Toshi’s mouth hit the floor. “What in the name…”
Decked out in a tutu and ballet slippers, Princess Petulance did a perfectly executed arabesque, upside down, hanging from the chandelier.
Tula rushed over to the CD player floating above the couch and turned it off. “You are not allowed to dance on this planet. My clients have not been evicted yet.”
Petulance leaped down to the ground and glowered. “Shut up, Miss Goodie-Goodie.”
“I’ll get a temporary restraining order,” Tula warned.
“OK, OK. If Giles wants us to leave we’ll leave.” The princess sauntered up to me with a flirty grin on her face. “Come on, Giles. How is one little ballet class going to hurt?”
“OK,” I said. “You can do one class. Then you have to leave.”
Tula yanked me off into a corner. “Why are you giving in to her?”
“It’s like you said, Tula. Kindness first.”
“That doesn’t apply to her.”
“You said it applies to everyone. Especially your enemies.”
I didn’t do it out of kindness. I did to make Tula jealous, to get back at her for allowing Buck to pound on me. I had another motive too. I didn’t trust Princess Petulance. I knew she was plotting something. But what? If I hung out with her I might be able to figure it out. I might discover her weaknesses.
I didn’t tell Tula that. I wanted her to be angry and jealous.
“Fine,” she said. “I’m due back in court. Go waste your time, Giles. You have nothing more important to do.”
“The test doesn’t start till Saturday. What’s the big rush?” I asked. “I always study the night before.”
“You haven’t finished building your team. But is that a priority? No. You’d rather hang out and play games.” Tula sadly shook her head. “Unbelievable.” She pressed the button on her briefcase and disappeared.
She did have a point there. I had to select the final member of my team. Bobby or Navida? I was still leaning toward Navida.
She and I were sort of a team already. We called ourselves the UNLs, the Urban Nature Lovers. Navida got the idea from her mom, who was a famous environmental lawyer. Navida learned so much from her mother she was practically a lawyer herself. That could be invaluable. If Tula was busy on another case, maybe Navida could handle the legal aspects. Best of all, Navida didn’t rub being smart in your face. Not like Bobby.
There it was. Navida was the one.
I called her. She didn’t pick up. I left a message on her voice mail. “Hi, Navida. It’s me, Giles. I’ve got some big news. I mean really big news. Call me immediately. No, call me way before immediately. Call me half an hour before immediately. That’s how important this is.”
The ballet teacher was a huge floating creature, part robot, part moose. She was a flying refrigerator with antlers. Judging from the vile look on her face, I bet she had an aunt or an uncle who was a dragon. She roared at one her students, “How many times have I told you, Nancy? Don’t eat the ballet bar.”
Nancy was a shy, termite-like girl. “I’m sorry, Teacher,” she mumbled, her buck teeth covered with splinters.
Toshi stared in horror at the pile of sawdust on the floor. “My mom’s going to kill me.”
He forgot all about that when the princess batted her eyelashes at him. “Please take ballet with us, Toshi.”
This concerned me. I didn’t want Toshi getting chummy with the princess.
“Listen, dude,” I murmured in his ear. “I know you don’t believe everything I’ve told you. But that purple girl is not to be trusted. Do you understand?”
“Got it,” he said.
The ballet teacher hovered grumpily over a pair of legs propped up against the wall. “Whose legs are these?”
One of the alien girls raised her hand. “Mine, Teacher.”
“How can you do ballet without any legs?”
“I’ll use my tentacles.”
“You most certainly will not,” insisted the teacher. “Tentacles are only allowed in aqua ballet.”
The girl put her legs back on and joined the rest of the dancers, who had gathered over on the right side of the room to go across the floor. Across the floor is an exercise in which everyone dances from one end of the room to the other. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not some geeky ballet expert, but when your best friend does it all the time you pick up the terminology.
“Whomever does a pirouette incorrectly will be eaten,” the teacher announced. “Toshi, you go first.”
Toshi turned in terror to the termite girl. “You can go ahead of me if you want, Nancy.”
“No way,” Nancy replied.
Toshi couldn’t stop shaking. “Teacher, I … I have to use the bathroom.”
“Do your pirouette first.”
Toshi did a pirouette.
“Well done, Toshi,” said the teacher.
Toshi almost fainted with relief.
My cell phone rang. It was Navida. I popped into the kitchen to be alone.
“Hi, Navida.”
“What’s your big news, Giles?”
“Here’s the scoop, Navida. We humans…” Once I told her I could never tell Bobby.
Standing by the toaster oven, the strangest thing happened. I suffered a bizarre case of amnesia. I forgot about all the annoying stuff my brother’s ever done to me and only remembered the good things, like the time he rescued me in the elevator. We were down in Miami, on vacation with my parents.
I snuck down to the hotel lobby in the middle of the night to get a Snickers bar from the candy machine. The elevator got stuck on the way back. Elevators don’t work down in Florida like they do in New York. You never hear of people getting trapped in elevators in New York. We know how to make elevators. Our elevators are as good as our pizza. But anyway, I got trapped. To make matters worse, the alarm button didn’t work. I was stuck in there for six hours.
No one could figure out where I was. They thought I’d been kidnapped. None of the adults even noticed an out-of-order elevator because the hotel had, like, twenty elevators. But Bobby noticed. He had a hunch I was trapped inside it and called the fire department.
What if I got trapped in a dungeon on the moon in the middle of the quest? I might need my brother. He’d be so grateful I made him part of the team he’d never tease me again.
The sound of Navida’s voice snapped me out of my daze. “Giles, what’s your big news?”
“Navida, I have to call you back.” I hung up, determined to make my brother a part of the team.
Five seconds later, something unfortunate happened. I got a text message from Bobby. It said:
Dear Moron, I saw your book title on the dining room table. You Can’t Have My Planet, But Take My Brother, Please.
Oh no. I left it there by mistake.
Here’s what the rest of Bobby’s text message said:
It was just a title page because a pea brain like yours couldn’t possibly write a book. But if by some miracle you ever did write one and insulted me on the cover, then I would have to exterminate you. After three or four months of torture. Yours truly, the Ultimate Genius.
My amnesia ended. I vowed never to tell that egomaniac about the quest. But I was way too embarrassed to call Navida back.
I trudged back out onto the dance floor.
Petulance was in the middle of a pirouette. She leaped so high she banged her head on the chandelier.
The teacher growled, “Young lady, come over here.”
“Do I have to, Teacher?” asked the princess.
“You most certainly do.”
“I hate getting eaten by the teacher,” muttered the princess.
“You mean you’ve been eaten before?” asked Toshi.
“Dozens of times. She spits me out at the end of class. My tutu gets covered with gunk. How am I supposed to look good with gunk all over my tutu?”
Dragging her feet, she walked over and got gobbled up by the teacher.
“All right now,
class,” said the teacher. “Let’s work on our leaps.”
Toshi screwed up on a cabriole and got eaten. I had a feeling he did it on purpose. Right before getting swallowed, he winked at me and said, “Later, Dude.”
“Toshi, no,” I yelled. “It’s a trap.”
Too late. He was gone. Petulance lured him to his death.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IF A KID GOT MUNCHED ON could I replace him with a new team member? Was I allowed to tell a fourth child about the quest? It didn’t matter now. My best friend got gobbled like a candy bar because of me. I never should’ve let the aliens do ballet. I should’ve stayed focused on the quest but I got distracted. I was allergic to concentrating. Just ask my teachers.
A minute later I got a text message. It was Toshi. For a second I thought they had cell phones in heaven. But the message said:
Hey, Giles, guess what? I’m texting you from inside the teacher’s belly.
That was probably the weirdest place I ever got a text message from.
We’re playing video games, Giles. There’s a room in here. With a couch.
I shot him a text back.
It must be like Tula’s briefcase, Toshi. She has an office in there.
At the end of class the teacher spat them both out.
“That was the funnest dance class ever,” Toshi told me. “Aliens are cool. I hope they take over Earth.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you saw the Kundabons, Toshi,” I said.
“Dude,” he said, “open your eyes. Aliens are hipper than half the humans I know.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “Dance class is over.”
I got the teacher, the termite girl and the other dancers to leave. Only Princess Petulance remained. She wouldn’t stop flirting with Toshi, and Toshi wasn’t used to having cute girls flirt with him. The tattoo pirate dived off her shoulder into the palm of his hand and clipped Toshi’s fingernails with his dagger. Toshi was spellbound. It made me squirm inside, especially when she said she had a secret to share with him and pulled him into the kitchen to keep me from hearing. I tried to follow them, but two alien guys appeared out of nowhere, blocking the door. They called themselves the GPPs, the Groupies of Princess Petulance.
The first guy was covered with cartoons and horror movies. It looked as if someone had peeled off his skin and replaced it with a some futuristic TV screen, something far beyond human technology, a screen that could bend and stretch like normal skin. A TV you could wear! A pair of surfer shorts was all he had on besides the TV, and each part of his body was playing a different show. A cartoon about a pot-bellied robot played on his shaved head.
This guy’s name was Cable.
“I had a crush on the princess,” he told me, lingering in front of the kitchen door so I couldn’t get through. “She wouldn’t give me the time of day. She said TV was only her love. So I had cinematic plastic surgery.”
“Did it make any difference?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “but at least she made me a groupie.”
I hoped I didn’t have to have cartoons on my nose to get Tula to kiss me.
The other goon had a head and a tail but no body. His name was Heads-or-Tails. The head resembled a wild boar’s, with long gnarly steel tusks connected to a curly pink pig’s tail. He bounced on the tail like a pogo stick.
“What happened to your body?” I asked.
“I had a weight problem,” he said. “So I decided to have it removed.”
“Did it work?” I asked.
“Heck, yeah. I lost nine hundred pounds in five minutes.”
Heads-or-Tails looked foolish but there was something cunning about him, as if the pogo stick was merely an act to get you to put your guard down. He reminded me of one of those court jesters from the days of Henry VIII, a court jester clutching a dagger behind his back.
Meanwhile, I was dying to know what was happening in the kitchen. Toshi was still in there with Petulance and I couldn’t get past these gays.
Suddenly, the princess marched out of the kitchen with Toshi by her side. She scowled at her two groupies. “What are you idiots doing? You’re supposed to be worshipping me.”
They fell to their knees in front of her.
Toshi jerked me into the kitchen and shut the door. “Hey, Giles, check this out. The princess said you and I won’t have to go to Desoleen with the rest of the humans.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“We get to stay here.”
“Tula never said anything about that.”
“That’s because your lawyer’s an idiot,” Toshi said. He grinned. “We kids will run the planet. I get Asia. You get Australia.”
“Dude, what are you talking about?”
“Princess Petulance is giving you Australia, Giles.”
“Are you serious?” I said.
“I am totally serious. All we have to do is fail the test.”
The princess joined us in the kitchen. “Giles, I’m making you Prince of the Land Down Under.”
I was speechless.
Would Bobby ever be jealous.
Like the Halls of Universal Justice, my palace would be filled with birds, rainbow lorikeets and jabirus sailing past my throne. Kangaroos with razor-studded boxing gloves would guard the entrance to my royal chamber.
Petulance was giving me an entire continent. How can you possibly say, “No, that’s OK. I don’t need a continent. I’d rather clean up the trash. Give it to someone else.”
(Hey, reader, would you turn down a continent? Sure you would. Like I really believe you. I’m serious. I totally believe you. You don’t need a continent. You’ll take a new smart phone but not a continent. That sounds perfectly rational to me. I’m glad I got your input on this matter. It was really helpful.)
“Hey, Princess,” I said, “can my grandmother stay on Earth with me?”
She chuckled cruelly. “You’re a prince now. Princes don’t whine for their grandmothers. They chop off heads and plunder neighboring kingdoms.”
“What about my mom and dad?” I asked.
“No adults,” the princess proclaimed.
“Well, at least my little sister, Nikki. She can stay, can’t she? She can play the violin.”
“I detest the violin,” said the princess.
What good was a kingdom without my family?
“You guys are right,” I said. “Who needs them?”
I didn’t want them knowing I wasn’t on their side. Suddenly I knew it was all a lie. If Petulance did let us stay on Earth, Toshi and I would end up being her slaves.
“I’ll be right back, you guys,” I said. “I have a map of Australia in my bedroom. I need to go get it. I want to study my kingdom.”
They fell for it and let me leave the apartment.
I took the stairs, since I didn’t feel like bumping into Buck in the elevator again. Tula was waiting for me in between the twenty-first and twenty-second floors.
“Tula, we’ve got a big problem. The princess turned Toshi into a groupie.”
“I warned you. But would you listen to me?”
Someone was coming up the stairs.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go to my apartment before someone sees you. Grandma’s gone.”
We raced up to the penthouse. When we were almost at the top floor I froze. I heard Buck grunting. I opened the stairway door a crack. He was changing a lightbulb in the hallway.
“Buck’s out there,” I whispered.
“If he tries to pull anything, whack him with my briefcase,” Tula said. “But don’t hit him in the head. Do you promise, Giles?”
“I promise.”
She dived into the briefcase. I grabbed it by the handle, whistling cheerfully. This was going to be so much fun.
“Hi, Buck,” I said.
He climbed down off the stepladder.
“Nice briefcase,” he said.
Before I could nail him with it, he snatched it out of my hand.
“Give it
back.”
He knocked me down with the stepladder and disappeared into the elevator.
“Great,” I said. “Not only is Toshi a groupie, now Buck’s got Tula.”
My team keeps getting smaller and smaller.
CHAPTER TWELVE
WITH NIKKI BY my side urging me on, I lingered outside Bobby’s bedroom, fidgeting, getting ready to knock on the door. There was no way around it. I needed his help to get the briefcase back from Buck. Grandma was still seeing the hypnotist. And Tula was unusually powerless.
I sent her a text message a couple of minutes ago. Here’s what I said:
Tula, maybe you should turn Buck into an insect so he won’t tell anyone he saw an alien.
And she wrote back:
Giles, I’m the one who feels like a bug in a jar. I’m trapped inside this briefcase.
I texted right back:
How can you be trapped?
This was her depressing text:
The briefcase is a living organism, Giles. It feeds on positive energy like love and kindness. Buck has it in his possession. He is extremely negative, full of bitterness and rage. Those dark forces have neutralized its powers. Basically my briefcase has shut down.
Her cell phone must’ve shut down too because I couldn’t reach her anymore. I had no idea what to do. Bobby would figure out something. I had to tell him everything. It was time. I knocked on his door. There’s a sack in your soul that’s made for storing secrets. My sack was fuller than a backpack crammed with every book in your locker. I was tired of lugging it around.
I knocked on his bedroom door again.
“Come in,” he said.
Nikki and I entered.
He was sitting at his desk, typing on his computer.
“Bobby, I’ve got a big problem,” I said.
“So do I,” he said without looking up. “You.”
“Bobby, listen to him,” Nikki pleaded.
“OK, OK.” He put his laptop to sleep. “What’s your problem?”
“Buck stole my briefcase,” I said.
“What briefcase?”
“The one my alien lawyer gave to me.”
“Your alien lawyer?” Bobby said.
“Her name is Tula,” Nikki said. “She looks like the sky, but without helicopters.”
You Can't Have My Planet Page 8
