9
It was a pretty memorable dinner. Not exactly in a good way. The Earl of Sandwich was definitely a royal pain in the butt, and he kept asking us to fetch him food we didn’t have—stuff that nobody eats these days, like roast puffin, quiche lorraine, and mock turtle soup. When we told him we didn’t have any of it, he got really snooty. He also kept suggesting we play elaborate card games I’d never heard of and pouting when we said no. All in all, I couldn’t believe he was the guy who invented the greatest food of all time.
Kid Mozart was supremely awesome, though. He was super polite but also told a lot of funny jokes and great stories about different royal palaces around Europe that he had visited. I’ve gotta say, he’s a couple of years younger than me and he’s already hung out with a bunch of kings and queens and is basically a celebrity in Europe—what have I done with my life so far? I can barely even play “Three Blind Mice”!
Blackbeard was quiet for most of the dinner. He just looked around the table mysteriously and stole glances at the other rooms in the house. He was definitely up to no good, and I could tell that Wiki noticed too. Wiki was still trembling a little bit and stuttering throughout the meal. Honestly, if it hadn’t been for Kid Mozart, it might have been one of the worst dinners of all time.
In an attempt to save the night, I hopped into the kitchen for a few minutes and put together one of my patented Javi Specialty Sandwiches—a double-decker beauty with Puerto Rican ingredients on one layer and American ingredients on the other: the Spanglish Sandwich!
We were just finishing up the meal when I brought it out on a covered-up plate. I stood next to the earl, and like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, whisked the cover off, revealing my glorious Spanglo Sando.
“Ta-da! It’s your royal invention, except way better. This one won third place in a school contest.”
The earl arched one eyebrow and gave me a nasty look. “What is this monstrosity?”
“Wait,” I said, stunned. “You don’t even know what a sandwich is? You mean I literally invited you here for nothing?!”
The earl made a face at me. “I hope you don’t expect me to eat this ridiculous mess of bread and the queen knows what else. Begone, shoo!”
When it comes to bullies, Brady acts way more like a big sister than a little one. She hates when people are mean to me (which is a pretty constant thing), and I could see her rage flaring. She stomped over to the earl and put her face so close to his that their noses were practically touching. “Listen here, Buster. You’re going to eat the food Javi made you, or else. He just made a whole mess in the kitchen building you this award-winning sandwich, and now I’m going to watch you eat it. Bite. By. Bite. Now chew.”
Blackbeard laughed. “I like this girl! You ever considered piracy? You’d be a fierce one!”
Brady blushed and curtsied.
Then Blackbeard turned to the earl. “I agree with the girl. Eat that sandwich or I’m gonna introduce you to Bessie.” He then pulled another, bigger dagger out of his boot, placed it gently on the table, and tapped on it twice. “Bessie would love to get to know you.”
The earl silently ate the sandwich, the whole time staring wide-eyed at the dagger on the other side of the table. Brady was beaming. Blackbeard was smiling wickedly. Everyone else seemed to be embarrassed by the whole situation and was looking awkwardly at other things in the room.
“The story goes,” Wiki whispered to me, “that the earl was so obsessed with gambling, that once he started playing he never wanted to leave his card table. Since eating fork-and-knife foods while playing cards was too awkward, he invented a food he could eat with his hands. That’s how the sandwich was born. I guess he hasn’t done it yet.”
I nodded sadly. I was hoping the sandwich had been invented in the middle of a sword fight or castle siege and used as a delicious weapon. Catapults filled with sandwiches—now that was an origin story.
“Well, that’s enough entertainment for one evening.” Blackbeard chuckled, rising out of his seat and exploring our living room, picking up objects and studying them as we stared in terror. He made his way to our bookshelf and started scanning titles.
“Blackbeard can read?” the earl whispered to himself.
“Compared to you, I’m a scholar,” the pirate mumbled gruffly, casually tapping on Bessie as he picked up a book about pirates. The earl gulped and probably peed his pants.
“Three chapters on old Edward Teach!” Blackbeard smiled, flipping through the book. “Wait ’til I tell Stede Bonnet and the chaps about this.”
He read the book, and we all stared at him in stunned silence. I’d been afraid to make eye contact with him before, so now I was finally taking a good look at him. Blackbeard would probably haunt my dreams forever. He was even more towering than I’d first realized, and his beard seemed like a separate monster living on his face, even more evil than he was. Between the bloodshot eyes and the tufts of smoke, Blackbeard seemed more like a demon than a man. And here he was reading a book in our living room like it was the most normal thing in the world.
“What’s this?” Blackbeard muttered. “This is impossible.” He kept reading, his demon eyes getting wider and angrier. “Robert Maynard? Who?” He read faster now, flipping page after page, his anger rising with each flip. “What?!” He slammed the book closed, threw it to the floor, and looked up at us. For a split second it looked like he was going to pull out his dagger and murder us, but then he remembered where he was, and his dark scowl turned into a creepy smile. “Excuse me,” he said, sitting back down at the table.
Creepy silence.
“I see you have a piano,” Kid Mozart said after clearing his throat, cutting through the awkwardness and saving the day yet again. “Allow me to play you a few songs.”
He jumped out of his seat and skipped over to the piano. When he saw it up close, he gasped loudly. “This is the most incredible piano I have ever seen!” He shyly pushed down on a few keys and then listened intently at the sound. “The sound is angelic. More beautiful than the pianos in the courts of Vienna and Paris. Is this the greatest piano in the world?”
I scratched my head, unsure how to answer him because I really didn’t want to let him down.
“Ha! We got that piece of junk in a garage sale for free,” Brady said. Yep, that’s what I didn’t want to tell him.
“Piece of junk? You call this exquisite miracle a piece of junk? Tell me this sounds like the music a piece of junk produces.” With that Kid Mozart sat down, cracked his knuckles above his head, and proceeded to play the most beautiful music I’d ever heard in my life. It looked impossible to play—his hands flew across the keys so quickly I was pretty sure his arms were made of rubber, and his fingers played the notes so perfectly I wondered if he was secretly a robot. (MozartBot! I liked the ring of that.)
Everyone fell under Kid Mozart’s spell. His music had us completely hypnotized. Nobody spoke or even seemed to breathe the entire time he played. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Blackbeard cry a single tear. Little Wolfgang played and played, song after song after song, but nobody wanted him to stop. It didn’t matter if you were into rock music or hip-hop or jazz, or even if you hated classical music—it was the best music you’d ever heard.
When he finally stopped playing, nobody spoke for a long time. We all stared at the floor, stunned. The first person to say anything was the earl, and he just started crying loudly. “I’m so bloody sorry for my rudeness!” he sobbed. “You’re perfectly wonderful hosts, the food has been delicious, the music divine, and that breaded dish you gave me was quite exquisite too. Oh, I’m nothing but a royal rudesby, a good-for-nothing royal rudesby. I repent! I repent! When I return to my home I’ll renounce gambling and live a life of virtue and generosity!” Then he put his face in his hands and sobbed even more loudly. We all looked at the floor and pretended we couldn’t hear him. This guy was the Earl of Awkwardness!<
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“Well, my fine new friends, this was a perfectly lovely evening, and I hope we’re able to dine again soon. I will begin composing a new song to play on your magnificent piano. I do grow a bit tired, and Papa will worry about me if I’m not home soon.” Mozart yawned.
“We can get you home in a jiffy!” Brady jumped up out of her daze and gave Kid Mozart a big hug. “I used to hate taking piano lessons, but now all I want to do is play like you do.”
Kid Mozart laughed. “That will be no problem if you practice eight to ten hours a day, seven days a week!”
Brady made a face like she’d just eaten poop. “Well, I want to play piano better than I do, anyway. Maybe not as good as you.” She then took a look at the bell. “Okay, have a seat at the table. When I ring this thing, I bet you’ll be home in no time.”
Mozart hugged Wiki and me warmly before he took a seat. What a great guy. I hugged him back. Wiki was still too in shock to do anything but look sick. You couldn’t blame him—he almost got stabbed by a pirate and then two minutes later was listening to the most beautiful music in the world. It was a lot to take in!
The earl waved goodbye sadly but didn’t get up from his seat. Instead he blew his nose really hard into one of our nice napkins and then put it on the table. Ew. Thanks again, Earl.
Blackbeard pointed at Brady. “Hope you’ll join my crew one day, milady. You would be one of the fiercest pirates on the sea. Maybe one day I’d kill my first mate and make you second-in-command. In the meantime, learn to tie some ship knots and practice raiding merchant vessels.” Brady nodded proudly. Blackbeard ignored Wiki and me completely. I wasn’t sad about it.
Brady then petted the table. “Okay, Andy, time to send our new friends home.” She held the bell over her head and rang it loudly. A flash of lightning blinded us all again, and there was silence in the room. I rubbed my eyes for a few seconds, waiting to open them again and pretend that the whole dinner party was a dream. Ah, back to good old normal life.
Instead, I heard Wiki scream, “Wait, where are you going? You can’t—ow!”
Then there was a big thud followed by an even bigger thud, and our front door slammed.
10
First I saw a lump on the floor. Then I realized that lump was Wiki. Brady and I ran over to him and noticed that he wasn’t moving. “Wiki! Wake up! What happened?” I shook him and shook him, but he just lay there. “Oh no—Wiki is dead! Wikiiiiiiiii!”
Brady rolled her eyes. “Put your finger under his nostrils, dummy—he’s still breathing. He just got knocked out.”
I breathed a massive sigh of relief. And then I got worried again. “Well, we need to figure something out to make sure he doesn’t die! Maybe he’s just knocked out for now, but… Brady, get a doctor!” I lifted Wiki’s head onto my lap, hoping his life wasn’t fading away. “Stay with us Wiki! Don’t die—you’d be a super-annoying ghost!”
Brady’s eye roll was even bigger this time. “Must I do everything, Javi?” She slapped Wiki, and a muffled groan came from his mouth.
“Sorry, Wiki.” Brady shrugged. “Javi thought you were dead.”
Wiki’s eyes gradually started opening, and he slowly turned his head from side to side. “Wiki lives!” I yelled, dropping his head on the floor in my excitement.
“Ow! Please don’t make me pass out again,” he said, rubbing his head. He shot up into a sitting position. “Did you catch him? He didn’t get away, did he? Please tell me he didn’t get away.”
Brady and I looked at him blankly. “What are you talking about?” I asked. Then I remembered the noise. “Oh yeah, you were saying something when the light flashed, and then we heard a few thuds and maybe the door slamming.” As I said it, I realized what happened.
“Blackbeard!” Wiki whispered in horror. “He jumped out of the chair right before you rang the bell and made a run for the door. I covered my eyes for the flash, so I wasn’t blinded. Then I stupidly got in his way, but he just knocked me out with the butt of his dagger and left.”
“There’s a real-life pirate in our world now?” Brady asked quietly. She let out a low, sad whistle. “Well, that’s not good.”
“Not just a pirate,” Wiki said, breathing harder and louder, his eyes getting a wild look. “Most historians consider Blackbeard the most dangerous pirate in history. And one of the most feared people in all of history. The damage he could do here…it’s frightening. It’s…it’s…” Wiki looked like he was about to explode.
“Chill, Wiki,” Brady said.
“Chill? Chill?!” Wiki looked at her in disbelief. “One of the most brilliant, powerful villains in all of history is loose in our world! In our neighborhood! And it’s entirely my fault!”
He looked at back and forth at Brady and me a hundred times, his brain going a trillion miles an hour. Finally he stopped, looked me in the eyes, and nodded. “I have a lot to figure out. Or our lives are in danger. Not just ours. Everyone’s.” He was quiet for a second, then nodded again. “Bye.”
Wiki bolted out the door and scrambled toward his house, as fast as anyone would run if there was a deadly pirate loose in their neighborhood. I went to close the door behind him and watched him sprint down the street, into the night.
Then something familiar caught my eye. On the other side of the street, someone who had been watching our house slid into the darkness and disappeared. But it wasn’t the pirate. It was the shadow.
The shadow from the woods. The one I saw at recess.
“Um, Brady? Can you come here for a—” But I couldn’t finish my sentence because Dad came out of his room and stumbled into the kitchen for a drink of water. Then he noticed the lights on everywhere.
“Javi? Brady? Why are you guys up? It’s three in the morning,” he said groggily. “And it smells like a…sewer?”
“Run!” said Brady, and we scrambled to our rooms, to the weirdest nightmares ever.
11
The next morning Wiki didn’t walk to school with us, answer his phone, or let us know that he was even alive. A few teachers mentioned that he was home sick, so we knew he wasn’t dead, but I doubted he had a cold or the flu. I wondered if he was going to come back to school at all. Brady and I whispered back and forth about our dinner party as we walked to Finistere, but we weren’t sure what to do next. All I could do was check the news online during library class and hope that there was no mention of a pirate wreaking havoc on our town. So far so good, but I knew it was only a matter of time before things went south.
Maybe I was desperate to process everything that had happened or maybe I just had a lot of nervous energy, but all through breakfast and library class I scrawled out every last detail of our dinner party, all the way up to the Blackbeard incident. English class was third period, and I turned in my secretly nonfiction essay feeling weirdly proud. I’d even printed out pics from Dad’s phone before heading to school. I was pretty worried that Ms. Vlad would give me an F because it was such an unbelievable story, but the opposite happened.
She handed the essay back at the end of class and gave me the most intense look. It wasn’t a murderous look, exactly. More like the look you give someone who’s about to jump out of a plane. First I noticed that she gave me back a photocopy of my essay with the pictures missing. Weird. Then I looked at the essay itself. A++. 110%.
I did it! I was ecstatic. I felt like a million bucks. I pumped my fist in the air and was about to let out a big “Yessssss!” when I remembered that there was still a pirate on the loose in our town and staying in Wiki’s English class wouldn’t matter much if we were both dead. Thanks a lot, Blackbeard, for ruining my moment. At least Dad would be super jazzed when I told him.
Wiki showed up in the middle of fifth period. He didn’t say a word to me, and he looked awful. I was pretty sure he hadn’t slept since I last saw him, and I was guessing he hadn’t eaten much either. His eyes were red, and he kept them
focused on the floor at all times. I tried talking to him between classes, but he just nodded glumly and mumbled answers to my questions so quietly I could barely hear him.
He sat on a swing at recess, far away from the other kids, and he didn’t seem super excited when Brady and I joined him. Usually I hate it when Brady tries to hang out with us at recess, but this time I was just fine with it. We had a lot to talk about. For a long time we just stared at Wiki, and he stared firmly at the ground. I wasn’t really sure where to begin.
“Hey, I got an A++ on that essay, Wiki. Looks like we’ll stay in the same English class after all,” I said, smiling weakly.
Wiki nodded and gave me an unenthusiastic thumbs-up without making eye contact.
Brady threw a stick at Wiki.
“Wiki, stop being a jerk. We need to make a plan, and being Glummy McGlummerson isn’t going to solve anything. Quit feeling sorry for yourself already.”
That woke him up. He glared at Brady. “We’ve unleashed a monster on the world, and it’s all my fault.”
Brady didn’t miss a beat. “Well, get over it, mister. You’re not solving anything slumped over in a swing like that.”
I tried to soften Brady’s sting. “There are a few things we should probably debrief on, Wiki.”
Wiki nodded and we ventured into the woods where we wouldn’t be overheard. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking between vomiting sessions,” he admitted.
“Thinking? Who would’ve guessed?” Brady said, trying to make a joke. Bad timing, Brady. Wiki just glared at her.
“First, we need to agree not to use Andy again,” Wiki said firmly. “Who knows who else we could unleash on the world, even with our best intentions.”
“Are you kidding?” Brady said, throwing her hands up. “That’s how we defeat Blackbeard! Do you think the three of us can take on that skunky pirate alone? I mean, maybe me… But still. I’d rather invite a bunch of knights to clobber him and be done with it.”
Time Villains Series, Book 1 Page 4
