Enough About Me

by S. G. Wilson

  Backing into the board to keep the chalk away from Lunt, Caveman finally seemed to notice the number problems written there. Excited, he started scratching out answers. Lunt looked just as shocked as I did to see him getting them all right.

  Meticulous nodded his head in pride. “That’s cracking!”

  When he finished, Cave took a big lick of the chalk. The class laughed again as Lunt spluttered in wordless rage.

  “Time to reel him in.” Meticulous raised his fingers to his lips and whistled. Cave perked up at the sound and looked over at us. The filthy Me threw down the chalk, shoved Lunt out of the way, and rushed for the door. Eardrum and Slime jumped from their chairs to block his exit, but Caveman plowed ahead, knocking them to the floor.

  “Like they weren’t mad enough at me already,” I muttered.

  Cave slammed the door on a classroom full of shouting kids and one very angry teacher. Grinning from ear to dirty ear, he pulled Meticulous into a huge bear hug.

  “There, there,” said Meticulous, peeling Cave off him. “Glad to see you too, mate. But we’ve got to go.”

  The classroom door flew open and Eardrum, Slime, and Lunt burst into the hall. They started charging toward us but stopped short when they saw three variations of the same kid standing before them. As they wrapped their heads around that, we made a break for the common yard.

  “Where’s Barbra?” I asked Cave between gulps of air.

  He grunted some gibberish at me.

  “He thinks she’s hiding close by,” translated Meticulous.

  We rounded the corner and reached the lounge, weaving around the busted TV, the shredded pool table, and the upside-down sofa to reach the exit door. The fizz in me had dialed way down, barely more than backwash in an empty soda can now. But I only needed a little in my fingers to work the lock and swing the door open.

  “Took you long enough,” muttered Meticulous as he rushed Caveman through the exit. “I could have picked that lock in half the time.”

  I hung back to look around for Barbra. Instead, I found O’Fartly and Pooplaski storming into the room with a pack of fellow guards behind them.

  Pooplaski clicked a remote. The door behind me slammed shut and locked tight. “Now, where were we before you cut our visit short?” she said.

  “We were talking about the length of his sentence,” said O’Fartly, closing in on me. “I think it’s safe to say his time in juvie just got a lot longer.”

  An earsplitting honk filled the room. Barbra shot out from under the ruined pool table and went straight for O’Fartly’s feet. He jumped out of her way, screaming. I couldn’t blame him. Barbra looked even more bizarre than ever, junk food wrappers clinging to her fur, and an empty ice cream carton perched on her head like a helmet.

  O’Fartly and Pooplaski tore down the hall in a panic with the rest of the guards. So much for their sworn duty to protect us delinquents from harm.

  The latch clicked and the door banged open. Meticulous popped his head through the doorway. “See how brilliant I was with that lock? What did I tell you?”

  Barbra loped through the exit, talons clicking on the floor. I didn’t hesitate to follow right behind her.

  As soon as I set foot in the common yard, Caveman and Meticulous dragged a pipe organ in front of the door I’d just stepped through.

  “Perfect!” I said, helping them steer the contraption into place. No guard would be getting through this anytime soon. Then a thought occurred to me, and I asked it out loud: “Where did we get a pipe organ?!”

  “Special delivery from the Rip,” said Meticulous, giving the organ a final shove. As soon as it slipped into place, Caveman and Barbra started slamming the keys, hooting with pleasure at the random notes they made.

  In the sky above, the puncture wound that was the Rip had gone untreated and gotten a nasty infection—bigger and darker than ever. A steady stream of lightning sparked inside it like some generator in a mad scientist’s laboratory.

  “The storm’s brewing, all right,” said Meticulous, shimmying out of his uniform. He wore his regular colonial clothes underneath. “Should be a real corker.”

  “So what am I supposed to be doing, again?” I asked.

  Meticulous pulled out his portal paper. “This.”

  “And what do I do with that?” I asked.

  Meticulous waved the parchment in front of my face. “Now, you wouldn’t understand the science, but I made this from papyrus and treated it with minerals to attract the cosmic energy of the Rip. I need you to fold it into the right origami key for Earth One.”

  Coming from Meticulous, this really wasn’t such a strange request. His elevator had been powered by the origami drive, which opened portals between dimensions when you folded the moldable energy inside it the right way. Not to brag, but I had a strange sixth sense about what those shapes should be. The right origami key for any given Earth would pop into my head, and my hands would do the rest.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “It’s paper, not the green goop I’m used to working with.”

  “The portal paper is a vessel to collect and hold that goop, as you so delightfully call it,” said Meticulous. “Think of it as a portable origami drive.”

  Lightning flashed above. Cave and Barbra ditched the pipe organ and huddled together again. I almost felt like joining them.

  “Why couldn’t I have folded your portal paper inside?” I asked. “Why did we have to come out here?”

  Meticulous searched the sky. “The Rip is drawn to the paper, especially once it’s folded. It’s like a lightning rod, attracting any stray bolt that shoots down. And we don’t want any stray bolt.”

  “We don’t?”

  “Of course not! We need the storm’s most powerful discharge.”

  “So I have to wait to do the fold until that special bolt is ready?”

  “Exactly.”

  The Rip thundered overhead. It sounded plenty ready to me. “Wait a minute. You know how to do origami. Why do you need me?”

  Meticulous smoothed his eyebrows. “I tried that. Watching the storm for the right moment while folding at the same time proved…distracting.”

  “So you wound up here by accident. Nice one!”

  “Average, you may have many, many faults, faults too numerous to mention. But one thing that can be said about you, perhaps the only good thing: you’re dead accurate when it comes to folding.”

  “Is there supposed to be a compliment in there somewhere?” I asked.

  “It’s not a compliment—it’s a simple fact. It has nothing to do with talent and certainly not with intelligence. It’s not unlike the way a feral kitten off the streets has the instinct to go in a litter box on the first try.”

  “I appreciate that comparison. Thanks.”

  “My point is that you’re the only Me who can even come close to folding as precisely and efficiently as myself. So you’ll do in a pinch while I complete the much harder task of analyzing the storm to find the right moment for us to make our move. Now, let me tell you the origami key for my Earth.”

  My mind fizzed, and an image appeared: “A growling riflebird.”

  Meticulous’s lips tightened. “Lucky guess. Get ready to do the fold while I keep an eye out. Should be any moment.”

  As the sky rattled louder than ever, Lil Battleship, of all people, stepped from behind one of the basketball hoops. He pointed at Cave and Barbra, who still shivered in fright. “Aha!”

  A bolt struck the ground ahead, raising a curtain of smoke between us and the exit door. Something large and angry roared on the other side. Claws as thick as swords ripped apart the smoke, and a huge brown monster burst through. It had the face of a sloth, the teeth of a saber-toothed cat, and the body of a grizzly bear on protein powder.

  “Keep still and it won’t notice,” said Meticulous.
<
br />   We watched, mesmerized, as the creature dug a small crater in the ground with its claws and started licking up the bugs underneath.

  “What is that?!” I asked.

  “A giant ground sloth?” said Lil Battleship, forgetting to be scared. “Like from the Ice Age movies?”

  “A saber-toothed sloth!” I said.

  “Evolution must have taken some exciting twists and turns on whatever Earth this thing comes from,” said Meticulous.

  “Another Earth?!” said Lil Battleship. “So it’s true! You two really are doubles! The multiverse really is a thing!”

  I was almost too confused to return his fist bump.

  Meticulous sighed. “Do you go around telling everybody, Average?”

  “He didn’t tell me anything.” Lil Battleship grinned. “Not while he was awake, at least.”

  “I talk in my sleep?!” I said.

  The Rip rumbled and Barbra squawked in fright. The sloth looked up from its bug buffet and noticed us for the first time. I don’t know if it saw us as food or competition, but it charged forward just the same.

  We sprinted for the big fence surrounding the center, Cave and Barbra leading the way.

  The saber-toothed sloth gained on us with every thud of its paws.

  “Why doesn’t it move slower?” I said. “It’s a sloth!”

  Matching my pace, Meticulous shoved the portal paper into my hands. “Fold!”

  My fingers ran over the glittery parchment, getting a feel for its flexibility. “Is the next bolt the big one?”

  Meticulous looked skyward again. “It’ll have to be!”

  Cave reached the fence first and scrambled up it with Barbra under his arm. Juvenile delinquents tend to be good at climbing things they shouldn’t, which was why this fence had bushels of barbed wire on top. Cave grabbed a clump like it was tinsel. He screamed as the sharp bits sank into his palm. He just hung there with Barbra after that, afraid to go back down.

  Lil Battleship and Meticulous pulled ahead of me and made it halfway up the fence before stopping just under Cave’s butt.

  Meticulous called down to me when I pulled up to the bottom of the fence. “Why haven’t you folded yet?!”

  I was about to tell him off when a nearby voice cried, “Meade?!”

  I’d been so focused on everybody above me that I hadn’t noticed the people straight ahead. Mom and Dad stood with Twig and Nash on the other side of the fence, in visitor parking. My parents looked completely spooked at the sight of their son in triplicate.

  Twig pointed at Meticulous. “I knew it!”

  Nash nodded like he’d known the truth all along.

  Mom and Dad looked from Cave to Meticulous to me. I thought for sure they’d realize the differences between us (Cave was still drooling, after all). I figured they could pick their true kid out of a hundred Mes, but they seemed clueless about which of us to turn to. They didn’t know their own son anymore.

  Just then, a bolt of energy tore from the Rip and shot to the Earth, striking Mom, Dad, Twig, and Nash all at once. The blast blew out my ears and scorched my eyes. But even after my senses cleared, I didn’t see or hear any sign of them.

  The Rip had stolen my parents and my friends away from me.

  * * *

  —

  My brain was a spinning wheel on the screen of a broken computer. “Th-they’re gone!” I spluttered.

  “They just got sent somewhere else!” Meticulous yelled down to me. “They’ll be okay! We’ll find them! Just start folding, like we talked about!”

  But I barely heard him over the roar of the sloth barreling toward me. In seconds I’d be a kabob in its fangs.

  The fence rattled and shook as Lil Battleship jumped to the ground behind the sloth. He grabbed its tail and tugged hard, stopping the monster in its tracks. The sloth swung around and chomped those massive fangs at my roommate but only bit air as the monster lost its balance. Cave and Barbra had leapt off the fence and landed on the sloth’s back.

  The pair slid to the ground, falling beside Lil Battleship. The sloth looked from one to the other, as if deciding who to eat first.

  These three had risked their lives for me while I’d stood by the fence like a goob. I had to help them.

  Meticulous must have had the same idea. We both charged straight at the sloth as the Rip roared overhead. As we ran, Meticulous pointed at the paper in my hand. “Fold us a way to Earth One!”

  Sprinting toward a monster while wondering if your parents and friends have lived or died isn’t the best situation in which to make origami. Instead of the growling riflebird Meticulous had wanted, my shaky hands produced some funky creature with three heads. Before I could go back and fix it, the Rip struck again, this time zapping Cave, Lil Battleship, Barbra, and the sloth into nothing.

  I barely heard Meticulous scream over the roar of the next bolt, which struck the origami in my hands. Somehow, the paper sucked up all the voltage, so I didn’t get fried. The thing with three heads that I’d folded turned green and glowy, just like the goop I’d handled in the origami drive. It hopped out of my hands and spun in the air, stretching flat like tossed pizza dough. In moments, it grew into a portal. On the other side, I could make out another common yard just like this one.

  Meticulous rushed through the portal and pulled me along with him. “Did you make the right fold?” he asked.

  As we stumbled into another Earth, all I could think to say was “Uh, close enough?”

  Getting zapped through an origami portal and teleported to a different dimension is hard enough without having poo thrown in your face. The moment I set foot on my first new Earth in months, splat! I was pummeled with a big hunk of soft and stinky dung.

  “Score!” I heard a kid’s voice shout. “You’re out! Game over!”

  I scraped away enough gunk to see that I was on a basketball court like the one we’d just left. In the same common yard, surrounded by the same fence, connected to the same juvie center. But that’s where the similarities stopped. For one, the place was full of inmates on break. For another…

  “They’re plant people?” said Meticulous.

  The kids on the court had ginormous flower blossoms for heads: roses, dandelions, daisies, and other plants. Their arms and legs were made out of stems and roots that had twisted together. It was like an entire botanical garden had clawed out of the soil to see what the surface world was all about.

  As more poo slid off my face, I saw that thick and springy topsoil had replaced the blacktop, and giant Venus flytraps stood in for nets. But that was nothing compared to the referees. A pair of dung beetles as big as people clomped along the sidelines on their hind legs. They wore black-and-white-striped shirts with short sleeves that showed off their spiky insect arms. I could accept the idea of an Earth with bug people, but why did it have to be dung beetle people?

  The larger beetle clicked its pincers in irritation. “What’s that Me doing on the court?!” I knew that voice: Pooplaski.

  “Hey, Me!” shouted the other beetle in the grating tones of O’Fartly. “Get off the court! You know the rules! Mes aren’t allowed on this side of the grounds!”

  Could these be alternate versions of my least favorite guards? Had I landed on an Earth where everybody I knew was a bug or a plant-human-hybrid person?

  Then I saw the Rip in the sky. It had doubled in size. I’d only ever seen it this big in one place before.

  “Earth Zero?!” Meticulous cried beside me. He’d avoided getting hit by the dung. Lucky him. “This is rubbish! You brought me to Earth Zero?”

  I shrugged, though that might have been my body shaking from nerves. “Is that where we are? I folded something with three heads by accident.”

  Meticulous pinched his nose, I guess because I stank. “You made a chimera?! By accident?!”

 
Oh right, a chimera: a mismatched monster for a mismatched world.

  Meticulous pointed to a distant mountain with a giant face carved on it like Mount Rushmore. The sculpture wasn’t finished, but there was no mistaking its subject: me. I’d been Rushmored. The Me up there looked infinitely more confident, charming, and focused than I’d ever felt. What had he done to get his face turned into a monument on a mountain?

  “I remember my drone spotting that monstrosity the last time I was here,” said Meticulous. “Something so daft would only pop up on Earth Zero.”

  “Who you calling daft?” bellowed a kid in ripped jeans with a sunflower head. Something about his voice sounded familiar, and not just the loudness. “And when did you jump in on the game? Dung ball is for dryads only!”

  Dryads? Weren’t those Greek mythology plant spirits or something? These kids looked anything but spiritual.

  The dryads tightened their circle around us. Sunflower shoved me backward, and I bumped into the petals of a punk-rock tulip.

  “Watch it!” Tulip whined in the unmistakable voice of Slime. This was a dryad counterpart to my hated roomie. That had to mean the loudmouth sunflower was Eardrum.

  Slime grabbed my arms and held them behind my back with brittle hands that felt like the leaves of some underwatered houseplant.

  “You can’t go two minutes without getting us in trouble, can you?” said Meticulous, dodging the punch of a poison-ivy kid in a puffy jacket. Meticulous raised his voice to address the crowd. “Any of you blokes seen another chap who looks like us, just a little less tidy? He’s traveling with an especially ugly bird?”

  The dryads were too focused on beating us up to answer.

  I tried to shake myself loose but worried about breaking their fragile plant arms. One wrong move and they might snap.

  Meticulous didn’t seem to share my concern as he yanked and pulled to get free of Poison Ivy and a tattooed hydrangea. “They survived, I know it!” he told me, ducking from Hydrangea’s reach. “The Rip doesn’t destroy things. It just moves them around. It either zapped our people to Earth Zero or sent them to another Earth entirely. I’m sure of it.”