CHAPTER ONE
THE DAY THAT COULDN’T GET ANY WORSE—SO IT GOT BADDER INSTEAD
“Ready for the serve?”
“Yeth!”
“Do you know what a serve is?”
“Yeth!”
“Are you a neon-green horse?”
“Yeth!”
Kyle Word sighed and hit the Ping-Pong ball across the table. It bounced twice.
Once against his little brother Gross Gabe’s side of the table …
… and once against Gross Gabe’s forehead.
“Zoopaloop!” Gross Gabe said, teetering on his hands and knees. “Werb!!”
He hadn’t really caught on to the whole speaking thing yet.
“Guess I’ve seen worse Ping-Pong from an almost-two-year-old,” Kyle said, dropping his paddle.
His little brother had woken him up early that morning. In the middle of a dream about a city made of ice cream. He’d climbed up and said, “Yaaah!” right in Kyle’s face, giving him a blast of swampy morning breath that reminded Kyle why he called his younger brother Gross Gabe.
And that was the high point of the day.
Because he’d been woken up early, Kyle fell asleep in class only to be woken up (again!) by tiny wet feet. Someone had slipped Roger, the class’s pet turtle, down his back.
Later in that very same class, Ms. Mackle saw the sketch he’d drawn of her with fins and fishy eyes labeled Ms. Mackerel. She flipped out. He’d thought the fact that he’d drawn her with a whole undersea rock band called Ms. Mackerel and the Mack Attack would’ve cheered her up. Instead, he had to write a whole page about why drawing people with crazy fish eyes was rude.
A page! Full of words!
If Kyle had liked words, he wouldn’t have been drawing so much in the first place. Pictures were easy. They showed you what they wanted to say right away. Words were like little mazes, full of bends and angles and twists. You had to navigate through them to get what they were saying.
Or Kyle did, at least. It seemed like everyone else had them pretty well figured out.
The day had finally seemed to hit a good point right at the end, when the substitute teacher had put on a movie (something about gorillas). There was just enough glow from the screen that he and his best friend, Becca Deed, were able to sneak some time to work on their comic book series: The Astounding Adventures of Mal & Cal Worthy.
Mal and Cal Worthy were dimension-hopping explorers and agents of justice, stopping crime in its tracks across multiple galaxies and times. When Cal worked with his sister, Mal, they were unstoppable. In fact, Kyle believed that the only people who worked better together than Mal and Cal were their creators: Kyle and Becca themselves.
Becca loved words but couldn’t draw anything except for a cartoon cat. Kyle would rather handle a leaky bucket of scorpion venom than a bunch of words. She was the words girl and he was the pictures guy; together, they made the perfect comic book team.
But right as Kyle was finishing one of his best sketches ever, a classmate got up to go to the bathroom with his thermos, tripped over a backpack in the dark, and spilled all his orange-smelling tea on Kyle’s sketchbook. Who carried a whole thermos of tea to the bathroom? Who drank tea in fifth grade?
And then the school bus home got stuck in traffic for an hour. He and Becca had tried to work, but he fell asleep … only to wake when someone poured itching powder down his new shirt.
The bus was so late that he’d barely walked in the door when Mom made him play Ping-Pong with his baby brother in the basement. Gross Gabe could be entertained for hours by a clump of dirt, so Kyle didn’t see why he had to be a babysitter.
Mom hadn’t been impressed with his proposal. “It’s your responsibility as a big brother to make sure Gabe stays safe,” she’d said. “Make sure he doesn’t do anything dangerous.”
But all Kyle wanted was to go to his room and sit down with the latest issue of Mal & Cal Worthy. It was the most important one they had ever done.
He and Becca had already registered and received the guidelines for the Storyland Young Storyteller Contest. Any story could be submitted, including a comic book. If they won, they’d get a free trip to Storyland in Hawaii.
Becca had finished the script a week ago, and Kyle wanted to put the final touches on the drawings tonight. It was the last chance he’d have, because the deadline to mail the submission was tomorrow. He’d get his weekly allowance tonight, and then he and Becca would send the comic book and entry fee first thing in the morning.
One wouldn’t expect a book-themed amusement park to interest Kyle, but books weren’t really a theme as much as a flimsy excuse for rides and roller coasters. It was hard to imagine any serious literary thought was behind the Mark Twain Shark Train. Besides, for all his drawings of sleek spacecraft and hyperdrive jets, he’d never actually been in an airplane before. He wanted a real adventure, like Mal and Cal had.
He also wanted to get right back to work on the illustrations, but his mother had said he must watch his brother … or else no dessert.
Kyle loved dessert.
Gross Gabe grabbed the Ping-Pong ball and tried to take a bite out of it. His teeth bounced off, which only increased his interest. He went for a second chomp, and Kyle swatted it out of his hand.
“No,” Kyle said, speaking clearly and slowly. “Not. Food.”
“Foof?” Gross Gabe said, following the ball with his eyes as it sailed away.
“Not food,” Kyle said.
“Foof,” Gross Gabe said, nodding in agreement.
“I really should see if Mom kept the receipt for you,” Kyle said, hoisting Gross Gabe off the Ping-Pong table and setting him down on the carpet. “Maybe we could trade you in for that new game Blue Blaster Blam 3 or something.”
“Bloo!” Gross Gabe said, pointing at the green carpet.
“Yep.” Kyle sighed. “Exactly.” He went to pick up the Ping-Pong ball and saw it had bounced next to a comic that had slid under the couch. Pulling it out, he realized it wasn’t his. It was volume one of Rachel Never, Hero of No Time, which Becca had checked out of the public library to help them with the contest.
“Have to make sure I get this to her,” Kyle said to himself. He glanced over at Gross Gabe. “And that my brother doesn’t eat it first.”
“How are you boys doing?” Mom said, coming down the basement stairs in her work apron. She owned a coffee shop and baked all the pastries herself. She was half covered in flour—which was half as covered as she usually was.
“Great,” Kyle said. He glanced at the wall clock over his mom’s shoulder, and the library book dropped out of his hand, forgotten. “I’ve only got five minutes till Allosaurus, MD!”
He took off past her up the stairs. His favorite show in the entire world was about a dinosaur that had been frozen until the present day and was now a famous brain surgeon. His struggle to fit into modern society was mixed with various medical emergencies and puzzles.
“Well, I hope Halley likes it, too,” his mom called up after him as he hit the first floor. “She’ll be over in a few minutes.”
“WHAT?” Kyle froze in his tracks, his hair swaying back and forth in front of his eyes like upside-down windshield wipers.
“Her mom just called. She and Halley’s dad are both coming home from work late, and she asked us to keep an eye on her.”
“Couldn’t she go somewhere else? Like, anywhere? On earth? Other than here?”
“I guess not, sweetie,” she said. “Come here, Gabey! Mommy’s gonna scoop you up! Whee!”
Kyle trudged into the kitchen, trying to block out the sound of his brother’s squealing in the basement. He opened the fridge and reached into his hiding spot. Waaaaaay in the back, behind the tartar sauce. Nobody ever used tartar sauce, but no one would throw it out, either, and that spot was as safe as Cal Worthy’s dimension-hopping skull implant.
In a small Tupperware container was a four-layer beauty of marshmallow, chocolate chips, peppermint bark, and whole Oreos he’d prepared himself. Enough sugar to make any fifth grader do a happy dance all over the place.
But Kyle wasn’t dancing.
He was angry. He opened the container and stabbed a spoon into his gooey treat. But even the rush of sugary goodness didn’t calm him down. Just thinking her name made him grit his teeth.
Halley Pierce-Blossom.
Kyle wasn’t sure what was worse: how much she acted like a know-it-all, or the chance that she actually might know it all. She was really smart. Too smart.
She brought books to school sometimes. Not schoolbooks, but books she read just for fun! What other school stuff did she do for fun? Pencil-sharpening contests? Gym-locker-number guessing games?
Becca read, too, and she was smart. But she didn’t run around telling everybody how smart she was all the time. And her voice didn’t make Kyle want to dig his ears out with a soupspoon. He sighed, carrying his glorious chocreation from the kitchen into the living room.
“Kyle,” he said in a squeaky girl voice as he sat down on the couch with his snacksterpiece, “did you know the Andean condor has a wingspan of up to ten and a half feet? That’s 3.2 meters, of couuuurrrrse.” Ugh. The last thing he wanted was to hang out with Halley the know-it-all. If only he were actually Cal Worthy, he could jump into a black hole and escape.
Maybe Halley would ignore her parents and stay home alone.
Maybe she’d get lost crossing her yard to his front door.
Maybe an Andean condor would swoop down and carry her off with all its 3.2 meters of wing.
The doorbell rang.
Or maybe not.
Copyright © 2017 by Paper Lantern Lit
