The Word Eater

by Mary Amato

  Reba interrupted in a clear, decisive voice. “Everybody here hates school, right? Let’s have Fip eat Cleveland Park Middle School. The building will disappear, and we’ll have a long vacation while they rebuild it!” She smiled and stuck out her chest, delighted with herself. The MPOOE club was gone, but Reba Silo was still a force in the universe.

  Everybody started talking, clearly thrilled at the idea.

  Lerner jumped in quickly. “Wait! It’s too risky. What if the people in the building disappear along with the building?” she argued. “Maybe what makes a school isn’t just the building but all the people in it.”

  Reba rolled her eyes at Lerner. “The walls and floors and roof will disappear, and all the teachers will be suddenly sitting in the dirt. It’s excellent. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.”

  “How do you know that people won’t disappear?” Sharmaine asked. “You haven’t even seen Fip eat anything.”

  Randy stepped forward. “Here’s what we do. We delete the school during a fire drill when everybody is outside of the building.”

  The noise level increased, excitement was building.

  “Excellent!” Reba said, beaming at him. “Randy and I will pull the fire alarm during fifth period. Once everybody’s outside, Lerner will let Fip eat Cleveland Park Middle School!”

  Students cheered.

  “Let’s pick something smaller,” Lerner said.

  “What if getting rid of the building just makes it worse?” Bobby said. “What if they send us to worse schools?”

  Randy started chanting, “Erase the school! Erase the school!”

  Students joined the chant.

  Reba hushed the group and said, “Lerner, you’re with us, aren’t you?”

  The way Reba wormed her way in and started taking over bugged Lerner. Reba was not the leader, couldn’t everybody see that? Lerner had to get the control of the group back, but how? The excitement about deleting the school now had a life of its own. If Lerner said no, the others would think she was a spoilsport and go with Reba.

  Why not go through with it? Cleveland Park Middle School was just a building, she told herself. If everybody was outside of the building, then nobody would get hurt. After it was over, she could hide Fip in her room and tell all the other kids that she couldn’t find him. She’d do this one deed, which would make her popular, and then she’d retire Fip and get back to normal.

  She pulled her pencil out of her pocket, pointed to the embossed label—Cleveland Park Middle School—and said, in a voice that didn’t even sound like her own: “Looks like worm food to me.”

  Bobby looked shocked. Everybody else cheered.

  The bell rang, and they had to go in.

  Lerner ducked in the library. Mrs. Popocheskovich took one look at her face, brought her into her office, and closed the door.

  “All right, Cookie, what’s sitting on that brain of yours?”

  Lerner opened and closed her mouth. All she could think about was that by the end of the day, this very library wouldn’t exist. She looked out Mrs. Popocheskovich’s office window into the library. Lerner loved this place the minute she first walked in. She loved the way the sun came through the big high windows and warmed up the dark wooden tables. She loved the Poetry Nook with the polka-dotted bean bag chairs and the GREAT QUOTES bulletin board, and all the African violets on top of the high shelves. Most of all she loved the feeling that she got whenever she walked in. Her old yellow bedroom in Wisconsin used to give her the same feeling: a sense of home.

  The school building wasn’t the problem. Bobby was right. Deleting it would just make it worse. Why didn’t Lerner just say no to Reba and the others?

  Lerner looked at Mrs. Popocheskovich’s patient face. “It’s . . . it’s . . . things are getting out of control.”

  Mrs. Popocheskovich nodded.

  On the wall, there was a poster of an open book with a dragon flying out of its pages: WORDS ARE MAGIC. READING IS THE KEY.

  “I’m glad that you came here, Lerner. I want this library to be a haven for you cookies. I worked like a cow this summer making it just right.”

  Lerner almost started crying. “This library is the only place in the whole school I like.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. You’re a smart cookie. You should so much enjoy school. Maybe it’s because you’re new, eh?”

  “It’s not just me. It’s the school, too. We don’t do anything real in our classes. We just do work sheets. And you know the MPOOE Club?”

  Mrs. Popocheskovich made a face. “Mpooe schmpooe!”

  “Well, the MPOOE Club is gone. But there’s another club forming and it’s getting out of control.”

  Mrs. Popocheskovich sighed and patted her twist. “You cookies need something constructive to do all together, eh? When I was a cookie, we worked together on making a school newspaper. The power of the press! This was so much exciting! Maybe we should start a newspaper here—”

  The fire alarm went off

  Lerner’s stomach dropped. “Oh great!”

  “Don’t worry,” Mrs. Popocheskovich said. “I’m sure it’s what you call a drill.” She ushered her out into the hallway with an innocent smile. “Go on, I’ll be right out.”

  Tears started to well in Lerner’s eyes. She wouldn’t feed the school’s name to Fip even if it meant losing popularity. She opened her pack—she’d make Mrs. Popocheskovich take him.

  But Fip was gone! The ink bottle was nowhere in sight. Lerner rummaged through her pack.

  “Outside now!” Mrs. Norker swept Lerner toward the exit.

  “But somebody stole my—my—”

  “We’ll worry about that later.”

  Somebody took Fip and was going to feed him the school’s name, Lerner thought. She looked back at the library. “Mrs. Popocheskovich! It isn’t just a drill. Make sure you come out!”

  “She will.” The principal ushered Lerner into the sunlight.

  Students were in lines across the playground and parking lot. The seventh and eighth graders were chattering away, unaware of anything unusual. But the sixth graders were all grinning at her. They knew the plan.

  Julio ran up and whispered to her, “Can I watch?”

  “I don’t have Fip,” Lerner said. “Somebody took him.”

  Bobby heard her and took off running. Lerner’s heart fell. She should have known not to trust him; he probably wanted the spotlight all to himself. She ran after him, ignoring Mrs. Norker’s shouts to get back in line. She tackled Bobby. “Give him back, Bobby!”

  “I don’t have him. I think they do.” He gestured across the blacktop. Randy and Reba were huddled over something.

  The embossed letters on the pencil were large, gold, and extra crispy, making them a bit difficult for Fip to swallow. He gripped the pencil with his bristles and munched, afraid that his kidnappers would harm him if he didn’t. They were hunched over him, watching his every move.

  “We should have found the words printed in a smaller type,” Reba whispered to Randy. “This is taking too long.” Fip had gotten through CLEVE and was just about to start LAND.

  Mrs. Popocheskovich tiptoed down the hallway toward the library. Even though it was a drill, she should have been outside with all the others. But as she was leaving she remembered that she had left the hot plate for her coffee on high. She pictured her office, with all its papers, going up in flames. It would be too ironic for her to cause a fire by leaving the building for a fire drill.

  She unlocked her office door and turned the knob on the hot plate to off. Then, because she figured the drill would only last another minute or two, she decided to sit down and write a memo to Mrs. Norker about starting up a student newspaper.

  “Reba!” Lerner yelled as she ran. “Stop it. People might still be in there.” The others followed.

  Lerner grabbed the pencil out of Reba’s hands. Fip had eaten the letters CLEVEL. She breathed a sigh of relief and pulled him off before he could eat more. CLEVEL wasn’
t a word. At least she didn’t think it was.

  “You spineless worm,” Reba yelled at Lerner. “I knew you didn’t have the guts to go through with it.”

  “You just want to be a big shot in front of everybody, Reba. You don’t stop and think about the consequences. You don’t understand.”

  “Just give me the worm, Lerner.” Reba held out her hand. “Everybody wants me to be the leader.”

  The principal was marching down the hill toward them with an angry look. Lerner looked around at all the faces of her classmates. Here we go again, she thought, Reba will reincarnate the MPOOE Club.

  Bobby spoke up. “I’m not following you, Reba.”

  “Neither am I,” said Winny.

  “I didn’t want you guys anyway.”

  “I’m not following you either, Reba,” Sharmaine said.

  Reba made a face and walked away. The principal told them all to get back in line, and the bell rang twice, signaling that it was safe to return to the building.

  As students headed back in, Lerner crouched down and put Fip back into his ink bottle. Her hands were shaking.

  “That was close,” Bobby said.

  Lerner couldn’t look at him. Now that it was all over, she felt bad about assuming that he was the thief. “I should have known it was Reba,” she said.

  Bobby shrugged. “I would have probably suspected me, too.”

  In the Helvetica Correctional Prison, graffiti was not allowed. Desperate with boredom and self-pity, Archibald Mack was breaking the rule. He was huddled on his bed, pretending to read the Bible, while scratching his life story into the concrete cell wall.

  Once I was something to be admired and feared. Now I am nothing. Well, at least I still have my looks.

  A guard passing by noticed something odd and stopped for a closer look. “Hey, what the heck happened to your hair?”

  Archibald Mack turned around, confused.

  The guard peered in through the bars. “Man, I’ve heard about guys going gray all of a sudden, but that’s ridiculous.”

  Mr. Mack jumped out of bed and pulled a lock of his hair down in front of his eyes. Gray! How could that be? His hairdresser had dyed his hair blond just last week. Clevel brand hair dye usually lasted three months.

  The guard laughed and then noticed the wall behind the bed. “Hey! No graffiti on the walls. Scrub that scribble off right now!”

  When the bus pulled up at the corner by the Nitzes’ house, Lerner and Bobby got off. As usual, Bobby ran ahead without saying anything.

  Lerner called out. “Do you want to come over? We could make a list of nonsense words to feed Fip.” She surprised Bobby and herself with the invitation.

  He stopped and put his hands in his pockets. “If you have a computer, we could check to make sure the words are really nonsense.”

  Lerner stopped. “I forgot. We’re both grounded.”

  “Well, all my parents said was that I had to do my homework after school. I’d say this is homework.”

  The two walked into Lerner’s house. The television blared from the family room. “We interrupt Hot Days and Nights for a live report about the Clevel mystery!”

  Lerner and Bobby looked at each other. “Clevel!” They had forgotten all about the letters that Fip had eaten.

  “Oh my Lord!” Mrs. Chilling exclaimed. Lerner and Bobby ran into the family room. Mrs. Chilling’s hands were clamped on her head. Her hair, which was usually blond, was as gray as a dead mouse.

  On the TV screen, a young reporter stood in front of Harriet’s Hair Extraordinaire Beauty Salon. Gathered in a clump were four gray-haired, angry women. A reporter stood in front of them with a microphone.

  “Clevel is the brand name of the most popular hair color in the country,” said the reporter. “And now the hair color seems to be missing from store shelves and well . . . from heads! Tell us exactly what happened here.” The reporter pointed the microphone at Harriet.

  “After lunch, all these customers started showing up, demanding that I give them their money back,” said the hairdresser. “They had all gotten dye jobs, and for some reason, the hair color vanished.”

  A gray-haired customer stuck her head toward the camera. “See?”

  “I told them all that I’d redo their hair, but when I went for the Clevel, it was all gone.”

  Lerner and Bobby stared at Mrs. Chilling.

  “Get out! Both of you!”

  They ran upstairs to Lerner’s room.

  While Lerner and Bobby were talking, Fip sat in his bottle and watched their faces. They looked nervous about something and, frankly, it was making him snoozy. Lately, there had been too much rustle bustle. Too many eyeballs. Too many fingers. He was feeling used. He thought about how nice it would be to snuggle up with a few words and chew into a long silence.

  The bottle opened and tipped. Fip rolled out into Lerner’s hand. Did she want him to eat something else? He curled up into a comma and closed his eyes. Not hungry. He pretended to fall asleep so that Lerner would leave him alone, and she did. She put him in his bottle, and she and Bobby left the room.

  Fip stretched and noticed that the bottle lid was off. He crawled up and out of the bottle and onto the open dictionary Lerner had left on her desk. He skinched across the page, looking down at the black morsels he was crawling over. Once he would have regarded the feast beneath his bristles with joy. But lately, people’s alarm chemicals blasted the air every time he ate. He was losing his appetite. And without an appetite, he had to ponder the meaning of life itself.

  He skinched over the page, pondering away, when he bumped into something. A thin white worm, no bigger than a staple, climbed over him, probing her little bristles over every part of his body.

  “Hey!” Fip yelled.

  “You don’t feel like a bookworm,” the worm said, touching his eyelids. “You can see.”

  Fip nodded. Then, remembering she couldn’t see, said yes. She skinched down and sat in front of him.

  “Me llamo Poly. Ich heiße Poly. Je m’appelle Poly. My name is Poly,” said the worm.

  “Oh. I’m Fip. “

  She held out her bristles and Fip shook them.

  “So you’re not a bookworm, are you?” she asked.

  “I’m supposed to be a Lumbricus,” said Fip. “But I don’t like dirt.”

  “What do you like?”

  “Words.”

  The bookworm contracted and expanded like a jack-in-the-box. “You eat words?”

  Fip squirmed. “You don’t?”

  The bookworm whispered. “To tell the truth, I’ve thought of it. Words are so wonderful to read, so nourishing to the mind. But really! It’s just a fantasy. One doesn’t eat words! One reads them.”

  “You know how to read?”

  “In four languages,” Poly said.

  “How—if you can’t see?”

  “Every letter has a feel. You should know that. I read with my bristles. You can’t?”

  Fip shook his head. Why couldn’t he remember to speak up? “No,” he said loudly.

  Poly contracted. “You don’t have to yell,” she said. “What words do you like?”

  Fip shrugged. “Whatever I land on. But to tell the truth, I’m a little tired of eating.”

  “Have you tried glue? It has a nice chew. That’s what we bookworms eat—the glue in the binding of old books. Librarians dislike us, an ironic fact of life since we bookworms are so appreciative of literature. You’re the one they should dislike. We don’t eat the words, after all!”

  Suddenly, Fip ached all over with loneliness and bewilderment. Why couldn’t he be an ordinary dirt- or glue-eating worm? Unable to help it, he put his head down and cried.

  “You’re homesick for your clan,” Poly said gently.

  Fip thought about the cold face and gritty voice of the Great Lumbra. “How can I be homesick when I never had a family?”

  “Why don’t you come home with me?”

  Fip looked at the letters spread across the
page under his bristles and sniffed. “No. I’d eat something important. I’m not a bookworm, although it sounds like a lovely thing to be.”

  “You need to leave. Make your own destiny. Start a new clan. That’s what the hero always does,” Poly said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The hero in every great story leaves and makes a new destiny.”

  “Hero?” Fip said. He liked the sound of that word. He imagined taking a big ummy bite of it. That’s when the idea hit him. “Do you know how to write, Poly?”

  Lerner and Bobby came back in, breathless. They were debating the pros and cons of contacting the FBI and telling them everything.

  “Let’s ask Fip what we should do,” Lerner said.

  “He can’t talk, can he?”

  “No. But maybe he could give us a sign.”

  Lerner walked over to her desk and picked up Fip’s empty ink bottle. “Fip?” She panicked. “Fip? Where are you?”

  “Ssh,” Bobby whispered. “Look here.”

  On a piece of paper, Fip was curled up next to a smudge. It wasn’t an ordinary smudge; it was a message being written by a thin white worm with dark brown bristles.

  Fip’s ma

  “Unbelievable,” Bobby whispered. “That little worm is writing!”

  The worm pressed down on the paper with her bristles, finishing the a. She wriggled over to a stale cookie and dipped her bristles in a chocolate chip. Then she crawled back and printed the letters g and i.

  “Chocolate ink!” Lerner exclaimed.

  “I’d eat words if they were made out of chocolate,” Bobby added.

  Poly printed a c and skinched over to Fip.

  “How does it look?” she asked. “I got a bit shaky when your friends came bounding in.”

  “Looks fine,” Fip said. “I wonder how it’ll taste?”

  Poly licked one of her bristles. “Not as ummy as old glue.”

  Lerner and Bobby stared at the message:

  Fip’s magic

  The words were sinking in.

  “He’s going to eat it, isn’t he?” Bobby said.