Oddity

by Sarah Cannon

  Cayden’s mother frowns, and I shut up. I’ve put my foot in it by letting on that he rewrote his report.… Good thing he did because he got a passing grade. He’s gonna get an earful later, I bet, though his parents aren’t the sort to slap a bald cap on him, so there’s that.

  “Well, have a snack,” his mom says. “I’ve got lots of Signal Boost and Full Bars!”

  This does not mean what you might think it means.

  I grimace. I’ve been wondering what the deal is with those. Greeley told the Coateses that Signal Boost (a drink) and Full Bars (an energy bar) are custom made, artisanal snacks just for Splint employees.

  Lucky them.

  While I may find Greeley’s creepy, there’s no denying they have the best sodas in town. They make and bottle sarsaparilla and chocolate egg cream and prickly pear (my favorite) right on site.

  Signal Boost, however, is just plain lousy. Cayden’s mom poured me some the first time I came over. LIFT YOUR MOOD WITH SIGNAL BOOST! reads the old-timey writing on the bottle. I spring into action when I see it, but only to leave the area.

  Cayden’s parents love it, though. His mom opens the pantry, and my jaw drops. That thing is wall-to-wall full of bottles of Signal Boost (which comes in three flavors: orange, green, and red) and Full Bars (which come in one flavor: cardboard).

  “Help yourselves!” trills Cayden’s mom.

  “Don’t you ever want spaghetti or something?” I ask, but Cayden overrides me.

  “Thanks, Mom!” he says. “We’ll eat upstairs!”

  He grabs a few of each, waving off his mom when she tries to load us with extra bars, then leads the way to his room.

  I slam his door, with feeling.

  “What the heck was that?” I ask. “If she’s trying to get rid of them…” I consider. “Well, that would actually be pretty funny. But she could be less obvious about it.”

  “I guess Oddity has trouble keeping cell phone providers?” he says. “I dunno. Greeley sends them over to the Splint office as incentives, and now she’s serving them for every meal.”

  “Yeah,” I say, flopping down on his bungee chair. “Cell service here stinks.”

  He throws the bars in the general direction of his desk, where they slide off the enormous pile that’s already there. “Last week, Dad told me we were ordering pizza, but when he opened the box, it was crammed with Full Bars.”

  “That’s a mean joke.”

  “That’s the problem. I don’t think he WAS joking. They both kept talking about how the pepperoni wasn’t as good as in Chicago.”

  “They’re not eating those cacti in the front landscaping, are they? They look good, but those things will mess you UP.”

  “No, I don’t think so.” He pulls out his bottom dresser drawer.… I mean all the way out, and sets it on the floor. He reaches into the empty space beneath it and pulls out bottled water, a jar of peanuts, and a chocolate bar, and hands me a share.

  “That’s okay,” I say. “It sounds like you need it more.” I only take the chocolate bar.

  As I sit down on his bed to eat, I look out the window. The little alien is down in the grass at the corner of the house, taking a break from punkball. He kicks a rock into the front bushes. Something throws it back. It whacks him in the head, and I see him snarl.

  Cayden looks nervously over my shoulder. “It’s still there?” he asks.

  “Just don’t feed it,” I say. I reconsider. “Or you could offer it a Signal Boost.”

  * * *

  Planning the Casa Grande mission may have kept me busy yesterday afternoon, but Aunt Bets would’ve had my head if she’d realized how late I was up last night, mapping my canvassing route and plotting. Stella was not thrilled about sharing the closet, but it kept the light from showing under my door. Goal number one: pick up more signatures than Raymond before school this morning.

  Aha. Here comes Mr. Metzger, right on schedule. I’m about to get my third Sweepstakes signature and thumbprint.

  For Mr. Metzger, right on schedule means just this side of late. He works at Oddity Bodkins, and everyone knows first shift starts at eight. But here it is, 7:53, and he’s dashing out the door with a dribbling travel cup in one hand.

  I sit perfectly still in his backseat and wait.

  He scoops his newspaper off the driveway, with its jaunty blue Sweepstakes flyer sticking out of the top, and shoves it under his chin. He opens the door one-handed, retrieves the paper, and throws it into the back without looking, along with his jacket and his lunch. He drops into the seat, sloshing more coffee from his cup, and jams it into the cup holder. He backs up without even checking the rearview mirror, which is his second mistake. The first was leaving his car unlocked … again. Then there’s the third—no seat belt. I’ve got mine on, of course. I’ve seen him drive.

  Away we go, down the street toward downtown. He rolls right through the stop sign where Roswell Street spills into ours, proving I’m right to make Mase look both ways. Then he finally looks in the rearview mirror, to see if any cops saw what he did, I guess.

  Aw, how cute. He’s screaming.

  I’m piling out of Mr. Metzger’s car in front of Bodega Bodega, having successfully gotten his Sweepstakes signature, when Betty Fischer, that lady who likes to bowl in the middle of the street even when there’s traffic, runs out of the alley, also screaming. Raymond’s right behind her, form and pen in hand.

  He stops when he sees me, and grins.

  “How’s that working for you?” I ask.

  “So far, so good!” He holds up his canvassing foldout. Four signatures already? Shoot!

  “How did you manage that?”

  “I’ve been jumping out at them.”

  I can’t help laughing as I watch Mrs. Fischer disappear over the next hill. “How do they sign and run away at the same time?”

  He shakes his head in self-disgust. “I cornered the rest of them. Forgot about her bowling ball, and she freaked out and threw it at me.”

  I don’t think he’s scary, but then he does every fool thing in front of me that Mason would do. Also, over the summer his feet developed stench. That makes it hard for me to take him seriously.

  “Four signatures.” I shake my head.

  “They’re not always conscious when they do it but they sign.”

  “Oh, come on,” I scoff. “Fake fainting? Nobody would ham it up that much, even for Sweepstakes canvassing.”

  “Why?” he asks. “What’d yours do?”

  I shrug. “Scream. Hide. Hop fences. Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

  I pause.

  “They are really convincing,” I say. “Even without fake fainting.”

  Raymond shrugs. “They only get to do it once a year.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Hey, Ada, wave!” says Raymond, raising a hand. I turn to see Daddy driving by in the animal control van. He worked late again last night, and he’s back on the job already? I narrow my eyes against the glare from the van’s windows, and wonder.

  Chapter 11

  Hunting

  It’s one thing for a neighborhood to show up unannounced. It’s another for it to be empty of people when it gets here. My daddy says when Casa Grande appeared on the outskirts of town in 1982, there was bare tar paper where some of the pastel, one-story houses hadn’t even been finished yet. It’s all been downhill from there. Casa Grande’s a ghost town too poor to afford ghosts, full of staring windows—some with no shades, others with rotting ones that peel apart like paper. The streets are so full of sand it’d take months to clean up all the drifts. It’s being swallowed, like the kingdom in that Ozymandias poem Mr. Bishop likes. But the desert swallows things slowly, so there’s plenty of time for us to lurk around like crows and see what’s shiny.

  Hunting down the Sunset Six was a quest, something you could go and do. Finding an invisible-ish monster somewhere in a fairly big ring of territory, that’s recon work, and recon takes time. The only good news is that if it’s smashing th
ings up, we should be able to hear it before we … don’t see it.

  I like the people who lived in the house we’re prowling through, whoever they were. Their stuff is nice, not costumey. Stored well, so the heat hasn’t crisped and ruined it. I find a velvet jacket, faded blue. A sailor blouse, yellowing but still good, ready to be mine. There’s a plaid wool skirt that would be too granny on the wrong girl, but if I use a belt or pin the sides or something, it’ll hit right on my calves and be perfect. There’s an armload of stuff left for Song even if I take the things I like, so I can maybe trade for saddle shoes, if she’s got them.

  Raymond comes in from the garage. His backpack sags on his shoulder, so I’m guessing he found tools. I’ve already grabbed things from the kitchen and bathroom, my favorite sources for weaponry. Pearl used to go for jewelry boxes.

  “What did you get?” I ask, dropping my backpack on the dusty kitchen table.

  “I did okay,” he says mildly, showing me.

  He’s got a short-handled pruning scythe in there, and heavy-duty clippers, and a couple of saws.

  I can’t resist. I pull out my best find.

  Finally, he looks interested. He whistles.

  It’s an absolute beauty of a pocketknife, a genuine Oddity Bodkin. I’ve gone through two cheap knives in the last few months, but from the weight of this one in my hand, and the sharpness of the blade when I tested it, I should be good for a long time.

  We join Cayden at the front door, and step outside. As we walk, Cayden falls behind. He’s not as used to wandering around the desert as most of us, though with two parents working for Splint, his family is practically a UHF-signal-tracking dynasty, so I guess he’d better get used to it.

  “Do we even know where we are right now?” he asks.

  “Sure,” Raymond says. “We used to come out this way for field trips, but we haven’t done the Cursed Campout in two years.”

  “My old school quit doing field trips, too. They said it was budget cuts.”

  “Ours said the fatality rate got too high,” I say. “Somebody always has to look right at the specters’ eyes and ruin it for everyone.”

  Cayden doesn’t talk much after that, just plods along, kicking at tumblegeeks with his janky, Chicago-boy sneakers.

  I love tumblegeeks. They do their best, but their frantically paddling little feet are a dead giveaway that they’re just tiny dudes using tumbleweeds as camouflage. I don’t see them as much in town, so I consider them a treat—a special discovery Pearl and I made when Daddy took us on hikes.

  The landscaping in this neighborhood died out years ago. Some front yards are just fields of chia bushes. Mr. Bishop says that chia was one of the primary food staples for indigenous people who lived in this area. It’s hard not to take the word staple literally when I end up with scratches and punctures all up my doggone arms.

  When I bring this up, Cayden laughs.

  “He also says that the indigenous people in Oddity were made immortal by aliens and were treated by the Anasazi as gods, but whatever.”

  “Cayden, honestly. Look, I’m sorry your last school was underprivileged—”

  “We lived in Oak Park—”

  “—but you have to stop acting like everything you learn here is wrong. You already have a hard enough time fitting in without arguing about how many dimensions of existence there are, or telling Mr. Bishop that cubits aren’t an up-to-date unit of measurement.”

  “But they’re NOT.”

  We’re puffing our way up a hill. I use that as an excuse to stop talking for a minute then change the subject.

  “Song’s going to love what I found. I’m going to use the cash to restock my skulduggery kit,” I say. “I’ll need it if we’re going to keep—”

  I am interrupted by a tremendous crash.

  All three of us drop to a crouch, getting stabbed by more chia in the process.

  Cayden pulls his phone out and glances at it, and I’m impressed for a second because I figure he’s getting his camera ready. Nope. He’s checking his signal.

  “No bars,” he mutters.

  “No one would get here in time anyway, Cayden,” says Raymond. “Whatever happens is ours to handle.”

  “Terrific,” he mutters.

  “Come on,” I say. I set my phone’s camera to video, then head in the direction of the noise.

  We creep the rest of the way up the hill, dropping down on our bellies when we get to the top, and I aim my phone down at the scene below us. When I see what’s making the noise, I almost drop it.

  Greeley is out there with a couple of blue-shirts, directing a third, who is currently driving a bulldozer into the side of an abandoned house. Now that the sounds aren’t bouncing off things on their way to us, I can hear the diesel engine I missed before.

  “That’s not a full patrol,” I say. “Why risk making so much noise?”

  “Are they cleaning up an old attack?” asks Cayden.

  “Maybe they’re doing salvage, like Badri,” I say.

  But they’re totally not, because one of the blue-shirts is playing mailbox baseball with a big aluminum bat, and when the mailbox is trashed, he demolishes the post, too. Greeley is grinning like he’s watching little kids chase butterflies.

  The bulldozer backs out of the hole it’s made in the side of the house with a stuttering roar. Greeley hollers something I can’t make out to the driver. I guess the blue-shirt can’t hear, either, because he drops the engine down to an idle. This time, Greeley’s voice rings out loud and clear.

  “Hit that next one at an angle!”

  The bulldozer lurches over to the house next door, dragging its blade across the front of the pink stucco like I trail my fingers along the cinder-block walls at school. It leaves a nasty, gashing hole.

  I continue to lie there not believing what I see until they’re using those push brooms that look like giant mustaches with handles to recreate the Blurmonster’s signature scuff marks in the sand.

  “Good job, kids,” says Greeley, clapping a blue-shirt on the back with his big old ham hand and just about sending her flying. “That ought to keep the Protection Committee happy for a while.”

  Then they all pile onto the bulldozer and pull it onto the road, driving it deeper into the neighborhood, to stash it in some empty garage, I assume.

  I stop recording.

  We all sit back against the low, brushy ridge over which we’ve been peeking.

  “What … was … that?” says Raymond.

  No one has an answer.

  Chapter 12

  Flamed

  “They call me Greeley. I am but a poor traveling salesman who hasn’t had shelter or a decent meal since Santa Fe,” says Delmar, who is wearing an enormous cardboard mustache (beards must have come later) and a straw porkpie hat that’s too small for his troll-like head. “Your town is strange, but I find it suits me well.”

  Someone’s throwing stuff at him from offstage. Spiders. Caps. Every time the caps pop, spiders jump off into the audience, which at this point is just long-suffering Mr. Bishop in a folding chair. His twitching is getting worse.

  “It’s nice to know some things are painful everywhere,” Cayden mutters.

  I’m not consoled.

  What I am is coated. In glue, glitter, and sap. The sap is figurative, but it’s what’s annoying me most. Mr. Bishop can call this a historical reenactment all he wants, but I know a pageant when I see one.

  I should’ve remembered—the fifth graders always do the “Battle of the Blur” on Sweepstakes Day, but once you’ve seen it a couple of times, you’re over it. I’ve skipped it for years in favor of stuffing my face and causing trouble.

  If Pearl was here, play practice might actually be fun. Right now, she’d be making glitter bombs, and I’d be snickering in a corner with Raymond.

  Instead, I spent half the afternoon reglittering the scrolling words across the side of a cardboard caravan. It’s a reproduction of the one in the museum, which the original Greele
y drove into town at the tail end of New Mexico’s gold rush. Painted on the side are a big jar full of wavy liquid and the words:

  C. W. GREELEY’S MEDICINE SHOW & PUPPET THEATRE! ELIXIRS! ENTERTAINMENT! INSTANTANEOUS RELIEF FROM ALL YOUR WOES!

  It turns out you can get paper cuts from glitter.

  Under your fingernails.

  Worse, Raymond noticed me being bad at glittering, and he didn’t do a very good job of hiding his smirk. He’s sitting out of arm’s reach, I notice.

  “What beast approaches to defool this town?” demands Delmar from behind his mustache.

  “Defile,” calls Mr. Bishop from the rows of folding chairs in front of the stage.

  “Huh?”

  “There’s no such word as defool. Say defile.”

  “Defile.”

  Mr. Bishop sighs gustily. “No, I mean say your line, but this time, say it correctly instead of defiling it.”

  “Oh. Okay, yeah. What beast approaches to defile this town? Be not afeared, but behold these miraculous puppets!”

  Cayden’s the new kid so he gets to be the mule that pulls the caravan. He’s so disgusted he doesn’t even need a costume. He looks plenty stubborn as it is. He’s unhitched right now, though, and he’s breathing in my ear, which is driving me up the wall.

  “Cayden, stop it!”

  He gets louder.

  “Chicago boy. If you do not back. The heck. Up. I will—”

  That’s when I look at him, and I scoot sideways with a yell, before I realize the big blue face coming at me isn’t Whanslaw, it’s Cayden in a mask. I fall over, past the curtain to where I’m visible onstage, which is not where I’m supposed to be. Class play practice is mostly about staying out of the way and being awake for your lines.

  “Ada,” warns Mr. Bishop, “I’m not sure what kind of shenanigans are going on up there, but if you’re not skilled enough to fly under my radar, you’re not qualified to be doing them.”

  I scoot back behind the curtain, pursued by the snickers of my classmates. I am the opposite of gruntled. I give Cayden a shove.