This commenced the first all-school food fight that had ever occurred on Principal Quigley’s watch. Lunch was thrown, floors were mopped, parents were called, and BP spent a very uncomfortable fifteen minutes riding home in a car with the white-faced and fuming Mrs. Clark.
The next day, a decree was handed down from the office of the principal that Chef’s Surprise would never again be served for lunch.
Chapter Thirteen: Body Jumping
“Ow! That really hurt!”
Angus looked at the limp crow body in his hand. He could have sworn he’d heard Ivy’s voice.
“You could have killed me, you know! What were you thinking? Leaving the glue on the fire like that?” Angus squeezed his eyes shut, and then opened them and stared at the crow carcass. Apparently he was so crazy with grief he was now hearing voices.
“Put that corpse down. You’ll have to bury it later. Poor valiant animal sacrificed its life for science,” continued Ivy’s voice.
Angus placed the crow body gently beside the fire, wiped his eyes, and looked expectantly around. “Ivy?”
“Over here … three steps forward, two to the right. Watch your feet! You almost stepped on me! Down here!” instructed the bossy voice.
Angus squatted down and looked at the ground. “Where are you?”
“Right here! You’re too far away. Come closer,” the voice ordered.
Angus knelt down and examined the rocks. “I still don’t see you.” A tiny jet of water sprayed him in the eye. He blinked and reached down to gently extract a tiny off-white and brown clam from the wet sand between the beach pebbles. He gripped it between his fingers and held it close to his eyes. “Ivy, is that you?”
“If it isn’t, you sure look ridiculous talking to a clam,” she retorted.
Tears sprang to his eyes again as he realized his friend was alive. He hadn’t killed her after all.
“Don’t go crying all over me! There’s salt in your tears and they sting,” the clam scolded.
“Sorry, Ivy. I’m just so glad you’re still here. When I saw you lying there by the fire …” His throat constricted with emotion, and he was unable to continue.
“Well, I was going to yell at you about that but seeing how sorry you are, I guess I forgive you,” said Ivy. “You’re going to have to bury that body, though. It freaks me out to see it lying there. Kind of like seeing myself in the hospital bed hooked up to machines all over again.”
“But how did you survive?” asked Angus.
“I don’t really know. The last thing I remember is peeking down into the pot to see how the glue was coming along, then this searing, hot pain, worst thing I’ve ever felt in my life, and the next thing I know I was watching you and my old body from a distance.”
“You saved yourself by jumping from one body to another.” Angus whistled. “That is pretty cool.”
“The weird thing is that I didn’t consciously try to body jump. I don’t remember doing anything,” said Ivy.
“So either you’ve gotten so good at body jumping you can do it without thinking, or …” Angus trailed off.
“Or my mind can’t stay in a body that’s dead.” Ivy was really thinking now. “I’ve never tried to transport my mind into anything non-living. Hold on a second.”
It was hard to tell what Ivy was doing because the little hard shell just sat there. Angus imagined it must be pretty boring to be a clam.
“Nothing,” Ivy’s voice said. “I tried to move into a rock, and then a log, but I just stayed a clam. Then I tried to go back into the crow body. Nothing. What do you think that means?”
“Well, your mind won’t allow you to stay in a dead crow and you can’t move into a non-living entity. Have you ever tried moving into a human?” asked Angus.
“I’ve only tried to move into myself in the different worlds,” answered Ivy. “It never occurred to me to try someone else.”
“Try me!” Angus suggested impulsively.
“Think about it a minute,” said Ivy. “If I went into your body, where would you go?”
Angus hadn’t thought about that. Now it worried him. “I don’t know.”
“Too dangerous. I’m afraid we wouldn’t get you back, and I don’t want to go through life as a boy,” said Ivy.
Angus was relieved. “Yeah. I kind of like my body. Not sure I’d want to trade places with you in that clamshell.”
“So does that mean,” began Ivy.
“You can’t die in an animal body?” finished Angus. “But how could you know for sure?”
“Well, you could put me on the ground and stomp on me,” suggested the clam.
“But what if we’re wrong? Then I would have your murder on my conscience forever. I couldn’t live with that,” said Angus.
“True. And it would really hurt,” said the clam. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if I survive the next time you accidentally kill me.”
The clam spurted water. Angus suspected Ivy was laughing at him.
“Not funny,” he scowled. “Now what? You’re a clam. What do we do about that? Should I stick you in my pocket?”
“No way I’m living in your pocket! Gross! You’ve probably got snotty tissues and chewed gum in there. I’ve got to find another animal body. Can you walk down the beach and put me on the sand? Far from the fire, and then walk away. I’ve got an idea,” said the clam.
Angus wasn’t sure what Ivy was up to but he complied and walked until Ivy told him to stop. “Here’s as good a place as any,” she said. He placed her on the ground and walked back to the fire. While he waited, he picked up the cooling pot and examined the cedar sap. It was thick and sticky. He picked up a pebble, dabbed a bit of the glue on it, and stuck another pebble to it. He squeezed them together for a few moments. When he let go they stayed together. He gave them a gentle tug, but they resisted. The glue appeared to be a success.
Angus looked up from the pebbles and gazed down the beach. The tide was coming in and with it several seabirds. He watched as a gray and white gull soared over the beach in lazy circles. It dove toward the beach, and Ivy. “No!” yelled Angus dropping the pebbles and setting off in great strides down the beach. He waved his hands around his head and screamed, “Shoo! Shoo! Get out of here you filthy flying rat!”
“Who are you calling a flying rat?” shrieked the gull. “I find such comparisons very insulting.”
“Ivy! You’re a gull now? I thought that gull, I mean you, was going to eat you, I mean the clam,” stuttered Angus. All this body jumping was making his head hurt.
“The gull would have eaten the clam but that was the whole point. I needed the gull to get close enough to the clam so I could move into its body. I can’t jump bodies if the animal is too far away,” said Ivy. “I guess the clam must have been the nearest living thing to the fire when my crow body died. And I couldn’t stay a clam. I have to be able to move.”
Angus wondered if he’d been close to the campfire rather than far away at the water’s edge when the glue exploded all over Ivy, would she be in his body now? He shuddered and shook his head to dispel the thought.
While Ivy watched in her new seagull body, Angus dug a hole in the ground beyond the tide’s reach. He placed the crow carcass gently in the hole and looked to Ivy. “Should we say a few words?” he asked.
“Thank you, crow, for allowing me to inhabit your body. I’m sorry you died,” said Ivy.
“Is that enough?” asked Angus.
“Feel free to add to it,” answered Ivy.
Angus gazed blankly at the crumpled body. After a few moments of silence he said, “Amen.” He looked to Ivy. She nodded her head and began pushing sand into the hole with her orange bill. Angus compressed the sand with the palm of his hand. When they had refilled the hole, Angus gathered flat, smooth rocks, and stacked them on top of one another in order of size, largest at the bottom. He stepped back and admired his work.
“A cairn. Nice touch,” Ivy approved.
“Thought it was the
least I could do,” said Angus.
“What’s going on?” asked Captain Hank walking out of the forest with several blankets over his arm and a pack of food strapped to his back.
Angus and the seagull looked at each other. “He’ll never understand,” Ivy whispered.
“Oh, just taking a break,” said Angus. “Let me show you the glue. It turned out great!”
He led Captain Hank to the fireside and the pot of glue.
Chapter Fourteen: Discipline
Mrs. Clark was fond of repeating the adage that both good things and bad things happen in threes. This was indeed the case on the day of the food fight.
Bad Thing Number One. After running behind the bus with her absentminded son’s shoes, she returned to her front door and discovered that Mr. Clark had left for work and locked the door securely behind him.
She stood in front of her home dressed in her tatty bathrobe and slovenly lime sherbet slippers unsure how to get back in to the house. She paced around it, turning door knobs, tugging on windows, trying to locate one that was unlocked. She stepped back and looked up at her home, which would be so much cozier if she could just get inside.
Good Thing Number One. On the second floor, she noticed Angus’ bedroom window. He had forgotten to close it before leaving for school. If she could just reach it, she could climb through it and be back in her cozy house.
However, the garage door was locked, so there was no getting at a ladder.
Good Thing Number Two. Beneath the bedroom window stood a small peach tree. The tree’s peaches had long since been harvested and eaten and its limbs reached out to her and beckoned for her to climb them.
In her youth, she had been the most fearless and fastest tree climber in her neighborhood, boy or girl. Throughout her childhood her friends could often be seen standing beneath the oldest and tallest trees gazing into the branches and holding stop watches. She had wanted to get into the Guinness Book of World Records and had nearly achieved her dream. By the time she was fourteen though, she’d given up her quest for more age-appropriate pastimes. Now, Mrs. Clark scrambled eagerly up the peach tree, reliving her glory days and forgetting that she was now middle-aged.
She suddenly remembered this when she found the front half of her body wedged in Angus’ window while the back half kicked helplessly behind her.
Mr. Siegfried, the spry octogenarian at the end of the street, kept his mind and body young by walking around the block three times a day. His first walk occurred directly after his breakfast of a soft boiled egg, half a grapefruit, and a cup of black tea. He shuffled off with purpose, eyes focused down on the uneven pavement.
Good Thing Number Three. The morning of the food fight, Mr. Siegfried uncharacteristically happened to glance up into the sky to gauge the day’s weather at the very moment that Mrs. Clark waved one of her green slippers off her foot.
The law-abiding elderly citizen shambled back to his home and phoned the police. A uniformed man helped Mrs. Clark into her home, asked her several probing and embarrassing questions, and respectfully refrained from outward signs of humor until he was seated again in his patrol car.
And with that, the three good things were all used up.
Freshly showered and dressed, Mrs. Clark stumbled over her son’s forgotten school books. She sighed, grabbed her jacket, and set out for the garage with the books and her car keys. She was surprised to see the hatchback held open by one of Angus’ “inventions”. To her untrained eye, it looked like an old fishing pole tethered to a broken bread machine. She tossed the invention to his disheveled corner of the messy garage, closed the hatchback, climbed into the car, and put her keys into the ignition.
Bad Thing Number Two. She turned her keys expecting the engine to cough and then start. It didn’t.
The emergency technician who showed up an hour later explained that the interior lights, triggered by the open hatchback, had drained the engine’s battery. After he installed a new one and charged her credit card, Mrs. Clark set off for Angus’ school with the books.
Mrs. Clark smiled to herself as she re-entered her cozy home. She planned to bake a chocolate cake this afternoon. If she finished it quickly, she’d be able to cut herself a sugary, thick slice before Angus returned from school.
She had forgotten that bad things happen in threes.
Mrs. Clark was accustomed to calls from Principal Quigley. Mrs. Clark was an active member of the school’s parent and teacher association. She was the first to sign up for bake sales and class parties. She sat up past midnight every spring sewing costumes for the annual all-school musical. Whenever Principal Quigley needed a parent to support the school’s efforts, rally other parents to volunteer, or head up a new committee, Mrs. Clark’s phone would ring. And since Mrs. Clark prized good citizenship and an excellent education above almost everything else in life, she always answered.
Principal Quigley requested that Mrs. Clark return to the school she had just left to retrieve her son. His presence would not be requested at school for the next few days.
Bad Thing Number Three. Mrs. Clark, costume designer and bake sale diva, upstanding parental citizen with a speed dial position on the school principal’s phone, was now the mother of a suspended student.
The stony silence inside the car on the drive home unnerved BP.
When he messed up on the Fearsome Flea punishment was fast and loud. Maniacal Marge would yell at the top of her lungs. Depending on the severity of the infraction, BP would be given extra chores, cuffed on the ear, swatted on the behind, or threatened with plank-walking or keel-hauling.
Mrs. Clark’s displeasure was much more terrifying.
She parked the car and climbed out, slamming the door. Without bothering to look back to see if BP was behind her, she entered the house. BP sat in the car for a moment, listening to the engine ping and pong as it cooled down. He pictured Mrs. Clark pinging and ponging as she cooled down. Maybe he should just wait it out in safety here in the car.
He laughed at himself. What was he worried about anyway? He was a fierce pirate after all and had faced the raging tirades of Maniacal Marge. This pink-lipsticked mother was certainly no scarier than that!
He grabbed his book bag and got out of the car. He walked to the door, pulled it open, and peeked inside. Mrs. Clark bustled about the kitchen pulling mixing bowls and baking ingredients off of shelves and out of cupboards. The door slammed behind BP, and he dropped his bag to the floor. Mrs. Clark ignored him.
She was acting much differently than he’d expected. The mother he’d known before he’d run off to join the pirates would have raged and railed at him for his behavior at school. Who was this woman standing before him? None of it mattered anyway. It was past time for him to return to the Fearsome Flea.
“Well, I’ll be on me way,” he spoke tentatively.
Mrs. Clark thumbed through a cookbook.
“Did ye hear me? I’ll be headin’ back to me ship,” he said a bit louder.
Mrs. Clark turned some knobs on the oven.
“Me ship is sure to leave harbor soon. Don’t want to miss her.” He picked his bag up off the floor.
Mrs. Clark began measuring ingredients and pouring them into a mixing bowl.
BP put his hand on the door knob, and tried one last time. “Well … bye.”
Without raising her eyes from the eggs she was beating Mrs. Clark said, “You are welcome to leave any time you like, but you’ll do so with your property, not mine.”
BP stopped and stuttered, “I don’t know what ye mean.”
Mrs. Clark raised her eyes to his. “Take off my earrings,” she commanded.
BP raised his hand to his ears and removed the jewelry.
“And I’ll have my salt shaker,” she said.
He tried to look innocent.
She pointed with a dripping whisk. “In the bag.”
He sighed, unzipped the book bag, and drew out the salt shaker.
“Come to think of it that bag stays her
e. I bought it, so that makes it mine,” she said.
He shrugged and opened the door.
“Oh, and the clothes you’re wearing,” she said.
He spun around and gaped at her.
Her lips curled in a smile that did not meet her eyes. “Those belong to me, too. Leave them here before you go.”
“But that’s indecent!” he protested.
She returned her attention to the recipe book. BP started out the door.
“Clothes,” she ordered.
He stopped, turned back around, and re-entered the kitchen.
“I can’t walk naked through the streets!” he croaked.
“Well, you won’t be walking anywhere in my property. You own what you came into this world with,” she said. She looked at him. “If you choose to leave, you may go as God made you. If, on the other hand, you choose to continue living under our roof, eating our food, and wearing our clothes, you will abide by our rules. And one of them is to not get suspended from school. Now which is it?”
BP thought a moment. He would be the laughing stock of the Fearsome Flea if he showed up naked. If he just waited it out a bit longer, he could sneak away when Mrs. Clark least expected it. Marge had been at the school today, so chances were the ship was still docked.
He nodded at Mrs. Clark. “Stay,” he said.
“Then go to your room and wait for your father to get home,” said Mrs. Clark as she began mixing the cake batter.
Chapter Fifteen: The Boat
After a chilly, uncomfortable night sleeping in the open at West Beach, Angus and Captain Hank began adding the finishing touches to the animal trough boat. After determining that the salt water would not degrade the cedar sap glue, they painted it on to the stern and applied three rows of wind-up toys grouped by type.
The Pirate's Booty (Inventor-in-Training) Page 10