Dinosaur Boy

by Cory Putman Oakes

  I looked up. Mathis had been watching me work through all this in my head. She nodded when she realized I had finally caught up.

  “Elliot brings the total up to thirteen,” she explained. “Lucky for me he was with you this morning.”

  The sound of Elliot’s name made me want to leap at Principal Mathis, but I was held back by the jump rope. I strained my arms as hard as I could, but nothing happened. Next to me, Sylvie was jerking back and forth, trying to free herself.

  “You can’t take him!” I yelled. “Elliot is one of the good ones! The best ones! You said it yourself, you never take the good ones!”

  “Desperate times…” Principal Mathis shook her head and picked up the Good Boy spray. “He’ll make someone an excellent pet. Don’t you worry, I’ll make sure he goes to a good family. Maybe even one with children for him to play with.”

  She took a step toward us, holding up the spray can.

  “Now, time for you to go back to sleep. When you wake up, this will all be over.”

  “You won’t get away with this!” Sylvie screamed at her. “We’ll tell! I’ll tell my father. And the police! And—”

  Principal Mathis cut her off with a laugh that was more like a snort.

  “I have never been afraid of the Martian Council. They have known about me for years, and they haven’t been able to stop me yet. And as for the humans? Well, that’s the wonderful thing about doing business on Earth. No one believes children. Not even when they’re telling the truth.”

  She took a step closer to our closet. Then she smiled and held up the can, finger poised over the sprayer.

  Next to me, Sylvie drew in a breath and held it, so that her cheeks puffed out. I did the same. No way was I breathing in any more of that stupid Good Boy spray. By the time we woke up this time, everyone would be gone. Including Elliot.

  And Principal Mathis was right. No one would believe us.

  Unfortunately, the decision not to breathe was not exactly a long-term solution to our problem. My lungs started to burn after about a minute. Beside me, I heard Sylvie pound the ground in frustration.

  Principal Mathis stood patiently in front of us, holding the can at the ready. She wasn’t the least bit concerned. She knew we would have to breathe eventually.

  Sylvie gave in first. When she tried to get in a quick gasp of air, Principal Mathis sprang forward like a cat and blasted her in the face with the Good Boy spray. Four times.

  Sylvie’s eyes grew wide. Then they rolled up into her head as she slumped to the floor.

  I could smell the gross, sweet smell of the spray. That meant it was getting in through my nose. I couldn’t help it—my hands were tied, so I couldn’t use them to cover my nostrils.

  I could feel my resolve crumbling. My anger toward Principal Mathis faded away as the Good Boy spray snuck up my nose and into my brain. I couldn’t remember why I was upset. I only wanted to be good. I wanted her praise more than I wanted anything else in the world.

  Principal Mathis leaned over me.

  “Breathe, Sawyer,” she ordered me.

  I did. And my reward was four puffs of spray in the face.

  Then there was just darkness.

  One Fried Martian

  “Wake up! Sawyer! Wake up!”

  An annoying voice was coming at me through a thick fog. I couldn’t quite place who it was or what they were saying. Or why they wouldn’t leave me alone.

  “WAKE. UP!”

  This time, the words were punctuated by a sharp pain in my right side. Then another one. And another one, and another one, as something kept hitting me mercilessly.

  “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake—”

  “OK!”

  My eyes flew open, and I rolled slightly to the side, to get out of the range of Sylvie’s foot.

  “What time is it?” I asked immediately. “Are we too late?”

  “I don’t know,” Sylvie said. She sounded frustrated. I couldn’t see her very well in the dim light of the closet. “I woke up a few minutes ago. It sounds really quiet out there…”

  She trailed off.

  We were probably too late.

  Not that it really mattered. We were both still tied up in jump ropes and stuck inside a dark closet in a building everybody thought was abandoned. It could be hours before anybody found us. Maybe even days.

  By then, it would be far too late to help Elliot.

  My tail started to cramp. I had rolled over halfway on top of it. I shifted my weight, and it gave an involuntary jerk of relief. One of my tennis balls snagged something on a nearby shelf, causing a waterfall of what felt like construction paper to rain down on me.

  Tennis balls.

  “Sylvie!” I rocked upward to a sitting position. “See if you can use your feet to curl my tail up, so that the end is up by my hands.”

  “Why? Do you have an itch?”

  “No, I have razor sharp spikes that can totally cut through jump rope.”

  I had spent so much time and energy trying to fit in, trying to convince everyone that I was safe to be around, that I had actually forgotten I could be dangerous.

  When I wanted to be.

  I could hear Sylvie wiggling around on the floor. After a moment, I felt her feet nudging the end of my tail toward my butt. It took a few more minutes, and a lot of grunting and weird contortions on both of our parts, but eventually I was able to get one of my spikes up to my bound hands. I twisted the tennis ball off the end and gingerly positioned a part of the rope against the sharp, serrated surface. I moved my hands back and forth a couple of times, and the spike sawed right through the rope.

  Once my hands were free, I was able to cut myself and Sylvie out of our ropes in less than a minute. We threw ourselves against the closet door, but it flew open the second we touched it.

  Principal Mathis hadn’t even bothered to lock us in.

  The kids were still running the obstacle course. I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

  Above their heads, the clock said 9:02 a.m.

  We had only been asleep for about ten minutes.

  I looked at Sylvie in confusion.

  She reached down and picked up the can of Good Boy spray, which Principal Mathis had left on the floor just outside of our closet.

  “‘Good Boy and Good Girl products have not been tested on hybrids,’” she read out loud. “‘Results may be unpredictable.’”

  I frowned. “Principal Mathis didn’t know that?”

  Sylvie shrugged. “She’s a full-blooded Martian. Her vision is so bad she can probably barely see the can, let alone read the fine print. Come on, let’s get everybody out of here before she comes back.”

  “And before the Jupiterians arrive,” I added. I had absolutely no interest in meeting them.

  Sylvie ran into the midst of the obstacle course.

  “Hey!” she said, waving her hands to get everybody’s attention. “It’s OK! We’re going to get out of here! Follow me!”

  Everybody ignored her and continued along the course as though Sylvie wasn’t there at all.

  “Stop running!” Sylvie yelled at the top of her lungs. “Stop doing that! Did you hear me? We’ve got to get out of here!”

  She marched over to Elliot and grabbed his arm.

  He shook her off and leaped over a stack of mats without missing a beat.

  “The fan!” I remembered suddenly.

  I dragged a chair over to the corner. Standing on tiptoe, I was just barely able to reach the off button.

  By the time I climbed down off the chair, the temperature in the room had already started to rise. The crazy obstacle course running continued for several minutes, but soon a few of the kids started to miss steps. A couple rubbed their eyes. Nora fell off the top of the climbing wall right onto Brad, who was stumbling around in a daze.<
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  Allan locked eyes with me, and I could literally see the moment when the Good Boy spray left his system. One second his eyes were cloudy and unfocused. The next, they were piercing into me like twin laser beams.

  With a snarl, Allan threw himself at me.

  • • •

  We fell to the floor in a tangle of arms and my tail. I thrashed, but Allan was much bigger than I was and I couldn’t get him to budge. I squirmed as hard as I could, but Allan quickly had both of my arms pinned down to my sides. He was sitting on my chest, and my plates on my back were being squashed so painfully against the ground that it was hard for me to think of anything else.

  Allan grinned down at me as he slowly pulled back his right arm, aiming a fist right at my face.

  It occurred to me then that one of my tail spikes was still un-tennis-balled. And it could saw through Allan’s leg just as easily as it had sawed through the jump rope.

  No. That would just be proving Allan right. And there was no way I was going to do that.

  I closed my eyes, bracing myself as I waited for the punch to land.

  Then, suddenly, I heard Allan shriek. And the pressure on my chest was gone.

  I opened one eye just in time to see Elliot pull Allan off me and set him roughly back down on his feet.

  “I am twice your size,” Elliot growled, keeping a grip on the front of Allan’s T-shirt. “I could break you. And I will, if you ever mess with Sawyer again. Got it?”

  Allan nodded quickly. Elliot released him but continued to glare threateningly at him.

  Sylvie sauntered over, reading from the fine print of the Good Boy can again.

  “‘Abrupt cessation of product may cause violent outbursts in up to five percent of subjects,’” she quoted. She looked around suspiciously at the other kids.

  None of the rest of them appeared to be part of the 5 percent. In fact, they all looked a little bit confused and out of it.

  Allan smoothed down the front of his shirt.

  “Sorry,” he said to Elliot, then turned to me.

  “Sorry,” he repeated.

  Elliot was looking at him strangely. The scary look on his face had been replaced by confusion.

  “Dude? What’s wrong with your hair?”

  Allan brought a cautious hand up to his head. I had been concentrating so hard on the fact that he was about to punch me, I hadn’t noticed that his usual buzz cut had been replaced by a full head of hair that was gelled into tall spikes.

  “Mathis,” he muttered, trying to make the spikes lay flat with the palm of his hand. Despite his efforts, the gel kept them more or less upright. “After she brought Cici and me here last night, she brought in a groomer. I think she gave me hair extensions.”

  “A groomer?” Sylvie exclaimed. I could have sworn she was holding back a giggle. I didn’t blame her. The idea of Allan having his hair done like a poodle was pretty funny.

  Allan shrugged.

  “It’s all pretty foggy. What exactly is going on?”

  “We’ll explain later,” Sylvie said, before Elliot or I could open our mouths. “But right now, we’ve got to get out of here. Follow me!”

  She strode purposefully toward the front door of the portable, putting on the heavy gloves she had snagged from the janitor’s closet that morning. Most of the kids stumbled automatically after her. After being under the influence of Good Boy for so long, they were probably all a little more susceptible to being bossed around than usual.

  “Are you OK?” Elliot asked me.

  I nodded.

  “Thanks,” I told him. “I didn’t know you could…I mean, I know you’re tall and everything—”

  “I always wanted to do that to Allan,” he confessed with a smirk. “I just never got the nerve up.”

  Allan, listening to our conversation, just grunted. Then he turned toward the front of the room with everybody else.

  Sylvie reached for the door. The second her gloved hand touched it, there was an enormous spark and she let out a high-pitched scream and flew backward.

  For a moment she seemed to float in the air, moving in slow motion. Then she hit the ground on her back, with a painful sounding thud. She did not move.

  And all of us smelled burned hair.

  Nobody Here but Us Hybrids

  Sylvie had already opened her eyes before any of us could reach her. A couple of wisps of smoke came from her toasted hair. There was only about half as many curls as there had been a moment ago, and the ones that were left were standing on end even more than usual.

  But it was short enough now that the tops of her pink antennae were clearly visible, standing up amid the frizzy, smoking strands. Her hair clips must have melted.

  Sylvie reached up to the top of her head, felt her antennae, and froze.

  Everyone else froze too. For a long moment, we all just stared at her.

  Allan was the first to speak. “Somebody had better explain what in the blazes is going on here!”

  Ignoring him, Sylvie picked herself up off the ground and addressed Elliot and me.

  “Let’s try the windows,” she suggested.

  The front windows were boarded up. I headed for the ones in the back. Instead of touching them, I picked up a nearby chair and tossed it.

  I braced myself for a shower of broken glass, but it never came.

  The chair set off a shower of sparks when it got near the window, but bounced harmlessly off the glass and fell to the floor.

  “Do you think the whole room is electrified on the inside?” Elliot asked. When no one answered him, he headed over to a rack of lacrosse sticks and picked them up one by one, studying them carefully.

  “What is going on?” Allan asked again. He seemed to be speaking for the twelve would-be pets who were now huddled in the middle of the portable, carefully avoiding contact with the walls.

  “Well,” Sylvie said, with remarkable poise given that her entire right side was twitching a little bit. “There is a long version and a short version of the story. Which would you like?”

  “The one that explains what is growing out of your head,” Allan said. The usual attitude in his voice was now buried beneath a healthy amount of hysteria. “Are you, like, a Martian?”

  Sylvie nodded.

  Allan glanced over at Cici, who glanced over at Nora, who nodded.

  “A few of us think Mathis is a Martian too,” Allan told us.

  “She is,” I said. “And she’s been keeping you here because she plans to sell you. As pets.”

  “Yeah, we figured that out too,” Cici said. Like Allan, she was a pale shadow of her usual snarky self. Her long brown hair had been shaved on the sides, and the top portion was curled up in elaborate loops. She had unraveled one loop and was twisting it nervously around her finger, again and again.

  “Mathis’s clients—the ones who want to buy you—are on their way,” I said. “If we don’t figure out a way to get you out of here, you’re all going to end up on Jupiter.”

  Allan’s head snapped up.

  “Us?” he asked. “What about you?”

  “Jupiterians don’t like hybrids,” I explained.

  He nodded toward Sylvie.

  “What about her? They don’t want Martians either?”

  “I’m only half Martian,” Sylvie informed him. “They don’t want me either.”

  “Bad news,” Elliot interrupted, coming up behind us and gesturing to the walls. While we had been talking, he had used the metal handle of a lacrosse stick to systematically test the electric barrier. He had wrapped a towel around the end he was holding, but his hair was still sticking up a bit more than usual.

  “The whole portable is electrified,” he reported. Then, stating the obvious, “We’re trapped.”

  Allan started pacing in an uneasy circle.

  �
�I’m not just going to sit here and wait to get hit with more of that spray!” he growled.

  “We’ll think of something,” I said, trying to calm him down.

  “Easy for you to say,” he snapped. “They don’t want dinosaurs! You’re not going to have to play fetch with some family on Jupiter!”

  Allan and the others were all staring at me. And not like they usually stared at me, to get a glimpse of the freak show. For the first time, they were looking at me with something that looked a lot like…jealousy.

  Actually, it looked exactly like jealousy. Even Elliot was eyeing my plates with a sort of wistful gleam in his eye.

  All of a sudden, I realized something. Totally by accident, I had finally achieved what my father had advised me to do on the first day of school.

  I had made all of the kids in my class wish that they had plates and a tail.

  And just like that, a plan began to form.

  • • •

  “Hurry,” Sylvie urged us all a short time later. “Mathis and her clients should be here any minute now!”

  “We’re almost done,” Elliot assured her, cutting through four sheets of construction paper at once with the one and only pair of scissors we had found in the supply closet. “Is there any more tape?”

  “I found some!” Gabrielle called, tossing it to him from the closet.

  “Good!” Elliot yelled back, catching the tape neatly in one hand and handing it to Mary, who was busily taping papers to Sam’s back. “See if there’s any more paper. Color doesn’t matter, does it, Sawyer?”

  I thought for a second.

  “I don’t think so,” I said finally. “Especially if it’s all we’ve got.”

  Elliot nodded and went back to cutting.

  I let out a quick breath and looked nervously around the room. It wasn’t every day you saw fourteen kids, all hard at work, executing a plan you yourself had come up with. At least, it wasn’t every day for me.

  I was starting to get nervous that it wasn’t really going to work.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I jumped a mile before I looked over and saw it was Allan.

  When I realized it was him, I jumped another mile.