by S. G. Wilson
“Why don’t we have a coach?” I asked Motor.
“Budget cuts,” he said, setting his backpack down on the bench.
Twig ran out to shake hands with Nash and consult with the referee, a living tree person in a black-and-white-striped jersey. Motor, Meticulous, and I all snuck a peek at Mom and Dad in their seats up front.
“I still can’t get over seeing those two,” said Motor. “Especially Dad.”
“Quite,” said Meticulous, his voice almost tender. “I have my issues with Father, but seeing him comforting Mum like that, well…”
“Maybe you could hang out with him or something when you get home,” said Motor.
Meticulous shrugged. “Maybe.”
I thought about my version of Mom and Dad and what Earth they might be on right now. Were Twig, Lil Battleship, and the rest okay too? I couldn’t let myself think about them, or the dung beetles would swarm my insides. So I changed the subject. “What Mom and Dad and Twig said about None of Me made him sound like not such a bad guy after all. You think that’s for real? Is he really out to fix the Rip?”
Meticulous bent over to stretch his legs. “If he is, he hasn’t succeeded yet.”
Motor did a few halfhearted jumping jacks. “They say he’s been cursing Me Corp. products.”
“Yes, we heard that too,” said Meticulous, standing up again. “And I don’t believe it. Cursing your own product line makes no business sense. Look, None of Me could be the Dark Lord, he could be the Fuzzy-Wuzzy Lord—it doesn’t bloody matter. We just have to find him and get to Earth One.”
Twig jogged back over to us. “Hey, triple threat, let’s get our heads in the game! It’s about to start!”
Mr. Clark, the school janitor on my Earth, stepped onto the court, big white feathery wings sticking out of his back. He carried a ball that changed its shape in his hands, growing as big as a basketball, then as small as a golf ball, then stretching into a football.
Meticulous and I gave Motor the same baffled look.
Motor shrugged. “That’s why they call it change-a-ball. It’ll make sense in a second. Or not.”
Twig looked worried. “You guys went over how to play the game, right?”
“Uh, sure,” I said, not wanting to let her down. “It’s just, where we come from, the sports equipment tends to stay in one shape.”
Twig chewed on a piece of her hair. “No offense, but that sounds pretty boring.”
Mr. Clark stretched out his wings to get everybody’s attention. “As principal of this school, I want a good clean game,” he told us. “And would the visiting team please go easy on these kids?”
A cocky grin spread across Nash’s face.
The tree referee pulled a small harp from his pocket and ran his fingers along the strings.
“Time to play ball!” yelled Mr. Clark, throwing the ball in the air. Nash and Twig both jumped for it, but Nash came away with the prize.
“Medusa ball!” he shouted.
It was like the tablecloth of the world had been pulled out from under us. Basketball hoops rose up on either end of the court as Nash and his teammates sprinted across the floor. The ball they now dribbled and passed to each other had sprouted squirming snake tails all over. I could have sworn I saw a giant set of snake eyes somewhere under all that wriggling. “Don’t look it in the eyes!” yelled Twig. “You’ll get turned to stone!”
Before Meticulous and I even knew what was happening, Nash shot the creepy ball and scored. I’d felt jealous and resentful every time I’d seen Nash sink a basket back home, but now that I was on the opposing team, I could do something about it. I swore to myself that if I couldn’t beat him, I’d at least keep him from trouncing us completely.
“Come on!” yelled Twig on her way down the court. “I need help guarding Nash!”
Motor followed behind her, giving me an apologetic look that said, Well, that’s change-a-ball for you.
When Twig reached Nash, he kept the ball out of her reach just long enough to shout, “Mace ball!”
The floor sprouted grass, and the basketball hoops widened into soccer goals. The ball morphed to iron as Nash kicked it toward a teammate. Unlike the rest of us, Twig was ready. She stole the ball with her feet and sent it sailing toward Motor.
With the flying carpet in his overall pocket lightening every step he took, Motor reached the ball and lined up a perfect shot. Then we all found out why mace ball was called mace ball: spikes shot from the surface just as his foot connected with it.
Yelping in pain, Motor grabbed his foot and hopped in place. Nash tackled him for no good reason.
The tree referee plucked his harp. “Penalty! Unnecessary roughness!”
Twig called a time-out, and the three of us joined her in a huddle. Before she could dress us down, I cut her off with a question. “I understand now that whoever touches the ball gets to change the game. But if the game is always changing, so is the scoring system, right? How does anybody win?”
Twig gave me a 75 percent eyebrow arch. “Didn’t Motor explain this? Or do you Mes just never listen? You have to get the highest score by the time the clock runs out.”
“Theoretically, there’s another way,” said Meticulous, acting bored. “You could switch to a game like disgraceball and tag all the opposing players out.”
“Disgraceball?” I asked.
“I believe it’s called dodgeball on your Earth,” said Meticulous. “Sports from other Earths count, right?”
Twig looked intrigued. “Maybe. My Meade had the change-a-ball take on all kinds of funky shapes last time we played a one-on-one practice game together. But you can’t really tag more than one person in change-a-ball. After you hit somebody, any nearby teammate of theirs could scoop up the ball and shift the game to a different sport.”
“Oh, right,” said Motor. “It’s hopeless, then. We don’t stand a chance out there.”
Twig punched him on the arm, then Meticulous, then Me. It gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling. And a bruise.
“Buck up!” she said. “The game’s not over yet. Let’s get back out there and start winning!”
Murmuring agreement, we broke up the huddle and hoofed it back to our positions. On the way there, Meticulous ran alongside me.
“You know the real reason she’s doing this, don’t you?” he asked.
“She told us already: to help save the school,” I said.
“Rubbish!” he said. “She wants to be near us because she fancies None of Me. And with him gone, we’re the next-best thing. We remind her of him.”
“As if!” Deep down, though, I liked the idea that this Twig might have a thing for None of Me. Then again, if None of Me really was bad, what did that say about her judgment?
“She certainly doesn’t fancy Nash, I can tell you that,” Meticulous added. “I’ve never met a Twig who preferred a Nash to one of us.”
I couldn’t believe Meticulous had actually said something that made me feel better.
The refer-tree strummed the harp again, and the field changed into something like a tennis court, but with lava pits and fire spouts. We had to dodge all sorts of eruptions as we chased the ball. I wound up crashing into the net headfirst while Meticulous and Motor bonked into each other.
Everybody in the crowd laughed. I couldn’t blame them.
“Look alive, cleaning clones!” said Twig. She reached the ball and shouted “Soot ball!”
The court changed into a football field and the ball became a pigskin that Twig hurled at me. When I caught it, the ball shot a thick cloud of ash in my face. I cleared my eyes just in time for a perfect view of Nash and his teammates barreling down on me. In seconds, they’d steamroll me flat.
My brain did a more elaborate cliff dive than it had before, this one starting with a handstand and followed by a double twist and a t
riple somersault. I’d never survive this. For about the hundredth time that day, I wished for the fizz to come back.
“Change it up, Average!” yelled Motor.
Change it to what? My mind felt empty as a cardboard box in the rain. The best I could manage was to hurl the ball at Nash, if only for the distraction. Just before the ball left my fingers, an idea occurred to me.
“Dung ball!” I shouted.
The ball changed into a big round hunk of poop as it sailed through the air and smacked Nash’s perfect face. It hit him so hard that the dung splattered the rest of his team too.
The ref twanged his harp. “Game over!” he cried.
Nash clawed at the gunk on his face, just like I’d done a few hours before. “Dung ball?! This doesn’t count! How can he win just by flinging poop?!”
“By striking every member of your team with a dung ball,” said the ref. “That’s how the game’s been played for centuries by the native dryad population of a world on a different plane from this one.”
Mr. Clark puffed up his wing feathers as he addressed the crowd. “Polymagic Vocational wins! This means we get the grant money! We get to stay open!”
Gasps of surprise turned into roars of joy as the crowd poured from the stands and rushed the playing field, hand-farting all the way. Twig ran up to me and almost gave me a hug, then thought better of it. She slugged me in the arm instead.
Motor wasn’t so reserved. He pulled me into a bear hug and gave me a noogie. Meticulous nodded in my direction, which, coming from him, might as well have been a standing ovation.
As Motor and Twig recited the blow-by-blow replay of my dung ball maneuver, I looked over to the local version of Mom and Dad. They smiled back at me in a sad sort of way. We waved goodbye to each other as they got up to leave.
The cheering fans hoisted me onto Twig’s shoulders. I’d always dreamed of taking in a sea of adoring fans from this sort of view. Oddly enough, those particular daydreams never included the sight of Lunt, O’Fartly, and Pooplaski pushing through the throng with old-timey manacles in hand. Manacles that looked just the right size for a Me.
Nash, still smeared in poo, shoved people out of the way to clear a path for the teachers dead-set on arresting Motor, Meticulous, and me.
“Stop this celebration!” Lunt yelled.
Everybody went quiet.
“Macadamia Macon and his duplicates are hereby required to report to the dungeon for punishment!” Lunt continued.
As O’Fartly and Pooplaski read out the charges against us from a scroll, Motor broke out a Gnome Gnibbler candy bar. He flipped the unopened snack over and over in his palm. “This is bad,” he said. “We’ll never get out of this one.”
Over at the bench, Meticulous scanned the MePad. The device must have finished its calculations, because he seemed excited by what he read. He gave us a thumbs-up, then pointed to the exit and slipped away.
“He’s ditching us?” said Motor.
“No, he just wants us to meet him outside.” I hoped I sounded convincing, because I wasn’t so sure myself.
Motor gestured to the huge hand-farting crowd surrounding us. “But we can’t get out, and you know he’ll never wait for us.”
“Hang on,” said Twig.
She slammed her hands together and bubbles spilled between her fingers. The moment Lunt, Pooplaski, O’Fartly, and Nash broke through the crowd to reach us, Twig opened her arms wide. A blizzard of bubbles filled the air, slamming into the wizards and knocking them off their feet.
The crowd squeezed out a deafening roar of hand-farts.
“This is not a good deed,” said the MeMinder X.
“Don’t ruin the moment,” I told the watch.
Unfurling his flying carpet, Motor eyed my stupid watch. “It has some sort of…conscience?”
“Dad added it,” I said. “It’s mostly just a pain in the butt.”
“I don’t know, could have its uses.” Motor folded his legs crisscross at the front of the carpet as it rose into the air.
Twig turned to me with a familiar grin on her face.
“We owe you one,” I told her as I climbed onto the carpet behind Motor. I spilled a few packs of Harpy Honey Hair from yet another cup holder on the way up.
“Do me a favor,” Twig said as we rose higher and higher. “Give my Meade a message when you see him. Tell him, ‘See ya on the other side.’ ”
* * *
—
We flew all over the campus looking for Meticulous, but had to leave when they sicced a ghost biker gang on us. By that point, we had no other option but to flee in the direction of Me Corp. Tower.
“He’s gonna beat us to None of Me!” I said, dodging a flock of tiny knights jousting with each other on the backs of flapping pigeons.
“Maybe he won’t be able to figure out the clue without us,” said Motor, weaving the carpet around a group of condos shaped like giant genie bottles.
“He’s Meticulous,” I said. “He probably figured out the riddle the moment he saw it.”
“Well, maybe we’ll find him before he makes it there.”
We spotted Meticulous a few blocks later getting harassed by a pack of teenage elves outside the Transformed Troll Hair and Beauty Salon. Motor drove the kids off by spraying them with a can of Basilisk Venom Energy Drink as he buzzed overhead.
“Well, if it isn’t the deserter,” I said as we hovered just out of his reach.
Meticulous waved Motor’s MePad in the air. “Don’t give me that! I just figured I should clear out before they searched our stuff and found the clue. Plus, I just had to change out of that horrible uniform. Couldn’t wait. So let me on board already.”
Motor and I had fun hemming and hawing about giving him a ride, until Meticulous reminded us that he had the clue we needed to enter the tower. Motor lowered the carpet just enough to let Meticulous hop on.
The carpet sagged lower to the ground with a third passenger, but it flew well enough.
“Why were you letting those elves push you around?” I asked as we buzzed over an off-leash park for pet gremlins.
“Don’t you remember?” said Meticulous. “All my skills were just a joke. Turns out I was fizzing all along. And now that I can’t fizz, I’m useless. I can’t fight back.”
“I can’t fizz right now either, not in any serious way,” I said. “But you don’t see me giving up.”
Meticulous scoffed. “I’m not giving up! I’m just expecting better service from you two next time. Until I can acquire some real bodyguards, you’ll have to do.”
I probably should have pushed him off the carpet, but he had a point. With my fizz drained away and maybe never coming back, I wasn’t good for anything. What did I even contribute to the group? Meticulous had the brains and Motor had the magic. They might decide to just ditch me as dead weight at any moment.
“Why don’t you tell us about the MePad’s translation of the clue?” Motor asked as we approached Me Corp. Tower.
“About time you asked,” said Meticulous. “It’s a poem.”
He cleared his throat and recited the lines from memory, like the show-off that he was:
“To escape the green arms
When they give ye pursuit,
Seek ye the magic
That won’t let them take root.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“You tell me,” said Meticulous.
“What, you don’t plan to contribute?” I asked.
“I’ve already contributed a great deal and will continue to do so,” said Meticulous. “But riddles bore me and I don’t do rhymes.”
We circled around Me Corp. Tower and saw the moving vines up close. They wriggled up and down the building, as thick around as people and covered in thorns the size of traffic cones. News crews swarmed the
front entrance, so Motor landed the carpet in the back parking lot. We couldn’t get too close for fear the vines would grab us.
The sight of all those squirmy, thorny tentacles brought out the pessimist in Motor. “This is hopeless,” he said. “We’ll never get past that plant monster.”
“But we’ve got the clue,” said Meticulous. “Surely you two gits can figure it out.”
“ ‘Seek ye the magic that won’t let them take root,’ ” said Motor. “It sounds like a medieval gardening manual.”
“That’s it!” I said. “Vinegar!”
“What’s magic about vinegar?” said Meticulous.
“You both helped Aunt Anna in her garden that one spring, right?” I said.
“All I remember is the sunburn,” said Motor.
Meticulous shuddered. “And the grit that got under my fingernails.”
I rolled my eyes at both of them. “Remember how she killed weeds? She used vinegar and wouldn’t shut up about it. She said it was true gardening magic. This might be None of Me’s idea of an inside joke for us Mes.”
“Not a very funny joke,” said Meticulous. “And even if you’re right, where do we get vinegar?”
Motor pulled a spray bottle full of blue liquid from his bag. The label read Window Cleaner.
“Good for you,” said Meticulous. “Now we just have to find some windows to clean.”
Motor shook the bottle and the liquid turned clear. The label now read Vinegar. “It’s an Every-Spray bottle,” he said. “Standard issue for all students at Polymagic Vocational.”
“But that’s a small bottle,” said Meticulous. “And those are big vines.”
Motor twisted the stream knob at the tip of the nozzle as he walked up to the first vine in our path. He pumped the handle and, against all reason, a stream as thick and strong as a fire hose shot from the bottle.
The vine shrank back like a time-lapse video of kudzu growth in reverse. As Motor kept spraying, enough of the green went away to reveal the rear door.