12
When I woke up the next morning I went down stairs and stared at the sitting room. Bare, wooden floorboards. The wallpaper all peeling off the walls. Mould on the ceiling. A major mess.
‘I’ll help redecorate, Mum. I’ve got an idea for edible wall paper, and sand instead of carpet. For a calming effect. Like the beach. And—’
‘Into the dining room with you, Monster. Hurry up,’ said Mum. ‘They’re all waiting for you.
No! Not another family conference! I’d forgotten I was running away from home to escape a major punishment. I sighed. Somehow all my tricks make everyone angry. Maybe I’d better stop playing tricks. Maybe. But I only do it to brighten the world up a bit. Otherwise it can get very boring.
I slunk around the dining-room door. Mum and Dad came in behind me. Sitting round the dining-room table, smiling, beaming at me, were Stone Face, my teacher, the doddery psychiatrist, my neighbour Skim Milk, the two cops, and Sis. She looked at me and started blubbering.
Words didn’t fail me this time. ‘Whoever’s responsible for dealing to my sister, I’ll…I’ll get them…’ My voice kind of trailed off at the end, like the way Dad speaks when he’s angry. I guess our family isn’t very good at being threatening. But I still meant it. I tried again. ‘Sis is Sis and that’s that. No one’s going to make her unhappy. She looks so bad when she’s sad. So there.’
She had her face in her hands, and rocked backwards and forwards, gulping. Then suddenly she tossed her head back and looked at me. She was grinning.
‘You’ve been tricked, Monster! You’ve been had. Totally! Had!’
She screamed and cackled and gaggled all at once. I thought she must be having a nervous breakdown.
Then I saw that everyone else was smiling, too. And Skim Milk was patting Sis on the shoulder as though he understood exactly what she meant.
What the—?
Skim Milk got up and pulled a horrible thing that looked like the skin of a chicken out of his pocket. He threw it on the table in front of me.
It was a latex mask. I recognized the tuft of hair sticking out of the top.
‘You? Herm? What—?’
They all started talking at once and I couldn’t understand any of it. Sis was crowing about tricking me with alien blue flashes.
‘And my car being a spaceship!’ laughed Skim Milk.
After a few minutes of deafening shouting, with everyone trying to tell me something, the nice cop took my arm and signalled we should leave. She took me out of the house, down the path, into the street.
Ah-ha, I thought, this is what it feels like to be arrested.
We turned left and walked up to Skim Milk’s garage. The nice cop said, ‘Take a look in there.’
I walked in the small side door and there was the yellow sports car that I’d thought was a spaceship.
I, the greatest trickster in the known universe, had been out-tricked. It was the worst moment in my whole life. Total humiliation.
‘But, but, but—’ I babbled.
‘It was your sister’s idea. She couldn’t bear the idea of you being sent away to school. So that last night, when you were so upset, she thought up this plan and got Mr Jenkins, your neighbour, to co-operate.’
‘But, but, but—’
‘They all thought this would be a better punishment than—’
‘Stop!’
I didn’t want to hear any more. Sis was right. It was the worst punishment I could have had. However, I’d get over it. I wasn’t a trickster anymore. I’d already decided that. I was a junior inventor now, planning to improve the world for children everywhere. And as soon as I was home from school that day I’d be starting on my first invention. So, look out, Sis. I’ll be inventing machines to get rid of trickster sisters.
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
First published 1997
First published in this edition 2010
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1, Auckland 1140
Copyright © Janice Marriott 1997, 2010
Janice Marriott asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
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National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Marriott, Janice.
Selections
Monstrosity / Janice Marriott.
ISBN 978 1 8695 0833 3 (pbk.)
ISBN 978 0 7304 5090 0 (epub)
[1. Practical jokes—Fiction. 2. Behavior—Fiction. 3. Humorous stories.] I. Marriott, Janice. Green slime dinner time. II. Title.
NZ823.2—dc 22
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Monstrosity Page 17