Wonkenstein

  The closet door began to open wider. It was so heavy, I knew there was no way it could just drift open. The hinges squealed like a rusty iron pig.

  Trevor pulled the pillow from my bed and stuck it over his face as I stared at the closet. I wanted to look away—actually, I wanted to crawl under my bed and call for my mom. But my body stayed right where it was, and my eyes were focused on my closet. Then the door flew open.

  I grabbed my baseball bat as Trevor pulled the pillow off his head and screamed like a girl. The creature grunted, and Trevor dashed out the window faster than I thought possible. I gulped. I was alone with the thing from the closet.

  It stared at me and groaned. I stood up slowly and took a really good look. After a couple of seconds, I dropped my bat and breathed in deeply. I would have been terrified if not for its size and smile.

  The creature was a small, weird man who came up to just above my waist. He looked like two different people who had been smashed together. He wore a top hat and had a cane in one hand.

  I rubbed my eyes and took another deep breath. I thought about running away like Trevor, but instead I sat down on the edge of my bed and tried to figure out what was happening. The little guy kept smiling. After staring for a few moments, I decided to poke him with a stick to see if he was real. He just laughed and batted the stick away. Next, I carefully grabbed his face and pulled.

  This wasn’t some kid in a mask. I thought maybe I was sick and hallucinating, but everything else looked normal.

  The little creature began to pound the wall with his right hand. He started to sing a weird song and dance on his right foot. It was almost as if he was trying to impress me.

  I was impressed, though I’m not sure whether it was a positive or negative impression.

  I can’t really explain what happened next. My head began to feel light. I mean, it could have been because I had only half a glass of chocolate milk to drink all morning. Or maybe it was because I was still tired, or that the day seemed warm. Or maybe it was because something otherworldly had just come out of my closet. I’m not proud of it, but for some reason I don’t fully understand, I passed out.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE THING

  When I woke up, it was eleven thirty. My head hurt, and everything was quiet. I rubbed my eyes and looked around.

  I was the only one in my room. My window was open, so I closed it and then walked to my closet. Beardy was smiling, and when I tried to open the closet door, it wouldn’t budge. I laughed at myself—maybe I had dreamt the whole thing. I combed my hair and went out to the kitchen to get something to eat.

  Tuffin was in the kitchen sink. My little brother’s afraid of our pool out back, so he uses the big kitchen sink to take a swim. He was playing an imaginary game of Marco Polo with himself. He always keeps one eye open and one eye closed so that he can hide and find himself at the same time.

  Libby was on the phone, talking to a boy named Paul. I could tell his name was Paul because every fourth word she said was Paul, followed by a giggle.

  I plugged my ears so I could avoid hearing their conversation. My mom was sitting at the dining room table, doing bills and grumbling about how much food we all ate. I made the problem worse by getting some meat from the fridge and making myself a ham and peanut butter sandwich.

  After I ate it, I began to feel better. I couldn’t believe I had had such a crazy dream. As I was swallowing my final bite, the doorbell rang. I ran to get it, and when I opened the door, there was Trevor, looking as pale as a sheet.

  I saw something small dart back behind Trevor. Apparently I hadn’t been dreaming. I pointed at the creature as he ran into the bushes and disappeared. Trevor yelped as I quickly stepped outside and closed the door behind me. The small guy dashed out of the bushes and headed for the dirt field where Aaron and Rourk were digging a big hole.

  It was actually a community hole. All of us had been working on it for weeks. I started it one afternoon when I was bored. I figured I would dig a huge hole and then throw a party.

  It was kind of fun at first, but then something hit me:

  So I gave up on the hole, but Aaron and Rourk had kept at it in their free time, which they seemed to have a lot of. And now the creature from my closet was running right for the pit. I ran after him, but he jumped over the pile of dirt screaming and fell down into the abyss.

  Rourk scrambled out, swearing like he was being attacked. It’s no secret that Rourk likes to swear—it’s one of the reasons why my parents don’t like me hanging around him. He picks up words from his older brother. But I don’t think he gets them right—half the time I can’t tell if he’s swearing or just making words up.

  We all gathered around the hole, looking down at the thing in the bottom.

  Hold on a second.

  I should point out that I’m not one of those kids who has a ton of self-confidence. I don’t walk into a crowded room and say things like …

  I’m not always happy with how I look, my teeth are a bit crooked, I’ve never kissed a girl, unless you’re talking about the old lady down the street, who I had to hug and kiss after she gave me a really rotten birthday present.

  I’m not the greatest at sports. In fact, last year, when our soccer team was in the finals, I mistakenly reached up and caught the ball with my hands when I wasn’t the goalie. I don’t know why I did it—it was just a reflex. But the other team got a penalty kick, and they won the game. Afterward everyone kept patting me on the back really hard and congratulating me. I think they were being sarcastic.

  Probably the most embarrassing thing about me is that I collect Thumb Buddies. When I was seven, Thumb Buddies were all the rage—fancy tiny pushpins decorated like characters.

  They were only popular for a short while, and after some kid in Texas poked himself one too many times, they stopped selling them. I should have grown out of it, but I kept collecting. I now have over five hundred different Thumb Buddies. I buy most of them on eBay, and once a year, they have a convention where other collectors meet and sell them.

  Not even Trevor knows I still collect them—which is a good thing, seeing how even he might pick on me if he knew. It’s an embarrassing secret, but I’m sure there are kids with worse ones.

  Nope, I’m a pretty average kid. My grades aren’t anything to brag about, my sister calls me a dork, I can’t sing, and I can’t play the piano with my rear like that one genius kid, Todd, who lives down the street.

  I guess I’m a nobody, but I don’t think I mind. I’m not the first person people think of, but I’m probably not the last. I’m kind of like a backup singer in the song of life. But lately my life has been cracking. If I close my eyes, I can see little lines of light, as if parts of me are falling away. My dad calls it …

  Which I think is one of the most stupid-sounding words in the English language. Why can’t it be called something less embarrassing like …

  Anyway, my life was already beginning to feel a little different, and now this was happening?

  I looked down in the hole and felt sorry for the creature. He was kind of singing and crying, and I knew that if I pulled him out, my life was going to be changed forever.

  I pushed Rourk back, got down on my knees, and reached out. The small thing looked at my hand and smiled. I pulled him up and set him on the ground. Rourk and Aaron were having a fit, but I told them he was just a new toy my dad was testing out. I picked him up, put him under my arm, and marched home.

  I walked back to my room and set the bundle on my bed. He smiled and started to sing softly. Some of his skin was greenish, and some was really pale. When I asked where he had come from, he just pointed at my closet. But when I tried to open my closet door, it was still locked tight.

  The creature started to talk to himself. I was about to check my temperature when Trevor came tumbling in through the window.

  Trevor stood by me while the little guy rambled. The thing was saying “gold” repeatedly and calling out for a doctor.

&nbsp
; Both of us just stood there staring. Trevor suggested we feed him something, but I was afraid he would grow bigger if we did.

  I couldn’t tell my mom and dad. They would only ask where he came from and then discover how many things I had shoved into my closet, and that would be the end of my getting to do anything fun ever again.

  So I did the only responsible thing I could think of. I closed my bedroom door, tucked the creature into my bed, and went out the window to be with my friends. I needed some time to think. I was hoping the little guy would just go to sleep and things would smooth out by themselves. I guess I’m just a hopeful person—hopeful but not incredibly smart.

  CHAPTER 5

  DRIVEN TO MADNESS

  Being outside with my friends didn’t help me feel much better. My stomach was tightening, and there was a thick layer of sweat on my forehead. Something baffling had come out of my closet, and that something was now sleeping in my bed.

  So I sat in the middle of the rock island beneath the palm trees and chewed my nails while trying to act normal. Jack said I looked like a …

  Trevor wasn’t looking much better than me. He had always been horrible at keeping secrets. Once, when I broke Janae’s front window with a bowling ball, Trevor promised to not tell a soul. It was an accident, anyway. I never thought the bowling ball would actually go that far. Ten minutes into the investigation, Trevor cracked and spilled the secret. He even showed Janae’s parents the plans for the catapult I had built and used.

  Now Trevor was standing by me, shaking like a leaf.

  And when Aaron and Rourk asked if they could see the big doll my dad had, I thought Trevor was going to pass out. I told them it had been deflated and packed away.

  Mr. Pang came out of his awful house and put some garbage in his trash can on the curb. He looked at us with his old eyes and yelled something.

  As soon as Mr. Pang went back inside, I dared Aaron to go see what he had thrown away. Aaron made up some lame excuse as to why he couldn’t.

  Rourk said he wouldn’t do it because he used to have asthma. Teddy couldn’t do it because he had just put on cologne, and he didn’t want to ruin his smell. Trevor was still shaking like a leaf, so that left only Jack for me to dare. Jack said he would do it for a dollar. I gave him ninety-three cents, and he slunk across the street and up to the trash can. He looked both ways and then fake coughed while knocking the lid off.

  Jack looked in and screamed. He ran back to us and told us there was a hand in the can.

  Teddy pointed out that if Mr. Pang was building Frankenstein, there wouldn’t be a hand in the trash because he would need it. Jack argued that maybe the hand didn’t fit right, so they threw it away. I had never seen a hand separated from its arm, and I was kind of surprised when my feet started walking across the street and toward the trash can. I peeked over the edge.

  There was no hand. I pulled out the object that Jack must have mistaken for a hand.

  It was at that moment that Janae’s mother looked up from doing yard work across the street and saw me digging through Mr. Pang’s trash. I would have waved at her, but there was a banana peel stuck to my hand.

  Janae’s mom shook her head and went inside. As I watched her go, I could see a small string of smoke coming out of my kitchen window. I told my friends I felt sick and needed to puke. Then I quickly ran across the street and into my house.

  There was no smoke in the hallway, and the rest of the house looked normal. I moved into the kitchen. Tuffin was sitting on the counter, drying himself off with two oven mitts. He said something about strangers and pointed. There in front of the oven, standing on a chair, was the small thing I had tucked in my bed earlier. He was holding a large frying pan with a half-melted plastic bottle of chocolate syrup in it.

  The kitchen was kind of smoky, but luckily the window was open and most of the smoke was drifting out. The creature’s right side was dancing about while other bits of his left side were trying to get things under control.

  I grabbed the pan and threw it into the sink. The water made the hot pan hiss and freaked the small guy out even more. He screamed and looked at me as if I were a mad scientist threatening to end his life. I smiled and stepped closer to him. He looked at the ground and then, with one great thrust, he moved across the room toward the wall. I thought the wall would stop him, but he busted through it and out into the garage.

  Bits of wood and wallboard burst all over as Tuffin clapped and Puck began to bark. My mother got up off the couch and worked her way into the kitchen. I have to admit, it looked pretty bad.

  Instead of taking the time to explain, I dropped to my knees and crawled out through the hole. My mom hollered after me as I fled.

  The garage was dark, but I could hear someone banging on the garage door and screaming to get out.

  I ran toward the noise. I reached out to grab at the thing, but he growled and dashed beneath my legs like a cat. I turned to go after him and he dashed back, causing me to lose my footing and stumble headfirst into the wall. My head slammed into the garage door opener. Ouch! I could see entire galaxies.

  The garage door lifted open, but I was too dizzy to stop him from running.

  I stood up and ran awkwardly after him. When I got out of the garage, I stopped and held my hand up over my eyes. I couldn’t see him anywhere. I did, however, notice Janae walking to her car with her mother. I thought about smiling and waving, but they were looking the other way. Besides, I spotted my small visitor. He was standing beneath one of Janae’s trees and rocking nervously.

  Janae opened the car door on her side and turned to say something to her mother. At that very moment, the little thing made a break for it. He jumped from the trees, slipped behind Janae, and got into her car. He slid into the backseat without her seeing him. My jaw dropped.

  Janae’s mother got into the car as Janae climbed in and shut the passenger-side door. I couldn’t move—my feet were frozen like Popsicles.

  The vehicle backed out of the driveway and then stopped for a second before beginning to move forward. My feet finally thawed.

  I ran down my driveway, screaming and waving, but it was too late. They couldn’t hear me. I stared at the back of the car as it disappeared. I could feel my heart slip into my gut.

  Trevor ran up to me, breathing hard. He waved a friendly wave at the car, and I hit him in the shoulder. We had to act quickly. I didn’t know what to do, but I had a feeling that if we didn’t do something, bad things were about to happen.

  CHAPTER 6

  SEARCHING

  I had no idea where to look for Janae and the little guy that had come from my closet. I mean, the world’s a pretty big place, and they could have gone anywhere.

  I rang the doorbell at Janae’s house to see if somebody might know where they went, but nobody answered. I could see Janae’s older sister, Lisa, peeking out at us from behind a slit in the curtains. Lisa was four years older than me, and we had never really gotten along. At first she tolerated me, but after what happened last year at the water park, she no longer even acknowledged me. I could be dying on the street with an arrow in my arm, my hair on fire, a knife in my leg, and a dog biting me, and she would skip right on by, singing.

  It wasn’t like the water park incident was all my fault. Lisa was standing next to the lifeguards, making what she thought were pretty faces at one of them, when I came walking down the stairs, holding an ice cream cone.

  I didn’t mean to slip, but someone had spilled suntan lotion right where I was stepping. When I came crashing down, I landed on Lisa. I crammed my ice cream into her weird-shaped face, and it slid down the front of her. She screamed louder than a monkey singing opera.

  In my opinion, I should have been the one screaming. I lost my ice cream and fell down in front of everyone. The only thing that happened to her was that her flirting was interrupted. Oh, and she might have badly twisted her ankle when she fell backward. Big deal, so she had to wear a foot brace for two months and use crutches, crutches she
would smack me with whenever I got near her. Now Lisa was peering out of the curtains and pretending not to see us.

  As tempting as Trevor’s suggestion was, there was no way I was going to make things worse with Janae and her family. So we got our bikes and went to search for them. Trevor had to ride his sister’s bike because the chain on his was broken.

  We couldn’t decide where to look for Janae and the creature. Trevor suggested that we go to the places girls always go. I told him he would know what those places were, seeing how he was riding a girl’s bike. So we rode to all the places we thought a girl might hang out.

  They weren’t at the mall. They weren’t at the bakery, the hair salon, or the nail salon. They weren’t in the grocery store, flipping through the latest issue of Teenish Dreams.

  They weren’t buying ribbons at the ribbon store or lip gloss at Target. They weren’t in any of the spots that we thought a girl might go. Trevor suggested we check the fancy underwear store, but I refused to step inside.

  Since we were exhausted and out of ideas, we decided to go home and regroup. While we were pedaling back, we finally spotted Janae’s mom’s car. It was in the parking lot of the public library. I had completely forgotten that girls like books.