The Island of Dr. Libris (2 page)

“A cozy spot over on Route Seventeen. They bake the best blueberry pie on the planet. Your dad and I used to go there when we were dating. We’d rent a car, drive up to Lake Katrine, and eat pie.”

Now his mom had a faraway look in her eye. Billy
wondered if she ever shut out the real world and imagined a better one like he did.

But just as quickly as she slipped away, she zipped back.

“If you get hungry before dinner, you can fix yourself a snack.” She led Billy into the kitchen and opened a cupboard.

Two whole shelves were lined with bright orange-and-red cartons of shrink-wrapped peanut butter crackers—just about the only food Billy, who was kind of skinny, actually enjoyed eating.

“Promise me you’ll also eat at least two pieces of fruit every day?”

“Deal,” said Billy.

“Here. Tuck a couple into your backpack. I don’t want you starving when you’re out having fun.”

“Thanks.”

“So why don’t you settle in and poke around? I need to go back upstairs and work on my dissertation.”

A dissertation, Billy had learned, was a very long, very boring paper that nobody would ever read except the professors who would decide whether his mom was “smart enough to be called
Dr.
Gillfoyle” and earn more money.

The paper was so complicated Billy’s mother planned to work on it
all summer.
That meant Billy would need to find lots of things to do on his own.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”

“I know, Billy. You always are.”

Billy hauled his suitcase up to the second floor.

After bumping the rolling bag up each and every one of the very steep steps, he reached his bedroom. The walls were paneled with knotty pine. There was a flannel blanket on the bed. The rug featured fish. Billy felt like he’d just walked into some kind of outdoor-clothing catalog.

Except there was another security camera suspended from the ceiling. Billy wondered if Dr. Libris was worried about people stealing his duck decoy lamps.

He rummaged around in his suitcase and found his bathing suit.

He didn’t fold it up and put it in the chest of drawers.

He hung it over the lens of that creepy spy camera and headed back downstairs to check out the living room.

It was pretty much a bust.

No TV, DVD player, or Xbox. No computer whatsoever.

There was, however, a framed needlework sampler hanging on the wall over the sofa:

A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

—Carl Sagan

“Okay,” said Billy, closing his eyes. “I’m saying my magic words: ‘Xbox,’ ‘TV,’ ‘DVR’!”

He opened his eyes and glanced around the room.
Nothing new had magically appeared. The cabin was still boring.

Billy tucked his iPhone into a pocket and headed outside.

To his left, he saw a glass-and-more-glass modern-looking house. On the right was a rambling two-story home that was kind of thrown together. One part was a castle tower, another a circus tent, and another an upside-down boat.

Billy thought the tossed-together place looked cooler than the glass house.

Strolling around to the back of the cabin, Billy noticed something weird: a giant satellite dish.

“Too bad you didn’t think to hook it up to a TV,” he thought out loud.

So why did Dr. Libris need a satellite dish?

Did he spend his summers trying to communicate with aliens?

Or did the big dish beam up the video feed for the worst cable TV idea in the world: The Home Security Camera Channel?
“Now you can watch empty houses filled with furniture, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week!”

About a hundred feet downhill from the cabin’s back porch, past a picnic table and a jumble of lawn furniture, Billy could see a small red rowboat tied to a floating dock.

Way out in the middle of the lake sat an island. It was so hazy it seemed to float on the water like a bank of fog spiked with evergreen trees. The island was maybe three
football fields wide and had a sheer rocky peak poking up out of the haze at its far northern edge. It looked sort of like a smooth tooth.

Billy might’ve stared longer (the island was kind of spooky), except he heard someone hollering at him from behind the rambling house next door.

“Hello? New neighbor? I need your help! Hurry!”

The little girl who’d been shouting had chocolate-colored skin, bright brown eyes, and hair knotted into three braids.

She looked like she was maybe five.

“You okay?” asked Billy.

The girl shook her head and pointed up at a tree close to the castle section of the mashed-together lake place. A baby doll in a sparkly pink dress dangled off a branch.

“I wanted to see if Dolly could fly, so I tossed her out the window,” said the girl. “Can you rescue her?”

“Maybe,” said Billy, leaning back to study the situation.

“What’s your name?”

“Billy.”

“I’m Alyssa. Alyssa Andrews. We live in this house. Me, my brother Walter, and my mom and dad. Not all the
time. Just for the summer. It’s not really a house. It’s a cottage, like the cheese? I can’t climb trees. I’m only five, so it’s against the rules. Walter’s allowed to climb trees but he doesn’t like to because trees have pollen and pollen makes his asthma worse.”

“Well, don’t worry. I’m pretty sure I can save Dolly.”

“Really?”

“Yup. I’m twelve. I’m allowed to climb trees.”

“Oh, good! Hurry!”

Billy was wiry and pretty good on the monkey bars in the playgrounds back home in the city. He figured he could handle climbing a tree. A tree was basically monkey bars made out of branches and leaves.

“Thank you!” Alyssa shouted as Billy scaled the tree.

Billy waved down at her, then cranked up a good tree-climbing tune on his iPhone. With his earbuds jammed in deep, he shinnied up higher.

And higher.

Pretty soon, he was maybe twenty feet off the ground, hugging the tree trunk tightly with his knees.

The branch that had snagged the doll wasn’t thick enough to support even Billy’s weight. So he stretched out his arm.

Couldn’t reach the doll.

He tried again.

He stretched out his arm and his neck and was just able to nudge the doll free. It fell to the ground.

So did his iPhone.

The doll landed with a soft thud in a clump of leaves.

The iPhone that had tumbled out of Billy’s pocket wasn’t so lucky.

It hit a rock.

Glass crackled.

Billy slid down the tree as fast as he could and picked up his phone.

Dead.

No matter how many times he pushed the wake button or the home button or the wake and home buttons at the same time, the splintered glass remained frozen and blank.

“I’m sorry,” said Alyssa.

“Is there an Apple Store around here?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

Billy was fixated on the sudden, horrible death of his iPhone. His mom would have to buy him a new one.

Chances of that happening? Impossible.

Because it wasn’t Christmas. Or his birthday. And iPhones cost a fortune.

“Dolly wants to give you a hug,” said Alyssa.

She jiggled her doll.

“That’s okay,” said Billy.

Alyssa narrowed her eyes. Telling her no didn’t seem to be an option.

So Billy took the doll.

“There, there, there,” he said, patting it on its plastic head. “Don’t cry, Dolly. You’re safe now.”

And, of course, at that exact second, three tough-looking guys on bicycles skidded to a halt on the gravel road ten feet away.

“Awwwww. Isn’t that sweet?” sneered the boy who appeared to be the bikers’ leader. “Weedpole wuvs his widdle biddy baby doll.”

Billy tossed the doll back to Alyssa.

The three guys—who were all about Billy’s age—straddled their rides and laughed the way hyenas do when they find a wounded wildebeest.

The leader was a beefy kid dressed in a sleeveless New York Jets football jersey and bright green mesh shorts. His greasy hair was spiked up into a cockatoo Mohawk.

“That’s Nick Farkas,” whispered Alyssa.

“What’s your name, Weedpole?” demanded Farkas.

Billy shuffled forward. “Um, uh … Gillfoyle,” he said, trying to sound tough.

It didn’t work.

“Your name is
Gillfoyle
?” Nick Farkas laughed. “What are you, a butler or something?”

“No. That’s my last name. My, uh, first name is Billy.”

“Um, uh,” said Nick, mimicking Billy. “You sure about that,
Gillfoyle
?”

His two buddies snorted.

“What a stupid name!” said one.

“Yeah,” said the other. “Stupid.”

“I guess,” said Billy, his eyes darting around as he looked for an escape route. He noticed something in Nick Farkas’s bike basket: a stack of comic books.

“Oh, wow—you guys read
Space Lizard
? I
love
the Space Lizard.”

“Well, the Space Lizard can’t stand wimpy weedpoles like you,” said Farkas. “In fact, he’d acid-blast your face till you shriveled up and died!”

“And then,” said the guy on the left, “he’d pluck out your eyeballs with a flick of his glue-stick tongue.”

“Yeah,” said the other. “His tongue.”

“Even though I was already dead?” asked Billy. “Isn’t that a waste of glue?”

“Huh?” said Farkas.

“If I’m dead, why pluck out my eyeballs? It’s not like I’m gonna feel it or, you know, go blind.”

“He’d do it because the Space Lizard hates your bony butt almost as much as I do!”

Oh-kay
, thought Billy.
So much for bonding over shared comic book interests.

He figured he should just go back inside his mom’s cabin and hide until summer vacation was over.

“See you later, guys,” he said, waving and backing away. “Cool meeting you.”

“Thanks again for saving Dolly!” shouted Alyssa.

The boys snorted some more. A broken iPhone and a pack of bullies who hated his guts? Billy wondered if it was possible for his first day at the lake to get any worse.

“I’m gonna be keeping my eye on you, Weedpole,” said Farkas. “So don’t you dare step across the border.”

“No problem,” said Billy. “Exactly which border are we talking about here?”

“The one between your lame-o cabin and my place.”

Farkas jerked his thumb at the glass-on-glass box up the road.

So this was how Billy’s first day and entire summer could totally get worse: Nick Farkas was his other next-door neighbor.