by David Lubar
Who was the fifteenth president?
“Lincoln,” Rusty wrote. At least that was an easy one. He went on to the rest of the questions, barely managing to finish before time ran out.
As he left the room at the end of the day, Mrs. Grimkin called to him. “Rusty …”
“Yes?” He waited for her to tell him the spelling grade was a mistake.
“It’s good to see you finally making an effort,” she said.
“Thank you.”
Rusty hurried out. On the way home, he almost walked right past the deli without noticing anything. But an odd difference caught his eye. He stared at the sign over the door: The Pickle Barrle.
“But …” Rusty ran home and pulled the dictionary from the bookcase. There it was, just like on the sign and on his paper—“barrle.”
“I must have forgotten or something,” he said, trying to remember exactly what the sign had looked like the day before. Spelling wasn’t his best subject, so he knew the dictionary must be right.
Rusty looked up one other thing and found bad news. According to the dictionary, Lincoln was the sixteenth president, not the fifteenth. That meant he had at least one wrong on the history quiz.
Eager to get it over with, Rusty started on his homework. Mrs. Grimkin had told them to write an essay called “What I Do After School.” At least he could use the spell-checker on his computer to make sure everything was all right. He’d never bothered using it before. But he didn’t want to risk making any more mistakes.
Rusty wrote carefully, trying to be sure there were no errors. The spell-checker caught a bunch of problems but fixed all of them. Once he was sure his essay was perfect, he printed it out. The first copy smeared as it came through the printer. Rusty made a second copy. That one came out fine, though he got a smudge of ink on the back of the page.
The next day, when Rusty turned in his homework, Mrs. Grimkin handed back his history test. Sometimes she let the class read while she graded papers. As the kids around him were taking out their books, Rusty stared at his test. A+. Another perfect score. But what about Lincoln?
Rusty reached into his pocket, pulled out a handful of coins, and grabbed a penny. At least, it looked like a penny. But he didn’t recognize the face on the front of the coin. “Who’s this?” he whispered, showing the penny to Steve.
Steve gave him a puzzled look. “Grant. Who else? You know, president during the Civil War.”
The penny fell from Rusty’s fingers and clattered to the floor. My mistakes become true, he realized. But not until Mrs. Grimkin reads them. She must have read the history tests last night. Suddenly, with shaking hands, Rusty grabbed the smeared copy of his homework.
“Check this, okay?” he asked, shoving it at Steve.
Mrs. Grimkin glanced up, said “Shush,” and then went back to grading the homework.
“Kind of late for that, isn’t it?” Steve whispered. “You already handed it in.”
“Please.”
Steve shrugged and took the copy from him.
Rusty held his breath and watched Steve’s face for any sign of trouble. A moment later, Steve grinned.
Oh no … , Rusty thought.
“You didn’t check this very carefully, did you?” Steve asked.
“The computer checked it,” Rusty said. “There aren’t any mistakes.” There can’t be any mistakes.
Steve shook his head. “No spelling mistakes, but that doesn’t mean no mistakes. Here, look.” He held out the paper and pointed.
Rusty read the sentence. He didn’t see anything wrong. The words were all spelled correctly, as far as he could tell. “It looks fine to me.”
“Read it again,” Steve said, pointing to the middle of the page.
Rusty read the paragraph. It was about what happened when he got home from school. He’d written: “My mom and dad both work. Some kids have a parent around in the afternoon. I don’t have any body.” He looked at Steve again, puzzled.
“Right there,” Steve said, tapping the words “any body.” “That’s not what you meant to say. You meant ‘anybody.’” Steve smirked, then added, “One word, not two. Big difference.”
For an instant, Rusty didn’t get it. Then, like the world’s largest snowball, the meaning hit him smack in the face. His gaze shot toward the front of the room. Mrs. Grimkin was reading a paper with a smudge of ink on the back. Rusty had to stop her before she read his mistake. He leaped from his seat.
Air whooshed past his ears.
He was falling.
His head hit the desk. Rusty looked down. It wasn’t easy. He didn’t have any body.
“Good essay,” Mrs. Grimkin said, walking up to his desk. She put the paper down, patted Rusty on the head, and walked away.
After a while, the bell rang. The rest of the kids left. Rusty, who didn’t have any body, watched them go. A while later, Mrs. Grimkin got up, turned off the light, and went out the door. Rusty, who couldn’t head anywhere, just stayed on his desk.
It could be worse, he thought. That was when his nose started to itch.
HALFWAY HOME
“Man, that was a long day,” Amy said as she walked out the front door of the school. When she reached the corner, she paused and looked down the street in the direction of her house. She could either follow the sidewalk or cut through the new development that was being built in the old field across from the school.
The road was a little hard to walk on in the new section. The workers weren’t finished yet, and most of the streets were covered with large pieces of gravel. But it was a lot shorter than going the regular way. Amy decided to cut through the development.
She walked onto the new road that sliced through the side of the field, then turned off on the long road that ran all the way through the development. Amy could follow it to the end, and then she just had to cross the street and walk a half a block to her house.
The road dipped down a little, then rose back up. At the far end, she could see a stop sign. All around, there were the frames of half-built houses, covered with silver and pink strips of insulation.
As Amy walked, she thought about her day in school. It had been pretty much like any other day, except for that thing her teacher had told them about. Miss Kripke had this period she always set aside for what she called Expanded Horizons. That meant she talked about stuff she thought was interesting, like geology or word origins.
Sometimes it actually was interesting. She’d talked about sports or outer space a couple of times. And once, she’d told them about a guy who’d spent his life carving a sculpture into the side of a mountain. But today it wasn’t exciting or interesting. Amy had just found it confusing. As far as she could tell, so did most of the rest of the class.
She looked ahead as she walked. Each step brought her a bit closer to the stop sign.
Closer. That’s what Miss Kripke had talked about. Amy tried to remember the name of the thing they’d discussed. Right. It was about some old Greek guy named Zero. No, not Zero. Zeno. Miss Kripke said he’d come up with something called Zeno’s paradox. She’d said he proved that motion was impossible.
Amy knew that was stupid. Obviously, things moved. She kicked a rock and watched it skitter across the road. In class, a couple of the kids had pretty much pointed the same thing out. One of the kids in the back row, Sammy Johnson, had even tossed his pencil across the room and shouted, “See that? It moved.”
“I know it seems that things can move. But Zeno looked at it differently,” Miss Kripke had explained. “To walk from my desk to the wall, I have to get halfway to the wall first. Right?”
“Right,” the other kids in the class had said.
“Big yawn,” Amy muttered.
“But, before I can go halfway, I have to go half of halfway.”
That’s when Amy had started to lose track of the concept. Miss Kripke kept talking, explaining the whole thing. It was something about if you kept cutting the distance in half you never ran out of pieces. And if you h
ad to go halfway, first you had to go half of that distance. And so on and so on.
Amy shook her head, as if to get rid of the memory of the class. She looked up. The stop sign seemed closer, but she was surprised she hadn’t reached it yet.
She kept going, feeling the sharp edges of the gravel through her sneakers. She walked. She got closer.
But she wasn’t getting there.
Amy stopped for a moment. She looked over her shoulder and wondered whether she should just go back the way she’d come. Off in the distance, at the other end of the road, she saw a street sign. But she wasn’t sure whether she could ever reach that sign, either.
Amy turned back toward the stop sign and kept walking. As the day grew darker and the sign grew closer, Amy found herself wishing she’d paid more attention in class. She knew, now, that she’d never reach the stop sign. She knew that she’d be walking on this road forever. She only wished she could understand why.
But maybe she could figure it out. She had plenty of time for thinking.
HOP TO IT
Morty almost walked right past the grasshopper. When he first noticed it, he wasn’t even sure whether it was an insect or a small stick.
“Hey,” he said to Carl. “What’s that?” Morty walked over to the side of the road and bent down to take a closer look at the insect.
“It’s a cricket or something,” Carl said, joining Morty.
“That’s not a cricket. It’s a grasshopper.” Morty was pretty sure crickets were flatter and shaped differently. This was definitely a grasshopper. Not the big green kind but the small brown kind.
“Doesn’t matter what it is,” Carl said. “It’s dead.”
Morty bent closer. He was ready to spring back at any moment, just in case the grasshopper tried to jump up at his face. But the insect didn’t move. “It’s not dead. If it was dead, it would be on its side or something.” He took a deep breath and blew on the grasshopper.
It still didn’t move.
Morty leaned even closer, looking for any sign of life.
“Dead,” Carl said. “Come on. Let’s get going.”
Morty wasn’t sure. He raised his foot and brought it down hard. He smacked the asphalt just behind the grasshopper.
It jumped halfway across the road.
“Cool,” Carl said, running over toward it. “My turn.” He stomped his foot next to the grasshopper.
It jumped again.
Morty laughed. This was definitely fun. He went over and stomped again. The grasshopper jumped again. “Pretty stupid bug,” Morty said.
“Yeah.” Carl stomped. His foot almost landed on the grasshopper.
“Careful,” Morty said. “You’ll squish it.”
Carl gave him a disgusted look. “Don’t tell me you care about a bug.”
Morty shook his head. “I don’t care, but if you squish it, we’ll have to find another one to play with.”
Morty stomped again. The stupid bug jumped again. After Carl stomped, Morty started trying to take two turns in a row.
“Hey, not fair,” Carl said.
“I found it,” Morty said. “And I figured it out.” It was his discovery, so he felt he should have more turns. He stomped. Then he ran to get to the bug before Carl.
The race was on.
Morty was faster than Carl, and he was better at guessing which way the grasshopper was going to jump. So Morty got to make most of the stomps. But Carl got in plenty, too. They both stomped and pushed and ran until they could hardly breathe.
It was Carl, rushing to try to get in a turn, who made the mistake.
He stomped the grasshopper.
“Carl! You ruined it,” Morty said. But he wasn’t really angry. He’d been getting tired, and his foot had started to hurt from all the stomping.
“So what? It was just a stupid bug,” Carl said. “There are lots of others. The world is full of bugs.”
Morty opened his mouth. But he didn’t say anything right away. For the first time in a long time, he looked around. He’d been so busy chasing the grasshopper and stomping that he’d paid no attention to where he’d been going. He turned to his left. Nothing looked familiar. He turned to his right. Nothing looked familiar there, either.
“Stupid bug,” he said out loud.
“Where are we?” Carl asked.
“I don’t know.”
They were on a road, but there weren’t any houses in sight. There was nothing around them but fields filled with tall weeds. The road itself ended just ahead of them. It came to a sudden stop, as if the people building it had gotten tired and left to do something more interesting.
Carl took a sudden step back from the squished mess that had once been a grasshopper. “I think it led us here,” he said.
“That’s stupid,” Morty said. He didn’t like the sound of panic in Carl’s voice. “It was just a stupid bug. And why would a stupid little bug want to bring us here?”
Carl took another step back. “It led us here,” he said again. “If someone was chasing you, wouldn’t you run somewhere for help?”
Morty couldn’t believe Carl would say such ridiculous stuff. But he also felt it was time to find their way home. Something about this place made him nervous. “Let’s go.”
A shadow fell over him from behind.
Morty turned.
It was another grasshopper. But not a little one. This was a big one. Really big. Bigger than Morty—a lot bigger than Morty.
Morty opened his mouth to scream.
The grasshopper raised one of its front legs. It stomped down. The scream caught in Morty’s throat as he saw the bug squish Carl.
The leg came up again.
Stupid bug, Morty thought.
But it was stupid Morty who got squished.
NOTHING LIKE A HAMMOCK
IT. was the middle of the summer, and I was bored. My usual friends weren’t around today, so I decided to go see Cody Peterson. I hadn’t seen him since school let out for the summer, but we’d gotten together at my house a couple of times last year and he was a lot of fun. I knew Cody lived down near the end of Randolph Street. I wasn’t sure which house, but I figured it wouldn’t be hard to find him. Randolph Street isn’t very long.
When I got there, it turned out that most of the houses on Randolph Street had names on the mailboxes. There were only two that didn’t, and they were right next to each other.
I checked out the first house. It almost looked like nobody lived there. The windows were shut and the curtains were closed. But I figured it wouldn’t do any harm to find out for sure, so I went up the porch and rang the bell.
The door flew open before my finger even left the bell.
“Hello, young lad, what can I do for you?” the man asked. He was tall and thin. Strangely enough, he was wearing sunglasses, which most people don’t do when they’re inside a house—especially a dark house. As he spoke to me, he kept rubbing his hands together. He was kind of leaning over, too, so his head was almost right above mine.
“I’m looking for Cody … .” I expected him to tell me I had the wrong house. He didn’t look at all like he was related to Cody.
“Cody’s out,” the man said. “But he should be returning any second. Why don’t you go around back and wait for him.”
“I could wait here,” I said.
“Nonsense. Go back and relax. Stretch out in the hammock if you want. It’s very comfortable. There’s nothing like a hammock.”
“Sure. Thanks.” I walked around the side of the house and went through a gate into the backyard. The yard was surrounded by a fence—a high, solid fence of wood. There wasn’t much to see there—no swing set or anything. Just the hammock, which really did look comfortable. It was made of thick ropes stretched out between two trees. What the heck—no reason not to relax while I waited for Cody. And when it came to relaxing, there really was nothing like a hammock.
I knew how to get into a hammock because my uncle Frank had one at his house up in Maine. I push
ed down at the edge and rolled in. My body sank right into the ropes. It felt so nice and relaxing. I closed my eyes.
“I’M HOME!”
I opened my eyes and lifted my head when I heard the shout. That was Cody’s voice for sure. But I didn’t see him. I heard more shouts. They were coming from the other side of the fence. Then I heard another voice, also on the other side of the fence.
“Cody, wipe your feet before you come in.”
“Yes, Mom,” Cody said.
I heard a door slam, on the other side of the fence.
The other side?
The thought hit me so hard I felt my body jerk. This wasn’t Cody’s yard. He lived next door. Which meant that the guy I’d talked to wasn’t Cody’s dad. I needed to get out of here. I started to sit up.
I couldn’t.
I was stuck. I tugged and pulled. The outside ropes were fine, but the middle ones, all through the center of the hammock, were sticky, holding me trapped.
I heard another door. This one didn’t slam shut. This one creaked open. And it wasn’t on the other side of the fence. I looked toward the house. The man slipped out the back door. He dropped to the ground, crawling on his arms and legs. Another pair of legs came out from his sides, through slits in his shirt, and then another. Eight legs. As he crawled toward me, the sunglasses fell from his face, revealing his eyes. They weren’t human eyes.
I struggled to break free.
It was no use. I wasn’t in a hammock. I was in a web. And even though they might look a little alike, a web is nothing like a hammock.
PUNCTURATION
Connie paused outside the entrance of the shop. There was no reason in the world not to go in. Everyone was doing it. Absolutely everyone in school except her had done it. Most of them had done it years ago. Nearly all of them had done it more than once.
“Well,” Nicole asked, “are you going in?”
“Sure,” Connie said. She glanced back at her mom, who smiled and nodded. “Why not?” She walked into Peggy’s Piercing Palace and looked for a salesperson.
A woman came over. “Can I help you?”