A shapely woman in a flowing white robe appeared suddenly at Marlo’s side. She stuck a flat piece of blue wood on Marlo’s tongue.
“Wait, what are you—” Milton asked just before the woman wedged a piece of wood into his mouth.
The beautiful, barefoot woman, her dark curly hair piled up on top of her head, grinned at the Fausters. Milton squinted at the woman’s beaming untarnished smile and felt himself disappear inside, but in a good way. Marlo rolled her eyes at her besotted brother.
“I am the goddess Peitho,” the lovely woman said. “And welcome to the Audaci-Tea House! You’re just in time for Vice Principal Carroll’s latest story!”
Marlo stuck out her tongue. It felt numb, heavy, and—in a weird way—kind of sad.
“Wha give?” she mumbled.
“Tongue depressors,” the lovely woman replied. “The new vice principal prefers a speechless audience. He’s only been here a week, so he doesn’t realize yet that it takes more than a Novocain-soaked stick to tamp down these tart tongues! Excuse me …”
An odd-looking man was sitting in the corner of the café. He wore a Victorian waistcoat and checked his pocket watch with the obsessive incessancy of a teenage girl checking her cell phone.
“Thice Pinthibal Cawoll?” Milton mumbled with his clinically depressed tongue. “The Lewith Cawoll?”
“Whothz he?” Marlo asked.
“He wote Alith in Wonderland.”
Milton found it odd that Principal Bubb would suddenly switch vice principals right before he and his sister arrived in Wise Acres. The principal was a timeless creature set in her wicked ways, not one to go out on a whim and make hasty changes. She was obviously up to something downright despicable. But what?
Vice Principal Carroll was seated before a nest of fringed pillows, lounging on a small rosewood love seat carved with delicate leaves and bunches of grapes. One by one, the other children left their lawn chairs and sat down on the pillows. Milton watched the vice principal daintily sip a cup of tea. The man seemed fragile and fussy, like some quaint porcelain figurine set upon a grandmother’s mantelpiece.
“Ch-children,” Vice Principal Carroll said with a slight stammer as he beckoned Milton and Marlo forward. “Come c-closer … the t-time has come to t-talk of many things: of shoes and ships and sealing wax … of cabbages and kings …”
Milton and Marlo sat down on a pair of unoccupied pillows at the edge of the vice principal’s story-time solar system.
A mousy little girl with stringy brown curls, old granny glasses, and a pinched expression (as if sucking on an invisible lemon) looked back at the Fausters.
“Nice entrance,” the girl said with a smirk, fighting to enunciate despite her depressed tongue.
She held out her tiny white hand. Milton held out his hand in kind, yet the girl ignored it and proceeded to pet one of the Luckys, who was poking out of Milton’s filthy shirt.
“Ferrets … cool,” the girl said. “My name is Pansy Cornett.”
“I’m Milton,” Milton said, chewing on his tongue as if to give the sluggish piece of meat in his mouth CPR. “This is my sister, Marlo.”
“Where are you from?” Pansy asked.
“Kansas.”
Pansy snorted. “You know what you call a smart, attractive person in Kansas?”
“No, what?” Milton replied.
“A tourist …”
Vice Principal Carroll removed several pages from his waistcoat pocket before glancing fearfully at the children as if they were a mob of kinderghosts who had suddenly materialized before him.
“W-well then, I would like to read a poem I wrote just this morning,” he said as he spread out the papers on his knee. “It’s called ‘Molly Coddles Codswallop’!”
Molly coddles codswallop
With cake and party favors.
Her rocking horses gallop
At words with strange new flavors.
These playful verbal dollops
Dance on her tongue to savor.
A pair of talking shoes,
Molly crayons to her feet,
In color-blinded hues,
They giggle down the street.
A lobster grows confused,
“What a shame I cannot speak!”
The children stared at one another, sitting atop their pillows.
“That made no sense whatsoever,” a serious-looking boy with a knitted brow said.
“Like the part where the lobster said he couldn’t talk,” a pretty girl with burgundy-streaked bangs and too much lip gloss added. “I mean, how could he tell us that?”
Vice Principal Carroll pinched the bridge of his nose, just between his sunken eyes. “It’s a p-poem, Mr. Babcock and Miss Youngblood. About n-not being about anything.”
“I know what your poem is about,” the boy, Mr. Babcock, said with a smirk before looking down at his watch. “About half-past interesting …”
The children chuckled, their tongues recovering from their brief depression.
“Seriously,” the boy added. “I could write a poem better than that.”
Vice Principal Carroll shook his head. “Everything is easier said than done.…”
“Except for talking,” Marlo interjected. “That’s about the same.”
The children trained their cold, glittering eyes upon her. She swallowed as the lip-gloss girl, Miss Youngblood, and Mr. Babcock exchanged eye rolls.
“Um … whatever,” Mr. Babcock said coldly. “It’s just that … what good is poetry anyway? All that rhyming mumbo jumbo …”
“How I tire of dragging my work down to a reader’s l-lowly l-level!” Vice Principal Carroll shouted, rising quickly to his feet. The upholstered love seat fell on its carved, serpentine back. “Miss Peitho! It’s sn-snack time!”
The vice principal stormed out of the Audaci-Tea House, leaving several sheets of paper behind in his wake. The children grumbled as the goddess returned carrying a large tray held upright by a neck strap. On the tray were piles of different-colored soaps and a pitcher of deep-red tea.
The goddess poured two glasses of tea and handed them to the Fausters. Marlo took a sip and grimaced, her face collapsing like a soufflé made of used Kleenex.
“Tart!” she gasped. “My tongue feels all tight and shrively!”
Peitho nodded knowingly. “Sassy-Frass tea,” she said in her milk-and-honey voice. “For extra-tart tongues.”
“What’s with the soap?” Marlo asked. “Do we have to wash up before we eat or something?”
Peitho’s lips curled like red ribbon on a Christmas present. “Something like that,” she said as she held a bar of bright pink soap to her flawless face. “Finally, a soap with a FLAVOR you can SAVOR!” Peitho exclaimed with all of the effervescent perkiness of a glamorous game show presenter. “It’s Double-Bubble Soap: the OFFICIAL flavored soap of Wise Acres! Double-Bubble Soap gives you great suds and a treat for your taste buds: plus a DELICIOUS SURPRISE INSIDE! So whether you’re in the bath or the shower, you can scrub up and chow down with the yummiest soap around. Double-Bubble Soap: Wash your mouth out with luscious flavor!”
“Um … is this some kind of commercial?” Marlo interrupted.
The goddess scowled at Marlo. “It’s called product placement,” she said out of the side of her mouth. “The good people at Chemi-licious Industries generously provide their discontinued products for free in exchange for this endorsement.”
Milton stared at Peitho with faraway eyes and a soft, gummy smile smeared above his chin like a microwaved crayon.
The goddess undid the strap around her neck. “My, I’m so tired,” she said, widening her deep chocolate eyes. “I wish some strong young man would help me serve all the—”
“I’ll do it!” Milton chirped as he took Peitho’s tray and hooked it around his neck. The goddess blessed Milton with another megawatt smile and pinched his blushing cheek. “And they say chivalry is dead,” she cooed. “Though we all are, so maybe they’re right!” Peitho sas
hayed away in a wiggling swish of sheer white linen.
“If this soap tastes gross, I can always lick you,” Marlo said as they walked over to the first group of chuckling children.
“Why is that?” Milton replied groggily, as if waking up from a dream.
“Because you’re a sucker.”
Two kids—a boy and a girl—with glasses and stringy brown hair crossed their arms and glared at Milton and Marlo.
“Hi!” the girl said coldly. “I’m a human being! What are you?”
Marlo clutched her side. “Please … I had an appendectomy right before I died. Don’t make me laugh or the sutures might split.”
The girl sneered and shook her head. “Whatever, new girl … Hey, dweeb. I’ll have the peanut butter soap with a grape jelly middle.”
Milton handed the girl a light-brown piece of soap that oozed purple goop from the center.
“Mashed potato soap with gravy inside,” the boy said.
The strap bit into Milton’s neck. It felt like he was being hanged, backward, in slow motion. After handing the boy his snack, Milton pulled at the strap with his finger. The boy snickered.
“I’d make fun of you about that, but I fell for it, too,” he said in a voice huskier than his apparent years.
“What do you mean?”
The girl snorted. “Peitho is the goddess of persuasion. She gets all of the boys and even some of the girls to do her work for her.”
A scowling little boy with a brown stocking cap stormed over. “You’re an ugly twerp … and I’ll have the pizza-flavored soap with mozzarella cheese inside.”
Milton handed the boy his soap.
Marlo leaned into her brother. “You can’t just take that.… You’ve got to sling it back.”
“But I don’t want to dignify dumb remarks like that with a response,” Milton said as a girl grabbed a bar of corn chip soap with a salsa center.
“You’ve got to,” Marlo whispered as the children chomped into their soap. “This place is like prison.”
“Prison? What do you know about prison?”
“You’ve got to immediately single out the toughest prisoner and beat him up.”
Marlo grabbed the wrist of a little girl whose face was almost totally obscured by a mop of teased blond hair.
“Hey … who’s the sassiest kid here?” Marlo asked, scanning the room. Her eyes settled on the serious boy and the girl with the burgundy-streaked bangs. “Is it them?”
“Moses Babcock and Cookie Youngblood?” the girl mumbled, her mouth frothing. “They go for the throat whenever they open their mouths, but they’re not the meanest kids here.”
“Yeah? Then who is?”
Just then, a stocky badger demon with white bands streaked across its gray-and-black face marched into the Audaci-Tea House, wheeling a girl on a dolly.
“That’s the sassiest kid in Wise Acres,” the girl said, scooping up a bar of spaghetti-flavored soap with a marinara middle. “Moxie Wortschmerz.”
The little girl couldn’t have been more than eight years old. Her greasy light-brown hair was tied tight with elastic bands sporting little colored balls on the ends. Her dark green eyes bugged out with rage, as if trying to escape her pasty, glowering face. She was wearing what looked like a straightjacket.
“Her?” Marlo replied. “What’s so mean about that little rug rat?”
Moxie’s intense, quivering eyes settled on Marlo. The little girl stuck out her tongue. It was covered with a silver sheath. Marlo gulped and grabbed one of the few remaining bars of soap. She bit into it, distracted by the creepy little girl’s stare. Marlo’s mouth foamed over with a torrent of sour, bitter salt.
The children began to snort and hoot.
“I knew she’d pick that one!” a little boy exclaimed. “Figures Creep Show would go for paste flavor with a booger filling!”
“Yuck,” Marlo said as she spat out the bubbling soap bits. “It tastes like … I don’t know … kind of familiar …”
She tried to wash out the disgusting flavor with a tart swish of Sassy-Frass tea. “Sort of like medicine …”
“I know what kind of medicine it tastes like,” Milton said with a smirk.
“What?”
“It probably tastes a lot like your own medicine,” Milton replied before scanning the room, hoping to unload more of his Double-Bubble burden.
“Soap’s on … come and get it!”
4 · A MATTER
OF PRINCIPALS
PRINCIPAL BEA “ELSA” Bubb, covered in more smears and globs than usual, stepped back from her painting. After screwing up her screwed-up goat eyes at the canvas, she realized that of all the crimes she’d committed throughout eternity, her latest crime against art was heinous enough to send her all the way downstairs in a one-way handbasket.
Principal Bubb was in a funk. And not the kind of funk that requires platform shoes and moving one’s booty to the music. The bad kind of funk. The kind of funk that makes eternal creatures dredged from the deepest depths of children’s nightmares do crazy things, like try their hand (or claw, rather) at painting.
The principal sighed. The sharp, rank stench of her hastily consumed lunch—baby panda liver, candied Limburger, and extra-clotted cream puréed into a not-so-smoothie—curled her snout-hairs … or would have had she not curled them herself only this morning.
Having Satan for a boss was one thing. You rather expected to be abused, misused, overworked, and underappreciated. But working beneath an angel—the holier-than-thouest archangel of them all, Michael, now doing business as the Big Guy Downstairs, aka the Devil—was something else entirely. Michael’s insufferable saintliness, his effortlessly condescending perfection, his taking every opportunity to saddle up his high horse and then—with an almighty “giddy up”—gallop down the moral high road, leaving everyone else behind in heaps of flaming rectitude … it made him somehow more diabolical than the epitome of all evil himself.
“Um … Miss Principal, ma’am?” a leathery pink demon with tiny bat wings and an unnerving baby face said uncomfortably, standing on a pedestal in the corner of the principal’s Not-So-Secret Lair. “Are you done painting me?”
Cerberus, Principal Bubb’s three-headed Pekingese, writhed in the demon’s arms, chewing a bone with savage delight. Unfortunately for the wincing demon, that bone happened to be his humerus, a situation that didn’t exactly tickle the anguished creature’s funny bone.
Principal Bubb set down her palette and brush and wiped her filthy claws on her filthy, paint-spattered smock.
“Yes, Cato,” she grumbled. “We’re through.”
Cato walked over to the canvas and studied the gruesome smudges. The painting featured Cato, dead and bloodied, at the center of a grisly crime scene. The principal—rendered in crude blotches that captured her likeness perfectly—was looking over the body, painted next to a medical examiner. The two figures smeared together.
“I seem to have painted myself into a coroner,” the principal said. She wiped away a tear of blood from her snot-green eyes.
“Are you all right, O Mistress of Malevolence?” Cato inquired.
“Of course I’m not all right!” she shouted. “The Netherworld is in a shambles, ever since Michael—that pseudo son of Perdition—was put in charge, after that miserable, meddling goody-two-shoes Milton Fauster testified against him at the Trial of the Millennium!” Fire smoldered behind the principal’s jaundiced goat eyes. “I want to squish that little squirt till he … squishes and squirts.…”
Principal Bubb grabbed a remote control from her desk and waved it at a bank of old televisions mounted on the wall of her Not-So-Secret Lair. Two orange, spray-tanned faces formed on the surface of the sputtering cathode ray-tube screen.
“I’m Bobo Bagatelle,” the unnaturally tanned news-woman chirped.
“And I’m Muck Raker,” her male counterpart interjected.
“And you’re subjecting yourself to URN—the Underworld Retribution Network—I Can’t
Believe It’s Not News! hour,” they announced in perky unison.
Principal Bubb scratched at a particularly scaly patch on her thick, anaconda arms. “I need to take my mind off this train wreck,” she murmured.
“And we’re here with Vice Principal—excuse me, Mr.—Mark Twain!” Bobo continued.
Bea “Elsa” Bubb gasped. “T-Twain wreck! Vice Principal Twain?! Why isn’t he back in Wise Acres, doing his job?”
Muck nodded, his shiny black helmet of hair as dark and stubborn as an oil spill.
“Yes, the recently ousted vice principal of Wise Acres, the circle of Heck for kids who sass back!” the anchorman continued. “So, please, tell us your shocking story and don’t spare any hyperbolic, inflammatory detail.…”
Ousted? Principal Bubb thought as the warped image of a dapper old man in a white linen suit appeared on her television screen.
“Imagine my surprise when I found myself, just last week, rudely prodded by a band of incorrigible brutes with pitchsporks, and told that my services would no longer be needed in the bad-mouthin’ burrow of Wise Acres!” Mr. Twain complained in his Southern drawl. The man had wild white hair, thick gray eyebrows, and a bushy salt-and-pepper horseshoe of a mustache drooping down over his grumbling lips.
“I was thrown outside like a cantankerous can of old-man garbage!” he continued with a nettled twitch of his mustache. “And Principal Bubb didn’t even have the decency to tell me herself why she removed me!”
“Because I didn’t!” Principal Bubb shrieked. “I had to find out about it on the Underworld Retribution Network, along with the rest of the accursed!”
Mark Twain cocked a bushy gray eyebrow.
“Sure, my prickly management style and acid tongue often got me in a heap of trouble, but to yank me outta there without so much as a ‘how do you do’ … and replace me with, of all folks, Lewis Carroll …”
The principal shook her hideous head in disbelief.
“Wait … Lewis Carroll?! The author of Alice in Wonderland?!”
Wise Acres Page 3