Bully-Be-Gone (2 page)

“Odd,” he said. “English muffins' and ‘cereal' sound nothing alike. I'll have to check the connection between the Robotic Chef and the Morning News Toaster. Yes, yes.”

Uncle Phineas had invented the Robotic Chef System for his wife, Felicity. Although she had disappeared many years ago, Uncle Phineas kept the system in relatively good working order since he couldn't cook at all.

“Everything else is perfect,” Millicent said, pushing her food around on her plate with her fork.

She didn't have the heart to tell him she hadn't ordered eggs or hash browns either.

“There,” Uncle Phineas said, tapping his screwdriver on the counter. He put a piece of bread in the toaster and pressed the lever. The morning news came on immediately.

“In breaking news,” the radio newscaster said, “the Mega-Stupenda Mart is reporting that three top-of-the-line bicycles were stolen this morning.”

“Well,” Uncle Phineas mumbled.

“Descriptions of the three robbers are sketchy,” the newscaster continued. “Seen by witnesses only fleetingly, and in silhouette, they are described as ‘one tall, one short and heavy, and one with incredibly long arms.' They are believed to be youngsters. Anyone with information regarding the robbery is encouraged to contact the Masonville police.”

Millicent was only half listening to the news report. Her
upcoming presentation dominated her thoughts. “Ketchup on my eggs, please,” Millicent said into the Robotic Chef's microphone located in the middle of the kitchen table.

The refrigerator opened and a metal arm reached out, a bottle in its steel grip. A red sensor on its wrist scanned her plate for scrambled eggs. It poured syrup on her hash browns.

Close enough
, she thought.

“Can you believe that? Stealing bikes? In broad daylight?” Uncle Phineas asked.

“Ridiculous,” Millicent answered while cutting her food.

“And a threesome of youngsters, no less,” he commented.

“A threesome,” she echoed, popping a wad of eggs into her mouth.

“Raising young people is a baffling job,” Uncle Phineas said. “Too much discipline and they rebel. Not enough and they run rampant. I confess, I make it up as I go.”

“I think you do pretty well,” Millicent said. Ever since Uncle Phineas became her guardian, he'd measured out his authority only when Millicent had truly deserved it.

“Say, Millicent, would you like to see my latest creation? Yes?” Uncle Phineas asked, waving his screwdriver.

“Sure,” she said, perking up. She set down her utensils. Uncle Phineas oozed inspiration.

“What do you do if you're waiting in a long line, at the post office, say, and you want to sit?” he asked.

She knew that pitches included compelling questions
meant to engage customers. She played along by answering with another question.

“Get out of line?” she asked.

“You could,” said Uncle Phineas. “Unless you were wearing Phineas's Inflatable Chair Pants!”

A deafening gust of wind came from beneath Uncle Phineas's white lab coat. Millicent covered her mouth in shock and, for a second, she thought he really ought to excuse himself. He turned around, revealing an inflatable chair sticking out of his trousers. He sat down and crossed his legs.

“As you can see,” he said smugly, “there's no place that's not a sitting place with Phineas's Inflatable Chair Pants.”

A high-pitched whistle pierced the air, like that of a punctured raft, but Uncle Phineas ignored it.

“The convenience of furniture, the tailoring of an Italian suit,” he said, his arms outstretched.

He sank farther and farther with each word.

“Uncle Phineas,” she said.

“A chair for anywhere,” he said.

“Uncle Phineas!” she said more urgently.

“Standing room only?” he asked. “Not so with—Oh, dear.”

Uncle Phineas lay on the floor on a mat of plastic. Millicent leaped to help him up.

“It's a great idea, Uncle Phineas,” she said, struggling to get him to his feet.

“Yes, yes. Well—” he said, standing and brushing himself off. “Minor problem. Utterly fixable.”

“Without a doubt,” she said.

“Indeed,” he said. “And your invention? Launching today, eh?”

“Yeah,” she said, tilting her head downward. She felt nervous all over again.

“What's wrong, Love?” he asked, stooping and placing his arm around her shoulders.

“I'm worried,” said Millicent. “Worried it won't work.”

Uncle Phineas placed his hand under her chin and lifted her head until her face was fully lit by the morning sun streaming through the window.

“Nothing is ever perfect,” he said. “That's why we invent. Imperfect inventions for an imperfect world. We inventors do little more than create the illusion of perfection. If we're lucky, there'll be a brief, flawless moment in the whole mess. And if we're especially lucky, we'll be partly responsible for it.”

Millicent poked at her eggs.

“Not convinced, eh?”

“I only hope you're right,” she said.

“Faith, my dear niece,” he said. “Faith, science, and a little finger crossing.”

Millicent looked at him, his curly brown hair of the day, his white beard, his green eyes. She wanted to believe him. She had the science and finger crossing down. What she needed to muster between now and the Wunderkind Club meeting was at least a beaker full of faith.

D
uring the summer, the Wunderkind Club gathered at the Masonville public library in a secret room. The room was concealed behind an immense iron door which, in turn, was concealed behind a bookcase in the children's book section. Only the Wunderkinder and a few select others knew of the room's existence.

In the mid-seventeen hundreds, Millicent's great-great-great-great grandmother Goody Constance Madding founded the Masonville public library.

Goody Madding loved books—the smell of their leather bindings, the rustle of their pages, their printed wisdom.
And she loved collecting them. Because of her, Masonville's library enjoyed the reputation of being the most well-stocked library in the region. Her life would have been utterly fulfilled were it not for a certain organization bent on enforcing its will in Masonville's every nook and cranny.

The organization went by the name Citizens Loathing Outlandish, Uncivilized Tomes, or CLOUT for short. CLOUT was comprised of needle-lipped, pill-eyed residents with not much to occupy their time or their minds. CLOUT's mission was to identify and eliminate any and all books with which they took issue.

One day, Goody Madding caught wind of a treacherous plot CLOUT was hatching to rid Masonville of a bunch of books they didn't like. She heard the rumor from Goody Akasha Fontaine, a servant who overheard it while cleaning a CLOUT member's home. Goody Fontaine told Goody Madding that CLOUT planned to raid the library in a week.

CLOUT's goal was to burn every book written by authors with strange names. Especially authors with hard-to-pronounce foreign names. After the book burning, CLOUT planned on hosting a party—an all-you-could-eat whole wheat cracker and warm water social—to celebrate.

Goody Madding was horrified. She stood to lose most of her beloved book inventory to CLOUT's bonfire. As she dwelled on it, her horror turned to rage.

Good and mad, Goody Madding mounted her own resistance.

Armed only with a trowel and a tin pail, for seven days straight she dug a room under the library in the wee hours every morning. She lined the finished room with bricks and mortar and filled it with the books CLOUT wanted to destroy. At its entrance, she installed an iron door.

Her crowning invention was a wheeled bookcase on tracks she could push in front of the iron door. CLOUT wouldn't think to look behind the bookcase.

Book burning day came, and the members of CLOUT congregated in the library's portico in a mass of black wool serge and buckled shoes and lit torches. At their lead were three hard-looking villagers. First was Mr. Hatch Farnsworth, the county tax collector, a tall skinny man with mean features. Next was Mr. Fenwick Jones, a pig farmer. He snorted a lot. Third was Goody Agatha Kwaikowski, the local judge and a glove maker with extremely long arms. She held her torch just a little higher than everyone else. On the count of three, CLOUT burst through the library doors. To their dismay, they saw most of the books were gone.

They hunted down Goody Madding, their torchlight dancing ghoulish shadows across the empty bookcases. They found her in the reference section, thumbing through a dictionary. Forming a crescent around her, they shouted, “Goody Madding! Where are those evil books?” Goody Madding smiled and shrugged her shoulders so high they touched the rim of her crisp bonnet. “It beateth me,” she said. “They seeming vanished into thin air. Prithee, oh prudent
LOUT members, were you of a mind to actually read them?” Her smart-alecky answer got them hot under their starched white collars. They tied her up and whisked her away to the village meetinghouse.

Goody Madding was put on trial. The CLOUT members charged her with the practice of a darker art than book collecting. Magic. Dematerialization of books.

The outcome shone clear enough for Goody Madding to see. She was going to be found guilty, regardless of her innocence. The jury included Hatch Farnsworth and Fenwick Jones. Goody Agatha Kwaikowski was the judge, her gavel sawn off to a nub to keep her from missing the table entirely when she banged it—her arm was that long. Throughout the trial, Goody Madding said nothing. She did not tell them where the books were hidden or about the secret door. She neither denied nor admitted the use of witchcraft. Instead, when questioned, she repeatedly said, “My only crime, if it is a crime, is my love of books.”

CLOUT members had their all-you-could-eat whole wheat cracker and warm water social after all. After they burned Goody Madding at the stake. They never did find out about the secret room or the missing books.

Each successor to Goody Madding's post as librarian has guarded the secret of the room, keeping it in strictest confidence with every generation of Maddings, down to Millicent herself, because they'd inherited the key.

 

T
he library was a full seven blocks from Millicent's house. Seeing as she was running a tad late, she was glad she owned a car. Millicent wasn't old enough to drive a real car, but she had an electric car, a miniature version of a sport utility vehicle, given to her by Uncle Phineas.

She loaded her backpack, easel, and flip chart into the back of the car, tying them down to the roll bar with a length of bungee cord to ensure they wouldn't blow away. She started the car. She couldn't have asked for a better driving day. A few wisps of clouds trailed across the sky like faraway flags, and the sun sat as squat as a bag of gold.

She sped down the sidewalk of Dolby Lane, turned left on Tattersall Street, thinking the whole way about her invention.

She was passing Grainy Bits Granary when three figures on bicycles veered into her path and skidded to a stop. She brought her car to an abrupt halt to avoid colliding with them.
Who would be so reckless
…she thought, trying to focus on the people in her way. Sunlight flashed off the bicycles into her eyes. She made a visor of her hand, placing it on her forehead.

“Where are you going, nerd?” asked one figure.

She knew that voice. It belonged to Fletch Farnsworth, one of the notorious bully threesome that tormented her and her friends. Fletch dismounted his bike, flicking the kickstand down with his foot. He sauntered toward Millicent, his tall, vulturelike body casting jagged shadows across Millicent's car.

Stopping just shy of her car door, he ran his hand through
his unruly blond hair. “So?” he asked. “Where are you going?”

Millicent trembled. Why hadn't she applied her new product? She wanted to slap her own temple in disgust.

“Going to play with your dorky friends?”

She recognized this froglike croak as Pollywog Jones's voice. Pollywog got off his bike, too, though more awkwardly than Fletch had, his oval face grimacing with the effort. He waddled over to her car, hiking up his pants. Pollywog's waistband often hovered around his full hips like one of Saturn's rings.

“Dorkus,” he said, kicking her car. He scratched his baseball cap, which slid back, exposing a fringe of brown hair. “What do I do now?” he asked the third person.

“Move,” said the figure.

Nina “the Knuckle” Kwaikowski came into view. Nina slid off her bike, towering before Millicent, her lengthy arms and big hands dangling at her sides like nooses. She put her foot on Millicent's fender.

“Picture it,” said Nina, pumping her leg, making Millicent's car bounce like a bucking bronco, “all those weirdos in the same place.”

“Oooo,” crooned Pollywog. “Let's do multiplication for fun.”

“Do a historic time line for kicks,” said Fletch, circling Millicent's car.

An
historic time line
, thought Millicent.

“Read a encyclopedia to kill time,” said Nina.

“
An
encyclopedia,” Millicent said under her breath.
Though she was scared, she couldn't help but correct sloppy grammar. “It's
an
encyclopedia. ‘An' almost always precedes a word that starts with the letter ‘h' or a vowel. Like
an
imbecile, for example.”

“What did you say?” asked Nina.

“Nothing,” Millicent said quietly.

“I think she called you a imbecile,” said Pollywog to Nina.

An, an, an,
thought Millicent, rolling her eyes discreetly.

“That had better be a compliment,” said Nina.

In this case it is,
thought Millicent.

“This is boring,” said Fletch. “Let's ride our bikes down to the ocean.”

Yes, please.

“New bikes, new bikes, gotta ride the new bikes,” sang Pollywog.

Nina gave Millicent's car one last push with her foot, which made it bounce clear off the pavement. Then she squatted near the driver's side door. She reached a long arm, like a tentacle, into the car and grabbed Millicent by the collar.

“Freak,” said Nina, staring into Millicent's eyes.

She tugged Millicent closer—close enough for Millicent to see she hadn't brushed her teeth. Millicent held her breath.

“Yeah, freak,” said Pollywog.

Fletch said nothing. He surveyed the area, as if he were being observed.

Nina pulled harder on Millicent's collar. “See you and your mutant friends in school next week,” she snarled. “Or
sooner,” she added with an evil upturn of her mouth. Finally, she released her grip. “C'mon, let's go,” she said to Pollywog and Fletch.

The bullies mounted their sparkling bikes. Millicent watched as they pedaled toward Masonville Bay until the glare off their rides became a flicker. Hadn't Uncle Phineas said something about bikes during breakfast? Or perhaps she'd heard mention of bikes on the radio.
Yes!
She thought,
the radio!
She remembered the Mega-Stupenda Mart bike robbery and the descriptions of the robbers. Were the bullies the bike bandits? They certainly fit the profiles, but to be certain, she'd have to get a closer look at their bikes. She needed proof. Half a block away, the trio stopped. Nina motioned with her arm and they made a right turn toward the Masonville public library.

Millicent took a deep breath and shivered.
No
, she thought,
the library is the last place they'd visit.
Just in case, she reached into her backpack and withdrew a bottle of her new product and smeared a patch on her forehead and cheeks, massaging until she felt certain her skin had absorbed the blue lotion.

This new invention had to be launched without a hitch. Though she dreaded another confrontation with the bullies, if it did happen, she'd at least have a success story to share with the Wunderkinder. “Wunderkinder,” she'd say, “I have irrefutable evidence my product repels thugs.”

She restarted her car, hoping against hope she wouldn't wind up being her own guinea pig.