by Paul Tobin
A word about Nate Bannister.
Before we met he really didn’t have any friends. Not in school. Not anywhere. It’s true he had Bosper, and I suppose he had Betsy, his car, but all our classmates just thought he was weird. Nobody talked to him in the halls. Nobody sat with him at lunch. Nobody ever picked him for their teams during gym, they just picked on him. They’d call him “Egghead.”
So Nate had been largely alone.
Because of this, because of the way people barely noticed he was alive, he wasn’t good with friends. I’ve built up my muscles and endurance thanks to my adventure training course, but Nate never had an opportunity to build up his friendship muscles. That’s one of the reasons he serves such snacks as mixed bowls of gum when I come over, because he’s simply not accustomed to guests. He doesn’t know how to act.
And he doesn’t know how to trust.
It’s tough for Nate. I do understand.
Nate is . . . who he is. And to a mind like his, friends don’t always fit. They don’t always do what you’ll expect.
Friends aren’t math.
“Do you trust me?” I asked Nate. It was a dangerous question, I knew, because Nate was currently unable to tell anything but the truth.
“Yes,” he said. Nothing else. I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back on my bed, where Liz was sleeping on her side, snoring a bit, and drooling on my pillow.
I told Nate, “Well, if you trust me, then trust Liz. Because I trust her.” I gazed meaningfully to Liz, trying to convey how much I trusted her, cleverly using my pillowcase to cover up how much she was drooling.
“Okay.” Nate sighed. “Let’s wake her up. But not Kip.”
“Agreed,” I said. Kip had been a spy, after all, and there was nothing to say he wasn’t still a spy, and that he’d only confessed so he could get closer to Nate in order to spy more efficiently. I felt a little bad about leaving Kip curled up in the closet, though. He did, after all, save the day during last year’s sixth grade theater production of Goose-zilla, where Liz and I built a scale model of Polt out of cardboard, which the goose was supposed to rampage upon, but it had instead chosen to rampage through the audience until Kip managed to wrestle the goose to the ground and bring an end to what I still consider one of my most successful plays. In gratitude, I made sure that Kip was comfortable in the closet, giving him my extra blankets to sleep on, and a pile of comic books in case he woke up.
Nate brought out a small device from inside his shirt. It looked like a bracelet made out of electricity, which was strange enough, but it was silent, which made it even weirder. Electricity is supposed to make noises like zzakkk or crack-crakkle or something, but in this case it was completely silent.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A neuro-massager. It stimulates the synapses that the sleeping dart deadened. It also has some side effects.” He was putting it on Liz’s head, stretching it out to fit. Her hair began sticking straight out. Her eyes flickered.
“Side effects?” I said. “Maybe . . . you should have told me about the side effects before putting it on Liz’s head?” I put a lot of meaning into my words. Liz’s eyes were opening. Who knew what strange side effects Nate’s device might trigger? Would Liz turn into a giant tortoise? Would her skin glow bright blue? Would she start liking cake more than pie, which is in fact the only reasonable way to think, but then she wouldn’t be Liz.
“I smell licorice,” Liz said, sitting up.
“That’s the side effect,” Nate said.
Hmmm, well, that wasn’t too bad. If the only side effect was that Liz smelled licorice, then—
“I’m floating?” Liz said.
“Oh, that’s the other side effect,” Nate said. “But don’t worry, it won’t last long.”
“What do I do?” Liz asked, with just a very minimum of anxiety in her voice, despite how she was now a few inches above the bed. One of the reasons Liz and I are friends is because she adjusts very quickly to new experiences, such as the time we tied several bottle rockets into our hair during camp, because our common sense wasn’t really working very well after we’d stayed up too late and eaten too much chocolate, and, anyway, it hadn’t gone quite like we’d planned, and Liz and I had both adjusted very quickly from being two sleepy girls to two very awake girls who were running across the campgrounds with sparks shooting everywhere around our heads until we dove into the lake.
“Hold on to my hand,” I told Liz, so she wouldn’t float any higher. She was already halfway up to the ceiling.
“It’s like I’m your balloon!” Liz said. “Nice! But, umm, seriously . . . how long will this last?”
Nate said, “Only a couple of minutes.”
“Oh good,” Liz said.
“And then it might trigger sporadically for the next few days.”
“Oh bad,” Liz said.
“Sorry,” I told her. “But we needed you awake. Nate and I need to stop the Red Death Tea Society from triggering the earthquake, and we also have to stop Chester Humes from running so fast. That means you, my balloon friend, need to gather up all the science vials that Nate stashed around the city.”
“Okay,” she said. I was walking her down the hall, toward the living room. “But, how am I going to do that?”
“Nate can give you a list of where they’re at,” I said. I could feel Nate squirming beside me. “And then you team up with Stine and Ventura and Wendy, and get those vials.”
“Okay!” Liz said.
“What?” Nate gasped, squirming worse. “More people? But—”
“No buts, Nate. You caused the problem, and now we have to deal with it. My friends can handle it.” I said this with all the confidence in the world, but in truth I was worried. After all, Liz was the only one who had even attempted my adventure training course, and even she’d been too chicken to swing over the spiked pit trap (which is only a foot deep, and the spikes are made of cardboard) because a squirrel had been scolding her for climbing into its tree. If she couldn’t stand up to an irritated squirrel, I worried about what might happen if she had to fight the Red Death Tea Society, as they are not anywhere near as adorable as squirrels.
“Hi, Dad,” I said, walking through the living room.
“Hi, Mr. Cooper,” Liz said, holding on to my hand and floating behind me.
“Hi, girls,” Dad said. He was stretched out on the couch, watching soccer. “You heading off somewhere?”
“Gotta fight assassins,” I said.
“Have fun!” he told us with a jaunty little wave. I’m not sure if it was because Nate’s nano-bots were changing the way Dad perceived things, or if he thought we were just joking.
Either way . . . time to go.
When we walked outside, Nate kept stumbling, because he was too absorbed with scribbling another of his equations on his pants. Even I, a girl who’s mastered such skills as doing one-handed cartwheels while texting Liz with my other hand, would find it difficult to walk while writing equations on my pants.
So Nate tripped when he was going down the steps.
And then he stumbled when he was going across the lawn, hopping as he tried to maintain his balance, too intent on the equation.
And finally he tripped when he was walking across the sidewalk, this time so off balance that I had to reach out and keep him from flopping onto his face, meaning that Liz almost floated away. Luckily, she grabbed my hair at the last moment, doing so in a move that was slightly more than uncomfortable, and I let out what could be considered a groan of agony, and in fact should be considered as one.
Nate made a terrible frown.
“No. I’m okay,” I told him.
“I’m glad,” he said. “But I was frowning at this equation.” He pointed to his pants, to where a herd of numbers was all but snickering at me, because they knew I would never understand them.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
“It didn’t turn out the way I hoped.”
“Math problems often do
n’t turn out the way I hope,” I told Nate. “They’re rather stinky that way. Remember that time I yelled ‘piffle’ in math class?”
“Which time?”
“Exactly,” I agreed. “What I mean is, sometimes the numbers don’t add up, not even for a genius. Don’t worry about it. Life goes on.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Nate said, as Liz gracefully floated down to the sidewalk.
“Take the car,” Nate told Liz.
“Huh? I can’t drive.”
“You won’t have to,” I said. “The car can do all that. Her name is Betsy.”
“Hello, driver Liz Morris,” Betsy said. Her blinkers went on and off, I suppose in greeting. Liz’s hand tightened on mine. It was a gesture of friendship, like our usual one, as the side effects of Nate’s neuro-massager had dissipated and it was no longer necessary to hold on to Liz’s hand to keep her from floating away, unless you count that her sanity might float away when she heard Betsy talking.
“That car just talked to me!” Liz said. She went a bit weak and leaned against me for support.
“Betsy’s really nice!” I told Liz, which is often true, though Betsy does have her mood swings.
“Thank you, friend Delphine,” Betsy said.
“Betsy projects holograms on her windows,” I told Liz as she got inside. “It will look like an adult is doing all the driving, instead of a twelve-year-old.”
“How old is Betsy?” Liz asked, buckling herself into the driver’s seat.
Nate said, “Two years.”
Liz said, “So, to anyone watching, it will look like an adult is doing the driving, rather than me at twelve years old, but in reality it’s a two-year-old driving?”
“Essentially correct, and welcome to my world,” I said. Nate had been fiddling with his watch, summoning Sir William, his robot gull, which came gliding down to a stop on the sidewalk.
“Oh, a gull,” Liz said as I picked him up. We were going to need him for scouting the current locations of Chester and the Red Death Tea Society, although of course it wasn’t too hard to tell where Chester was at, on account of the violent storm clouds that were following him around.
“He’s not really a gull,” I told Liz. “His name is Sir William and he’s a robot.”
“Oh,” she said, in a small voice.
“Screech!” Sir William said, in my voice, because we recorded my voice for Sir William to use whenever he’s trying to communicate. So now the gull could say “screech” and “chuk chuk chuk” and “piffle,” the last of which Nate still didn’t know about, because I’d recorded it when he was in the bathroom.
“Oh,” Liz said again, looking at the gull. Her voice was even softer this time.
“You going to be okay?” I asked.
“Let me get this straight: all this time I thought you were a completely normal though awe-inspiringly wonderful friend, you’ve actually been utterly un-normal and un-sane, and you’ve been fighting the Red Death Tea Society and riding around in a talking car with a talking dog and a pet bee and a robot gull?”
“Basically accurate,” I said.
“Oh,” Liz said, which was apparently her new mantra. Her eyes were half-closed, and I was afraid she was going to zone out completely, but then she got that grin of hers and she reached out and clamped a hand onto my forearm, yanking me closer.
“Have you been to the moon?” she asked. Liz’s nearly purple eyes were sparkling, and her whole expression was one of delight.
“Huh?” I said. “The moon?”
“I WANT TO GO TO THE MOON!” Liz roared. “That’s my completely fair price for helping you! You have to take me to the moon!”
“Huh?” I said. “Liz, that’s impossible. We can’t take you to—”
“Deal,” Nate said. “Shouldn’t be too much trouble.” And then he reached past me and closed the car door, and I watched as Liz and Betsy drove away.
“Wait,” I said. “We can go to the moon?” Then, before Nate answered, I said, “Hey, double wait. Forget the moon, how are we going to get around Polt now? Liz just drove away in our only available car.”
“Improved jetbelts!” Nate said, holding out a belt for me. It looked like a regular belt, but with diamond patterns around the length.
“Ooo! Pretty!” I said, taking the belt. It had a slightly buzzing feel, like when you’re touching an electrical cord and can feel the electricity whizzing around inside.
“More than pretty,” Nate said. “These diamond shapes are miniaturized deuterium-powered variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rockets.” He tapped one of the diamond shapes on his own belt as I put mine on.
“I’m going to stick with calling them pretty,” I told Nate.
“No! Listen, this is really cool. The rockets will—”
“Ahhh!” I interrupted, because I was suddenly zooming up into the air.
“My fault!” Nate said. “I should have calculated that would happen.” I was whooshing all over my lawn, zooming here and there at a speed far faster than my old jet-belt, although all I really wanted to do was hover in place and . . .
. . . and . . .
I was hovering in place.
“There!” Nate said. “Now you’re seeing how it works. My new jetbelts sync with the nano-bots in our systems, so all you have to do is think about where and how fast you want to fly, and the belt will respond.”
“Will we be fast enough to catch Chester with these?”
“No,” Nate said, rising up off the ground to join me in the air. “Chester’s minimum speed is still two thousand miles per hour above our maximum speed.”
“Really?”
“It’s the truth,” Nate said.
“Oh yeah. I guess it would be.”
“You should practice with your jetbelt,” Nate said. “Let’s meet up at Polt Pond, outside of town, in twenty minutes.” He was starting to fly backward, leaving me behind to practice, which made sense, I guess.
“Why Polt Pond?” I asked.
“I have an idea of how to stop Chester, and I’m also calculating that Maculte and the Red Death Tea Society will be there.”
“Because . . . ?”
“Oh. The lake. It’s much deeper than most people suspect. In fact, it’s over a mile deep in some parts, way down to where a fault line is in place. If Maculte could activate the fault line, it would rip open the earth and destroy all of Polt. You see, tectonic forces are—”
“Go, Nate!” I told him. “I’ll practice and see you in a few minutes!” If I let Nate start talking about science, we’d be standing in the city’s ruins before he finished. He gave me a nod, and then zoomed off and away, toward the waiting storm clouds.
I practiced with the belt.
I went high into the sky. I zoomed along the ground. I waved hello to Dad as he began mowing the lawn. I was almost thirty feet up in the air when he saw me, but he waved as if I was standing on the lawn, so I knew that Nate’s scientific gadgets were still cloaking Dad’s mind, rearranging the way he saw the world. Nate has told me that nobody sees the world as it really is. Our senses can’t comprehend all the true colors, for one thing, so . . . everything is different than we think it is. That’s scary. But exciting, too.
Another exciting thing was to zoom along through the air with one of my best friends, Melville. It was easy to keep up with her. The new jetbelt was amazing. I hardly needed to practice at all.
“This isn’t so hard,” I told Melville. “Not sure why Nate thought it would take twenty minutes for me to get the hang of this.”
It was then that I saw the note.
One of Nate’s notes.
With
"Delphine"
written on it, in Nate’s distinctively florid handwriting.
“Bzzz?” Melville said. She was circling the note, which was dangling above my backyard obstacle course, hanging from the oak tree on a string.
“Hmm,” I said. “Why would Nate leave me a note, here, when he could have just told me whatever he wante
d to say?” I thought of zooming closer to the note, and the jetbelt responded, but suddenly it was jerkier than before, so that I was bobbing up and down in the air. I realized it was because I was nervous and the jetbelt was responding to my thoughts. Something didn’t feel right.
Melville was circling my hands as I unfolded the note, buzzing with the same sort of apprehension I was feeling.
It was then, just as I was unfolding the note, that I heard Bosper’s voice.
“Red Death Tea Society,” he whispered. I stiffened, startled, and because of this the jetbelt responded to my thoughts and whooshed me through the air, incorrectly translating “I am startled” into “I sure would like to zoom through all the branches of this oak tree, and then scrape along the roof of my house until I smack into the chimney.”
Moments later, dazed, slumped against the chimney, assuring Melville that I was okay, I could still hear Bosper whispering.
I peered over the edge of the house, down to the hedges.
There was Bosper.
He was bouncing up and down with the nervous excitement of all terriers, and he had a jar of peanut butter with him, with a bright pink ribbon tied around it.
The jar was open.
And it was full.
But Bosper wasn’t eating it.
“Bzzz?” Melville said, puzzled.
“I know,” I told her. “Bosper not eating peanut butter? That’s totally weird.”
I couldn’t see who he was talking to, so I hovered off the roof, sneaking closer, making sure to stay out of Bosper’s line of sight, and thankful that my jetbelt was entirely silent. Whoever Bosper was talking to was hidden by the hedges, even hidden in the hedges, so the mystery person had to be small. I could hear them moving the branches aside, with the hedges rustling, and I really wanted to see who it was.
So . . . I accidentally flew full speed into the hedges.
You see, this is one of the problems with having a thought-controlled jetbelt. The moment I thought about really wanting to see who Bosper was talking to, my jet-belt happily kicked into full speed and flew me into the hedges.