Dinosaur Boy (15 page)

Sylvie had already opened her eyes before any of us could reach her. A couple of wisps of smoke came from her toasted hair. There was only about half as many curls as there had been a moment ago, and the ones that were left were standing on end even more than usual.

But it was short enough now that the tops of her pink antennae were clearly visible, standing up amid the frizzy, smoking strands. Her hair clips must have melted.

Sylvie reached up to the top of her head, felt her antennae, and froze.

Everyone else froze too. For a long moment, we all just stared at her.

Allan was the first to speak. “Somebody had better explain what in the
blazes
is going on here!”

Ignoring him, Sylvie picked herself up off the ground and addressed Elliot and me.

“Let's try the windows,” she suggested.

The front windows were boarded up. I headed for the ones in the back. Instead of touching them, I picked up a nearby chair and tossed it.

I braced myself for a shower of broken glass, but it never came.

The chair set off a shower of sparks when it got near the window, but bounced harmlessly off the glass and fell to the floor.

“Do you think the whole room is electrified on the inside?” Elliot asked. When no one answered him, he headed over to a rack of lacrosse sticks and picked them up one by one, studying them carefully.

“What is going on?” Allan asked again. He seemed to be speaking for the twelve would-be pets who were now huddled in the middle of the portable, carefully avoiding contact with the walls.

“Well,” Sylvie said, with remarkable poise given that her entire right side was twitching a little bit. “There is a long version and a short version of the story. Which would you like?”

“The one that explains what is growing out of your head,” Allan said. The usual attitude in his voice was now buried beneath a healthy amount of hysteria. “Are you, like, a Martian?”

Sylvie nodded.

Allan glanced over at Cici, who glanced over at Nora, who nodded.

“A few of us think Mathis is a Martian too,” Allan told us.

“She is,” I said. “And she's been keeping you here because she plans to sell you. As pets.”

“Yeah, we figured that out too,” Cici said. Like Allan, she was a pale shadow of her usual snarky self. Her long brown hair had been shaved on the sides, and the top portion was curled up in elaborate loops. She had unraveled one loop and was twisting it nervously around her finger, again and again.

“Mathis's clients—the ones who want to buy you—are on their way,” I said. “If we don't figure out a way to get you out of here, you're all going to end up on Jupiter.”

Allan's head snapped up.

“Us?” he asked. “What about you?”

“Jupiterians don't like hybrids,” I explained.

He nodded toward Sylvie.

“What about her? They don't want Martians either?”

“I'm only half Martian,” Sylvie informed him. “They don't want me either.”

“Bad news,” Elliot interrupted, coming up behind us and gesturing to the walls. While we had been talking, he had used the metal handle of a lacrosse stick to systematically test the electric barrier. He had wrapped a towel around the end he was holding, but his hair was still sticking up a bit more than usual.

“The whole portable is electrified,” he reported. Then, stating the obvious, “We're trapped.”

Allan started pacing in an uneasy circle.

“I'm not just going to sit here and wait to get hit with more of that spray!” he growled.

“We'll think of something,” I said, trying to calm him down.

“Easy for you to say,” he snapped. “They don't want dinosaurs!
You're
not going to have to play fetch with some family on Jupiter!”

Allan and the others were all staring at me. And not like they usually stared at me, to get a glimpse of the freak show. For the first time, they were looking at me with something that looked a lot like…jealousy.

Actually, it looked
exactly
like jealousy. Even Elliot was eyeing my plates with a sort of wistful gleam in his eye.

All of a sudden, I realized something. Totally by accident, I had finally achieved what my father had advised me to do on the first day of school.

I had made all of the kids in my class wish that they had plates and a tail.

And just like that, a plan began to form.

• • •

“Hurry,” Sylvie urged us all a short time later. “Mathis and her clients should be here any minute now!”

“We're almost done,” Elliot assured her, cutting through four sheets of construction paper at once with the one and only pair of scissors we had found in the supply closet. “Is there any more tape?”

“I found some!” Gabrielle called, tossing it to him from the closet.

“Good!” Elliot yelled back, catching the tape neatly in one hand and handing it to Mary, who was busily taping papers to Sam's back. “See if there's any more paper. Color doesn't matter, does it, Sawyer?”

I thought for a second.

“I don't think so,” I said finally. “Especially if it's all we've got.”

Elliot nodded and went back to cutting.

I let out a quick breath and looked nervously around the room. It wasn't every day you saw fourteen kids, all hard at work, executing a plan you yourself had come up with. At least, it wasn't every day for me.

I was starting to get nervous that it wasn't really going to work.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I jumped a mile before I looked over and saw it was Allan.

When I realized it was him, I jumped another mile.

He took his hand off my shoulder and raised both hands above his head.

“I come in peace, OK?” he said.

I bit back a smile at his oddly appropriate choice of words. I think Allan realized what he had said too; the corners of his mouth went up a fraction of an inch as he lowered his arms back down.

“You look like you're thinking about something,” he prompted me.

I nodded.

“Before she left, Mathis told me that Parker didn't accept her invitation to Camp Remorse,” I told him. “Which is why Parker isn't here. But he's not at his house. And you said you couldn't find him either. So…where is he?”

“Oh.” Allan shifted his weight a bit uncomfortably. “Parker's at military school in Maryland.”

“What?” I asked, incredulous.

Allan looked a tad embarrassed. “His mom told my mom a couple of days ago.”

“Military school,” I said thoughtfully. “Where they have to wear uniforms, right?”

Allan shrugged. “I guess so.”

At least that explained why Parker's mom would throw out his clothes.

“Well, I guess I didn't eat him then,” I said pointedly.

“I guess not,” Allan said sheepishly.

There was a moment of awkward silence before Allan spoke again. “I've been thinking too,” he announced.

“Really?” That must be new and different for him.

“Last night at the science fair,” he began. “You tried to stop Mathis from taking me and Cici. And now you're here, even though the…the, Jupiter people don't want dinosaur pets.”

He frowned and trailed off, apparently having lost the thought that had been about to occur to him.

“Yeah…” I encouraged him.

“Why?” he asked. “Why are you helping us? After everything that we—I—have done to you?”

I bit my lip and thought about it. I examined Allan's face while I did. He wasn't being smart, or mean, or jerkish. He really wanted to know the answer. He truly could not understand what I was doing here. Was that because it would never have occurred to him to go out on a limb to help someone else? Or maybe because no one had ever done something like that for him?

It was food for thought. Some other time when Jupiterians weren't about to descend on us and try to kidnap my best friend.

“I don't know, Allan,” I said finally. “Maybe the brain in my butt has finally taken over the brain in my head.”

Allan smiled. It was kind of a frightening thing, to see his face squint up like that beneath his oversized forehead. It looked especially weird with his insane, spiky hair. And at the same time, it was the least scary he had ever looked to me.

“Yeah,” he said slowly, as his grin widened. “That must be it.”

Suddenly, the ground started shaking beneath us and there was a loud sound from outside, like a jet engine coming in for a landing.

“They're coming!” Sylvie yelled suddenly, backing away from the crack in the board that was nailed against the front window. “Places!”

Allan nodded at me, then fell back to stand beside Cici.

I took my place in the front of the room, just as Sylvie used the wooden handle of a broomstick to kill the lights.

Take
me
to
your
leader.

Any minute now, a Jupiterian was going to ask that. And when they did, he—she? it?—would be brought straight to me.

Why the heck hadn't I come up with a better plan?

• • •

A little bit of light came into the portable when Principal Mathis opened the door, but not much. It was barely enough for me to see the outline of our principal's hand, holding a can of Good Boy (or maybe it was Good Girl? It was too dark to see the color of the can) at the ready. And there was also enough light to see the slim outline of a broomstick knock the can out of her hand.

“Oh!” Principal Mathis exclaimed.

The lights flicked back on, just in time to catch Mathis on her hands and knees, fumbling around for the spray.

“Good afternoon, Principal Mathis,” Sylvie said, nudging the can out of the way with one foot and bowing deeply. She purposefully made her voice sound toneless and distant, as though she were under the influence of the spray. “We are all ready to go, just like you asked.”

Principal Mathis gaped at her. Forgetting about the can, which had rolled back behind my feet, she stood up slowly. She took off her thick glasses, quickly cleaned both lenses, then put them back on to gape at Sylvie some more.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

Sylvie smiled and patted the construction paper cape of plates she had taped to her back. She turned around slowly, making a full circle, to show off her long paper tail.

“Oh, nothing. Just a bit of grooming. I wanted to fit in with everybody else.”

Principal Mathis glanced up and got a good look at the rest of us. Her mouth fell open.

There was an impatient sound from behind her. Like someone clearing their throat.

Principal Mathis's expression changed from confused to furious in approximately two seconds flat.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she began. “I'm not sure we need to—”

“Let us
see
them already!” an excited voice squealed. A tall, slim shape shoved Principal Mathis out of the way and walked eagerly into the room. A half dozen even taller figures followed the first, until the doorway was crowded with Jupiterians, and Principal Mathis was shoved, protesting, into the corner.

The Jupiterians were all about two feet taller than Principal Mathis. Their long robes were the same shiny silver as their skin, and their long arms and legs looked even skinnier than Elliot's. They all had tiny facial features that were squished into the middle of their faces, slits for eyes, tiny bumps for noses, and mouths that were even smaller than the thin line behind Mathis's human mask.

I heard someone behind me, probably Cici, gasp. But other than that, we all just stared silently at the Jupiterians while they stared back at us.

As mesmerized as we all were by them, I can only imagine how fascinating
we
must have looked to
them
. And how confusing.

Fifteen kids with dinosaur plates from their necks all the way down their backs. Right to the tips of their long tails.

Well, actually, we hadn't been able to find enough construction paper to make tails for everybody. But we directed Gary, Gabrielle, and Jeremy (the three kids without tails) to stand in the back. After all, Sylvie had said that
the
only
people
who
have
worse
eyesight
than
Martians
are
the
Jupiterians.
Hopefully, she was right about that.

“Oh
no
,” the first Jupiterian, the one who had pushed Principal Mathis out of the way, exclaimed. “Oh, Mathilda. This is quite wrong. This is absolutely
not
what we ordered.”

The Jupiterian's voice was sort of singsongy. It sounded like a girl's voice, but all the Jupiterians had shiny bald heads and were dressed exactly the same, so I wasn't sure what gender any of them were. Or if the Jupiterians even had genders…