The Word Eater

by Mary Amato

  Reba stuck her chest out. “And how do you know he didn’t do it?”

  That shut Lerner up.

  “Drop it, Reba,” Sharmaine said. “The only person who is in love with anybody is you. You’re in love with yourself.”

  “Ha. Ha. Ha,” Reba said. Her glare practically set Sharmaine’s hair on fire.

  Lerner tried to calm down and think things through. It was all so complicated. She should never have messed with the tests or the vending machine or Ripper. Why had they all seemed like such good ideas? She needed time to think. She decided to get Fip and ditch school. She’d walk over to Ellsworth Park and spend the rest of the day alone. She grabbed her backpack and headed toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” Reba asked.

  “None of your business.”

  Winny the SLUG called after her. “But Mr. Droan said not to move a muscle!”

  Lerner ran back to her locker. With a pounding heart, she opened her locker door—now she was going to add skipping classes to her list of sins—only to discover that Fip’s bottle was gone. Lerner choked back a scream and pulled out every book and paper. Her experiment notebook was gone, too.

  Footsteps sounded in the hallway. Was it Mr. Droan?

  It was Principal Norker marching Bobby down the hall. Mr. Droan was probably headed back to his classroom. He’d find out in a minute that she was gone.

  Lerner and Bobby caught eyes. And a guilty expression crossed his face. In that instant Lerner realized that he knew why she was rummaging through her locker. He knew that Fip was gone! That meant that he must have taken him! He must have done it right after she put him in, right before they both showed up late to Droan’s class. He wanted Fip for himself!

  “Clean up this mess and get back to class,” Mrs. Norker scolded.

  Lerner clenched her teeth and tried to catch Bobby’s eye again, but he wouldn’t look.

  Mrs. Norker led Bobby down the hall. “Bobby, you’ll serve your suspension in the library until your parents arrive to pick you up.”

  Lerner stuffed everything back in her locker, trying to figure out what to do next. How much did Bobby know about Fip? Even if he didn’t know how the magic worked, he could do something horrible by accident. He could let Fip crawl around on the phone book and eat Washington, D.C., into oblivion, person by person. She had to get Fip back before anything happened.

  Bobby sat in the back carrel of the library. He took the bottle out of his backpack, set it down in front of him, and wiped his sweating palms on his jeans. His chest tightened with panic. He had the creature. He had the power. Now all he needed was the guts to use it.

  He pulled a memo out of his back pocket. He had taken it from Norker’s office when she wasn’t looking because the name on the memo—Mr. Markus Droan—had caught his eye. Markus Droan. It looked like fine worm food to Bobby. He spread the memo out on the desk. Why should he care about anybody? Everybody thought he was always to blame, so he might as well do something really horrible.

  With trembling fingers, he placed the worm on the letter M.

  Fip stalled, sniffing at the ink. Something about this boy’s vibration felt wrong. Where was the girl? He knew from experience that strange things happened when he ate. Now, this boy wanted to feed him. That was suspicious. Well, he wouldn’t eat a smatch! Not until Lerner came back. Nobody could force him to eat.

  “Do it!” the boy hissed, and poor Fip jumped. What if the boy got so angry, he squashed him? Fip sniffed the letter M again. Maybe it wasn’t a bad idea to eat just a little.

  Lerner ran down the hallway. Outside the library door, she collided with Mr. Droan.

  “Ms. Chanse, why aren’t you in class?”

  “It’s an emergency!” She plowed in ahead of him.

  Bobby’s untied sneakers stuck out from under her favorite carrel.

  “Bobby!” she hissed.

  “Go away,” he whispered and hunched over the carrel.

  Lerner got a glimpse of a piece of paper. “Let me see.” She pushed his arm away. Fip was eating Markus Droan!

  “Ms. Chanse, come back here right now!” Mr. Droan called out.

  The handful of other students in the library looked up.

  “Bobby, stop!” She tried pulling him out of his seat.

  “You did it to Ripper,” Bobby said.

  Mrs. Popocheskovich started walking toward them.

  Lerner ducked behind Bobby’s carrel. “I was terribly wrong. I shouldn’t have. Bobby, you can’t delete a human being!”

  “Don’t stop me! I hate Droan. He makes me feel like dirt,” Bobby yelled and pushed her away from his desk. She fell against a table and knocked a globe to the floor.

  “Cookies, stop this . . . ,” Mrs. Popocheskovich’s voice trailed off.

  Lerner and Bobby both looked up. Mr. Droan’s body was shimmering, as if he were made of a million tiny parts and each part was beginning to head off in a different direction. His eyes shifted to the right; his mouth shifted to the left. “Onnne more word and you twooooo are out,” he said in a wavering voice. Then he put his hand to his throat and said, “Doess my voiccce sound strannnge?”

  No one in the library moved or spoke. The horrible sight of a living human being disappearing before his eyes sobered Bobby. He lunged for the paper. “Okay, I’ll stop.”

  “Wait!” said Lerner, and grabbed his hand. “The only thing to do now is to let him keep eating. If we let him eat the phrase, ‘Markus Droan’s suitable proposal,’ then the proposal will disappear, not Mr. Droan.” She leaned in toward Fip and whispered, “Come on, Fip, eat some more!”

  Fip moved over to the apostrophe and sucked it up.

  The teacher was walking toward them, undulating with each step like a walking anemone. “Dooo yoooou waaant a detennnntion, toooooo, Ms. Chansssse?” he said.

  “Markus.” Mrs. Popocheskovich moved toward Mr. Droan uncertainly, extending her hand.

  Fip ate the “suit” of suitable, then twisted up with a horrible gizzard ache.

  Bobby looked at Lerner, and Lerner looked at Bobby. Fip had eaten the words: Markus Droan’s suit! They looked at Mr. Droan. The teacher’s body solidified, but his suit was shimmering.

  “What the devil—” Mr. Droan looked down.

  One second.

  Two seconds.

  Three seconds.

  The hair on Mr. Droan’s arm’s prickled. He felt a rush of cool wind around his legs. He looked down and his eyebrows jumped up. There he was in his striped boxer shorts. His suit had disappeared!

  Mr. Mack was perched at his office window when a swarm of cars approached the Mack Industries gate. Children and puppies poured out of the thumbtack factory and the Attackaterrier training facility.

  Ms. Ferret got out of the leading car and put a megaphone to her mouth.

  “Archibald Mack. You’re under arrest for violating child labor laws. Children are not slaves. Surrender now.”

  Lucia hopped out of the car, jumped up on the hood, and waved a white banner.

  The children cheered. The puppies yipped.

  Lucia leaned over to the large Mack Industries sign and flung her banner over it. Ms. Ferret threw her a lipstick and in bright red Lucia wrote: Re Bampas Iste Frio!

  “The children are free!” she yelled.

  The children and puppies went wild. “Yip! Yip! Yippee!”

  Hee. Hee.

  It started with a giggle from someone over in the Poetry Nook and pretty soon everybody in the library was laughing. For a few seconds, Mr. Droan stood there with his knees as white as headlights and his eyebrows going up and down like psychotic windshield wipers, then he covered up his striped rear with a newspaper and waddled out faster than anyone had ever seen him move.

  The bell rang. In the chaos that followed, Lerner scooped Fip back into the bottle and ran. Bobby was right behind her. Principal Norker caught them both. Mrs. Nitz was there, wringing her thin hands.

  “It’s my fault,” Lerner heard herself saying. “
Bobby didn’t do anything.”

  She could feel Bobby’s surprised eyes on her. She was surprised herself. Bobby had stolen Fip and, even worse, had intended to delete a teacher. But she couldn’t help feeling at fault. She shouldn’t have brought Fip to school and she shouldn’t have experimented on anything living. It was too dangerous, and the consequences were too unpredictable.

  Mrs. Norker glared at both of them. “Tell me exactly what’s going on here.”

  Lerner pushed up her glasses. If she told the truth, it would be the end of her private experiments with Fip. Keeping Fip a secret all to herself was exciting, but the responsibility was becoming overwhelming.

  Lerner took a deep breath and handed Mrs. Norker the bottle. She told them about Fip and how whatever he ate disappeared. As Mrs. Norker and Mrs. Nitz listened, the wrinkles on their foreheads kept getting deeper.

  Lerner imagined what would happen next: The principal would run to her office and call the FBI. The FBI’s Division of Unexplained Phenomena would assign the X-Files team to confiscate and study the worm. Tearfully, Lerner would say good-bye to Fip, but she’d receive a Medal of Honor for discovering a new species and become the youngest person to be appointed X-Files Consultant. Every day after school, they’d want her to go over to the FBI building and help with Fip-related research. Maybe they’d even allow her to skip school entirely and serve the nation by working for the FBI.

  Mrs. Norker held Fip’s bottle up and looked at the worm inside. “If you think this is funny—”

  “No!” Lerner said, “I—”

  “Telling crazy fairy tales isn’t going to help. I’m calling your parents, Lerner.” She turned to Mrs. Nitz. “I suggest you take your son home and have a long talk with him about all this. First thing on Monday morning, we’ll have a conference. I’d like your husband here, too, Mrs. Nitz, and both your parents, Lerner.” She shook her head and handed Fip’s bottle to Lerner. “You’d better own up to the truth.”

  While Mrs. Nitz and Mrs. Norker worked out the details for the meeting, Lerner stood holding the bottle in a confused fog. Lerner had spilled her guts and they didn’t believe her. Now what? They weren’t going to let her or Bobby off the hook without an explanation, but if they didn’t believe the truth, then what could she and Bobby do?

  She glanced over at Bobby. He was staring at her. Like it or not the two of them were caught in the same net.

  On the ride home, Lerner’s parents were mad, but they were willing to hear her side of the story. She tried to explain the whole thing about Fip to her parents. They listened quietly and then her mother said that maybe they should all see a really nice kind of doctor. Lerner knew what that meant. They thought she was crazy.

  She spent the night in her room, trying to figure out what to do next.

  Lerner woke to the sound of Mr. Nitz shouting. She jumped out of bed and ran to the window. Bobby was sitting on his back steps, staring at his shoelaces. Lerner opened the window wider.

  “You have nothing to say, do you?” Mr. Nitz was saying. “Well, that’s because you don’t even have half a brain.”

  The words hung in the air like a black cloud.

  Lerner grabbed a piece of paper. If Fip could take the Attacka out of Attackaterriers, he could take the meanness out of Mr. Nitz. She wrote in tiny letters: Mr. Robert Nitz’s meanness toward Bobby

  Last night, she had promised herself no more risky experiments, but this one felt right.

  Fip was hungry, and the tiny letters went down quickly.

  Lerner looked out her window.

  “Look at me when I’m talking to you,” Mr. Nitz said.

  Bobby looked up. Mr. Nitz froze and then shivered, as if an invisible creature had scurried up his spine. His neck lengthened and then his whole body relaxed. He shook his head, confused. “I don’t know what got out of me. I mean, what got into me.”

  Bobby’s chest tightened. Warily, he looked at his father, waiting for another insult to fly.

  Mr. Nitz looked back at him with clear eyes. “I feel a little funny. Funny in a good way. How about you?”

  “How about me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re asking me how I feel?” Bobby squinted up at his dad.

  Mr. Nitz shrugged, smiling. “Seems like a simple enough question.”

  “It’s just that you don’t usually say stuff like that.”

  “I don’t? Well, old dogs can learn new tricks.” He sat down next to Bobby on the steps. “We were talking about Ripper, weren’t we?”

  The tightness in Bobby’s chest moved to his throat. Why wasn’t his father yelling at him? “You won’t believe me. But I swear I didn’t let Ripper out.”

  Behind the curtain in her room, Lerner winced. Bobby was going to tell his dad that it was her fault. She closed her eyes and waited to hear him blurt it out.

  “Maybe it isn’t anybody’s fault,” Bobby said. “Maybe Ripper just got out.”

  Lerner opened her eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. Bobby Nitz was not a tattler.

  “Maybe you’re right,” Mr. Nitz said.

  Bobby looked up, surprised that his father was agreeing. He caught sight of Lerner in her window.

  She ducked behind the curtain. Inside her room, she gazed down at the magical little worm in her hand. “Go, Fip!”

  Fip could sense an incredible energy vibrating from Lerner’s entire being. This was more like it. All the tension of yesterday melted away, and Fip skinched around on her palm with joy.

  Later on in the day, the Nitzes came over to talk about the “school situation,” as Mr. Chanse said. Lerner didn’t stare at Mr. Nitz, although she wanted to. She could tell he’d changed, though, in a matter of minutes. There was a bright, pleasant atmosphere in the room, even though they were gathered to talk about serious school problems. And Mrs. Nitz kept looking over at her husband with the same expression you see on people’s faces when they open their doors in the spring and discover that all their daffodils have bloomed.

  Mr. Chanse cleared his throat. “Well, I have to say I’m confused. It sounds like we’ve got a big mess here. I’m sure that one person isn’t to blame for everything. I think we’ll be able to sort it out if you each accept the blame for whatever mistakes you made.”

  Lerner nodded. She knew it was pointless to tell the truth. Parents preferred simple apologies. “I took a dare that would have gotten Bobby into trouble. And I stole candy bars and quarters from a vending machine. And I was really the one responsible for getting rid of Mr. Droan’s tests. . . .” She hoped they wouldn’t ask how. “And I can’t really say what happened to Ripper, but I wished he would disappear.” She stopped.

  Bobby cleared his throat, and everybody looked at him. He was sitting on the edge of a cushioned footstool, jiggling his feet, one on top of the other. “I did a lot of wrong things,” Bobby said.

  There was a long, awkward silence. Lerner held her breath. He didn’t sound the way he sounded when he was talking back to Mr. Droan or Ms. Findley.

  “I hate it,” he finally said and looked up. “I hate it.”

  “Hate what?” Mr. Chanse asked.

  “School. The MPOOE Club. Everyone in it.” His words were like the red-hot coil of an electric broiler, and the truth of his hatred radiated out like heat.

  The grown-ups shifted back a little in their seats. It wasn’t exactly a detailed confession, but the emotion underlying what he said was so big that they didn’t want to push it any further.

  “Well then,” Mrs. Chanse said. Everybody stood up.

  The Chanses grounded Lerner, made her apologize to Bobby, gave her extra chores to pay for the candy bars, and told her that she had to write letters of apology to Mr. Droan and to the owner of the vending machine (returning the money as well).

  Mr. Nitz grounded Bobby and told him to apologize to Lerner. Then Mrs. Chanse invited them for a potluck a week from Monday. “I had no idea the Nitzes were so nice!” she said as she closed the door.

  In priva
te, both Lerner and Bobby got long lectures from their parents about how they couldn’t let the MPOOEs bother them and how they had to do the right thing no matter what kind of peer pressure they were up against. Lerner and Bobby both nodded through the lectures, knowing that it wasn’t as simple as their parents made it sound.

  That night, just as Lerner was falling asleep, she heard a thump against her window. She looked over and saw something sticking to the glass. A paper airplane with a suction cup ingeniously attached to the tip. She raised her window and peeled it off. There was a message inside.

  Dr. William Jay

  Figer National Observatory

  Astronomy Lab

  Tucson, AZ 78734

  Avalanche Woman

  c/o Mountain View Convalescent Center

  Anchorage, Alaska

  Dear Ms. Avalanche:

  I’m sorry I cannot address you by your name. I don’t know it. I have read about your extraordinary case. I’m writing in the hopes that you can help me. Last week, I lost the power of speech from a shock. Perhaps you read about me in the newspaper? I feel words in my throat like prickles of light in the dark sky, but when I open my mouth nothing comes out.

  I read that your recovery is complete and had something to do with spinach soufflé? Please come to Tucson at my expense and help me. I have this feeling that we are connected.

  Yours truly,

  William Jay

  Late morning sun streamed through Lerner’s bedroom window, spreading out on her yellow quilt like butter on top of French toast. She was sitting up in bed, still in her pajamas, still under the covers, with a pad of paper resting on her knees. She had been trying to do some science homework, like she was supposed to, but she had set her textbook down and given herself an assignment of another kind. In the form of a table, she was writing an analysis of Fip food, sorting out the good from the bad, the known from the unknown. Feeding Fip was complicated. If she was going to continue giving him words, then she had to thoroughly analyze the situation and come up with a plan.