

  “Hop up,” Dr. Shallix said, patting the examination table.

  I climbed uncertainly onto the table.

  “Now, you will take off your shirt so we can get a good look at that arm, yes?”

  I hesitated. I hated taking my shirt off in front of people. I had a birthmark on the left side of my chest, just about where I figured my heart was. It looked like a pale red O about the size of my fist. I’d never seen anyone else with one like it. It felt like yet another reminder that I was different from everybody else.

  “Come on, now,” Dr. Shallix chided. “Do not be shy. I am a doctor, yes?”

  I slid my shirt off over my head, wincing as the fabric dragged across my shoulder.

  “Hmm . . . the shoulder always seems to be the weak point,” Dr. Shallix muttered to himself, smiling as he studied my arm. “External regeneration seems within specifications, however.”

  He poked at the raw, red injury with a shiny, pointy metal thing.

  “Ouch!” I gasped.

  Dr. Shallix nodded. “Good.”

  I failed to see what was so good about it.

  He picked up an instrument that looked like an oversize metal hairbrush and held it over my shoulder. It didn’t look like any medical device I’d ever seen before—even on all those real-life emergency room shows that Mom and Dad didn’t like me watching. It beeped a few times and displayed some numbers on a little screen in the handle.

  “Circulatory systems are functioning normally.” He paused to open up a sleek silver laptop and clicked open a window that read S. CARTER—OMICRON PROTOCOL at the top. When he saw me looking at the screen, he angled the laptop away from me and typed a few notes into it. Finally, he closed it up and looked at me again. “Now, Sven, you will tell me what happened, yes?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Telling him I thought I had a detachable arm like some kind of flesh-and-blood LEGO guy would probably get me sent to the loony bin. So I started to make up a more believable story. “Um, you see, there was this kitten stuck in a tree, and I—”

  “The truth would be better,” he remarked matter-of-factly, his teeth glinting. “You can tell me what really happened. After all, I am your doctor, yes?”

  I kept my mouth shut.

  “It is okay, Sven. Whatever you say will just be between us, yes? I simply want to understand what happened so I can be sure you are not . . . seriously damaged. After all, we need you shipshape for your thirteenth birthday. It is just this Saturday, yes?”

  He smiled at me in a way that said he wouldn’t take no for an answer. So I took a deep breath and told him everything.

  When I finished my story, Dr. Shallix stared at me for a few moments, scratching his chin. Finally, he spoke.

  “I think I see what has happened here. You believe you saw your arm amputated. But that is just the trauma talking, yes? The brain plays tricks on us sometimes. The shock, the distress of having an accident, can alter your perceptions. You scraped your shoulder pretty badly, I can see that. But obviously your arm is still attached, yes? You just imagined something else happened. Do you understand this?”

  No. I didn’t understand. There was no way I imagined it. I felt the pain of my arm pulling away from my body. I saw Will holding my arm out like a dead thing. I heard him screaming. Why would Will be screaming if all I’d done was scrape up my shoulder?

  A wave of anger swelled inside me. How dare he tell me that what happened hadn’t happened?

  “You’re wrong!” I spat. “I know what happened! And it wa
sn’t my imagination!”

  “Please, Sven. Be reasonable,” oozed Dr. Shallix in his most soothing voice. “Surely, you must understand what you are telling me is impossible, yes?”

  “I know it’s impossible,” I snapped through gritted teeth. “But it happened anyway.”

  He shook his head. “It is impossible.”

  This was like banging my head against a brick wall. How could I get him to listen to me?

  I remembered Will’s phone.

  “Here!” I cried. “I’ll show you!”

  I pulled the phone out of my back pocket and tried to turn it on. The shattered screen flickered a couple of times and went black. Ugh!

  “I do not understand. You have a nonfunctional telephonic device, yes?” Dr. Shallix said quietly.

  “Yeah,” I replied, “well, this nonfunctional telephonic device recorded the whole thing! My arm came off! You can see it yourself. I mean, you could if the phone was working.”

  Dr. Shallix smiled and tut-tutted me. Then he pried the phone from my hand. “Sven, do you not see you are deceiving yourself into believing this absurd fantasy? That is not good for a growing boy’s psyche, yes?”

  He dropped the phone into a trash can next to the exam table.

  “Hey!” I objected.

  “Now, now. That is the best place for it. The sooner you forget about this delusion, the better off you will be, yes?”

  “Stop telling me it’s a delusion! It’s not a delusion!” I screamed. “You know what? You can just ask my friend, Will. He was there. He saw the whole thing. Just ask him!”

  A grim expression spread across Dr. Shallix’s face for just a moment, and then the smile returned. “Ah, yes. Will. He saw it. Well, then, that changes things.”

  He stroked his chin again, lost in thought for a few seconds.

  “Yes, that changes things. Very unfortunate, yes? I had hoped it would not come to this.”