Escape from the Drooling Octopod! (7 page)

“Yes, she saved it from getting out the door,” Dashiell said.

For a brief moment Scilla felt good.

But then Dashiell went on, “Of course, it would have been better if she hadn't let it out of the cage in the first place. I didn't actually see her do it, but you know how she likes to show off when I'm around.”

“Scilla!” her grandma said through a tight jaw with her fists on her hips. “Put Huckleberry back in his cage and get up to your room right now!”

“But — ” Scilla started.

“You know better than to play with Huckleberry out of his cage,” her grandmother added. “Just because your brother is visiting, it's no time to take leave of your senses.”

Scilla felt like melting into the floor. There was no sense arguing about it. She'd fed him in the morning. Maybe she'd left the cage door unlocked.

Scilla didn't have to stay late after school the next day, but she wished she had. She hurried in the house to drop off her backpack and change her clothes, as usual. But then Dashiell glided into her room and insisted on telling her the words he'd spelled to win fifteen spelling bees in a row. It was like listening to a talking dictionary. He kept spitting out words until she started seeing them flittering about the room like moths.

When he finished, she started to move toward the door, but then he had to tell her about their grandma's tea party earlier that day. He told her how silly the old ladies looked and talked — how Mrs. Jacobs kept pulling up her knee-high nylons, and how Mrs. Hedley tapped on her hearing aid and yelled, “What was that?” after anyone said anything.

Still, he'd apparently been a hit. Oh yeah, he had schmoozing down to a science. With his perfect looks and charm, he probably had his grandma and the other ladies thinking he was an up-and-coming Cary Grant.

Scilla finally thumped down the stairs two at a time with him scrambling after her. But before she could get out the door, he said he had a surprise for her. He pointed to an end table across the living room. Sure enough, a chocolate bar lay on top. That was about the only candy she could still stomach eating these days.
Wow! Maybe he liked her after all.

“Thank you,” she said, giving him a big smile and walking over to the table. She picked up the candy and started back toward him. Half a second later, her grandma's crystal lamp spun off the table. She didn't notice that she had hit it, but she saw it crash to smithereens on the floor. “Eeeeiiii!” Scilla yelped in a squeak dripping with panic. “No! This is Grandma's favorite lamp!” She was totally worm meat now — maybe even pond scum.

With trembling hands, and aching with anguish in about every part of her body, Scilla cleaned up the broken crystals and retrieved the tasseled shade and marble base. In the process, she found a long thread so thin and clear that it was almost invisible. It was fishing line. She remembered it from the time her uncle Ted had taken her fishing. Maybe Grandma had used it to fix something. Wiping tears from her eyes, she put everything in a large bowl — just in case the lamp could be fixed — and ran crying out the door.

Scilla knew that she would probably be grounded again — for good reason, she admitted. She wiped away the last of the tears with her shirtsleeve and started climbing up to the tree ship. To get to the tree, she didn't have to go into Beamer's yard. His big tree had a split trunk. One half went almost straight up. The other half ran up at about the angle of a playground slide, crossing over into her yard before it turned to a more vertical rise. All she had to do was hoist herself up and crab-walk up to where she could hop onto a branch that took a diagonal course toward the tree ship.

She almost forgot how depressed she was when she smelled the honeysuckle and hibiscus flowers. Right there, about halfway up the angled trunk, Scilla decided to make this day — her last day before being grounded — a great one. Suddenly she was no longer plodding up the tree, but practically dancing. Some of her grandma's red bougainvillea had wound itself into the tree. Nothing was better than the colors and smells of spring. Best of all, though, were the bright green leaves that waved to her an enthusiastic greeting in the breeze. A gentle cloud of spinning white dandelion seeds also glided by, each sparkling in the evening sunlight. For a moment, she felt like she was in a fairyland where nothing could possibly go wrong.

Just as she plopped down on the wooden platform next to the tree ship's door, she saw a patch of pink flapping in the distance. She pulled some branches back for a better look and then gave a heavy sigh — one with a little “eek” in it.

A few minutes later, the elevator creaked to a halt next to the ship. Beamer and Ghoulie locked the elevator into place, tossed a few yellow-white kernels of popcorn into their mouths, and turned toward the ship. Scilla was sitting, hunched down next to the door, elbows on knees, chin in hands, looking like she was awaiting the end of the world.

“Hey, what's up?” Beamer asked her as he crunched his popcorn.

She pivoted her head sideways on her hand. “Look for yourself — that away,” she said, cocking a thumb north-ward, up the street.

Beamer and Ghoulie stopped crunching at the same time and stared. Beamer handed the bowl to Ghoulie and crossed over to push away the branches. Yep, sure enough, there it was — a flag — a pink flag — waving on the roof of Alana's house. Talk about kicking the joy out of the day; even the leaves seemed to sag.

Beamer sank down next to Scilla. “Now what do we do?” he asked morosely.

“I don't think we have much choice,” groaned Scilla. “We promised!”

“Hey, we didn't say the word
promise
, did we?” Ghoulie argued. But then he saw the look on their faces. “Okay, okay, so we gave her the idea we'd be back. Uh . . . maybe we can keep our promise later,” he said as he sat cross-legged facing them. He tossed a popcorn kernel into the air, caught it on his tongue, and snapped it into his mouth like a frog catching a fly.

“You know what'll happen if we don't visit her,” grumbled Scilla.

“Oh, right,” said Ghoulie with a wince, “I almost forgot — more pink dreams.”

“Well, we might as well get this over with,” said Beamer as he stood up.

Beamer launched up to the nearest branch. “One thing we gotta figure out on the way over,” he said, “is how to play without staring at her face all the time.”

“Yeah, she'll suspect something is wrong if we keep doin' that,” Scilla agreed. Now that she was more familiar with the route, she skipped from branch to branch like a tree fairy — light as a feather.

“Probably the best approach,” said Ghoulie, “would be to concentrate on what we're doing and look at her only when we have to.”

“She'll notice if we avoid looking at her,” said Scilla, shaking her head.

“Then we'd better come up with a picture in our heads that we can substitute for her real face,” Beamer said as he lofted himself up into the corridor they would travel through the trees.

Alana heard them land on the balcony and rushed to greet them. Right away they practiced looking straight at her and smiling while imagining somebody else's face. Beamer used the face of Lisa from the
Simpsons
— well, they were both blonde, anyway.

One thing was for sure — Alana was no Cinderella. Her room was actually three rooms — a bedroom, a bathroom, and a huge playroom. It wasn't as big as Ghoulie's play-room, but it had everything a girl could want — dolls and stuffed animals, books, art supplies, a computer, more glass figures — kept out of harm's way — and a mini carousel.

Luckily, she also had a few things guys liked to mess around with. Ghoulie had a lot more fun than he had expected — playing with cars, big and small, that scooted around, vrooming and honking on the floor, and planes that would fly around the room sounding like tiny lawn mowers. The trouble, of course, was that even these were mostly colored pink. Beamer swallowed hard each time he touched one of them.

As far as he could tell, Alana seemed to be having a good time. If anything, she seemed a little hyperexcited to have people to play with. There were a few times when she had trouble sharing. Beamer was about to chalk this trait up to her “evil” side, when it occurred to him that she probably hadn't had much practice.
How do you learn to share when you
have no one to share with?

Yeah, this girl might as well have been born on the moon. Planet Earth was a total mystery to her. She had no TV and no video-game machine. She did have a computer, which Ghoulie hooked on to right away. But it had no connection to the Internet. The only programs on the machine were educational ones.

That's not to say Alana wasn't smart. When it came to facts, she was a walking, talking encyclopedia. All they had to do was say a word — like maybe
albatross
— and she'd rattle off what it meant in incredible detail.

She was no slouch when it came to numbers either. Ghoulie was on her computer, trying to show her where he lived, when she popped down beside him and used her map and geography programs to calculate the distance to his house, how far the house was from the exact center of the city, and the pollution content of the air around his house. All Ghoulie could do was gulp.

To Beamer, it seemed she was more like a robot in the process of being programmed than a kid learning. It was weird. There were huge gaps in her “programming.”

The more he thought about it, the more worried Beamer became. You couldn't tell by looking — what with her having a big house full of goodies — but, no doubt about it, Alana lived in a bubble. Whatever else she might be, she was every bit as delicate as one of her glass figurines. Any mo-ment, he worried, they could accidentally do or say something that would break her and her bubble into a thousand pieces.

10

Oh, Brother

It wasn't surprising that Alana wanted to know everything about everything outside her bubble. Some of her questions were kind of strange.

“How can you walk to school?” she asked Scilla. “Won't the gangs kill you before you get there?”

What she did know about the world was definitely a little warped.

“Well, I've heard about gangs,” Scilla said, “but I've never seen any around here — except for the Scull Cross gang. They're mean, but they don't kill anyone.”

“But aren't there wars and plagues and criminals and hypocrites everywhere?” Alana asked.

“I haven't seen any of that stuff either,” said Scilla with a shrug, “except on TV. Well, I might have seen a hypocrite, I suppose, since I don't know what that is.”

Beamer looked questioningly at Ghoulie, who merely shrugged and said, “Me neither. I guess that's something you learn after the seventh grade.”

“I think . . . well, I mean you're thinking about it all wrong,” Beamer said. “Bad things do happen, but an awful lot of good things happen too — much more than the bad, maybe. And if you spend your time worrying about the bad things, you never see the good things.” He'd said something like that to his mom when they were watching the fireflies one night last summer. She thought it sounded pretty good.