by Jon Scieszka
I jumped on Brian’s bike and pedaled quickly across his front yard toward the road. Just as I started to head down the street, I heard footsteps behind me. I looked over my shoulder.
The bikers were running after me as fast as they could!
And, man, they were fast.
I tried to speed up, but their hands grabbed me from behind and yanked me off the bike, which rolled down the street, then wiped out and tumbled onto its side, its handlebars now bent.
Oh, man, Brian’s gonna kill me if I live through this.
“And where do you think you’re going?” Carl said as he tossed me over his shoulder while his biker buddies all laughed evilly.
Inside our house, the bikers had tied me to a kitchen chair. My mom and dad were staring at me from across the room, looking very upset. I had been so stunned from getting captured I couldn’t speak. Everything was all just too weird.
“The neighbors said you were trying to call the police,” my dad finally said. “Any reason why you’d be doing this?”
The bikers stared at me as Carl bent down and put his face right in front of mine. Man, did his beard smell terrible.
“You wouldn’t happen to know anything you shouldn’t know, would you?” he said threateningly. “You haven’t been snooping around and saw or heard something that’s none of your business, have you?”
His breath stank so bad that I didn’t even want to open my mouth or inhale to talk, so I just sat there and stared back at him as I held my breath.
“If you had just stayed in the backyard like we told you to and not come out of your tent, you wouldn’t be in so much trouble,” my mom said as she stepped forward. She looked terrible. “But, as always, you just don’t listen.”
“You gotta tell us what you know, kid,” Carl said, his nose practically touching mine. “You’d better open that mouth and start talking or I’ll reach down your throat and pull the words right out of you.”
I kept holding my breath, but now I was starting to feel like I was going to pass out. Like it or not, I was going to have to breathe in a big whiff of Carl to get some air so I could tell him to get away from me.
PAAAAAAAAHHHHH! I exhaled a huge breath right into his face.
His eyes went wide and he jumped back suddenly, swatting at the air in front of his mouth and nose.
“AAAAHHH!” Carl yelled. “He’s been eating broccoli! Get him out of here!”
The other bikers sniffed the air, and then they started freaking out, too, waving their hands around and holding their heads.
“Broccoli!” they screamed as they ran out of the room. “NOOOOO!”
My mom and dad sniffed the air and started to panic, too.
“You didn’t throw away that broccoli, did you?!” my mother yelled as she started to cry. “You ate it, didn’t you? YOU NEVER DO ANYTHING WE TELL YOU—”
BOOM!!!
There was a huge explosion inside the house as all the dishes and pots and pans fell off our kitchen shelves and smashed onto the floor and a cloud of dust blasted in from the hallway.
“IT’S HAPPENING!” my father hollered, and then pointed at me. “GET HIM OUT OF HERE NOW!”
Carl started to move toward me. Freaking out, I exhaled again. Carl and my parents recoiled in fear.
“He’s filled with too much broccoli!” Carl yelled. “Just get away from him!”
And then they all ran out of the house.
The ground started shaking like a volcano was erupting. Everything that wasn’t nailed down started to fall. Dust and debris continued to blow through the hallway as I heard a loud, hollow sound coming from my bedroom. I had no idea what it was but felt like I had to see what had become of my room and all my stuff. Since my arms were still tied to the chair, I had to bend over and try to walk with the chair tied behind my back.
The wind in the hallway was like a hurricane. I struggled to move forward as all my possessions blew out of my room and hit me in the face. The hollow noise got louder, and the air blowing out of my room started to get hot as I pushed my way through the door.
And that was when I saw the hole.
There, in the middle of my bedroom floor, where my bed used to be, was a huge round opening that went deep into the ground. It was about six feet across and had metal walls. It looked like it went way down, as if it were some sort of futuristic sewer pipe that tunneled straight into the center of the earth. I could hear a low moaning sound deep inside it, and I tried to get to the edge of the hole so I could peek in at what was inside.
WHOOSH!
Suddenly a huge swarm of what looked like ghosts came bursting up out of the hole, knocking me off my feet and sending me flying backward into my desk.
SMASH!
Wood and plaster exploded everywhere. I looked up and saw thousands of the ghosts flying through the ceiling and into the sky. When I looked back down at the hole they were pouring out of, one of the ghosts flew straight at my face, and before I could even move, he went up my nose. And then…
I was a different person.
I mean, I knew I was still myself in my body, but that part of me couldn’t do anything. My brain had different thoughts, and my body started to move even though I wasn’t controlling it. The person inside me held my hands up in front of my eyes and thought, Finally, I have hands!
And all of a sudden I knew exactly what was going on.
I was part of an alien race whose home planet is light-years away, but I had been in a giant metal “seed” filled with millions of alien spirits that was sent out thousands of light-years ago and had crashed into the earth a few hundred years ago and had been sitting underground waiting until now to come up through the tube that had always been directly under this bedroom, and all my alien friends and I, who were made of gas and who needed bodies to inhabit so we could take over this planet, were on our way to some giant stadium, where we were all going to get people to live inside, thanks to our leaders, who had taken over some bikers and the parents of the kid I was inside now, and we were going to enslave the rest of the human race and use them to do our dirty work, and oh no, this body is full of sulforaphane because the kid who owns it has been eating broccoli and I HAVE TO GET OUT OF IT NOW!
I fell back onto the floor as the alien spirit jumped out of me and flew around in circles like he was having a melt-down before crashing into the wall and knocking himself unconscious.
I looked at him lying on the floor, and now that I was myself again, I realized it was up to me to save the world because I knew exactly how.
And so I did.
It took a lot of convincing on my part to get the army to believe me, but since weird things had been going on in other parts of our country and around the world, they knew that something strange was up. So they eventually decided to give my advice a try. The army all ate tons of broccoli to safeguard themselves against being taken over by aliens, and then they went out with giant semis loaded with broccoli and tons of tanker trucks filled with broccoli juice and made everybody eat broccoli and captured anyone who was acting weird and forced them to drink broccoli juice. And just like that, the alien spirits started jumping out of people and flying back into their underground seed through the hole in my room. Eventually everybody in the world had eaten broccoli, and they were all much healthier on top of not being possessed by aliens anymore. The army then sealed the seed and dug it up and shot it deep into outer space and the world was saved and I was a big hero.
And back at our house, which the army rebuilt for us since it had gotten pretty much destroyed by all of this alien stuff, my parents and Carl and his biker friends sat around having a celebratory dinner where they all thanked me for saving their lives. It turned out that Carl wasn’t such a bad guy after all. The alien inside him was much meaner than Carl really was, and although he still wasn’t that into hygiene, he wasn’t nearly as dirty and stinky as he had been when he was possessed. It turned out that the aliens had no idea how to take care of a human body and didn’t have a clue
that you needed to wash them and change their clothes every day.
“Here’s to our hero,” said Carl as he raised his beer in the air, and everyone else raised their glasses and toasted to me.
“You’re the best son a parent could ever have,” my mom said as she kissed me on the cheek.
“I second that,” said my dad as he smiled at me and gave me a wink.
“Thanks,” I said back to them all. “And I promise I’ll never forget to take out the trash again.”
They all laughed, and then Carl leaned back in his chair, burped, and put his feet up.
“Get your feet off the table, Carl,” my mom said.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Carl.
It was nice to have everything back to normal.
THE BLOODY SOUVENIR
BY JACK GANTOS
My mother was right. I was not my own man. I was a “spineless follower” just as she had always said. I was a boy who was easily led astray. I liked hanging around with dangerous kids who were full of insanely feral ideas that ended in disaster, and I felt lucky that we had recently moved next door to the two most dangerous guys in the world, the Pagoda brothers. Frankie was a skinny, innocent-looking kid who was my age, even though he was covered with about a hundred years’ worth of bruises. We were in the same sixth-grade class, though I didn’t see him much because he mostly only showed up for lunch and to take his afternoon nap in the puke-smelling nurse’s office. Gary Pagoda was in eighth grade, but I was never sure of his age. Maybe he was fifteen or eighteen or even twenty. It was impossible to tell. He had a lot of scar tissue on his face. When I looked at his mouth full of chipped teeth, I thought he might even be twenty-five. But when you considered how he behaved, he might just have been a supersized six-year-old psychopath. One thing I did know is that he had already been to prison. The other thing I knew was that I was vastly jealous that I hadn’t been to prison, too, because that is where he got most of his manly facial wounds and body tattoos, which my mother said were “too rude for the naked eye.”
Well, you can imagine that my mom did not want me to play with those kind of boys. In fact, she “forbid” me to play with them, especially after Gary had poured a bucket of boat fuel on top of their swimming pool and set it on fire. He made Frankie and me dive in and play like we were the survivors on a Nazi submarine that had been hit with a depth charge. He stood on the end of the diving board and threw cherry bombs into the water as we swam around under the flames. No one was seriously hurt, though Frankie temporarily lost his hearing and I only suffered a little burn from where I popped up for air and set the top of my head on fire. It was no big deal that I had a patch of hair that looked like the remains of a tiny forest fire and smelled like burned rubber. I could tell Mom was annoyed, but she was still at the point where she was hoping I would grow out of this self-destructive stage. It wasn’t until a week later when she entered my bedroom and caught me stitching up a three-inch gash over my knee that she lost her temper. I was using one of her sewing needles and some nylon fishing line I had found in the garage.
“You are becoming just like those Pagoda boys,” she said harshly.
“No, I’m not,” I replied. “I’m smart enough to know the difference between dangerous play and fun play.”
“No, you are not,” she shot right back. “You are lying to yourself. Mark my words, you’ll do something so stupid someday that even you won’t be able to deny just how Pagoda-stupid you’ve become.”
She was right, of course, I had already become a hazard to myself, but I actually thought I could stop going over there whenever I wanted. I’m not addicted to stupidity like they are, I had said to myself. I figured I could just snap my fingers and become a whole different kind of kid—like a choirboy, or a chess genius, or a Latin scholar, but I was wrong. I could snap my fingers until the skin peeled off and I wore the raw flesh down to the bone and I wouldn’t change one little bit. In fact, I was even more stupid than they were, though I didn’t know that just yet.
I thought I was just flirting with danger like when we made the Roman catapult out of a springy pine tree and shot each other across the front yard. I only dislocated my shoulder when I landed on a concrete yard gnome, but Mom didn’t find out because Gary popped the joint of my arm back into the socket for me. But this game didn’t mean I had totally lost my sense of good judgment. We were only having fun like the time we put on roller skates and blasted down their metal sliding board and through a flaming Hula-hoop at the bottom as their cousin Jennifer Pagoda filmed us. Sure, that was dangerous, but I wasn’t compelled to do it like my mom suggested. I did it only after I weighed the consequences and decided it was mostly a safe activity. I had self-control when I wanted to use it. I just didn’t want to use it all the time. To me, this was the difference between me and the Pagoda boys. They were obsessed with danger and driven like mindless beasts to hurt themselves. On the other hand, I was just a casual thrill seeker who could give up danger whenever I felt like it.
Or maybe not.
And this is really where my story begins, and where I proved to my mother that I was a pathetic example of a defective human a full rung below Pagoda-stupid. I started out the day by exercising some better judgment over at the Pagoda house. Gary wanted to have a cigarette-smoking contest to see who could suck through a pack the fastest, and I stood up and said, “No way am I doing that!”
“Why not?” Gary asked, and took a quick step toward me as he reached for his knife, which was tucked into his back pocket.
“Because smoking will kill you,” I smugly replied. “Ask anyone.”
“What if I kill you first?” he suggested, and opened his knife, which was as sharp as a razor. “What is worse? A knife through the neck or a pack of smokes? Answer me that, brain-boy.”
“I’d rather die with a knife blade through my lungs than smoke a pack of cigarettes and die like a coughing dog,” I replied. “Smoking is about the most stupid thing a person can do.”
Gary spit tobacco juice on the ground. “Oh, go be a public service announcement and leave us alone,” he said, and waved his knife toward my house. “Beat it.”
“No problem,” I replied, and marched off feeling very proud of myself. I was walking across my front yard while thinking that it was a shame I couldn’t tell my mother how mature I had just been because she had forbidden me to play with them in the first place.
I didn’t have shoes on because it was hot and shoes made my feet sweat. I took a step and suddenly I got a sharp pain right in the bottom of my left foot. “Ouch!” I yelped. It really hurt. I figured I had stepped on a sharp rock or a piece of glass or a nail. I lifted my foot to see what it was, but it wasn’t any of those things. It was a great big wart on the bottom of my foot and it was madly throbbing. How could it have so suddenly grown on me? Maybe warts are like volcanoes, I thought, and they just spring up overnight. I reached down and touched the painful tip of it. “That is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen,” I said out loud as I balanced on my other foot. I figured I had better go in the house and tell Mom, but then I thought, No, don’t tell her. She’ll just take you to the doctor, and he’ll remove it somehow and that will hurt. So I concluded that I would take care of this little wart problem myself.
I limped into the house remembering how Gary had showed me two little scars on his hands. When he was born, he had six fingers on each hand but the sixth one, he said, was like a rubber worm. It just limply hung down by the base of his good little finger. There was no bone in it and no way to control it, so it was always getting caught in car doors and dresser drawers, and when he wiped his butt, it always dipped into the toilet water, which was really gross. So one day when he was ten, he took a pair of garden shears and snipped them off. “Sure it bled a little bit,” he said. “But I rubbed dirt on the cut parts and the blood stopped and a week later the skin healed over. It was no big deal.”
“What’d you do with the fingers?” I asked.
He grinned sheepishly
and leaned toward my ear. “Fishing bait,” he whispered. “A little finger food.”
“Did you catch anything?” I asked.
“A catfish that was big enough to feed the whole family,” he replied. “It was a monster.”
So if Gary could snip off his extra fingers, I could just pull my ugly wart out as if it were a bad tooth. How hard could it be?
I opened the front door of the house and didn’t see my mom, so I quickly limped down the hallway and slipped into my room. I kept my toolbox on my dresser, and I opened it up and removed a rusty pair of needle-nose pliers I had found in the street. They must have fallen out of the back of a telephone repairman’s truck. They were a little dirty-looking, so I rubbed them back and forth on my pants. Then I stood next to my bed with the bottom of my back left foot facing up. I twisted around behind me and with the pliers got a deep, unyielding grip on the wart, and just like my dentist I shouted out, “One, two, three—shazam!” And with all my might I ripped the wart out of the bottom of my foot. Instantly I knew this was not a good idea because I actually heard the sound of ripping flesh, which was like a little zipper sound. And then the blood came squirting right out of that hole in my foot and shot about six feet across the room and hit the wall.
“Arrrgh!” I cried out, and dropped straight to the floor. The pain was crippling. I kept slapping the floor and muttering the magic words against pain, “Mind over matter…mind over matter…I don’t feel a thing!” But the magic words did not work. The pain was massive. I looked back at my foot and a little fountain of blood was spurting out with every beat of my heart. I’m dying, I thought. I’ve really done it this time.