Milton tapped Marlo on the shoulder.
“Eeeek!” she squealed, falling over in a heap.
Milton stood over her. “You’ve been tying your shoes for five minutes,” he said.
A dark-haired woman with bags underneath her eyes scowled from behind the door. “No one likes a Nosy Parker,” the woman said while pretending to smoke a piece of chalk. “And I should know!” The teacher slammed the door.
“I’m guessing that was Dorothy Parker,” Milton said as he helped his sister from the floor.
“What’s a Dorothy Parker?” Marlo grunted as she got to her feet.
“She was a critic and humorist back in the twentieth century.”
Marlo brushed herself off. “Well, the ‘critic’ part seems intact but I think she left the whole ‘humor’ thing back on the Surface.”
Milton and Marlo walked down the sparsely populated hallway.
“So … why were you eavesdropping?” Milton asked.
“Eavesdropping? Geez,” Marlo replied. “Everyone’s always telling me to listen to my teachers, and now that I actually do, you get on my case about it.”
Milton glanced over his shoulder. The hallway was empty.
“What did they say?” Milton asked.
Marlo tugged her tweed coat closed, hoping to hide the “My Clothes Attract Attention … Not to Mention Flies” slogan scrolling across her electric shirt.
“When the teachers weren’t harping on each other, they were harping on Vice Principal Carroll,” she relayed. “They say he’s as nuts as a bag of nuts rolled in extra-nutty Nutella and then covered in more nuts.”
“They said that?”
“I’m paraphrasing. They said he locks himself away in some shed, his Absurditory, so he can come up with more crazy stuff. The teachers were also talking about how miserable they were because they couldn’t write anymore, not anything good anyway.”
“Why is that?” Milton asked.
“Because they’re being kept from their muses … and the part of their souls that they poured into their books or something … which, um, reminds me. Speaking of muses …”
“Where’s Lucky?” Milton asked, noticing Marlo’s coat didn’t have the same, vaguely ferret-shaped lump in the breast pocket.
Marlo relayed her experience with Miss Dickinson.
“She said he’d be okay, and I kind of trust her,” Marlo added. “As much as you can trust someone who uses wasps as teachers’ aides, that is.”
The other Lucky poked his head out of Milton’s coat.
“We should probably hide him, though,” Marlo said. “It’s only a matter of time before they take Lucky Two, too.”
They walked across the book-strewn floor (mostly romance novels and serial Westerns). A cat brushed past Milton’s leg. And then another. Milton sneezed as the cats padded down the hall and around the bend with something approaching urgency.
“More of those cats,” Milton said, wiping his nose. “I wonder where they’re going?”
“To Lewis Carroll,” Marlo said as she and her brother turned the corner. “That’s what Miss Dickinson said. They’re Furriers, carrying messages back and forth for Vice Principal Crazy Pants.”
The two cats were joined by another, a jaunty black-and-gray tabby. The cat was wearing a leather pouch tied to its back.
“If we could just see what’s in those bags,” Marlo said as she trotted up behind the cat and made the fatal mistake of touching it.
Hissssssssssssss-sssspiiiiiit!
The feline erupted into a mewling storm of claws and teeth.
“Owwww!” Marlo yelped, her forearms cross-hatched with oozing scratch marks. “Bad kitty!”
Cookie Youngblood, Concordia Kolassa, and two other girls strutted toward Milton and Marlo.
“Don’t blame the cat, New Girl,” Cookie said with a sneer. “It was only trying to cover up what it thought was poop—that’s what cats do.”
The girls laughed as Cookie assessed Marlo from head to toe, attaching snarky comments along the way.
“It’s like Papa Smurf ate Smurfette, then threw up on New Girl’s head.… New Girl’s nose looks like a thumb that lost its nail.… New Girl’s body couldn’t decide if it was a boy or a girl, so it just gave up.…”
When Cookie finally finished, Marlo smiled and wrapped her pale arms around the girls. “Dearly bedeviled, we are gathered here today to mourn the loss of Cookie Youngblood’s mind. This tiny speck of brain is survived by her shapeless stick of a body. Cookie’s mind will be sorely missed—but maybe if we keep throwing stuff at it, we’ll hit it.…”
The girls rolled their eyes as they turned left toward the Audaci-Tea House.
Marlo balled her hands into fists and slammed them into her hips. “Man, that girl bugs me,” she seethed.
A Siamese cat darted down the hall. It sniffed at a patch of wall with intense interest, then started scratching furiously. In just a matter of seconds, it had dug a small tunnel through the compressed wall of old encyclopedias.
“Let’s see where the itty-bitty kitty committee goes,” Marlo said as she followed the cat.
“I don’t know,” Milton said, his eyes watering and itchy. “My cat allergy …”
“Maybe we can find out more about the vice principal’s Absurditory. C’mon!”
Marlo squeezed herself through the cramped shredded hole with Milton elbowing along close behind. They emerged in a dark, neglected corridor. A few yards away was another iron spiral staircase—smaller and shabbier than the main turret staircase—shooting up through the crumbling floor of ancient, decomposing books. The Siamese cat had a shred of ancient, excavated paper in its jaws.
“C’mere, kitty kit-kat,” Marlo cooed as she pussyfooted toward the creature. Suddenly, she lunged at it and snatched the paper from its muzzle. The cat hissed and spat before bounding up the staircase.
“This must be the back entrance or something,” Marlo said. A winding trail of dusty paw prints led up to a tiny door at the very top of the staircase.
Marlo and Milton stared quizzically at the yellowed parchment.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was … whoops!
“Whoops?” Marlo murmured as she and her brother squinted at the oddly shimmering handwriting that seemed to writhe and wriggle on the page.
Sorry, I seemed to have dropped my ambrosia. Butter fingers! Anyway, in the beginning–that is, before anything was formed–was the Word. A Word that promulgated My will and My commandments. Hmm … that sounds so … bossy. What I want to convey is that by My Word, I have created all Creation, speaking All Things out of Nothing. And that Word was Me: no second to the Most High, but the supreme eternal Author. Wow … that sounds like I’m awfully full of Myself!
“Is this like Bible stuff or something?” Marlo asked.
“Sort of,” Milton said. “But it’s different. Like it was dictated. Maybe this is an early draft of the Bible. It’s weird …,” Milton said, blinking really fast. From the corner of his eye, the writing appeared different, written in a foreign language. “The original Bible was supposedly in Aramaic, but we can read it. This must be written in a special kind of ink that allows us to—”
“What are you guys doing?” a voice asked, booming in the dim, musty stillness.
Marlo tucked the parchment into the pocket of her nasty tweed coat. A short, narrow-faced boy with a sharp, shrewd gaze peered back at the Fausters.
“Um, hi … uh,” Milton replied.
“Roget Marx Peters,” the boy replied.
“Right. Anyway, we’re kind of—”
Roget looked up the stairs.
“Listen, squirt,” Marlo said. “This is none of your business.”
“Well, I’m making it my business, concern, undertaking,” Roget replied stonily.
Marlo glared at the boy. “Careful, or I’m going to give you a high five … in the face … with my shoe. But okay. Just don’t tell anyone what we’re doing.”
“What ar
e you doing … carrying out … undertaking?”
Milton and Marlo padded up the creaking steps.
“It’s hard to tell,” Marlo said as she reached the top step. “Just following these weird messenger cats to …”
Marlo flipped open a plastic flap on the tiny door. Outside, in the uncared-for grounds covered with undergrowth and a taunting tangle of Sassafras and Syca-Yew trees, was a huge shed shaped like a grinning cat head.
“… the big scary cat shack.”
Milton joined his sister at the top of the stairs.
“It’s a pet door—”
“Animal portal, creature exit,” Roget muttered.
“Leading out to Vice Principal Carroll’s Absurditory,” Milton finished. “Of course … it’s like the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland … I didn’t know Wise Acres had a backyard.…”
“It’s part of the Talk-Back Forty,” Roget offered. “An undeveloped, wild, uncultivated part of Wise Acres that stretches nearly all the way out to Wisecrackatoa …”
The Siamese cat bounded across the grounds and darted through another pet door, hidden in the Cheshire cat’s teeth. Marlo tried to wedge herself through it, but it was too small.
“I’m double-jointed,” she grunted. “So maybe I can just dislocate my shoulder …”
“And become a permanent fixture of the architecture,” Milton said as he helped tug Marlo loose. “We need to think of another way.”
Lucky poked his head out of Milton’s coat, taking hungry sniffs of air.
“A ferret,” Roget mumbled. “Weasel, polecat …”
Marlo felt around in her coat pocket. “That gives me an idea,” she said.
“Notion, thought, concept …”
“Look, I’m going to punch you in the head, skull, noggin if you don’t shut up,” Marlo said, routing around her pocket. “Good … I still got it.…”
“Have it,” Milton and Roget said simultaneously.
Marlo pulled out her half-eaten bar of booger-and-paste-flavored soap.
“Why did you keep that?” Milton said with a grimace.
Marlo shrugged. “The taste of paste takes me back,” she said, giving the bar a few licks. “Kindergarten, specifically. Plus I’m resourceful. You never know when something will come in handy.…”
Marlo reached for Lucky and set the squirming ferret on her lap. She rubbed the foaming bar of soap all over Lucky’s head and tail. Marlo sculpted Lucky’s ferret ears into stiff points.
“Urn …,” Milton said warily. “He’s going to scratch your eyes out.”
“Nah,” Marlo said as she worked up the fur on Lucky’s head into a sticky lather. “He loves the attention.”
Lucky hissed.
“See? That’s ferret-speak for ‘Thank you, Marlo. You are both kind and beautiful.’ ” She rubbed soap on Lucky’s tail until it stuck up in the air.
“There!” Marlo exclaimed as she set Lucky in front of the pet door. The supremely irritated ferret was nearly paralyzed with indignation, his ears and tail pointed straight and prickly with dried soap suds.
“It’s just like they always say: a ferret makes a lovely cat,” she explained.
“Nobody says that,” Milton replied. “But he does sort of look like a cat.…”
Marlo pushed Lucky through the plastic flap.
“Hey! What are you—”
“Go follow the other kitties,” Marlo instructed Lucky. “Vice Principal Carroll probably has cans of tuna labeled ‘Eat Me’ in there.”
Lucky sniffed at the air with interest. A cat playfully batted the Absurditory pet door, beckoning the ferret with its twitchy rhythm, like wounded prey. Lucky hunkered down before darting across the grounds toward the big cat-faced shed.
Marlo wiped dried soap scum off her hands.
“Now the vice principal will give Lucky a message, he’ll head straight for you—like he always does—and we’ll get to read it.”
Milton shook his head doubtfully. “I don’t know … he’d have to be pretty mad to think Lucky is a cat,” he murmured.
“Feline, mouser, grimalkin,” Roget muttered.
Milton sighed.
“I just hope the vice principal isn’t wearing his Looking Glasses when he slips Lucky a message.”
10 · BOTCH YOUR
LANGUAGE!
“WHAT DO HITTITE, Aramaic, Latin, Phoenician, and Sanskrit all have in common?” Miss Parker asked as she paced in front of the class, tugging on a strand of fake pearls dangling from her wrinkled neck.
“They’re all incredibly boring?” offered a smug, pudgy girl.
“They were members of the worst basketball team ever?” interjected a girl with dark braids.
“They were the latest dance moves when you were a little girl back in the Middle Ages?” spat a large, olive-skinned girl. The hefty girl leaned back against a stack of moldy, outdated astronomy textbooks printed before Pluto was designated a planet and definitely before it was eventually stripped of its planetary status, making the outdated textbooks strangely indated.
Miss Parker sighed, barely able to summon the energy to lift her chalk to the blackboard. Though known for her wit, an eternity spent among the tirelessly impertinent had left Miss Parker feeling at her wit’s end.
“As shrewd as Misses Scathelli, Zanotti, and Caustilo are, they are all shockingly wrong in this instance. Hittite, Aramaic, Latin, Phoenician, and Sanskrit are all …” Miss Parker scratched on the chalkboard:
DEAD LANGUAGES
Marlo raised her hand.
The teacher glanced down at her roster. “Yes, new girl? Miss … Fauster? You have something vital to add to the class I have yet to teach?”
Marlo had no idea why she had raised her hand. She was to “raising her hand in class” as Abraham Lincoln was to bungee jumping. But her need to be recognized as some kind of tart, teenage trouncer of all things status quo had apparently hijacked her arm while her brain had defected.
“What use is learning a dead language?” Marlo asked.
Instantly—from Miss Parker’s dark, heavy-lidded stare—Marlo could tell that her teacher had heard this question many times before.
“Miss Fauster, if I may for a moment deflect your question with several of my own?” Miss Parker asked, her eyes gleaming above bags so stuffed with world- and underworld-weariness that they looked like luggage.
“Yes … you may,” Marlo replied, trying to appear sassy to impress the other girls.
The class subtly leaned forward in their mildewed book benches, anticipating a fight.
“Are you currently one of the living?” Miss Parker asked.
“Um … no.”
“So that would make you what, exactly? Take your time, Miss Fauster, as you’ve already taken plenty of mine.”
“Dead … I guess.”
“Very good! You are in fact dead. As is everyone currently in the underworld. And what do we teach here in Wise Acres, Miss Fauster?”
“Words and stuff.”
“Words and stuff,” Miss Parker repeated with a smirk. “How eloquently put. Another way of saying that—the accurate way—is ‘language.’ Last question: this one for all of your dignity, if there’s any left. Are you game?”
Feeling the heat of her fellow students’ stares goading her on, Marlo folded her arms in defiance. “Game? I’m Parcheesi, Candy Land, and Chutes and Ladders all rolled into one.”
Miss Parker smiled despite herself. “Touché, Miss Fauster. Now, what have you learned since your arrival here in Wise Acres?”
Marlo shrugged. “Besides that wasps sting and that I’m dead, nothing useful.”
“Bingo!” Miss Parker exclaimed, a brief touch of color flushing her chalk-white cheeks. “You are learning dead languages because you are dead, you are in Wise Acres, and it will be of no use to you whatsoever!”
A pretty, auburn-haired girl showed her irritation with a double-barrel-roll of her wide blue-green eyes.
Miss Parker smacked her palms again
st the lectern. “Don’t look at me in that tone of voice, Miss Duckworth!” the teacher exclaimed. “I can’t help that I’m forced to, in essence, teach boredom. But there is a cure for boredom, and that’s curiosity.”
“What’s the cure for curiosity?” Marlo asked.
“Thankfully there is no cure for curiosity,” the teacher replied with a sly wink, Marlo having somehow graduated from tongue-tied-small-fry to wise-guy-ally in the blink of an eye.
Miss Parker thrummed her fingers against her lectern. “The word ‘language’ is Latin, meaning tongue,” she said. “Which is why the first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue, because language, you see, is a powerful thing. But perhaps you’ll only appreciate its worth once it’s been frittered away.”
The teacher squatted down behind her lectern, rummaging through a large white canvas bag, and emerged with an armful of what looked like snorkels. She passed them out to the girls in the front row, who handed them over their shoulders to the girls behind them. Miss Parker walked over to Moxie Wortschmerz, whom a demon badger had wheeled in and set at the back of the class. The girl wriggled angrily in her straightjacket.
“You are—understandably—excused from this exercise, Miss Wortschmerz,” the teacher said.
Moxie furiously clacked her silver-sheathed tongue against the roof of her mouth. Miss Parker returned to her lectern.
“Now, girls, please put on your Sass-Masks.”
“Sksam-ssas,” mumbled a girl with sleek, side-swept bangs.
“Huh?” Marlo said as she fiddled with her mask.
Flossie leaned into Marlo. “That’s Roberta Atrebor,” the perky girl explained. “She has to say everything backwards and forwards. It’s like how some people have to wash their hands all the time.”
“At least that makes sense,” Marlo replied as she strapped the mask over her face. “I mean, have you seen the kind of things hands touch?”
As soon as Marlo put the Sass-Mask on her face, it tightened just under the jaw.
“Hey! What gives?!” she shouted. In the corner of her goggle mask, a digital readout clicked from 100 to 97.
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