1


“Rrreeeeoooowwww!”

“Fang, you have to get under the bed,” I pleaded. “I know it’s a bit smelly.” I flicked away some old gym socks that had been under there since the beginning of the summer, probably. “Yuck. Yeah, OK, pretty smelly, but you have to get under there anyway. They called an immediate tent search for pets! And you know what happens if they find you. It’ll be the Canoe of Shame for both of us.”

“Urgh, urgh, urgh, urgh,” said my Evil Scientist tentmate Igor, who is a kid of few words. OK, one word.

I translated the urghs. “Yeah, or they’ll put us in the ‘I-Stupidly-Tried-to-Break-the-Rules-and-Smuggle-in-a-Pet’ Stockade and call Mom to come and get us!”

“Urgh, urgh, urgh,” Igor added, looking out from the front flap of the tent.

“They are almost here, Fang. You’ve got to hide,” I said, trying to shove her. She’s tiny, but when she wants to she can spread herself out so wide that you can’t bend her, let alone hide her somewhere that she doesn’t want to be hid.

“She’s not budging,” I said, and let go of Fang. She relaxed her claws, leaped up onto the bed with a smug “Meow” and started to wash herself.

“Fang, you are gonna get us kicked out of camp,” I said.

“Urgh, urgh, urgh!” Igor rushed over toward us as I heard footsteps approaching the tent flap.

Igor must have caught Fang off guard because she didn’t claw him when he scooped her up. I don’t know what he was thinking, but in a split second, just as the tent flap opened, Igor threw Fang up into the air. We were both pretty surprised when she didn’t come down again.

Phillipe Fortescue, master of evil disguise, and Kirsty Katastrophe, evil cheerleader at large, strode into the tent and looked around.

“You know why we are here,” Phillipe said. “There has been a pet found in one of the tents.”

“Urgh, urgh, urgh?” Igor nodded, trying desperately not to look up to see where the heck Fang had gone.

“Well, no pets here,” I said, putting my hand on each of their shoulders and guiding Kirsty and Phillipe toward the tent flap. “Thanks for checking, though.”

Kirsty judo-flipped me onto the floor. “Owwwh,” I mumbled.

“We are not done looking,” she said, and walked over to where I had been standing before. The first place she checked was under my bed. “No animal could live under there. It stinks,” she said. Then she looked under the blankets and around the bottom of the bed.

As I sat up, rubbing my head from where it had thwacked the floor, I spotted Fang.

She was hanging upside down from the tent roof like a little bat kitty. And she didn’t look happy to be there. I jerked my head back toward Kirsty quickly so she wouldn’t see me looking up.

Igor hadn’t spotted Fang yet.

“So what pet did you find?” I asked, getting up and speaking to Phillipe.

“It was a turtle. Apparently, it had been in hibernation and the camper had disguised it as a rock. It wasn’t until it tried to crawl out of the tent and got stuck upside down in the dirt that someone noticed that the rock could move.”

“Urgh, urgh,” Igor said, shaking his head.

“Yeah, poor kid,” I echoed.

Kirsty upended my mattress and shook it while she spoke. “If you’re hiding something, then it’ll be easier to tell us now.”

I snatched a glance and saw that one of Fang’s claws had slipped off from the tent canvas. She was tilting now and hanging like a bat kitty with a wonky claw.

“Soooo, do you go easy on a kid if they confess to having a pet, then?” I said.

“No.” She laughed. “I meant it would be easier for us. We have a lot to do before our special guest gets here, and I don’t want to keep looking for any more contraband pets.” She dropped the mattress and it fell to the floor. “Come on, Phillipe, let’s go.”

As the tent flap closed behind them, I pointed to the ceiling.

“Urgh,” Igor said as he looked up just in time to see Fang unhook her final claw and tumble onto the mattress.

The tent flap burst open again.

“Arrrgh!” I jumped toward the mattress to cover Fang. “How did that wild cougar kitten get into our tent from the woods…?” I started to say.

“Relax, it’s just me,” Geeky Girl, the only non-evil kid at Evil Scientist Summer Camp, said. “I wanted to see if you passed tent inspection.”

“Yeah, just,” I said. “And we learned that Fang is part bat.” I laughed.

Igor did a pretty good impression of an upside-down bat Fang and giggled too. I don’t think I had ever heard Igor giggle. It’s kinda like a very low gurgly growl with shoulder shaking.

“Anyway, yeah, we passed. I guess Boris was out on a tree branch somewhere?” I added. “How does nobody notice a bright green budgie flying around camp?”

“People don’t look up very much, I guess.” She reached down and stroked Fang. “Plus, he’s pretty good at sensing danger,” Geeky Girl said. “Speaking of danger, everyone is on edge about this new special visitor. Something doesn’t feel right. You guys might want to stash Fang somewhere safe and come outside.”


Text copyright © 2020 by Mo O’Hara.

Illustrations copyright © 2020 by Marek Jagucki