Vend U.

by Nancy Springer

  Vend U.

  By Nancy Springer

  Copyright 2013 by Nancy Springer

  Cover Copyright by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Other Titles of The Fantasy World of Nancy Springer and Untreed Reads Publishing

  Dreamfisher

  Iris

  Mariposa

  Rumple What?

  The Boy Who Called God “She”

  The Boy Who Plaited Manes

  The Scent of an Angel

  The Youngest One

  We Don't Know Why

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  VEND U.

  Nancy Springer

  We did not like Jocelyn.

  Jocelyn put tapioca pudding in our book bags. Jocelyn put Jell-O in our gym shoes. Jocelyn smeared Ben-Gay on toilet seats. In the boys’ room too. And if we were on a field trip and we all went into a convenience store to get snacks, Jocelyn would find whipped cream and squirt it all over the store and we’d all get kicked out and nobody would get any snacks.

  Jocelyn parked chewing gum on people’s heads. Jocelyn parked boogers on locker handles.

  Jocelyn beat people up. Boys too.

  If we drew faces in art class, Jocelyn would reach over and turn the noses into vacuum cleaners.

  We did not like Jocelyn. We stayed away from her. Nobody was her friend.

  So at first we were kind of glad about what happened with Jocelyn and the monster vending machine.

  * * *

  It was summertime. It should have been vacation from you-know-who. But our parents sent us to this summer arts day camp on a college campus and there she was. Jocelyn.

  Nobody wants to get sued so forget the name of the college. Let’s just call it Vend U.

  The college kids who were there for sports practice were so big they reached right over our heads in the lunch line. The campus was big. The buildings were big. But the vending machines were the biggest of all. In the cafeteria there was a whole wall that was nothing but vending machines standing shoulder to shoulder like huge metal football linebackers in black uniforms. With no heads. Humongous. Jocelyn was as tall as any of us but her nose just about came up to their coin slots.

  Right away she shoved in front of everybody. Of course we were all crowded in front of the vending machines. Like, arts camp is okay, but vending machines are LIFE. And we had never seen so many vending machines that sold so much STUFF. Not just candy and chips and soda and gum but coffee and ice cream and turkey dinner seafood cocktail buffalo wings buffet. And not just awesome stuff to eat, but nail clippers Swiss Army spy cameras poker baseball fishing hats Parcheesi harmonicas rubber stamp printing presses folding bikes trips to Disney World. We all stood bug-eyed with our mouths airing out, looking at that whole wall of hard plate glass bellies full of coiled metal guts with wonderful stuff in them, but Jocelyn didn’t waste any time looking. Jocelyn just tossed her head and got moving. Jocelyn was a tough slim girl like a motor always running, and when something made her stop she made noise. Right away Jocelyn ran all along the whole row of machines smacking her hands against all the buttons at once. She didn’t put any money in, just whacked buttons.

  “Stop it, Jocelyn!” somebody yelled.

  Whenever anybody tried to tell Jocelyn anything, she always grinned like a snake and whipped her head back and cranked open her mouth, which was always slimed with green bubble gum, and started to sing. What was really annoying was that she always sang the same thing. Which was what she did right then. She sang, “DON’T worry, BEEEE happy,” and she kept right on punching buttons.

  “Stop it! They don’t like it!” about six of us yelled at once.

  Which is weird, that we all yelled it at once, but we all felt it. The vending machines didn’t like it that Jocelyn disrespected them. They were big and tall with chests that stuck out even harder than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s and they didn’t like it at all.

  Right in the center was a monster candy machine, the biggest vending machine of all, with one of those liquid-crystal displays that do words, like, TRY DOUBLE-YUMMEE NEW TEABERRY GUM. Usually those displays stay sort of dark greenish all the time. But when Jocelyn didn’t put any money in and whammed the Butterfingers buttons (F8) and the Nestle Crunch buttons (G10) at the same time, the display started to glow yellow, not happy yellow but a kind of watch-out yellow.

  “Stop that,” a girl said to Jocelyn.

  “Get out of the way,” a boy said. He had two quarters. “I want to buy something.” Of course he wanted to use the machine Jocelyn was at.

  And of course Jocelyn couldn’t let somebody else go first. “DON’T worry, be happy,” she sang, and she whipped out a big coin purse stuffed full of money. She plunked two quarters into the monster candy machine and jabbed the KitKat buttons about five times as hard as she would have had to.

  The yellow screen started flashing a black word: OWWW. At the same time the KitKat metal coil turned, which was what was expected, and next would come the thunk as the candy bar fell into the grab slot. Which it did. Except there were two thunks. THUNK THUNK. And we could see through the glass. We all saw. Two candy bars fell.

  “Lucky!” we yelled, and we were not happy that Jocelyn had gotten two candy bars, because after all, weren’t we nicer kids than she was? Then we all crowded forward to try and see if the vending machine would give us two candy bars too. But Jocelyn was quicker. She snatched her candy bars and jammed more quarters into the coin slot and whammed the buttons.

  GREEDY, AREN’T WE? the machine flashed, and now the display was traffic-light red. But it did it again. THUNK THUNK. Two KitKat bars.

  “Happy,” Jocelyn sang, “Be HAPPEEEEE,” and fast as fate, keeping control of the machine, she grabbed her candy bars and slammed in more quarters and hit the buttons again.

  Nothing happened. No thunk thunk. Not even one thunk.

  “Hey!” Jocelyn yelled. “Where’s my candy?”

  The display, which had gone sundown purple, flashed, YOU’LL GET FAT.

  “Hey!” Jocelyn started trying to shake the machine, which was so big and heavy she couldn’t rock it. “Gimme my candy bars!”

  Meanwhile some of us had moved off to the other machines, and we were kind of disgusted when we would get just one soda or whatever we paid for instead of two. But most of us were still watching Jocelyn shaking the candy machine. “For crying out loud, Jocelyn,” somebody said, “you’ve already got more candy than you put in money for.”

  YOU’LL GET CAVITIES, the machine told her.

  Jocelyn just got real mad. “I don’t care!” She started pounding on the machine with her fists, and Jocelyn knew how to hit hard. “Gimme my candy!” WHAM, she pounded, WHAM WHAM WHAM.

  PARDON ME. The machine’s display had gone pure velvety black with ic
y white letters.

  “Jocelyn, stop it,” somebody said. “You’re gonna get in trouble.”

  But the vending machine turned its big steely KitKat coil just a little bit. Just enough to let one KitKat bar slip down and hang from the tip of the coil by a corner of its wrapper, dangling behind the glass.

  “You snothead!” Jocelyn stopped pounding on the vending machine and stood panting. “You big fat buttface!” She got down on her knees, bent over and stuck her arm into the grab slot up to her elbow. She was trying to reach all the way up inside the machine and grab that KitKat bar. We could see her hand wiggling around like a lizard or something inside the glass at the very bottom edge. But she needed about eight or ten more inches to get to the KitKat bar. She scrooched down closer to the slot and twisted around and got her arm in there up to the shoulder and her hand snaked farther into the machine.

  Just as her fingertips touched that KitKat bar, all the metal coils sprang forward and grabbed her. All at the same time. We saw it. Her fingers shot wide open as those coils clamped onto her arm. And at the same time, that grab slot changed shape and opened up like a happy metal mouth, like a giant baby’s lips about to latch onto a monster pacifier or something. It all happened so fast Jocelyn didn’t even get time to scream before her head disappeared into that vending machine and that big metal mouth was slurping in the rest of her like it was inhaling a milk shake.

  A few kids screamed, but mostly we were all so surprised and fascinated that we hardly even made a noise, we just gawked. Anyway, it wasn’t like it mattered enough to scream about. This was Jocelyn.

  Maybe we should have tried to help. Like, we could have grabbed her by the legs and pulled her out. But we didn’t.

  The plate of glass went dark for a minute. And Jocelyn’s legs got shorter and shorter and the whole huge vending machine shuddered and shook. We all jumped back. But then the glass cleared up, and everything looked just like before, Mr. Goodbar, Rolos, Raisinets, M&M’s, Snickers—except Jocelyn was gone.

  The vending machine’s display was a serene green. It said <*URP*>.

  We all started talking at once and some of us flopped down to look under the machine—somebody found a nickel that was practically welded to the sticky linoleum, it had been there so long—and some of us ran to look behind the machine. The whole row of machines had a gray dusty space behind it, and we looked in there. But all we saw was cruddy electric cables and pipes and stuff. Jocelyn wasn’t there.

  Jocelyn was gone.

  “Well, good,” some kid said. “No more Jocelyn.”

  Of course that was what we all were thinking, but most of us didn’t want to say it because we were nice kids. But when somebody said it we all yelled, “Yeah!”

  “No more tapioca pudding!”

  “Or boogers!”

  “No more Jocelyn boogers!”

  “Jocelyn’s gone!”

  “Good!”

  We all yelled and laughed. But nobody took her KitKat bars or her money. There were four KitKat bars and a coin purse lying on the floor in front of the biggest vending machine. We all looked at them but nobody touched them. They lay there all day.

  * * *

  Everything would have been okay, in fact everything was spiffy diffy for a little while—until adults started wondering what had happened to Jocelyn.

  It took a few days. At first when the teachers noticed that Jocelyn was missing, which of course they noticed right away because things got so peaceful, they didn’t want to know where she was. They wanted to think she was somewhere else she was supposed to be, like she went home sick or she was absent or she was visiting somebody else’s class. And her parents—Jocelyn always said whenever her parents grounded her it only lasted one day before they couldn’t stand having her around. So even her parents wanted to think she was somewhere else, like staying with a friend. Yeah, right, like she had any friends. But that was what they wanted to think.

  So things were great for a couple of days. No Jocelyn. But then the cops came and started asking questions.

  Then it got really uncomfortable. Because, you know, what were we supposed to tell them? So we told them we didn’t know anything. Then we felt bad, which was stupid, because we hadn’t done anything to Jocelyn, but we felt bad anyway because we’d lied. Then because we felt bad we looked guilty and the teachers and cops and people saw us looking guilty and kept asking questions harder and getting more and more annoying until it almost would have been better having Jocelyn around again.

  When things reached that point, which was when Jocelyn had been gone a week, we knew we had to try to do something.

  * * *

  We hadn’t gone near the vending machines since it happened. If teachers and cops had a clue about kids at all they should have known where to look just because we were eating the cafeteria food and not going near the vending machines.

  But a week after the monster vending machine’s revenge on Jocelyn we all went over there after lunch. It wasn’t like we decided. We just did it. One of us went over to look, and then we all went over to look.

  We gathered at a safe distance from the machines, like ten or twelve feet, which was still nearer than we’d been since it happened. We stood there and jiggled our feet and stuff but nobody said anything. Nobody did anything. Nobody knew what to do.

  The biggest vending machine’s liquid crystal display started to glow a sunny color with black letters flashing across it, like there was a new kind of candy being advertised.

  So of course we had to see what it said. It was like vending machine gravity took hold. We weren’t thinking about Jocelyn anymore; we just fingered the dimes and quarters in our pockets. We just wanted to slip them into the slots. We just wanted to hear those wonderful noises, click chinggg whirrrr grunk. And the thunk of a vendable being vended. We wanted to grab something out of the grab slot. We wanted to check the coin returns.

  We were nice kids; would the vending machines eat us?

  We all inched forward with our necks stretched so we didn’t have to get too close before we could read the black letters.

  On a mellow yellow background the biggest vending machine was saying, DON’T WORRY.

  All of a sudden we all started smiling and laughing because everything was all right; the biggest vending machine was our friend. The biggest vending machine forgave us for being of the same species as Jocelyn. Life was good; we could buy candy bars again. O great vending machine, thankyou thankyou. We all crowded around to drool over the NutRageous bars, the Starbursts, the Almond Joys, the—

  “Whoa!” somebody yelled.

  There behind the glass, between the 5th Avenue bars and the 100 Grands, was a miniature Jocelyn looking out at us.

  Really looking. The eyes watched us. It wasn’t like a toy or a doll. It was real. It was exactly like Jocelyn.

  We all jumped back and we all started talking so loud and so fast and we were all so discombobulated that we still don’t understand exactly what happened next. Nobody will admit to it, but maybe one of us was actually crazy enough to put money in. Like, a mini Jocelyn only cost ten cents and some of us were saying hey, get her out of there so the cops don’t see her, but we hadn’t actually taken a vote or anything. We were still milling around and babbling when—

  Click. Chinggg. Whirrr. Grunk. We all heard the sounds of money in the big machine’s belly, then the mechanism starting to move. We all gasped and watched, quiet as bunnies.

  THUNK THUNK.

  We all saw. Not one Jocelyn, but two Jocelyns, toppled out of the coil and into the grab slot.

  We all stepped back. Nobody reached to pull them out.

  Nobody needed to. They came crawling out all by themselves.

  BE HAPPY, the machine flashed.

  We weren’t happy. We were way far the opposite of happy. We were so far unhappy that we couldn’t move, we couldn’t scream, we couldn’t run. We just watched pop-eyed like frogs as the little teensy hands hauled the metal flap back so the heads and bo
dies could struggle out. Good grief, Jocelyn was strong. Jocelyns. Plural. They snaked out of that slot like Marines out of the jungle, swung their legs over the edge, hung by their hands for just an eyeblink and dropped to the linoleum floor.

  Then, the instant their feet hit the floor, they grew. Quickly. They shot up like inflatables until they were Jocelyn-sized again.

  We were all backing away, but not fast enough. Right away, without even saying hi, both Jocelyns grabbed the nearest kid. One Jocelyn grabbed a girl and the other one grabbed a boy.

  Kids were screaming now. But the Jocelyns didn’t mind. Like it wasn’t even any trouble they turned the kids they’d grabbed upside down and held them by the ankles and shook them like they were trying to shake money out of a couple of piggy banks.

  “Stop it!” we all yelled.

  “DON’T worry, BEEEEE happy,” the Jocelyns sang. Pocket money rained down from the kids. The Jocelyns dropped the kids and grabbed the money and jammed it straight into the biggest vending machine.

  Too late, as the two kids on the floor scrambled up and ran, too late, as the Jocelyns jabbed the buttons, too late we understood what was happening.

  THUNK THUNK.

  THUNK THUNK.

  Four more Jocelyns.

  We didn’t wait around to see these ones crawl out of the slot and hit the ground and shoot up to full size. We got out of there. We scooted, we skedaddled, we scrammed, we split. We vamoosed, we high-tailed it, we made like trees and leaved. We ran.

  Our mistake, see, was that we had just sort of assumed that the monster vending machine had swallowed Jocelyn for good.

  Well, it was a lot bigger than she was.

  But Jocelyn was—

  We didn’t want to think it.

  When we couldn’t run anymore, we leaned against trees and looked at each other. And we all looked shiny fishy greenish white, our faces like a bunch of egg-shaped liquid crystal displays. Sick.

  Nobody knew what to say.

  “I bet the machine put up a good fight,” somebody said finally.

  “Yeah,” somebody else agreed. There must have been one monster whopper of a fight inside that steel belly before the machine found out it was no match for Jocelyn.