Driven by Emotions (3 page)

Sadness inched her way out on the lightline after me.

Suddenly, I heard an awful mechanical groan, unbelievably loud. I turned around, but what I saw seemed so impossible I almost didn’t believe it.

Goofball Island had started to crumble.

As I stared, huge sections of it broke off and crashed down into the Memory Dump. Then the lightline started to collapse, too! There was no way we were going to make it to Headquarters.

“AHHHH! Go back! Run! Run! Run!” I yelled at Sadness.

We ran as fast as we could back to the island, but it was disappearing faster now. We poured on the speed, ducking and dodging to avoid pieces of the collapsing island. We zoomed across the last
remains of Goofball, tore over the bridge, and leaped back to the cliffs. Still, we weren’t safe. Goofball’s collapse made the cliffs unstable. I felt the ground slipping under my
feet.

“Come on, Sadness!” I screamed as I grabbed her arm. “Run!”

She stumbled after me, and we made it to a more stable area just as the bridge and
all
of Goofball Island gave a final groan, collapsing into the emptiness below.

As I watched the island sink like a lost iceberg, images of the Goofball part of Riley’s personality flashed in my mind. I saw her at three years old, giggling and spinning around until
she fell. I saw her on Dad’s shoulders, giving herself a cotton candy beard. I saw the whole family making silly faces at each other while they jumped on a trampoline.

That was all gone now. Riley would never have goofy times like that again.

No. That wasn’t true. Riley would get Goofball back. I just had to return the core memories to the holder, and Goofball would grow back. Riley needed me to stay positive and take action,
so I got to my feet and started marching.

“Wait, Joy, you could get lost in there!” Sadness said. She raced to catch up and grabbed my arm.

I looked ahead. Shelves stretched into the distance as far as the eye could see and towered overhead. They branched off into corridor after corridor of more shelves, each of which looked exactly
like the others.

Sure, yes, it looked a little daunting, but I was determined, and I was positive, and I knew I’d be able to handle it without a problem!

“Think positive!” I told Sadness.

“Okay. I’m positive you will get lost in there. That’s Long Term Memory. I read about it in the manual,” she replied.

The manual! Of course! All that reading Sadness did while standing in her Circle of Sadness in Headquarters was finally going to pay off. “Congratulations! You are the Official Mind
Map!” I exclaimed. “Lead on, Mind Map!”

“Okay,” Sadness said, flopping down. “Only, I’m too sad to walk. Just give me a few…hours.”

Since she refused to get up and join me, I grabbed her leg and dragged her into the shelving maze. “Which way? Left?” I asked.

“Right.”

I turned right.

“No, I mean go left. I said left was right. Like ‘correct.’”

Why was everything so complicated with Sadness?

I followed her directions and dragged her until, suddenly, everything went dark.

“Oh, Riley’s gone to sleep,” Sadness said.

“Okay.” I perked up. “Then nothing else can happen! By the time she wakes up, I’ll be back at Headquarters with the core memories.”

That’s what I thought. But by the time Riley woke up, we were
still
trudging through Long Term. Riley has a
lot
of memories.

I admit it, I was starting to get frustrated. I hadn’t given up hope, no siree, but being lost with Sadness while Riley’s entire personality was on the line…it was
challenging. So when I heard voices up ahead, I dropped Sadness’s leg and raced to find them.

It was two Mind Workers, and they were doing something with a vacuum cleaner, a clipboard, and some of Riley’s memories.

“Phone numbers?” the first Mind Worker said. “She doesn’t need those. They’re in her phone.”

“Forget it!” the other worker replied.

And they sucked several of Riley’s memory spheres into the vacuum. To
forget
them! These weren’t just any Mind Workers, they were Forgetters—Mind Workers; who worked in
Long Term Memory vacuuming up old memories. I had never heard of them before, but apparently they had been around a long time.

“Hey!” I shouted. “You can’t throw those away! Those are perfectly good memories.”

“Really,” one Forgetter clucked. “The names of every
Cutie Pie Princess
doll?”

“Yes!” I shot back. “That is critical information! Glitterstorm, Honeypants, Officer Justice…”

“Forget ’em!” the other Forgetter cried, and then the first one vacuumed them up!

“Hey!” I objected. “Bring those back!”

“They’re in the dump,” the Forgetter replied. “Nothing comes back from the dump.”

“When Riley doesn’t care about a memory, it fades,” said the other Forgetter.

“Fades?” I asked.

“Happens to the best of ’em,” the Forgetter noted.

Wow. I had always thought when Riley made a memory, she had it forever. It was a shame any memory would fade away. The idea almost made me sad.

“This one will never fade,” said the Forgetter, chuckling, as he removed a sphere from the shelf.

“The song from the gum commercial?” I asked. Of all memories to keep, that was the most ridiculous and useless one!

The Forgetters explained that they liked to send it to Headquarters for no reason. They began to play it over and over again.

“We all know the song. Okay, okay. Real catchy,” I said.

Then one of the Forgetters replaced the memory on the shelf and tipped it backward. The memory got sucked up by a tube and sent straight to Headquarters.

I’m sure Anger, Disgust, and Fear really appreciated that.

I asked the Forgetters if they knew where I could find Friendship Island, but before they could answer, we all heard a terrible groaning noise. I followed the sound, running as fast as I could.
What else was going wrong inside Riley’s mind? I turned a corner and stopped in my tracks.

Friendship Island was crumbling to pieces!

“Oh, not Friendship Island,” I said.

“Riley loved that one. And now it’s gone,” said Sadness. Apparently she’d caught up to me. If it was up to her, we’d just sit against a shelving unit and mope, but
that is not my style. Friendship Island might be gone—for the moment—but I could see Hockey Island in the distance, and I was sure once we got there, we could get to Headquarters.
We’d have to go back through Long Term to find a bridge to Hockey, but if that’s what we needed to do, that’s what we’d do.

CLONK.

The noise rang out somewhere behind us. I turned and saw a huge pink elephant humming to himself as he picked memory spheres off the Long Term shelves.

I walked right up to him. “Hello!” I said.

The elephant froze for a moment and then sprinted off!

“Wait! Hey! Wait!” I yelled.

But the elephant wouldn’t stop. He just kept on running! We followed him around a corner and into a dead end. He frantically tried to climb a wall, but he wasn’t getting
anywhere.

“Um, excuse me?” I said.

“AHHHHHHHH!” he screamed. He then grabbed a memory sphere from one of the shelves, throwing it in one direction and taking off in the other. After that he ran right into a cart of
memories!

“Are you okay?” I asked him.

“I don’t think so,” he replied.

There was something familiar about this odd creature. He looked like a pink elephant, but he also had a big, fluffy cat’s tail, and…

“Hey, I know you! You’re Bing Bong! Riley’s imaginary friend! Riley loved playing with you. You two were the best of friends.” Then it dawned on me. Bing Bong could help
us! “Oh! You would know! We’re trying to get back to Headquarters…”

“You guys are from Headquarters?” asked Bing Bong.

I nodded. “I’m Joy, and this is Sadness.”

“Joy? THE Joy?” asked Bing Bong.

I couldn’t help but feel a little flattered. Apparently I was famous in the Mind World!

Bing Bong suddenly realized that if I was in the Mind World and not in Headquarters, Riley would never be happy. “We gotta get you back,” he said. “I tell you
what…follow me!”

“Oh, thank you!” I cried.

As Sadness and I followed Bing Bong down a row of memory spheres, we began reminiscing about all the great times Bing Bong had with Riley. There was the time when they were in a band together,
and the time when they played tag. But they had their best adventures in Bing Bong’s rocket. I remembered his rocket ran on song power! And not just any song…Bing Bong’s theme
song that Riley wrote! Oh, those were the best times.

A dull voice interrupted our reminiscing. It was Sadness. “What exactly are you supposed to be?” she asked.

“You know,” Bing Bong replied, “it’s unclear. I’m part cat…part elephant…part dolphin.”

I looked him over. I didn’t see any dolphin bits. “Dolphin?” I asked.

He plugged his elephant trunk and made a noise
exactly
like a dolphin’s. It was pretty impressive. “What are you doing out here?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said, “there’s not much call for imaginary friends lately. So, uh, you know, I’m…”

“Hey, hey, don’t be sad,” I said. “When I get back up to Headquarters, I’ll make sure Riley remembers you!”

“You will?” he asked, suddenly perking up.

“Of course! She’d love that!”

“Ha, ha! This is the greatest day of my life!” Bing Bong cried. He then started doing a little jig, which ended with him getting hurt. He began to cry, and candy tears poured out of
his eyes.

“What’s going on?” asked Sadness.

“I cry candy,” said Bing Bong. “Try the caramel, it’s delicious.”

Mmmmm! I reached out for one, but the five memory spheres I was holding began to slip.

“Oh, here, use this,” said Bing Bong, emptying out the satchel he was carrying. Everything from a kitchen sink to a cat came tumbling out! Sadness and I stared at Bing Bong in
amazement.

“What? It’s imaginary,” said Bing Bong, and he handed the satchel to me.

“Thanks,” I said, slipping the memories inside. “This’ll make it a lot easier to walk back to Headquarters.”

“Walk?” Bing Bong said. “We’re not walking! We’re taking the Train of Thought!”

Yes! The Train of Thought! I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it! I’d used it just the other day to get those extra daydreams for the first day of school. The train ran
from down here to Headquarters all the time!

“How do we catch it?” I asked.

“Well,” Bing Bong said, “it kind of goes all over the place, but there is a station in Imagination Land. I know a shortcut. Come on, this way!”

Sadness and I followed Bing Bong through Long Term Memory until we came to a building that appeared to be some kind of warehouse or factory. When I looked through its window, I saw out the other
side—and there was the train station!

No wonder Riley had loved Bing Bong so much when she was little. He was brilliant!

“After you,” he said, opening the door.

Sadness grabbed my arm. “I read about this place in the manual,” she said. “We shouldn’t go in there. This is Abstract Thought. Let’s go around.”

Leave it to Sadness to be negative. I looked to see how far it would be to go around. The answer?
Super
far! The building was huge! There was absolutely no good reason we shouldn’t
listen to Bing Bong and take the shortcut.

“Look,” I told Sadness, “we don’t want to miss the train. Bing Bong knows what he’s doing. He’s part dolphin. They’re very smart!”

I gave her my happiest, most joyfully positive smile, and it worked. Sadness followed Bing Bong and me into the building. Score! Soon we’d be on the train and on our way back to
Headquarters!

Soon after we walked into the Abstract Thought building, the door slammed shut behind us.

Unexpected, but nothing to worry about.

Then all kinds of shapes floated up from the floor: little triangles and circles and rectangles of various sizes and colors. It was like standing inside a kaleidoscope. So beautiful.

Then the shapes began to melt in a weird, goopy kind of way.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” said Sadness, as she shuddered. “They turned it on.”

“I’ve never seen this before,” Bing Bong said.

I turned to look at him. His face had changed! It was all flat and blocky! I screamed, and when Bing Bong looked at me, he screamed, too.

I looked at Sadness. She had changed, as well! Then I carefully raised my hands toward my own face. I felt my nose sticking out two feet beyond my face. It was flat and pointed.

“AAAAAAH!” I screamed. “What is going on?”

“We’re abstracting!” Sadness cried. “There are four stages. This is the first: nonobjective fragmentation!”

I had no idea what that meant. I only knew we needed to get out of the building. I tried to run, but my legs were stiff boards without knees. And my arms couldn’t pump, because my elbows
were gone.

“Oh!” I wailed. “What do we do?”

“All right, do not panic!” Bing Bong advised. “What is important is that we all
stay together
!”

Then his arm fell off.

It was time to panic. I would have tried to run again, but my head popped off. Then Sadness’s leg fell off, causing her to tumble to the floor.

“We’re in the second stage,” Sadness explained. “We’re deconstructing!”

Pulling ourselves together—literally—we raced for the window. Oddly enough, it’s difficult to move quickly when you’re juggling your own body pieces. Just saying.

“We’ve gotta get out of this place before we’re nothing but shape and color and get stuck here forever!” Sadness cried.

Then things got worse. We deflated into two-dimensional shapes. Have you ever tried to move when you’re as flat as a pancake? I don’t recommend it. That was apparently stage three.
We all still struggled for the window, but it seemed to get farther and farther away.

POP!

We abstracted into flat blobs.

“Oh, no!” Sadness groaned. “We’re nonfigurative. This is the last stage!”

I didn’t want to give up. I’m
not
a giver-upper. But what were we going to do?