Beasties, p.1
Beasties, page 1
Dedication
For Bobby and Josie
and also for Tina, Nick, Joe, Jennie, and Mom,
the loves of my life,
but mostly for Bobby and Josie
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
After
About the Author
Books by Peter Lerangis
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
WITH ONLY THREE HOURS left as a human being, I forgot my allergy meds.
If I were smart, I would have gone home to get them instead of boarding the bus.
If I had missed the bus, I might have been late for school.
If I’d been late for school, I might have missed the field trip.
If I’d missed the field trip . . .
Well, let me put it this way. Because of what happened on that weird April morning, I still touch my mouth to feel whiskers that aren’t there. I’m also afraid of birds, and I start to drool when I pass garbage cans.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
First, my name is Riley P. Trent. Most people don’t call me by my real name. Because my eyes water on allergy days, some people call me Cryley. I don’t like talking to people, so others call me Shyley.1 But that morning I got a new nickname. That’s because I sneezed about a thousand hundred times on the bus ride to school.2 Kids were screaming “Ew!” so loud that people on the sidewalk looked up from their phones—and New Yorkers almost never look up. So the bus driver called me “Sneezy Snyder” (which in New York sounds like “Sneezy Snydah”).
I managed to sniffle my way into my sixth-grade class at Loeser Academy.3 Our teacher, Mr. Sen, reminded us we were going on a trip to see the meteors at the American Museum of Natural History. Which, I have to admit, is the coolest place in New York City. If not the world! But I was the only kid in class who didn’t cheer.
Instead, I sneezed.
I reached for the pocket tissues I keep on my desk. But someone had stolen them, so my sneeze sprayed everywhere. “Yuuuuuuck!” bellowed a kid with cauliflower hair, freckles like a planetarium sky, and imported Italian Gucci buttery leather loafers.4 He flomped flat on his back, shrieking, “Send me to the nurse! I have secondhand snot exposure!”
In my opinion, that is not funny, but everyone laughed anyway. And when Mr. Sen told him to be quiet, he farted. Which made everyone laugh even harder. Even quiet, polite Sara Simpson. And Mason Rosas, the class giant, who loves, loves, loves Sara and was laughing only because she was.
Farting and stealing my tissues are two of Dylan Vlissing’s greatest talents. The only people not cracking up were Mr. Sen and my twin sister, Kate. She was busy rolling her eyes at me. Which she does like a million times a day. I swear, I barely know what her eyes look like at rest. Kate is three minutes older than I am, but she calls me her little brother, which is annoying. And there’s not much I can do, because she’s also two inches taller. Maybe four, if you count her hair. It’s thick as a wire brush, and she keeps it pulled back tight. Mine lies flat like a reddish-brown mud field.
I’m always forgetting things. Not Kate, who never, ever, ever does. She has memorized every subway stop on every line. She plays songs on the piano by heart. She is also an expert on endangered animals and once found a bird species that every expert thought was extinct. She made it on the local news.
And of course, she remembered to bring my allergy meds. Very dramatically she pulled a bottle from her backpack. “Forgot to take these again?”
“Save us from Sneezy Snyder!” bellowed Dylan Vlissing. “Hur-hur-hur-hur! Sneezy Snyder!”
You see?
My life sucks. It really does.
At least he didn’t call me Cryley.
Mom and Dad always say, “Be kind to everyone.” It’s hard enough with Kate. But Dylan? Fuggedaboudit.5 His life’s mission is to make fun of me. Oh, I also stutter. That turns him into a stand-up comedian. Dylan and his mom live in our building, and his dad lives in Seattle. It’s weird that he even has parents, because I sincerely believe he was created from a pile of boogers and battery acid, struck by lightning.
By the time we got to the museum, my meds had kicked in. Sneezelessly, I endured Kate’s lecture to the class on the extinct dodo bird. The rocks and minerals exhibit was awesome. For reasons I’ll never understand, Dylan decided to lick the mighty thirty-four-ton Ahnighito meteor. But everyone ignored him.6 Sara cleaned it off with a disinfectant wipe, and Mason carried that disgusting wipe around for a half hour before he found a trash can.
It was on the way back that things started to go wrong.
When we entered the park at West 81st Street, I still felt great. It had rained, which keeps the pollen down. Now the sun was out, and I stayed away from maple or oak tree blossoms. Kate the musical genius was teaching a new kid the Loeser school song, but instead of just singing it, she was lecturing: “OK, so the musical staff has five horizontal lines, and those lines and spaces represent the seven notes of the octave, which are lettered A through G only . . .”
Boringness was in the air. Mr. Sen was yammering about some beat-up construction site: “Over there they are restoring Tanner’s Spring . . . an early source of water for the area blah de blah de blah. . . .” Being dull puts Mr. Sen in a good mood, so he let us stop at the pretzel and hot dog cart. I can barely understand the Greek accent of the guy who runs it, Petros. He’s nice, though. He never makes me feel bad when I take a long time to say what I want. This time he just waited and smiled, ignoring the other kids who were shouting their orders. By the time I got out a “P-pr—” he’d given me a warm pretzel speckled with salt. My favorite food in the world.
But I didn’t get a chance to eat it. My throat was closing up. I tried to take a deep breath but just made a choking sound. “You OK, Riles?”7 said Mason, looking away from Sara for the first time all day. We call Mason the Boss, because he’s six feet tall at age thirteen, and everybody does whatever he wants.
“Aaaaah . . . aaaaah . . .” I held so tight to the pretzel, I could feel the salt melting.
“Oh! Oh! I’m sorry!” whispered Sara, who eats strange food and apologizes whenever she speaks, which is mostly never. She pulled a glass container from her shoulder bag. “Acai-kale-sesame pellets? They’ll clear your sinuses? Wait, I have to dip them in eucalyptus infusion. . . . I’m sorry.”
“Aaaaah . . . aaaaah . . .”
Kate raced around me and pulled out some twigs with limp yellowish-white blossoms from a pocket of my backpack. “What the—oak blossoms?” she said, flinging them into the bushes. “Why the heck are oak blossoms in your backpack?”
I didn’t know. I can’t even say “oak” in April without my face swelling up. It is the number-one cause of my spring allergies. I sneezed again, so hard that my body spun around.
And now Kate and I were staring at someone with hands covered in pollen dust. He was humming a tune and trying to look innocent. Guess who?
“Dylannnn . . . ?” said Mr. Sen.
“Dude!” said Mason.
“Dear,” said Sara.
“D@&^%!#,” said Kate, which means I can’t really tell you what she said.
“Don’t mind if I do,” said Dylan, snatching the pretzel from my hand.
So on the positive side, Kate had saved my throat. On the negative side, I really reeaalllly wanted that pretzel. “G-g-g-give—”
“Guh-guh-guh-guh,” said Dylan.
And then he licked it.
He ran his big. Fat. Pink. Slimy. Tongue. Top. To. Bottom. With a big. Fat. Smile. “Mmmmmmmm . . .”
I wanted to strangle him. But he’s twice my size. I hoped someone would back me up, but now Mr. Sen was running after a seagull who stole his hot dog. Mason was devouring Sara’s pellets and saying they were delicious.8 Kate was looking in her backpack for something. Probably for an inhaler, which she brought for me. Because she’s so organized.
“Smile!” said Dylan. He had taken out his phone and turned, and now he was shooting a selfie. His mouth was open to show the half-eaten pretzel, and I was in the background looking like an angry emoji come to life.
Dylan needed to be punished. My pretzel was ruined, and I was tired of his bullying. I lunged toward him. I wanted to knock it out of his Pillsbury Doughboy hand.
“Come-n-geh-uh,” Dylan mumbled with a full mouth, shooting out flecks of wet dough. He turned and ran. Cackling. Taking huge bites of the pretzel.
I ran after him as fast as I could, but he had a head start. His Gucci buttery leather loafers slapped against the blacktop as he headed toward the construc tion site ahead. The place where they were restoring the water spring or whatever. A big yellow tape was wrapped around the entire site. It said “Danger Do Not Enter.”
Dylan ducked under. He saw me coming and took another big, slobbery bite.
I jumped over the tape, and he turned and ran farther into the site. In the center was a big green canvas tent.
He dived right into that tent, shrieking, “Come and get—”
But that was all he said. I heard a weird pop and a flash of light. Like maybe his phone had exploded.
I looked behind me. Mr. Sen and the class were still gathered around Petros. Two kids were fighting over a hot dog. Kate and Mason were staring at Sara’s weird food. Nobody noticed Dylan and me. Well, there was a turtle crawling toward me pretty quickly. Central Park has tons of turtles, but usually they crawl away from people. And they stay close to water. So I ignored it.
“Dylan?” I called out.
He didn’t answer, but I wasn’t letting him get away. I leaned into the tent. It was dark inside, and it smelled funny. But then again, so does Dylan.
Here’s the weird thing. All of a sudden, my allergies disappeared. I felt weirdly lightheaded, but still, I was breathing through my nose, which was awesome.
I called out Dylan’s name again. As I stepped farther inside, I felt a stab of pain in my ankle.
I looked down and saw the turtle. It had bitten me.
“Owww!” I shouted.
“————,” replied the turtle. Because turtles do not talk.
I jerked my foot away and fell.
I didn’t really want to be alone in a dark place with Dylan Vlissing. But I didn’t have much choice. I landed on a pile of dirt, rocks, and roots. The turtle was waddling closer, at super-slow turtle speed.
That was when I noticed the large poop at the other end of the tent. It stank. But not like poop, really. Sort of like burnt rubber. Sour and sharp and metallic. Next to it was a mangy raccoon. It was shivering. It was also the largest raccoon I’d ever seen. I mean, it looked like it had visited every garbage can in New York City. And, judging from the poop smell, maybe a toxic waste dump, too.
I stepped back. It had to be rabid or something. But I also couldn’t help noticing what was next to the shivering, large raccoon. It was a pile of clothing—a grease-stained Loeser Academy shirt, khaki pants, boxers, and shoes.
Gucci buttery leather loafers.
But no Dylan.
1Get it? Cry? Shy? It’s so dumb. And these are just two of the nicknames.
2I’m also allergic to many other things, like nuts, tomatoes, red grapes, shellfish, and lentil soup. (Not that last one, really. But if you ever tasted my dad’s lentil soup, you’d say you were allergic, too.)
3We call it Loser Academy, but teachers and staff hate that.
4How do I know this about his shoes? Because Dylan brags about them. He is the only kid I know who brags about shoes. Gucci is pronounced “Gootchy” and it’s a company that makes shoes and clothes for rich people who can say “Gucci” without thinking it sounds funny, which in my opinion it does.
5This is a popular New York City expression. It means “impossible.”
6And the meteor survived, in case you were wondering.
7I hate this nickname almost as much as “Sneezy Snyder.”
8They’re actually disgusting. But as I said, Mason likes Sara. I mean, really likes. She could say trees tasted good and he’d go on an all-bark diet.
2
“D-D-DYLAN?” I CALLED OUT.
I leaned down to the examine the clothes. I could see my pretzel sticking out from underneath. Dylan was nowhere to be seen. Which meant that wherever he was, he was naked.
Even Dylan isn’t that weird.
But the moment I touched the clothes, the raccoon started chittering9 super-fast. Like it was trying to say something to me.
“Shoo. Get out of here!” I stomped on the ground in its direction, to scare it away. Usually raccoons are afraid of people. But this one kept pointing and gesturing like some cartoon character.
I kept my distance from it while I looked around for Dylan. Something nipped at my ankle from behind. I figured it was a rat. Central Park is full of rats, and I hate, hate, hate them. I have nightmares about them all the time. But as I jumped away, I caught a glimpse of my ankle biter, and it wasn’t a rat at all. It was the turtle. Some aggressive, mutant New York City killer turtle.
Unfortunately, there was only one direction I could go, without squashing the raccoon. Toward the poop.
Luckily, I did not land on it. I slipped and landed right next to it, on my butt.
Which is when it began to sizzle. The poop, not my butt.
I had never seen sizzling poop before. I had also never seen poop harden into a bright, shiny orb. My first instinct was to take a picture of it. But I was too stunned to reach for my phone. I was also tingling, like I’d touched an electric wire. The poop started to do things I never in a million years thought a poop could do.
It glowed. It pulsed.
And then, before I could get to my feet, it exploded.
Here’s the weird thing. It wasn’t loud like it should have been. Instead it was a nearly silent blast of silver white. It seemed to suck all the sound and sunlight from Central Park. And then—wham!—it felt like a thousand needles flew directly into my eyeballs. I shrieked. Honestly, I thought I’d just died.
I don’t know how long it lasted, maybe a nanosecond,10 before things were normal again.
Well, not normal, really.
Because now there was someone shouting in the tent, in the squeakiest voice I ever heard.
“I’m going to sue!” it squeaked. “I’ll sue the park department! I’ll sue the tent maker!”
My eyes were still adjusting. I blinked about a hundred times before I could focus.
I was flat on the ground. The first thing I saw was a phone. It was propped up against a tent pole like it had fallen there. I could tell it was Dylan’s because it was crusty with bits of wet pretzel.
“I’ll sue the mayor! I’ll sue the governor!”
I blinked again. The voice was not from the phone. It was coming from the raccoon. The big, mangy thing was hopping around, punching the air.
“Wait,” I said. “What the heck is going on here? You talk?”
Whoa, time-out. That was ten complete words from my mouth and not even the tiniest hint of stuttering. That hadn’t happened in a long time. Maybe this whole scene was in my imagination.
The raccoon was standing on its hind legs now, stomping its feet. “I’ll sue the . . . the . . .”
“The president?” another voice rumbled. This one sounded low and a little muddy, like it was underwater.
I spun around. The turtle was resting in the dirt, its head on one webbed foot.
“You talk, too?” I asked.
“I’ll sue the president!” screamed the raccoon. “And you, too, Riley!”
“How do you know my name?” I asked.
“Because we go the same school? Because I live in your building? I mean, duh!” the raccoon replied. “If it weren’t for your dumb pretzel, none of this would have happened! You’ll hear from my lawyers!”
OK, this had to be a dream. I had a concussion from the explosion. Yeah, that must have been it. Is there such a thing as a concussion dream?
I mean, the raccoon was doing a great imitation of Dylan. The stuff about lawyers, the annoying way its hands were on its hips. What kind of raccoon puts its hands on its hips? I had to laugh.
“You think this is funny?” the raccoon said.
Now the mutant killer ankle-biting talking turtle was creeping toward the phone that rested against the tent. It started to nudge the phone. Turning it.
The screen was in selfie mode. As it moved, it showed the raccoon and the inside of the tent.
The turtle pointed the phone at me, but instead of my face, the screen filled with twitchy, ugly, hairy grossness.
The face of a rat.
“Aaaaaaaghhh!”
The rat screamed at exactly the same time I did.
I pushed up with my arms.
The rat pushed up, too.
I scrabbled away from the phone, screaming again.
So did the rat.
And in that moment, I realized there was only one thing worse than having nightmares about rats.
I was one.
9I don’t know if that’s really a word. But if you ever heard a raccoon, you know what I mean. They make strange sounds, like kittika-kittika-kittika.
