How to Properly Dispose of Planet Earth

by Paul Noth

  It spoke—an earsplitting blare.

  I couldn’t understand most of it, but I did pick out the words “surrender, Happy.”

  I turned and sprinted away. But after only a few strides, I tripped over a tuba Alice must have stolen out of the music room.

  Falling, I rolled under a grand piano and across a pile of sheet music.

  Peeking out from the other side of the piano, I looked up at a tree-size crystal spike falling straight toward my face.

  I dove away, down an embankment of textbooks. Mid-dive, upside down, I saw the spiked arm of the giant creature plunge into the piano.

  But instead of smashing the keyboard into matchsticks, the spike punctured the surface of space-time.

  A bursting white light blasted the creature off its feet and into the air, where it got sucked into a black dot at the center of everything.

  This dot, I knew, was the micro black hole itself—somehow made visible … and growing larger.

  The entire Doorganizer shifted and seemed to deflate.

  I grabbed hold of a desk leg and clung to it like it was a life preserver.

  White light fizzled from the puncture wound over the piano. Then something small popped through it. An arm. A kid’s arm. A girl’s arm. Then a shoulder. Then a head with long, flowing, wavy brown hair.

  Nev Everly looked around in astonishment.

  Her eyes landed on me.

  “Grab on to something!” I yelled.

  Nev grabbed the underside of the piano just as the rest of her came flipping in from the outer world. Her school chair rolled in after her, followed by her desk, which ripped the white opening wider.

  All at once a crowd of kids, chairs, and tables tumbled in. Dana Mosley, a teacher’s desk, Jake Harrison, Mr. Stanley, Doug Melman, a door, and Davina Tyler whirled off toward the growing central black dot.

  After them, a full blast of kids and school poured in.

  Broken floorboards, a wall of lockers, a clock reading 11:15, fluorescent light fixtures still attached to chunks of the ceiling. Everything rushed behind Nev like a passing freight train. Brick walls, whole classrooms, cars, and trees. Tumbling school buses. All ripping it open even wider.

  Nev, clinging to the edge of the piano, dangled at the cusp of a growing chasm where whole houses, highways, and buildings fell churning in massive dust clouds. Then entire forests, mountains, cities, roaring seas, the bulging Earth itself pushed in and funneled toward the central, growing black hole.

  “Nev,” I said, reaching my hand toward her.

  “Happy!” she shouted back.

  I stretched out my fingers.

  I felt something crawling on my shoulder. Squeep! scurried up my arm and onto my hand. Looping his body, he spun counterclockwise. As time reversed at hyperspeed, Squeep! bit down onto the tip of his tail.

  “Nev,” I said.

  “Yes?” said the girl seated next to me in homeroom.

  “Norton, Andre,” said Ms. York, still calling the attendance roll.

  “Here,” said Andre.

  “Nowlan, Philip,” said Ms. York.

  Everyone sat at his or her desk. The Earth was still here, unharmed, uncrushed. The kids, the desks, the classroom, the planet, Ms. York, me, Nev.

  She stared at me, because I had just said her name aloud.

  “What?” she said. “What is it?”

  “Uh …”

  CHAPTER 13

  THE TORN PAPER

  “Uh …,” I said, feeling a wave of euphoria.

  We were all alive!

  “What?” said Nev, smiling now, because I was smiling.

  “Uh,” I said. “Can I borrow a pencil?”

  “Oh … sure,” she said, lifting up a shoulder bag the same color as her watch band. “Do you need it just right now or for the whole day?”

  “Just for right now,” I said, glancing into my own backpack.

  Squeep! wasn’t in there anymore.

  “Here you go,” said Nev.

  I took the pencil from her and stared down at it blankly, still trying to figure out what had just happened. I had watched the entire Earth destroyed in front of me, but now it was all back. As real as this pencil, which seemed like the most real thing I’d ever held in my hand. A Ticonderoga. The sort of pencil that smells like the forest.

  “Thank you,” I said to Nev, and also to the universe. I felt the idiotic smile still smeared across my face, but I didn’t care. We were alive!

  “No problem,” said Nev. “Your name’s Happy, right? … Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” I said, grinning at her. Why had I ever felt afraid to talk to this girl? There were scary things out there, but she wasn’t one of them.

  “Are you in the school play or something?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t even know about it.”

  “Then why are you made up like that?” she said.

  “Made up?” I said.

  “You’re wearing stage makeup,” she said, “to look like you have a five-o’clock shadow.”

  I touched the stubble on my grinning face.

  “Oh this,” I said. “It’s not makeup. I just forgot to shave this morning.”

  “Oh, yeah right,” she said. “Don’t even try to tell me that’s real.”

  “Sure it’s real,” I said. “I have a beard.”

  “What? Shut up.” She laughed.

  “Ask anyone,” I said, grinning. “They all used to call me Beard Boy and do the Make-Beard-Boy-Cry Dance.”

  She burst out laughing, and so did I.

  Would this have embarrassed me before? Now it seemed like the funniest thing in the world.

  “Wait, wait,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “This is a joke you play on people. There’s no way you already shave every day.”

  “I shave three times a day,” I said. “And if I don’t, I end up looking like the world’s smallest hillbilly.”

  She laughed again, throwing her head back. Her laugh was ridiculous. A he-he from the back of her throat that made me laugh too.

  I remembered now how I had wanted to make her laugh, and why.

  “Do you have a lab partner in science yet?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Do you want to be my lab partner?”

  “Sure. We can do our project on why you lie about having a beard.”

  I shrugged, smiling. I figured she had taken it all as a joke, but that was okay. Being lab partners with her didn’t seem like such a big important deal anymore.

  “How do I text you?” she asked.

  “I don’t have my own phone,” I said. “But you can email me.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  I pulled a piece of paper from my pocket and tore it in half.

  We both wrote our emails with her Ticonderoga pencil.

  Nev joined the kids getting up to go.

  “See you later,” she said.

  I nodded.

  I didn’t want to leave until I had found Squeep!

  He wasn’t in my backpack, but I saw he had left a doodad behind for me there. A nacho chip … the exact same nacho chip from before.

  I looked down at the piece of paper, where Nev had written her email.

  I unfolded it. On the other side, I saw half of the image of Grandma and me, with all the different languages, that I had taken from …

  It had all been real. And yet, somehow, none of it had happened.

  As I puzzled over this in the emptying classroom, a small girl in a yellow headband came tearing in. Kayla, of all people.

  Out of breath, she had clearly sprinted here from the elementary school, though her skin wasn’t flushed. Her face looked as white as fresh mozzarella, and her glossy eyes spilled tears.

  “Hap!” she said, panting. “Oh my God, it’s so awful! I couldn’t see it before … I wasn’t looking on Earth. I was looking in space, way in the future. But it happens here! Right here. In the present. Today! Really soon. Oh no … I can’t even say i
t!”

  “A black hole,” I said. “A black hole opens up.”

  She looked astonished.

  “How do you know?” she said.

  “I just watched it happen,” I said. “I might … I might have caused it.”

  PART 2

  THE BLACK HOLE

  CHAPTER 14

  BLIND SPOT

  I showed Kayla the ripped flyer, hoping she would attach to it and follow it back a few minutes to witness the catastrophe for herself.

  “I can’t see into that place,” she reminded me.

  “Oh, right,” I said.

  To Kayla and Alphonso, any event in the Doorganizer happened in an enormous blind spot.

  So I told her. I described the crazy lights, the jagged hole into a futuristic world, and the owl-headed crystal monster. How it yelled my name and the word “surrender” before stabbing the piano. I told her about the explosion of white light and the growing black hole pulling everything in—the classroom, the school, our town, what seemed like the whole world.

  “Then everything spun backward,” I said, “really fast, for an instant, and then … none of it had happened. I was back in class. I felt sure it had all been a hallucination. I still feel certain that none of it happened.”

  “None of it has happened yet,” said Kayla. “You were two hours and thirty-seven minutes in the future. At 11:15 this morning a black hole will open up right here. Dead smack in the center of your school.”

  “Well, we gotta DO something!” I said, a high-pitched trill creeping into my voice. “We gotta pull the fire alarm and evacuate the school or—”

  “It’s a black hole, Hap,” said Kayla. “Where are we going to evacuate to, Alpha Centauri? … Okay, take a breath. You’re on the verge of going into shock. Take a deep breath.”

  I did. And a clearer thought struck me.

  “Squeep!” I said. “We need to find Squeep! He’s been trying to tell me something for days. It must be about this.”

  “Is Squeep! the portal?” asked Kayla.

  “Dad says he can’t be,” I said. “But he goes in and out whenever he wants. Also, when I ask Squeep! where the Doorganizer is, he gives me this.”

  I handed Kayla the nacho chip. She stared at it, her face quivering.

  Then she groaned in frustration.

  “If I could only see into that place,” she said. “Okay, we need Squeep! Where do you usually find him?”

  “I can never find him!” I said. “He always finds me.”

  “Right,” she said. “Where does he expect you to be right now?”

  “Heading to my first-hour class,” I said. “Science.”

  “So let’s get over there,” she said, but then clamped down on my arm so hard it hurt. “No, wait! Somebody else is looking for Squeep! too.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Alice. I tried to tell you that earlier, but you—”

  “We can’t let her catch him,” said Kayla. “We can’t let her catch you especially! Okay … Hap, you stand right there, on that spot …”

  Uh-oh, I thought. It was never a good sign when Kayla started giving me step-by-step choreography.

  “Wait right there until you hear the desk break, then run for that door and go straight to your next class. Stay wherever Squeep! would expect you to be, so he can find you. He’s afraid of Alice, so steer clear of her.”

  “Desk break?” I said.

  “Yes, then run out that door.”

  She pointed to the exit at the front of the class but stared toward the other door at the rear. Alice and Dimitrius came walking through.

  “Kayla!” said Alice, glaring. “What are you doing here? Are you in on this with him? Are you stealing from me too?”

  “No, Alice,” I said. “You’ve got to listen to us! Something really bad is about to—”

  “Don’t bother, Hap,” said Kayla. “She’s back in her obsessive mania. Nothing we say will make any difference. She won’t even hear us.”

  “You’re the one with the mania!” yelled Alice. “You’re the ones trying to steal from me!”

  “Should I grab them both?” said Dimitrius, striding toward us between a row of desks.

  “Yes,” said Alice. “But watch out for her.”

  “Watch out for her?” laughed Dimitrius.

  Then his expression changed as Kayla glided upward, stepping lightly off a chair, to run across the desktops straight toward him.

  “Careful,” said Alice as Kayla hurtled closer. “Watch her …”

  Dimitrius shot out an arm the length of Kayla’s whole body to grab her. As his fingertips touched her shirt, she twirled sideways, landing atop the next row while Dimitrius, overreaching his balance, fell gut-first onto a desk, which shrieked out CRAAAAANCH! as it collapsed, cracking like a nut between his body and the floor.

  A desk breaking. That meant I should do something.

  Kayla and Alice glared at each other over the wreck of Dimitrius.

  Run, I remembered.

  Turning on my heels, I dashed out into the hallway.

  CHAPTER 15

  LIKE AN ARROW

  Running, I carried this light, slithery feeling in my stomach.

  My science class wasn’t far, only a ways around the next corner.

  Had the first-hour bell rung yet? Glancing up at a hallway clock, I saw I still had about fifty seconds.

  The sight of the clock made the slithering in my stomach lurch. I had just seen it, this clock, along with part of the wall and a hunk of the ceiling, fly past me inside the Doorganizer. My mind’s eye recalled now the full, vivid, stinging picture. The clock whirled within a mess of papers, books, and students—its face, caught at 11:15, beside a kid’s face frozen in astonishment as he watched his ripping brown lunch bag eject its contents.

  A crazy old joke, “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana,” escaped from some asylum in my mind to run madly through my thoughts.

  “Stop it!” I yelled silently. “Do not go crazy. You can still prevent this from ever happening.”

  Where was Squeep! now that I needed him?

  Wait, was that really our big plan? How was Squeep! supposed to stop a black hole? What was he going to do, hand it a nacho chip?

  But the nacho chip must have meant something, like “seashell” meant “Doorganizer.” Squeep!’s doodads had been warnings, or maybe instructions. I still had some in the side pocket of my backpack and the Doodad Decoder in my notebook. Maybe Squeep! had already given me the whole solution, if I could be smart enough and stay sane enough to understand it.

  The first-hour bell rang.

  Time flies like an arrow. Walking into the classroom, I saw kids still milling about—several the same ones I’d seen sucked into the black hole minutes earlier, or hours later, depending on how you looked at it. Fruit flies like a banana.

  Willow Johansen stood with Lacy and Paisley, the two little friends who followed her around laughing at her jokes and doing whatever she told them to. These three girls had so ridiculed and bad-mouthed me over the years that I normally found the sight of them slightly disgusting.

  But now everything looked different.

  Willow, Lacy, and Paisley weren’t repulsive little brats. They were unique, extraordinary, and precious little brats, who had as much a right as anyone to not be vaporized into a black hole before gym class.

  Nearing them, I noticed Willow cradling something green in her hands, while Lacy and Paisley giggled. When I realized what Willow held, I almost screamed.

  “You found him,” I said, reaching out for Squeep! “You found my lizard.”

  “Get away,” said Willow, pulling back from me. “He’s not yours.”

  Before I could contradict her, I realized that she was right. This wasn’t Squeep! Though the same type of lizard, this one looked more … bloated.

  “He’s my lab partner’s,” said Willow.

  “Lab partner?” I said.

  “Actually, Conklin,” said a voice, “that’s me.
What did he actually do, Willow?”

  Felix strolled up and stood beside her.

  “He tried to grab the Mighty Thor,” said Willow. “He said that it was his lizard.”

  “Holy crow, Conklin,” said Felix. “Are you actually crazy? What is it with you and lizards, anyway?”

  “Time flies like an arrow,” I said, accidentally out loud.

  “Huh?” Willow laughed. “Have you flipped out or something?”

  As I turned away and headed toward my desk, I heard Felix say:

  “You know he actually has an imaginary lizard?”

  “What!” laughed the girls.

  “He thinks it’s a real lizard,” said Felix, “but it’s actually just a seashell that he carries around in a bowling ball bag.”

  Squeals of laughter.

  Feeling dizzy, I dropped into my assigned seat by the window.

  “Enough!” said Ms. Prince, our science teacher. She turned around from where she had been writing on the whiteboard. “You girls settle down. I’m not going to let anyone do any special projects unless they act responsibly. That means finding your assigned seat, right now.”

  I looked into the backpack on my desk. No Squeep!

  Maybe I was going crazy. I felt like I might burst into hysterical laughter or tears or both. Kayla had said I was “on the verge of shock.”

  I needed to take deep breaths and remember what to do … do …

  “Doodads,” I said, reaching into my backpack. “Do the doodads, do the doodads, do the doodads. Time flies like an arrow.”

  I opened my math notebook to the “Doodad Decoder” and reread it.

  Unzipping the side pocket of my bag, I took out the three I had with me. The bottle cap, the chocolate Easter egg, and the quarter.

  I picked up the bottle cap and turned it over in my hand.

  It was from one of Kayla’s Tamarindo sodas and …

  I smacked a palm to my head for being so stupid.

  The bottle cap meant “Kayla.” It represented her. Nobody else drank that kind of soda. Squeep! had wanted me to tell Kayla … to tell her what?

  I picked up the quarter and the Easter egg. Squeep! had always delivered these two as a pair. Every other doodad was singular, but the coin and the chocolate egg meant something together, in combination.