by Alex Polan
“Well, you’re wrong,” said Maddy, scrunching up her nose. “Grimer is slimy and stinky. I don’t care if we find him or not.”
Marco laughed out loud. “Maddy, the poster of Grimer won’t be slimy or stinky. We have to try to find him. It’s part of the game. C’mon.” He led the way into the tunnel.
“I hope we find Zubat first!” said Maddy as she followed.
The tunnel was much narrower than the one they’d walked through before. Marco could stretch out his arms and touch both sides. Just a short ways in, he heard footsteps rushing toward him from behind. Before he could turn around and look, Maddy give a little yelp.
Then something slammed into Marco’s back.
Hard.
CHAPTER TEN
Marco bounced off the wall as an enormous kid pushed past him.
“Hey, watch where you’re going!” called Marco, rubbing his shoulder. He caught a glimpse of Max, the hulking Team Fennekin kid, barreling down the tunnel ahead.
Stella brushed by next, giving Maddy a sickly sweet smile. “Good luck finding Zubat,” she said. “I’ll bet there’s a whole colony of bats in here, just waiting for you.” She snickered and ran off after Max.
“I’m not even scared of bats!” Maddy called down the hall after Stella. Then she added, “Maybe Stella is, but I’m not!”
“I know you’re not,” said Marco. “Don’t listen to her. Let’s keep going.”
A camera flash from the end of the tunnel told him that they were on the right track. Grimer, or some other Pokémon, was waiting for them down there. But Team Fennekin is there, too, Marco remembered. Then he heard footsteps running back down the tunnel toward them.
“If it’s Stella, don’t say anything to her,” he whispered to Maddy. “Don’t even look at her.”
He couldn’t help himself from looking at Max, though. The kid looked like a bull lumbering toward them. Marco stepped aside and flattened himself against the wall, pulling Maddy back with him.
Max jogged by without a word, but Stella made a face as she passed. She hissed her favorite line: “See ya, losers.”
Marco didn’t give her the satisfaction of reacting. Instead, he tugged on Maddy’s hand and kept moving toward the cave.
“Eww,” said Maddy. “Something stinks in there.” She held her nose as they entered the small cave.
“Must be the trash can,” said Marco. “What a weird place for one!”
He avoided it at first because of the smell. But after searching the cracks and crevices all around the cave, they still hadn’t found a Pokémon. Then something caught Marco’s eye—a Poké Ball dangling from the trash can.
“Look!” he said. A poster of Grimer was hanging on the back side of the can, almost out of view. “See, Maddy? He’s not slimy at all.”
“Well, he sure is stinky,” said Maddy, who stayed on the other side of the room. “I told you he would be.”
“You were right,” said Marco, chuckling. “I wish we had our camera so we wouldn’t have to come back here with Professor Birch and smell him all over again.”
He expected Maddy to laugh at that. When she didn’t, he straightened up to look for her. But the cave was totally empty.
“Maddy?”
His voice echoed off the walls and bounced right back to him, making the hair stand up on his arms.
“Maddy?” he called, louder this time. He hurried back toward the tunnel.
“Down here!” came a muffled response. Maddy was on her hands and knees on the floor of the tunnel.
When he saw her, he felt a wave of cool relief. “What are you doing?” he cried.
“Looking for Zubat!” she said happily. “See the picture? I told you Zubat would be here.”
Marco scanned the wall looking for another Pokémon poster. What he saw instead was chalk art of a purplish bat. He reached out to touch it and felt the chalk smear beneath his fingers.
This art was different from the other art on the walls—brighter somehow. But it was definitely a Pokémon. And an arrow beneath Zubat pointed straight down.
Maddy’s feet were now sticking out of the wall. She was crawling into some sort of tunnel. “Maddy!” Marco cried, squatting to get a better look.
The tunnel was a few feet high and the same distance wide. Maddy fit into it easily, but Marco wasn’t so sure he wanted to follow.
“Don’t go too far,” he said. “You don’t know where that leads.”
But she was already gone, scurrying ahead of him like a speedy little mouse.
Marco’s palms started to sweat. But he couldn’t let Maddy crawl off into some weird tunnel all by herself. So he crouched down and started after her.
Tiny rocks dug into his knees as he crawled. His head kept brushing against the ceiling, which made him feel claustrophobic. As he bent his head and shoulders down lower, something dropped out of his pocket and clattered to the ground.
The compass!
Marco patted around in the dark with his hand, but he couldn’t find it. “Maddy, I dropped the compass!” he called to her. “Bring back your Night Goggles!”
He could see a faint light from the tunnel ahead, but Maddy didn’t respond. So he kept crawling after her in the darkness, with panic rising in his chest. “Maddy!” he called again.
Finally he caught up to her—his hand bumped against her sandal. “There you are!”
“That’s the end,” she said simply.
“What?”
“The tunnel ended. We have to go back.”
Maddy sounded so matter of fact, but the panic in Marco’s chest swelled. “I … I don’t think I can turn around,” he said.
“Crawl backwards, then!” Maddy said.
He tried—one knee scraping backwards, and then the other. He shut his eyes and focused on staying calm.
Maddy’s sandals kept bumping into his hands. She was moving quickly, but he couldn’t. Left knee, right knee, left knee, right … he chanted in his mind so that he wouldn’t have to think about where he was or how much farther he had to go.
Then his knee hit something hard. Something painful. Something that crunched beneath him.
Marco knew with sick certainty exactly what it was.
“I found the compass,” he said into the darkness, swallowing hard.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Marco reached beneath his knee and pulled out the broken compass. He could feel the cracks in the plastic, but he tried not to think about them. Just get out, he told himself. He crawled backward as quickly as he could, until the tunnel brightened and cool air tickled his ankles. He’d made it—finally.
But the compass hadn’t. As Marco rolled over and leaned against the wall, he studied it. The plastic cover was cracked and caved in, trapping the red arrow below.
Maddy popped out of the tunnel after him looking confused. “Where was Zubat?” she asked. “Why’d the counselors draw that picture on the wall?”
Marco shook his head. “I don’t know. But I busted the compass. We’re going to need it for orienteering tomorrow, and I don’t want to ask for another one from the counselors. They’ll take away points for that, remember?”
The thweet! of Professor Birch’s whistle drowned out Maddy’s response.
Game over, thought Marco sadly.
There was no more time to search tunnels—little or big. They’d found only two of the four Pokémon. And not even a single glittery rock.
“Nisha!” Marco blinked into the bright sunlight, wondering if his eyes were playing tricks on him.
“Hey!” She rushed toward him and Maddy, looking much happier than Marco felt. “Did you find any Pokémon?”
“Just Grimer and Geodude,” he said sadly. “We didn’t have the camera, but we showed Professor Birch where we found them.”
“I know—he told me,” said Nisha. “I found the exact same ones. What are the chances of that? But I also found some glittery rocks. So that’s three points, right?”
“Did you find Zubat?” asked Maddy.
N
isha shot her a confused look. “Zubat isn’t on the map.” She pulled it from her pocket, just to be sure.
“But I saw Zubat’s picture on the wall!” Maddy insisted. She told Nisha about the chalk drawing and the tunnel.
Marco shuddered, remembering the tight crawl through the claustrophobic tunnel.
“I’ll bet anything Stella drew that picture of Zubat,” said Nisha, lowering her voice.
“How do you know?” asked Maddy, spinning around to look for Stella.
Team Fennekin was whooping it up a few yards away—celebrating another victory as they got back onto their bikes.
“Two reasons,” said Nisha. “First, Stella is a really good artist, remember?”
Marco remembered—he’d seen her sketchbook once, and she could draw Pokémon really well. He’d never tell her that though. She’d have to get a whole lot nicer first.
“What’s the other reason?” asked Maddy.
Nisha’s dark eyes flashed as she stole a look at Stella. “Didn’t you see? She has purple chalk smeared all over her shorts.”
Marco tried to catch a glimpse, but Stella was already pedaling away, leading her teammates down the road like a flock of obedient little birds. “We have to tell Professor Birch!” he said.
“Yeah,” said Maddy. “That’s cheating! And it made us lose points.”
“We could tell him,” said Nisha. “But we can’t prove it was Stella.”
“Besides,” said Marco with a sigh, “we lost points for lots of reasons. Logan twisted his ankle so we were late, and then we forgot to get the camera from Logan, and then I … did this.” He reluctantly held out the broken compass, showing Nisha his latest mistake.
For some reason, she didn’t seem mad. “We can always get a new one from the counselors,” she said, “but it’ll cost us points. So maybe there’s another way.”
As she nibbled thoughtfully on a fingernail, Marco noticed she wasn’t wearing gloves anymore. “What happened to your gloves?” he asked.
She glanced down in embarrassment. “Oh,” she said, “I gave up on those. It was just too hard.”
Maddy nodded, as if she knew just how Nisha felt.
Marco did, too. Everything feels hard right now, he thought. And tomorrow is going to get a whole lot harder.
Marco met the rest of Team Treecko at the Media Center after dinner. He was relieved to see Logan lying on the couch, playing Pokémon on a handheld video game. His bandaged ankle rested on a Poké Ball cushion, and his crutches leaned against the end of the sofa.
“How does your ankle feel?” asked Marco. He hoped Logan would jump up and shout, “I’m healed! It’s a miracle!” Maybe he’d even do a little dance. That was the friend Marco knew and loved.
But Logan barely glanced his way. “Okay,” he mumbled. “Still sore.”
Maddy sat beside him in an overstuffed chair. “Do you want to hold Dedenne?” she asked, holding out a shoebox. Her little brown mouse was nibbling on lettuce, casting wary glances up at Logan. “Dedenne’s leg was hurt when we found him, remember? But it got better. Yours will get better, too.”
“I can’t hold him right now,” said Logan, waving the video game in his hand. “I’m playing Pokémon. Professor Sycamore showed me how to go down deeper in Granite Cave.”
“Professor Sycamore is here?” asked Maddy, searching the room for her favorite counselor. He ran a kitchen “lab” where kids could make Poké Puffs, and Maddy had practically lived there the first week of camp. When she spotted him in his white lab coat across the room, she waved.
Marco waited for Logan to ask how things went at the cave, but he never did. Doesn’t he even care? wondered Marco. So finally, he just told him—about the forgotten camera, the fake drawing of Zubat, and the chalk on Stella’s shorts.
Logan’s face clouded with emotion. “It’s my fault,” he said. “If I hadn’t hurt my ankle, I would have been there with the camera.”
“No!” said Marco. “I made lots of mistakes, too.” He wished someone—Maddy or even Logan maybe—would speak up and say that he hadn’t, but neither of them did.
“Hey, do you want to hear a joke?” asked Maddy brightly. “I just made up a good one. Which Pokémon is really good at baseball?”
When no one answered, she declared, “Zu-BAT! Get it?”
Marco grinned. “That’s actually pretty good,” he said.
But Logan grimaced. “Enough about bats,” he said. “Can we talk about something else?”
So much for laughter being the best medicine, thought Marco. He was starting to feel sick to his stomach.
“Shh! Listen up!” Nisha rushed over and took a seat on the floor next to Maddy’s chair. “Professor Sycamore is about to show team scores for Pokémon Orienteering. Watch the screen!”
The Pokémon movie paused, and Professor Sycamore’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Good evening, Orienteers! After a full day of hiking, canoeing, and cave exploring, we thought you might want to see exactly how your team stacks up in this weekend’s Pokémon Orienteering challenge. Are we ready?”
Cheers and murmurs swelled from around the room, but Marco stared down at his hands. He was afraid to look.
When he heard Maddy squeal, he finally glanced up. And there it was in black and white—the top three teams:
TEAM FENNEKIN: 14
TEAM TORCHIC: 12
TEAM TREECKO: 10
“Third place?” said Logan, slapping his good leg. “That stinks!”
“It’s better than fourth or fifth,” Maddy said sweetly, stroking Dedenne’s head.
“But there’s more!” boomed Professor Sycamore’s voice. “Tomorrow is our last day of orienteering, and it will take us to the lovely and mystical Crescent Isle. There, you’ll search for a single Pokémon: the legendary Cresselia.”
The movie screen filled with color, and there was the legendary Pokémon.
“Cresselia!” Maddy lifted Dedenne out of his box so that he could see, too.
Cresselia looked like something out of a fairy tale—a blue, swan-like Pokémon with a majestic yellow head and pink ring-like wings. Marco wanted to ooh and ahh over the Pokémon like everyone else. But right now, he didn’t care if he ever found Cresselia. Because the only way to capture that Pokémon is to cross the zip line, he thought with a shudder.
Then Professor Sycamore said something that set the room abuzz. “Because Cresselia is the last Pokémon to capture, and because the journey to Crescent Isle will be the most challenging, Cresselia will be worth more points than any other Pokémon.”
Marco’s ears pricked. How many points?
“If you’re lucky enough to spot Cresselia on Crescent Isle, your team will be awarded five points,” Professor Sycamore announced dramatically.
“Five?” Logan sat straight up.
Nisha’s eyes widened.
And Maddy nearly dropped Dedenne, who squeaked and tried to run up her sleeve.
Logan sucked in his breath. “You’re so lucky that you get to ride the zip line,” he said to Marco. “You could be the one who finds Cresselia and puts Team Treecko back on top! I’d change places with you in a second.”
Nisha laughed out loud. “But Marco doesn’t even want to ride the zip line!” she blurted.
“What?” Logan said.
As their words rang in Marco’s head, his body started to tingle. His cheeks burned. How did Nisha know? he wondered. How could she?
Everyone was staring at him—he could feel it. They were waiting for him to say something, to tell Nisha she was wrong.
But she wasn’t.
And right now, Marco wished he were a mouse like Dedenne—so he could crawl into a hole and never come out.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“I’m sorry, Marco,” Nisha said quickly, clamping her hand over her mouth. “I shouldn’t have said that. I found your letter in your trashcan, but I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Wait, you were digging through our trash?” asked Logan.
&nb
sp; “I was looking for more 3-D goggles!” Nisha explained. “I thought I could make a pair of glasses for each of us. But I found Marco’s letter to his parents instead.”
“What did it say?” asked Maddy.
Nisha shook her head. “I’m sorry, Marco,” she said, her eyes rimmed with guilt. “Please don’t be mad.”
Marco tried to swallow the Shroomish in his throat. He wasn’t mad exactly. Just scared, as usual. Scared that his friends would think he was a big baby if they knew the truth.
But now he had no choice. He had to tell them.
“I’m afraid to ride the zip line.”
The words sounded tinny and far away, as if someone else had said them. And the silence that followed seemed like an eternity. Marco kept talking, just to fill it. But he kept his eyes on the floor.
“I didn’t want you guys to know how scared I was. Because you’re all so brave—you’re not scared of anything.”
When Marco finally glanced up at his friends, Maddy was smiling.
“That’s dumb,” she said.
“What?” Marco almost laughed out loud. “Why is it dumb?”
“It’s dumb because everybody is scared of something.” Maddy hesitated and then said, “I’m scared of the water. Because I don’t know how to swim.”
This time, everyone whirled around to face Maddy.
“Really?” said Nisha. “Is that why you wouldn’t go in the canoe?”
Maddy nodded as she stroked Dedenne’s head.
Marco felt something warm spread through his insides. “Thanks for telling me, Maddy,” he said. “That was pretty brave.”
Hearing Maddy’s confession did make him feel better. But still, he thought, she’s younger than me. She’s supposed to be scared of more things.
And Logan was being awfully quiet. Does he think I’m a loser? Marco wondered.
“Everybody’s scared of something,” Maddy repeated.
“Not Logan,” Marco couldn’t help arguing.
But his friend surprised him by sitting up on the couch. “That’s not exactly true.”
“He’s scared of bats,” said Maddy matter-of-factly.
“No, he’s not!” said Marco. “He thought the bat at the cave was funny. Right?”