Nanny X Returns

by Madelyn Rosenberg

  Boris led us back to the Mall side of the Castle. He spotted two people in the distance, running at top speed with a stroller. They stopped running, and Boris’s phone rang. He held it to his ear, but we could still hear it when Nanny X said, “We’ve got her. We’ve got The Angler.”

  18. Jake

  Something’s Bugging Nanny X

  “Got her” was an exaggeration. What Nanny X should have said was that we “possibly almost cornered her.” Or “We see her!” That would have worked.

  Because we did see The Angler. She was still standing on the top step of the Museum of Natural History as the rain fell down around her. And she was studying the screen on what was not a video game, but a remote control, just like I’d guessed.

  At first I thought we should just go up behind and grab her, but we didn’t know if she had any weapons. Plus, she had threatened the president of the United States. And even though she had threatened to destroy things and not people, once you start threatening destruction, it’s probably hard to know when to stop. Nanny X’s computer database—before it got destroyed—hadn’t said “Armed and Dangerous.” It hadn’t mentioned Ursula at all. But there could have been an update.

  “Approach with caution,” Nanny X said, reading my mind. “Watch Eliza, Jake Z.”

  “What are you doing?” I whispered.

  “I will engage.” Nanny X adjusted the brim on her fishing hat. Then she reached into the diaper bag and pulled out a small, flowery umbrella. She popped it open and marched up the museum stairs. She actually marched, like a band was playing “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Because of the rain, the tourists were getting inside as fast as possible. No one was paying attention to us. I guess that’s the best way to be inconspicuous: Conduct your most important operations when it’s raining.

  I know I’m in trouble when my mom calls me by my whole name, Jacob Zachary Pringle. So I wasn’t surprised when Nanny X used Ursula’s whole name, now that we knew it.

  “Ursula Marie Noodleman?” she said.

  The lady looked at us, and I could tell she hadn’t expected anyone to come up with that. She seemed to notice the rain for the first time, too. She took a fishing hat out of her pocket and put it on.

  “I believe,” Nanny X continued, “that you and I share an affinity for fish.”

  “I love fish,” Ursula said. “And other creatures. Bugs, for instance.”

  If Ursula liked bugs, she was in the right place. The top floor of the Museum of Natural History had an insect zoo. But Ursula didn’t seem interested in the exhibit, which was partly sponsored by an exterminating company. It turned out she had brought bugs of her own—beetles. Not that we needed more of them. According to my Freaky Facts book, there are more beetles than any other type of bug in the world.

  Ursula’s beetles were about the size of a half dollar and almost as flat. Some of the shells were green, like emeralds—and like the tiny screw Eliza had found at the art museum. Some were black.

  You might think: What could a bug do? The answer is: a lot. For one thing, it could sneak through a museum door a lot more easily than a squirrel. Plus, beetles can chew.

  Even if they didn’t have brains as big as a squirrel—or a fish—they had Ursula at the controls. They could chomp on a painting, or the Easter Island statue, or the fur on the Neanderthals in the Prehistoric Man exhibit. They could destroy things.

  Nanny X walked up a few more steps so she and Ursula were even. “You’ve brought some visitors to the museum, I see,” she said, nodding at the bugs, which were getting rained on with the rest of us. I thought that was a weird word choice—“visitors”—as if the bugs were going upstairs to hang out with the hissing cockroaches.

  “Just one is exploring the museum at the moment,” said Ursula. “Sometimes one is all it takes.”

  If that was true, I thought, somebody had to find it.

  My brain ping-ponged back and forth. Ping: A bug was already inside. Pong: Ursula was outside. Ping: The bug was small. Pong: It could still go chomp. What if the bug was chomping mummies in the Ancient Egypt exhibit right now?

  I grabbed Eliza and we ran inside to search for that bug. This was where our dad worked. I’ll bet even Nanny X didn’t know the museum as well as we did. I’ll bet Ursula didn’t, either. I tried to guess where the bug would go. What was the most valuable thing in the museum? What was a national treasure?

  So far she’d taken the Warrior of Montauban’s thumb, a painting of George Washington and a pitcher by Paul Revere. But she’d said she was going taller, which meant bigger.

  The museum had lots of big things, starting with the African elephant near the front. We didn’t see the beetle there. We peeked into the marine hall. Nope. Then I thought about the biggest things in the museum: the dinosaurs. They were big in size, plus they were popular.

  I wanted to look at the T. rex, but Eliza toddled over to the triceratops. “Dina-tore,” she said. He wasn’t the tallest dinosaur ever made, but he was taller than me. He was also about thirty feet long.

  I put my hands on the railing and stood next to Eliza. I felt a tickle. Then—ouch—I felt a chomp. A beetle, like the ones we’d seen near Ursula, had bitten my pinky.

  My mother doesn’t like us to kill bugs, except for mosquitoes. Instead, she asks us to “escort them outside.” I picked up the beetle the way you’d pick up a crayfish, holding my fingers behind the pinchy part.

  “Come on, Eliza,” I said.

  We escorted the bug back to Nanny X.

  19. Alison

  Nanny X Learns About Insect Digestion

  I am not afraid of worms, snakes, mice, rats, bats or raw chicken, but bugs have freaked me out ever since Jake told me, during a previous visit to the museum, that there are more than ten quintillion insects in the world at any given time. There were only about twenty bugs outside the museum when we found Nanny X, but they were still disturbing, even though none of them was actually moving. The only bug that was moving so far was the one inside the museum, with my brother and Eliza.

  “You know,” said Stinky, who was probably sorry he’d given me the rain poncho, “with global warming there’s going to be a major increase in the number of insects.”

  More than ten quintillion? But I was not going to run screaming down the stairs in front of Stinky. Yeti looked like he wanted to run, though. He has not liked bugs since his flea problem.

  “The population has already grown,” said a woman who had to be Ursula. She looked at her own bugs—kind of fondly, I thought. Her hair was brown, pulled back in a braid that poked out from underneath her fishing hat, which was like the one Nanny X wore except it was green instead of orange and it didn’t have as many fishhooks in it.

  Ursula hit a button on her remote, and the bugs near her feet began to move. They fanned out in different directions, some going toward the museum and some going away from it.

  Nanny X took her umbrella and pointed it at one of the bugs. The umbrella didn’t fly or talk, like Mary Poppins’s umbrella. Instead, it shot out a blurp of clear liquid, the queen of all raindrops. The blurp hit the bug, which struggled for a minute, like it was dizzy. Then it straightened up and kept walking.

  “Stop,” said Ursula. She was talking to Nanny X, not the bug.

  But Nanny X shot another blurp as the rain continued to fall. “It’s supposed to be sticky,” she said. “It’s supposed to trap them like flypaper.”

  “The rain must be counteracting the stickiness,” Boris said.

  It was hard to believe my special-agent training was coming to this, but I couldn’t think of what else to do. I walked up to the bug nearest to me and stomped on it. Tiny screws and mechanical pieces came spurting out of the side.

  Stinky and Boris went after the bugs, too. So did Howard. Yeti stayed close to Boris but didn’t attack anything. Nanny X reached into her diaper bag and pulled out an industrial-strength nasal aspirator. Nasal aspirators are what you use to suck the snot out of babies’ noses when they are too youn
g to blow properly. Jake called them “booger suckers.” This one had a wide opening at the end, so when Nanny X squeezed the bulb part and let go, it slurped the beetle right inside.

  “You are destroying my art,” Ursula said.

  “What about you?” said Nanny X as she sucked up another bug, and then another and another. “What have you destroyed?”

  My brother came out of the museum then with my sister. In his hand he was holding a small black beetle. He ran down the steps and stood next to me and Stinky. Boris and Yeti and Nanny X came over to us, too. So did Howard.

  We fanned out on the same step, side by side, like a team. Ursula had one last beetle near her foot. She reached down to catch it—and save it—and when she did, Nanny X lunged.

  She twisted Ursula’s arm behind her back and handcuffed her with a teething ring. She attached the other cuff around her own wrist.

  “Art is about creating,” said Nanny X. “Not destroying.” She pulled out her diaper phone and pressed a button. “X, reporting in,” she said. “We’ve got her.”

  I’d heard that before. But this time it was true. We’d caught The Angler, squished a bunch of bugs and saved a lot of national treasures from destruction. We hadn’t saved all of them, though. I didn’t know what NAP would have to say about that. Would we get another case after this one?

  “You know,” Jake told Urusla as the rain eased up and the sun started to look out on us again, “I thought your fish sculpture was very realistic. And your squirrel is totally tundra.” Leave it to my brother to be polite to a criminal. He was right, though.

  “You mean you think I’m good?” Ursula said. She didn’t mean “good person,” which was in question at the moment. She meant “good at art.”

  “Yes,” said Jake.

  “Yes,” Stinky and I agreed.

  Jake frowned. “I’m not so sure about your poetry, though,” he said. “Plus, you said you were going after something tall. None of the national treasures you picked was really very tall.”

  Ursula froze, her eyes wide. “But I did try to destroy a tall thing,” she said. “Washington, D.C.’s tallest lawn ornament. It was the obvious choice.”

  We all looked down the Mall and saw it towering in the distance. The Washington Monument. Of course.

  “It looks okay from here,” I said.

  Nanny X pulled out her baby-powder spyglass. She turned the dial. Then she turned it again, three more times. She looked at Ursula. “Hand me that remote,” she said.

  “They don’t work with my remote,” Ursula said. “They’re automated. They just chew.”

  Nanny X ran to the curb at Nanny X speed. She whistled for a pedicab, but none came. I guess they didn’t like the weather. Then she spied a row of Segways leaning against the wall. The owners must have gone somewhere to get out of the rain, which had now stopped completely.

  “Mergenthee,” said Eliza.

  “Emergency,” agreed Nanny X. She pulled a card out of her bag and handed it to Boris. “Congratulations!” it said. “Your __________ has been borrowed by a Top Secret Government Agency. It will be returned immediately after __________. Thank you for your cooperation.”

  Boris took a pencil out of his pocket and filled in the blanks: Segway/We save the Washington Monument. He attached the card to the wall above the Segways.

  Nanny X unhooked Ursula’s handcuffs. She handed her the helmet that was hanging from the handlebars. “Climb on.”

  “Us too?” I said.

  “You too.” Nanny X bent down and slid on her bunny slippers. They were still miraculously fuzzy, even after the rain and a day on the streets of D.C.

  Boris gave us a Segway lesson. “Lean forward to go. Pull back to stop—but not too far back or you’ll go in reverse. And don’t let go of the handlebars.”

  “Got it!” yelled Jake.

  “Got it,” I said. I fastened my helmet and mounted my Segway, which I was way too young to drive unless the nation’s most famous obelisk was in peril. I leaned forward. The wheels began to roll. I rolled, too, slow and shaky at first, but then straighter and faster as we followed our nanny to the Washington Monument. Ursula leaned right near Fourteenth Street and her Segway turned. Wait. That wasn’t the way to the monument!

  I’d been working on my whistling, which seemed like an important special-agent skill, so I puckered and made a sharp tweeting sound. Then more whistles joined mine. Jake and Stinky had been practicing, too. Nanny X skated back. She gave me Eliza’s stroller as she and Boris made a fast turn. Yeti went with them, barking up a storm because, like I said, he’s the best dog in the world. In seconds they returned with Ursula between them.

  “I had to try,” Ursula said.

  We got back in our single-file line, with Nanny X and Eliza leading the way again. Then came Jake and me and then Stinky and Ursula. Boris was last, keeping an eye on all of us. He rang his bell as we passed pedestrians with the wind in our hair and a nasal aspirator full of destructive beetles in Nanny X’s diaper bag.

  20. Jake

  Nanny X Goes Rock Climbing

  Here are some facts about the Washington Monument: It is 555 feet high and it is made mostly out of marble. That means that most bugs leave it alone. Ursula’s bugs were different. “They have small digestive systems,” she said. “I’m sure they won’t eat much.”

  But small cracks from an earthquake shut down the monument for a long time. Sometimes a little damage was all it took. Besides, Ursula’s beetles (plus a squirrel) had eaten an entire portrait of George Washington and half of a pitcher by Paul Revere. They could do more than a little damage. They might even be able to topple the whole thing!

  Howard put his hand on the cold marble and tried to climb. But there were no nooks to hold on to.

  Nanny X tipped back her head and looked up. The bugs were walking around as though they owned the place. She plunged her hand into the diaper bag and pulled out two pairs of earrings with little pink balls on them. She clipped one pair to her ears and handed the other to Boris.

  “We can keep in touch through these,” she said.

  Next she grabbed a tube of Boffo’s Baby Butt Cream, which is not Eliza’s usual brand for diaper rash. Nanny X squeezed some into each hand. She smeared some onto the bottom of her shoes, which had replaced the bunny slippers again.

  She reached up with her right hand and touched the marble wall. Her hand stuck there, as if it were attached by suction. She reached up with her left hand. Slowly our nanny made her way up the side of the Washington Monument, just like a superhero.

  “Be good to my bugs,” Ursula called.

  Nanny X reached the first beetle at about twenty feet up. Shhhllllurp. She sucked it into the nasal aspirator.

  The next beetle was higher, and Nanny X kept climbing. We took turns watching through the spyglass. Ali took some pictures with Nanny X’s diaper phone, to send to NAP. There was no way they would think she wasn’t in special-agent condition now. Unless she fell.

  Shhhllurp. Another bug went into the aspirator.

  We could feel a crowd gathering around us. The flags that surrounded the monument whipped and fluttered as two park rangers came up behind us. “What’s she doing?” one of them said.

  “She can’t do that,” said the other.

  “Yes,” Boris said, “she can. She’s with NAP.”

  He spoke into one of the earrings, which he’d fastened to his shirt collar. “X, are you okay?” he said. “Can you read me?”

  “Loud and clear,” said our nanny.

  And that’s when my brand-new powers of observation spotted something through the spyglass: One beetle, faster than the rest, had made it more than halfway up the monument. Nanny X would have to climb a long way to get it.

  I passed the glass to Ali, whose powers of observation are better than mine, and she spotted something else: a small hole in the side of the aspirator. The beetles were eating their way through.

  “Boris to X. We have a problem. Two problems. Do you read?
”

  “I read,” said Nanny X. “What problems?”

  He told her.

  “If I get you the aspirator, can you plug the hole?” asked Nanny X.

  “I think so,” Boris said. “I’m coming up.”

  “I’ve got this,” said Nanny X. “Watch Ursula and the children. Send Howard for the beetles.”

  In no time, Howard had butt cream on his hands and feet. He climbed straight to Nanny X. He was a much faster climber than she was. His body didn’t shake. He grabbed the nasal aspirator in his mouth and climbed back down to us. He put the aspirator on the ground near Boris’s feet.

  Stinky grabbed Nanny X’s flowered umbrella, and was about to use it to squirt some goop inside the nasal aspirator.

  “Wait!” Ursula said. “Don’t destroy them. Please.”

  She pointed to her bag, which wasn’t half as big as Nanny X’s. Boris had taken charge of it, in case there were weapons inside. He reached in and pulled out a metal box.

  “Won’t they just eat through it?” I asked.

  “The inside is curved,” Ursula said. “They can’t grab it with their teeth.”

  I figured the bugs were going to be taken away as evidence, so her artwork would be locked up for a while, but I guess that was easier than seeing them squished or covered in goop. Boris squeezed the bugs out of the aspirator and into the box. He slammed the lid down. Ursula wrapped the box with a chain and locked it. It shook a little, but she was right; they couldn’t escape.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Or course,” Boris said. He handed the box to Stinky.

  “Guard these,” he added. Then he attached the teething ring hand cuff to Ursula’s wrist. He attached the other half to the Segway, which was leaning against the flagpole.

  Above us, the last bug was still free. Nanny X was still climbing. She was so high now that she looked like a bug herself.