by Greyson Mann
NO!!!
When Mom made smoochie noises, I sprinted out of the cabin and practically dove into a snowbank.
Remember when I said I have rotten luck? Well, last night was PROOF of that. I mean, Chloe couldn’t get a signal down here at the bottom of the hill for DAYS. But when Mom called and I had the phone, I SUDDENLY had reception. Not just one or two bars, but THREE. Yup. Mom was coming through LOUD and clear.
“What’s wrong, honey?” she kept asking. All I could see was her mouth now, like she thought if she held the phone to her lips, I’d hear her better.
“NOTHING, Mom,” I said. “Except that my phone battery is going to die ANY minute now, so we’d better keep this short, okay?”
I reassured her that everything was fine. That I was wearing my sweaters. That there were no polar bears near our camp. That I was eating at least two square meals a day and obeying all of Mr. Carl’s rules.
“But the phone’s going to die in a few seconds, so I’d better go!” I said.
“Oh, okay, honey. Give Chloe a kiss—“
I hung up on Mom right there and then, because there would be NO kissing of my Evil Twin. Not after the stunt she’d just pulled.
I couldn’t go back into the cabin for breakfast. Bones and his buddies would eat ME alive, after hearing my video-chat with Mom. So instead, I took a picture of the moon rising over the pond. Might as well post on Snapghast while I still had reception.
I even wrote a rap about it. What can I say? I guess being cold and hungry inspires me.
Then I headed back to our sleeping cabin and thought about what I’d learned.
What I learned (ALREADY) today: When Chloe is dying to give me the phone, I probably SHOULDN’T take it. I should turn around and RUN.
DAY 6: WEDNESDAY MORNING
Things started looking up last night. Why? Because Ms. Wanda said we could finally make SNOW GOLEMS!!!
I guess she’d been storing some pumpkins for us in the main cabin. They were smooth and orange and PERFECT.
Ziggy Zombie didn’t think so. He’s more of a fan of moldy, rotten jack-o-lanterns. But I got one of those stinky, slimy things stuck on my head once, so I can’t even SEE a jack-o-lantern without wanting to hurl.
Anyway, Ms. Wanda didn’t make us study a bunch of diagrams before we made our golems. She’s an art teacher, so she’s all about creativity. Besides, what’s so hard about stacking a couple of snow blocks and sticking a pumpkin on top?
Sam wanted his snow golem to have only one snow block—so it would be square like him. But snow golems don’t really work that way. I tried to tell him, but sometimes a slime has to learn things for himself.
Ziggy stuck a couple of sticks in the front of his so it would look like a zombie staggering around with its arms outstretched. WEIRD.
I kept mine simple. I only wanted one thing: a snow golem that could throw a decent snowball. So I gave mine super sturdy branches for arms.
I happen to know that snow golems are really loyal. So, like, if Bones and his gang whip a snowball at me, guess who will protect me? My golem! He’ll zing snowballs right back at Bones. Or Chloe, for that matter. In fact, after she forced me to video-chat with Mom in front of EVERYONE yesterday, I’d MUCH rather zing HER with a snowball than Bones.
So as soon as I propped my pumpkin up on top of my snow golem, I couldn’t WAIT to see him come to life. And he did! His pumpkin head turned just a bit so he could take a good long look at me.
That kind of creeped me out—but only for a second. Then I quickly snapped a photo of him for Snapghast. If I don’t post a photo right away at night, morning comes fast—and then I’m stuck posting dumb photos like a sketch of an igloo or the side of Sam’s head or even my foot (that photo was an accident, but SOMEONE out there might think it’s actually art).
Anyway, my snow golem started slipping and sliding around the snowy field. Ziggy’s was “alive,” too, sliding toward me with its creepy zombie arms. Yikes!
Even Sam’s short little golem somehow worked. When he added a pumpkin head, the golem started to move—but REALLY slowly.
“Huh,” said Sam, his forehead all scrunched up. “Is yours faster than mine?”
Mr. Carl heard him from way over by the cabins. “That’s a GREAT question, Sam,” he said. “A SCIENTIFIC question. Should we test it out?”
SIGH.
Now instead of just hanging out and having snowball fights with our golems, Mr. Carl was going to turn the whole night into a science experiment.
Next thing I knew, he had us counting the number of seconds it took for our golems to move like three feet. I didn’t think that was very scientific. First of all, you can’t MAKE a golem move, not like in a race anyway. And none of us had tape measures or rulers. We were just guessing how much was three feet. And to top things off, I’m PRETTY sure Willow Witch was using a potion of swiftness with her golem. That snow golem moved across the snow so fast, I thought it was a polar bear.
When I told Mr. Carl that the girls were cheating, Chloe made a face at me and whipped something at my snow golem—a glass bottle. I couldn’t believe it. Chloe was throwing SPLASH potions now? (Note to self: I really have to break up her friendship with Willow Witch. It’s going nowhere good.)
I didn’t know what kind of potion it was until I happened to run right THROUGH it. “Gerald, stop!” Sam yelled. But it was too late. I barreled through the cloud of purple dust.
Right away, I felt like I was in a daymare, like when you’re trying to run away from the Ender Dragon but your legs just won’t MOVE. Everything happened in slow motion. My phone bounced on the ground and kind of floated back up again, right toward Chloe. She grabbed it, flashed her evil grin, and took off running. Score one for my Evil Twin.
My snow golem slowed way down too, almost as slow as Sam’s. Good thing I wasn’t measuring my golem’s speed right now—he was almost moving BACKWARD, he was going so slow.
“What . . . HAP-PENED?” I asked Sam, but it took forever to get the words out of my mouth.
“Lingering potion of slowness,” he said with a jiggly shrug. I guess when you date a witch, you pick up on stuff like that. But all I wanted to know was how to get the potion OFF me.
Sam read my mind. “It’ll wear off pretty soon,” he said, and he was nice enough to squat down beside me. But that made us sitting targets for Chloe, who took that opportunity to bean me with a snowball.
I tried to get up and tackle her, but my body was practically frozen to the ground. Then I realized something. Chloe’s snowball would start the PERFECT snowball fight, because my snow golem would protect me, right? RIGHT???
WRONG. My golem slid slowly down the hill, AWAY from Chloe.
“Hey!” I hollered to Sam and Ziggy. “My golem doesn’t work! It won’t throw snowballs at Chloe.”
“Snow golems DON’T throw snowballs at creepers, genius!” That was Bones. Then I heard the thwack of his bow and arrow and the smuck of a snowball against the back of my head. OUCH.
I was face-planted in the snow when I realized Bones was right. I’d heard that before—that snow golems won’t throw snowballs at creepers. Why? I dunno. Maybe we’re just naturally friends or something.
That should have made me feel all warm and fuzzy toward my golem, but it didn’t. I wanted to start throwing snowballs at HIM for not backing me up against Chloe. SHEESH. What does a creeper have to do to get some good help around here?!
Anyway, it turns out that snow golems DO throw snowballs against skeletons, because after Bones nailed me with the snowball, my golem came BACK up the hill—and lobbed a snowball at Bones. YAASSSSSS!
That’s when a full-on war broke out.
Snowballs zinged left and right, and when the potion of slowness wore off, I could finally dodge the balls and fling a few of my own. But Bones was WICKED with that bow and arrow. When I took a ball of ice to the nose, I tasted the blood before anyone else even saw it.
Well, I went straight to Mr. Carl with my bloody nose, b
ecause bows and arrows have NO place in snowball fights. He gave me a stained yellow handkerchief, which totally grossed me out. And to make matters worse, he DIDN’T make Bones put away his bow and arrow. Instead, he turned it into a science experiment.
When he started to talk about the “trajectory” of Bones’s snowballs off his bow, he lost me. He lost Bones, too, who rattled off toward his cabin like he was going to put his bow away before Mr. Carl started quizzing him on how it worked. So score one for Mr. Carl, too—he bored Bones into good behavior.
Mr. Carl looked kind of disappointed, until someone else asked, “How long before the snow golems melt?” Then his eyes lit up and he turned THAT into an experiment. “Let’s test it out!” he said, all jolly-like.
But that’s one experiment I will NOT be taking part in, thank you very much. I mean, I just GOT my golem. And maybe he’s not going to take my side against my Evil Twin, but he’ll be great for Snapghast photos—I mean, if I ever get my phone back from Chloe.
After a while, some of the golems wandered away. I guess that’s what they do—they get bored just like we do. Ziggy’s golem slid off toward the woods with its arms outstretched. Sam’s took off, too, super slowly. It left a wide path of snow.
“Do you want to follow it?” I asked. “It’s leaving a decent trail.”
But Sam just shook his head. I think his super-wide, super-slow golem had been kind of a disappointment right from the start.
But mine? I was NOT ready to let mine go yet. So you know what I did? I brought it home with me.
Not to the cabin—it would melt for sure in there. No, I brought it to our igloo instead. See, I figured it would stay nice and cold in there, but I could block the door with a giant snowball to make sure the golem didn’t wander away. I even decided to hang out in there with him so he wouldn’t get lonely.
At first, my golem kind of paced back and forth inside the igloo. But then I must have fallen asleep, because next thing I knew, it was almost dawn, and the golem was GONE. The snowball had been pushed away from the door of the igloo, and my snow golem’s path zigzagged across the hill, just BEGGING me to follow it.
Now I know all about Mr. Carl’s rules. I KNOW I’m supposed to stay with the group and not wander away without a buddy. But my snow golem IS kind of my buddy, right? He protected me against Bones, didn’t he?
So before I could talk myself out of it, I followed that path, straight down the hill toward the pond.
I’m not gonna lie, I DID think about polar bears. I was the only mob out there so early in the day. If a polar bear wanted to eat me up, I’d be like the last cookie on a plate—all alone and easy to grab. CHOMP.
But I didn’t see polar bears. I saw something else.
WOLVES.
Well, paw prints in the snow, anyway. They looked just like the prints Eddie Enderman’s wolf-dog, Pearl, made when she pulled me in a minecart sled last winter.
Now some mobs might be scared to see those paw prints. And I did look over my shoulder, wondering if the wolves out here in the Taiga were more ferocious than Pearl.
But then I thought about something else: what an AWESOME photo I could take of these paw prints in the snow. Suddenly, I couldn’t WAIT to take the photo. It would be an award-winner for sure!
I forgot all about my golem and raced back to the cabin. Sam was just getting ready for bed, and Ziggy Zombie was already out cold—like a torch someone had just put out with a bucket of water.
I asked Sam if I could borrow his tablet to take a photo. Then I had a better idea—I asked Sam to come WITH me on an adventure. I mean, if we DID run into polar bears, I’d be a lot less scared with Sam by my side. (And I’d have only half the chance of being eaten too.)
Sam said YES—that slime is game for anything. But he’s been looking for his scarf for like ten minutes now, so I thought I’d catch you up on the night’s events. I have a feeling that today is going to be EVEN more eventful.
Snapghast photo awards, here I come!
DAY 6: WEDNESDAY NIGHT
What I learned today: Don’t post things on Snapghast that you don’t want Chloe—or Mom—to see. SIGH.
Okay, let me back up. Sam went with me to get a shot of the wolf paw prints. And it was a PERFECT photo, if I do say so myself. The lighting was just right. I centered the paw prints just so. I zoomed in to make them look even BIGGER. And then right away, at 7:35 a.m., I posted it to Snapghast.
Well, Chloe must have been really impressed with that photo. How do I know? Because she texted Mom IMMEDIATELY to rat me out and try to get me in trouble.
Chloe told Mom that I broke all kinds of rules and wandered away from my cabin during the day. But I HADN’T broken any rules. I had my buddy SAM with me, for crying out loud. And my snow golem was out there too—somewhere.
Anyway, when Mom video-chatted me on Sam’s tablet ten minutes later, she said she didn’t care if I had a whole ARMY of snow golems with me. She did NOT want me anywhere near a pack of wolves. (Mom can be kind of dramatic when she wants to be.) “Did Mr. Carl know you were out there?” she demanded to know.
“No, he was sleeping,” I said. What else could I say? I mean, if I’d lied and told Mom that Mr. Carl DID know I was out there with the wolves and all, he’d be in trouble too. Right?
Except that plan backfired.
Mom called Mr. Carl and gave him a piece of her mind. She said that chaperones weren’t supposed to SLEEP on the job. She said she’d be talking to the principal of Mob Middle School about this. And then she posted a message on the blog warning ALL the other parents to stay in touch with their kids to make sure they weren’t “wandering all over the Taiga in the middle of the day unsupervised.”
Well, you can imagine how popular THAT post made me today. By the time all the mobs got up and headed to the main cabin for dinner, almost every single one of them had gotten a warning text from their parents. Thanks to me.
To top it off, Mr. Carl has a new rule: NO leaving the cabins after bedtime. He even threatened to lock us all in, just to be sure. Oh, and he says we won’t be making any more snow golems during this field trip. And he looked right at me when he said it.
Personally, I think Mr. Carl doesn’t like snow golems because he can’t CONTROL them with all his rules. He can’t lock them in cabins or make them learn things when all they REALLY want to do is wander around and throw a snowball or two.
If you ask me, the snow golems have the right idea. But no one did ask me. Because no one is really talking to me right now.
So like I said, when you’re gonna post something to Snapghast, you really have to stop and think about WHO is going to see your post. And just how much TROUBLE it might get you into.
Photo contest or no photo contest, a creeper’s really got to think ahead.
DAY 8: FRIDAY MORNING
“You skipped a day, Gerald!”
That’s what you want to tell me, right? But if you knew how BORING Thursday was, you’d thank me for leaving it out of my journal.
See, Mr. Carl and Ms. Wanda decided we needed a quiet day at camp, time to “reflect” on everything we’d done so far. I think it was pretty much a giant time-out for me and any other mob who thought they could sneak out during the day or break Mr. Carl’s rules.
But Ms. Wanda kept saying that it was good for us to “take a pause,” to spend a day sipping hot cocoa and writing letters home about all of our adventures.
There were only two problems with that plan. First of all, the cocoa wasn’t hot. It was this lukewarm watered-down stuff that wasn’t at ALL like the super-deluxe hot cocoa that Sam and I order at the Creeper Café back home.
In fact, Ms. Wanda’s hot cocoa wasn’t even as good as the stuff we get in the vending machine at school.
How can a witch who brews POTIONS manage to botch a whole batch of hot cocoa?
The other problem with Ms. Wanda’s plan is that NO mob writes letters anymore. I mean, why would we? We have our mothers VIDEO-CHATTING us and SNAPGHASTING us and
HUMILIATING us all over social media. Letters, schmetters. Mom probably doesn’t even know what those are anymore.
So Thursday was pretty much a bust—a giant waste of a perfectly good night in the Taiga.
But after all that pausing and quiet time and “reflecting,” I can’t get to sleep. So I’m trying to work on my 15-day plan.
So now I’m thinking about Mom and that phone. The phone has been nothing but trouble from the beginning, right? Chloe won’t share it—except for the time when she flung it at me so that Mom and I could have a loud and super embarrassing video-chat. And Chloe used the phone to rat me out for going outside during the day.
I can’t block Mom from social media—I mean, she IS my mom, after all. But maybe . . . I can block Chloe.
YES. I CAN!
So I just did. I deleted her from my “Friends” list on Snapghast, just like that. And now I’m wondering why I didn’t do that a LONG time ago.
But now I have another idea: a GENIUS idea. Hold on a sec.
Okay, I’m back. I just borrowed Sam’s tablet, which was NOT easy. (I had to slide it out from underneath that sleeping slime.) And I wrote a text:
“Dear Mom and Chloe. I’ve decided that Chloe should really keep our phone all to herself. She takes SUCH great photos with it, and besides, I’m really trying to UNPLUG out here in the Taiga. If you need to get a hold of me, send a message to Sam. Thanks for understanding. Peace out, Gerald.”
There. Done.
