Inside Out Junior Novel

by Suzanne Francis

  Sadness was afraid, but walking the tightrope of the lightline was the quickest way back. “If we fall,” she protested, pointing down at the Memory Dump, “we’ll be forgotten forever.”

  “We have to do this,” Joy said, trying to reassure her. “For Riley. Just follow my footsteps.”

  Holding the memories in her arms, Joy tried to balance herself on the narrow line. One of the memories slipped over the side, but she snatched it back just in time. She breathed and slowly began the long, treacherous trip toward Headquarters with Sadness right behind her. Joy wished she knew what was happening with Riley.

  Tap, tap, tap. Dad knocked on Riley’s bedroom door and peeked inside. “Hey,” he said.

  Riley lay in her sleeping bag on the floor, silent and motionless. “So, uh…” Dad said gently. “Things got a little out of hand downstairs.” He waited for Riley to respond, but she remained silent.

  “You want to talk about it? Come on, where’s my happy girl? Monkey,” Dad said. “Oo oo ooo!” He made silly monkey sounds, trying to cheer her up.

  The Emotions could see he was trying to start up Goofball Island. Fear looked at the empty core memory holder and then out the window at Goofball Island. It was still dark.

  Riley didn’t respond or laugh like she normally would when her dad acted silly. Instead, she glanced at him before rolling over to face the wall.

  Rrrrrrrrrrck. Goofball Island made an awful groaning noise and shuddered like an old, tired ship. Suddenly, bits and pieces of the island began to crumble away!

  Joy and Sadness, who were still balancing on the lightline connected to the island, felt it tremble beneath their feet as Goofball Island started to disintegrate. The lightline was falling! They had to get off it now! “Run! Run! Run!” Joy screamed.

  Frantically they dashed back to Goofball Island, barely outracing the crumbling pieces of land.

  At the edge of the island, the bridge twisted and buckled underneath them. They managed to stay on their feet as they reached one of the cliffs of Long Term Memory just as the memory tube and basket they had arrived in broke off and fell into the Memory Dump below.

  From the safety of solid ground, they watched in horror as Goofball Island sank and vanished into the dump. The island was GONE. Joy gasped. “What…?”

  Inside Riley’s bedroom, Dad was telling her that he understood and that he thought she probably needed some alone time. “We’ll talk later,” he said as he left the room.

  Fear, Anger, and Disgust stared out the back window of Headquarters, stunned.

  “We have a major problem,” said Disgust.

  “Oh, Joy, where are you?” whined Fear.

  Joy and Sadness gazed down over the edge of the cliff at the endless drop below. They couldn’t believe it: a huge hollow space hung where Goofball Island used to be. The island had completely disappeared.

  Sadness was immediately worried. “We lost Goofball Island. That means she can lose Friendship and Hockey and Honesty and Family,” she said. She turned to Joy. “You can fix this, right?”

  “I…I don’t know,” admitted Joy, feeling lost.

  Sadness’s groan of despair was enough to kick-start Joy’s optimism. “But we have to try. Okay? Come on.”

  Joy’s eyes fell on Friendship Island as the sky began to darken. “Riley’s gone to sleep, which is a good thing. Nothing else bad can happen while she’s asleep and we’ll be back to Headquarters before she wakes up,” Joy said. “We’ll just go across Friendship Island.”

  When Sadness noticed there was no way to get there along the edge of the cliff, she moaned. “We’ll never make it, hoh…no…”

  Joy reached for Sadness, knowing she was on the edge of collapse. “No, no, no, don’t obsess over the weight of life’s problems. Remember that funny movie where the dog dies?”

  Sadness thought for a minute. Finally, she slumped down to the ground in a face-plant of despair.

  “Sadness, we don’t have time for this,” Joy said.

  Joy looked around, trying to figure out the best way back to Headquarters. She saw stacks of memory shelves winding off into the distance. “We’ll have to go around. Take the scenic route,” she said. She took a deep breath and set off.

  “Wait! Joy, you could get lost in there!” Sadness shouted after her.

  “Think positive!” Joy reminded her.

  “Okay,” Sadness said. “I’m positive you will get lost in there! That’s Long Term Memory. I read about it in the manual.”

  Joy’s eyes popped wide open. “The manual?” she cried. “The manual! You read the manual!”

  Sadness had had lots of time to read about Long Term Memory while she was sitting in the “Circle of Sadness.”

  Joy ran back to Sadness. “So you know the way back to Headquarters?”

  Sadness was confused. “I guess…”

  “Congratulations,” Joy beamed. “You are the official Mind Map.”

  Sadness didn’t know how to respond. “Thank you?”

  “Let’s go! Lead on, Mind Map. Show me where we’re going.”

  Sadness nodded, but she didn’t move. “Okay! Only…I’m too sad to walk. Just give me a few hours.”

  Joy was not about to let Sadness’s emotional slump slow them down. Determined, she picked up one of Sadness’s legs and dragged her into the labyrinth. “Which way?” Joy asked. “Left?”

  “Right,” Sadness said. Joy turned right. “No, I mean, go left. I said left was right. Like ‘correct.’”

  “Okay,” Joy said, moving on.

  “This actually feels kinda nice,” Sadness said as Joy picked up the pace, pulling her through the maze.

  “This is working!” Joy said.

  Out of breath and sweating, Joy continued to drag Sadness. They were lost. “This is not working. Are we getting close?”

  “Just another right…and a left. Then another left, and a right…” Sadness said.

  Joy simply grunted in frustration and kept moving.

  When the sky finally brightened, Joy was still dragging Sadness through the winding memory shelves. “Riley’s awake,” Joy said with a sigh. She couldn’t believe they had walked the entire night and they were still trying to get through Long Term Memory. She wondered if they were any closer to getting out than they had been when they started.

  Joy dropped the core memories and Sadness reached out to touch them. “Ah ah ah, don’t touch, remember? If you touch them, they stay sad,” Joy reminded her.

  “Sorry,” said Sadness. “I won’t.”

  Joy looked back to see all the bottom rows of the memories on the shelves they had passed: they were now all blue.

  “Starting now,” Sadness added.

  Joy dropped her head in her hands. “Ugh,” she groaned. “I can’t take much more of this.”

  But then she brightened as she heard voices among the shelves. “Mind workers!” she said, racing off in search of the voices.

  “But, Joy, we’re almost…” Sadness called after her. “Ohhh.”

  Joy slipped down an aisle and found two pear-shaped mind workers wearing helmets and goggles. They were vacuuming memories off the shelves. One held a clipboard while the other sucked up memories with the vacuum. “Look at this,” said the first worker, pointing out some memory spheres. “Four years of piano lessons.”

  “Yeah, looks pretty faded,” said the other worker, assessing them.

  “You know what?” the first worker said. “Save ‘Chopsticks’ and ‘Heart and Soul’ and get rid of the rest.”

  ZOOP! The worker used the vacuum to suck up the memories. Joy was shocked. She asked them why they were vacuuming up perfectly good memories.

  The workers introduced themselves—they were Forgetters. They explained that their job was to clear out Riley’s faded memories and send them to the Memory Dump.

  “Nothing comes back from the dump,” the Forgetter holding the clipboard said. “When Riley doesn’t care about a memory, it fades.”

  “Fades?” Joy a
sked, confused. This was the first time she had heard about memories fading.

  “Happens to the best of ’em,” the Forgetter said.

  “Except for this bad boy!” the other Forgetter said with a chuckle. “This one will never fade.” Grinning, he pulled out a memory from a nearby shelf and showed it to Joy.

  “The song from the gum commercial?” Joy asked. The memory was of a Tripledent gum commercial that had a catchy tune.

  The Forgetters laughed as they played the memory again. “You know, sometimes we send that up to Headquarters for no reason,” the first Forgetter said.

  “It just plays in Riley’s head over and over again,” the other Forgetter added. “Like a million times!”

  They laughed as they watched the commercial again, and cracked up even more as they sang along.

  Joy watched as the worker put the memory on the shelf and pushed it toward the back. FWOOM! It shot through a tube out of the top of a shelf and up toward Headquarters.

  Meanwhile, Riley was in her bedroom on her laptop, talking to her best friend Meg from Minnesota.

  “Do you like it there?” Meg asked. “Did you feel any earthquakes? Is the bridge cool?”

  “Yeah,” Riley replied somberly. “It’s good…. What happened with the playoffs?”

  Meg went on to tell Riley that the Prairie Dogs had won their first game. She told her about a new girl on the team. “She’s so cool,” Meg said.

  “Oh, she did not just say that,” Disgust said, her voice dripping with attitude.

  “A new girl?” Fear said, panicking. “Meg has a new friend already?!”

  “GRRRRRRRRRR!” Anger growled.

  “Hey, hey, stay happy!” Disgust coached. “We do NOT want to lose any more islands here, guys.”

  But Meg continued to tell Riley how she and the new girl passed the puck to each other without even looking. “It’s like mind reading!” Meg said.

  Anger grabbed the controls. “You like to read minds, Meg?” he shouted. “I got something for you to read right here!”

  “Hey, no, no, no, what are you doing?” Disgust asked.

  “Let’s just be calm for one second,” Fear advised as Anger pulled Fear’s nose out and let it snap back like a rubber band.

  With no one holding him back, Anger pushed the gear full steam ahead.

  “I gotta go,” Riley said, cutting Meg off. Then she slammed down the lid of her laptop and hung up on her.

  Joy, still listening to the Forgetters laugh about their gum commercial prank, heard a horrible crrrreak from outside the memory shelves. She ran to see what it was.

  “Oh no,” she cried, taking in the sight. Friendship Island was falling apart!

  Joy looked down at the Friendship core memory in her arms; it was fading. Inside the memory sphere she could see the faint image of little Riley and Meg, skipping over cracks in the sidewalk, laughing and having fun.

  Joy watched as the broken island completely sank into the darkness below. “Ohhh, not Friendship,” she said.

  Sadness walked up to her, having witnessed the whole thing. “Oh, Riley loved that one,” she said. “And now it’s gone.” Sadness couldn’t help herself, and she continued. “Goodbye, Friendship. Hello, loneliness.”

  Joy’s expression fell. Then she scanned the area. She eyed Hockey Island in the hazy distance and set her sights on a solution. “We’ll just have to go the long way,” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Sadness. “The long…long…long way. I’m ready.” She collapsed onto the ground and kicked her leg up, offering it to Joy.

  Joy sighed as she once again started to pull Sadness by the leg through the winding memory shelves. “There’s gotta be a better way,” she said.

  She heard someone humming, and in the distance she could see a large pink elephant happily grabbing memories from the shelves.

  “Oh, look at you,” the elephant figure cried as he grabbed one particular memory. “You’re a keeper!”

  Joy continued to watch him from a distance.

  The figure was so intent on picking memories that he didn’t see Joy until she stepped forward. “Hello!”

  When the elephant locked eyes with Joy, he froze—and then ran. He tried to get away, but Joy chased him until he reached a wall and began frantically to try to climb it. He was a strange-looking pink creature with a long trunk, whiskers, and a fluffy striped tail. He wore a checkered coat that was too small for his body and had a tiny hat perched on top of his head.

  “Excuse me,” Joy said, trying not to scare him more than he already was.

  The creature jumped, startled, and screamed. “Ahh!” Feeling cornered, he grabbed a random memory off the wall and threw it at Joy. “Ha ha, so long, sucker!” But he ran right into a cart of memories and fell to the ground, taking the memories with him.

  “Wait,” said Joy, recognizing his face. “I know you.”

  “I get that a lot,” he said nervously. “I look like a lot of people.”

  Joy gasped, finally placing his face. “You’re Bing Bong, Riley’s imaginary friend!”

  “You do know me!” Bing Bong said, pleasantly surprised.

  “Riley loved playing with you!” Joy exclaimed. “Oh, you would know. We’re trying to get back to Headquarters.…”

  “You guys are from Headquarters?” Bing Bong asked.

  “Well, yeah. I’m Joy. This is Sadness.”

  “You’re Joy? The Joy?” Bing Bong gasped. “Without you, Riley won’t ever be happy. And we can’t have that. We gotta get you back. I’ll tell you what, follow me!”

  Joy thanked Bing Bong for his help as the three of them walked down a long corridor of memory shelves. “It is so great to see you again,” Joy said.

  She remembered how Riley and Bing Bong had held concerts with pots and pans as their instruments; how they had raced each other, with Bing Bong on the ceiling and Riley on the floor; and how Bing Bong’s red rocket ship wagon ran on song power.

  Joy even remembered the theme song Riley made up that powered the rocket ship. Bing Bong and Joy sang the happy tune together as Sadness finally took a good look at him. “What exactly are you supposed to be?” she asked.

  “You know, it’s unclear,” Bing Bong said. “I’m mostly cotton candy, but shape-wise, I’m part cat, part elephant, and part dolphin.”

  “Dolphin?” Joy asked. She didn’t really see much evidence of a dolphin in Bing Bong.

  Then he let out a high-pitched noise that sounded just like a dophin!

  Joy asked Bing Bong what he was doing in the memory shelves. Bing Bong explained that there wasn’t much need for an imaginary friend in Riley’s life lately. He thought maybe if he could find a really good memory, Riley would remember him and he could be part of her life again.

  “Hey, hey, don’t be sad,” Joy told him. “When I get back to Headquarters, I’ll make sure Riley remembers you.”

  Bing Bong was thrilled. He began to dance around in excitement, but ended up tripping over his own feet. “Dooooh!” he cried.

  Joy and Sadness watched as pieces of candy fell out of his eyes. “What’s going on?” Sadness asked.

  “I cry candy,” Bing Bong said, in tears. “Try the caramel, it’s delicious.”

  Joy munched on one of his sweet candy tears as she shifted the core memories around in her arms. The spheres were heavy and slippery, and it was a challenge keeping them all together.

  “Oh—here, use this,” Bing Bong said, dumping the contents of his little bag onto the floor. Joy and Sadness watched with amazement as an insanely large pile of random stuff fell out—memories, three boots, a hissing cat, and even a kitchen sink! “What?” Bing Bong shrugged. “It’s imaginary.”

  “This’ll make it a lot easier to walk back to Headquarters,” Joy said with relief, putting the core memories safely into the bag.

  “We’re not walking. We’re taking the Train of Thought!” Bing Bong led them out onto a cliff edge and pointed at the train speedily chugging toward Headquarters in th
e distance.

  “The train, of course!” Joy exclaimed. “That is so much faster!”

  Bing Bong told them about a station in Imagination Land, another part of Riley’s Memory World, where they could catch the train. He said he could take them there. “I know a shortcut,” he said proudly. “Come on, this way!”

  “I’m so glad we ran into you,” said Joy.

  Bing Bong led the way to a huge bunker-like building. They looked through a window and straight out another window on the opposite side of the building. There was the train station.

  Bing Bong opened a large, sturdy hatch door. “After you.”

  Joy took her first step into the building but stopped when Sadness called her.

  “I read about this place in the manual. We shouldn’t go in there,” Sadness said.

  “Bing Bong says it’s the quickest way to Headquarters.”

  “But, Joy, this is Abstract Thought,” Sadness explained.

  “What’re you talking about?” asked Bing Bong. “I go in here all the time. It’s a shortcut, you see?” Bing Bong pointed to a sign hanging above the door and spelled it aloud: “‘D-A-N-G-E-R.’ That spells ‘SHORTCUT.’ I’ll prove it to you.” Joy and Sadness watched as Bing Bong climbed through the hatch.

  “Look at me! I’m closer to the station ’cause I’m taking the shortcut!” Bing Bong sang from inside.

  “Let’s go around. This way.” Sadness pointed to the path alongside the incredibly long building. Joy looked back at Bing Bong.

  “Almost there!” Bing Bong shouted.

  Joy turned to Sadness. “If you want to walk the long way, go for it. But Riley needs to be happy. I’m not missing that train,” Joy said. “Bing Bong knows what he’s doing. He’s part dolphin. They’re very smart!” she added.

  “Well…I guess…” Sadness said, following Joy through the hatch and into the building.

  Inside, it was dark and gray. There were strange shapes scattered all around.

  Outside, two mind workers wheeled a cart over to the hatch they had just entered. They didn’t realize that Bing Bong, Sadness, and Joy were inside the building.