At that moment, Butch glanced over at Simon, and their eyes made contact. Simon quickly turned his full attention to the drinking fountain, hoping Butch wouldn’t realize he had seen the exchange.
Panicked thoughts raced through his head. Oh, wonderful water! Just drink’n water here. Nothing but cool crisp water. Didn’t see anything at all. No need to come over here and kill me…
One more gulp and Simon knew he’d be sick. He turned his head ever so slowly towards the lockers, but Butch and his minions had left.
A loud ringing sound boomed throughout the hallways, causing the boy to jump in fright. This time it wasn’t the sweet sound of angels he heard but the bitter sound of doom; he was late for Mrs. Cunningham’s math class.
Simon sprinted down the hallway as the last remnants of life disappeared into the safety of the classrooms. The halls now appeared empty.
Not bothering to stop at his locker, he dashed around a corner. Just one more hallway to go and then——Simon didn’t see it coming. One moment he was running, and the next, his frail body was thrown against a locker like a rag doll. He couldn’t feel the ground under his feet anymore, and the back of his head pulsated with pain.
A faint whisper sounded in his ear. “If I so much as hear you peep a word about this, I’m going to make you wish you were never born.”
Simon’s vision became blurry, but he still recognized the outline of Butch pinning him against the steel wall. He grunted as the sophomore ground his shoulder blades into the locker. Then he gasped when the bully pressed a cold knife against his throat.
“Do you understand me?” the menacing figure threatened. Simon nodded.
“What’s going on here?” roared Principal Harmon from behind.
“Not one word,” the young man whispered as the knife vanished into the dark recesses of his black overcoat. Butch gritted his teeth and gently placed Simon back on the ground. “Nothing, sir,” he said coolly. “We were just playing.”
“That’s not what it looked like to me,” the principal snorted. “You!” He pointed a stubby finger at Simon. “Go to class.” He looked at Butch and growled, “And you. Come with me.”
“Why? I didn’t do anything.” The teenager folded his arms in defiance.
Principal Harmon waved at Butch’s long overcoat and said, “Don’t be coy with me. You know that’s against dress code.”
Simon felt his heart start to beat again as he walked to his classroom. He tried to forget what had just happened, but he couldn’t purge the memory of the knife from his mind—how the sharp blade touched his skin and how deftly Butch handled the weapon. Butch had used that knife before; Simon knew it. He searched his neck for blood but found none. Relief came for a moment but fear returned when he reached Mrs. Cunningham’s classroom.
He climbed up on his tippy-toes to look through the window in the door, but his short height prevented him from seeing anything. The boy jumped up and down, but the dumb window remained out of reach. He huffed. Why did God have to give him a body from the reject pile?
Feeling extremely nervous, he opened the large door and slipped into the classroom. Luck was on his side! Mrs. Cunningham was facing the chalkboard. Simon glided down the row towards his desk just as the old woman started to speak.
“Mr. Kent,” she said, her smoke-stained lungs crackling, “since you’re already up, please come to the chalkboard and solve this problem for us.” At that, she added a couple more digits to the end of the equation.
Simon moved towards the chalkboard slowly, as if he’d been asked to place his head in a guillotine. He wondered which was worse.
“Well? Come on, Simon. We don’t have all day,” coughed the teacher. Mrs. Cunningham was the ideal model for an antismoking commercial. One view of her on TV would be enough to scare anyone out of taking a puff.
It’s just a simple long-division problem, Simon thought. I can do this.
All the arithmetic he had learned from seven long years of school lay before him, taunting him. He picked up the yellow chalk and tackled the problem head-on, beginning with simple division.
Screeeeech! The chalk shrieked against the board, and everyone in the classroom cringed in their seats. A few girls brushed the goose bumps from their arms, and Mrs. Cunningham closed her eyes.
“Sorry.”
He finished the division part of the problem. Now for multiplication. It seemed awfully hot in the room, all of a sudden, and Simon felt extremely uncomfortable. Next came addition. The students started to chuckle. Wait! Next comes subtraction, not addition! Simon undid the top button of his shirt and continued.
A woman’s voice came from the intercom in the ceiling. “Sorry for the interruption, but is Simon Kent in the room?”
“Yes, he’s here,” the teacher hacked.
“Please have him go to Principal Harmon’s office immediately.”
“Oooooh,” the kids in the room teased.
“He’s on his way,” Mrs. Cunningham replied. “Well, Mr. Kent, you got a good start on this problem. We’ll save it for you, so you can finish it when you come back.”
Simon hunched his shoulders and sighed. Mrs. Cunningham stretched out her hand to take the chalk and eraser, but before Simon could give them to her, he sneezed and sent a mushroom cloud of dust into her face. He handed the chalk and eraser to Mrs. Cunningham—who looked at them distastefully—and started his long trek to Principal Harmon’s office. The boy was in no hurry to get back to the math problem, especially after the chalk incident, so he took his sweet time.
Along the way, he noticed a police officer carefully withdrawing a handgun from a locker. The officer moved the gun with a pencil, so as to not put his fingerprints on the weapon.
“Oh, yeah. Come to Daddy,” the officer said, dropping the gun into a plastic bag. He looked up at Simon. “You Simon?”
“What?”
“Are you Simon Kent?”
“Oh. Yes,” Simon said sheepishly. He looked at the officer’s uniform and read the name tag: McKenzie.
“We got some questions for ya, kid. Follow me.”
As Simon neared the principal’s office, he could hear an argument taking place on the other side of the door. “You can’t hold me here,” Butch yelled. “That knife was just a birthday present.”
“Was this gun a birthday present, too?” Officer McKenzie asked as he walked into the room bearing the weapon. The office overflowed with people—including Buz, Spike, Butch, Principal Harmon, another officer named Petri, and a few more students whom Simon didn’t recognize. Butch sat with handcuffs on his wrists, and a knife with a curved ivory handle in the shape of a cobra lay on the hardwood table.
Scowling at Simon, Butch sprang forward, attempting to head-butt the boy, but Principal Harmon held him back. Simon hugged the doorframe.
“You told him where it was, you little twerp!” Butch said.
During the excitement, Spike jumped in front of the policemen to distract them while two of the other seniors snuck behind the men and knelt on all fours. Most officers, even ones stationed at high schools, wouldn’t have been so naive, but these two might as well have gotten their badges from crackerjack boxes.
“You know what, guys?” Spike said as he tapped the officers’ badges with his fingertips. The men were slow to react. “You two are so oblivious, I bet you’d fall for anything.”
“Huh?” both officers said in unison.
“Exactly.”
With his hands already on their chests, Spike applied a little pressure, and the two men both toppled over the kneeling students.
Butch exploded with energy, releasing himself from Principal Harmon’s grasp. Still in handcuffs, he grabbed the knife off the table and lunged at Simon. Simon’s eyes widened as adrenaline shot through his veins. He slammed the door and ran for his life.
“We’re gonna get you, punk!” Butch yelled, kicking the door.
Butch, Spike, and Buz exited Principal Harmon’s office unhindered and pursued Simon down the em
pty hallway.
Two seconds later, Principal Harmon rushed out the door, threatening, “You’ll all be expelled for this!”
* * *
“Here ya go, Butch,” Buz said, tossing the handcuff keys to his friend; he had stolen them from Officer Petri during the commotion. While in full stride, Butch spun around and caught the keys from behind. However, not wanting to slow himself down, he didn’t bother to use them.
Simon burst through the front doors of the school and headed towards the crowded parking lot. Panting heavily, he made his way through the first few rows of cars before he heard the three bullies yelling his name.
From a bird’s-eye view, the parking lot looked like a garden with many colorful vegetables, big and small: red ones, blue ones, yellow ones, even neon-green ones; cars with low-riding bodies, others with jacked-up axles, and still others with mammoth tires. The lot contained minivans, trucks, convertibles, old station wagons, and many other varieties. With such a large selection of vehicles, Simon thought he could easily find a suitable hiding place, but to his dismay, he found none.
“There he is!” Buz shouted.
Butch slid over the hood of a new Corvette. As he did so, the knife and keys in his hands scraped the shiny red paint. Simon rolled under a large black truck just before Buz could grab him.
As if he’d done it a hundred times, Butch slid his hands down his body and pulled the handcuffs to the front. He jumped onto the bed of the truck so he could pounce on the seventh-grader when he came out the other side. Simon scurried like a centipede to the head of the truck and inched his way to the next vehicle.
“Come on out, Simon,” Spike called, looking under the black truck to get a better view. “We just wanna talk.”
“Yeah, right!” Simon blurted. “You want to cut me open and talk to my insides.”
“He went under another car!” Buz exclaimed.
Simon crawled out from under a jeep and raced towards the fence. Fortunately, the large teenagers had trouble maneuvering through the tight maze of cars, thus giving the slender boy a chance to flee.
Simon made it to the outer fence and slipped through the bars just as Buz grabbed his shirt. The fabric tore, and Simon catapulted down the busy street.
“You guys go on without me,” Butch ordered. He fumbled with Officer Petri’s keys while his friends struggled to climb over the tall fence.
Simon stopped at the intersection and waited a few seconds for the light to turn red so he could cross. Buz and Spike bolted towards him like crazed football players in a sudden blitz.
“Come on! Come on!” Simon shouted at the light. The cars zoomed by so fast that he didn’t dare to cross early; besides, it was against his nature to break the law. Soon, the light turned red, and Simon sprinted through the intersection.
The streetlight turned green when Buz and Spike started to cross. A small car swerved to miss the teenagers and ran into a fire hydrant. Water flew up into the sky and splattered against the windshield of a bus, forcing the driver to veer into oncoming traffic and smash into another car. None of the vehicles were going fast enough for anyone to get seriously hurt, but the whole intersection became a big watery mess. The two seniors didn’t even look back to admire the wreck they had caused. Simon was escaping, and they needed to catch up with him.
The young boy felt as though his lungs were about to burst. While still running, he unzipped his fanny pack, pulled out his inhaler, and took a deep puff. He then collided with an old lady who had just exited a corner store with her bags.
Simon frantically gathered up her groceries, apologized, and ran off—but then he stopped, suddenly realizing that he had dropped his inhaler. Looking back, he saw the plastic dispenser resting in the gutter. His assailants were getting closer, so with bitter anguish, he turned around and continued running.
The old lady had taken only one step before she was knocked down again—this time by Buz and Spike as they rushed by. She watched sadly as several cans of cat food rolled down the sidewalk.
While maneuvering though the sea of pedestrians, Buz and Spike came upon a tall, slender woman wearing a red tank top and white Daisy Duke shorts. A little poodle stood by her side on a leash.
“Hey—” said Buz, suddenly stopping. “Nice dog.”
The two boys stood there for a moment, leering at the curvaceous woman, trying to say something intelligent, until they heard the screech of a car and someone yell, “Hey, kid, get out of the road!”
The seniors turned around to see Simon running across a narrow street up ahead. Reluctantly, they pulled themselves away from the attractive woman and followed after the boy.
Simon darted down a side street between two large buildings and realized, to his horror, that his luck had finally ended; he had just run into a dead end.
Chapter 3
The Visitor
Buz snickered. “Oh, look at the little mouse caught in a corner.”
Spike picked up a cracked two-by-four and tapped the side of an old, beat-up car. Buz found a red brick and followed suit.
Terrified, Simon ran to the far wall as the two older boys closed in on their prey. His heart pounded in his chest, and his eyes darted about, looking for an escape route. Dirty newspapers littered the dark alleyway, and streams of filthy water gathered in small pools about their feet.
“Look, guys,” Simon pleaded, “I didn’t say anything.”
“Sure ya didn’t.” Spike laughed in a patronizing manner. “But just to be safe, we’re gonna make sure you don’t say anything.”
At that, both teenagers ran towards Simon with weapons in hand, but just as they reached the petrified boy, a light blue mass of electricity appeared in the air behind them. The electrical cloud expanded to three feet in diameter and formed into the shape of a sphere. A flash of green shot out of the strange ball and smashed into Buz and Spike, forcing them to fall at Simon’s feet. The ball of lightning disappeared as fast as it had come, leaving no trace of even being there.
Simon’s mouth hung open in bewilderment. A young, beautiful girl sat on top of Buz and Spike. She wore a sleeveless green tunic that extended to her mid-thigh. The plastic fabric stretched across her chest like spandex, lay flat against her stomach, and hugged her hips. She also wore green boots that held onto her slender legs with several straps of leather. But despite her clothing, her most unique feature was her bright green hair; the long ringlets reached down to her thin waist and sparkled in the dim light.
“Ahm-Chi Kuta,” the girl said, looking down at the boys. “Masta Baloo andga eichi?”
“What on Earth are you saying, girl?” Buz answered back.
The strange girl jumped up, waved a small wand, and chanted, “Aiyee, Aiyee, Aiyee bookata!” The wand released a stream of light that engulfed her body for a second and then vanished. She opened her mouth to speak once more.
“Guten morgen…”
Spike scratched his chin.
“Ohayo gozaimasu… Buenos dнas… Bonjour?”
“Are you making fun of us?” Buz asked, raising his brick. He sat up and rubbed his head.
The girl smiled. “Good morning.” Her clear voice was as soft as an autumn breeze.
“Good morning,” Simon stammered. He could hardly believe what he had just witnessed. The strange girl had appeared out of nowhere.
She turned and said, “My name’s Tonya. I’m from Paraworld 4329.” Her yellowish green eyes sparkled as she spoke. “Wow, this looks really different from what I was expecting.”
Tonya bent over and picked up a curious device she had dropped during her collision with Buz and Spike. It was about the size of a textbook but had two handles, several buttons and knobs, and a digital readout that looked almost like an odometer from a car. She banged the device against her wand as if she were trying to erase an Etch A Sketch.
“Ah, this thing’s broken.”
Simon looked over at the readout on the device. It appeared to have eight place markers for digits, but they were all spi
nning wildly, resembling a slot machine. The first marker became blank, and then the second, and then the third, and so on, until it reached the last place marker. The final marker spun for a second more and then went blank like the others.
“Oh, yeah, really funny!” Tonya smirked. “Someone’s trying to play a joke on me.”
“Excuse me, little girl,” Spike interrupted. He grabbed his two-by-four and stood up. “We were in the middle of something here. Run along and play somewhere else.”
She turned to Simon and asked, “Are these your servants? Because if they were mine, I wouldn’t let them talk to strangers like that.”
“You are making fun of us,” Buz chimed in as he scurried to his feet, still clutching his brick.
“They’re not very smart, are they?” She chuckled. “Professor Gwyn told me all about this paraworld. Is it true the younger you look, the older you really are?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I mean, that’s simply amazing. I heard this is the only charted parallel world where everyone grows down instead of up. To think of it, I’d be considered an old woman here!”
She laughed heartily, but Buz and Spike were not amused.
“I can’t quite put my finger on what paraworld your servants are from,” she continued. “Oh, I hope this isn’t on the test. I know they’re not native to this paraworld—their bodies are too big and clumsy. I bet they’re worker drones from Paraworld 5467. Am I correct?”
Simon just stood there with his mouth open in confusion. What a strange girl.
“Oh, fiddlesticks!” she exclaimed. “Let me see… Oh, I know! I should have seen it earlier. By the way they’re holding their sticks and stones, they’re from one of the prehistoric worlds, aren’t they? So are their brains really the size of a walnut?”
“Okay, that’s it,” Buz grunted. “You’re gonna pay for that!”
He picked up the girl as easily as he would a feather pillow and walked towards a large puddle of dirty water.
“Oh, dear,” Tonya said, looking back at Simon. “Do you think he understood me?”
Paraworld Zero Page 3