by Paul Noth
This was the wrong thing to say to me.
“Hey!” I said. “I do too have a lizard, and guess what, he’s not constipated like yours. He’s magic!”
“Ho,” said Felix. “So now it’s a magic lizard? Ho-ho!”
“Oh … go poop the Mighty Thor!” I said.
I stormed down the stairs and out the front door.
I fumed the whole walk home, until I remembered something:
I had never wanted to be Felix’s lab partner in the first place. I wanted to be Nev Everly’s lab partner. And tomorrow I would ask her. This was just the push I needed. Tomorrow morning, first thing in homeroom, I would ask Nev to be my lab partner.
Well, I wouldn’t just ask her … because that was impossible.
So I devised a clever plan that would make asking her not impossible.
First, I’d need a little help from my younger sister Kayla.
Then I would be able to ask Nev tomorrow.
And once we were lab partners … who knows?
Maybe we’d become math buddies.
CHAPTER 6
NEVER EVERLY
Nev’s first name was Nevada, but I had started thinking of it as “Never,” because talking to her seemed so impossible.
I figured my only hope was to make her laugh. That would break the ice between us, and then asking her to be my lab partner would stop being impossible. But I couldn’t just walk up to her with some preplanned joke. That would look desperate. It needed to be spontaneous. The best way would be to wait until she made me laugh, and then hit her with a hilarious comeback. Here’s how I saw it happening:
But here’s what always happened instead:
The perfect funny comeback always arrived way too late. What would have been genius at 11:00 a.m. was useless at 5:30 p.m.
And that’s where my sister Kayla could be of help.
Kayla, now ten, had an imaginary bee named Alphonso who helped her predict the future. It sounds crazy, but if you’ve met Kayla, or read the last book, you know it really works.
Kayla could “attach” to anything she saw or heard.
So if she “attached” to me, she would see all my possible pasts and possible futures laid out in hexagons, like this:
In this honeycomb of time, Alphonso the bee was the present moment. He was also Kayla’s friend. She could ask Alphonso which of the trillions of possible pathways he was going to take, which of my possible futures would become my actual future, and he would tell her.
The only blind spot to Kayla’s ability had been the Doorganizer. When something went into Alice’s makeup compact, Kayla lost the trail and could no longer make predictions about it.
I didn’t need her to see into a black hole, but only into my day tomorrow. Then she could tell me the funny thing Nev would say in class, and I would have hours to craft the most hilarious response possible.
This brilliant plan had only one snag. Kayla had stopped predicting things that would happen on Earth. These days she only wanted to attach to things she saw in the night sky through her telescope.
She believed astronomical predictions to be more important. Also, she could see a lot farther into the future up there. On Earth, life’s endlessly complex interactions limited her range. It took hours of intense concentration for her to see into next week on Earth. But a spot of space through the telescope was so much less eventful she could see hundreds or even thousands of years ahead in minutes.
Every night she’d concentrate on a different tiny section of the sky and hunt for future asteroids of the sort that had wiped out the dinosaurs millions of years ago.
Once she got going on this, she wouldn’t stop until our parents made her go to bed.
But I knew how to get her to take a break from her telescope. I brought her a bottle of her favorite soda, Tamarindo.
I found her in her usual evening spot on the roof of our building, sitting on a lawn chair beside the tripod of her plastic telescope and making little marks in a grid paper notebook.
CHAPTER 7
ASTEROIDINI
“How’s it coming?” I asked.
“It’s the weirdest thing,” she said, without looking up. “A while ago I was tracking an asteroid about five hundred years in the future. But now I can’t find it anymore. It’s … just gone.”
“Well, that’s good, right?” I said. “If it’s not there, it can’t hit us.”
“It’s not good. Asteroids aren’t supposed to disappear for no reason.”
“Maybe you just need a break from that,” I said. “Here, I brought you a Tamarindo.”
“Oh,” she said, perking up. “Thanks.”
She took the bottle from me eagerly but then paused before twisting off the cap.
“Wait, you must want something from me,” she said. “I’m not going to predict anything on Earth for you. I don’t do that anymore.”
“You just did,” I said. “You predicted I wanted you to predict something.”
“Well, that was obvious,” she said, handing me back the bottle. “Sorry, Hap, but no thanks.”
“You can keep the soda if you listen to my idea. You don’t have to say yes. The soda’s just for hearing me out.”
“Fine,” she said, twisting open the bottle. She took a sip and smiled with deep satisfaction. Kayla loved all sweet liquids. Maybe she was part honeybee herself. But her smile faded as I told her my plan for getting Nev to be my lab partner. By the time I finished she was shaking her head at me.
“Come on,” I said. “Why not?”
“Do I really need to tell you?” she said, turning back to the eyepiece of her telescope.
“Aw, come on,” I said. “It will take you three minutes.”
“No,” she said. “And that’s final.”
But I went on pestering her about it, until she got angry.
“Hap, I’m witnessing a serious astronomical paradox here,” she yelled. “I’m not going to take a break to help you think of pickup lines.”
Now this made me angry. That’s not what I wanted her to do at all.
“Pickup lines?” I said, feeling my face flush. “That’s not … I’m not trying to … Look, this is for science. I want her to be my lab partner in science class. By not helping, you’re standing in the way of science.”
She rolled her eyes in a way that infuriated me.
“You think you’re so smart,” I said. “But you don’t know anything about people. All you care about is research and experiments. You’re turning into Dad.”
She shot me a look so angry that I took a step backward, because I knew she was about to juke me.
She didn’t have to do that.
Yes, I had said something deliberately mean to hurt her feelings, but still … she didn’t have to juke me for it.
Kayla discovered the juke a few months ago, while watching a soccer game on TV. That had been a dark day in the lives of her older siblings.
She had noticed how one player could use footwork and body language to throw the opposing player off balance or send him in the wrong direction. A useful trick in a soccer game became a deadly weapon in the hands of Kayla, who could predict a person’s involuntary reactions to millions of possible moves before she made them.
Now on the roof, after I said, “You’re turning into Dad,” she leaped up like a cat, took two crazy steps toward me, and I fell over.
Still two feet away, she hadn’t touched me. But she’d executed three perfect moves to make me trip over my own feet.
I landed painfully on the roof gravel. Springing back up, I ran away from Kayla as fast as I could toward the door. I knew better than to be around her when she was like this. But I couldn’t resist the urge to turn and yell back the meanest thing I could think of, based on her greatest fear.
“I hope the FBI locks you up in a research hospital!” I yelled, noticing that she was about to throw the soda bottle at me.
She never actually threw it. This was another juke, designed to distract me so I woul
d run straight into the side of the door.
Now I had a headache and lot of homework.
I would need to think of a science project I could do by myself, without Nev or Felix. Plus I had a lot of catch-up work in pre-algebra.
In my room, I dragged my backpack onto my bed to get started.
As I unzipped it, something dark moved inside.
It sprang out at me.
Leaping back, my hand clutched to my heart, I stared down at Squeep! the lizard.
“You!” I yelled. “What are you, trying to kill me?”
Squeep! stared up at me blankly. Lately his !-shaped body had been looking a lot more like a ? instead.
I squatted down to get some answers.
“Where do you keep disappearing to all the time?” I said.
He flicked his tail to his face and handed me a gray seashell.
“What’s this supposed to mean?” I said, throwing it on the floor.
He flicked his tail to his face again and handed me the same seashell.
I threw it on the floor.
“Why do you keep giving me stuff?”
He flicked his tail and handed me a third identical gray shell.
He had pulled it out of thin air. Looking around, I couldn’t find any of the shells I’d thrown on the floor. I examined the one in my hand.
A small gray shell. The shape of it reminded me of something. So did the idea of objects appearing out of nowhere …
“The makeup compact,” I said. “Alice’s makeup compact was shaped like this kind of shell.”
Squeep! bobbed his head in a way eerily similar to a nod.
“That’s what you’ve been trying to tell me, isn’t it? Something about the Doorganizer? … They destroyed that thing. Last year.”
Squeep! shook his head, a clear no.
Uh-oh.
“Is that where you keep going? Into the Doorganizer?” I held up the seashell. “Is this it? The shell. Is this the new portal?”
He shook his head.
“Where is it?” I asked.
He flicked his tail and handed me a nacho.
“It’s in a nacho?”
He flicked his tail and handed me a poker chip with a picture of Elvis Presley on it.
This was insane. Where was he getting all this stuff from?
The Doorganizer, of course. It was all stuff Alice had stolen over the years. He was slipping in and out of time, grabbing things and slipping back seamlessly, just like she used to.
Not good, I thought. The Doorganizer was dangerous.
I knew I had to tell Dad, but I also knew that Alice must never find out.
After a year of therapy, Alice had made a bit of progress recovering from her obsessive manias. But this news could send her back off the deep end.
I decided to wait until Alice fell asleep, then tell Dad.
In the meantime, I tried to catch up on my pre-algebra. But I couldn’t concentrate. Eventually, I turned to the Doodad Decoder in the back of my notebook.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t any better at doodad algebra than I was at the regular kind.
CHAPTER 8
THE FRUIT FLY
Around midnight, I carried Squeep! into the hallway. The only light came from the crack under the door of Beth and Eliza’s room. Alice and Kayla’s threshold was dark. As I crossed the living room, I heard my parents having a hushed argument in the kitchen.
Dad stood painting a bowling ball with an experimental new varnish under the stove’s vent fan.
As part of the parole deal that kept him out of prison, Dad had agreed to take a break from inventing and scientific research for a few years. He had taken the least scientific job he could find: day manager at Striker’s Island bowling alley.
But quitting science proved impossible for someone like him. He became obsessed with improving the bowling equipment, until we had half-dissected balls, pins, bags, and shoes all over our apartment.
I stood unnoticed for a while at the edge of the kitchen.
“You tell Kayla come down the roof!” said Mom. Her English got worse when she was angry. “She not listen. Always on the telescope.”
“Maybe she’s discovered something,” said Dad, dabbing his brush.
“It’s twelve o’clock on the school night!” said Mom.
“Okay,” said Dad. “Just give me a second to finish this.”
“What Kayla say! Always ‘give me second,’ ‘give me second.’ You and her the same …” Mom said a Romanian word for a specific kind of crazy person. Then, noticing me standing there, she added, “Now this one up too. Nobody goes asleep.”
“Hap, go to bed,” said Dad.
“There’s something wrong with Squeep!” I said, holding up the lizard as I walked in. “I think it might be serious.”
“Uh-oh,” said Dad. “Is he sick?”
“No, it’s … weirder than that. Where do I start? … First, he can understand English.”
Dad sighed and then shook his head, chuckling.
“Oh, Hap,” he said. “Look, sometimes it seems like animals understand us. But really they’re just reacting to our body language, or even reading our pheromones. You know, there was an interesting study in the Journal of—”
“Okay, okay,” I said, trying to head off a dissertation before he got one going. “Here’s what’s really worrying me. Squeep! is still going in and out of”—I lowered my voice to a whisper—“the Doorganizer.”
Dad’s eyes popped open. Mom looked up in alarm.
“That’s impossible,” said Dad. “It no longer exists. I personally oversaw the demolition.”
“Well, it’s still there somehow,” I said.
“We destroy the makeup compacts,” said Mom. “They all gone.”
“Tell that to Squeep!” I said. “Because he’s still popping in and out of it every chance he gets. And bringing things back!”
“He can’t be,” said Dad. “There’s nothing to pop in and out of. It’s gone. There’s no more micro black hole. No more portals.”
“I think … maybe he is a portal,” I said.
“A living organism can’t be a portal,” said Dad. “That’s impossible for so many reasons. And even if it weren’t … even if a lizard somehow could be a portal, he could not then enter the Doorganizer through himself.”
“Why not?” I said. “Isn’t extra-dimensional space-time really weird like that?”
“It’s really weird, but not like that,” said Dad. “Look, you saw some strange things inside the Doorganizer, I know. But that doesn’t mean you understand extra-dimensional space-time. It’s a highly complex mathematical concept that, frankly, someone who gets Cs in pre-algebra—”
“I got one C.”
“—is not equipped to comprehend. Sorry, Hap, but you just don’t have the math to get this.”
“Well,” I said, a little annoyed now. “Really good scientists can put things in layman’s terms, like with analogies and stuff. So that normal people can understand extra-dimensional space-time too.”
“Analogies, huh?” said Dad, thinking. He pointed to the open window. “Okay, this window is a portal to the outside of our apartment. Imagine a fruit fly enters in through it, picks up this bowling ball, carries it all the way to the bowling alley, and then throws a perfect strike. That’s more likely than you understanding extra-dimensional space-time.”
“Hey!” said Mom. “That’s not … încurajator.”
“That means ‘encouraging,’ ” I said to Dad. “See, I actually learned Romanian, unlike you. Do you know what ‘encouraging’ means in English?”
“You’re good with language, Hap,” said Dad. “But you need to take math more seriously.”
“But that’s not how Happy learns,” said Mom. “He’s special.”
“Mom, please don’t call me that!” I said. “Guys, would you just trust me on something for once? Squeep! is seriously going into the Doorganizer.”
“What!” said a voice from behind me. “The
lizard’s going into my closet?”
Wheeling around, I saw Alice standing in her nightgown at the threshold of the kitchen with an empty water glass.
“Of course not, sweetie,” said Dad. “See what you started, Hap? The Doorganizer doesn’t exist anymore. We destroyed all the compacts. Squeep!’s just been a little agitated lately. Maybe he’s sick. Here, why don’t I examine him.”
Hearing this, Squeep! leaped out of my hands and scuttled across the kitchen floor.
Alice dropped down like a hockey goalie to catch Squeep!, who accelerated and zipped past her fingers.
“I told you he understands English!” I said.
Alice turned, stumbling to her feet and chasing him through the living room. I sprinted out of the kitchen to catch her before she caught him.
Around the next corner, in the hallway, I found her staring down at the place on the floor where Squeep! had vanished.
He had left something behind.
Alice bent down and lifted up … a green kazoo.
“This is mine,” she said, glaring at me. “This is my kazoo.”
“You mean it’s a kazoo you stole once,” I said.
“He’s really going into my closet, isn’t he?” said Alice. She slowly smiled. “It’s still there. It’s all still there … How’s he doing it?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I was asking Dad.”
“Bring me the lizard,” said Alice. “When you find him, bring him straight to me.”
“Why should I?”
“Because,” she said, leaning in close. “I can make things good for you at school … or I can make things really bad.”
“I know,” I said.
“Good,” said Alice. “So bring me the lizard.”
She stalked off, clutching the green kazoo in her fist.
CHAPTER 9
THE BECKONING FLIPPER
After staying up so late, I slept through my alarm the next morning.
I didn’t wake until Squeep! yanked my eyelids open.
“Gah!” I yelled, swatting him away. “What the heck, man!”