by Paul Tobin
For Colleen
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Acknowledgments
chapter
1
Let’s just say the cat was bigger than a horse.
To be honest, the cat was nearly the size of an elephant, but that sounds too scary, so … let’s just say the cat was bigger than a horse.
It had claws the size of my fingers.
It had teeth the length of my forearm.
It was hissing so forcefully that my hair was blowing in the wind of its breath.
Its name was Proton.
It was invisible, odorless, and silent.
It was trying to kill me.
It was Nate’s fault.
I should probably explain.
Nate’s smart. That’s for sure.
His IQ had been measured by amateurs, who returned results that made eyes pop wide. These results had been checked and rechecked and submitted to experts, who rushed to Polt Middle School to investigate Nathan Bannister with further and far more difficult tests.
These tests took place a couple of weeks back, after school, in our sixth grade classroom. I’d stayed late to sweep the floor, since Ms. Talbot uses cleaning duty as a punishment for misbehaving children, among which I am numbered. Nate was there, blinking at these experts, these men and women who’d come to Polt from as near as Portland and as far away as New York, London, and a city in Russia that had a name far past my ability to pronounce. Nate was blinking at these Very Serious People, not understanding why they were giving him such simple tests. The chalkboards were covered with Nate’s equations, equations that were making the experts shiver. There were three women dressed in skirts and cardigans, and a man in a horrible green suit. He was muttering to himself and leaned up against the blackboard, getting chalk on his suit from where Ms. Talbot’s weekly cleaning duty list was posted, which at the time happened to have my name, Delphine, written five times in a row.
I was fascinated, and it wasn’t because of the dreadful green suit or my name on the chalkboard, but because my classmate, Nate, a boy I’d never really paid any attention to, was pointing out the mistakes in their math, and suddenly it felt like they were the ones being tested. And they were failing.
I let out a little laugh.
Nate looked over to me.
He smiled.
I smiled back.
And then I went back to pushing the broom.
That was the first day that I really started to pay attention to Nate. I wanted to know why so many people had come from so far to meet him, even though most everyone in our middle school barely noticed him, myself included. It wasn’t until later that we became friends, and that his invisible cat almost killed me. Sort of. It’s a long story that starts with dogs.
Nate has a Scottish terrier named Bosper, and I walk dogs as a part-time job. It takes up a lot of time, three days a week after school, but it earns me enough money to buy comic books and fund my weekly Cake vs. Pie meetings, which are a never-ending debate between me and my friends, despite the obvious superiority of cake. Plus, I have to pay for my cell phone by myself, and I’m also saving up for when my friend Liz Morris and I start traveling the world as a mysterious duo of carefree adventurers. Sadly, from the looks of my savings, that will probably have to wait until at least seventh grade.
Anyway, Nate and I were both at the Mark Twain Memorial Dog Park. He had Bosper, and I was surrounded by an assortment of dogs ranging from wiener dogs to Saint Bernards, all of them in the mood to bark and drool and twist their leashes around my legs.
There was a young girl at the dog park, maybe five
years old, playing with a blue balloon. She was having the time of her life. But of course she lost her grip on the balloon and it soared right up into the air and began floating away.
“Ahhhh!” the girl yelled. She crumpled to the grass, devastated.
“I’ll get it!” I said, despite the fact that at four feet seven inches I’m not exactly the most excellent height for grabbing runaway balloons.
I hurriedly tied my dogs to a statue of a swan, and then spent the next thirty seconds in a humiliating attempt to grab the balloon. It kept dancing in the air just out of my reach, which made my desperate grabs all the more idiotic. At one point it looked like it was going to get caught in a tree so I climbed up into the branches, providing me an excellent view of the balloon floating far away.
“Bosper!” I heard somebody yell. I looked down from my perch in the tree and saw Nate Bannister with his flopping brown hair and that nose that’s too big, and his glasses and the checkered shirt along with the pants where, if you look closely enough, you’ll see several equations. In pen.
Nate has brown eyes, and the wind was blowing softly. Not that I mean to connect these two facts in any particular way.
“Fetch that balloon!” Nate ordered his dog, which was ridiculous. Why did Nate think his dog could fetch the balloon when I couldn’t? I mean, I’m not tall, but I’m way taller than a terrier.
The dog bounded off.
I climbed out of the tree.
Nate sat on a bench and went back to reading.
The dog was going the wrong way.
I told Nate, “Your dog’s going the wrong way.”
He looked up at me with a smile and said, “Wait for it,” which I’ve grown to understand is one of his key phrases.
So I waited for it. I watched Bosper run across the dog park, completely in the opposite direction of where the balloon was going, running right past the poor screaming girl who had lost her balloon and who was now on her back rolling all over the ground, which is not something I’d recommend in a dog park. After a bit, the balloon went higher into the skies and then … and then it hit some wind currents and changed direction five or six times and eventually floated to a spot only two feet off the ground, right where Bosper was waiting for it. The dog calmly took the string in his mouth and trotted over to the girl, where he handed off the balloon and then flopped down at Nate’s side to chew on a stick in a casual manner that suggested nothing marvelous had just happened.
But it had.
“What the piffle?” I said, amazed at what I’d seen. “How’d he do that?” (“Piffle,” incidentally, is a word I use so that I don’t get into trouble with Mom. I would be in trouble if she understood my definition for the word.)
“Air currents,” Nate said. “Simply a matter of tracking them. Judging them. The connections. Chaos theory. Fractals. Quantum projections. Combining these factors.”
“Simple,” I said. It was not what I meant. I noticed he was reading a Nancy Drew mystery. I liked him for that. Most boys don’t like girl detectives.
“Of course it’s simple,” Nate said. I don’t think he meant it, either. I think he was testing me.
I said, “I lied. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I didn’t think so. Most people don’t. I guess I’m smarter than most people.” He sounded sad. He sounded lonely. I felt bad for him. I’ve always had about a million friends. I’m not ever lonely. But I guess I know what lonely looks like and sounds like. I’m smart enough for that.
I sat down on the bench, smoothed out my clothes, and took off my hat. I put out my hand to shake.
I said, “I’m Delphine Cooper.”
“Na
te Bannister. Most people call me Egghead.”
“I’m not going to.”
“Okay.” He sounded happy about that.
I said, “So, obviously you’re smart. But, how did your dog know where to wait for the balloon?”
“His name is Bosper.”
“I got that part.”
“He figured it out for himself.”
“You lost me there.”
Nate said, “Don’t tell anyone this.” He stopped and looked around to make sure we couldn’t be overheard. I leaned in, acutely aware that we were so close and so very much in public that I could be starting rumors about me and Nate. But I wanted to hear.
“I accelerated him,” Nate said. That … didn’t mean anything to me. I looked down to Bosper. He didn’t look any faster than a regular dog.
I said, “I, um …”
“I made his brain work a bit better. He does calculations.”
“Stick,” said Bosper, chewing on his stick.
I lost my breath. I flopped back on the bench, heaving.
Nate said, “So, you heard him?”
“Ye-ye-ye-yeah,” I said.
“Bosper!” Bosper said.
Nate said, “When I accelerated him, he learned to talk. He’s not very good at it.”
“Not very good at it!” Bosper said, happily.
Nate said, “His tongue’s not optimized for speaking. Our own mouths and tongues have been shaped for speech by evolution.”
“Bosper has a bad mouth!” the dog said.
“We’re in the park, Bosper,” Nate said. He gave a nod and a raised eyebrow, keeping his hands on his Nancy Drew book but pointing all around the dog park with a finger. The terrier slunk low, returning to his stick. I was close to passing out. It still hadn’t occurred to me to breathe.
“Bosper is bad,” the dog said.
“He’s not supposed to talk in public,” Nate explained.
“He’s not supposed to talk at all,” I answered. My words sounded like a snake being stepped on. I was really going to have to start breathing. I honestly and truly was. Breathing is, like, the dumbest habit to give up.
“He’s usually quiet around other people,” Nate murmured. His eyes had gone distant, and his thumbs were twitching. He wasn’t talking to me anymore. As I got to know Nate, I found out that about half the time he’s not talking to me; he’s only pondering genius thoughts. And then about twenty percent of the time he talks over my head. The rest of the time he’s okay.
“Why is he talking?” Nate mused. He’d stood. He was pacing. He was tapping his forehead with a finger. He looked to the sky, then the ground, then to me. He said, “Delphine, you really should breathe.”
I did.
The world quit swimming quite so badly, and I didn’t feel like passing out anymore. I did feel like I wanted a whole bunch of answers. Of course, when it comes to Nate, having the answers and understanding those answers are two completely separate issues.
“Nose!” Nate said. Kind of loud, really. I jumped.
“Nose?” I asked.
“Exactly!” Nate said. His finger came out to touch my nose. “There are five million scent receptors in there,” he told me.
“In here?” I said. I held my nose in case my scent receptors were going to fall out. I mean, five million of them? That would make a horrible mess.
“But over here,” Nate said, touching the terrier’s nose, “are one hundred and forty-seven million scent receptors.”
“That’s thirty times more!” I said. I was hoping he’d be impressed with my math. Somebody should be, sometime, right?
“Twenty-nine point four,” Nate corrected. “Well, by pure math, that is. But in reality it’s many times more than that. For one thing, his brain contains forty times the scent processing power of our own, multiplying his progression arc.”
“My brain’s hurting here, Nate.”
“I’m saying his sense of smell is at least ten thousand times better than ours.”
“Ewww,” I said, immediately thinking of how bad my brother Steve’s gym clothes would reek to Bosper.
“I know this looks silly,” Nate said.
“What does?” I asked. But by the time I spoke Nate had reached into a canvas messenger bag with sewn-on patches of Isaac Newton, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, and the Muppet guy … Jim Henson, and he’d pulled out a mechanical dog nose. It had a strap that Nate put around his head. The nose went over his own. The mechanical nose made a whirring sound. And a snorting sound.
“That definitely looks silly,” I said.
“It lets me smell like a dog.” He began making adjustments.
“Bosper!” Bosper said.
Nate picked up my arm and smelled it.
“Oh!” he said. “That scent!”
“Piffle!” I said, yanking my arm back. “Why did you do that?”
“Delphine!” Bosper said. This was the first time I ever heard a dog say my name. It was unsettling, but also … amazing.
“We’re going to be friends,” Nate said, with a look of awe on his dog-nosed face. “I get it now! That’s why Bosper was talking to you! Because he already knew! Good boy!” Nate leaned down and patted the terrier’s head. Bosper reacted by jumping up and down in a circle, excited past any ability to control.
“Nobody here knows what you’re talking about,” I told Nate, which wasn’t exactly true. Bosper clearly understood. Meaning a dog was one up on me.
“Your scent,” Nate said, holding out his hand to shake. “You smell like a friend.”
“What?” I said. I can’t say I expected an answer. The trends so far hadn’t been good.
“I’m going to have a friend,” Nate said. He was so happy that I was afraid he was going to jump up and down like Bosper. I was also afraid that he’d never take that nose off.
Anyway, that’s how Nathan Bannister and I became friends.
“I’m home!” I said, and picked up the lint brush that I always keep on the table just inside the door. If there were a list of things that dog hair clings to, the primary item on that list would be me, Delphine Cooper, as I am apparently made of glue.
“In here,” Mom said from her office, which is just off our dining room. I walked inside and she had six million papers (my best guess, though there might have been seven million) spread all over her desk. On these papers were the complaints and demands of about thirty artists and musicians. Mom’s job is finding galleries and gigs for them, helping sell their work, and so on. She thinks the artists are more consistently crazy, but the musicians are more intensely insane.
“Hey, Mom,” I said. “Still working?”
“I should be done in a decade,” she said, waving a couple of pieces of paper at me. “Apparently, a rat appeared at the Floating World gallery opening last night.”
“Ick. And the artist was mad?”
“Just the opposite. She was thrilled. She said a frightened crowd is more likely to buy art. She sold ten paintings last night and now she wants me to set rats free at all her openings. Do you know how many permits you have to get in order to let wild animals free at public events?”
“No,” I said. “I do not. Where’s Dad?”
“He drove Steve out to the mall, because Steve’s sister drew little cartoon animals on most of his T-shirts.”
“Steve’s sister,” I said. “That would be me.”
“That would be you,” Mom agreed. There might have been a scowl involved, but it was difficult to tell, because of all the glares and grimaces. I thought about telling Mom that I’d only drawn on Steve’s shirts because of how he’d filled my favorite sneakers full of potato salad, but then she might wonder why he’d done that, and I would have to confess certain things that I felt no need to make public.
“Will they be back in time for supper?” I asked, because I was a bit hungry, and because it was time to steer the topic away from me being in trouble, or any possible questions about why I’d spent twenty-four dollars on shaving cream
and covered Steve’s bedroom floor in nearly three feet of it, which is something I was hoping Mom didn’t know.
“Don’t think so,” Mom said. “But there are sandwiches and yogurt. Make sure to have some fruit.”
“Is cake a fruit?”
“It is not.”
“Just checking.”
I grabbed a turkey sandwich, some pineapple yogurt, and exactly twenty-three red grapes (I counted them, discarding a twenty-fourth grape because it failed the squishiness test) and sat in my room at my computer. Curious about Nate, I looked up “talking dog” and “mechanical dog nose” and “wind currents” and “largest horse of all time,” the last of which had nothing to do with Nate, but, duh … monster horses are fascinating. There wasn’t anything interesting on the first two searches, and the results on wind currents were far too technical, but the largest horse of all time was Sampson, a horse that could have won a battle with a dump truck.
“Mrrww?” I heard. I looked down. Snarls the cat had wandered into my bedroom. Snarls is Mom’s cat. We are not friends. There have been incidents. Claws were involved. A birthday cake was destroyed.
“No,” I said. Snarls only wanted to be friends with my sandwich, not me. I pushed him away with my toe and clicked my computer to the Pterodactyl Nest, the blog about Polt Middle that’s named after our team mascot. We’re the Crimson Pterodactyls.
It was time to do a little online reconnaissance.
First, I did a search for all my friends. Liz. And Stine. Ventura. A few others. There were all sorts of matches. Numerous articles. Various pictures. My hair looked weird in a lot of them.
Then I did a search for Nate. There were only a few matches, and most of them just had him tagged in the background of other people’s photos, like when we were on a class field trip to the Schomburg Art Museum, and Kip Luppert was posing dramatically in front of a statue of a bear, and Nate was in the background staring at a painting of Albert Einstein.
“Hmm,” I said, eating my sandwich and looking at the screen. None of my friends knew Nate. Nobody really knew Nate. Everyone thought he was sort of … boring.
“Hmm,” I said, eating my twenty-third grape.