Hamstersaurus Rex vs. Squirrel Kong

by Tom O'Donnell

  I scoured the shelves looking for any strange dietary supplements that could potentially mutate a squirrel. They were all gone. Weekes had replaced them with books (books?!) that had titles like Achieving Your Mental Soulpath and Who Really Built the Alamo? (It Was Aliens.)

  Weekes’s desk was equally empty of any powders, pills, or potions that might create a Squirrel Kong. Instead, I found a crystal pendant and a day planner that only had one entry. On the Thursday after next, Coach Weekes had written in “3 p.m.—Achieve Total Consciousness.” I was about to leave when I found an MP3 player in the bottom drawer. On impulse, I put the earbuds in and pushed Play.

  I heard the soothing sound of the ocean and instantly felt more relaxed.

  “You are a rock in the middle of the sea,” a calm, steady voice said. “Be the rock.”

  It was some kind of strange meditation tape.

  “You have total control of your impulses . . . A rock doesn’t bite its toenails . . . You are a rock . . .”

  I listened for a few more minutes before yanking the earbuds out. There was no evidence in Coach Weekes’s office. Whatever Squirrel Kong’s origin, it didn’t involve Weekes’s questionable dietary supplements. The man really had turned over a New Age leaf. Also he bit his toenails. Blech. I grabbed the roll of bandages and headed back out to the gym.

  Frustrated, I watched the hours of the day dwindle. Martha refused to talk about the case. (She was pretty talkative about her Antique Doll Museum internship, however.) Everyone else frowned and shook their heads when I mentioned Hamstersaurus Rex. They snickered when I brought up Squirrel Kong.

  Dylan—her right knee tightly wrapped in a massive clump of unnecessary bandages—tried to be positive. She came up with a crazy plan to obtain a similar-looking hamster from the local pet store and somehow swap it out for Hammie at the last second. But I wasn’t about to let another innocent hamster go down for Squirrel Kong’s crimes. Besides, where were we going to find a second hamster with a dinosaur tail and fangs?

  The final school bell rang to go home. Time was up. But there was still one place I had yet to investigate.

  “You sure you want to do this?” whispered Dylan. “Principal Truitt made it super clear that nobody is supposed to be poking around in here.”

  She scanned the hallway. It was empty. Pretty much everyone had gone home by now, but I knew from experience that Mr. Grogan might happen by any second with his bucket and mop. We didn’t have much time.

  “No choice,” I said. “If I don’t do something, then I may never see Hammie Rex again. But I totally understand if you want to back out now.”

  “No way,” said Dylan, holding up her fist. “I stand with Hammie.”

  I nodded, and we started to pull aside the many layers of yellow caution tape that blocked the entrance to Room 117.

  Inside it was dark and eerie. Random planks had been crudely nailed over the hole in the wall, giving the science lab the feeling of a zombie movie right before an undead attack. We replaced the caution tape as best we could and I flicked on the light of my UltraLite SmartShot to guide our way.

  The devastation was total. Lab tables had been smashed to splinters. The glass of shattered beakers crunched underfoot. It looked like someone had gone for an indoor joyride in a tank. I needed something that definitively proved that this had been caused by a giant squirrel, not a dino-hamster. But what?

  “Hey, look at this,” said Dylan, picking up a crumpled piece of paper off the floor. “I got an A on the quiz about cell division.”

  Sure enough, the name at the top read “Dylan D’Amato” with a score of 9/10.

  “Heh,” said Dylan. “Looks like I only missed the question about cytoplasm.”

  I noticed something strange about the paper. It had a weird orange splotch on the corner.

  “What is that stuff?” I asked.

  “Oh,” said Dylan, reading, “Cytoplasm is ‘C.’ The gelatinous material that fills the inside of eukaryotic cells—’”

  “No, no, that orange stuff.”

  “Huh. No idea. Ew,” said Dylan, seeing that she’d gotten a little on her fingers. She wiped it off on her jeans. “Sam, you’ve got some on your elbow.”

  Sure enough, I had a splotch on my shirtsleeve. I sniffed it. I couldn’t quite place it, but there was something familiar about the smell.

  As I shone the light around, I now saw that smudges of the same orange dust were everywhere in the science lab: on a broken chair, on a smashed light fixture, on a biology textbook with a giant chomp taken out of it, on a flattened test tube rack—

  Hang on. A textbook with a giant chomp taken out of it?

  I picked up the book. It was thickly coated with the orange dust and the bottom third was missing. A single, perfect bite had been taken out of it. You could see the outline of every tooth.

  “Check this out,” I said. “There’s no way Hamstersaurus Rex could have taken a bite like this.”

  “You’re right. You’d need a mouth a foot wide to do that,” said Dylan, examining the book for herself. “Still, you can’t necessarily prove that a giant squirrel did it. You’d need to be an expert in—”

  Just then, we heard the sound of footsteps outside in the hallway.

  “Somebody’s coming,” hissed Dylan.

  We froze, and I killed the light on my camera. Now the lab was dark once more. The footsteps got louder. Someone was approaching the door to Room 117.

  “Hide!” I whispered.

  Dylan nodded and dove behind an overturned desk. I scrambled into a cabinet with a broken door.

  From my vantage point, I could still see the doorway. A tall silhouette was now outlined through the layers of yellow caution tape. I caught the flash of metal as something poked through. Snip. A layer of tape fell away. Snip. Another fluttered aside. Someone was cutting their way inside with a pair of scissors. Once they’d cut the last strand, the mysterious figure stepped into the room.

  CHAPTER 7

  I HELD MY BREATH and watched the figure gingerly take another step into the lab. Something cracked under their shoe. I could see now that it was a man wearing a white lab coat. Beyond that I couldn’t make out many details, but something about him seemed . . . familiar. He felt his way along the far wall, right toward Dylan’s hiding spot. I held my breath and hoped he didn’t step on her.

  He didn’t. He turned on the lights.

  “Whoa!” screamed the man, leaping back three feet as he saw Dylan lying on the floor. “Very uncool!”

  “Uh. Hi,” said Dylan.

  With the lights on, I instantly knew where I’d seen him before. He had the same ponytail, the same gratuitous indoor sunglasses. He was the double thumbs-up guy from the principal’s office.

  “Yo, like, what are you even doing in here?” said the man, panting.

  “What am I even doing in here?” said Dylan, standing and dusting herself off. “What am I even doing in here? What am I even doing in here? Uh, Sam, what am I even doing here?”

  “I am not Sam,” I said in a heavy accent as I squeezed out of my cabinet.

  The surprised man screamed again.

  “I am his identical cousin Jarmo, from Finland!” I said, “We were playing a very much fun game called piilosta laboratorio—where you hide in a scientific lab for great joy. You just won the game by finding us! A hundred and fifty congratulations to you.”

  “Yep, that’s right,” said Dylan, nodding rapidly. “A hundred and fifty congratulations to you, sir. I’m, uh, from Finland, too. Even though I, uh, can’t do the accent—I mean, I don’t have an accent.”

  “You’re from Finland, too?” said the man. “So what’s your name?”

  Dylan frowned. “My Finnish name?”

  The man nodded.

  “It’s Finnn . . . Fin,” said Dylan.

  “Your name’s ‘Finfin’?”

  Dylan nodded. I face-palmed.

  The man’s expression softened. “Look, homies,” he said. “You don’t have to make
a bunch of crazy junk up. I get it. You two were poking around where you shouldn’t be and you got caught by the quote unquote ‘Man’: me.”

  Dylan and I looked at each other.

  “Yeah,” we said in unison.

  The man picked a miraculously unbroken chair up off the floor and set it on its legs. Then he spun it around backward and sat down in it.

  “Mind if I rap with you a little?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “We don’t mind if you rap with us.”

  “Real talk,” he said. “I get it. I was young once, too. And trust me, nobody was a bigger troublemaker than me. In fact, I used to cut class all the time to ride skateboards and play bass and do bungee jumping.”

  “That sounds pretty awesome,” said Dylan.

  “If you think being a rebel who plays by his own rules is awesome.” The man shrugged. “Anyway, the name’s Duderotti. Todd Duderotti. I’m your new science teacher.”

  “Welcome to Horace Hotwater Middle School,” said Dylan.

  Mr. Duderotti held out his fist. Dylan bumped it.

  “Look, I’m not going to narc on you for being in the lab or whatever,” said Mr. Duderotti. “But I guess since I’m a so-called ‘authority figure,’ I should probably tell you: it would be totally un-rad if you ever did something like this again. I mean, look at all the broken glass and exposed wires and junk. You little dudes could really hurt yourselves.”

  “We understand,” I said. “We’re very sorry. It won’t happen again, Mr. Duderotti.”

  “Please, Mr. Duderotti was my old man. Call me Todd.”

  “We understand, Todd,” I said. It didn’t sound right as I said it.

  “Okay,” said Mr. Duderotti, standing. “Great rap session. I’ll see you both in school tomorrow. We’re going to be learning the difference between plant cells and animal cells.” He pantomimed a little air-guitar riff.

  Dylan smiled.

  “Remember,” said Mr. Duderotti, pointing at us, “knowledge is the original rap music.”

  “I’ll try to remember that,” I said.

  He held out his fist to me. Somewhat reluctantly, I bumped it. Over Mr. Duderotti’s shoulder, I saw Dylan quickly swipe the chomped book and hide it behind her back. We both hurried out the door.

  “Stay chill, amigos,” called Mr. Duderotti after us, and he made a sort of “hang loose” gesture with his hand. Dylan waved.

  “Wow, what a nice guy,” said Dylan, once we’d made it out of earshot. “I can’t believe he’s going to let us call him by his first name.”

  “He didn’t seem a little off to you?” I said.

  “He only seemed off to you, Sam, because he’s cool.”

  “Wait, are you implying that I’m not cool?” I said. “Because I’m cool. I’m really cool. Have you seen my dioramas?”

  “Look, we could debate your coolness level all day long, but I’ve got to get to practice,” said Dylan. “Weekes’s inner peace is going to turn into outer rage when he sees me drag in twenty minutes late.” She tossed me the book. “But you finally have your evidence: tooth marks that might have been made by Squirrel Kong.”

  “They were!” I said. “But I’m going to need help from someone who’s an expert in rodent dental forensics.”

  Oddly enough, I knew someone like that.

  Fifteen minutes and a quick phone call to my mom later (“Meeting Club is running long today! So much lively debate!”), I was on the crosstown bus. The sky overhead was dark and ominous. It felt like a downpour might start at any second.

  As the bus pulled over at my requested stop, I could see the gleaming SmilesCorp campus on a hill in the distance.

  “You sure this is where you want to get off, kid?” said the bus driver. “You know this museum is just a bunch of spooky old dolls, right?”

  “All too well,” I said as I hopped out of the bus and ran toward the Antique Doll Museum. Outside, I saw Martha’s tandem bicycle locked up.

  “We’re closed,” said Patricia, the ticket taker.

  “No, you’re not,” I said, pointing to the sign of posted hours. They were clearly open for another forty-five minutes.

  “Fine. You called my bluff. It was worth a shot,” she said with a shrug. “Five dollars.”

  I slapped a bill on the counter and rushed for the entrance. Unfortunately, I was so distracted I didn’t see that a woman was coming out of the same door at exactly the same time. I bumped into her and she dropped an armload of papers on the ground.

  “I’m really sorry, ma’am,” I said as I stooped to help her pick up her things. “I guess I wasn’t thinking there would be any other, you know, people here.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” said the woman. “We’re always glad to see a new patron! I’m the new PR director at the museum and I have to ask. Were you attracted by our new ad campaign, ‘The Maple Bluffs Antique Doll Museum: Absolutely Doll-icious’?”

  “Um. No?” I said, handing her a stack of papers. I was surprised to see Roberta Fast—the SmilesCorp rep who had lost the company’s invisible doughnut at Science Night—staring back at me.

  “Hey, I know you!” said Roberta, smiling. “Sam Gibbs, winner of the Little Mister or Miss Muscles competition.”

  “I cheated,” I said with a shrug. “Wait, I thought you worked at SmilesCorp?”

  Roberta Fast’s face darkened. “Not anymore,” she said. “I just couldn’t do it. I got sick and tired of the soulless corporate atmosphere; the lies; the unethical behavior. It was too much. So I quit. I’m telling you, Sam Gibbs, that company is evil. And so are all the people who thoughtlessly help their foul agenda of seeking profits at any cost!”

  “My mom still works there, so . . . ,” I said.

  “Oh, she’s fantastic! One of the good ones!” said Roberta Fast, instantly brightening again. “And how’s your pet hamster? The one that caused all that adorable property damage? The little guy is doing well, I hope!”

  “Not really; the principal of my school wants to send him to hamster prison,” I admitted. “Anyway, it was, uh, nice to run into you, Ms. Fast. Congrats on the new job.”

  “Don’t be a stranger,” said Roberta. “And next time be sure to enter the offer code ‘DOLLICIOUS’ when you buy your tickets online for a forty-five-cent discount.”

  “Will do,” I said.

  And with that, Roberta Fast walked out into the parking lot toward her silver hatchback. I continued onward, past shelf after shelf of the dustiest, creepiest dolls history had to offer. Norton, the security guard, doffed his cap as I walked past.

  I found Martha Cherie stuffing a wad of suggestions in the museum’s Suggestion Box. She wore a blue blazer and a gold lapel pin, marking her as an official Antique Doll Museum intern.

  “Oh, hello, Sam,” she said. “Are you here to check out the Fanged Dolls of Medieval Hungary exhibit? It’s closing next weekend.”

  “No, Martha,” I said. “I need your help.”

  “That’s what I’m here for!” She pointed to her lapel pin. “Just let me finish adding my daily suggestions to the Martha Suggestion Box. I used to say all my suggestions about how the museum could be better run out loud, to the museum staff, and that’s why they added the box. It’s just for me. Can you imagine, a whole box filled with my thoughts!”

  Martha stuffed eight more suggestions into the slot. The box was so full that the last one barely fit. She scribbled on a final slip of paper and narrated as she wrote: “Need bigger Martha Suggestion Box.” She left that one sitting on top.

  “Now, what did you want help with, Sam? Is it navigating our vast collection of loose doll arms on the third floor? I’m afraid it can be a tad daunting to patrons who are new to the exciting world of doll arms, but with a little guidance, I think you’ll find it a very rewarding experience.”

  “Not doll arms,” I said. “Look, you remember how I told you that a giant squirrel attacked our school?”

  Martha frowned. “Yes,” she said. “Even though we’re friends, I thou
ght that claim sounded outlandish and unbelievable. I’ve noticed you’re sometimes prone to mendacity. Which means ‘lying.’”

  I pulled the chomped book out of my backpack and handed it to her.

  “Well, I’m not lying about this,” I said. “You see those tooth marks? They were made by Squirrel Kong.”

  Martha stared at the book. For an instant I thought I saw a hint of something flash in her eyes. Then she handed it back to me. “It sounds like the help you’re asking for doesn’t involve antique dolls at all,” she said, “but rather exonerating a certain type of rodent, which I’d rather not name.”

  “You can prove that that bite mark came from a twelve-foot-tall squirrel and not a hamster with fangs. You can use your rodent dental forensics to save Hamstersaurus Rex!”

  “No, Sam,” said Martha. “I left that world behind. I have a new life now. And unless one of these precious antique dolls gets gnawed by a ferret or something, rodent dental forensics doesn’t play any part in it.”

  “But Hamstersaurus Rex is getting sent away tomorrow!” I said. “You’re my last hope.” I felt like crying.

  “Sorry, Sam,” said Martha, “but I’m not a Hamster Monitor anymore.”

  I took a deep breath. “Martha, you didn’t leave the cage unlocked that day,” I said. “I took Hamstersaurus Rex out for the night. It was my fault.”

  Martha stared at me in shock and disbelief. “What?”

  “I should have told you sooner.”

  “And you just let me resign my post? Humiliate myself in front of the entire class? You let me think I made a mistake?” said Martha, her eyes wide. “Sam, I thought we were friends.”

  “We are! And that’s why I need—”

  “I said I’m not a Hamster Monitor anymore!” cried Martha, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. “And guess what? I don’t think you’re one either!” Then she turned and walked away.