by Jo Nesbo
“Then let’s get to it!” she yelled so they heard her almost to the end of the line. “No pushing, let the little ones in first, and have your money ready!”
THERE WAS STILL a line out there at seven o’clock when Nilly shut the gate, but they were totally out of powder.
“Sold out!” Lisa shouted, and said that anyone who hadn’t gotten to buy fart powder could come back tomorrow, once Doctor Proctor had made some more. And even though naturally a few people were a little disappointed, they quickly started looking forward to the next day. Because all the way down Cannon Avenue, you could already hear the farts banging and the laughter from the kids who had gotten to buy the powder.
“Phew,” Lisa said, flopping down into a garden chair once everyone was gone.
“Phew,” Nilly said.
“You know what?” Doctor Proctor said. “We have to celebrate this. What would you guys say to a little …”
“Jell-O!” Lisa yelled in delight.
“A five-foot-long Jell-O!” Nilly yelled, jumping up and down in his chair.
The doctor disappeared, but returned quickly with the longest Jell-O Nilly and Lisa had ever seen.
“I made this just in case,” Proctor said, smiling slyly.
And as the swallows drew strange letters in the evening sky over the pear tree, silence settled over Doctor Proctor’s yard. In the end all you could hear was the smacking noise of three mouths devouring a four-foot-eight-inch-long Jell-O.
Truls and Trym Blast Off
WHEN LISA WALKED out her front gate the next morning, Nilly was standing there with his backpack on.
“Waiting for someone who’s going the same way?” Lisa asked.
“Yup,” Nilly said.
Then they started walking.
“My mom and dad asked me what was going on in Doctor Proctor’s yard yesterday,” Lisa said.
“Did you tell them?” Nilly asked.
“Yeah, of course,” Lisa said. “I mean, it’s not a secret, is it?”
“Nooooo,” Nilly said hesitantly. “I just don’t usually risk telling my mom about things I think are really fun. Because she almost always decides they’re dangerous or naughty or something.”
“She may almost always be right, you know,” Lisa said.
“Yeah, that’s what’s so irritating,” Nilly said, kicking a rock. “What did your parents say?”
“Dad said it was just fine if I earned some money of my own, then he wouldn’t have to earn it for me.”
“Oh? So then he didn’t think it was dangerous?” Nilly asked, a bit skeptical.
“A little farting? Not at all,” Lisa said. They walked for a ways before Lisa added, “Of course, I didn’t tell him about the fartonaut powder.”
Nilly nodded. “Probably just as well.”
“Anyway, I have an idea,” Lisa said.
“Well, that’s definitely good,” Nilly said.
“Why?”
“Because you pretty much only ever have good ideas,” Nilly said.
“I was thinking that the fart powder doesn’t really taste like anything,” Lisa said.
“It has absolutely no taste,” Nilly said.
“That’s what I’m saying.” I mean, the farting is fun,” Lisa said. “But what if we added a flavor to it, so it tastes good when you eat it, too?”
“Like I said,” Nilly replied. “Only good ideas. But what kind of flavor?”
“Simple,” Lisa said. “What’s the best thing you’ve tasted recently?”
“Simple,” Nilly answered. “Doctor Proctor’s Jell-O.”
“Exactly! So what we do is add five percent essence of Jell-O to the fart powder.”
“Brilliant!” Nilly exclaimed.
“Brillll-yant?” they heard a voice say from right behind them. “Don’t you think that sounds brillll-yant, Trym?”
“It sounds like gobbledygook,” said another voice, which may possibly have been even closer.
Nilly and Lisa slowly turned around. They’d been so excited that they’d forgotten to stop and see if the coast was clear before they walked by the house where Trym and Truls lived. And now the two enormous boys were standing there. They were sporting big sneers, each of them chewing on a matchstick, their jaws moving up and down in their enormous, barrel-shaped heads.
“Good morning, boys,” Nilly said. “Sorry, but we have to hurry. Mrs. Strobe doesn’t like her geniuses to be late to class.”
He tried to say it offhandedly and casually, but Lisa could hear in his voice that Nilly wasn’t all that confident. He grasped Lisa by the hand and was about to pull her along after him, but Trym was blocking their way.
Truls was leaning against the picket fence, rolling the matchstick from one corner of his mouth to the other. “We didn’t get any powder yesterday,” he said menacingly.
“You guys must have gotten in line too late,” Nilly said, and gulped. “You can try again this afternoon.”
Truls laughed. “Did you hear that, Trym? Get in line?”
Trym hurriedly started laughing.
“Listen up, you freckly anteater,” Truls said quietly, grabbing Nilly by the collar. “We’re not going to be standing in any line or paying you anything for that fake powder of yours, you catch my drift? We want that powder right here, right now. Or else …” The matchstick flipped up and down in the corner of his mouth as he stared at Nilly grimly.
“Or else what?” Nilly whispered.
Truls looked like he was thinking.
“Or else what?” Lisa repeated dully.
“Come on, Truls,” Trym said. “Tell them.”
“Shut up!” Truls yelled. “Let me concentrate …” He concentrated. Then his face lit up. “Yeah, or else we’ll smear honey all over you and tie you to the top of this here oak tree. Then the crows will peck you to pieces.”
Truls pointed to an oak tree with a trunk that was as big around as four men the size of Lisa’s father. And as big around as two men the size of Truls and Trym’s father.
They all looked up.
“Oh,” Nilly said.
“Oh,” Lisa said.
“Uh-oh indeed,” Trym said.
Because the oak tree was so tall, it looked like the top branches were brushing against the white cloud that was sweeping past up in the sky.
“In that case,” Nilly said, “we’ll have to see if we can find some kind of a solution. If you could just let me go for a second …”
Truls released his grasp, and Nilly started rummaging around in his pockets. When he was done with all six of the pockets he had in his pants, he started on the six in his jacket.
Truls was getting impatient. “Well?” he said.
“I’m almost certain I have a bag here somewhere,” Nilly muttered.
“We don’t have time for fakers,” Truls said. “Trym, get the honey and the rope.”
“Wait!” Nilly yelled desperately.
“Let’s get the little girl first,” Truls said, grabbing Lisa by the arm.
“Here,” Nilly said, holding out a bag of grayish powder. “That’ll be fifty cents.”
“Fifty cents!” Truls grabbed Nilly’s wrist, snatched the bag, and spit his half-chewed matchstick into the palm of Nilly’s hand. “Here, you can have this. Now you can go home and set yourself on fire.”
“Ha, ha,” Trym laughed.
Truls eyed the bag suspiciously. “What does this say here?” he said. “D-O-C-T-O-R. P-R-O-C—”
“Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder,” Lisa said quickly.
“Shut up, I can read!” Truls yelled.
“Well, excuse me,” Lisa said, sounding miffed.
“Hmm,” Truls said.
“Hmm,” Trym said.
“You first,” Truls said to Trym.
“No, you first,” Trym said to Truls.
“You guys could share,” Nilly said.
“Shut up!” Trym yelled, almost as loudly and nastily as Truls just had.
Then they opened the bag and Truls
poured exactly half into Trym’s hand and half into his own hand. They looked at each other for a second and then swallowed the powder.
“They’ll taste better once we add the Jell-O flavoring—,” Lisa started.
“… ut up!” Truls and Trym yelled, their mouths full of powder.
“Nothing’s happening,” Truls said, once he’d managed to swallow.
“Seven,” Nilly said.
“What the heck?” Trym said.
“Six,” Nilly continued. “Five.”
Truls turned to look at Lisa. “What’s the puny one babbling about?”
But Lisa was offended and showed with her pursed lips and crossed arms that she of all people was not planning on answering.
“Four,” Nilly said.
“Truls …,” Trym said. “I can feel something happening … it’s like … it’s like a tickling in my stomach.”
Truls scrunched up his forehead and looked down at his own stomach.
“Three,” Nilly said. “Two.”
“Hey, now I feel it, too,” Truls said. A big smile spread over his face as Nilly said, “One. Good-bye.”
“Huh?” Truls and Trym said. But no one heard them. Because the only thing anyone could hear was the bang that woke up everyone on Cannon Avenue who wasn’t awake already. Lisa rubbed the dust, which had blinded her, out of her eyes, but she still couldn’t see anyone besides Nilly.
“Where’d they go?” she asked.
Nilly pointed his index finger toward the sky.
Lisa looked at Nilly in disbelief. “You … you didn’t give them …?”
Nilly nodded.
“The fartonaut powder? You’re crazy, Nilly!” Lisa shielded her eyes, staring up into the sky.
“It was them or us,” Nilly said, glancing upward himself.
“They’re gone,” Lisa said.
“Vanished into thin air,” Nilly said.
“I bet it’ll be a long time before we see them again,” Lisa said.
“Maybe never,” Nilly said. “Or, wait a second.”
Now that they were getting their hearing back, they were able to hear the rumble of a long fart. And a pitiful voice.
“Help!” the voice was yelling. “Help, we’re falling!” It sounded like the long fart and the voice were both coming from the oak tree.
Lisa and Nilly went over to the tree and there, way up at the top of the tree, they could see the soles of two pairs of sneakers. Truls and Trym were dangling by their arms from a branch at the very top of the tree, and the long fart was making all the leaves below them shake.
“Mommy!” Truls yelled.
“Daddy!” Trym yelled.
Nilly started laughing, but Lisa grabbed his arm. “We have to get them down,” she said. “They might get hurt.”
“Okay,” Nilly said. “Let me just finish laughing first.”
And then he laughed some more. And when Lisa heard that, she couldn’t help but laugh, too. And all the neighbors who’d been woken up by the bang now opened their windows to peer out and see what caused it. They heard three things: people yelling “Mommy” and “Daddy,” people laughing, and a flapping noise that reminded them vaguely of … but that couldn’t be, could it? … yes, it was: a real marathon fart.
“If we’re going to rescue you guys, you’ve got to hurry up before the fart ends and do exactly what I say!” Nilly shouted up to Truls and Trym. “Understand?”
“Just get us down!” Truls yelled.
“Grandma! And Auntie!” screamed Trym.
“Lift your legs so your butt is pointing down toward the ground, and let go!” Nilly yelled. “Now, right away!”
Truls and Trym were so scared that they just did what Nilly told them. They let go. And then wafted down between the branches, pulling with them a bunch of leaves and acorns, and landing rather hard in a heap in front of Lisa and Nilly.
“Well?” Nilly asked, rolling the matchstick from one corner of his mouth to the other. “Do you guys want some more?”
“N-n-no,” Trym said.
“All right,” Nilly said. “That’ll be fifty cents, then.”
“Wh-what?” Trym said. “Did you hear that, Truls?”
But Truls hadn’t heard. He was lying on his back on the sidewalk, staring blankly up at the sky, blinking over and over again.
Trym dug down in his pants pocket and held out a dollar, which Lisa accepted.
“Well, gentlemen,” Nilly said, stuffing the matchstick into his back pocket. “The clock is ticking and unfortunately, Lisa and I have to get going.”
Nilly and Lisa started running. They made it onto the playground just as the bell rang.
“Hey, Nilly!” It was a boy whose face was vaguely familiar to Nilly. “Cool powder! You wanna come play soccer at Kålløkka after school today?”
“Nilly!” someone else yelled. “Børre and I are going to come buy more farters tonight. Do you want to come over to Børre’s afterward and play PlayStation or something?”
A girl came over to Lisa. “Some friends are coming over for pizza tonight. Can you come?”
Nilly and Lisa nodded in all directions and ran toward the door to the school.
“Can you believe it, Lisa?” Nilly whispered. “We’re popular. You’ll see—you’ll have a new best friend in no time.”
Lisa nodded slowly.
As they filed into the classroom along with everyone else, she tugged Nilly’s sleeve:
“Hey, Nilly, I’ve been thinking.”
“Yeah?” Nilly said.
Lisa smiled and looked down.
Nilly wrinkled his forehead. “What is it?”
Lisa opened her mouth and was about to say something. But then it was like she changed her mind and closed her mouth again. And when she opened it again, it was like she was saying something different from what she’d been planning to say originally.
“Well, I was thinking that it was strange that you happened to have a bag of fartonaut powder with you,” she said. “And especially strange that it said on the bag that it was regular fart powder.”
Nilly shrugged.
“You planned that, didn’t you?” Lisa said. “You filled one of the regular bags with fartonaut powder when we were sitting in Doctor Proctor’s garden yesterday. Because you knew Truls and Trym would stop us someday and when they did, you wanted to have a bag with you so you could trick them.”
Nilly just smiled in response.
“Isn’t that what happened?” Lisa asked.
But just as Nilly was about to respond, they were interrupted by the loud voice of Mrs. Strobe saying, “Good morning, my dear children. Take your seats and be completely quiet, please.”
And then they all obeyed. Mostly, anyway.
TRULS AND TRYM didn’t go to school that day. They stayed home for four good reasons. The first was that the puny devil might have come up with more dirty tricks. The second was that the other kids at school might have heard about what happened and would forget to be scared of Truls and Trym and laugh at them instead. The third was that when it came right down to it, Truls and Trym were two very lazy guys. But the fourth and most important was that they needed help thinking up a way to get revenge. Because no one was better at revenge than their father, Mr. Trane. And now their big, fat father was sitting in a big, fat armchair in their big, fat home, scratching his fleshy belly. “Interesting,” he said. “So, this professor has a powder that can shoot a person right up into the air? Plus another powder that kids are willing to pay money for?”
“Yeah,” Truls said.
“Yeah,” Trym said.
“Not such dumb inventions,” Mr. Trane said with an evil sneer as he jabbed a stick into a cage where a frightened guinea pig was trying to get away. “I think I have a plan, boys. A plan that we can all make some money off of.”
“Yippee!” cheered Truls.
“Yippee!” yelled Trym. “What’s the plan?”
“A little creative borrowing,” Mr. Trane said.
�
��Awesome!” cried Truls.
“How do we start?” asked Trym.
“We start, of course …,” Mr. Trane said, grunting as he reached for the phone, “by calling the police.”
A Perfect Day?
NILLY AND LISA danced home from school. It was a perfect day. It had started with Truls and Trym eating the fartonaut powder, which blasted them up into the sky. And continued with everyone wanting to be friends with them. Even Mrs. Strobe had been in a good mood, and when Nilly had given one of his usual unusual answers, she’d laughed so hard she cried, patted him on the head, and said that it was remarkable how many strange things he had room for in there. And this afternoon, Lisa, Nilly, and Doctor Proctor were going to sell even more fart powder, make even more friends, and eat even more Jell-O, and then just wait for Independence Day. So it wasn’t so strange that they were dancing. Because what could go wrong?
Nothing, Nilly thought.
Nothing, Lisa thought.
Which is why they didn’t give it a second thought when they noticed a police car parked on Cannon Avenue.
“See you this afternoon,” Lisa chirped.
“Definitely,” Nilly said, practically jumping over his front gate. He ran up the steps, opened the door, and was about to go in when he caught sight of a group of people moving through the tall grass toward Doctor Proctor’s front gate. There were two men in police uniforms, one of them with a Fu Manchu mustache, the other with a handlebar mustache. They both looked very determined, and between them they were holding Doctor Proctor, who was gesticulating and looked very agitated.
“Stop!” Nilly yelled, leaping down from the porch and running over to the fence. “Stop in the name of the law!” The group stopped and turned toward Nilly.
“We are the law,” Mr. Fu Manchu said, “not you.”
“What’s going on?” Nilly asked. “What do you want with the doctor?”
“He has broken the law,” Mr. Handlebar said. “And we on the police force don’t take that kind of thing lightly.”