Chapter 10
Mom Has Super Powers?!
Sunday Morning started out great. Mom had made some French Toast, and apparently the powdered sugar Rob liked to heap on top along with the syrup was almost as equally appealing to Kile as the chocolate he’d quickly fallen in love with. It wasn’t quite the same. Chocolate seemed to have some extra kick in it for trolls, but the massive amount of sugars seemed to do as a close second. Kile had been raving while Mom scrambled up some eggs. As she came to the table to heap some on Robert’s plate and then Kile’s, the little troll stopped her.
“Please, um, Mom…” Kile said. He looked over at Robert and winked, his glimmer only in effect for Mrs. Johansson. It just about choked Robert with egg having surprised him so with a human gesture he hadn’t seen Kile do before.
“Yes, Ricky,” Mom said in a curious tone, patting the troll’s head. She seemed to be feeling for something more than just giving her little boy a pat.
“Could you maybe put the shells back in the eggs?”
Rob understood the trouble about mid-way through the sentence while still trying to clear his throat, but he couldn’t deflect the little troll’s odd request quickly enough. Mom’s eyebrows crooked and she sneered a little at the thought.
“You want me to put some egg shells…in your scrambled eggs?” she asked hesitantly, but turning back to the range top all the same, eyeing her would-be smallest son.
“Umm…Yee….essss,” Kile slowly answered as he rolled his eyes cautiously in Robert’s direction.
Rob was quickly shaking his head as imperceptibly as he could but still signaling to Kile that he’d said something wrong. Kile swung his eyes back to Mrs. Johansson who was apparently getting ready to break another egg or two into the remaining serving of scrambled eggs and probably leave the shells.
“Well…or something else crunchy,” Kile plied, flicking his eyes back at Robert just long enough to smile and nod again, proud of his quick recovery. Rob gave another quick shake of the head and Kile lost his smile.
The boys went about eating the remainder of the French toast and Robert picked at his eggs in silence. Mom did indeed put the shells in and crunched them up pretty well. Rob supposed she was filling the order just to teach Little Ricky a lesson. But then as they were nearly cooked again, she gave them a jump in their seat.
“So, did you enjoy your hike last night?”
This time Robert did choke on his eggs. He spat them out all over Kile who’s eyes were flittering back and forth between Mrs. Johansson’s back turned to them and Robert. He shrugged and shook his head slightly.
Clearing his throat, Rob spoke first, “Uh. What hike are you talking about, Mom?”
“You know,” she replied, “the one the both of you snuck out on at about 10:30 last night after I shut off the lights.”
“Oh,” Rob thought it best to come clean, to a certain extent. “You saw that did you?”
She turned and scooped the eggs onto Little Ricky’s plate before him and then sat down. She picked up her cup of coffee that had been cooling on the table before answering and had a sip or two.
“Of course I did Robert,” she answered in her deeper, you’re-already-caught-so-let’s-make-the-interrogation-easier-on-us-both voice. “A mother always senses when her kids are up to something.”
She only eyed him sourly when her Little Ricky giggled in an unfamiliar way and started to say, “Yeah! But you don’t even…”
Kile’s grin and giggle dropped immediately when he saw Robert’s face and the very quick, very intense shake of his head.
“We just went out to go see some night animals, Mom,” Robert replied, and forced himself to take one last casual bite of French toast.
“Is that right?” Mom asked casually as well. “You know there are bears that still live here on these mountains, right?”
“Uh,” the boys stared at each other. Rob continued, attempting to play down the concerns. “Yeah, but I don’t think they’re any down here in town where we were.”
“Oh.”
They all sat quietly sipping or picking at their food. Kile seemed the least convincing in the faux conversation, looking from one to the other and then stuffing a giant sized bite into his mouth.
“So, are you enjoying those crunchy eggs?” Mom asked Little Ricky, eyeing his fork as it was raised to Kile’s mouth.
“Oh! Yefff!” Kile mumbled around one of the large gulps he hadn’t managed to chew up yet.
Silence returned for a little bit more. Mom still sipped at her coffee.
“So, just how far up did you go then?” she asked finally.
Rob quickly swallowed the bite he’d been dragging out. “Sorry?”
“Well,” Mom continued. She put her cup down, wrapped both hands around them as if to warm them in the cool spring morning and leaned on her elbows, bringing her face much nearer to both boys on either side of the table beside her. “You said there weren’t any bears here in town where you went. How far up did you go?”
“Oh,” Rob batted his mouth with a napkin while he thought how to continue to play his lie coolly. “Um, just to the last couple roads up the hill.”
“Mmmm,” Mom answered again nodding. “Did you get a chance to go up to the kids’ airfield above town?”
Kile had sat up straight as a troll could in his kitchen chair and eyed each of the others in turn. His lips were pursed and from Mom’s perspective through the glimmer looked pretty ridiculous, but she didn’t let on.
“Um, yeah, yeah. I guess we did get up there, didn’t we Ricky?”
Kile nodded slowly at first and then more so as he saw Rob’s own subtle nod. “Yes. We did get up there.”
Rob flinched a little. Kile didn’t realize it, but he hadn’t disguised his voice as Little Ricky very well that time. His glimmer was still on, but he was neglecting the little boy voice. Mom’s expression didn’t flicker though while she turned her cup a little and watched the coffee ripple.
“You sure you didn’t get a little further up? Maybe see some really cool animals?”
“Well,” Rob thought the better he broke down this lie and fessed up the less likely she would ask about what exactly they saw. “Yeah. I guess we went a ways up. We saw some deer and stuff. In fact, I think we even found one of the eagle’s nests up there.”
“Oh my,” Mom said coolly. “I hope you didn’t disturb it or anything. Those eagles can take a pretty big chunk out of you.”
“Oh no. We know how to behave,” Rob continued. His mother looked at him for the first time in moments with a slightly sideways smile, and then returned to her mug. “In fact, I think we maybe even did hear a bear once, but we came back right away.”
“Really? That sounds exciting. But you really need to be careful, don’t you,” Mom replied again.
“Oh yes!” Kile added, his voice somewhat more correctly registered to Ricky’s tone. “We even saw a wolf pack! And…”
It was immediately clear that Kile overstepped in the conversation again. Robert tried to back track and act like Little Ricky was making up stories. All the while Mom sat sipping and warming her cup of coffee. Until at some point during the denials she started smirking herself.
“May I tell you boys a little story about when I was thirteen in Iowa near the Des Moines river?” She looked at both but spent a particularly long time looking at Ricky.
“Uh, sure, Mom.”
Kile just nodded, aggressively looking back and forth between Robert and Mrs. Johansson.
As she spoke, Mrs. Johansson turned and cradled her coffee, focusing on it, rather than the boys. She was trying to keep from giving away too much herself.
“You see, as a kid my family moved into a little neighborhood in Des Moines that was being built almost right alongside the Des Moines river within a mile or two of the downtown. It was a pretty cool little neighborhood because you could go fish the river just down at the end of the street, and th
e banks were still covered with trees. In the early 90’s we learned it was just a little too close to the river and had to move away because the whole street flooded…but that’s another story.
One summer, when I was turning thirteen, I happened to spend a lot of time with the neighborhood’s tomboy. And let me tell you, she was the tomboy of all tomboys. She’s the one that had taught me how to fish a couple years earlier and stuff. The funny thing was that we always just met outside to play and I never really knew where she lived.
Anywho!...After knowing her for a few years I was turning thirteen, and well…you know…I was more interested in looking like a girl than a boy.”
Kile spoke up, “What do you mean?”
Mrs. Johansson looked at the visage of Little Ricky for a moment smiling and then snickered, “You know…I wanted to look pretty. So I told this girl, Wilhelmina she said her name was…which was pretty weird for that time. Anyway, I told Willy that I didn’t really want to play by the river much anymore and asked her if she wanted to have a sleep over at my house and we could do make overs and…well…gurly stuff like that.
So then she says to me: ‘Let me show you something first, then if you want we can do makeovers.’ So I did. She had me follow her down the river. I have no idea how far we went that day. It felt like nearly two hours. But we eventually got to where she had us cross the river on some boulders and went into a field. There was a big grove of trees there, mostly oaks, that must have been extremely old.”
Mrs. Johansson stopped her story for a moment and she seemed about ready to shed a tear.
“This Willy, she says to me, ‘This is my home!’ And of course, at first I was like, oh, she must be homeless or something, maybe that’s why she doesn’t want to have a makeover with me. But then she had me stand in the grove and wait a minute. When she came back she had these…other people with her.”
“What other people, mom?” Robert asked. He was enthralled. Mom’s voice had gotten low and he could tell this is stuff she’d never shared with anyone else before.
“Well…I’m not exactly sure how to say this, except that I think you’ll understand now,” Mom replied, looking over at Kile and grinning.
Kile flapped his hands down on the table and said with a comical breath of awe, “What? Say what? Please say what, human lady?”
Robert got a lump in his throat again and mumbled uhn-uh as he shook his head most vigorously this time.
“Human lady, eh?” Mrs. Johansson said, still grinning. “Well, alright then.”
“Willy came walking out of the forest in her blue-jean cover-alls with three fairies flying around her shoulders.”
“What?” Robert grumbled, thoroughly frustrated. His mom had him going and pulled him right in for the punch line and he wasn’t happy he’d been suckered.
“Fairies!?!” Kile cried, his voice squeaking of troll glee. “What kind of faeries? If they were flying I bet they were pixies!”
“No, no,” Mrs. Johansson said with a laugh. “They weren’t pixies. They were sprites! Water sprites is what Willy told me.”
“Sprites?” Kile said, placing an index finger to his bottom lip again and pondering.
Mrs. Johansson put her hands out softly on each boys’ wrist and held them warmly. She smiled at both as she continued, though Robert was flicking his eggs about with his fork again, having felt duped by his own mother.
“Yes, sprites. And then, Willy warns me not to get too excited, that she’s going to drop her glimmer. Of course I say, ‘What’s a glimmer?’ but before she could answer, poof! She changes into one of the sprites too!”
“Sprites, Mom?! C’mon,” Robert said, trying to yank his hand free of hers.
“No, really, it’s true, Rob,” she said. But before she could add more Kile interrupted.
“Yes! Yes! Must be careful of sprites, Robbie! They are very powerful.”
Rob looked at Kile and could see he was being very earnest. Mom seemed to be too, though she was still smiling at him. His look of puzzlement must have shown pretty well because Mom propped her check on her fist, the one he’d made her let go of him with.
“Yep. They control the elements!” Kile was saying, lowering his voice and rasping while doing it.
“Too true!” Mom blurted, then pulled back both hands and slapped them on the table.
Rob didn’t know what to do and Kile seemed to be literally bouncing out of his chair looking back and forth at the two humans.
“So, then, Ricky…” Mom continued. “What are you?”
Kile stopped bouncing and pointed at himself mouthing the words “who me?”
“Yes, you. You must not be a sprite or a pixie because you asked about those. So…what are you then?”
Kile looked nervously to Robert. Robert hesitated but then began a show of resistance. “C’mon Mom. What are you talking about?”
She leaned very close to her eldest boy and looked him straight in the eye. “This is what I’m talking about: I’m a mom. I know when I’m being conned, and you’re not the first pre-teen kid to find out faeries are really real!”
Mom sat up straight again, before then leaning over and looking Kile squarely in the eye and trying to find something there. “Tell me what you are, because you’re not my Little Ricky.”
Kile gulped once, checked Rob out of the corner of his eye, and having not received any clear guidance there with Robert’s shrug, replied, “Um, I am a mountain troll, ma’am.”
“I’ll be darned!” she said, pushing the chair out and laughing. She leaned way over and tried patting the head of Little Ricky again. “Are you using glimmer like the sprites do?”
By this point Kile wasn’t sure what to make at having been made. Did he need to panic and run? The human female wasn’t getting ready to shoot him or pitch-fork him or anything else. In fact, she seemed to think it was pretty amusing. He decided like Robert earlier, that it would be better to come clean on everything he could, but keep as much about his mission from the humans as possible.
“Uh, yes. I use glimmer. I’m best at it! Well, for boy trolls,” he finally fumbled. He was interlacing and massaging his fingers again as though they ached.
“So…I thought trolls ate people and…goats and stuff. That’s what Willy told me anyway.”
“No, no, no!” Kile patted the air in between he and Mrs. Johansson trying to affirm his negation of the idea. “Those are bridge trolls. They are green, and horned and ugly. Mountain trolls do not eat humans!”
“Any more,” Robert quietly mumbled. He sat watching his mother and troll brother interacting and wasn’t sure what to make of it, though the feeling he had was very much that the gig was up and that this would all put an end to their adventures. After a week with Kile, he wasn’t quite sure he wanted that yet.
“I see,” said mom, hands on her hips. “Drop your glimmer! Show me what you look like!”
Kile did so almost immediately and then grinned at her. Mom startled and raised her hands to her mouth stepping back a bit. But then she started laughing. Kile looked embarrassed.
“Oh, I’m sorry! I guess I wasn’t quite ready to see a troll after all!”
The little troll, big nose, ears and wide mouth looked troubled and turned to Robert for support. Having found nothing there again but the now common place shrug, Kile just stood at attention as the human female moved about a little, inspecting him. He felt like one of the Queen’s guards were measuring him up again just before he was granted audience with her a year earlier to discuss their reconnaissance of the humans in the neighboring town encroaching on their mountain territory.
After a few minutes of further inspection and some questioning, Mother finally stopped her work and stepped back a few steps and stood at the kitchen counter. “Alright, boys. So tell me. Where is the little boy I gave birth to then?”
Troll and human looked at each other. This must be it, thought Robert, this is whe
re we’re going to get it. Kile decided to do the talking in this case though, before Robert could stop gaping his mouth like a fish and come up with some human words.
“He is with the troll Queen, Isabel, in our grand city. He is learning from the trolls while I learn from Robbie.”
“I see,” she said, much more calm and definitely more seriously as she gave Robert a stern look. “So, what’s the plan here. How long until he comes home? Because to be honest, I would have like to have been asked before you did all this.”
“Really, Mom!? How was I supposed to know you would be okay with this? And besides, it wasn’t even my idea. They really didn’t let me decide anything, they just did it. You’re crazy little perfect boy Ricky and this crazy little half-sized troll!”
“Yea, crazy!” Kile nodded smiling. And then he caught on to the insult at the end. “Hey, I’m not crazy!”
“And!” said Mom, “I didn’t say I was okay with this! I just understand it is all.”
Robert was beside himself. Somehow he felt he was being given all the burden of this little venture with none of it being his fault to begin with. “How was I supposed to even know that, Mom?”
“Calm down, now,” she said. “Let’s just figure this out. You’re pretty sure he’s safe? I mean, they wouldn’t try to induct him into some troll society or anything by having him catch a bear or some stupid stunt like that, right, uh…errr…what’s your real name anyway, troll?”
“Kile!” the troll gleamed. “My name is Kile.”
“Kyle? Well that doesn’t sound like a very Trollish name to me. Are you sure you don’t have an actual troll name?”
Kile kicked his feet a bit at the floor. He was still embarrassed that he did not have a tough, threatening name like all of his troll brethren in Machsa. “No, Kile is my name.”
“So, alright Kile. What’s the plan for getting my boy back here?”
“Well…” said Kile. “I was supposed to meet Dronosh one week from exchange and get message from queen last night.”
Robert’s brows cocked sideways again. There was apparently an ulterior motive to the troll zoo trip, then?
“But we could not find him,” the troll finished.
Oh boy¸ Rob thought to himself again. He knew Kile was setting himself for further grilling without having the right finesse to giving his mother only the information she needed to hear.
“Hmmm,” Mom’s mumbled thought came forth. “So how do we get in touch with him. I really think Little Ricky should be home for the last week of school, and Thursday is his brother’s birthday too.”
Oh yeah! Rob’s mind whirled again. This week was his birthday, and through some unique bartering around Ricky’s birthday several months back he was sure he was going to end up getting a copy of the new video game he’d been wanting since Christmas. Ricky was supposed to ensure it in exchange for Robert getting him a certain robotic insect toy. That wasn’t going to happen of course unless Ricky, the real Ricky were home to ensure it. Rob grimaced slightly at his materialistic motivation, but if Mom was motioning for the return swap to happen soon, he could definitely second it.
“I go find him tonight!” Kile said.
“Whoa! Big Fellah!” Mrs. Johansson said, grasping his shoulders. “Are you planning on taking Rob here with you?”
Kile stood looking into Mrs. J’s eyes awaiting direction but nodding all the while. He found the human female’s gaze just as powerful as the queen’s. He wondered almost if she had magic of her own. …It was possible she learned some, if she’d been in contact with Sprites in the past. But he simply stood nodding until Mrs. Johansson’s own head started shaking “no” in reply.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. You didn’t exactly tell me where all you went last night, and I have the feeling it wasn’t entirely safe either.”
“Kile kept me safe, Mom.”
“I’m sure he did,” Mom patted Robbie’s shoulders as she collected his plate from the table. “But I hung out with sprites for a while, Rob. I think I have a pretty good understanding of what Kyle’s version of ‘safe’ is and I’m not entirely comfortable with it.”
Kile was bouncing on his toes now, eager to please the human female now that she had stepped up to take charge. “I will get a message to the queen. She should be able to trade back soon. My job is nearly done…”
The little troll caught himself. He checked both humans’ expression and they too caught what sounded like a near slip, but in each other’s presence, or perhaps in spite of it, they were both letting it go…for the moment.”
Still he attempted a minor correction. “My job is to make sure everything go smoothly. I will make sure Ricky comes home now.”
All three agreed, that after dinner, which should be safer in the dusk for Kile to leave town, even with his available shimmer and glimmer, he would travel up to the cave entrance which Robert and Ricky had found and make contact with the rest of the mountain trolls to see what the status was.
When Rob laid down in bed that night, half waiting for the troll to return, he thought to himself, Mom sure is taking this well. I wonder what she learned from those sprites anyway.