Attack of the 50 Foot Wallflower

by Christian McKay Heidicker

  It felt strange at first, like I was cradling a baby. But then he wrapped his arm around my forearm, and I felt his cheek against my skin, and I felt his back against my chest. We both breathed in and out, my breath ruffling his hair.

  I remembered Calvin, and the spot on my finger where my nail had connected with his skull started to throb.

  We lay in silence a while, the darkness of the chapel dancing around us. I tried to imagine we were just two regular-size kids snuggling in candlelight without a worry in the world. It wasn’t easy.

  “Will you tell me now?” Lear said.

  “Tell you what?”

  He looked into my eyes and did that thing where his eyes moved from one of mine to the other and back again. But my eyes were so far apart, he had to turn his head to do it. “Tell me how I can become like you.”

  “You don’t want this,” I said. “Besides, the people who did this to me would kill us if we went there.”

  Lear sank into my arm in disappointment.

  But then I realized there was something I could tell him. A secret for a secret. I opened my mouth to begin, but then swallowed it. I’d never told anyone about this before. Not even Katie.

  I sat up and grabbed the little ribbon-wrapped basket from the corner. I slurped the jams out of their jars to give myself courage.

  “The world might be ending,” I said.

  He gazed up at me, eyes fearful with belief. “What do you mean?”

  “Hoo, boy,” I said. “I know I told you my dad died in a Shiver, but that was a lie. I’m sorry. Really, my dad is the size of a mountain. He, um, fills the sky and watches the world, and wherever he looks, monsters appear.”

  Lear didn’t say anything. Only listened.

  I snuggled back up to him and told him everything. From my innocent eyes playing peek-a-boo with Daddy among the clouds, to seeing him for the first time, to the fact that he was staring at Pennybrooke now. Staring at me.

  As he listened, Lear drew invisible things on my arm, as if he was re-creating the story on my skin. After I was finished, I noticed the locusts had fled. Just telling someone else everything lessened the weight a little. With Lear in my arms, I was starting to feel drowsy and nice.

  “Anyway,” I said, “if I don’t keep things interesting, Daddy will use his remote control and turn the whole world off—ending everything once and for all.”

  Lear rolled onto his side and sighed, contented. This was the last reaction I was expecting.

  “What is it?” I said, my eyelids drooping.

  “If there is a man in the sky who makes disasters with his eyes,” Lear said, “then maybe a lot of the lousy stuff that happens isn’t our fault. Or anyone’s.”

  I touched his hair with my pinkie, delicately dragging it from his forehead to the top of his neck, then lifting and doing it again. Just having him around almost made me forget what I had become. Almost.

  “You’d better pay me back for all that food before the world ends,” Lear said. “Otherwise, my mom’s going to kill me.”

  A laugh burst out of me, whipping Lear’s hair.

  He curled up in my arm. “I guess I should have asked this before, but is it safe to cuddle like this? Are you radioactive?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  We giggled together for the first time. That was the last thing I remembered.

  I woke to the sound of paper tearing.

  My eyelids were heavy, almost like they were glued shut. I barely managed to peel them open, one and then the other. Lear was gone, my arms delicately wrapped around nothing at all. At the end of the church’s aisle, something confusing was happening. Rhoda was holding Pan-Cake in the crook of her arm while tearing pages out of choral books and dropping them into a large pile in front of the double-door entrance.

  As if sensing that I was awake, Rhoda spoke. “It’s funny to me that you would try and make yourself look decent when you’re the size of an elephant. Three elephants, really.”

  She kept tearing pages while I tried to sit up. The whole church started to spin and my head thunked painfully back to the floor.

  Rhoda continued. “I mean, Lear only visited you so he could get a look at how obscenely big you are. Like going to a circus to see the fat lady.”

  I tried pushing myself up, but my arms were like cooked noodles. The whole church seemed to tilt at an angle so steep I could barely tell which way was up. Through my bleary eyes I saw the remains of the basket of jams and fruits left on the stoop the night before.

  Rhoda tore more pages and added them to the pile. “It was your shade of nail polish that gave you away. It was all over poor Calvin’s forehead when I visited him in the hospital. I remembered it from the first time I met you. The kind of shade I wouldn’t put on a chimpanzee.” She sighed and tore another page from the choral book and delicately released it like a tumbling flower petal. “When Marsh canceled church, I knew something fishy was going on. He’d hold service around his deathbed. I hadn’t seen you at school or around town, and then when people at the carnival said they saw a girl taller than a telephone pole, I put two and two together.”

  And she had brought me a special basket full of jams and sleeping pills.

  I managed to push up onto one of my trembling elbows. “Is Calvin okay?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Rhoda said. “He got such a knock to the noggin, he may never flirt with another girl again.”

  Locusts dripped in the corners of my vision. Rhoda continued to tear up choral books as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, holding up my heavy head.

  She ignored my question. “First you tried to seduce Calvin, which I thought was pathetic but harmless enough. But that just wasn’t enough for you, was it? When he stood you up at the motel, you had to hurt him because you couldn’t stand the rejection. And then you tried to steal another girl’s beau.”

  “That isn’t what happened,” I said thickly.

  Rhoda clicked her tongue. “You are greedy greedy, Phoebe Lane. Trying to take all the boys for yourself. It’s no wonder you blew up to the size you are.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping to stop the church from spinning.

  Pan-Cake started to whimper in Rhoda’s arms. “There, there. Did she hurt you, you poor thing? Mommy’s got a basket of kisses all for you.”

  I opened my bleary eyes. “Did you drug me just to get a dog?”

  Rhoda stopped tearing pages and flashed a smile down the aisle. “That’s not what people will think. I’ll be a town hero. The girl who stopped the creature who hurt poor, innocent Calvin.”

  She reached into her skirt waistband and pulled out a matchbook. The sight made me want to leap up, but my legs were useless.

  Rhoda struck a match and watched it flicker. All of a sudden, I didn’t see a girl at the end of the aisle. I saw something much different. People may have thought that Rhoda’s mom was the monster for feeding her all those sleeping pills, but maybe her mom was really just trying to rid the world of one. Not all monsters had fur or scales or tentacles. Some of them wore pigtails.

  Before I could cry out, Rhoda tossed the match on the pile of scattered choir pages. As the paper started to smolder, I tried clawing my way down the aisle, but my hips wouldn’t fit between the pews.

  “Toodle-loo,” Rhoda said. She stepped around the fire and out of the church, the cleats of her shoes clicking.

  I pushed myself back and dragged my body the long way around the edge of the church toward the entrance. The choral pages blackened. Flames leapt. The church doors started to crackle as smoke licked ash up the wall and slithered along the ceiling. In ten seconds flat, the whole entrance was in flames. I was trapped.

  My lungs burned and went into a panic, telling me to escape, flee, get out, flatten everything that stood between me and fresh air. I scanned the chapel through the haze. I couldn’t fit out the single-door back exit. There was only one thing I could try.

&
nbsp; By this point my heart was pounding with enough adrenaline to push to my feet. Wavering, I just managed to heft a pew over my shoulder and throw it with all my might through Jesus and his lambs, making a great outward explosion. Smoke rushed toward the morning sky.

  I did my best to high step onto the sill, punching out the leftover shards of glass, shoving my body into the frame. I didn’t fit. Any way I squeezed myself, there was no way my hips were getting through. I kept my head out the window for a few breaths of fresh air, took one last gasp, and then leapt off the windowsill back into the fire.

  The chapel had transformed into a hellscape. The air was filled with soot and flames; the heat roasted my skin. The front entrance was a devilish waterfall, black and roaring upward. I started kicking at the side wall, hoping my giant leg would serve as a ramming rod, but I was too weak from the sleeping pills.

  The front entrance popped and splintered, and there came a gasping sound as the oxygen sucked the fire and smoke outside. There was only one exit. And it was through the flames.

  I grabbed Frank and wrapped it around as much of my body as I could. I ran down the church aisle toward the fire, which crackled and howled, daring me to enter. I dove through it, headfirst. My head broke through the doors, and I landed on coals and embers, burning through the comforter to my stomach. I was stuck. I screamed and kicked against the floor, my stomach sizzling, my mouth screaming and gulping lungfuls of smoke. My hips finally broke through the charred frame, and I lay beneath the wide white sky, coughing, sputtering, and smoldering until darkness overtook me.

  • • •

  “Dear God.”

  “What is it?”

  “Say, isn’t it that Lane girl?”

  “No, it’s the monster!”

  “It’s both!”

  I blinked tears from my eyes and looked left and right at a crowd of shocked faces, flickering with firelight. It seemed every citizen in Pennybrooke was there, holding buckets of water to help put out the church . . . and here they found a burned giantess instead.

  In the crowd, I saw the greasers smoking and smirking. I saw Dr. Siley, his arms folded, the church fire reflected in his glasses. I saw Rhoda grinning, a worried-looking Pan-Cake in her arms. I saw Officers Graham and Shelley and their dead vegetable eyes. I saw Lear, pale and terrified. I reached out to him, but he looked helplessly at the mob and ran.

  A man screamed, “She hurt my Calvin! She must pay!”

  The shocked faces sprang into action. They tossed the still-smoking Frank over my chest, and the men sat on its edges to keep me pinned to the ground. Pan-Cake wriggled free from Rhoda’s grasp and latched onto the comforter’s corner, tugging to free me. But her tiny strength was no match for the population of Pennybrooke.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt Calvin!” I croaked, and then painfully coughed up smoke. “It was an accident!”

  “That didn’t look like any accident I’ve seen!”

  I couldn’t argue. Not only because it was hard to breathe with my chest constricted by the comforter and the weight of the men, but because I had flicked Calvin on purpose.

  “Let her go, you dicks!”

  It was Beth. I couldn’t see her through my stinging eyes, but hearing her voice was enough to settle the panic in my heart a bit.

  “Now, now, Beth,” I heard Principal Toll say. “They won’t harm her. This is America, where everyone is given fair trial.”

  “Fight them, Phoebe!” Beth cried. “Throw them off! Escape!”

  But all the fight was out of me. The wings of the locusts burned up with the church. All I wanted was sleep, and maybe more than that. I let my stinging eyes flutter shut.

  The people of Pennybrooke started to grope and pinch me through the comforter. They slapped at my bare thighs. A small hand touched my breast and jiggled it. “Just like a water bed! Ha-ha!”

  Maybe the fight wasn’t out of me after all. I sat upright, throwing off the comforter and sending a dozen men sprawling. I clenched my fists, ready to swing them like a club, but then the burns on my stomach screamed to life, and I fell back, whimpering. Before I could so much as curl my legs into my chest, they threw the comforter back over me and even more people sat on its edges.

  “Boy, she’s a lively one, isn’t she?”

  Someone touched my thigh. “Fuzzy too! Never again will I have to wonder what it’s like to hunt a woolly mammoth!”

  “Come on, Davey! Hop aboard her foot! It’s like a bucking bronco!”

  I thrashed, but they just laughed at my helplessness.

  “Well, what do we do with her?”

  “She almost burned up in the church. I say we finish the job!”

  There was a wave of agreement.

  “Stop!” a new voice screamed. “She must be forgiven! She has given full confession!”

  It was Marsh.

  “You’ve been hiding this monstrosity?” Mr. Marple said.

  “I have been trying to save her, yes.”

  “The reverend cares more about the monster than his own church!” someone cried.

  “Forgive thine enemy!” Marsh screamed in an impromptu sermon. “Jesus forgave even the women who sold their bodies—” There was a meaty sound, like a fist connecting with a jaw, and Marsh’s voice fell silent.

  “Here’s a Bible quote for ya!” someone screamed. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

  “That is not in the Bible!” Marsh said through what sounded like a bloodied mouth. “If you kill this girl, then you are no better than the beasts that crawl out of the earth as God’s punishment for our sins. Nay, your actions will only make the monsters multiply.” He stepped around my hair and set a small hand on the unburnt part of my shoulder. “Though she may be a giant, this girl has earned God’s forgiveness and has not sinned since! To this I can attest!”

  I rolled my head awkwardly, painfully to the side.

  “I did it,” I told Marsh. “I hurt Calvin.”

  The look on his face broke my heart. I’d cursed his sermons for good. He’d failed to cast out the biggest demon of all. Someone seized Marsh’s arm and yanked him into the crowd. The people of Pennybrooke started screaming for my death.

  I thought of Liz. This was the part where I was supposed to let my rage pick me up off the ground and fight until either I or the entire town was dead. But I was never meant to be a Shiver.

  “I’m done!” I said. “I won’t fight anymore.” I found Daddy’s disappointed eyes through the clearing smoke as I addressed the crowd. “Do what you want to me.”

  The mob grew quiet as something slow and heavy rumbled down the road. There came the squeal of a metal door opening, followed by a sharp voice. “Jesus in his knickers! They don’t grow ’em like this where I come from. What do you all eat for breakfast down here? Uranium?”

  A shadow stepped into my periphery. A general, decorated with stripes and shiny stars on his epaulets, removed his hat. “Blanket sitters, you are relieved!”

  Everyone jumped off me, dragging Frank with them, leaving me in my bikini.

  “I’m General Spillane. I’ll be handling things from here.”

  My skin turned cold. Lear had called his uncle.

  The general marched circles around me and sniffed deeply.

  “Whoo, boy.” He wafted his hand in front of his nose. “No wonder my boot camp boys have been so restless. They can probably smell you sixty miles away. Do me a favor, miss, and don’t spread your legs, or else we might have a full-on exodus from the base. Why do you folks have her restrained?”

  “She hurt my boy, sir,” Mr. Marple said.

  “That true, giantess?” the general said.

  My body tensed from my hair all the way down to my toenails. I wanted to tell him I hadn’t meant to hurt anybody. But I remembered all the monsters who had come in peace, like the alien Klaatu. Even Emperor Ook himself. They still got killed in the end.

  “Cat got your tongue, huh?” the general said. “Or is it a tiger? Heh-heh. Does anyone know if
she bleeds?”

  “Um,” Mr. Marple said, “what do you mean, sir?”

  “Get your mind out of the gutter.” The general pinched my side. “I mean does she have impenetrable skin? I guess it’s questions like these that got me where I am today. Private Mangum, hand me your weapon.”

  “Sir!”

  Boots came squishing across the church’s lawn.

  “No!” Beth screamed.

  The general cocked his eyebrows toward her. “Somebody do me a favor and restrain that girl.”

  “There, there, Beth,” Principal Toll said. “The general knows what he’s doing.”

  A gun cocked and I flinched.

  “Don’t!” I screamed. “Don’t shoot me! Please!”

  “She speaks!” the general said, wiggling his finger in his ear. “Boy, does she speak. Heck, those pipes would put my old lady’s to shame. Do you bleed, giantess?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  The burns on my stomach blistered and wept down my sides, but the pain had quickly dulled to a tingling.

  “Ah, well, I guess I wouldn’t have taken your word for it, anyhow. That’s what makes us the US military and not the commies. Step back, folks.”

  I heard some shuffling and then felt a pinprick of cold press the top of my pinkie toe. “Controlled fire!”

  There came a staccato burst of sound as bullets ripped through my toe. I screamed.

  “She bleeds!” the general cried. “Hoo, boy, does she ever! Medic! Look at that gusher. I’ve seen men lose half that much blood and pass out cold.”

  I stifled a sob.

  “Ah, come now, giantess,” the general said, patting my shoulder. “To a girl your size that’s nothing more than a paper cut.” He put his face up to my ear and spoke real quiet. “But at least you know we can hurt ya if you try anything. Men! Please point your weapons at the giantess’s head.” He tapped the center of his forehead. “Give her a third eye if she so much as winks at you.”