by Paul Tobin
“Me either,” Liz said.
“Bzzz,” Melville said.
“Seriously?” I asked my bee. “You like bats? Why would you like bats?” But there was no time for her to answer, because the bats came for us, swarming like a . . . like a . . . like a swarm of bats that I do not like.
“Bats!” I said, in case nobody else had noticed the bats, or because I knew the bats would get in my hair, because that’s what bats do.
The bats came swooping down, and Melville swooped up to meet them, but before anything happened I saw two notes on the floor.
More of Nate’s notes.
Both with my name on them.
I picked them up and read the first one. It said . . .
"Tell Betsy to use the friend gas."
“Betsy!” I yelled. “Use the friend gas!” She roared into life and came zooming closer, screeching her tires and honking her horn and then, with a quick 180-degree turn, she putt-putted a cloud of gas from her tailpipe, whooshing it up into the air.
The bats flew right through it. And then they swerved and fluttered wildly and seemed to lose all sense of direction. They did barrel rolls. They flew in loops. And then they all found perches and made bat noises that sounded like video game effects, but higher pitched, and they were all glinting with beads of the friend gas, like dew on morning grass.
And then one of the bats flew over to me and landed in my hair.
“Gahh,” I said. I did not scream this. I pronounced it. Quietly. It would be best to consider it a horrified squeak.
“You have a bat in your hair,” Liz said.
“Is it friendly?” I asked. The bat was flopping around in my hair, grabbing handholds. I was a statue. Shrieking on the inside.
“Hard to tell,” Liz said. Then, “Delphine, you should quit shrieking on the inside.”
“How did you know?” I squeaked.
“Easy to tell. And since bats can hear high-pitched frequencies, your internal shrieks might bother it. You do not want to bother the bat in your hair.”
“I do not,” I admitted. “I also do not want it in my hair. Could someone please shave me bald?”
“Friend Delphine,” Betsy said. “Would you like me to translate what the bat is saying?”
“Is it saying good things?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Then go ahead.”
“The bat is repeatedly saying ‘friend,’ and also questioning if you have any fruit.”
“Fruit?” I asked. “Why would I be carrying fruit? It would be weird to carry fruit around.”
“I’ve got these grapes,” Liz said, taking some grapes from her pocket, because Liz is weird, which is one of the reasons we’re friends. Why would anyone want friends who weren’t weird?
Liz gave a grape to the bat in my hair, which is not a sentence I am comfortable with, but in all honesty if you have a bat in your hair you might as well get comfortable with it, because there is no known way to get a bat out of your hair. We were going to have to take it along with us on our mission to bring Chester back to the underwater headquarters of the Red Death Tea Society. So, Melville flew in through Betsy’s open window and landed on the dash, and then Liz helped me to the car, because I was walking stiffly, like a mummy in the movies, owing to how I was scared of the bat in my hair. Once we were all inside the car, Betsy drove herself into the water and then dove down past the mini-submarines, acting like a submarine herself, speeding through the waters while I, in case I have not mentioned this, had a bat in my hair.
“What’s on Nate’s second note?” Liz said, tapping on it. The tapping noise intrigued the bat in my hair, causing it to shift around so that it could crawl forward, lean out over my forehead, and peer down to the note.
I unfolded it.
It said . . .
"Delphine, in case this becomes pertinent, I should let you know that there is no possible way to get a bat out of your hair."
“I know that, genius,” I whispered to the note.
We whooshed through the lake waters at a good speed, which is easy to do when there are no traffic lights. Meanwhile, the bat in my hair kept shifting to get a better view of what was happening, and Liz kept feeding it grapes, so that there was grape juice trickling down my forehead, which is only one of the many unfortunate things about having a bat in your hair.
Melville, however, was making friends.
“Bzzz,” she said at one point, hovering in front of my face.
“Oh yeah,” I said, sarcastically agreeing with her. “Having a bat in my hair is super-keen and I like him, too!”
“Bzzz!” Melville said, happy that I was happy, which likely meant that my bee was taking sarcasm-detecting classes from Nate.
It was only a couple of minutes before we surfaced, shooting several feet from the water like a dolphin. My stomach did that roller-coaster thing twice. Once for the sudden weightlessness. Once for the way the bat in my hair tightened its grip.
“Nice!” Liz said, grinning, lost in the adventure we were having. “Delphine, your life is incredible!”
I gave a nauseated thumbs-up while the bat in my hair made a series of high-pitched noises, like a tiny guitar solo in my ears.
“Would you like me to translate?” Betsy said.
“Sure,” I said. “What the heck. Go for it.”
“Twibble says that your hair smells nice.”
“Twibble?”
“That’s his name.”
“Okay,” I said, resigned to my fate, because there was no time for further introductions. We’d reached the shore by then, and I couldn’t help but notice that the weather was bad. Horribly bad. There were drifts of hailstones as thick as snow, and everything was dented and battered. The hail was coming in gusts, with the sky almost blue one moment, and in the next it was a series of grays and reds and swirling blacks. The air smelled of burning candles. The wind was so strong that it was swatting us. Lightning was constantly flashing. Thunder was continually rumbling.
“Chester has to be around here somewhere,” Liz said, looking at the clouds in the sky. “Didn’t you say he was causing these weather patterns?”
“Yeah. He’s running so fast that— GAHHHHHH!”
I was moving.
So very fast.
A boy was holding me.
Chester.
We were running across the lake. On top of the water. It went by in the blink of an eye, and then there were some mountains and some vague flashes of buildings and a long stretch of an interstate highway with cars that I thought were parked at first, but I soon came to realize they were actually driving at normal speeds, which was the tiniest fraction of the speed Chester and I were moving.
“How do I stop?” Chester asked. He was more than a bit frantic, which was still a bit less frantic than I was.
“Not sure!” I said. We were back on the lake again. For the fifth or sixth time. “But Nate says you need to come with us. There’s something you should know about Nate. He’s super-smart and—”
“I know!”
“You know?”
“I’ve been running around listening to you guys. I’ve heard everything you said since I started running. And if I missed it, I can just go back and hear it again.”
“Go back?” I asked.
“Check it out! I’ll show you!” Chester put on a burst of speed. We were running across the lake again, with the waters churning and boiling wherever Chester touched. There were chunks of hail that, because we were moving so fast, seemed only suspended in midair, pushed aside by the tremendous force of Chester’s speed. Liz and the others were only just realizing that I was gone, with frowns beginning to show. Melville had a look of fury. The bat was still in my hair.
Of course.
“You know?” I heard. It was my voice.
“Go back?” I heard. My voice, again. But I wasn’t actually speaking. So where was my voice coming from?
“Did you hear it?” Chester said. “I caught up to the sound of your voice. Sound move
s really slow.” Chester took a long curving arc, up and over a hill and back down the interstate highway and then he swooped back almost to where we’d just been.
“You know?” I heard again. We’d caught back up to my voice and were running alongside the sound, so that I could hear myself on repeat. You know? You know? Again and again.
“So I haven’t missed anything you’ve said since you had me swallow that pill,” Chester said. “I know that Nate is super-smart, and that you’re his girlfriend, and you fight against the Red Death Tea Society, but I can’t stop running! Delphine, how do I stop running! I’m getting tired! It’s starting to hurt! I mean, really hurt!”
“What did you say about me being Nate’s girlfriend?” I asked. Honestly, I felt bad about it, because we really did need to figure out a way for Chester to stop running, and Nate had seemed very serious when he’d asked me to bring Chester back to the underwater headquarters, and there was the little matter of the Red Death Tea Society having several of my friends at the mercy of an army, and the entire city of Polt at the mercy of an earthquake machine, and also there was a bat in my hair, which was not an insignificant threat to my sanity, and yet . . . with all that . . . I was questioning Chester about why he thought I was Nate’s girlfriend.
“Oh,” Chester said. “It was because of . . . uh . . . something Nate said.” Lightning was crackling all around us, but it was too slow to catch us. I could feel the bat in my hair trying to steer us, like a cowboy steers a horse, with Twibble pulling the hairs on the right side of my head, or on the left side of my head, or yanking my hairs back when he wanted me to slow down, even though I wasn’t the one doing the running. No, I was only being held in the arms of a sixth grade speedster who believed Nate was my boyfriend.
“So, what did Nate say?” I asked.
“Something about you. And about being a girlfriend. You weren’t around and he was talking to himself, working out an equation on his pants just before he went down into the water.”
“He mentioned me by name?”
“Yes.”
“And he said ‘girlfriend’?”
“Yes.”
“That’s weird,” I said, because Nate and I aren’t dating, so for him to consider me his girlfriend had to be some sort of joke, except, except . . . Nate was still under the effects of having to tell the truth about everything.
It must have been the friction from how fast we were running, because suddenly everything felt incredibly warm.
“Did he say anything else?” I asked.
“Something about having to make sure you were okay, and then having to stop the Red Death Tea Society, and he was talking about a white poodle.”
“A white poodle?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Nothing about this makes sense,” I said. Why was Nate talking about white poodles? And about me being his girlfriend? I mean, he’d never even asked me out, so how could he be my boyfriend? And if Nate had asked me to be his girlfriend, I would’ve turned him down, of course. I want my boyfriend to be handsome, or at least interesting to look at, sort of the way Nate is. And I would want him to be considerate, like the way my mom takes cares of her clients whenever they need help, or I guess the way Nate always tries to help people whenever he can. And I would want my boyfriend to be heroic, the type of boy who is willing to sacrifice himself for others, the way Nate is willing to do in order to stop the Red Death Tea Society. And I would definitely want my boyfriend to be mysterious, full of surprises, so that life would always be an adventure. And of course I would want my boyfriend to be very smart, because I find that fascinating.
So you can clearly see that Nate isn’t what I’m looking for in a boyfriend.
And speaking of looking for things, Chester and I were racing across the lake again, and I caught a quick glimpse of Liz and her worried face and it reminded me that I was on a mission.
“Chester,” I said. “Nate and some of my friends are trapped in the Red Death Tea Society’s underwater headquarters. Can you get us there?”
Chester dove into the lake.
He wasn’t swimming.
He was still running.
The three of us were encased in a big air bubble that was surrounding Chester, a bubble of air that was swept along with us, like a leaf caught in the wake of a passing car. Incidentally, by “the three of us,” I mean me, Chester, and Twibble . . . the visiting bat in my hair.
“Which way?” Chester asked.
“I’m not sure!” Everything was moving too fast and I couldn’t catch my bearings.
It was then that I felt a bat tugging on my hair. And while it’s true that I’d been feeling a bat tugging on my hair for quite some time, it was now more insistent. And always in one direction.
“Hold on,” I said. “I think Twibble is trying to tell me something.”
“Twibble?”
“The bat in my hair.”
“Oh. I’d noticed you had a bat in your hair, but I didn’t think it was nice to tell girls they have bats in their hair.”
“I get that. But for right now, Twibble thinks we should go to the left.”
“Okay,” Chester said, veering to the left. Twibble tugged a bit of my hair to the right.
“Not that far left,” I told Chester. He eased down on the curve.
And so it was that Chester ran us through the depths of the lake water, with me in Chester’s arms telling him where to go, thanks to a bat in my hair telling me where to go. In no time flat we’d reached the underwater cave where Twibble had befriended my hair, meaning the huge cavern with the mini-submarines and the seven heavily armed guards that had certainly not been there before.
“Piffle,” I said, looking at the guards.
“Fire!” one of the guards yelled.
“Huh?” he then said, only a millisecond later. His gun had gone missing. Everyone’s guns had gone missing. Well, they weren’t so much missing as jumbled together in a smoking pile on the floor. It was only at that moment that I noticed Chester had tossed me up into the air. And then he’d raced around and disarmed everyone. And then he caught me.
Almost.
I fell on him.
Because while Chester is fast, he’s not all that strong, and his plan of catching me was optimistic at best. The two of us thumped down onto the floor, and for once I didn’t knock anybody out (hurrah!), but it still gave the members of the Red Death Tea Society (boo! hiss!) a chance to run up and grab us both.
Which is when the bats descended from above.
I suppose I can understand the bats’ enthusiasm. After all, it’s exciting to make new friends, and for a time all you want to do is hang out and get to know one another. And since Betsy had sprayed the bats with friend gas, they were all my friends now, despite the ongoing objections from my hair. Unfortunately for the bats, I’d left immediately after we’d become friends. The bats had undoubtedly missed their new friend, but now they were thrilled to see me again, except . . . I was being threatened.
Friends, of course, stick up for friends.
So suddenly there was a chaotic swarm of friendly bats, although they were only friendly depending on your perspective, and it was a terrible perspective if you happened to be a member of the Red Death Tea Society, because they were being attacked. More precisely, they were being buffeted and scratched and bitten, and there was a fair amount of high-pitched screeching from the bats, and even more high-pitched screaming from the assassins.
“Let’s go!” I told Chester, taking advantage of the distraction. We ran out into the hall, where more assassins were waiting, but Chester managed to disarm them all in the space of a heartbeat, even before I’d really even seen them, so I could not for certain tell you if they’d been wearing pants in the first place. I could say that they certainly weren’t wearing pants as we raced past. They were only wearing underwear with “teacup” designs, and they were also wearing expressions of concentrated confusion.
“Did you do that thing with the pants?”
I asked Chester. By then we were several hallways past the assassins, having run through a series of intersections and even stopping in the kitchen so that Chester could grab a quick snack (several cupcakes and six bowls of oatmeal) owing to how he was burning up so many calories with all his running. It had been less than five seconds since we’d left the first room with all the submarines and all the bats, and by “all” the bats I mean all of them except the one in my hair.
“I did do the thing with the pants,” Chester said. “I don’t like those assassins.”
“Look out,” I said.
“What?”
“Look out!” I yelled. We were running right for a wall at the end of a T intersection, and Chester was still eating cupcakes and had globs of cream frosting on his face, and also a thick layer of chocolate sprinkles, making me worry he couldn’t see.
“You mean the wall?” Chester said. “No problem. I can easily avoid it, because my GAHHH!”
So . . . that terrified scream of his?
I should explain.
It turns out that having cream frosting and chocolate sprinkles on your face is enticing to bats.
Which is why Twibble had leaped out from my hair and landed on Chester’s face.
And when you’re running at speeds well over a thousand miles per hour, it’s an unfortunate thing to suddenly have a bat’s wings cover your eyes while it’s licking your nose.
“GAHHH!” Chester repeated, apparently feeling it needed to be stressed.
“Piffle!” I yelled, expressing my own opinions on the matter.
“Eeeeeee!” Twibble screeched, which I’m just going to assume meant, “I sure am enjoying this cream frosting and chocolate sprinkles, Delphine, but I miss your hair!” Because he leaped back into my hair.
But by then it was too late. Chester, still holding me in his arms as he ran, stumbled and staggered and lost a bit of his balance, and then . . .
We fell.
At a thousand miles per hour.
We bounced and tumbled and thudded against the walls and the floor, banging against the ceiling and against each other, with Chester holding me tight in his panic and Twibble burrowing deeper into my hair. And then . . . there was the wall.