Ignatius MacFarland (5 page)

I rolled over to see if they were coming but no one was there.

“GARY?” I yelled. “IVAN?”

Nothing.

What a couple of jerks, I thought. They’re probably laughing so hard that they aren’t even able to answer me.

“GARY? IVAN? C’MON, YOU GUYS! HELP ME TAKE THE ROCKET BACK TO THE BARN!”

The last thing I wanted was for Frank Gutenkunitz and his cretin friends to have heard the explosion and then ride over and see my rocket. If I had thought it was bad when Frank found out that my mom had made me take a ballet class at the YMCA when I was five, this would be about ten thousand times worse.

Nobody answered. My ears continued to ring.

“FINE! I’LL DO IT MYSELF!” I said, trying to make them feel guilty.

I started to drag the rocket, but the top came off in my hands.

“ALL RIGHT, FINE! LET’S LEAVE THE STUPID THING HERE! I DON’T CARE.”

I took the bottom of my shirt and tried to wipe the water and smoke out of my eyes. It was driving me crazy not to be able to see anything. For all I knew, the entire school could have been standing around the dead field watching me.

When I looked up and was finally able to focus, I tried to see if I could spot Gary and Ivan in front of the barn and quickly noticed one small problem — I couldn’t see the barn.

I looked behind me. Then I looked to the left. Then I looked to the right. And finally I turned around in a complete circle.

The barn was gone.

And so were Gary and Ivan.

There was nothing except the field and the trees surrounding it.

Maybe the explosion had destroyed the barn. Maybe the barn got blown away with Gary and Ivan inside. Did I just kill Gary and Ivan?
And
the barn? I tried to find the spot where the barn used to be, but there was nothing. No debris, no Gary, and no Ivan.

I think I’d better go home and tell my parents about this, I said to myself.

And so I headed out of the field.

8

A REALLY BAD SUIT OF ARMOR

I couldn’t get out of the field.

I don’t mean I couldn’t walk or anything like that. I mean I couldn’t find the path we always took through the trees.

It wasn’t there. And there were more trees than usual. And the trees weren’t the trees that had been there before. I mean, they
kinda
looked like the trees that had always been there but they weren’t the same ones. These trees had round leaves with red and blue veins on them, and the branches were really fat and short, with bark that was pointy and jagged, like the trees were covered with teeth. And they were twice as tall and twice as fat as regular trees and way closer together. Most of the trees were so close that I couldn’t see any way to squeeze between them, especially since they were covered with all those pointy thorns.

I’m not going to tell you how many times while I was seeing all this weird stuff I wondered if I was going crazy or if I had a concussion or if I was dead. I kept asking myself if this was heaven or the other
hot
place downstairs (because, after all, I
had
gotten Gary to steal and lie to his brother).

I took out my cell phone, figuring that if I could just talk to my mom then maybe everything would go back to normal. But there was no signal. I tried dialing a few different numbers but nothing went through. Great, I thought. The only reason my parents let me have a cell phone was for emergencies. Well, this pretty much qualified as an emergency. Stupid phone company.

I saw a shadow on the ground about ten feet away from me. It looked like it was from a big bird in the sky above the field. I looked up to see if it was going to be something as weird as the trees and plants I was seeing and quickly realized it was even weirder than I could have imagined. Because it wasn’t a bird.

It was a girl.

She was hovering about thirty feet above me, watching me. As soon as I looked up at her, I saw her body flinch, as if she hadn’t expected me to notice her. And just like that, she flew away. But my brain took a picture of the flying girl that made it feel like I had just been staring at her for an hour.

She looked like she was about my age, with long hair that was almost white. She seemed really pretty, but it was hard to tell because there was something strange-looking about her, like she was made out of powder or silk or something. I know that’s a pretty weird description, but it’s true.

Her arms and legs were longer than most people’s, and the way they floated around her made it look like she was underwater. Her wings weren’t like the wings on a bird. They were more like two long, skinny bedsheets that floated like ghosts. Everything about her was more like air and clouds than skin and muscles and bones. She sure didn’t look like any girl I had ever seen before, especially not any of the girls that lived around my neighborhood.

After she had flown away, I started running around the edge of the field, looking for any gap in the trees that I could squeeze through without shredding myself like a wedge of Parmesan cheese on a grater. But there were no gaps big enough. There were several places that were
almost
big enough, but whenever I tried to get through, the teeth on the trees would be just close enough to grab my shirt and scrape my arms and ears. I was trapped.

I looked over and saw my sad-looking rocket lying on its side in the middle of the field and got an idea. I ran over and started jumping up and down on it, trying to flatten the garbage cans.

When they were almost flat, I stood them back up and squeezed myself and my backpack inside. The garbage cans were now just thin enough for me to push my way sideways through the trees. Or at least thin enough for me to
try
to push through. And trying was better than doing nothing, at that point.

Wearing the cans, I started walking over to the trees, which wasn’t easy because I barely had room to move my legs. It was like when you’re in the bathroom and you’ve done a number two but then you see there’s no toilet paper and so you have to try to walk to the cabinet to get another roll while your pants are down around your ankles. Well, this was like having your pants wrapped all around your body.

When I got to the trees, I turned sideways and started to push my way through them like a knife cutting through a loaf of bread. The teeth scraping on the sides of the garbage cans sounded like a hundred people were scratching their nails on a chalkboard and I got the shivers so badly I almost peed my pants. I was also sweating like a pig because it was hot inside the cans and I was working so hard to push through the trees that it felt like I was mowing twenty lawns all at once using a lawn mower that didn’t have any wheels.

I stopped and tried to catch my breath. It was so tight inside the cans that I couldn’t move my arms to wipe off my forehead, which was pouring sweat into my eyes. I felt really trapped and was trying not to freak out.

Just keep going, I told myself.

I took a deep breath and pushed on. All of a sudden, I hit something. I tried to push past but couldn’t. I pushed again and moved another couple of inches as the sides of the garbage cans squeezed me like a nutcracker. What if I die? I thought to myself. What if I push again and the cans squeeze me so hard that my heart pops out of my mouth and I croak and then hundreds of years from now when somebody finally cuts down these stupid trees they’ll find these two flattened garbage cans with my skeleton inside and say, “Huh . . . I wonder who this kid was and why he was trying to squeeze through these weird trees inside two garbage cans?” And then they’ll probably have a good laugh at my expense and toss my bones onto a garbage heap and then tell their friends at dinner that night about the idiot from a hundred years ago who got himself wedged in a bunch of trees for no apparent reason. The thought of this made me so angry that I pushed the garbage cans forward with all my might.

POP!

The next thing I knew, I was tumbling head over heels down a hill, my garbage can suit of armor rolling between the trees and banging so hard each time a corner hit the ground that I thought my brains were going to fall out of my head.

Man, am I going to be sore tonight, I thought.

9

DATS AND COGS

BAM! . . . BAM! . . . . . . . . BAM! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BAM! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BOOM!

That was what it sounded like inside the garbage cans when I finally slowed and then stopped rolling down the hill. My rocket, which was now more like a square pizza cutter, fell over onto its side with a loud thud. After a few moments of lying there with my head spinning, I grabbed my backpack and pulled myself out.

Nothing looked familiar. Again. Just more weird looking plants and trees. Big things that looked like fat bushes but that had purple leaves and big pointy arms sticking ten feet up in the air. Trees that were growing sideways across the ground with leaves that were about five feet wide and shaped like potato chips. Grass that was orange, with blades that looked more like tongues. And right in the middle of it all was something that looked like a big pile of dirt but that was covered with what appeared to be hundreds of little red watermelons.

I couldn’t figure it out. Was I on another planet? I had to be.

And that was when I saw the mouse ears.

The mouse ears were what we all called the two hills that were on the north edge of our town. They were really big, so big that when I was a little kid I used to call them mountains. There was always some rich guy or another coming to our town and looking at the mouse ears because he wanted to turn them into a ski resort in the winter. But then the city council would vote against it because they didn’t want tons of ski bums clogging up the streets and having parties all night. Well, according to the position of the mouse ears and the dead field behind me, my neighborhood should have been straight ahead.

But it wasn’t.

There wasn’t anything except more weird-looking plants as far as I could see.

I spent the next few hours walking through what I was certain used to be my neighborhood, but every place where I knew a house or store or building should have been no longer had a house or store or building there. Just more weird plants and trees and nothing even remotely resembling the town in which I grew up. I kept checking my cell phone but there was still no signal, only an X where it normally showed how strong the reception was. Cellular technology was clearly not going to be of any use to me here.

Now, I don’t want to make it sound like I was just walking around going, “Oh, that’s interesting. Hmm. My hometown is no longer here. What a funny thing.” I wasn’t tapping my chin thoughtfully with my finger while pondering the disappearance of everything I had ever known, talking to myself like some English guy in one of those movies about the old British colonies in India, going, “I say, that’s a bit odd, all my friends and family nowhere to be seen. I think I’ll have a spot of tea and think about this for a while.” No, I was really freaking out.

Like, if you could see a picture of me during all this, my mouth was probably hanging open so wide that a vast assortment of bugs and birds could have flown in and built several nests and laid mountains of eggs in my teeth. I don’t want to say that I started to cry at one point, because that would be kind of embarrassing. So let’s just say that I was in shock.

Thank you for your discretion.

When I got to the river that ran through what
used
to be the middle of town, I heard a weird noise. I turned around and saw this strange-looking dog sitting up in a tall tree. First of all, the dog had a really wide nose, like he had gotten two noses for the price of one. Next, his coat was made of really long brown fur that was striped with white lines. And finally, he was licking his paw and wiping his face with it over and over, the same way Gary’s cat always did. And the fact that the dog was sitting way up in a tree seemed a bit, well . . . odd.

As I was staring at it, the dog looked down at me for a few seconds, and then went back to licking its paws, as if I didn’t exist.

Dogs usually like me. I’m always the person who gets jumped on and has his face licked. My mom says it’s because I’m a nice person, but then my dad tells her that dogs just lick people to get the salt off them. But even with all the sweating I had just done getting those garbage cans through the trees and then walking for two hours while I dealt with the fact that everything I knew no longer existed, I apparently still wasn’t sweaty enough to motivate a weird looking dog to come out of a tree and say hello.

As I stared at the dog, I heard a really loud and deep meow. I turned around to see a cat running toward me. It wasn’t much bigger than a normal house cat, but it had ears that were really long and pointy and eyes that were way bigger than usual. I didn’t know if the cat was going to attack me or not. But it was coming so fast, all I could do was stand there.