What a Trip! (11 page)

That's when Passepartout crashed through the door and started leaping around the room. But Fogg was too busy gazing into Aouda's incredible eyes to notice.

Yeah, yeah, it was romantic goop, all right. But I sort of liked it. Frankie, of course, thought it was the best thing ever. I could tell just by looking at her wet cheeks.

Passepartout hugged Aouda, then Mr. Fogg, then both of them, then Frankie and me. Lots of hugging going on and lots of bouncing around.

“Passepartout,” Fogg said finally, “it is now five minutes past eight
P.M.
on this quite special Sunday. Please notify the Reverend Samuel Wilson of Marylebone Parish that there is to be a wedding at his church.”

“For tomorrow, Monday?” asked Passepartout.

Fogg turned to Aouda. “For tomorrow, Monday.”

“Yes, for tomorrow, Monday!” she said.

Passepartout leaped up. “I can't wait!” He zoomed out of the room like a rocket.

“Indeed!” said Fogg, cracking his first smile ever.

After about a minute of Frankie and me standing there, it was clear that Fogg and Aouda didn't really want two kids hanging around.

“Um, hey, Frankie, how about we go find Pass—”

“Good idea!”

In a flash we were out and about in London.

It actually took us a while to find Passepartout, mainly because the London streets were as twisty as Fix's mustache, and partly because Frankie wasn't really helping. She was trying to read the last few pages of the book to see if there were any clues about what might happen to her and me. But, no, the pages were still too blurry to make out any words.

“I guess when the gates died, the story died, too,” she said. “I mean, we're making our own story now. Which, let me tell you, is way too weird for me.”

Finally, we saw a familiar figure racing along the street toward us.

“Passepartout!” I said. “Slow down. What's wrong?”

But he rushed past us, shrieking, “Must hurry! Tell Mr. Fogg! Must hurry! Oh!”

We hustled to keep up with him as he screeched around the streets. “Did you find Reverend Samuel Wilson of Marylebone Parish?” I asked him.

“Yes!” he huffed. “No time to explain! Must hurry!”

We raced with Passepartout into Mr. Fogg's house.

“What is the matter?” Mr. Fogg asked when we burst into his living room.

“Wedding impossible for tomorrow!” Passepartout blurted out. “No weddings are performed on Sunday!”

“But today is Sunday,” said Mr. Fogg.

“No, Saturday!”

“Impossible.”

“No,” cried Passepartout. “You have made a mistake of one day! We arrived twenty-four hours ahead of time. But now—there are only eleven minutes left!”

Mr. Fogg looked at Passepartout, then Aouda, then Frankie, and me. “Just a moment,” he said calmly. “I must understand this.”

And with a bare ten minutes left before the
actual
deadline, Mr. Fogg sat at a small table, took out that notebook of his, and began to jot down stuff.

After what seemed like forever, with Passepartout leaping about yelling things like, “Nine minutes! Eight! Only seven minutes!” Mr. Fogg finally looked up at us.

“I see now. The cause of the error is very simple. Without suspecting it, we have gained a complete day on our journey. How, you ask?”

“We didn't ask!” said Frankie. “Let's go!”

Fogg held up his hand. “I will tell you how. As Sir Francis Cromarty reminded us, we were traveling constantly eastward, from London to Suez, India, China, Japan, the United States, then back to London.”

“We remember those places!” I said. “Now let's go!”

“Well, in journeying eastward,” he went on calmly, “we were always traveling toward the sun. The days were therefore four minutes shorter as we crossed each of the three hundred sixty degrees around the earth. Three hundred sixty multiplied by four minutes equals twenty-four hours. Thus, we gained a day.”

Aouda brightened. “So, while you saw the sun go down eighty times, your friends in London only saw it go down seventy-nine times.”

“Precisely,” said Fogg. “And speaking of my friends, they are no doubt waiting at the Reform Club. Now, as there are one thousand, one hundred fifty-one steps from here to the Reform Club, and five minutes and thirty-two seconds before our time runs out, by my calculations—”

“Stuff the calculations!” I screamed. “Let's get over there—NOW!” I took the book. “Hold on to your hats, everyone! I'm flipping to the next chapter!”

“Devin, don't—” cried Frankie.

But I couldn't take anymore delays. I flipped those blurry pages ahead to the last chapter.

And the whole room exploded in light.

Chapter 22

Kkkkk!
The room lit up as if there were fireworks blasting all round us. Then a big black rip appeared up near the ceiling and started toward us.

“Oh, my!” Passepartout yelped loudly. He fell into Mr. Fogg, sending both of them out the door.

Aouda tumbled out of her chair, and Frankie and I spilled into each other on the floor. It was very messy.

Then, suddenly, it was very quiet.

I picked myself up from a very cushy, thick-pile carpet and looked around. It was the Reform Club, all right. Frankie was there. But Fogg was nowhere in sight.

“Don't tell me he didn't make it!” I groaned.

Frankie pulled me up. “Let's check the main room where all the wager guys are. Hurry!”

An orangy light from the gas lamps was flickering all over the old leather chairs and the deep carpet. We crept across the room, trying not to wake up the snoring men.

The wager guys were in the main room, sitting at their usual card table. But they weren't playing cards. They were staring at the huge clock on the wall. The clock said eight forty-one.

“What time did the last train arrive from Liverpool?” one of the men asked.

“Seven twenty-three,” replied another. “If Phileas Fogg had been on it, he would have been here by now. We can, therefore, regard the bet as won!”

The others gave a hearty chuckle at that.

The clock ticked away another minute.

“Three minutes left!” Frankie muttered. “Where is he?”

The old guys picked up their cards but didn't play them. They continued staring at the clock, watching the second hand sweep around once more.

And once more again.

It was a moment of deep silence. The whole room was perfectly quiet. At eight forty-four, the men stood and approached the clock, counting the seconds.

“I can't stand it!” I said.

“Shhh!” said Frankie.

“Eight forty-four and thirty seconds,” one of the men said. “Forty seconds … fifty-two seconds … fifty-six … fifty-nine … and—”

Then, a fraction of a second before the clock chimed the quarter hour, the door swung open and Phileas Fogg stepped into the room.

In his calm voice he said, “Here I am, gentlemen.”

Ding!
went the clock.

“Ya-hoooooo!” I screamed.

Stunned, the old men quivered and shivered and nearly fainted, but finally they shook Mr. Fogg by the hand, then handed over the money that they'd lost betting against him.

“I have done it in eighty days, gentlemen,” said Fogg, now joined by Aouda and Passepartout. “But I couldn't have done it at all without my
real
friends here.”

That was, like, the most amazing thing to hear. Frankie and I started to get all misty ourselves.

“This is a good end to the story,” Frankie said.

“It is awesome,” I said. “But it's not quite the end.” I pointed to the next paragraph.

Two days later—which really was Monday—we all piled into the Marylebone Church, and Fogg and Aouda became Mr. and Mrs. Phileas Fogg. Passepartout, grinning so big his smile just about covered his ears, gave the bride away. The newlyweds asked Passepartout to stay on forever as their servant and friend.

Of course, he said yes. After about an hour of jumping up and down.

Then, just as the exit music began playing and we were all leaving the church, we saw it. The blue flickery light of the zapper gates, tucked behind some shrubs by the front walk.

“Frankie, they're back,” I said. “We really did do it in time! So the gates still work. We can go back … home … sort of … I guess ….”

Frankie must have been thinking the same thing as me. She knew what time it was. But she didn't look all that happy about it.

“I don't want to go home,” she said. “Not yet. I mean, we've been completely around the world with these people. We've done everything with them.”

I nodded. “Yeah. They're our friends.”

We didn't want to go, but we had to. The gates wouldn't buzz and flicker forever. Passepartout grabbed us and embraced us all. We said good-bye to pretty Aouda, who hugged us very tightly, looked at me with those awesome eyes, and gave us kisses.

“We shall miss you,” said Mr. Fogg. “I shall miss you. Yes, indeed I shall ….”

You could see he was remembering everything that we had done together. All the adventure. All the danger.

Icy cool Mr. Fogg had definitely thawed out.

I couldn't have asked for a better send-off.

Finally, with one last wave, Frankie and I ran straight for the bushes and dived at the glowing zapper gates.

The bright blue light surrounded us completely.

For a split second, we felt all electric and sparkly.

Then everything went dark, as if we were falling into some kind of tunnel. We bounced and tumbled for what seemed like forever, but finally stopped when my head slammed against a big aluminum bookshelf.

After my brain stopped hurting, I realized it was very quiet all around us. As quiet as …

“The library,” whispered Frankie.

Yep. We were back.

Chapter 23

We were in the library workroom we had left eighty minutes before. And there were the gates, the last little bit of sizzle leaving them.

“Holy crow, were
we
lucky—” I said.

“Shhh!” said Frankie, pulling me down. “I hear someone coming!”

The door swung open and the repair guy entered, his chin covered with traces of powdered sugar.

With him was Mrs. Figglehopper.

“I checked out the gates thoroughly,” he said to her. “Backward and forward, top to bottom.”

“And?” asked Mrs. Figglehopper.

“They really can't be fixed.”

“Oh?”

“Well, they are very old, almost classic,” he said. “The newer gates are much more efficient. If you want, I can take these off your hands and use them for parts.”

“No!” I wanted to scream, but Frankie poked me.

Mrs. Figglehopper had a strange look on her face, as if she had been half expecting the tech guy to make such an offer.

“No,” she said. “These gates have been with me for a long time. I think I'll keep them for a while longer.”

It was all I could do to keep myself from jumping around like Passepartout. Frankie sighed with relief.

After the repairman packed up his stuff and left, Mrs. Figglehopper spotted us lurking. “Frankie? Devin?”

We crawled out from behind the bookshelf.

“We were just, um …”

“Enjoying your great books!” said Frankie.

Mrs. Figglehopper's eyes did this funny twinkly thing. “Did you enjoy your tour around the world—”

I gasped. “What! So you
do
know about it!”

She tilted her head as if she didn't understand me. “I only meant, did you enjoy your tour around the world of books? That's what every library has, you know. A world of books.”

Frankie nodded quickly. “Um, right, we heard. Mr. Wexler told us that, too. And, yeah, it was fun.”

The librarian walked us out to the main room. Just as we got there—”Hup! Hup!”—Mr. Wexler rounded everybody up. “Time to go back to class, class!”

Our ultimate field trip was over.

Frankie and I formed a line with the other kids who had only been looking at books and hadn't been in one.

“That was a close call,” Frankie said. “Do you think Mrs. Figglehopper knows? About the gates, I mean?”

“I'm not sure,” I whispered. “But we definitely have to keep an eye on her. If she had really gotten them repaired, we might still be in 1872.”

“Back to class,” Mr. Wexler said as we filed into the hallway outside. “Excuse me, Devin, what is that?”

He pointed at my hand. I looked down. I still had the book. “Dude! I'm holding a … a … book!”

“Indeed!” said Mr. Wexler. “Please return it.”

I ran back inside and set the book back on the stand. Frankie put the watch back, too. Together, we read the last page once more. Then we closed the book.

“One awesome story,” I said.

“Definitely one of the best,” she said. “We did so much stuff in there. Lots of excitement and danger.”

“Passepartout was fun,” I said. “Mr. Fogg was pretty cool and calm through the whole thing, though.”

“He didn't do much sight-seeing,” she said. “Plus, he spent a ton of money and brought back no souvenirs.”

“He found Aouda,” I said.

She grinned. “Yeah, he found Aouda. For a friend like that, I guess I'd make a trip around the world.”

“Me, too,” I said. “A couple of times, even.”

She chuckled. “It makes me want to get some T-shirts made up. Frankie and Devin—the World Tour!”

“I love it! Except it should be Devin and Frankie—”

“And you know,” she said, “I think we're getting pretty good at this reading thing. If we ever read
Around the World in Eighty Days
again, with what we know now I bet we could shave a day or two off Fogg's record.”

I stared at her. “Whoa! Is that a bet?”

Frankie grinned at me. “You bet it's a bet!”