CHAPTER ONE
NOTHING GOOD COMES IN A BUCKET
Once upon a time, superheroes Mal and Cal Worthy were trapped in the belly of a yellow beast. The smell of salami was overpowering. Would anyone claw free of the monster’s vile belly? Anyone?…
“… Anyone?” the school bus driver called out again before shutting the doors. Immediately, two dozen kids began to shout.
Becca Deed covered her nose. Corey “Gorilla” Manila, an eighth grader about the size and smell of a sack of dirty elephant laundry, had obviously had salami—and maybe garlic—for lunch again.
Becca had been trying to escape into her brain, because her body sure wasn’t going anywhere. The bus had been locked in traffic for an hour. She was a writer, and as such, she was the kind of girl who could sit quietly as she explored her imagination—but even she couldn’t imagine away the toxic mix of eighth-grader breath.
She pinched her nose tighter. Definitely garlic.
Becca looked over to see her best friend, Kyle Word, snoring, his face pressed up against the window. Despite his last name, Kyle hated words and writing, but he and Becca got along because they both liked stories with epic adventures, dastardly villains, and justice for all. In fact, they were working on a comic book series together, The Astounding Adventures of Mal & Cal Worthy, that had all those things. She handled the text while he illustrated—which was a good thing, because Becca was really only good at drawing a cartoon cat.
“Watch out for the Garblenuff,” Kyle mumbled in his sleep.
“Wake up, Kyle,” Becca said, poking him in the ribs. But his only response was to snore a little louder and say something that sounded kind of like, “I know karate.”
Becca sighed. They had planned on plotting the next Mal and Cal adventure on the bus, but Kyle had been tired all day because his little brother had woken him up extra-early. She guessed it didn’t really matter anyway. It was impossible to focus on anything when surrounded by garlic-zilla fumes. Not to mention Kyle’s sketchbook was still soggy from when someone had accidentally spilled tea on it. It had been a long day.
But one more stop and Becca would be home. And not a moment too soon, because, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Gorilla Manila dump a pack of itching powder down Kyle’s shirt.
“Bye, Kyle,” she said, standing up quickly as the school bus screeched to a halt. “I’ll bring some aloe for you tomorrow. Maybe in the next issue, Mal and Cal should face down a bunch of giant mosquitoes.”
“ZZhmm? What?” he said, waking up. “What do you mean?”
Becca knew the moment the powder met his skin. His eyes popped like a poked puffer fish and he shot straight up, scratching like a monkey with chicken pox. Or, since he was bobbing his head to reach his neck, more like a chicken with monkey pox.
The school bus’s doors swung open, and she hurried down the aisle before Gorilla Manila dumped itching powder on her back. Eager to breathe clean air, she hopped down the steps—right into a tsunami!
Where had the water come from?
The last time Becca checked, she lived miles away from any ocean. And she didn’t think it was supposed to rain today.… Maybe an elephant had escaped the city zoo and stepped on a water main?
Then her eyes cleared and she saw the Bucket.
The Bucket held by her stepbrother, Sam.
That bucket and the villainous smile on his face told her the whole story.
“Welcome home!” Sam said, his smile getting bigger.
“Welcome to your doom!” Becca shouted. Dropping her backpack on the sidewalk, she charged.
CHAPTER TWO
THE ONLY ANNOYING THING IS EVERYTHING
Chasing him wasn’t really the best idea—Sam was built like a praying mantis, and when he wasn’t sleeping, he was usually playing basketball. Actually, he probably played basketball even when he was sleeping, too. She was pretty sure she’d heard him calling out plays in between chain-saw snoring. The constant thud-thud-thud-thudthudthudthud of the ball being dribbled in the driveway when she was trying to write was the least of her worries, though.
Sam’s dad and Becca’s mom had been married less than a year, and she’d barely been able to tolerate having a stepfather, let alone the new “brother” he’d brought along with him.
Her stepfather was named Stephen R. Danielson III. He liked to say it Three instead of The third, for some reason. Becca guessed he must have thought it sounded cool. She also guessed that he’d never bothered asking anyone what cool meant.
SRD3, as his license plate said (ugh), was also a writer. He wrote copy for advertisements. When he found out she wrote, too, he’d tried to bond with her “writer to writer.” Becca didn’t see how selling people stuff with silly jokes was the same as telling beautiful stories about great heroes and brave adventurers. She certainly didn’t think any of her characters would be caught dead saying, “Don’t have time to dust? Dust to time, with the Tidy Tune musical duster! Keep on track with one step: a two-step!”
If Stephen R. Danielson III made her mom happy, that was great, but she wasn’t interested in adopting a parent. However, at first she’d thought that adopting a brother might be better. That was, until she met Sam.
Obviously, she had been very, very wrong. Stepbrothers were no good, either.
“Just you wait until I get you!” she shouted as she sloshed across the yard.
“I don’t know if I feel like waiting that long,” Sam said. “The nursing home staff might not be happy with you tackling me in the pea soup line. I bet—OOMPH!”
“Good boy, Rufus!” Becca said as their new one-year-old “duppy” (too big to be a puppy, too silly to be a dog) viciously attacked Sam with his pink tongue.
“Gah! The smell! THE SMELL!” Sam gagged as he got a whiff of puppy breath straight up the nose.
“Serves you right,” Becca grumbled. An idea started brewing in her head for a new villain to fight Mal and Cal Worthy in the comic: Samoron the Worst. Or Samrog, Prince of Toads. Or Lord Samstank of Hoops. Becca liked that last one—authoritative, yet accurate. She just needed to write it down in her notebook before she forgot—
She stopped short. “Oh no! My notebook!”
Running back around to the front of the house and over to the sidewalk, she knelt down to examine her soaked backpack. She didn’t just have schoolbooks in there—she also had her most precious possession: her ideas notebook. Dozens of story and character ideas had gone into it, and if the tsunami had damaged it, every good idea she’d had for the past three months would be gone.
Unzipping her backpack, she felt around inside. Dry. Phew. Luckily (and unluckily), her body had shielded her backpack from the water. It was only a little wet on the outside, and her notebook wasn’t even damp. In fact, the only thing that seemed to have gotten truly soaked was a piece of paper in the outside pocket.
With her thumb and forefinger, Becca carefully pinched it out. At first she thought it was a spit wad from Gorilla Manila, but when she took a closer look, she realized it was even worse than that: It was a note from the public library!
A note that said three books were due today, and if she didn’t return them, she’d owe $$$! Triple dollar signs!!!
Though the actual fee had been blurred by water, she was pretty sure the numbers would be the exact amount of change she had in her piggy bank … and the exact amount she needed for the entry fee for the Storyland Young Storyteller Contest, a writing competition that she and Kyle had entered. They had registered for the contest online, but they had to send the story and fee by mail, and the deadline to send them was tomorrow.
Becca was the sort of girl who splurged only once in a while, saving up for something she really, really wanted. Kyle, on the other hand, had a sweet tooth, and more often than not, he exchanged his coins for chocolate ones. He was getting his allowance tonight and putting some finishing touches on Mal and Cal, but if she didn’t pay her half, their entry wouldn’t count!
And that simply wasn’t an option.
Because if they won, they’d get a free trip to Storyland, a new amusement park in Hawaii. Because they were only in fifth grade, they’d have to take at least one parent along, and Kyle had already said it could be Becca’s mom, Jane. That was Part 1 of Becca’s master plan.
Part 2 was that Kyle would go home by himself—she knew airlines let kids go alone sometimes when a parent okayed it—and she and her mom wouldn’t go home at all.
Ever.
No more Stephen R. Danielson III and no dribbling stepbrothers. She would miss Rufus, but she was sure Mom would book a cruise for Rufus to come to Hawaii after they’d found a house with a good backyard for him.
Swinging her backpack over her shoulders, Becca sprinted to the house. She always kept her library books on the shelf next to her bed, unless she was reading them or discussing story ideas with Kyle at his house.
Becca skidded to a stop.
She suddenly remembered that over the weekend, she’d gone to Kyle’s house. They’d looked at her favorite comic series, Rachel Never, Hero of No Time, while eating Mrs. Word’s cookies. In a chocolate-induced coma, she’d left the book in his living room.
“NoooooOOOoooo!” she yelled. Instinctively, she started chewing on a thumbnail that was already jagged from Sam-related stress. Her dream of replacing Sam and his father with white sand and flower necklaces was floating away.
“Becca?” Sam peered around the corner. Thanks to Rufus, he now looked just as wet as Becca did. “Why are you screaming—hey! Where are you going? Does Jane or Dad know?”
“No time, I’m on a mission,” Becca called, wringing out her hair and marching off in the direction of Kyle’s house. Her clothes were still damp, but this was more important than that.
“A mission?” Sam said, trailing behind. “For what?”
“My future!”
Copyright © 2017 by Paper Lantern Lit.
