by Jon Scieszka
Officer Kronsky flipped her pad back open. She wrote down Fred and Will’s description of the apes. She wrote down times, stops, everything Fred overheard.
“I’m glad you spoke up,” said Officer Kronsky. “They might still be on the train.” She got on her radio and told her partner to lock the train doors.
“Do you need any more from us?” asked Mr. Brown. The boys looked at him gratefully.
“This is plenty,” said Officer Kronsky. “This is good. Really good.” Officer Kronsky turned to Fred and Will. “Every once in a while I get a nice surprise on my job. You two guys are one of them. You want a lift to the next train stop? We can still get you to that field trip.”
“That would be great,” said Mr. Brown. “We can join up with our class.”
Fred smiled. “And Will can join up with his new special friend.”
Will couldn’t help smiling.
But he still gave Fred a solid arm punch and told him, “Shut up.”
Ghost Vision Glasses
by Patrick Carman
Kyle Jennings was a normal ten-year-old kid when it came to his understanding of money. It was used, primarily, for three things:
• candy
• action figures
• weird stuff
Kyle was especially fond of weird stuff and would often limit his spending on candy and action figures in order to get more weird stuff. Some of the best weird stuff Kyle had included the following items:
• six cans of fart putty
• a magic trick that made it look like he’d cut his thumb off
• a Chia Head with a full head of green grass hair (Probably Kyle’s favorite weird thing, the Chia Head was pottery in the shape of a bald head, with tiny holes where green grass grew out like hair if you watered it regularly.)
• a camera that squirted water (nonoperational after recently attempted syrup squirt)
• a Magic 8 Ball
• a rubber chicken
• tennis shoes with wheels in them (one currently clogged with old chewing gum)
Kyle kept his stash of weird stuff in a plastic bin in his closet so Scotty Vincent wouldn’t find it. Scotty Vincent was the biggest, meanest kid in the neighborhood. He had gigantic arms like a gorilla and always wore a bright orange baseball cap backward on his huge head.
And he liked to take Kyle’s things.
For example, Kyle used to have a robot made out of grape soda cans until Scotty Vincent took it outside and crushed each can one at a time on the sidewalk in front of Kyle’s house. (He started with the grape-soda-can head and worked his way down to the soda-can feet. It was disturbing.) And he’d once shown up with a pair of scissors and given the Chia Head a grass-hair crew cut, laughing the whole time.
Scotty Vincent’s parents were just as bad, only larger and louder. They constantly yelled at Kyle to stay off their property, which was hard to do because they had a superfriendly horse named Skipper, tied up in their backyard, that would eat out of Kyle’s hand.
“Get your hands away from that horse!” Scotty Vincent’s mom often yelled. She was a large, obnoxious woman and she sometimes smelled like cheese. Scotty Vincent’s dad, one of the hairiest and most unpleasant people Kyle had ever met, usually followed by throwing rotten fruit in Kyle’s general direction and screaming, “This ain’t no petting zoo!”
Scotty Vincent’s parents ran some sort of mail-order internet business out of their house, so they were home quite a lot, which was probably why Scotty himself spent so much time outside during the summer months. Who’d want to stay indoors with those two all day?
At least Scotty’s parents didn’t go looking for kids to torment. That pursuit was Scotty’s alone, and he did it well. He was not above knocking on Kyle’s front door and acting all pleasant to Kyle’s parents in order to gain access to his room, where Scotty proceeded to take whatever he wanted.
Sometimes, when no one was around, Kyle put on one of his fake mustaches and yelled out his bedroom window into the neighborhood, “Scotty Vincent, you’re a big fat jerk!”
Then he shut the window very quickly and hid in his closet with all his weird things and his action figures and his candy.
It was there, on a particular summer day, that his father found him sleeping.
“Kyle,” he said, pushing the sleeping boy with the toe of his tennis shoe. “Wake up. Time to go.”
An hour later, after driving up into the mountains that surrounded the town Kyle lived in, the car pulled down a dirt drive and faced a tiny blue cabin. The cabin was old as dirt, but it had been a bargain his penny-pinching parents had long hoped for. Every previous summer they’d stayed at the lake they’d rented a place, but the winter had brought incredibly low prices, and Kyle’s parents had purchased the little blue cabin. It was the crummiest, smallest cabin on Lake Lenore. The inside, Kyle assumed, would match the outside.
“This is it,” said Kyle’s mom, beaming with excitement. “Don’t you just love it?”
“It’s perfect,” Kyle’s dad agreed.
He slapped Kyle on the back and handed him the keys.
“Go ahead, you first.”
It was early summer, a Saturday, and the lake was brimming with kids. Unfortunately one of them was Scotty Vincent, who was just then pulling up to the dock jutting off the edge of the green grass. The big jerk had his own rowboat, which he’d rowed across the small lake with his gorilla arms. He wasted no time buttering up Kyle’s mom and dad.
“I’m really glad you guys bought a place up here,” Scotty said, although he couldn’t help making a slightly sour face as he glanced at the cabin. He waved menacingly in Kyle’s direction, but Kyle was already unlocking the door and hurrying inside.
The cabin smelled like old gym socks and, wow, was it small inside. Downstairs had a bedroom barely big enough for the double bed his parents would sleep on, a postage-stamp-sized kitchen, and a main room with a single couch and an ancient woodstove. At least there was a second floor, which Kyle went for immediately, in search of the attic room he’d be staying in.
The stairway to the second floor was narrow, with steps that creaked loudly under his feet. Upstairs was nothing but a small loft with a harrowingly low upside-down V-shaped ceiling. It was a head cracker for sure, so Kyle crawled along the floor.
“Awesome,” he said. His imagination ran wild as he thought about how he would transform the loft into a private lakeside fort. He’d create a Lake Lenore Scout Club and invite all his lake buddies to join. Their sworn duty would be to protect one another from Scotty Vincent and, if possible, sink his stupid rowboat.
Kyle set his backpack on the twin-size bed in the corner of the attic and took a good look around. There was a small window where he could see the lake past tall green fir trees, and in the shadowy far corner, something else.
“What’s this?” he asked himself.
It was a cardboard box, and opening it up, Kyle found two things: a dead mouse and a stack of old comic books. He was sad for the mouse, but extremely happy otherwise, because he loved comic books.
“Whoa, these are old,” he said, sitting down under the window where the light streamed in from outside. He held a thick stack of torn-up comics in his lap and started flipping pages. About five seconds later, he heard steps bolting quickly up the stairs. He put the stack of comics behind his back and leaned on them, holding them precariously against the wall of the loft.
“Nice place you got here.”
His parents had let Scotty Vincent into the cabin, and he wasn’t going to leave empty-handed.
“Find any treasures?”
Kyle squirmed on his butt, and the comics slid down on the wall a little bit.
“Nope, just this nice window here.”
“What’s in the box?” asked Scotty, crawling closer to Kyle, looking more like a gorilla than ever.
Kyle leaned harder against the wall as Scotty Vincent picked up the cardboard box and looked inside.
“Check that out!�
�
Kyle could see the wheels turning under Scotty’s orange baseball cap. He could see that Scotty was thinking about picking up the dead mouse and dropping it down Kyle’s shirt.
“You don’t mind if I borrow this little guy, do you?”
Scotty Vincent laughed, picked up the mouse, and dropped it into the pocket of his T-shirt. He was, no doubt, imagining something terrible he could do with it, like scare some four-year-old kid half to death.
Scotty Vincent looked at Kyle very carefully.
“You sure you didn’t find anything else up here?”
“Nope, nothing any good. Just dead mice and dust. And this nice window here.”
“You’re a weird kid, you know that?”
Kyle nodded enthusiastically as Scotty Vincent started down the stairs. He turned at the last second and offered some advice accompanied by a wicked smile.
“Be careful out there on the water. It’s pretty deep. You never know what might happen to a little kid like you.”
Kyle was steaming mad as he peeked out the window and watched Scotty Vincent row away with a dead mouse in his pocket. He sat down under the window with the stack of old comics and started plowing through them, and quickly discovered it was much more of a treasure than he had first imagined.
They were all Archie comics from the year 1970, and this created an unfortunate bit of confusion for a ten-year-old like Kyle. The confusion was particularly strong when Kyle turned to pages filled with offers for the most incredible weird stuff Kyle had ever seen in his life. And what was even better—or so he thought—was how cheap everything was!
98 cents for a Hercules wristband!
79 cents for a handshake shocker!
49 cents for Vulcan ears!
$1.50 for an entire crime detection lab!
A 65-cent crazy-action billiard ball, 30-cent joke gum, and a magnet that lifted fifty pounds for a buck!
Kyle clutched the magazines to his chest, filled with a warm sense of happiness. Could it really be true? Had he hit the weird-stuff jackpot? He ran downstairs and gathered up supplies: a handful of marshmallows for energy, a pad of paper, a pencil.
“Everything okay, sport?” asked his dad.
“Everything is great!” howled Kyle.
“Don’t you want to go swimming in the lake?” his mother asked.
“Right after I get done setting up my room!” Kyle said.
An hour later Kyle had written down a grand total of twenty-seven weird items, including an air car, a secret pocket pen radio, a decoder ring, a werewolf mask, a dog whistle, a whoopee cushion, a trick baseball, and a family of sea monkeys. All that plus the wristband, hand shocker, Vulcan ears, crime detection lab, joke gum, magnet, and the crazy-action billiard ball and tons of other stuff, all for . . . for . . .
It couldn’t be.
It was impossible.
But there it was, all in print in real comic books, so it had to be true!
All for only seventeen dollars and twenty-seven cents!
He’d done a lot of figuring to get the cost just right, because there was one item he wanted more than all the others, and it was expensive. He’d found the item in the very last comic on the very last page and known immediately that he had to have it. It was the one item in the old Archie comics that made him tingle with excitement.
Ghost Vision Glasses.
Putting them on made it possible to see real ghosts floating around right next to you! They were outrageously expensive—a whole ten dollars!—but wow, what an incredible weird item it was. The best weird item of them all.
He’d need a grand total of twenty-eight dollars, and while he couldn’t be positive, he was nearly sure he had that much saved up back home.
Lake Lenore was up in the mountains, almost off the grid. If a person stood in the right spot (like in the tiny kitchen of the blue cabin) they could get a signal on a cell phone, but there was no mail service at the lake. He’d have to wait until he got home to place his orders.
A week at the lake moved like a slug on a wet tree: relentlessly slow. Kyle endured endless tormenting from Scotty Vincent, much of which revolved around getting into the lake. Scotty patrolled the perimeter in his dumb rowboat, seeking out other boys who dared to float along aimlessly on an inner tube. More than one kid had shared horrifying stories of being chased down, flipped over, and left for dead. Kyle wanted no part of that nonsense, and bore the ruthless heat of the week with cannonballs off the old boat dock and quick exits out of the cool water.
He pored over the order forms in the old comic books, double-checking his figures, changing the items a thousand times. But no matter how many times he adjusted his math, the expensive Ghost Vision Glasses were always at the top of the list.
At long last the week came to an end and Kyle, having nailed down the items he would buy with all of his saved money, closed the door to the blue cabin and raced his dad to the car. The second they pulled into the driveway back home, Kyle ran to his room and set the biggest weird-stuff buying spree of his young life in motion, which began by grabbing the sum total of his personal fortune: a jar of change, three gumballs, and some lint.
“Dad, I need paper money,” he said, carrying his jar of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters into the kitchen. It was a big jar, filled to the rim, although as he peered inside the glass, there was an unfortunate amount of copper staring back. Lots and lots of pennies, mixed with a smaller number of nickels and dimes, and the occasional giant quarter.
“And if it’s not asking too much, I’d like mostly ones, please. You can throw in a ten if that makes it easier,” Kyle continued, thinking about the ten-dollar bill he was planning to send for the Ghost Vision Glasses.
Kyle’s dad, always happy to see his son considering the idea of money at all and sensing a teaching moment in the making, poured the change out on the kitchen counter, where it appeared, sadly for Kyle, even more coppery than it did inside the jar.
“Start counting,” said Kyle’s dad. “I’ll go get my wad of ones.”
Kyle’s dad was offensively thrifty, which was not to Kyle’s advantage. At ten years old, he should have been getting at least twenty dollars a month for necessities, but he only got two crisp one-dollar bills a week. What he’d poured on the table was pocket change he obsessively collected from two primary sources:
Begging. Sometimes, if he begged just right after having gone through the checkout at Wal-Mart, his dad would have pity on Kyle and give him whatever came rolling back in the coin tray.
The ashtray in his mom’s minivan, where she was in the habit of tossing nickels and dimes and pennies. It was their agreed-upon deal that whatever accumulated in the ashtray was Kyle’s, so long as he took out the trash once every day.
It took the better part of what was left of Sunday to count and stack all the change on the table, and when he was done, Kyle was disappointed to discover he had a little less than he’d expected: $28.11.
“Saving twenty-eight dollars takes discipline,” Kyle’s dad said. “I’m impressed!”
So impressed, it turned out, that Kyle’s dad forked over twenty crisp one-dollar bills and a ten-dollar bill in exchange for all the coinage. True, it had also cost Kyle an additional fifteen minutes of his life, in which he was forced to endure a boring lecture on interest rates, savings, and the Federal Reserve, but still—thirty dollars! It meant he could afford every single thing on his list.
This turned out not to be true after Kyle calculated what it would cost for the stamps. There were eleven envelopes with eleven order forms asking for a total of twenty-seven weird things. Postage would run a whopping $4.84.
“Crud,” said Kyle, and he went back to the drawing board with the comic books, refiguring the entire order. Somewhere between scratching the life-size raven’s claw and adding back in the superstretchy monkey, Scotty Vincent appeared at his bedroom window. It was a hot day, and the window was slid open.
“Hot and boring,” said Scotty Vincent. “Puts me in a
bad mood.”
Oh great, thought Kyle. As if Scotty Vincent in a good mood isn’t bad enough.
“What the heck are you doing anyway?” asked Scotty Vincent.
“Nothing important,” said Kyle. “Just being bored and hot, same as you.”
Scotty started to push the first-story window farther open so he could climb through, as he was apt to do whenever he felt like it.
Kyle leaped for the window just as Scotty Vincent’s flip-flop-clad foot landed on the sill. He was not usually one to slam a window shut, but Kyle really didn’t want Scotty Vincent in his room checking out the incredible deals he was getting on weird stuff. His brain fired with thoughts of Scotty taking the order forms, the comics, the envelopes, the twenty crisp one-dollar bills and the ten!
And so it was that the window, which slid sideways, slammed into Scotty Vincent’s flip-flop, which made Scotty Vincent scream, fall over into the yard, and begin flip-flopping around like a hooked fish on the dock at the lake. Kyle locked the window shut and pulled the blind, but it wasn’t enough to protect him from hearing his tormentor yell as he hobbled toward the sidewalk and down the street.
“You are so toast, Kyle Jennings. So toast! You can’t stay in there forever!”
And Scotty Vincent was right. If Kyle didn’t get out of the house he couldn’t buy stamps or mail the order forms for the incredible haul of weird stuff, and there was no way in a million years Kyle wasn’t going to get those letters mailed. He got busy preparing the order forms, addressing the envelopes, and parsing out the funds. He was smart enough to know he couldn’t mail coins—they were too heavy—so for items that were under a buck he put in an entire dollar bill with a note that said, “Please use the extra money I’m paying you to rush-deliver my order. Gratefully, Kyle Jennings.”
The next morning Kyle ate a big breakfast and waited for his dad to leave for work and his mom to become hopelessly preoccupied with planning a Fourth of July family reunion at the new cabin. He waited until she was on the phone, talking to one of her four brothers.
“I’m going outside, be back later,” he said.